PRAISE FOR THE ELIZABETHAN MYSTERIES
Murder at Westminster Abbey
“Carmack once again delves into the Elizabethan Age, in all its drama, treachery, and religious mania, with this richly textured second outing for court musician Kate Haywood . . . deliciously detailed.”
—Publishers Weekly
“[Carmack’s] details on the sights, sounds, and smells of London as well as her descriptions of court attire and typical manner of interactions really serve to bring this period to vivid life. . . . Murder at Westminster Abbey is a very intriguing and suspenseful historical mystery that you will not want to miss! Enjoy.”
—Fresh Fiction
“Amanda Carmack’s writing is stellar. . . . Flowing descriptions, wonderful historic and fictional characters, and an intriguing mystery make for an exciting story.”
—Open Book Society
“Young Kate is again loyal, clever, and a shrewd detective. The setting and personalities of the time come alive as Carmack weaves a breathtaking mystery with nonstop action and emotional growth for Kate.”
—RT Book Reviews (top pick, 4½ stars)
“Kept me turning pages. A great combination of tension and intrigue. The climax was another nail-biting, intoxicating ride and the wrap-up drops a bombshell . . . that had me wanting the next book immediately. Another stellar book for this series, which is exceeding expectations. Buy two copies: one for you and one for a friend.”
—Mysteries and My Musings
“This is my favorite type of mystery! An intelligent female amateur sleuth solving crimes in the richly detailed setting of Tudor England. Add a dash of romance, a puzzle with a natural yet surprising solution, and pull heavily from historical record, and it’s no mystery why this book earns a well-deserved spot on my keeper shelf!”
—Plot Twist Reviews
Murder at Hatfield House
“Meticulously researched and expertly told, Murder at Hatfield House paints a vivid picture of Tudor England and a young Princess Elizabeth. Amanda Carmack’s talent for creating a richly drawn setting, populating it with fully realized characters, and giving them a tight and engaging narrative is unparalleled. An evocative and intelligent read.”
—New York Times bestselling author Tasha Alexander
“Amanda Carmack writes beautifully. . . . I enjoyed Murder at Hatfield House and recommend it; it is a cozy excursion into Tudor times with a lively heroine.”
—Historical Novel Society
“An excellent start to a new historical mystery series.”
—RT Book Reviews
“Historical suspense with a solid murder mystery and very enjoyable heroine. Near perfect.”
—Mysteries and My Musings
“We see the action unfold through Kate the musician’s eyes, but the most exciting revelation is not the unveiling of the mystery, but the unveiling of Elizabeth.”
—Heroes and Heartbreakers
“I enjoyed this novel, with the rich descriptions and the lively and interesting cast of personable characters. I think that this is going to be a great series to follow and I highly recommend it to those who enjoy a bit of history to their mystery!”
—Sharon’s Garden of Book Reviews
ALSO BY AMANDA CARMACK
The Elizabethan Mystery Series
Murder at Westminster Abbey
Murder at Hatfield House
Murder in the Queen’s Garden
OBSIDIAN
Published by New American Library,
an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014
This book is an original publication of New American Library.
Copyright © Ammanda McCabe, 2015
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ISBN 978-0-698-19656-8
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Contents
Praise
Also by Amanda Carmack
Title Page
Copyright
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
EPILOGUE
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Excerpt from Murder at Fontainebleau
PROLOGUE
Summer 1546
“Oh, we shall all be killed! Your Grace, Your Grace, what should we do?”
Matthew Haywood heard the shouts and screams even as he climbed the stairs to Queen Catherine Parr’s chamber. The messenger who had summoned him to the queen’s side had vanished, and all he saw as he moved closer was a maidservant dashing past with something hidden in her apron, and a footman with an armload of firewood, despite the warm day outside the windows.
Rumors had swept around the palace corridors all day, but he had tried to dismiss them, tried to concentrate on the music lesson he was giving his little daughter, Kate. Rumors were always rife in King Henry’s palaces, especially when the king was ill, as he had been of late. When his ulcerous leg pained him, he roared with anger, and everyone around him ducked and cringed. Everyone except his wife, that is. Queen Catherine was the only one who could soothe him, with her sweet voice and intelligent conversation.
But not lately, they said. Lately the king had become tired of her increasing devotion to the new Protestant learning, impatient with her bookish ways, even envious of her success in writing. And the queen had many enemies, such as the king’s conservative Secretary Wriothesley and his Bishop Gardiner. Both were men who did not like to be crossed. Had the queen’s good fortune run out today?
Matthew glanced over his shoulder, thinking of his little girl, her dark head bent over her lute. He was devoted to the queen, but how could he protect his Kate if Queen Catherine fell? Her loyal household would certainly fall with her.
Another footman brushed past him, carrying more wood, and Matthew quickly followed him into the queen’s rooms. Her chamber, an elegant room draped with fine silks and scattered with soft cushions and carved chairs, was usually a peaceful spot. Normally the queen’s ladies read silently or quietly chatted as they sewed and played music. Today chaos reigned. A fire roared in the grate, and the queen’s chief lady, her sister, Lady Anne Herbert, fed p
apers to the flames, her pretty face streaked with tears. Other ladies huddled in the corner, sobbing.
Suddenly Matthew felt an insistent tug on the hem of his robe, and looking down he saw a small dog growling playfully at his feet. He’d been so caught up in the somber scene he hadn’t noticed. He fell back a step, then laughed once he realized it was only a lapdog.
“Gardiner, nay!” The Duchess of Suffolk, one of the queen’s best friends and another great scholar of the New Church, cried out as she snatched up her naughty dog. It had seemed so funny when she named the dog after the bishop, admonishing “Gardiner” for growling and making a mess on the queen’s fine carpets, but now the duchess’s face was grim under her jeweled headdress. “I am sorry, Master Haywood. He is full of agitation today, as are we all.”
“What has happened, duchess?” he asked quietly. “I was sent a message to come at once to the queen, but was not told why.”
The duchess glanced around at the chamber, her arms tight around her dog. “I fear the queen learned that the king issued a bill of articles against her. Her physician, Dr. Wendy, found a copy of the vile document and brought it to her. One of her ladies, Lady Tyrwhit, has already been arrested, and we all fear we’ll soon meet the same fate. The queen has ordered us to burn all her foreign books.”
Matthew was appalled. He remembered the other queens who had fallen from favor, Anne Boleyn and Cat Howard, imprisoned in the Tower, executed. How could such a fate befall Queen Catherine, a lady of such gentleness and great learning? “On what charges?”
The duchess shrugged in bewilderment. “Heresy, I would suppose, though we do not yet know. The king does have a changeable temper, as we all know too well, but his fondness for the queen has always seemed so genuine!”
But Matthew knew fondness with King Henry turned too swiftly to indifference and hatred. He glanced quickly around the room, and at last glimpsed the queen. Catherine sat by the window, sorting through a small box of papers. There were books piled beside her, some of which she handed to her sister to be fed to the fire while she put others in a separate box to be kept. She looked calm, quiet, but her heart-shaped face was pale, her eyes shadowed with purple, as if she had not slept. Her raiment was usually impeccable, bright velvets and satins trimmed with furs and jeweled embroidery, her dark red hair brushed to a silken gleam and swept back into stylish headdresses, but today she wore a loose robe, her hair in a braid over her shoulder. Her hand trembled as she handed Lady Anne another book.
“Ah, Matthew, I am glad to see you,” she called, and he hurried to her side. He gave her a low bow, but she shook her head at such formality. “I fear there is little good news today.”
“So the duchess told me,” he answered. He studied her face, and her eyes darted from lady to lady, as if she could read what was happening in their fearful expressions.
“Shall you desert me, Matthew?” she asked quietly.
“Never, Your Grace,” he answered fiercely. “You have brought elegance and learning to the kingdom. Anyone would be honored to serve you.”
She studied his face carefully, and nodded. “You must send your dear daughter away, though. If you are to stay by my side, she could be in danger. Those against us will do anything to harm someone loyal to me.” She closed the box next to her and held it up to him. “Perhaps you would look after these things for me. I have put a few of my most treasured books and papers in here, and I need someone to keep them safe for me, if—if I must go away.”
Matthew carefully took the box in his hand. It was small and rather light, but the weight of it felt strong in his grasp. He had come to work at the queen’s court because it was a great honor for a musician, but also because he believed in what Queen Catherine taught, what she wrote of in her Prayers or Meditations. He believed in studying and learning for oneself, and he wanted such a life for his daughter. If all that was snatched away now . . .
He had to help the queen however he could.
“I will keep them safe, Your Grace,” he said.
“I know you will, Matthew. I have great trust in you.” She reached into the sewing box at her feet and took out a folded parchment. “And if you could keep this particularly safe for me . . .”
Matthew carefully unfolded the paper and saw it was a piece of music, the queen’s own writings set into a song. Something about the notes did not look quite right, something strange about the arrangement of the bars, but he had no time to examine it closely now. The frantic atmosphere of the chamber had taken hold of him, and he knew as the queen did that time was growing short. He tucked the paper into his robe, and stepped back with a bow, the box in his hands.
“I will happily give these back into Your Grace’s hands very soon,” he said.
Queen Catherine shook her head with a sad smile. “Nay, Matthew, I think you must keep them safe for me for a long while to come. . . .”
CHAPTER ONE
The Christmas Season 1559
Whitehall Palace
“Holly and ivy, box and bay, put in the house for Christmas Day! Fa la la la . . .”
Kate Haywood laughed at hearing the notes of the familiar old song, the tune always sung as the court bedecked the palace for Christmas. Queen Elizabeth’s gentlewomen of the privy and presence chambers, along with the young maids of honor, had been assigned to festoon the great hall of Whitehall Palace and its long corridors for the night’s feast, the first of the Twelve Days of Christmas.
Long tables were set up along the privy gallery, covered with piles of holly, ivy, mistletoe, and evergreen boughs brought in from the countryside that morning, along with multicolored silk ribbons and spangles. Under the watchful eye of Kat Ashley, Queen Elizabeth’s Mistress of the Robes, they were meant to turn all those random bits into glorious holiday artistry.
Kate sat at the end of the table with her friend Lady Violet Green, who was expecting another child after the New Year. They twisted together loops of ivy and red ribbon as they watched two of the queen’s maids, Mary Howard and Mary Radcliffe, lay out long swags of greenery to measure them. The Marys sang as they worked, sometimes stopping to leap about with ribbons like two wild morris dancers, until Mistress Ashley sternly admonished them to “sit down again, and cease acting like children who have eaten too many sugary suckets.”
Kate laughed at their antics. Surely Christmas was the time for everyone to behave like children again? To dance and sing, to feast on delicacies until one was about to burst, to tell stories by the fire until the night was nearly gone. She had always loved this time of year the best of all, those twelve days when everyone set aside the gloomy darkness of winter and buried themselves in music, wine, and bright silk ribbons—and then more music again. Always music for Kate, as she was one of the queen’s principal musicians.
Kate snatched a ribbon from one of the twirling Marys and laughed. She might be missing her father, her only family, this Christmas, as she had last seen him two months ago in the autumn. But she was surrounded by such merriment that she scarcely had time to feel melancholy.
The queen’s court at Whitehall was full to bursting for the holiday. There were groups from Sweden and Vienna, pressing the marital suits of their various princes and archdukes, as well as the Spanish under Senor de Quadra and the French, insisting on friendship from the queen’s cousin Queen Mary of Scotland, now also the new queen consort of France. To make things even more complicated, a group of Scottish Protestant lords had also arrived, to ask the queen’s aid in their rebellion against Queen Mary’s mother and regent, Marie of Guise. It was enough to make every courtier’s head spin to decipher who was against whom. And all this during Christmas, the season of banquets and dances and fun.
Nay, Kate thought, she could only miss her dear father very late at night, in the darkest hours when the rest of the palace finally slept and she was working on new music for the queen’s revels. Then, in the silence as she bent over her mothe
r’s lute, playing old songs her father had taught her when she was only a child, she could miss him.
Kate reached for two bent hoops and bound them into a sphere for the base of a kissing bough. She picked out the greenest, brightest loops of holly and ivy from the table, twining them around and tying them with a length of red satin ribbon.
“Are you making a kissing bough, Kate?” Violet asked teasingly. She tied together her own twists of greenery into a large wreath for one of the great hall’s fireplace mantels. She looked most plump and content in her new pregnancy, her blond curls bouncing and her eyes shining. “They say if you stand beneath it and close your eyes, you will have a vision of your future husband.”
Kate laughed. “I think I would be too nervous to do such a thing. What if I saw a vision of an ancient gouty knight with twenty children? We can’t all be as fortunate as you with your handsome Master Green.”
Violet blushed, and laid her hand over the swell of her belly. “We are wondrously happy now, it’s true, since my mother-in-law moved to her dower house. But that only makes me want to see my friends equally well matched! Have you had no suitors since I was last at court?”
“Nay, not a one. There is no one new at all. There is no more room at court for ambitious young lords. And if there were, they would all be in love with the queen herself.”
As Kate snipped off the end of a branch with her dagger, she thought about Queen Elizabeth in the past months, as they had moved from Windsor to Richmond to Whitehall. After the frivolity of the summer progress, the queen’s pale oval face had taken on a newly solemn expression, and she spent many more hours in meetings with her privy council and poring over her stacks of documents. Yet there were still days at the hunt and nights dancing, still suitors and sonnets.
And still Robert Dudley, richly arrayed and ready to pour lavish gifts at Elizabeth’s feet.
“What of the delegations visiting now?” Violet said as she tied off an elaborate bow. “There are so many here. The French are so charming, so well dressed, and they say the Swedes are most generous with their gifts to anyone who will help them in their prince’s suit. Or the Scots! Some of them are quite handsome indeed. Very tall, such good dancers. You could marry one of them!”
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