Murder at Westminster Abbey

by Amanda Carmack

  Even the lavish banquet in the great hall hadn’t banished the sensation of being stared at by unseen eyes.

  Kate wasn’t one to believe in ghosts, but here in this place it felt as if the real, bustling, everyday world ended at the thick stone walls, and her dreams were full of blood and screams.

  She shivered and pulled the blankets closer around her shoulders. Those dreams still had their skeletal arms wrapped around her, making her mind a blur. Slowly, she saw the chalky ray of moonlight from the high, narrow window falling over the sleeping figures all around her. Lady Mary Everley shared her cot, but it wasn’t she whose voice woke Kate. Mary still slumbered under her counterpane, her red hair spilling from her lace cap.

  “Kate!” the whisper came again, and a hand on her shoulder turned her around.

  Kate blinked her eyes hard, scarcely daring to believe what she saw. It was Queen Elizabeth herself, kneeling beside Kate’s bed.

  “Your Majesty?” Kate whispered. The queen wore a fur-trimmed bed robe of pale satin, her hair falling in a thick red-gold braid down her back. The moonlight turned her face a stark blue-white, her eyes fathomless dark pools.

  “I am sorry to wake you, Kate,” Elizabeth said softly. “But there is something I must do tonight, and I can ask no one else to help me.”

  “Of course I will help you, Your Majesty, in any way I can,” Kate answered, confused. Elizabeth was always surrounded by courtiers, ladies, and servants ready to leap at her smallest sigh. The evening had been full of ceremony, ritual, and lavish food and music, merely a preamble to so much more to come. What could Elizabeth have to do tonight? And with the help of Kate, of all people?

  Kate thought again of Hatfield, and all that had happened there in the last days of Queen Mary’s dark rule. Things that could never be spoken of, but were never forgotten.

  “Come with me.” Elizabeth helped Kate up from the low cot, waiting with a tap of her silk-slippered foot as Kate wrapped a shawl over her linen smock and found her shoes. They tiptoed past the slumbering ladies into the hall beyond.

  Elizabeth had left a lantern burning on a table outside the door, and its amber glow showed that the remains of the feast were only half cleared away. Silver plates gleamed dully under torn hunks of bread and streaks of spiced sauces. Goblets tipped on their sides, dripping the dregs of fine Rhenish wine onto white damask cloths, scenting the cool air with fruity sweetness blended with melted wax candles and the lingering remains of expensive perfumes.

  Only the queen’s greyhounds breathed in there, an elegant new pack gifted from the King of France that she had insisted on bringing with her. They slept under the tables, replete with scraps from the feast. But the lantern light glowed on the gold-tinged figures of the tapestries on the walls, Diana and her acolytes at the hunt, making them seem to run and move.

  Those rooms had once been refurbished for the coronation of Elizabeth’s mother, the walls painted and paneled, Tudor roses carved on the cornices with entwined Hs and As along with Queen Anne’s falcon badge and her motto—The Most Happy. Most of those had been hastily removed long ago, but a few ghostly As still lingered, overlooked. She was the last queen the rooms had sheltered on the day before a coronation, until now.

  And those rooms had also housed Queen Anne on the eve of her death.

  Kate had tried not to think of that as she listened to the tributary speeches, as she played for the dancing. Tried not to think of how it must feel to have such glorious triumph turn to bitter ashes. Today was a new day.

  But surely the queen tried not to think of that as well. Perhaps that was why she could not sleep, tonight of all nights.

  Elizabeth led Kate down the short flight of stone steps and pulled open the door to the outside. Guards were stationed there, their pikes at the ready, their new red and gold livery stiff and shining. But they moved not at all when they saw who hurried past them.

  Kate wrapped her shawl tighter around her shoulders as she followed Elizabeth onto Tower Green. The night was very cold, as clear and sharp as a diamond as it bit into her lungs, but the snowflakes had ceased to fall. Everything was perfectly still, as if all London held its breath. The sky beyond the crenellated Tower walls stretched out an endless soft, velvet black, scattered with tiny pearl stars, and the frosting of snow lay over the grass and paving stones underfoot.

  The buildings around them—the Bell Tower, where once Elizabeth had been a prisoner; Beauchamp Tower, where Robert Dudley and his brothers once languished; and the sturdy, square White Tower in the center of it all—crouched close, their small windows blank and dark, and Kate again had that sensation of being watched.

  But strangely she felt no fear now, only the tingling touch of excitement dancing along her fingertips and toes. This was an adventure indeed, just as she had dreamed of in those long, quiet days at Hatfield. And adventures always started with a blind leap into the unknown.

  Elizabeth led her across the dark, grassy stretch of the green, her robe swirling behind her. The queen seemed very sure of what she was doing, just as she always did. Even in the most dangerous days, when her sister Queen Mary hated her and sought her downfall, Elizabeth’s confidence never wavered and she always sailed forward into life, serenely, surely. But suddenly she went still, her head tilted back as if she scented something on the cold breeze.

  Kate shivered as she looked at Elizabeth’s still, white face. “Perhaps we should go back inside, Your Majesty,” Kate ventured. “It is quite cold, and you haven’t slept. There is much to be done tomorrow.” The queen was to create new Knights of the Bath before one more night in the Tower, a long, complicated ritual that couldn’t be done if the monarch had caught a chill. “Surely whatever errand can be done in the morning.”

  Elizabeth gave her head a sharp, impatient shake. Her hair, the famous Tudor red-gold, rippled over her shoulders. “I can only do this tonight. Now. Don’t you feel it, Kate?”

  “Feel what, Your Majesty?” Kate whispered, wondering at the madness of the night. It seemed to have affected even the unflappable queen.

  “They are here with us.” Without a word of explanation, Elizabeth hurried onward. Her steps slowed as they skirted around the stone courtyard where once scaffolds had been built, where Queen Anne, Queen Catherine Howard, and Lady Jane Grey had ended their lives under the sword and the ax. But she lifted the furred hem of her robe and rushed on.

  Kate realized where the queen was going. The long, low church of St. Peter ad Vincula, which lay just beyond the execution site. The clear, bright moonlight caught and glowed on the windows, and for an instant it looked as if a light flashed from inside the church, but that illusion was quickly lost once more in darkness.

  There were no guards there, and Kate wondered if the queen had sent them away. Elizabeth pulled hard on the door, and it creaked open just enough for them to slip inside. The door clanged shut behind them, closing the two of them in stuffy, stone gloom. The wind was abruptly cut off, leaving the scent of dust, wax candles, and old flowers.

  Kate looked around at the carved monuments along the walls, the engraved letters only half-illuminated by the light from the tall, wide mullioned windows and the flicker of Elizabeth’s lantern.

  Elizabeth took Kate’s hand and drew her down the aisle. The click of their shoes on the marble floor echoed to the beams of the ceiling. The queen’s clasp was tight, her jeweled rings pressing into Kate’s fingers, but Kate could say nothing. She felt as if she had dropped into another world altogether, one of echoing silence and shadows.

  “He said it was here,” Elizabeth murmured as they reached the altar against the far stone wall, below a faded image of Christ in judgment. Like churches all over London in the mere weeks since Elizabeth had become queen, the elaborately carved altar and screen here were replaced by an altar table draped in white cloth. A plain silver cross sat there, gleaming in the darkness.

  “‘He,’ Yo
ur Majesty?” Kate asked, whispering as if she could be overheard. Indeed, she wondered if she still lay in her borrowed cot, trapped in more dreams.

  “One of the old guards I found this afternoon,” Elizabeth answered. She set the lantern down on the altar steps and her dark eyes scanned along the stone floor beneath her feet. “He has worked at the White Tower for decades, since he was a boy, and he was here when it happened. He told me he saw them carry her to—here.”

  Kate watched in astonishment as Elizabeth knelt down on the cold floor, her furred skirts fanning around her. She bent her head and her braid of hair slid forward to half conceal her face. The queen pressed her hands flat to the marble.

  “My mother is here,” she said, so softly Kate could barely hear her.

  “Oh, Your Majesty.” Kate choked out the words, so overcome by her own shocking, sudden flood of emotion that she knew not what to say or think. She knelt down beside Elizabeth on the cold floor. She should have realized that was why they came here to this silent place in the dark of night, so secretly.

  Elizabeth had brought her mother’s family back from their exile, raised her Boleyn cousins to places at court, but she never spoke aloud of her mother or the old, scandalous doubts about what happened to Queen Anne over twenty years ago. To the English crowds who cheered her now, she was all old King Henry’s spawn, the lion’s cub, “mere English.” There were those who would still call her mother the Great Whore, still have doubts about the legitimacy of the marriage. But never here.

  Elizabeth still held her hands to that thin line in the stone floor that indicated a hollow crypt beneath. “He said they used an elm box once used to bring bowstaves from Ireland. No coffin had been prepared, but she was so slender that her wrapped body fit just so. Her ladies placed her thus, and she was lowered here, beside my uncle, her brother.”

  “Your Majesty,” Kate said carefully, her voice thick with the tears she held back. “It was such a very long time ago.” And yet here, in the closeness of that haunted place, it seemed only a moment ago. “Surely the fact that you are here now brings her soul peace.”

  “Does it? Do I vindicate her now, being here beside her as queen?” Elizabeth suddenly looked up at Kate, her dark Boleyn eyes burning in her white face. “Do you remember your mother, Kate?”

  Surprised, Kate shook her head. “Nay, not at all. She died the day I was born.”

  “But surely your father talks about her. It has always been obvious that he misses her.”

  “Aye, he says he could never have married another after her,” Kate answered, thinking of the few tales her father would tell her about Eleanor, the beautiful, gentle, brilliant woman he had loved and lost. “When he talks about her, I do feel like I can see her. Know her.”

  “And you play her lute. Your father says you are a great musician, as she was. That you look like her.”

  Kate was surprised that the queen remembered all that. “So he does. I am no beauty as he says she was, and no great musician. But I hope that my love of the song comes from her.”

  Elizabeth looked back down at the blank floor. “No one ever spoke my mother’s name to me, not even Kat. Everything I learned of her I heard in secret whispers. Until I met my Boleyn cousins, Henry and Catherine Carey, and they told me of their own mother’s stories.”

  “They do say Queen Anne was most extraordinary,” Kate said carefully.

  A proud smile touched the edge of Elizabeth’s lips. “She knew many languages, you know, Kate. She went to Austria and France when she was only a girl, and dazzled everyone there. Margaret of Austria herself told my grandfather Thomas Boleyn that she was more beholden to him for sending her such a jewel of a girl than he was to her for accepting her. My mother could dance and ride and sing better and longer than anyone else. . . .” Elizabeth’s smile faded. “I am sure she was not frightened here in this place. She had a stout heart, as brave as any man, no matter what anyone says. I know it to be true.”

  Kate was silent for a long, heavy moment, thoughts of the past and the tangled-up present racing around in her mind. “Do you remember her at all, Your Majesty?”

  “Sometimes I think I do. She smelled of roses, and her voice was soft and low, full of laughter.” Elizabeth shook her head. “I have a dream that comes to me sometimes at night, where I see her leaning over my bed. There are tears in her eyes, and she sings a French song to me as she touches my hair and tells me not to be afraid. Perhaps it is a memory. Or perhaps it is only a dream.”

  “I wish I had such a vision of my own mother.”

  “Perhaps our mothers knew each other!” Elizabeth said with the sudden sunburst of another smile. “Perhaps they played music together. Did your parents not meet at court?”

  Kate realized that, for all her father’s tales of her mother, she knew little of their courtship. Little of where her mother came from before she was Mistress Haywood. “I believe so.”

  “Then I am sure they met. And that they see us here now, thinking of them.” Elizabeth was silent for a moment longer, looking down at the floor. Finally she smoothed one last touch over it and pushed herself to her feet. “Come, Kate, I have kept you from your bed too long. It will soon be dawn, and there is much to be done.”

  “Aye, Your Majesty.” Kate hurried after the queen as they slipped out of the silent church and back into the cold night. The sky was indeed growing lighter, the palest of pearl grays at the edges, casting some of the mysteries of the Tower back into their hidden corners for one more day.

  Elizabeth was walking briskly back toward the Queen’s House, without a backward glance at the haunted church. But Kate couldn’t help the feeling that something had changed, something very deep and strange. Emotions she had never realized she even possessed stirred inside of her, feelings of loss and memory.

  She parted with Elizabeth on the stairs, the queen to go on up to her grand chamber, where she would slip past Mistress Ashley and into her curtained bed, and Kate back to the crowded ladies’ dormitory.

  Shivering, Kate took off her shoes and slipped back between the chilly bedclothes next to Mary Everley. Everyone still snored and stirred in their dreams, buried deep in the night as if nothing at all had changed.

  But Kate knew she could never sleep again that night.

  Mary suddenly rolled over and seized Kate’s hand. Startled, Kate tensed. But when Mary laughed, Kate was glad her friend was awake too, that she didn’t have to be alone in that quietest part of the night.

  “Where did you go off to so secretly, Kate?” Mary whispered.

  “To the jakes, of course,” Kate whispered back.

  “Indeed? But there is a chamber pot right under our bed. And you were gone a passing long time.” Mary’s fingers tightened excitedly on Kate’s hand. “Are you sure you were not meeting someone? You can tell me.”

  Kate laughed. “Who would I be meeting?” She could never tell Mary, or anyone, what had actually happened that night. None would believe her anyway. She could scarcely believe it herself.

  “A handsome suitor, of course.”

  “When would I have time to meet a suitor, handsome or otherwise? We have had only a few weeks to prepare for the coronation, and I have been working every waking moment. Unless you think I have a passion for Master Cawarden?”

  Cawarden was the old Master of the Revels, a little, bandy-legged, paunchy man with a short temper who possessed an equally moody wife.

  “Nay, not him,” Mary scoffed. “But I am sure you must have had a sweeting in Hertfordshire that you left behind. Mayhap you have found him again here in London.”

  Kate bit her lip as she remembered that glimpse she had on the barge. Of a tall man in a lawyer’s black robe, with dark hair and strong shoulders. But she was sure now she had just imagined it was Anthony.

  “Nay, there was no one,” Kate said. “It was most quiet at Hatfield. Queen Mary would allow few vi
sitors.”

  “There are many men Queen Mary would not have known. Men who aren’t courtiers,” Mary said.

  Something in her musing tone caught Kate’s attention. “Do you have a sweetheart, Mary?”

  For a long moment, Mary was silent, her face turned away. But then she laughed. “I shall not settle yet for one where there are so many to fancy at court. Tell me, Kate. Which do you think the handsomer? Robert Dudley or Lord Hertford? I daresay the queen would say Sir Robert, for all that he has a sickly wife buried in the country somewhere. But I hear tell Lady Catherine Grey would declare for the other. . . .”

  CHAPTER 3

  “A maid of honor! When we were Ladies of the Bedchamber to Queen Mary. How is such a humiliation to be borne?” Lady Catherine Grey muttered as she paced before the window of their small sitting room in the Tower. The winter sun was creeping over the high stone walls as the long night ended, and attendants hurried along the gravel walkways to prepare for the ceremony appointing new Knights of the Bath in the White Tower.

  But no Greys were to be appointed that day, and Catherine and her mother and sister had been sent word that their attendance was not needed on the queen that day, either.

  “As all such things are borne, my dearest,” Lady Frances Grey, Dowager Duchess of Suffolk, said as she carefully lowered herself into her cushioned chair. Her handsome young husband, Adrian Stokes, offered her a plate of sweetmeats, but she waved it away. As her illness advanced, her appetite receded. “With a smile and silence.”

  “How can we be silent!” Catherine cried. “We are of royal blood, and she treats us as mere servants. Queen Mary made us Ladies of the Bedchamber. She gave you the precedence you were due at court, even above Princess Elizabeth. . . .”

  “And perhaps we pay for that now that she is Queen Elizabeth.” Frances sighed and watched Catherine’s pacing with her tired, faded blue eyes. “Queen Mary was of a rare merciful temper. After your father’s foolishness in rebelling against her not once but twice, we were fortunate not to be tossed in a dungeon.”