Rob’s face hardened. “I wasn’t here to save Nell, but I must do what I can for her now. As you said, I—I cared for her. I would find who did this. But I must beg for your help, Kate.”
Surprised by his words, Kate slid her hands from his and sat back on her stool. “My help?”
“I told him not to be a fool,” Bess snapped. “If he starts asking questions around, waving his dagger about, they’ll say he did it for sure. Everyone in Southwark knew he was one of Nell’s regulars.”
“I’m not such a cabbagehead as all that, Bess, my beauty,” Rob said with a flicker of a smile. “I know where I can go freely and where I can’t. And I cannot go to the queen’s court.”
“But I can,” Kate said quietly. She studied the two of them in the firelight, Rob looking sad and desperate, Bess doubtful and fierce. She knew she should be sensible and stay far away from such matters. Court was full of dangers and pitfalls aplenty without the muck of Southwark, the blood of a Winchester goose. She had much work to do, a place to establish for herself and her father in the new royal court. And yet . . .
Yet had Nell not been a person, too? A woman of “merry” nature, an enemy to none, if what her sister said was true. And still she had been horribly murdered. And Rob, who had once proved himself to be Kate’s own friend, had cared about Nell. Cared enough to risk his neck to find her murderer. Even if the girl had secrets, she deserved for the truth to be known.
And the curiosity that had nearly been Kate’s downfall—that need to discover and see and know—was taking hold of her again. Nell surely deserved justice in this new, bright England that Queen Elizabeth was building. If Kate could help with that, even in a small way . . .
“Tell me more about Nell,” Kate said. “Who were her friends? Which gentlemen from court visited her the most often? What did she look like?”
Rob smiled in a sudden burst of relief. “Thank you, Kate. You are a true friend.”
“Do not thank me yet,” Kate warned. “I might be able to discover nothing at all. It’s not easy to get people such as the queen’s courtiers to give up secrets. They are too good at being guarded.”
“At least you will try,” Bess said grudgingly. “Most would not, not for the likes of us. But I can tell you whatever I’ve learned of Nell’s gentlemen. Some of them we shared. And as for how she looked . . .”
“She looked like Bess here,” Rob said. “Red hair and snow-white skin, with a delicate neck like a swan and a pointed chin like a kitten.”
“Like the bleedin’ queen, we are,” Bess said with a humorless laugh. She took a tiny object from the purse at her belt and tossed it into the air before catching it. “Should be very fashionable now to have hair like this.”
• • •
“You are called, er, Henry, are you not?” Kate asked the bald giant of a man who guarded the door of the Cardinal’s Hat. She was waiting for the errand boy to escort her back to the Tower, and in the meantime had decided to see what she could find out from the house’s residents about Nell.
The bawds were forthcoming enough, once Bess told them Kate was a friend, but were able to tell her little. Most of them had been gone the day of the procession, wanting to see the queen themselves and drum up a little business from the crowds. They hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary, and when asked about Nell’s regular visitors, their comments became mostly laughing comparisons of the gentlemen’s—assets.
And none of them had red hair like Nell and Bess, though they admitted some men did prefer such a hair color.
This was probably not useful, Kate thought wryly, especially the information about various men’s codpieces. Unless she asked the men of the court to drop their breeches for comparisons. But she did make some interesting notes for future reference.
Henry, though, might be different. Bess said he was almost always at his post, and surely saw everything. She had to swallow a nervous knot in her throat at the sheer size of the man, and the number of his fearsome scars, to approach him.
“I’m called Mad Henry,” he said shortly.
“Er—aye. Of course,” Kate answered. “Bess said you might be of some very valuable assistance.”
Mad Henry scowled doubtfully as he stared down at her from his great height. “Assistance with what?”
“Finding who did this to Nell.”
A spasm of emotion passed over his face, gone as quickly as a flash of sun on a winter’s day, but it was enough to show that he was not quite as stolidly unemotional as he wanted to appear. “Poor Nellie. Bess thinks you can help?”
“I am going to try.”
“How did she send for you, then? You don’t seem the sort who would know the girls here.”
“I am friends with Master Cartman. We witnessed a murder in Hertfordshire last year, and I never wish to see another villain go unpunished.”
“Even a whore like Nellie? Most would say it scarcely matters.”
So “most” would, Kate thought sadly. They would shrug and say there were plenty of whores where that one came from. But Kate would not. “I would not be one of those ‘most.’ Everyone deserves justice. Nell was a person, was she not? A living, feeling woman, and from what Bess and Rob say, a nice one as well.”
Mad Henry’s fearsome face softened. “Aye, that she was. Always one for a laugh. She never deserved what happened.”
“Then you will help me?”
His gaze flickered over Kate’s small, slender figure, over her boy’s doublet to her muddied boots. She stood still beneath his regard, unflinching, and something he saw seemed to reassure him. He nodded.
“I’ll help ye, if I can,” he said. He paused to let two cup-shot young men through the door. “What d’ye want to know?”
“Nell must have had some regular visitors,” Kate said. “Did any of them seem especially—jealous of her attentions?”
Henry thought hard, frowning so fiercely she almost feared his mind would burst from the effort. “None in particular, I’d say. We pulled a villain with a knife off one girl last week, but Nell didn’t seem to attract the bloody-minded ones. She was a friendly sort, able to make anyone laugh. But drink and lust, they don’t mix well, if you know what I mean.”
Kate feared she did know what he meant. She had seen the free flow of wine lead to many screaming arguments and violent endings at court, though seldom in death. “I do indeed, Mad Henry. I am a musician’s daughter. I have seen many different sorts of men in my life.”
“There are quarrels sometimes, but I break ’em up right quick. None of the bawds have ever been hurt here at the Cardinal’s Hat while I was on watch. Mistress Celine wouldn’t let it.”
“But you weren’t on watch that day?”
Henry shook his head regretfully. “There weren’t very many here, were there? They all went to look at the queen. Afternoons are usually quiet, anyway. Nell was the last to leave, and she told me to go have an ale at the Rose and Crown. But I should have stayed!”
His ham hock of a fist suddenly shot out and pounded into the doorframe. Splinters went flying, and Kate instinctively ducked.
“You—you could not have known what would happen,” she said gently. “So Nell had no especially ardent suitors of late? No one who came often?”
“She had ones that came here regular, aye,” Mad Henry said, with a visible, heaving effort to calm himself.
“Do you know any of their names? Were many of them from the court?”
“Aye, some of them dressed fine indeed, but they don’t often give their names,” Henry said. “Even the bawds don’t know their real names ofttimes, or at least they pretend they don’t.”
“Could you describe some of them?”
Henry thought very hard again, but none of his descriptions could be very helpful. They sounded like every man at court, Kate thought. Handsome, plain, tall, some bearded, some clean-shav
en, some dark, some blond. Some with those fashionable pearl earrings that Sir Robert Dudley favored and thus every young blade emulated. She tucked away every detail she could to go over later, along with the nicknames Mad Henry knew and bits of gossip he had heard from the women.
“Thank you, Henry, you have been very helpful,” Kate said when it seemed he had told her all he could remember.
“I’ll help in any way I can.”
The errand boy came running out of the house to tug at Kate’s doublet sleeve. “Rob says you have to get back to the Tower, miss, afore sunrise!”
Kate nodded, and turned to follow him back the way they had come. Suddenly she remembered a very important question indeed, and looked over her shoulder to Mad Henry.
“What happened to her body, Henry? Bess said you, er, took care of it.”
Henry blinked hard, his eyes suddenly shining as if he would cry. “Aye, I took her to a church I know. St. Botolph’s. They don’t ask many questions there, and they buried her right quick in the churchyard. I made sure she was wrapped up decent.”
“Very good of you,” Kate said. It was better than what Bess seemed to suggest, that Henry had tossed Nell into the river. But Kate still couldn’t examine the body herself. Even if it was still there, she was not a coroner. She was a musician, a woman. No one would let her, surely, and it would only bring suspicion on her and her friends. “Did you notice anything—not right when you wrapped up her body?”
Henry hesitated for a long moment. Then he reached inside his jerkin and took out a grimy handkerchief. He stepped closer to Kate and held it out to display a silver button.
It was finely made, smooth and polished, with a distinctive braided edge, but there were no identifying initials or crests.
“This was clutched in Nellie’s hand,” Henry said. “As if she had ripped it off when she tried to fight him away, poor mite. I kept it, thinking I might see someone come by wearing the same buttons.”
Kate studied the object carefully. It was an expensive bauble, surely off a gentleman’s doublet or a lady’s sleeve. A tiny smudge of dried blood marred the decorative edge. “I doubt whoever did this will come back, or if he did, he would surely repair his garments first. That braid work is unusual, though.”
“You take it, then. See if it matches to any of those preening peacocks at court.”
“Thank you, Henry.” Kate tucked the button away carefully. “If you think of anything else, send me word through Bess.”
“Mistress! We have to go now,” the boy called.
Kate nodded once more to Henry and hurried away. It had been a strange night indeed, she thought. And sure to get even stranger before it was all over, and she could escape into her music again.
CHAPTER 7
“The cushion! Oh, where is it? It cannot be lost!”
Blanche Parry, the queen’s Second Lady of the Bedchamber and her attendant since she was a child, scurried through the crowd gathering in the forecourt of the Cradle Tower gate of the Tower, waiting to form the procession into London. Her graying hair straggled from its fine velvet and lace cap, and her eyes were as wide and wild as if she had lost the crown jewels. Everyone around her shook their heads, preoccupied with their own last-minute arrangements to their finery.
Kate stood near the back of the brightly colored flock, feeling strangely as if she watched everything in a dream. The sky arching over their heads and beyond the high walls was a low, leaden gray. Tiny, bitingly icy snowflakes drifted down to dust the earth. It seemed that the famous astrologer Dr. Dee, who had drawn up the queen’s horoscope and proclaimed this to be the most fortunate date for her coronation, had not predicted the weather.
But all around were as many colors and as much movement as if it were high summer. Hundreds of ladies and knights, bishops in their gold-embroidered cassocks, city aldermen and foreign ambassadors, all rushed to find their places in line, a tangle of satin and jewels and banners. Laughter and shouts startled the ravens into the gray sky.
Kate had no official duties that day. A lady could not play music in public, only at the queen’s private revels. She was to ride in one of the ladies’ chariots behind the queen, along with Mary Everley. But Kate couldn’t resist going to talk to the trumpeters who were to walk before the queen’s litter, making sure everyone was there and knew the order of the music her father had so carefully planned.
Now she couldn’t find Mary, and was fascinated by all that was happening around her.
“Blanche!” Queen Elizabeth shouted, her voice ringing out above everything else. She stood beside her white and gold litter as footmen harnessed it to four white mules draped in gold brocade, standing still as some of her ladies straightened her skirts and smoothed her loose hair. “Blanche, I pray you, stop fussing about the cushion. There are quite enough of the benighted things in the litter already, and you are driving me to madness.”
Elizabeth swatted away one of the ladies and twitched her gold-edged ruff into place herself. She gleamed like the sun that had failed to make an appearance, robed in twenty-three yards of cloth of gold and fine ermine. A scarlet velvet cap, ringed with her gold princess’s crown, sat atop her rippling hair. She looked every bit the goddess-queen, the center of the world.
Except for the frantic pink color high in her pale cheeks.
“No time for madness, Your Grace,” Robert Dudley said, with one of his flashing white pirate’s grins, the smile that made ladies giggle and swoon everywhere he went. His purple and silver doublet sparkled with diamond and pearl embroidery, and he wore a pearl earring in one ear. “All is nearly in readiness.”
“We shall be late,” Elizabeth grumbled, but she smiled at him in return.
“England is yours,” Robert answered. “It waits only for you, from now forward.”
“Then let us begin. Blanche! Where is my special cushion?”
Blanche Parry ran past Kate, sending her stumbling under the stone arches of the forecourt. That was when she finally glimpsed Mary Everley, who stood with her friend Lady Catherine Grey. They were both talking to the Count de Feria, their three heads bent close as they whispered, seemingly oblivious to the chaos around them. Mary and Catherine giggled and gave each other a secret little glance.
How very strange, Kate mused as she watched them, that someone as friendly and sweet as Mary should seem to have so many secrets. First the golden-eyed man on the walkway, and now . . . what? Was the queen’s lady not allowed to talk to her ambassador? But to be so intimate with someone as suspect as Feria seemed odd.
And there was something strange in the closeness of the moment for someone as seemingly low in courtly rank as Mary. Also there were all the whispers that Lady Catherine was not at all content with her new place. . . .
“Everyone must now be ready!” Cawarden, the Master of the Revels, called as his horse trotted down the disorderly line of people. “Quickly!”
Before Kate could call out to Mary, Feria and Lady Catherine hurried away and Mary’s brother, Lord Henry Everley, broke out of the crowd to grab her arm. His short velvet cloak swirled around them, and for an instant they were both concealed from Kate’s sight. When she saw them again, she glimpsed the dark red color flushing Henry Everley’s handsome, bearded face. He gave Mary’s arm a hard shake, his fingers crumpling her fine silk sleeve, and she tried to push him away.
Mary, who always seemed to be laughing, looked just as furious as her brother. She shook her head, pulling again at her arm. They were much too far away from Kate for her to hear their quarrel, but something like a cold flash of stark fear broke through Mary’s anger.
Moved to help her, Kate started toward them, but a sudden shout pulled her back.
“Kate Haywood!” the queen called. “To me.”
Kate spun around to see Queen Elizabeth waving her forward with an imperious gesture. Kate glanced back at Mary. She and her brother had disappe
ared and the place under the shadow of the arches was empty. Kate had no choice but to go to the queen, yet that flash of fear on her friend’s face lingered in her mind.
“Yes, Your Majesty?” she said, as she hurried toward the queen. She carefully held the hem of her new black-trimmed white satin gown above the frosty ground and darted around the frozen droppings of the waiting horses.
“One of those trumpeters is completely out of tune,” Elizabeth said testily. “He is giving me a headache. You must speak to him at once.”
“Of course, Your Majesty,” Kate said, though she feared she could never decipher which of the dozens of trumpeters in their scarlet and gold tabards was the offensive one.
By the time she had organized the musicians and found her place in one of the ladies’ chariots, it was nearly time to depart. Mary Everley already sat on one of the fat red pillows among the other ladies, and she slid over to make room for Kate. Mary offered Kate the other end of a fur-edged lap robe, but she wouldn’t meet Kate’s eyes and had a most distracted air about her.
Far ahead of them in the line of chariots and palfreys, Elizabeth raised her bejeweled hands and everything fell silent.
“Oh, Almighty God,” she cried. “I give Thee most hearty thanks that Thine hast been so merciful to spare me to behold this most joyful day.”
Then she let Robert Dudley help her onto the white satin cushions of her waiting litter. He took his own mount just behind, where he was to lead the queen’s white mare, and the chosen noblemen raised the scarlet canopy of state above Elizabeth’s head.
With a blast of trumpets and sackbuts, the gates were flung open and the church bells of London rang out. Crowds immediately surged close amid cries of “God save Your Grace!” and “God bless Queen Elizabeth!”
The noise of such great joy was too loud at first for Kate to say anything to Mary. Eventually the celebration made even Mary smile, and she waved to Catherine Grey, who rode with her sickly mother, Lady Frances, and her tiny sister, Lady Mary, in the chariot just ahead.
Murder at Westminster Abbey Page 6
