Murder at Westminster Abbey

by Amanda Carmack

  He was laughing with Edward Seymour, the two of them handsome and glowing with robust health and manly, courtly charm. Anyone looking at them now would never know only two nights ago they had been falling down in Southwark mud puddles. She wondered if they had known Nell.

  “I beg your pardon, Master St. Long,” Kate said as she hurried toward him. “I am bid by the queen to find Lady Mary. Have you seen her?”

  Richard smiled at her, but Edward Seymour fidgeted with an impatient frown on his angelically handsome face.

  “I haven’t seen her since last night, I fear, Mistress Haywood,” Richard said. “But it’s a fearful thing for her to keep the queen waiting. Shall I help you look?”

  He seemed everything open and friendly, worried about his cousin, yet Kate felt a touch of disquiet as she looked up into his eyes. Eyes that were blue, not a strange gold color. But there was no need to go on an extensive search.

  “Here I am!” Mary called.

  Kate turned to find Mary weaving between the bejeweled throngs, her scarlet train looped over her arm. She smiled, but her pretty face was taut, her eyes sparkling frantically like the queen’s. Her red hair straggled from beneath her cap.

  Several steps behind trailed her brother, scowling above his red-blond beard.

  “The queen is looking for you,” Kate said.

  “I mislaid my earrings, so stupid of me,” Mary said with a shrill laugh. She grabbed Kate’s arm and hurried toward where the queen waited.

  Kate glanced back to see Henry Everley and Richard St. Long muttering together. Henry’s fist was tight around the hilt of the jeweled dagger at his belt, but Richard looked after Mary with a thoughtful tilt of his head.

  “Mary, what is wrong?” Kate said quickly, knowing there was not much time for them to talk but worried about her friend.

  “My brother is a foolish hedgepig, that is all,” Mary said with a laugh. “He usually lets out his temper in Southwark, but the queen has kept him too busy lately. He will come around soon. He must. Everything depends on that.”

  There was not a moment to say anything else. The queen impatiently waved Mary into place, and a footman handed her the velvet cushion holding the queen’s embroidered gloves. Kate went to find her own place in line, behind the musicians.

  Lady Gertrude Howard was watching her again, she saw as she smoothed her hair. Lady Gertrude frowned fiercely, and her words rang in Kate’s head. You look like her. Eleanor.

  Her head whirled with the frantic, lightning energy of the day, with all that had happened in only a few moments. She knew she would have to consider and absorb it all later, next to her own fire. But now the doors of the palace were thrown open, letting in the cold gray day, and the tumbling outpouring of the joy of an entire city.

  A blue carpet was laid out from the palace to the Abbey, and to the accompaniment of the trumpets and drums, a choir singing the “Salve Festa Dies,” and all the pealing church bells of London, the court made its stately journey.

  The scarlet-robed bishops in their gold miters went first, then knights and pages, noblemen bearing the heavy crown of Edward the Confessor, the scepter and orb, the spurs and sword, without which no monarch could be crowned.

  Then the Duchess of Norfolk took up the queen’s train, and the canopy of state was raised over her head by the Barons of the Cinque Ports. The Earls of Pembroke and Shrewsbury walked beside her, but none could outshine the gold and white queen, in her cloth of gold and ermine robes sewn with pearls, her glorious hair falling free down her back.

  Held back by railings to either side, the crowds that had waited so long in the cold night to see her burst forth with deafening cheers and surged forward.

  Elizabeth’s impatience and fit of temper inside the palace seemed forgotten as she beamed out over the crowds.

  “God have mercy on you all, my good people!” she called as she walked past them. Once she was gone, they fell on the fine carpet, tearing it to pieces for remembrances and nearly knocking over the Duchess of Norfolk in the process.

  Once inside the hush of the Abbey, Kate’s eyes were so dazzled for an instant she could hardly see. After the gray glare of the day, the cavernous church glowed with the soft golden light of hundreds of candles and torches, which scented the cool air with their waxy smoke. More nobles sat on the tiers of benches set up along the long aisle, watched by the stone eyes of the funerary monuments.

  The lords and ladies rose as one in a rustle of velvet and brocade when the queen appeared in a fanfare of trumpets. The music could not have been arranged better, Kate thought with a glow of pride. It soared into the vast church, as if it came from the heavens itself to greet the bright new day.

  Queen Elizabeth herself seemed to float down the aisle on a cloud of that music, poised and assured, as glorious as if she had always been a queen, and had never been a bastardized exile who had to fight for her very life and those of her friends. She glided toward her crown with a serene smile, and a beam of light fell through the jewellike window to gild her red Tudor hair.

  Kate was astonished that she herself was there to see such a glorious moment, such a queen, and she knew she would do anything to serve Queen Elizabeth. That this was truly the beginning of a new day, for all of them.

  Elizabeth reached the dais where the bishop of Carlisle waited to crown her.

  “Do you, good people of the realm of England, desire this royal person Elizabeth Tudor for your lawful, God-given queen?”

  “Yay! Yay!” the shout poured out. “God save Queen Elizabeth. . . .”

  CHAPTER 10

  “Walter? Are you there?” Mary Everley tiptoed into the silent darkness of the abandoned Abbey. She held her stiff velvet and brocade skirts tightly to keep them from rustling, but her heart was pounding so loudly in her ears she feared it could be heard all the way back to the queen’s banquet at Westminster Palace.

  The banquet where she was meant to be right now, waiting on Queen Elizabeth. How angry her father would be if he saw she wasn’t there! Mary almost laughed to imagine the glaring light in his eyes, the way his jowly face flamed red whenever he was unhappy about anything. And that seemed to be all the time of late.

  “I have bribed and begged our way back to court, and I won’t let an ungrateful chit like you ruin it all!” he had thundered just that morning, when Henry told him what he had discovered. Henry was a rat of a brother, but she had always known that. That was why she knew she could rely only on herself to get what she wanted. That was why she went to the Spanish for help.

  “Elizabeth might be just an upstart Boleyn bastard, but she’s better than Queen Mary. This is our one chance. . . .”

  Mary frowned at the memory of those shouted words, of her father’s hand slapping smartly across her face. It was his chance, mayhap, his and Henry’s and Richard’s. They had schemed for it during all those long years of country exile while Mary Tudor was queen. But they hadn’t counted on their own quiet Mary not going along as their contented pawn.

  She had her own plans. And they were so close to coming true, she could almost reach out and touch them.

  Mary stumbled on a crack in the floor, pain shooting up from her slippered toes as she pitched forward. Her hand clutched not at her dreams but at a cold stone pillar, and she leaned against it to catch her breath.

  The church felt cold, so empty after all the crowds of the coronation. Empty and full of twisting shadows. Mary shivered as she studied the carved effigies all around her, their stone eyes watching her blankly in the dim light of her lantern. Perhaps this had not been the best place to ask Walter to meet her, but she could think of nothing else so sure to be deserted at such an hour. Everyone else would be feasting and dancing until dawn.

  Mary glanced back over her shoulder. She had left the side door ajar, as she told Walter she would, and now she only had to wait for him.

  Surely he would com
e soon. She knew he couldn’t bear to stay away from her, just as she longed for him. Soon, very soon, they would never be parted again at all.

  Mary took a careful step and found the pain in her foot was fading. She hurried on, past the ghostly, empty throne in front of the high altar, and into the burial chapel of King Henry VII and Elizabeth of York. Their gilded figures, forever staring up into the heavens side by side, glowed as the lantern light flickered over them.

  Mary carefully put down her lantern on a stone ledge. Her hands trembled too much to hold it. Where was Walter? Surely he should be here by now! She dared not stay away too long for fear her father or brother would notice her gone. She could bear no more of their slaps or their orders.

  Yet neither could she bear not to see Walter. Only her stolen moments with him seemed real to her now. They were all she wanted, all she longed for. And even those instants had seemed like a dream, until she’d drunk too much port one night and whispered confidences to Catherine Grey.

  Catherine was a true friend, and Mary was sure she would keep the secret, as she harbored more than one of her own. Just saying the words aloud—Walter kissed me, Walter loves me—made them seem real.

  Once or twice, Mary considered telling Kate Haywood as well. Surely any lady who could write such beautiful songs would know the pain and the soaring joy of love! Yet something had always held back Mary’s words from her new friend. She had to be very, very careful now if her plans were to come to fruition.

  The vast church, so cold only a moment before, now seemed like a desert. Mary swept off her velvet cap and shook her hair free, letting the red waves fall over her shoulders. Once she had hated its strange color, longing to be blond like Catherine Grey. Now, thanks to Queen Elizabeth, it was fashionable to have red hair. And Walter did seem to like it so. . . .

  A sudden noise split the silence, a heavy footfall on the stone floor. Mary spun around, her heart soaring with happiness. Walter! Surely it had to be. A tall, slim figure in a plumed cap strode out of the shadows and reached for her.

  “You whore!” the person shouted. Mary realized with a cold bolt of fear that she had been terribly wrong.

  But it was all much too late.

  CHAPTER 11

  “‘The sighs that come from my heart, they grieve me passing sore! Sith I must from my love depart, farewell my joy forever more . . . ,’” the chorus sang, their sad-sweet words ringing out over the great feast.

  Kate leaned over the railing of the musicians’ gallery to watch as Sir Edward Dymoke, the Queen’s Champion, rode into Westminster Hall in full armor to challenge any who dared dispute her title, just as the Royal Champion had for centuries. None made challenge, of course, but there was much laughter and applause as the queen’s health was drunk once more. She had the best of views from up so high; she could see everyone arrayed below.

  It was now after eleven at night, and the banquet began at three in the afternoon, so the noise grew louder and more abandoned as the hours flew by. Remove after remove was brought to the long rows of white damask-draped tables set up under the rafters of the old hall. Leeks in almond sauce, chicken amorosa, fish stuffed with lemon and spices, veal in rosemary, fresh white loaves of manchet bread, sugar subtleties in the shapes of castles and rivers. The wine flowed freely into the gold and silver goblets, a steady stream of ruby red that fueled the merriment.

  And no one looked merrier than Queen Elizabeth, now crowned and anointed. She sat on a raised dais at the high table beneath her canopy of estate, her dark purple velvet gown lustrous in the torchlight. On her head was a jeweled crown, said to have been worn once by Queen Anne Boleyn at her own coronation banquet, and two of the highest noblemen, Lord William Howard and the Earl of Sussex, served her sweetmeats on bended knees.

  Elizabeth held out her hand to thank her gallant champion, her face radiant against the curtain of her loose red hair. It gladdened Kate’s heart to see it, for the queen’s life until that night had held little gaiety, little grandeur. It was a glorious night indeed, before work to rebuild an England left in ruins by Queen Mary would have to begin again in the morning.

  But not just yet. As Elizabeth laughed, the crown atop her bright hair sparkled, and Kate remembered what Bess said about Nell. That she had longed to see a queen’s coronation after their grandmother’s tales of Queen Anne’s procession. But now poor Nell was gone, after her glimpse of the new queen, and someone in this vast city had killed her.

  Mayhap someone in that very hall. Kate studied the rows of faces, all of them laughing and bright with drink beneath their jeweled coronets. Had one of them, in a fit of fury, bashed in a woman’s head and left her for dead?

  Kate feared she could well believe it of some. She’d seen fits of temper aplenty at court, had heard bitter whispers from men resentful of being denied what they saw as their rightful glories by the new queen. Feria the Spaniard hated her; the Seymours and the Howards thought she passed them over for upstarts like Robert Dudley and William Cecil.

  Men such as that were accustomed to holding the power tightly in their own hands, not wielded by the delicate white fingers of a woman like Elizabeth. A woman who would not give way to their bullying, and whom they could no longer control. What violence were such men capable of when thwarted?

  Kate suddenly sat up straight as a terrible thought struck her of a man of power and strength who imagined his rightful place was being denied him by the queen. What depths of fury would fill him? Such white-hot anger could not be taken out on the queen herself. But a helpless Southwark bawd . . .

  Like the bleedin’ queen, we are . . . , Bess had said.

  Kate’s gaze swept over the crowd again. Edward Seymour was laughing raucously with his young friends, many of them the same drunken boors Kate saw in Southwark the night she went to see Rob. They looked as if they never thought of anything but their wine and their jokes, but she had seen just such careless young courtiers turn from indolent laughter to duel-worthy fury in an instant.

  The Seymours had long hated the Boleyns, ever since Jane Seymour supplanted Queen Anne. Young Edward had seen his father, the Lord Protector Somerset, and his uncle Thomas Seymour killed on the block by the Tudors. Now Elizabeth’s Boleyn relatives, like Baron Hunsdon and his sister Catherine Carey, took high places at court while the Seymours were ignored.

  Kate saw Lady Catherine Grey seated at one of the lower tables with the other maids of honor, watching Edward Seymour with her wide blue eyes. Her elegant hands were twisted painfully in the lap of her silver silk gown, and hectic, angry red stained her high cheekbones. Not only men could feel angry, of course, or displaced from their rightful positions. Catherine and her mother were said to be furious at their treatment.

  Yet surely only a man would have had the strength to batter Nell bloody. Catherine Grey, despite her anger and wounded pride, was a slight woman. She had friends, though. Such as Feria and his Spanish cohorts. Mayhap even King Philip himself?

  Kate studied the black-clad Spaniards at their table. Unlike most of the other revelers, they hadn’t taken much of the fine wine, and they watched the ever increasing abandon around them with pinched faces and disapproving eyes. Kate remembered Catherine Grey and Mary Everley whispering with them.

  Mary—where was she? Kate’s attention flashed past the blur of laughing faces to find Lord Everley, Mary’s father, at his place in the middle of the hall. Her view was half-blocked by a tall silver saltcellar, but she saw the earl’s bearded face and gold coronet as he talked to the lady who sat next to him. The earl had long been a widower, and he smiled as he made the women giggle. It was the first time Kate ever saw him look anything but stern or disapproving.

  He gave his more accustomed frown as he glared at the empty places on his other side. Henry Everley and Richard St. Long were not there, though Kate was sure she had seen them take their seats before she was distracted by the banquet music. They were not seated t
here now, though many of the younger lords had gone wandering as the night went on, seeking their friends and flirtations.

  But Mary wasn’t at her place among the maids, either. Kate knew there were many places she could be, but the image flashed through her mind of Henry Everley grabbing Mary’s arm. A shiver of cold disquiet seemed to slide over her.

  “Mistress Haywood,” one of the musicians called. “Shall we do ‘The Princess’s Madrigal’ now?”

  Startled out of the ever more oppressive world of her thoughts of violence and missing courtiers, Kate glanced over to find the other lute players watching her. She had forgotten her purpose for being there, which was to play the new songs she wrote for the night.

  “Yes, of course,” she said quickly, and took up her lute again.

  The instrument had once been her mother’s, and it was a thing of great beauty with its lustrous Italian wood and mother-of-pearl insets. On the back of the neck was the flowering initial E, with a smaller K beneath it that her father had carved when he gave it to Kate. It sounded exquisite, too, light and delicate, responsive to Kate’s slightest touch, always following where she led when the flood of notes and moods overcame her.

  She liked to imagine that her mother watched her when she played, helped her. Music could always take her out of herself, out of the dark world around her, and into a different realm entirely. One where there was only sound.

  Kate had worked hard to finish those songs in only a few weeks for the coronation. But tonight she couldn’t lose herself in them as she usually did. Too many things kept flying through her mind to let the notes take full hold. Nell and Bess. The glories of the day just finished, and the dangers the new queen would face even in the wake of such joy.

  She had practiced the tune over and over, though, and the strings of her lute brought it forth readily enough. When they built, built, to a crashing crescendo, there was a ripple of applause from below, and the other musicians smiled. They had been most reluctant to work with her, a mere woman, even though she had the authority of her father. But they came round somewhat when they heard her play.