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Authors: Karen Harper

Tags: #Fiction - Historical, #England/Great Britain, #16th Century, #Mystery, #Tudors

BOOK: The Fatal Fashione
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“Though there have been a few who have hoodwinked me,” she muttered, as they began to stroll again. “But, Thomas, as for my fostering competition, even foreign if need be, take the burgeoning new starch industry. Mrs. Dingen van der Passe and her hovering hulk of a husband have more than once tried to suggest I bestow upon them the right to control all London starch houses, and I’ve told them no. I cannot see shutting the door on such young talent as her competitors, someone like Mistress Hannah von Hoven, who also—”
Though Thomas had seemed sure-footed, he stumbled, grunted, and almost pitched into her. She caught his arm as his walking stick clattered to the cobbles. One of his watchmen, a short, sinewy man with eyebrows that seemed knit together as one dark slash across his face, darted to pick it up, then backed away again. Elizabeth was surprised that anyone had stood so close, for she had not seen or heard him. But she noted now that the man emanated a strange acrid scent she had smelled earlier, no doubt the residue of mortar or resin on his person.
“Forgive me, Your Majesty,” Thomas said. He turned away a moment and called to the man—perhaps a personal guard, she thought—“My thanks, Badger.”
“Thomas, I will forgive you on the condition that you visit both of the starch houses I’ve mentioned, Mrs. van der Passe’s large one and Hannah von Hoven’s small establishment, to see what I mean. I’ve been sending ruffs to both, encouraging both. Indeed, Hannah’s small shop is holding its own in the burgeoning business.”
Suddenly, he seemed more distressed than his near fall had made him. “Your Most Gracious Majesty, I keep so busy here—”
“I will only be a
gracious
majesty if you humor me on this. I’ll not have you believe your queen is not forward-thinking. I will inform both women that the illustrious Sir Thomas Gresham, financier and builder of the English exchange, will honor them with a visit. My herb mistress sells Hannah the roots of the cuckoo-pint herb to make starch, so everyone profits, you’ll see.”
Thomas nodded, but she could see she’d upset him. Perhaps, despite the numerous industries he had personally encouraged, one run strictly by women to promote style was beneath him. If so, her heartfelt admiration of the man would suffer. Too, she had heard that he and his wife were not getting on of late, and she never approved of marital discord among her closest subjects.
“I shall look forward to the visits and encourage both ladies,” Thomas assured her, but he still looked annoyed. Men would ever be men, she thought. She told herself again: Though she could hardly rule without them, she’d never take one on as mate or king.
Carting four hemp sacks of walnut-sized cuckoo-pint roots, two sacks knotted over each shoulder, Meg Milligrew left the palace through the kitchen block and headed for Kings Street at midmorning the next day. Under the Court Gate, she nearly bumped into Ned Topside. Ned, whose real name was Edward Thompson, was the queen’s principal player for court entertainments.
With roguish green eyes, chiseled nose, curly hair, and well-turned legs, Ned was beguiling and knew it. Talented, too, for the clever thespian could become a prince or a pauper in the blink of an eye. When Elizabeth Tudor was still a princess and struggling simply to remain safe, Ned had taught Meg not only to read and write but to mimic the queen in stance and speech, so that she could serve as Her Majesty’s counterpart upon occasions of the queen’s choosing.
Ned was witty, besides, with his glib tongue and teasing ways, a man women adored on stage and off. Though she’d lied to herself about it for years, Meg knew she not only hated but loved Ned, and had since she’d laid eyes on him eight years ago. She considered herself a reasonable person, but, curse the man, he always managed to make her sound like a ninnyhammer.
“Mistress Milligrew,” he declaimed, and swept off his cap in a bow, “as they used to say in days of yore, whither goest thou?”
“Where you’d like to go, you blackguard, but Her Majesty has sent me this time instead. To Hannah von Hoven’s with roots to make starch.”
“Her Grace only sent me once to her with your cuckoo roots when you were puking, as I recall. After all, I deem you the real stiff and prickly Mistress Starch, not her.”
“That isn’t funny. And one official visit doesn’t mean you didn’t go back to see her on your own and more than once, smelling of pomade, I heard you did.”
“Did Jenks tell you that?” he inquired, taking two of the sacks from her shoulders so fast that, suddenly unbalanced, she almost tipped into him.
“What if he did?” she challenged, her voice rising.
“Jenks is still sweet on you and wants you to be angry with me, that’s all. I don’t love Hannah.”
“Love?” she screeched, snatching back her sacks. “When did that ever enter into the talk between you and one of your—”
“I missed you, too, the week you were away,” he interrupted, and darted a quick kiss on her forehead. He wedged her in with one arm on the arched wall of the gate, heedless of how people stared. To her amazement, he tenderly brushed her flyaway hair from her face and tucked the loose tresses behind each ear.
In a silky voice, he said, “You always did have the most lovely skin, and your ears are like little sea shells. Meg, Hannah may be fair of face and form, but you are—”
“—onto your seductive flatteries, Ned Topside, actor
extraordinaire.
Save your lip for Her Majesty—or both lips for Hannah. Now leave off and let me pass!”
Instead, he stepped closer and put both big, warm hands on hers where she gripped the tied necks of her sacks. Her voice came out breathy this time. “Don’t trifle with me, Ned.”
“You are not a trifle to me, lovey.” His voice, too, was husky, which only made the butterflies in her stomach beat their wings harder in her wretched need for him. “Let me go with you,” he whispered, “and after we can—”
“I have business with Hannah and don’t need you underfoot!” She wrenched herself from his touch. Devil take it, she should have wed Jenks when she had the chance two years ago, but she feared then her heart would be untrue not only to herself but to dear Jenks. And after he had saved Ned’s life, they both owed him dearly.
“Her Majesty,” Meg said in a calmer tone, noticing that several palace servants upon their own errands had stopped to stare, “has sent me to tell Hannah that Sir Thomas Gresham will visit her soon with some questions and she’s not to think aught is amiss. Now, if you please, let me pass.”
She was certain Ned, too, realized they had an audience, because he dramatically lifted his hands, palms out, to his shoulders, as though he would never touch her again.
“If I pleased, you would not pass,” he said. Those green eyes seemed to devour her. “I had hoped for a softer tone and sweeter touch after your week away. I only hope things went much better between you and your little Sally than between us. Good day then, Mistress Milligrew, alias Mistress Starch.”
With a half-bow and a flourish of his hand, he disappeared into the small crowd that had gathered. Her cheeks aflame, Meg turned and hied herself up Whitehall toward Charing Cross just west of the royal mews, berating herself with each step.
Ned had seemed so sincere when he’d mentioned her daughter and bid a hurt farewell. Why did she always have to act the shrew with him when he made advances? If he didn’t care for her one whit, wouldn’t he have given up long ago? Or did he just like the challenge? For the love of heaven, why couldn’t she feel this swept away by solid, sturdy Jenks?
She saw a little girl about Sally’s age sitting in a doorway, cutting scraps of cloth with a small knife. Tears filled Meg’s eyes. Sally. She must keep her thoughts on Sally, not Ned.
Though she made her way through the crowded crosstraffic of Charing Cross, Meg saw again the day—last Wednesday, it was—when she and Sally had gone off alone to cut the cuckoo-pint roots she now bore on her shoulders.
Look in the shaded spots for the telltale bright red berries, but don’t eat any,
Meg heard her own warning voice say to her daughter.
All parts of the plant are poison. Why, even touching the starch made from the roots turns the hands of laundresses and starchers chapped and red.
But it won’t hurt us to just pick them, Mother Meg, before the starch is all boiled up?
Meg smiled even now at the way the girl called her “Mother Meg” and her adoptive mother “Mother Susan.” They both tried hard to keep anything from harming or even frightening the child. Her poor face was so scarred from the small pox that had nearly killed her as a baby, but her adopted family owned no mirrors, and the child knew she was cherished.
Meg prayed that would be enough to sustain Sally when her parents told her—soon but reluctantly, they would, they said—about her disfigured face. Meanwhile, Meg feared the girl would see her image in a polished kettle or horse-trough water. At least Sally was living on a small, isolated farm on the fringe of the heath, not here in London where a woman’s face could be her fate. Gracious, if Hannah’s starch business didn’t make her name and fortune, surely the blessing of her beauty would.
Even though the cuckoo-pint plant is cursed to be poison,
Meg had told Sally,
the Lord God gave it a special blessing.
Sally had looked up into Meg’s face, breathless to hear.
What blessing, Mother Meg?
The pollen—the seed dust—of the plant glows in the dark, like fairy lamps. Can you see it on the leaves in the deep shade there?
Oh, yes—pretty fairy lamps!
she’d cried, clapping her hands.
The fen folk call them shiners, my dearest girl, and can even find them at night by their glow. I think the stuff is so pretty, I’ve collected it over the years, and keep it in a little box. In daylight it is mere dust, but at night—bright magic!
Isn’t it silly, then?
Sally had said with a giggle.
Poison that glows and draws one to it
…
“Eh, watch where
ja
going,
ja
clay-brained baggage!” A man’s voice jolted Meg from her reverie.
She’d bumped into him, a tall man with hulking shoulders. Though he was all in black, he sported a flat taffeta cap of striped red and blue. He sounded foreign, but then, so did too many in London these days. As he, fortunately, turned away and hurried off, Meg noted she’d somehow walked a few doors past Hannah’s. From here she could see laundresses and bleachers, called whitsters, guarding their linens spread to dry in St. Martin’s fields just beyond, so many sheets it seemed to have snowed. She turned around and went through a narrow alley to the entrance of the young Flemish woman’s starch house.
Compared to the large establishment Mrs. Dingen van der Passe owned over on Holywell Street, Hannah’s place was small and plain, just a large loft; three women worked with her, instead of the veritable army Mrs. van der Passe employed. Both of the starchers were from Flanders in the low, or Dutch, countries, but the older woman had come first and caught the queen’s eye. Why, Dingen van der Passe claimed she could make a ruff from a spider’s web, and she charged five pounds to teach others to starch their own neck and wrist ruffs at home if they didn’t bring them in like the servants of the queen’s courtiers did.
“Hannah!” Meg called up the narrow enclosed stairs, wishing the sprightly woman would come down to help her lug these sacks. Meg hoped she wasn’t still upset over the way they’d contended over the price of the herbs last time. Gracious, that petite, pretty woman could screech and argue, and she was tight with the purse strings.
“Hannah, it’s Meg Milligrew with your starch roots!”
Silence from above. Not even the usual echo of laughter or patter of quick feet. Was no one up there to help, even if Hannah had stepped out? Grunting, Meg trudged up the steps, bumping her sacks against the walls, half wishing she had let Ned come along. She really had been too hard on him.
Though amazed to find the loft deserted, she saw nothing amiss. Suspended from stretched cords, rows of newly starched ruffs of all shapes and sizes dried in the brisk air from a window set ajar. The neck-sized wooden forms that held ruffs while they were set with heated poking sticks bore finished ruffs.
Meg thumped her burden to the floor and noted that the low braziers that heated the poking sticks had burned down to silver ashes. She walked toward the long, open window overlooking the fields. Within the large, coffin-shaped dipping vat, the bath of milky white starch lay undisturbed—but for the stiff human hand that floated up from beneath to break the surface.
 
“ANNE,” THOMAS GRESHAM CALLED TO HIS WIFE, “someone’s moved my things all around on this shelf in here!”
She came to the door of his privy second-story chamber, which overlooked the central courtyard and gardens of their huge home.
“You surely didn’t let little Marie play in here, did you?” he asked, glaring at the rearranged, neatly aligned items.
“At thirteen years of age, she’s hardly little anymore. I’ve been out on an errand and just returned myself. Besides, you’ve ofttimes had her in here, our Marie-Anne.”
Why did she always insist on using not the name the child had been born with, Marie, but the hyphenated one she had given the girl when she’d agreed to rear her? Bridling his temper, he said, “But she was only in here when I was with her.”
“No, she wasn’t in here lately.”
“I told you the servants aren’t needed here to clean, and only you have access besides me—”
“Whatever is wrong, then?” she demanded, bustling in with her household keys clanking. “Yes, I may have moved a thing or two, for I can’t abide the jumbled way you keep things—bizarre things, as if you were yet a boy with your prizes from the woods or stables, like those strange brown pieces of soil dug from the earth of your beloved financial exchange.”
“Hell’s gates, woman, that’s precisely the shelf that’s been tampered with! It was right here,” he said, banging his fist on the oaken length of it, now all dusted and tidied.
“But you already had plugs of soil you’d kept from the day the cornerstone of this house was laid. You even had doubles of them, so I assumed you have extras of the one that broke.”
“Broke?” he echoed, raking his fingers through his hair. “Anne, just tell me where in hell are the pieces of my dried brown cake, the one that looked different from the others.”
“Cake? That one did look and smell strange.”
“About this big?” he demanded, circling together the thumbs and index fingers of both hands. “And—it broke?”
“When I moved it, it dropped and went to pieces and dust on the tiles, then dirtied the good Turkish carpet. It was a mess, and I swept it up, which I should never have to do in this huge house of servants, oh, no, not Sir Thomas Gresham’s wife. But he doesn’t want any servants in the great big room full of—of dirt in more ways than one!”
“I didn’t ask or tell you to clean here—to tamper with my things!”
“But it was just soil, wasn’t it? You look white as a sheet.”
“Only because you managed to break and discard a gift for Her Majesty, a unique and expensive one at that!”
Anne sucked in a breath and clapped her hands over her mouth. She was still fair, his Anne, with her slender, erect form and piercing blue eyes that used to so enchant him. When their love was new-fledged, she could captivate him with a smile or a touch. Fire still danced in her eyes, even if now it oft heralded a spat and not a seduction. She might look fragile, but her physical stamina and strength were deceptive. Until Marie was nearly six years old, Anne had sometimes carted her about as if she were a toddler.
Once her passion had been for him; she’d been pregnant with their son when they’d married. But the flames slowly went out, and Anne never seemed happy again. Granted, she’d served as his hostess among the rich and powerful in Europe and much favored the new fashions and furnishings the Gresham wealth provided—
yet
, ever homesick, she’d carped about how much time he spent away, and she’d detested living abroad all those years. Even now, back in England with occasional visits to the queen’s court, she was malcontent.
Besides a passion for power and possessions, Thomas felt he and Anne had little in common now. The tragedy of losing their only son and heir had not united them in grief but had augmented their alienation. Even their little girl, though beloved by both parents, managed to stand between them.
“Why,” Anne demanded, as her fisted hands perched on her waist, “in all of God’s creation would you give the queen a dirt cake? The pearls you found for her, the other things, including that fine Barbary horse you brought her back once, I can see, but—”
He collapsed into the nearest carved chair. His bad leg was losing its strength, and he was about to lose his temper. He felt sick, just sick. And here the queen had coerced him into visiting starch houses, one of which he’d vowed desperately to himself he’d never set foot in again, and to protect Anne, damn her.
“What was the little cake, then?” she wheedled, her voice low as she propped herself up with both hands on the edge of his worktable. As if it were a dark mirror, the polished oaken surface reflected her image. Strangely, that recalled for him the painting of the twin girls he had hidden in a locked chest in this very room, one face in sunlight, the other more in shadow.
“That cake,” he explained through gritted teeth, “was of a rare sort of dried paste the Spanish call
chocolata.
It is the source of a rich drink King Philip has had secretly imported from the New World. A royal drink among the Indian rulers there, good for health and worth a fortune—a perfect gift for a queen.”
She had the decency to look shocked and sorry. He slumped back in the chair, gripping the arms of it so hard his fingers went white.
“I—you never tell me things anymore,” she accused. “How was I to know? I never did know half the things you were up to. Can you get more? I know you have your sources. I know you have your secret imports, too.”
He looked up at her; their narrowed gazes met and held. His eyes, not hers, were glassy with tears. The fact that he’d once taken a mistress and had loved her utterly—still did—was what truly always lay between them. It hadn’t even helped that Anne knew the woman was dead, or that Anne deeply loved his illegitimate daughter she’d reared. She doted on the child she called Marie-Anne, as if she could pretend the child was truly hers and Gretta had never been. But she
had
been and seemed to stalk them yet, now not only as spirit but, lately, as flesh.
“Are you quite sure,” he asked, trying to control his voice, “the cake of
chocolata
is destroyed?”
“Gone out with the rubbish two days ago,” she said flatly—smugly, he thought, as if she were somehow now enjoying this. “My lord, I regret the mishap but cannot change it—like mistakes in life. Well, at least
I
admit and rue mistakes
I
have made.”
He struggled to ignore that thrust. “Then I must ask you not to come in here again, even to tend or clean this chamber. And I’d best go see Marie to tell her the same, at least that she cannot enter unless I am here.”
“Which you seldom are—never were,” Anne muttered, and swept from the room.
He was surprised to find her waiting for him in the hall. Perhaps she wanted to be sure he did not speak sharply to Marie, but then she knew he cherished the child, too, for the girl’s sake as well as for the lovely, lost woman who had borne her thirteen long years ago.
“Marie!” he called outside the girl’s apartments. He heard no answer, no movement within.
“Isn’t she about?” he asked Anne, who pushed the door open and went in. “It’s nearly midday,” he went on. “Don’t you know where she is?”
They peeked into the bedchamber together. The bed was mussed but empty. “She was here, resting because she stayed up late last night, reading, she said,” Anne explained, her voice rising. “I told her I would fetch her for midday meal when you came home. I told you we should find a young maid-companion for her, one to sleep in her room since her nurse is gone now.”
“She’s not feeling ill?”
“She said she was fine.”
Fine or no, Marie was neither in her three rooms nor in the other thirty-eight on four floors of Gresham House. The parents and servants searched the central gardens, the stables, the street.
Thomas gripped Anne’s arm when they met in their frenzy by the front entrance. Servants’ voices calling for their daughter echoed through the mansion. “I’m going to the construction site to be sure she isn’t there looking for me, though she knows better than to go out alone.” He turned away, then added, “If she’s not there, I’ll raise a force of men. We’ll search the area—the city if we must. The queen will help put out a hue and cry, I know she will.”
“Godspeed, Thomas. Godspeed,” Anne cried after him as he painfully climbed the mounting block he always used to get onto a horse with this damned leg. He blinked back tears. Those were the very words his dear Gretta had said to him before, still cradling their tiny baby, she’d closed her eyes and died.
In early afternoon, Queen Elizabeth walked in the walled privy palace gardens with her lord treasurer, William Paulet, the Marquess of Winchester. She’d chosen the fresh air because the old man always seemed to reek of the dust of the past. He’d served as comptroller of the royal household under her father and as lord treasurer under her brother and sister.
Widowed now, but looking for a wife even at age eighty-one, Paulet had entertained Elizabeth munificently at his country home in Hampshire on her royal progress last summer. She’d jested it was too bad he was so elderly or she would put him on Parliament’s list of potential suitors. The wily old man seemed unwilling to retire or to depart this earth until he achieved his aims, several of which, she feared, ran counter to her interests. Politically, he was still helpful; personally, he was untrustworthy and Catholic to the core. Worse, some of his closest friends were the northern lords she feared might rise in rebellion and support of her cousin, Queen Mary of Scots.
Of ruddy complexion, with thinning hair but thickening jowls, Will Paulet, as his friends called him, was hardly heeded these days by the monarch, and he knew it. Still, it did not keep him from lecturing her long and loud, for he was hard of hearing, too.
As ever today, he was accompanied by Hugh Dauntsey, one of his minions, who at least had the sense to stand on the other side of the large fountain to give them some privacy. Dauntsey was the charming, staunch Catholic her sister, Queen Mary Tudor, had brought in to replace Gresham in foreign finance, before she’d seen to her surprise and shame that he was all slick surface but wretched at his work. He had been summarily dismissed, and Elizabeth refused to employ the man in any position.
Though she hated to admit it, Hugh Dauntsey’s very gaze unsettled her. His eyes were so pale blue and rimless that from a distance he seemed to have only white eyeballs with no irises at all. Of a pasty complexion and sporting a thin goatee, part blond and part white, the man almost seemed an albino. He was short and thin as a rail, with deliberate movements. Dauntsey was always finely attired, almost above his station, and it annoyed her that Paulet insisted on treating the forty-year-old hanger-on, who had never wed, more as a son than as his secretary.
“I observe, Your Majesty, the tasks of your government are overburdening the greatly reduced number of secretaries and comptrollers you keep on the rolls,” Paulet lectured her in a loud voice as they took another turn on the gravel path, littered with autumn leaves from the fruit trees. He always turned the better of his two bad ears toward her and cupped it with his hand, despite how his stiff ruff got in the way. “The more subjects directly employed by the crown, the better for the country. Your father said that more than once. Keep them busy, keep them close.”
“I see you keep your man Dauntsey close, my lord. But the bureaucracy was quite bloated,” she told him, nearly shouting. She’d heard Paulet had a listening horn of some sort, but he never used it around her. “And feeding and feting so many people strained our finances. We’ve pared the government to a good level of efficiency. I expect my people not to cling to the past but to look toward new endeavors and enterprises.”
“What surprises? You listen too much to Thomas Gresham, while he’s obsessed with building that foreign exchange. It will just draw in more wily foreigners, I tell you.”
“The influx of foreigners does not distress me as much as the behavior of my own countrymen, those who covertly keep to their Catholic ways. Be sure to share that with your northern friends, for they are being closely watched.”
Despite his years of practicing a courtier’s wiles, he looked momentarily like a fish out of water, gaping for air as she went on. “As for Sir Thomas Gresham’s mercantile exchange, however much its style is inspired by the bourse in Antwerp, it is to benefit our people. He, at least, is loyal and valuable to me, though I know you do not approve of him or get along.”
“Alone—that’s exactly it. You listen to him alone these days. Why, I had advised the royal Tudors for years before Gresham was even born, Your Majesty.”
As Elizabeth made the turn back toward the palace, she saw not only Hugh Dauntsey watching them—and probably hearing their raised voices, too—but Ned Topside, half behind a tree, no less, gesturing madly to her in a most rude way. She was briefly grateful that Paulet couldn’t see well, either, these days. Whatever was the matter with her man to insist she come to him straightaway? More often than not, Ned Topside was saucy and needed his ears boxed, yet he seemed confident and almost commanding right now.

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