The Fatal Fashione (4 page)
Read The Fatal Fashione Online
Authors: Karen Harper
Tags: #Fiction - Historical, #England/Great Britain, #16th Century, #Mystery, #Tudors
“See what I mean—spirits abroad,” Ned insisted.
Meg tried to speak calmly, rationally. “The queen will have our heads if we’ve been traipsing through footsteps and evidence and such and she decides to call a Privy Plot Council meeting to investigate.”
Properly chastened, they searched the rest of the large, irregularly shaped loft and finally found six fat rolls of ruff fabric, two each of cambric, linen, and lawn, standing on end on a deep shelf in the farthest corner—a shelf that was dripping onto the shelf below and then onto the floor.
“That’s just Hannah’s rolls of patching pieces,” Meg whispered. “They don’t make ruffs here.” She refused to go closer until Jenks took her arm and tugged her along.
Without another word, the men lifted the partially wet rolls of fabric away to reveal a wet, clothed corpse on the shelf. The three of them gasped in unison, then stood, shoulder to shoulder, staring as if they worshipped at a shiny marble effigy of a saint on an altar.
At first glance, the graceful, petite woman seemed asleep, but her slender body was glazed with a pearly film, drying from slick to crusty. It matted her pale eyelashes to her cheeks and her long, loose blond hair to her head and neck, at least where her tresses didn’t stand straight out. Still sopped with starch, her sea-blue skirts formed fantastical shapes, but the edges, hems, and fringes—and her little neck ruff—had already gone sharply stiff.
“HEY, THERE—YOU, GIRL!”
The woman’s voice meant nothing until she came close and stuck her face nearly nose to nose.
“You all right, then?” the woman asked. “You been standing there for hours, I seen you. And I can tell by your clothes you’re not a street girl.”
She hoped this woman would leave her alone. Strange, but she’d lost her voice, her thoughts. Lost herself. Desperately, she’d been trying to remember something—or was it to forget?
“Not’scaped from a forced betrothal or some such, have you? You look frighted. Someone been bothering you? We’re whitsters, see? We wash, bleach, and dry linens, that’s our trade. You don’t belong here. You just keep clear of trouble on the streets, hear?”
She nodded. Her head hurt, and her eyes ached from staring so long at the bright sheets in the wind and sun—and then at the high, open window across the way. Its slanted planes caught the sinking sun now and nearly blinded her, but she kept staring. She wanted to run from something, but her feet felt like lead, as in a nightmare. Was she dreaming? Something dreadful had happened. She’d seen it. But what?
“You hungry?” the woman asked, holding out a hunk of bread with a piece of yellow cheese.
She shook her head.
“Cat got your tongue, then?”
No, I’m fine,
she tried to say, but she didn’t hear her own words, her voice. She just kept hearing a muffled scream—and then nothing else.
she tried to say, but she didn’t hear her own words, her voice. She just kept hearing a muffled scream—and then nothing else.
But she did know one thing. The mere sight of food almost made her sick. She’d vomited in the hedges of this field earlier. She wanted to walk away from this place, this view, but she couldn’t bear to go home. Not now. She was not even sure where home was.
“Here now, mistress,” the same woman was saying, “you look peaked. Can I fetch someone for you, then? My name’s Ursala Hemmings, so what’s yours, eh? I’ve a friend near here, has a starch shop, and you could rest there out of the wind and sun while we find your folks.”
A starch shop … starch shop.
Either she screamed
No!
at the woman or just thought she did. Some kind of sound like a shriek echoed, echoed, trapped in her head, trapped in a big attic. She gripped her laced fingers tighter as if she were praying. But she wasn’t. She was just trying to make all the grief and horror stop.
No!
at the woman or just thought she did. Some kind of sound like a shriek echoed, echoed, trapped in her head, trapped in a big attic. She gripped her laced fingers tighter as if she were praying. But she wasn’t. She was just trying to make all the grief and horror stop.
Wending her way through the women with their linens, she turned away and started out of the busy field. Her shadow was long now, as if someone dark followed her. She didn’t feel her feet. It was almost as if she floated, as if she had to swim through a thick, white haze. She gazed one last time at the high, open window, then forced her feet at a quicker pace away.
“You sent for the Reverend Hosea Cantwell, Your Majesty?” Cecil asked as he came in with a stack of bills and grants for her to sign. “He’s been put in the corridor anteroom to await you and seems mad as a wet hen—a dour Puritan one.”
The queen stopped walking so fast her skirts swayed. She’d been pacing, waiting for word about the body in the starch vat. Cecil knew naught of that yet, though he’d been a key member of her Privy Plot Council. Over the last eight years, a small group of trusted friends and servants had helped her solve several murders that had struck close to the crown.
Besides that distress, she’d been praying her men who had fanned out over the city with Thomas Gresham’s staff would find his daughter. Never had her little band searched for a missing person who was not a murderer, but she had silently vowed the Gresham girl would be found.
“’S blood, yes, I sent for Cantwell, but it slipped my mind,” she admitted, and smacked the heel of her hand against her forehead so hard she rattled her pearl eardrops. “My lord, I cannot abide Cantwell’s public pulpit rantings against me. Or against current fashions, as he’s likely to damage the ruff-making industry or the starch market. That, in turn, would affect the dyers, the seamstresses, and the tailors,” she plunged on, flinging gestures.
“I completely agree, Your Grace. Indeed, one man could affect the balance of crafts and trades, and just now while the mercantile exchange is being built.”
“Exactly. Hosea Cantwell makes far too much out of little things, not to mention he’s one of the most vocal agitators in the Commons about my marital status.”
“It’s not just you he harangues, Your Grace, I assure you.”
“But it’s I who mean to have it out with him,” she declared, and headed for the door.
His arms still full of papers, Cecil leaped to open it for her. “Then should I accompany you?”
“I need you to stay here and inform me if Meg Milligrew, Ned Topside, or Steven Jenks returns.” She stepped back into the room and closed the door. “There’s been a strange death at Hannah von Hoven’s starch house.’S blood, just wait until Cantwell gets wind of that. Oh,” she said, opening the door again despite his stunned expression, “and let me know at once if there is word of Thomas Gresham’s young daughter being found.”
“What? All that when I’ve been gone but three hours?”
“I’ll explain the moment I have dealt with Cantwell. I have never met with him privily, but it needs to be done,” she concluded, and left him sputtering.
If Hosea Cantwell had been, as Cecil had said, angry, that was not the case now, Elizabeth noted as he bowed before her and they exchanged proprieties. Rather, he seemed sure of himself, almost smug, not the wet hen but the cock of the walk. The man was much too handsome to be a Puritan cleric, or lay preacher, as he was often called. His hair shone like polished ebony; dark lashes fringed large brown eyes in a well-chiseled face. He had a Roman nose, which balanced a strong mouth. His manly form bespoke more of riding and sweating than of reading and sermonizing. No wonder more people than Puritans filled his pews lately. Elizabeth thought all that made him more, not less, dangerous.
“Let me cut directly to the topic at hand,” the queen said as Cantwell began to comment on the windy weather. “Do you not have better things—more important things—to speak of from your pulpit and in the halls of Parliament than styles and starch?”
“Ah, and I thought I was summoned for my stance on your marital state, Your Majesty.”
“It goes without saying that I resent your trying to coerce your queen to that. But starch, man? Would you have us return to the old-fashioned days of paste wives with laces steeped in egg white or made rigid with beeswax and wire supportasses, which go all limp and poke one in the neck or wrist to boot? Is it true you have ranted that starch is ‘the devil’s liquor’?”
“I pray I have not ranted. Counseled, perhaps. Pleaded. I plead guilty to that, at least, Your Gracious Majesty.”
Somehow this man kept defusing her fury. With his wit and puns, she might think she was verbally sparring with Ned Topside. Was this the same person who had glared at her when she defied Parliament? Though she’d pictured him up close as stiff-faced with a stiffer backbone, his lips curled into a smile and his eyes twinkled. His voice was smooth and modulated, not piercing, as someone had told her it was when he preached.
“May I explain, Your Most Gracious Majesty?”
“You may try.”
“While courtiers and the Londoners who ape them and the English who then ape the Londoners spend small fortunes and large amounts of precious time on what is on their backs—around their wrists and necks in this instance—they are being ensnared by the world of the flesh and the devil. The ruffs, like other personal tomfooleries, grow larger and larger. Forgive me, Your Majesty, but any fashion you set, all will follow. Starch is but one foreshadowing, no doubt, of a curse on our nation—a curse that can spread. You already favor black and white, not so far a reach from plain Puritan garb, so why not simple collars and cuffs?”
She’d like to cuff him, the queen thought. Yet, though she was ready to explode at his presumptions and his dire prophecy, he’d said that last with a little disparaging flourish of his hand toward his own garments. She felt entirely pent up about the Gresham girl and the death at the starch house. She had fully expected to berate this man, but his demeanor and delivery were not what she had expected. Was he one who could change his leopard’s spots quickly and at will, like Satan himself?
This man bore watching, she decided, and not just because he was quite clever. She didn’t trust those whom she knew opposed her yet tried to get in her good graces. The man had criticized her garments, her judgment, and her morals, yet done it so cunningly she had found no sure footing to scold him in turn.
“That is all for now, as I have much to do,” she told him, and waited until he bowed himself out. No good if he’d be hanging about to hear there could have been a murder in a starch house today—and in a vat of the very thing he had labeled “the devil’s liquor.”
Elizabeth barely had time to tell Cecil that Hosea Cantwell was not only a critic of morals but a chameleon of moods when her trio of servants trooped back in via the privy staircase that faced the river. Her lady-in-waiting Rosie Radcliffe, now her most trusted confidante since her dear friend Kat Ashley had died, had opened the door for them behind the arras when they knocked.
“We decided to come by this entrance, for you told us to go the back way, Your Grace,” Ned explained.
“Good, but never mind all that. Was there a dead woman in the vat?”
“No—and yes,” Meg said, out of breath. “Someone had lifted Hannah out—”
“It
was
Hannah von Hoven?”
was
Hannah von Hoven?”
“Yes, I regret to say so, Your Grace. Between the time I fled and the time we got back, someone, perhaps her murderer, had pulled her from the starch bath and laid her out on a shelf.”
“She looked—Hannah looked, not Meg,” Jenks put in, “like she’d been dipped and set out to stiffen. And she was starting to, in more ways than one.”
Ned rolled his eyes and shook his head at Jenks’s dull-witted rendition of things. Cecil and Rosie moved to stand on either side of their queen as she sank into a chair at the head of the long table where her paperwork awaited in Cecil’s neat piles.
But life wasn’t neat, wasn’t fair, Elizabeth thought. Hannah had been young, ambitious, and comely, just setting out on a great endeavor in England. Even before promoting her to Thomas Gresham, the queen had hoped to champion the young woman as a symbol of competition in the kingdom. Like Elizabeth Tudor, Hannah von Hoven was a woman making her own way despite the odds against her. After all, Hanna’s rival starcher had a husband, one who perhaps really ruled the roost.
“Even if we might think she slipped into the starch by accident,” Elizabeth said with a half-groan, half-sigh, “we can hardly tell ourselves she got herself out and onto a shelf as if she were her own starched goods for sale. Yes, I wager we have a murder on our hands, unless, like Meg, someone else just stumbled on her, chose to pull her out, then panicked and fled.”
She thought again of Cantwell’s prediction of a curse caused by starch and the results rippling through her kingdom. Pure coincidence, she thought, that one of the royal starchers now seemed to have been fatally punished.
“Your Grace,” Cecil said, “are you quite all right? Shall I send for something, or do you need one of Meg’s calming potions?”
“If so, I should share it with her for being the one who found Hannah drowned—or however she died. Were there marks on her throat or any other discernible bruises?” she asked the three of them.
“I—she’s so slippery and sticky with starch,” Meg said, “we didn’t wash her off to look closely, but ran back here to tell you.”
“Your Grace,” Cecil put in quickly, “do you mean to pursue this and not just turn it over to the constable and coroner?”
“The men of my city’s criminal law enforcement will be informed in the morning, after we’ve had a good look around the place and at the body.”
“We?” Cecil repeated. “But, Your Grace, surely you don’t intend to go there yourself to—”
“The weather is cool,” she interrupted him, “and the body will keep a few more hours. Bates is still there, standing guard, is he not?”
“Aye,” Jenks said, “and standing a ways off, like you said.”
“Then we will go together at nightfall the back way and tarry but briefly. I can think of one or two who might fall under suspicion for this terrible deed, and I mean to look into it.”
“Surely not Meg, Your Grace!” Jenks blurted. “And why then? Just because she and Hannah been arguing sore about prices for the roots?”
The queen saw Meg shoot Jenks a look that could indeed kill. Jenks’s talents had always been for dealing with horses, not the intricacies of human reason. Still, Elizabeth knew he was utterly faithful, not only to Meg but to her.
“No, of course, Meg is no more under suspicion than any of you. I mean Dirck van der Passe, my other starcher’s husband—and who knows who else,” she added, thinking again of Hosea Cantwell’s probable desire to make his curse come true.
“Are we to have a meeting of the Privy Plot Council to solve a murder, then, Your Grace?” Meg asked, wringing her hands.
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