The Twylight Tower (27 page)

“Go now, Robin,” the queen said, relieved he seemed to be thinking as well as reacting now. Her face felt as hard and cold as marble, but marble that would crack and shatter. Behind Harry and the messenger Bowes, courtiers crowded into the outer room.

“Do not desert me to the wolves, my queen,” he begged, merely mouthing his words now the way Gil sometimes did. With a quick turn, holding his shoulders back and his head erect, he followed Harry out through the crowd.

Elizabeth locked her knees and continued to stand as Kat and her ladies hurried in. Everyone began to talk at once around her, and she heard nothing. Had her good sense deserted her that she had loved Robin so blindly? They would all whisper he had hired his wife murdered, perhaps that the queen of England had led him to it or herself sent someone to dispatch Amy.

“Lovey,” Kat’s voice finally pierced her darting thoughts, “won’t you come sit, at least, or lie down? What can we do for you?”

“Send for Cecil,” she said, her voice cold and
clipped. “A dreadful deed may have been done to a lady of my realm, and I must see to it as I do to all court and country business.”

She turned slowly, regally, and walked toward her bedchamber as fierce tears burned her eyes. The enormity of this loss loomed before her like a dark hole she could fall down and down. A fall. Amy Dudley had
fallen
under mysterious circumstances, as had Geoffrey and Luke. And Hester Harington was missing.

She made it into her room before she finally tripped on her loosed stocking.

“GET UP, GIRL,” ELIZABETH ORDERED, AND
pulled the bedclothes off Meg Milligrew the next morning. “Ill or not, your queen has need of you.” Who was ill or not? Meg’s muddled mind wondered as she struggled to throw off sleep and clear her head. Oh, that’s right—she’d been claiming she was puking. The mere thought of Ben Wilton being on the grounds and in town made her sick to her stomach. But the queen had sent his barge to fetch Cecil, so she’d snatched a few good hours of sleep last night. The queen! Here in this room.

“What is needful, Your Grace?” Meg jolted upright in her rumpled bed.

“I will take no time for my doctors bleeding me, purging me, and lecturing me on my diet because they believe it will improve my choler. I have things to do. Arise and now.”

Someone near the door held a lantern that hurt
Meg’s eyes. She came finally awake to see the queen had come in black mourning garb to the little room near the kitchen block Meg shared with two scullery maids. Kat Ashley peered in the door with Lord Robin’s sister Mary Sidney, and Bella Harington. With the dreadful news yesterday, it was just like them not to let Her Grace out of their sight. When Elizabeth Tudor was in pain, anything could happen.

Wrapping her sheet around her shift, Meg scrambled out of bed. The queen stood between her and her clothes, but she knew that tone of voice brooked no delay.

“What can I do, Your Grace?” she asked, not bothering to look for her shoes under the bed. “I would have come posthaste if you’d but summoned me.”

“I need curing herbs that heal the mind and heart as well as the body. I have England’s work to do and need them now.”

Meg knew it must be early morning yet, as the maids had not been roused. Her wide gaze snagged Kat’s as the queen stalked from the chamber, leaving her friends who shared the other bed gawking. Nearly running, Meg padded down the long hall toward the pocket of a chamber she used as her herbal room here at Windsor. Fortunately, since the corridor was pitch black but for occasional sconces set along the hall, the queen’s guards carried lanterns as well as pikes.

Her Majesty got there just before Meg did. However did her royal mistress know exactly where this was in the maze of rooms down here? It sobered Meg
to realize how the queen, sooner or later, seemed to know everything.

Meg shoved the door in and sneezed, either from her bare feet on stone floors or the fine, sweet dust that always hung in the air from her mortar and pestle. “Get a light in here!” the queen ordered. Someone thrust a lantern into the tiny room, and Lady Harington raised it high. It threw strange, shortened shadows on the walls and cluttered shelves.

Meg cleared her throat. “Which herbs do you require, Your Grace?”

“You said once that sweet marjoram helps those given to oversighing.”

“Oh, yes, especially those who are lovelorn and th—” Meg cut herself off and began to scrabble through her wooden boxes for the marjoram.

“What else would serve?” the queen demanded, leaning over her shoulder.

“For oversighing?”

“For what ails me!”

“Let me just recite their virtues and you decide, Your Grace.” Meg’s heart ached for her queen, but she was glad that Ned was now predicting she would call a Privy Plot Council meeting. More than just Amy Dudley’s death needed looking into. Meg had Geoffrey’s stained death shirt hidden in this very room, and the cause of Luke’s fall needed to be found. She had overheard, however, courtiers wagering that Her Majesty would get Cecil busy and call a governmental Privy Council meeting with her advisers to see to the
realm’s business—without Lord Robin, of course. So maybe the queen still would not have time to look into Geoffrey’s demise.

“I have basil, which is good for the heart and takes away sorrowfulness,” Meg announced, racking her still sodden brain.

“Yes, some of that.”

Meg pulled out a parchment packet, then a second. “Boiled chervil root gives courage.”

“Do you think that I need courage, girl?”

“No, Your Grace,” Meg murmured, slapping that box closed. “Rosemary comforts the brain and heart and cures nightmares.”

“Yes. Bring that.
If
I ever sleep again.”

“Lavender for the nerves, but then that’s already in your garments. Oh, I have vervain for contentment, one of the herbs I strew on your floors.”

“Yes, all right, but if you already have it all over my floors, it is not worth a damned fig.”

“I’ll put more on fresh. And a pennyroyal garland helps giddiness.”

“Hardly that,” the queen said with a sniff. “I have already been cured of such.”

“Lastly, meadowsweet to make the heart merry.”

“Merry? I shall never be merry again, never. Hurry with them, as I have much to do,” she commanded, and swept from the room like a whirlwind.

As Kat followed the queen and her coterie out the door, she glanced back at Meg and shook her head. They both knew that perpetual activity was one way
Elizabeth Tudor tried to stave off grief and heartbreak, but they both knew she would eventually spiral down and crash.

SECLUDED AGAIN IN HER PRIVY CHAMBERS WITH A FEW
intimates and Meg, who was strewing fresh vervain and meadowsweet on the floor, Elizabeth Tudor flung orders this way and that as she rampaged through piles of papers on her desk, signing some, thrusting others at Bella or Mary. They had suggested she send for one of her own clerks or secretaries, but she wanted only her closest friends around her now.

“Cecil will have to explain that … Cecil can see to that,” she said as she waded through parchments to clear a place on the abalone-inlaid tabletop. “Now,” she said, seizing a fresh sheet and dipping her quill pen again, “I must plan a fine, public funeral for poor Amy Dudley.”

Elizabeth noted well that silence descended on the room. She looked up and stared each woman down, including Meg in the far corner, until all nodded or murmured acquiescence. Elizabeth had not slept last night but had paced the floor, railing at what had happened. Now her legs hurt. Her thighs, one of which Robin had stroked so seductively but yesterday, trembled. Her eyes burned with tears, shed and unshed, and she had the most violent headache topped off by a continual urge to sneeze from the herbs hanging heavy on her person and in the room.

“At Oxford, I think, would be fitting,” she told
them, swiping at her nose with a lavender-scented handkerchief, then exploding in a racking sneeze. She blew her nose loudly, then went on. “St. Mary’s Church of Our Lady at the university will do. Lady Dudley shall have swags of black cloth, painted escutcheons, and a fine choir and chief mourner I shall hire for a good fee. Then a large feast after.”

“But, Your Grace,” Mary put in, holding a pile of papers to her breasts, “you told me last night to write Robert at Kew to command that Amy’s body be buried in Cumnor Church after it was viewed and searched by the coroner. Have you changed your mind?”

“And if I have?” Elizabeth challenged, then softened her voice. “No, this large funeral is for after her early interment, after we have the questions of her death settled publicly and truthfully. And write to your brother that, as all the court, he is to be fitted for mourning clothes, even at Kew.”

“You will not write him yourself?” Mary asked, flinching slightly as if she were expecting another explosion.

“It grieves me sore, dear Mary, but I will not write nor see your brother until his name is cleared—pray God, soon—and he may return to us all. Of course, I believe him innocent, but it must be proved to others beyond a doubt.” Even as she declared Robin’s lack of complicity or guilt, doubts gnawed at her. She saw tears flood Mary’s wide eyes as she nodded.

“Write the funeral orders, Bella, and I will sign,” Elizabeth said, jumping up and thrusting her pen into her friend’s hand before she tugged her into the chair
she had just vacated. The queen strode to the oriel window where but yesterday she and Robin had lain together—and nearly lain together indeed. That is what would have happened. That is what she, fool that she was, had wanted to happen before the dreadful news had saved her. Why could a queen not carry on as a king and to hell with what people thought? Must a woman’s reputation be so much more pristine and precious than a man’s?

“The royal barge,” Elizabeth cried excitedly, pushing her nose nearly to the leaded glass window before shoving it farther ajar. “The barge is back.”

The queen noted Meg spilled the rest of the herbs she had been carefully strewing, but she seized her cloak and hurried past the girl. Elizabeth was out the door and down the corridor so quickly that her guards, companions, and courtiers scrambled to clear her path and then keep up with her. She fought not to run, to keep her eyes clear of tears, striding out of the palace through the gate named for her father. She walked down the grassy knoll among roses and herb beds, along the edge of town to the royal landing before she slowed her steps. Never had she walked this before, but she did not want to wait for her litter, and Robert was not here to pick a good mount for her.

The September afternoon sun glittered off the Thames as she glanced in the direction of Kew. She blinked back tears, but when she saw Cecil standing at the front of the barge, she was suddenly sure his eyes watered too.

“I am glad to see you, my Lord Secretary of the
State,” she called to him in a scratchy voice before he made his way across the gangplank. He had two of his clerks in tow, both carrying fat satchels. “I have need of you as things have been piling up this summer since you brought us back that fine Scots treaty,” she added as he approached. She had expected him to be reproachful or angry but she read naught but concern on his strong, stern face.

Cecil bowed then kissed the hand she offered. “But now that the seasons are shifting again, we shall take care of all your burdens,” he said, his voice controlled and comforting. Always when William Cecil spoke he said volumes beneath the surface of his words. It was something they shared, and she realized how desperately she had missed that and him.

They began to walk up toward the palace with a vast entourage trailing while her guards made a buffer through the swelling crowd. “And, Your Grace,” Cecil added quietly, “I am here to help in public and in privy councils.”

BY LATE AFTERNOON, WORKING STRAIGHT THROUGH WITH
Cecil’s clerks madly copying and ferreting out documents he kept calling for, the queen and her chief secretary had cleared her pile of papers or set things aside for the Council meeting tomorrow. It was nearly dusk, seven of the clock, when Elizabeth was finally alone with her old friend.

“Though I can hardly go rushing to Cumnor to investigate Amy’s death,” she said as they yet sat side by
side at her big desk, “I mean to call a Privy Plot Council meeting late tonight to do something about it.”

“Forgive me, Your Grace, but I think you need your rest. You’ve obviously been burning the candle at both ends even before this tragedy occurred.”

“I cannot rest now. I must know what happened to her so that others far and wide may know and leave off their carping and slanders. Besides, two men in my service have also met with strange deaths through falls.”

“Yes, but, as with those, Lady Dudley might have simply fallen. She was ill, mayhap morose or distracted.”