Murder at Fontainebleau (17 page)

Kate glimpsed the bronze shine of a memorial tablet set in the wall above the couple, and she leaned closer to study it. In French, the carving read, I
N
L
OVING
M
EMORY OF
M
LLE
O
RIEUX, WITH THANKS FOR HER GREAT GIFT.
M
AY HER NAME BE WREATHED IN FLOWERS IN HEAVEN.

Orieux—it was an unusual name, one Kate was sure she had heard before. But where? And why would someone not a d'Emours be memorialized in their private chapel?

She glanced back at the marble lady and thought that her stone features concealed as many secrets as the living ones at Fontainebleau. Somehow it felt wrong to be there in that beautiful chapel, alone with this lady. Kate slipped out from the side chapel and tiptoed past the altar toward the château. The door suddenly opened, and she whirled around, her heart
pounding, to find Jacques d'Emours standing there, framed in the light from the corridor beyond. His eyes wide, he seemed just as startled to find her there.

Those icy blue eyes narrowed and he stepped slowly, deliberately, into the aisle. Kate glanced past him toward the door, wondering how long it would take her to run for it and make an escape.

“What are you doing in here, mademoiselle?” he demanded.

Kate thought quickly and pulled out an obvious, though rather undignified, answer. “Forgive me, monsieur,” she said with a hasty curtsy. “I—I was looking for the privy, and on the way back to the hall, I took a wrong turn and found myself here. I couldn't help but stay for a moment, it is so beautiful.”

His harshly handsome face relaxed just a bit at the compliment. “You are the English girl, are you not? The one who plays music?”

“Aye, monsieur. I am Kate Haywood, court musician to Queen Elizabeth.”

“Queen Mary praises your work.”

“I am glad I can bring her a bit of distraction at a sad time.”

His lips quirked in a small, unreadable smile. “A sad time indeed. You knew Mademoiselle Wrightsman, I am sure.”

Kate nodded warily. “I traveled with her and the Barnetts to France.”

“And what did you think of her?”

Kate wondered why he was asking her about Amelia,
what he hoped to hear. She carefully edged back until she ran into a marble pillar. “She was kind to me.”

“Kind?” he said sharply. “When was Amelia kind?” His handsome face twisted in a thunderous expression, and his hand came up in a fist. Kate felt a jolt of fear and fell back a step from his anger. This was a man who fought duels, after all, who seemingly broke Amelia's heart. He could not be trusted.

But he was not a courtier for nothing. His face changed as quickly as if it had been wiped clean, and his hand fell to his side. Abruptly, he turned and gestured toward the beautiful altar. “You must be Protestant like your queen,
non
? What do you think of my family's chapel?”

Kate took in a deep breath and pushed down the urge to flee. “It is beautiful,” she answered honestly. “And also welcoming. It has the feeling of being much loved.”

He gave her a surprised glance, a smile drifting over his face. “So it has been. D'Emourses have worshipped here for many generations. One ancestor was even declared to be a saint. His relics are behind the altar, just there.”

Kate looked back toward the shimmering altar, the silver-and-gold reliquary toward one side. The thought that a saint's bones, however ancient, rested there made her shiver. She was suddenly rather glad for the plainer churches in London; they seemed less haunted.

Or perhaps she was still thinking of Amelia, so newly laid in the ground herself.

“It is most beautiful, especially the Virgin's statue.
I feel as if her eyes could see us, they are so lifelike,” Kate said.

“But what is your favorite part of my chapel, mademoiselle?”

Kate was surprised by him again, by his friendly tone. He was not at all what she had expected from the tales of him, from his own demeanor, but she was wary by then of the deceptively lovely face of the French court.

“The small chapel with the pretty red-and-blue windows. It is most beautiful,” she said.

“Ah, my parents' burial chapel. It was my mother's favorite as well, which is why she wanted to be laid to rest there. I visit there often.”

“I am sorry, monsieur, if you came in here to visit your mother and I am trespassing,” Kate said quickly. “I will return to the others and leave you alone.”

He just nodded and turned toward the small chapel, as if he had already forgotten she was there. His face looked most solemn and even sad after his raw anger, and Kate couldn't help but wonder what he thought about now. His mother—or Amelia Wrightsman. Or maybe even the mysterious Mademoiselle Orieux.

 • • • 

“Mademoiselle Haywood!” Queen Mary called as Kate slipped back into the great hall after leaving Monsieur d'Emours in the chapel. She had hoped to be unobtrusive, unnoticed, but at the queen's words everyone turned to study her. “It seems we must wait
here until the rain stops. Would you play more of my cousin's English songs to pass the time? I have enjoyed them so much.”

Kate had time only to nod and take a borrowed lute someone thrust into her hands. She found a low stool near the queen and sat down to begin a song, a lively dance that had once been written by Queen Elizabeth's father, King Henry. It was familiar, and she hoped she would not stumble over it now.

“Is England much like Scotland?” Queen Mary asked abruptly.

“I fear I have never been to Scotland,” Kate answered. “I would imagine that, much like England or France, Scotland is very different depending on where one goes. Edinburgh is surely very different from a Highland farm. I have heard it has many beauties.”

Queen Mary sighed and glanced at her brother, who seemed to have imbibed much of the delicious wine and now nodded by the fire. “My brother warns me that I would find it very different from France, and my doctors fear my health would suffer in its chilly weather. My father's first wife was a French princess, you know, and she died only weeks after she arrived in Scotland. Yet surely I have inherited my own dear mother's hardier constitution! It was once my home.”

“We would all follow you anywhere you went, Your Majesty,” Mary Seton reminded her.

Queen Mary smiled at her. She was all ease and friendliness now, tinged with a sort of wistful sadness.
She was very different from the angry woman who had burst into the Barnetts' room after Amelia's death.

“I do cherish your loyalty, my Marie,” the queen said. She glanced at her uncle, the Duc de Guise, who prowled by the fireplace. His scarred face looked doubtful. “But I also must think of all of you as I consider what I must do next. I must take more counsel and think matters over most carefully.

“In the meantime, I will listen to your beautiful English songs!”

Kate nodded and kept on playing, half listening to the Maries as they whispered together. She thought of all Queen Mary's possible futures: marriage in a new kingdom, a quieter life in France, taking up her own rule in Scotland. Everyone seemed to have their own ideas of what she should do, and the queen herself kept her own thoughts on the matter most private behind her charming smiles. What did Queen Elizabeth and Cecil really want from her? Kate couldn't help but wonder what she was doing here in France, what she should do next.

“‘A
ll his fair virtues were but candleshine! Speak not of him for fair Ginevra's hand!'”

Kate studied the glittering assembly arranged before her. It seemed the entire court at Fontainebleau had assembled to watch the Queen Mother's troupe perform
Ginevra
, a light romance from Queen Catherine's native Florence, and it was hard to tell which sparkled more—the spectacle on the stage or the courtiers who applauded it.

The play was indeed enthralling, filled with romantic intrigues and beautiful songs. Yet Kate could not quite forget what had happened at the hawking expedition. The d'Emours house, the strange merriment after Amelia's burial. The tablet to Mademoiselle Orieux, whose name she still couldn't quite place. There was so much she did not know about all that had happened ever since she left London. It was as if she groped her way along a darkened corridor, with only tiny flashes of lightning to show what was around her.

Perhaps Cecil and his friend Sir Nicholas
were
hiding
things from her, things that could prove fatal. Amelia Wrightsman was dead, after all, in most suspicious circumstances. Were the Barnetts in danger? Mistress Berry? Kate herself? She shivered as she thought of tumbling over the ship's railing. But no one here at Fontainebleau had been on the ship, had they?

Kate rose from her seat, tiptoed behind the tiered benches that held the rapt audience, and made her way out of the gallery. Sir Nicholas was a most shrewd diplomat; he would not tell her if he had an agent working for him on the ship. Or perhaps there was a double agent he knew nothing about. Kate needed to find out. It was very possible Amelia herself had been a spy for him. There were so many times she hid behind her laughter. Kate would have few other chances to find the palace corridors so empty, as everyone was at the play. But it would not be for long. She had to hurry.

She made her way past the guards at the gallery doors. Rather than go through the large doors to the garden, she turned toward a staircase that led up to the private wings housing courtiers and ambassadors. A few servants hurried past in the flickering light of a few torches and candles, all of them intent on their own errands. They paid her no attention.

Occasionally, a wisp of a word or a quick laugh would float to her from some distant chamber, as if from a ghost.

Kate crept carefully into Sir Nicholas's sitting room, where she had taken him the letters from England. She knew he was watching the play with Charles and the
Barnetts, but Toby had not been seen that day. No one was working in the sitting room, and the moonlight from the window gave her enough illumination to quickly light a candle and study the table where Sir Nicholas usually sat.

It was tidy, with small piles of manuscripts and books, quills and pots of ink, and a carefully locked carved casket.

She took a long carved ivory pin from her hair and slipped the sharp tip into the lock. One of Cecil's intelligencers, an expert picklock, had shown her how to do that, and it had been very useful many times, such as at the Spanish embassy one night in London. She wiggled it around until the mechanism caught and the lock sprang open.

The box was filled with papers, and as she glanced over them she saw what she had hoped to find. Most of them were in code, lists and small sketches that at first seemed to make little sense, until she looked closer.

Code had been one of her favorite lessons in Queen Elizabeth's service. It was like music, the way small ink markings suddenly clicked into place and made some sort of alchemy. Also like the notes, they seemed to stay in her mind until they could be deciphered and fit together once again.

She found the letters she had carried from England, the letters that were in Cecil's own hand. She scanned them, memorizing the lines as quickly as she could, before anyone could return and catch her there. She
was careful to leave them exactly where she had found them, replacing the lock before she made her way out into the corridor and hurried toward her own room.

Kate closed and latched her door behind her. Only once she was by her own hearth did she let out her breath. She listened carefully at the door until she was sure there was no one else out there before she went to her small writing table.

She took out her quills, ink, and small code book from their box and closed her eyes, letting the memory of the figures and patterns of the letters come back into her mind. Learning music from the time she could toddle around the house had trained her mind to see things and remember them quickly. Each letter and symbol that seemed to mean nothing had a corresponding letter, and once those were discovered it would click into place.

It was a rather simple transposition cipher, one that she had practiced at Cecil's offices but that would be much harder for someone new to the code to break. The frequency of the letters was the same as in a plain-text letter, but jumbled. She just had to sort them out.

She wrote down what she remembered, the quill scratching quickly over the paper.
YCKKVOTM OTZU
, and so forth. Slowly, she found she could decipher a pattern and match it up to her code book. Much of it was as she expected. Connections to make, messages to deliver, news from the queen's other embassies.

But one of the messages made her catch her breath.
As for Madame Fox and her new cub, they could be of much use
indeed, for they are much admired in France, but care must be taken. They are unpredictable and their loyalties are unknown.

Madame Fox and her cub.
She thought of all the ladies she had met at Fontainebleau. Perhaps it was Celeste Reynard, with her last name—the fox—and her red hair? It would help explain her changeable nature, her efforts to make friends with Kate. But as far as Kate knew, Celeste had no child. Could the cub possibly be Amelia, the two of them spying together? She knew where she needed to turn for a few answers. She would start with Amelia herself.

 • • • 

Amelia's small chamber had been unoccupied for only a short time, but the smell of dust and disuse seemed to hang in the air along with a hint of Amelia's perfume. For a moment, Kate hovered in the doorway, reluctant to go inside, as if she would disturb the occupant in some way. The quiet sadness seemed enveloping.

But she knew she had to hurry. The corridor where the Barnetts' rooms lay would not be empty for long.

“I am doing this to help her,” Kate whispered, and forced herself to step into the chamber and close the door behind her.

She wasn't entirely sure what she was looking for, only that she needed some proof that Amelia was the “fox's cub” to Celeste. That she had some secret work here in France. Work that had perhaps led to her death.

She drew back the window curtain to let a bit of light into the gloomy space. There wasn't room for much
there, only a narrow bed with a truckle for the maid, a table lined with Amelia's pots and bottles of beauty potions, and a chair piled with books. There was no clothes chest or jewel case, which Lady Barnett had probably already taken away.

Kate quickly looked through the books. They all seemed to be light works of romantic poetry, tales of handsome knights on quests to rescue fair ladies. There were no letters tucked among the pages, but Kate did find something intriguing in the last book. Some of the letters had been underlined, tiny unreadable symbols sketched above them.

Could it match the code in Throckmorton's letters? Kate quickly committed some of the marks to memory, to compare them later, and stacked the books the way she had found them.

She looked beneath the bed and under the concealment of the mattress. All she discovered there was that the servants at Fontainebleau were not as careful about dusting as Queen Elizabeth's own attendants. Elizabeth was most fastidious about the cleanliness of her palaces and her person.

Nor would Elizabeth approve of Amelia's lack of tidiness,
Kate thought as she studied the toilette table. The silver lids were not secure on pots of pearl powder and cochineal lip stains, and some of the face cream had leaked out of its bottle. Combs and hairpins and ribbons were scattered everywhere.

Kate carefully sniffed the cream, which had a hint of lemon balm, and reached for a crystal perfume bottle. It
smelled of violets, of course, as Amelia always did, yet there was something slightly bitter just beneath the sweetness. She held it up to the light and saw there wasn't much of the oil left. What there was had turned a strange yellowish color, almost like a sticky piece of amber.

Kate thought of the mark on Amelia's wrist, and Dr. Florie's words about the Italians and their poisons. Amelia had probably not drowned, but was pushed into the water after being befuddled somehow. Kate had thought perhaps it was in the wine she drank that night, but what if it was something else? She knew from reading the herbal book that it was easy enough to distill poisons from leaves and berries or to use too much of a harmful substance that was originally meant to help. What poisons could get in through a person's skin, or even by sniffing?

She heard a voice outside, a maid calling in French to someone else, and she knew she wouldn't be alone in Amelia's room for long. She carefully wrapped the bottle in a handkerchief and tucked it into the purse fastened at her sash. As she turned away, she glimpsed a small portrait tucked among the ribbons on the table, an oval of ivory framed in gold. Something about the lady's painted eyes—a bright, clear blue—caught her attention.

She picked it up and studied the delicate features, the high, lacy collar on her black velvet gown, the golden curls that escaped her white cap. She looked very much like Amelia dressed in the fashions of a generation ago. Kate turned it over and saw written on the back,
Dear Mama, Ly E. Orieux DeLC Wrightsman.

Of course—Orieux!
Kate felt foolish for forgetting. That was the maiden name of Lady Barnett's grandmother, so presumably of Amelia's mother as well. It was an unusual name. Why would one of that family be memorialized in a French chapel?

There was another burst of laughter outside, and Kate quickly replaced the portrait on the table before she slipped out of the room. She thought she heard something around the corner, but the corridor seemed empty as she hurried away. She had to find Dr. Folie.

 • • • 

The doctor sniffed carefully at the perfume bottle, scowling as he held it up and examined it. “You think there was something put into this potion, then?”

“I don't know,” Kate answered. “I have only just begun a small study of herbs. It doesn't smell quite right, though, and you did say the mark on her wrist might have been from some caustic substance. She would have put the perfume on her arm and neck, surely.”

“It has been known to happen,
oui
,” the doctor murmured. He went to his stone table beneath the window and carefully dabbed a drop of the perfume on a cloth. “But there is so little of this left, it is hard to tell. What do you suspect?”

“I was reading of belladonna.”

“Ah, yes, easy to procure in a royal court. Alas, vanity reigns here. It is a pretty plant when in flower and has its uses, but ladies think if one drop makes them beautiful, three will do more. Alas for them.”

“I read it can cause disorientation.”

“And then hallucinations. But she could not have been given too much at once; it would be noticeable. Very clever to put it in something she uses every day. Was the perfume a gift?”

A gift from Monsieur d'Emours? Or another admirer? “I can try to find out.”

“Very good, mademoiselle. I will see if I can conduct some tests here. You are very clever, bringing me another puzzle! It has been dull here in recent weeks.”

Kate nodded and left him to his tests.
A bit of dullness would surely be a wonderful thing,
she thought,
compared to murders and secrets.
Where could she find out about Amelia's perfume? Perhaps Lady Barnett or Mistress Berry would know, especially with the knowledge of herbal potions she had. Or maybe Celeste, whose motives had to be worked out now, would know who had given Amelia such gifts.

Outside her chamber door, she was surprised to find a footman waiting. “A letter arrived for you, Mademoiselle Haywood, and Sir Henry Barnett said to bring it to you right away. He also said you must begin to pack, for he wishes to depart Fontainebleau as soon as he can.”

“Merci,”
Kate answered. If Sir Henry insisted on leaving soon, she would not have much time for her inquiries. She waited until she was alone in her chamber to open the letter, and saw it was not familiar handwriting. The signature at the bottom read
T. Overbury
.

Master Overbury—Anthony's old school friend who now served an English bishop's retinue in Paris. She had written to him when she first arrived, sending on
a note from Anthony and asking him her own questions, hoping he had heard of some of the French courtiers in his position in Paris. She read his short note eagerly.

Mistress Haywood, I send my greetings and thank-you for the word that my old friend Master Elias is in good health. Tell him I hope to have an ale with him at the Rose and Crown soon, for these Frenchies cannot make a fine beer, though their wine is enjoyable! I hope you are faring well at Fontainebleau. My master as well as everyone in Paris wishes they were there. But I hope you are wary. There was much talk here a few months ago of a duel between a man named d'Emours and someone who was not his social equal. There have been questions of his opponent's loyalty to France, for he has many English friends, though I can say nothing for certain. I will ask and keep my ears open . . .

Kate remembered that d'Emours's opponent, presumably another of Amelia's admirers, was named Mamou, and he had not been seen at court since the fight. Where was he? Could he also be a spy?

Or could he have sent Amelia gifts, begging her not to forget him?