The Thorne Maze (28 page)

Darnley, the queen had been informed by Clifford, had gone through the maze with Chris Hatton at first light and again with his mother. Jamie had rowed Rosie through it while Kat took a nap in the house.

“I can tell Jamie is going to ask for my hand, Your Grace,” Rosie had whispered to her royal mistress earlier. “But I never want to desert you, and how can a queen’s maid of honor wed one of his rank—or lack thereof?”

“You know very well how,” the queen had told her with an affectionate squeeze of her arm. “The queen elevates her dear maid of honor’s betrothed and turns her maid to lady of the bedchamber once she’s wed. With Kat ailing I cannot do without you. But Jamie will be dependent on me to prosper, so you shall both live at court in my service.”

Rosie had vowed eternal loyalty, but Elizabeth knew how husbands could change things. With a sigh, she went about her duties, helping Cecil weave their web.

As much as the queen had wanted to see Jenks from afar and call out some questions to him, the press of people had kept her from trying to visit him again. Meg said he was resting comfortably and showed no signs of the plague.

“Since Jenks can be left alone now,” Elizabeth had told her, “I want you to secretly hie yourself into the manorhouse as soon as Ned begins his presentation this evening. I shall come inside, disrobe, and you shall don my clothing.”

“So we will exchange garments as we have before, and you’ll row into the maze in mine?”

“No. You will be sitting in my gown in my window overlooking the guests—supposedly with the headache I shall develop on cue,” Elizabeth explained. “But I will not be wearing your skirts or any others—nor be rowing.”

“But you will have guards with you?”

“Counting Cecil, I shall have two, but simplicity and surprise are essential. Do not worry for me, as everything is arranged. You’d best return to Jenks for a while. And how do things stand between the two of you?”

“I was stunned to hear what he had done,” Meg admitted, wringing her hands, “though he’s always risked a great deal to help you. But he said he risked his life this time because he despaired I didn’t care a fig for him. Even now, he doesn’t make a murmur in all his pain. And to think he’s been suffering over loving me in silence all these years.” She shook her head and pressed her clasped hands between her breasts. “It’s a stronger aphrodisiac than any herb I could name.”

“And have you told him so?”

“I think he knows.”

“The more I’ve seen the Cecils’ dilemma, the more I believe assuming such is not enough, my Meg. If you care for Jenks, you must tell him now, but,” Elizabeth added on her way back to join her courtiers, “be on time the moment Ned begins to speak!”

Elizabeth had written her steward at Hatfield that her yeoman Stackpole was not to come to Theobalds with the guards accompanying her courtiers. At least the man would be useful for one thing before she replaced him. Just after supper, while Darnley played the lute and guests sang madrigals on the lawn outside the moat, Stackpole made his entrance. He rode hard toward the manor, though he had no idea he was part of their plot, delivering a message Cecil himself had written and sent back to Hatfield.

Cecil was ready, standing with Mildred, on the old drawbridge over the moat, as if it were the gallery in this
al fresco
theater. Cecil made a great fuss of stopping Stackpole and taking the note from him. He carried it to the queen through the press of people as Darnley strummed his last chords and the singing trailed off.

Such silence fell that the queen could hear a night owl nearby in the trees. The breeze lifted her tresses off her flushed face.

“A note from Hampton Court via Hatfield,” Cecil informed the queen loudly enough that everyone could hear.

“From whom?” she demanded, turning her profile to their audience.

The coroner admits he forgot to inform us that he turned up something on Templar’s corpse, a note which reveals—”

“My lord, not here, not now,” she scolded. “I cannot bear to have this lovely evening ruined by having to fret about my lack-brain legal authorities again. Keep that note but do not bring it up to me before tomorrow morn. I will have some merriment this eve in these dour times, I swear I shall, and you will not gainsay me!”

She even threw her fan, which Rosie retrieved for her. Cecil pretended to try to reason with her again, then, when she dismissed him, he stomped off toward the maze, folding and placing the note in his flat hat. As if wishing for a diversion, Elizabeth motioned for Ned’s histrionics to begin.

“And now,” he called out in his clearest voice as he mounted the platform, “I shall present a few speeches to promote frivolity and to honor gaiety.”

In the front row, for they were all groundlings of necessity this evening, Elizabeth began to hang her head and stroke her brow as if her head pained her.

“And to the person who laughs and applauds the loudest, a rare prize,” Ned went on, “a decent mattress to replace the straw-stuffed ones in the pavilions!”

Laughter. Elizabeth waited until it passed and sighed. Kat came over. “One of your headaches coming on, Your Grace?” she inquired, as if she knew the script.

“’S blood, I’m afraid so. It was that row with Cecil set it off,” she said, rubbing her temples harder under her plumed hat. “One can’t countenance a thing that rustic coroner says, and Cecil’s in a stir as if it were state business. I believe I will go upstairs and sit in my window to listen to Ned from there.”

“I’ll come along, too,” Rosie declared, “and Kat can stay out here with Lady Cecil.” Elizabeth saw that Jamie was standing near his beloved, even as Chris Hatton had been hovering, watching his queen most of the evening with apparently adoring eyes. She could hear whispers in the crowd as others spread the news that Her Majesty was feeling indisposed.

“No,” Elizabeth told Rosie, “you both stay here. I want everyone to have a good time, and I shall sit up in that very window to be sure you do.” She pointed to her chamber window above the moat, directly behind Ned’s little stage. “Consider it a royal command. Mildred,” the queen told Lady Cecil, for it seemed she suddenly huddled nearby, too, “I need to go inside for a bit. All of you, carry on.”

Trying not to rush through her exit, she made her way over the moat bridge and entered the courtyard, then went into the manor and up the central staircase to her small suite of rooms. Meg, bless her, was already there, stripping off her skirts and sleeves.

“Here, Your Grace, I can help unlace you.”

“And now,” Ned’s voice carried through the window, “I shall commence the evening’s enjoyments with a speech from the new and fashionable Italian comedy,
The Potion of Pleasure.
Close your eyes and dream you are in sunny Italy and have found such a magic liquor there as to make anyone who drinks it either fall in love with you or die poisoned by rue and regret … .”

“He’s overdoing it,” Elizabeth muttered as Meg unlaced the back of her gown, “especially since I think our murderer’s been brewing poison of late.”

“Overdoing it, that’s Ned. Just think, this is our own tiring house behind his stage. But what are you going to wear then? I don’t see a th—”

“In the coffer on top—Ned’s riding clothes.”

“You didn’t tell me that part of it.”

“I said I wasn’t wearing skirts. Just hurry!” the queen commanded, untying and yanking the loosened bodice over her own head. She untied her heavy petticoats herself and let them fall into a pool she stepped out of so that Meg could step in. “Lace yourself as best you can,” Elizabeth told her, “because I must get out to the maze posthaste. Your hair looks right but, even in here, wear my hat, and do not fidget!”

It had taken Elizabeth longer than she’d planned to walk far around the crowd on the front lawn. Despite the warmth of the weather, even fully clothed and booted, she found the water colder than she’d expected. She was shivering already. Bucking the current, she made her way toward the maze into which Cecil had rowed nearly a quarter hour ago.

She saw some sort of twisted bunting hanging over the entrance. Draperies or some swag of heraldic decoration? Part was of muted color, but part was stark white with scalloped edges. Why had Cecil suddenly put that here?

Then Elizabeth realized that she was looking at the hacked off skirts and petticoats of the murdered Bettina.

She almost screamed to Cecil and Clifford to come and look. Had the killer ferreted out their plan and thrown down his version of a gauntlet? Did it imply,
Keep out or I dare you to come in?
Elizabeth wished she’d put an individual watch on each of her suspects, but she was afraid that would scare the guilty one away.

She almost fled in fear, but this trap was the best chance they had to stop this madness. Suddenly furious at such diabolical defiance, she yanked the material down. Entering the maze, she jammed it inside the first interior wall to hide it, though the thorns scratched her hands and wrists.

Steeling herself, forcing each slow step, she made her way toward the dead end where she would hide, just one wall away from the heart of the maze where Cecil waited. From there, she would be able to overhear whoever approached him and, hopefully, glimpse him or her rowing past.

She partly pulled herself along farther by holding on to the barrels in which the thorn maze was planted. Each booted step took her through water which lapped nearly to her shoulders. She felt again for the dagger in its scabbard she’d strapped on so that it rode between her breasts. Clifford, hidden just behind the maze, ready to duck through a single opening he’d hacked in it to reach Cecil, had a dagger and a sword—Darnley’s, for it pleased her to think of him being captured with his own weapon.

But even before Elizabeth could get herself in place, she heard a boat behind her. It could be nothing, but it could be everything, and here she yet stood in the main path. She pulled herself toward the barrels on her left, turned sideways, and ducked under the maze wall so she got soaked up to her chin.

Though thorns snagged her man’s cap and pinned-up hair and scratched her forehead, she was out of the main channel. Yet she had no way from here to see who was in the boat which rocked the water as it passed. She hoisted herself up a bit by the edges of the barrels. After that harrowing experience underwater in the pond at Hatfield, feeling as if her breath were choked from her, she had no intention of so much as getting her mouth under, let alone her nose.

When the water quieted, she went back out into the main path, moving stealthily toward her position near the goal. Whoever had gone by was no doubt nearing Cecil already.

William Cecil sat in the goal of the maze with his boat rocking slightly. A breeze had sprung up, disturbing the water even more than did the rain-swollen current. The hedges walling him in seemed to shift and sigh. Somewhere an owl hooted its haunted cry.

He used an oar to keep out of the shrubs so the thudding
bump, bump
of boat against a barrel would not drive him to distraction or frighten anyone away. Moonlight or not, the single, small lantern set in the bow of the boat seemed so meager now. He was getting tired of pretending to strain to read the note from his hat. This wasn’t going to work. The ghostly murderer of the royal mazes would never come here to this one he owned, despite the fact they were tempting him or her with a grand prize.

He wondered if the queen and Clifford had waded in yet, Clifford from the back of the maze, the queen from near the rowboats. They had pored over the maze pattern he’d drawn for them, as well as showed them in person. Now, for some reason, he kept picturing that wooden maze game Templar Sutton had brought for a gift on the day of his daughter’s christening. Its little ball had click-clicked through the turns to the E for Elizabeth in its very center.

He sat bolt upright. What if, from the first, Elizabeth had been the target of the maze murderer? When the attempt to strangle her failed because Bettina approached, to cloak the assassination plot, the traitor had dispatched the Suttons as a diversionary tactic. This elaborate sham they’d planned tonight could play directly into the mastermind’s scheme to kill the queen while Cecil, more or less, treaded water.

He almost called out to Elizabeth to be certain she was safe, even at the risk of ruining their plan. But then he heard the muted, rhythmic
swish, swish
of oars in water. An oarlock creaked. His stomach knotted as his deepest fear was realized.

“Mildred?” he croaked out when he saw who rowed the boat. “Mildred!”

It could not be her behind all this, he told himself, gaping as her drawn white face emerged from shadow and her boat bumped his.

“I was worried about you, my lord. Whatever is in that letter?”

“You should not have left our guests,” he said, sounding inane to himself, but he was so frightened of what she might say or do next. The queen, he knew, was listening.

“They’re entranced with Ned Topside, so they won’t miss me. I’ll go right back, but I had to settle something once and for all between us. I have something to confess—about another night in the maze at Hampton Court.”

He blinked back tears. He tried to speak but nothing came out.

“My lord,” she went on, her voice greatly agitated, “I eavesdropped on you and the queen that night and heard her warn you to keep a watch out for a piece of black cloth torn from the garment of one who had assaulted her. So I hid a skirt of mine which had a tear, the one Bettina was later buried in. But I swear to you, I did not harm anyone.”

Yet to Cecil’s utter horror, she leaned into her boat and lifted a brick from beneath her skirts, holding it in both hands as if prepared to heave it at him. He felt sick to his soul. She’d killed Templar to cover her attempt to strangle the queen, and if that were true, Bettina—and now …

“I want this brick to be in the foundation of Theobalds we will build together for Robert and our family,” she said, holding it out to him. “I sent for it from your ancestral home and believe it should be the cornerstone of our home here—the sign we will start over together.”