The Twylight Tower (23 page)

“Indeed I was not! So—do you have some idea who could have come for her?”

“For all I know,” she said, stepping around to the side of the house to look at the deep prints the ladder had made amidst the white hollyhocks under the escape window, “she could have dropped coins to some knave in the street who fetched a ladder for her. But in truth I have no such hope. I fear she was hired by someone to ingratiate herself with me, for what
purpose I am not certain—mayhap simple spying if she meant not to harm me when she could. Nor do I know her mentor’s identity, who either came or sent someone to filch her to freedom to do more mischief. But her rescuer appears to be a man. See the large, deep bootprints on each side of the ladder marks?” she added, pointing.

“Indeed, a good-sized man in riding boots,” Harry observed, squatting down. “Besides, it would probably take a man to heft a tall ladder.”

“A well-off or well-paid man, as his boots were not worn at the heels. Gil,” she called to her lithe little artist, “draw me those bootsole prints to size while Jenks and Ned go about in this area to see if anyone saw or heard something amiss or has a ladder that would fit these holes.”

As Jenks and Ned hurried off, Gil made hand signals to her that said, “In London, leaving prints, she would be caught and put in prison as an angler, just like me and Bett. Do you think she took goods from that house to sell? If Lord Harry has rich things, there are men who’d pay a pretty penny …”

“Never mind all that,” Elizabeth scolded. “You are no longer a thief, and I’ll not have you chattering about it. You just worry about the pretty penny I’ll give you for drawing those marks in the ground. And, Gil,” she added, her voice softer, “I sent your drawing of the lutenist to my friends at first light, and it was a fine one.”

The boy smiled, nodded, and bent to his work.
Elizabeth let Harry escort her into the house, forgoing the cakes and ale he had waiting for her. Leaving her guards downstairs, she climbed the two flights to the small upper-story room where Felicia had been kept last week and last night. She surveyed the small space under the eaves.

“But,” Harry was saying now, nearly on her heels in the slant-ceilinged chamber until she motioned for him to stand back in the doorway, “who would fathom she was so devious? You are thinking, are you not, Your Grace, that she might have had something to do with your lutenist Geoffrey’s demise to get in your good graces in the first place?”

“And mayhap with poor Luke’s death—not his
final
death,
per se,
but with the apparent accident that led to it. Is this where she stuck the note in the drape?” she asked, fingering the slit there. “It was a lyric by John Harington, you see, and I believe the girl was mocking or defying me with it—for all I know, giving me a clue to her real identity. I had earlier accused her of being John’s daughter and Isabella’s step-daughter, Hester, who ran away from their country home over a year ago.”

Harry gasped. Elizabeth looked back at him. “Oh, yes,” she said. “And that would mean she has Tudor blood in her veins from her real mother, John’s first wife, one of—of my father’s bastards. That would make Hester, mayhap alias Felicia, my niece, kin as close as my cousins Katherine Grey, Margaret Douglas, or Mary Stuart. If her mother had not been
illegitimate, her claims could be stronger than theirs, for Hester is directly descended from my father, whereas the other claimants are heirs of his sisters.”

“But …” Harry stammered, “you can’t imply that someone like Felicia—Hester—actually believes you should elevate her somehow or name her as your heir.”

“I told you I don’t have all the answers yet. But I believe it could have been Felicia as easily as Katherine Grey who had access to my rooms. One of them washed in my bathwater, almost as if baptizing or consecrating herself before she went wild and defaced things. The same person had earlier sneaked in, I believe, and worn my clothes, mayhap laid in my bed. I know not which woman, what else, or exactly why. But I will find out. I swear I will!”

With a vengeance, Elizabeth rummaged in the single, small chest in the room, one carved from a tree trunk. The green gown Felicia had worn but yesterday, a smock, grass-stained slippers, and another gown of brown linsey-woolsey were folded inside. The girl had worn more dresses than these, but she must have left in some haste. The queen yanked them out, shook them to see if anything was secreted here, and threw them on the floor.

“Did you ever take the male garb from her, Harry?” she asked.

“Why, no. I simply told her not to wear it again.”

“Then we may be looking for a lad and not a lass, damn her. Ha, another paper,” she exulted when she saw a single sheet of parchment on the rough bottom of the chest. She picked it up and turned it over. The
paper bore a crude drawing of a pointy-chinned, long-nosed woman in a crown with writhing snakes in place of curls and a dreadful frown. Her neck was long and scrawny and looked either crooked—or broken. Perhaps this was a perverted counterpart to Gil’s drawing of Felicia, though it was obvious enough who the subject was here. The words under it were from a song Elizabeth had never heard, but obviously meant to be those of an angry, spurned lover. Did Felicia actually love her or hate her? Her skin crawled as she read,

Elizabeth jumped and gasped when a shadow fell between her and the window. Gil’s head popped up outside as if he had flown from the ground. The queen ran to the sill and peered over. The boy was standing on the next-to-top rung of a ladder while, below, Jenks held it.

“It fits the marks and has soil in it too!” her man called up, grinning triumphantly.

“Seize the one who owns it,” she cried, leaning around Gil to see Jenks better.

“A poor old dame, a thatcher’s widow down and across the lane,” he called up as Ned joined him. “The ladder was hired last night by a small man with a strange way of talking and a flat cap—she doesn’t see well. He seemed to be alone and gave her a whole crown for its brief use.”

“A strange way of talking?” she called down, still looking with difficulty around Gil, who was holding out his sketch to her. She took it and hauled him toward the window where he scrambled lithely past. “A lisp, Spanish, French, what?” the queen demanded. “Ned, do some voices for her until she can pinpoint something.”

They were drawing a crowd from the street and other windows, so Elizabeth pulled back in. “Not good drawing of you,” Gil signed to her with flying hands when he glimpsed Felicia’s farewell message. Elizabeth was so frustrated she almost cuffed him. But she heard someone coming fast upstairs. Ned appeared in the doorway, shoving past Harry, who kept wringing his hands.

“I already did voices for her,” Ned reported as if their conversation had not been momentarily disrupted. “It’s my guess the man was just disguising his voice at first so she couldn’t identify it later. She thought she heard him talking different—regular, she put it—to a lad he had with him when he brought the ladder back. She can keep the coin, can’t she, Your Grace?”

“What? Yes, all right. Did she see them ride off?”

“Like I said, bad eyes, but she thinks it sounded like just one horse.”

The girl dare not run home to the Haringtons, Elizabeth reasoned. Besides, she had sent for them forthwith, so they’d soon be on the road to Windsor. Again she glanced at the mocking, mayhap threatening, drawing and the accusatory verse. The other song that had been stuck to the drapery also mentioned escape and death. Did that imply Felicia meant to commit suicide or—if she had been the cause of Geoffrey’s death—meant to make it look as if someone else had killed himself? Or did it mean Felicia would kill someone else and escape again?

SHE HAD BEEN TEMPTED TO WATCH FROM
the old, ruined tower because she loved heights. They made her feel that she could soar, and she often dreamed of flying. She loved looking down on everyone else, the way she would when she was queen.

Hidden in the copse of chestnut trees beyond the old, ruined tower at Cumnor House, Felicia Dove also wished she had filched that observation glass from Dr. Dee. She had to keep her distance to avoid being seen by the wrong people. Her back and thighs ached from the ride here and from keeping watch, hunched over, yesterday. This second day her eyes burned from squinting through the sun, waiting for Amy Dudley to appear.

Without even glancing at her fingering, she’d been playing song after song she intended for Lord Robert’s
wife. The ones by Surrey and Wyatt were especially depressing and distressing, Felicia thought with a tight grin. And every so often, to remind herself how serious this was, Felicia would hum or strum the melody that she’d meant to present at the queen’s birthday celebration on this very day.

“This is my offering to you, Your Most Gracious Majesty, Queen of England, Scotland, and Ireland,” Felicia declaimed as if she were at court instead of stuck here. “On this special, blessed event of the commencement of your twenty-seventh year, this momentous seventh of September in the year of our Lord, 1560, I offer this song in the first year of a new decade during which will blossom forth your brilliance and your might.”

Felicia spit against a tree, wishing it were the queen. That drivel was almost too much to get out. Yet it was the way her sponsor had wanted it. He was powerful and clever and—but for the queen—the best sponsor she could have right now. Last week Lord Robert had told her he had a sumptuous pearl necklace to give the queen at her birthday gathering, for which he’d nearly beggared himself. This song would have been her royal gift, before everything at court fell apart.

“So now,” Felicia gritted out through clenched teeth, “curse you on this day of your birth, Elizabeth Tudor, Queen of England, Scotland, and Ireland. For I will curse you indeed with my deeds and soon celebrate your death day too!”

Felicia startled as she saw the woman emerge from
distant Cumnor House who must be, by the description given to her, Amy Dudley. Soberly clad, she had been out once earlier but with a maid, and that would never do. This time, heading around the back of the house toward the tower, she was blessedly alone.

Gripping the fine, new lute her sponsor had bought her, Felicia emerged from the trees, keeping her prey in sight. For a moment she thought she’d somehow lost her behind a low wall. Had she fallen? Everyone knew that Amy was sore ill with a breast tumor, but Felicia had the strictest orders not to be inquiring of her condition from local folk. Besides, her companion on the fast, furtive ride from Windsor and their endless watch yesterday had told her all that she must know.

As Felicia came closer to the low stone fence, she saw for the first time it set off a graveyard. Amy sat on the turf in the midst of small, sunken headstones, her arms wrapped around her knees, humming in a minor key.

That was a good sign, the lutenist thought as she crept closer. If Amy liked music, it would be all the easier to befriend her and convince her to cooperate.

Forcing a smile to her lips, Felicia leaned on the stone wall, the lute cradled in her arms like a babe, and called out, “Pardon, milady. I’m a strolling player—of the lute, not comedy or tragedy, and would play for you.”

Like a doe scenting a hunter, Amy looked up and froze. Her dark eyes were smudges in a pinched, chalk-white face. The lady was ill indeed. Then, as her
sponsor had said, in the long run, she would really be helping, not harming, Amy.

“I—I brought no coin out with me,” Amy said, getting slowly to her feet. “But I would favor a tune and can get you food from the kitchen for it. If you play something, pray make it lively and loud. I keep hearing old Latin church songs in my head.”

Though she had escaped Eton in boy’s garb, remembering she was a lass again in the plain gown her rescuer had brought with him, Felicia walked around to the gate and went into the cemetery. She kept her distance from the woman, hoping she would not bolt.

This,
Felicia marveled, was the lusty, suave Robert Dudley’s wife? She looked as if a breath could blow her away, so mayhap all of this would be easier than Felicia feared. Anything to bring the queen down, no matter why her sponsor was paying for this masque without a mask. She began to pluck and sing a bouncy, brazen little tune she hoped would work subtly on Amy’s heart.