The Twylight Tower (5 page)

“Yes,” she said, “poor player.”

Ned glanced up at her, evidently unsure if she meant her lutenist or her favorite actor himself. Kat and Mary clung to Elizabeth as if to pull her back, but she shook them off. Doors slammed and feet came running amidst random cries in the courtyard.

“Oh,” the queen said, fanning the air before her face as she straightened. “No wonder the man lost his balance. I smell strong drink on him. Let that be a lesson to you all,” she said, addressing the growing circle of courtiers and servants. “Geoffrey Hammet was a
fine musician who loved his lute but also loved his drink overmuch, and it must have cost him his life.”

Meg’s teary face appeared next to Ned’s stunned one. Elizabeth knew the two of them had been fast friends with Geoffrey. “We will all mourn his loss,” the queen continued, her voice gentler. “Geoffrey was dear to me and to others too.”

“Including his poor wife,” Meg blurted out.

“Wife?” Elizabeth cried. “The man told me plain when I took him on he was unwed.”

Meg’s mouth went to an O, and even in the push of people to glimpse the corpse, Elizabeth saw Ned elbow the girl. “Ned, is this true?” the queen demanded, glaring at him. “Speak up, man.”

“An early marriage,” Ned said, his voice hushed. He seemed to speak to his feet rather than to an audience for once. Someone tried to quiet the others so they could hear. “There is one child, yet of toddling years,” Ned whispered, clearing his throat. “And a babe.”

“I see,” Elizabeth pronounced. “Then I can only hope that others who serve their queen intimately do not keep such secrets from her, for whatever reasons.”

At that, Meg looked sorely stricken that she had given her friend’s secret away. As the fine mist turned to raindrops, she began to cry, but Elizabeth had no time for such indulgences. “My lord,” she said to Robin, who had appeared looking sleepy and disheveled, “have some of your men find a coffin for my musician. We shall bury him on the morrow and mourn his and his music’s loss.”

As Robin pulled three men forward, including her former guard Jenks, Elizabeth almost stopped them. She could send for young Gil Sharpe, her court artist in training, who always traveled in her retinue of servants when she was on progress. The boy was skilled at sketching people and scenes. But no—there would be no examination of a corpse or investigation of a scene for a drunken fall.

The queen stepped back as the men turned Geoffrey over. She noted well two things, neither suspicious. He had an abraded, bloodied bruise on his head and a splotch of blood—no, it looked more like wine—on his shirt. Her musician must have filched a great deal of drink to make himself dizzy
and
to spill that much. A thief as well as a liar, she thought sadly, but she would not speak ill of the dead. She motioned with her hand, and the men lifted the body.

Elizabeth returned the lantern and started away, then turned back. “Where is his lute?” she inquired. “Did it not fall with him? But I heard him playing it even after …” Despite the heavier rain, she paused, frowning. That music she had heard after the thud and muffled cry, which must have been Geoffrey going over the edge, could have been the sounds made by the wind on those humming old weather vanes.

“Meg, to me,” she called to her herb girl. The slumped, pale-faced redhead sniffled and wiped her nose on her sleeve. However much Meg resembled her sovereign physically, Elizabeth thought, Meg Milligrew was hard-pressed to emulate queenly carriage and control.

“Your Grace,” Meg began, “I regret I didn’t tell you about his wife, but he begged me not t—”

“Not that. I want you to go up with Ned on the parapet where Geoffrey played across from my window and fetch his lute out of the rain. Dry it off and bring to it me tomorrow, as it was my gift to him. And I shall send coin to his widow, so do not fret for that. I am not some heartless harpy, though your face seems to say so.”

“Oh, it’s not that, Your Majesty. I mean, I don’t ever think that of you. It’s just”—she lowered her voice and glanced around—“when do you want to call a covert meeting of those of us who helped you solve the murders before? You know,” she pursued when Elizabeth looked past her to see if Robin was coming this way, “to find out who killed him.”

Elizabeth looked back at the girl. “Who killed him? I said the man got literally tipsy and killed himself with a tragic and careless fall. Look at the proofs, if you must. It was an accident.”

“But that’s not sack spilled on him, and that’s all he ever drank. It smells like malmsey, your own favorite.…”

“My father’s favorite,” Elizabeth muttered. “It did indeed smell like sweet malmsey. If Geoffrey’s been into my stores of wine, that’s another strike against him. Now fetch Ned and find that lute.”

Robin joined the queen and her women as Meg scurried off. “Things are cared for as you ordered,” he told her, taking her arm and escorting her back into the palace. “A sad business, the sudden death of one so
young, skilled, and promising. It could not be suicide, I take it?”

Elizabeth sighed heavily. “I believe not and did not summon servants or counselors alike out into this dark and rain to create rumor or myth about the poor wretch’s accident.”

“Ah. Well, at least this gives me the opportunity to see how fetching you look in that robe.”

“Not tonight, Robin. The man’s loss is a loss to me.”

“If you grieve for him, he is blessed. Will you grieve for me if I leave tomorrow for Cumnor for a few days? You know Amy hasn’t seen me in weeks, and I worry for her health. Or will you tell me again,” he said, and she saw his gaze catch lantern light to glitter over her, “that you cannot spare your Robin, your eyes?” Elizabeth had more than one pet name for him, but the latter had always amused him. He’d taken to signing notes or letters to her with two dots inside circles to show he served as an observer for her, a second vision of the court and country, as it were.

“Tomorrow?” she said. “I thought you wanted me to ride to Mortlake with you to meet your brilliant Dr. Dee.”

“But you said you had business since Cecil has returned to crack his whip,” he countered quickly.

“I
am the only one who cracks the whip here,” she declared. She pulled her elbow free from his hand as she started up the stairs toward the royal apartments with Kat and Mary still in tow. “You may, of course, go to Cumnor to visit—after we make our own visit to Dr. Dee.”

“As you wish, my queen,” he said, catching up with her.

“ ’S blood, I need something to cheer and divert myself tomorrow, as the other lutenists have ham hocks for hands compared to Geoffrey’s fine ones,” she went on, gesturing broadly. “I’ll never find a decent replacement for him until we’re back in London this autumn. Though it appears at the last Geoffrey was a sneak and scoundrel, I shall miss the man. Robin,” she added, seizing his wrists, whispering now, “don’t you ever turn sneak and scoundrel. Don’t ever make me learn things I mislike about you.”

“Then there is naught you mislike about me now?” he challenged with a taut smile. “But, my beloved queen, if you’d allow me, I’d make a new sort of music between us to fill your life with joy.”

“With joy—you already do,” she said, and turned away at the door to her royal apartments. “But then, always before,” she whispered to herself as she walked away from him, “with that looms loss and pain.”

“WHAT WERE YOU DOING IN THE COURTYARD SO LATE TO
discover Geoffrey’s body anyway?” Meg asked as she and Ned climbed the narrow, curved watchman’s stairs inside the tower near where their friend had fallen.

“After I sent him to his nightly post, I realized I was starved and knew there would be at least one venison haunch left in the royal kitchen.”

“Not to see that kitchen girl, Sally?” she demanded,
keeping close on the steps, as Ned had the only lantern and it was pitch dark in the tower.

“Hellfire, Meg, can’t you stow it even tonight? What would I want with the likes of her, reeking of tallow, grease, and smoke? You smell a hundred times finer with your herbs and flowers, and I’m not chasing after you.”

Meg just shook her head sadly. Another of his backhanded compliments that stole as much as they bestowed. She couldn’t count the many times Geoffrey had defended her when Ned ranted at her. She’d miss the lutenist sore, and not just for his music.

“But now that you ask,” Ned muttered as he passed the lantern back to her so he could lift the heavy latch to the narrow wooden door, “I’d best get my story straight before Her Majesty starts questioning everyone tomorrow.”

“She won’t,” Meg muttered.

“I realize she trusts me, but she always demands to know ev—”

“She’s decreed Geoffrey’s fall mere happenstance and she, or we, won’t be looking into it. Besides,” Meg explained as Ned opened the door into the bucking wind, “she’s much too busy with Lord Robin.”

“Do I hear resentment?” he challenged as they stepped out onto the narrow walkway that linked the towers. Rain swirled around them. “I thought you adored the man as much as she does—albeit more privily, of course.”

“Don’t you mock me or Her Grace. I just think Lord Cecil may be partly right about her listening to
Lord Robin too much, that’s all. I don’t see the lute,” she said, lifting the sputtering lantern higher and scanning the area. “If Geoffrey was sitting in his usual place and didn’t have it when he went over, wherever is it?”

As they moved, wind-whipped, along the parapet, their light caught the familiar polished sounding board of the pear-shaped, stringed instrument, leaning against the low wall, about ten paces from where Geoffrey always sat. The lute’s intricately carved sound hole, the rose, stared at them like a single, doleful eye. The neck and pegboard were laid against the wall to balance the instrument perfectly.

“He put it down that way as he accidently fell over?” Ned whispered.

“And in a thickening mist? You know he worried the damp air would warp the wood and stretch those gut strings he was always tuning. You don’t think … he put it down deliberately … and killed himself?”

“No. The man loved his life and his calling at court. And if he didn’t just fall, that leaves one alternative,” he declared, lifting and cradling the lute to him, just as Geoffrey would have. “If the queen’s not going to call a meeting of her Privy Plot Council to investigate a possible murder, I am.”

BECAUSE OF HEAVY RAIN, IT WAS THREE DAYS BEFORE
the queen, Lord Robert Dudley, four of her ladies, and a contingent of guards rode out from Richmond toward Mortlake several miles upriver to see the
learned Dr. John Dee, Robin’s former tutor, though the man was but six years Robin’s elder. Robin still saw much of the man, because the queen had given her favorite a house at Kew not far from Mortlake. Now the royal retinue cantered down the muddy, rutted river lane past occasional thatched houses with their gardens sprawled to water gates on the Thames.

“You know people say the man’s a magician,” the queen observed to Robin.

“All rumor,” he countered quickly, turning slightly toward her in his saddle. “People slander him when they claim he dabbles in wizardry. Besides their petty jealousy of a brilliant man of a mere thirty-three years, I think it’s because when he studied at Cambridge he found a nearly invisible way to make people seem to fly to the heavens in the plays they put on there.”

“Really?” Elizabeth said with a little laugh. “Ned Topside would like that. Invisible strings of some sort?”

“Wires and pulleys. At any rate, that reputation, which he’s never been able to shake, was one reason he was put in prison and charged with casting spells on your sister when she was queen. But he was soon released and ended up helping his gaoler cross-question others on
their
crimes against the crown. Actually, people call him doctor because he is so learned, though he did study medicine abroad.”

“I’m already intrigued by the man, I must admit.” They slowed as the Dees’ little house, courtyard, and Thames-side gardens came into view. “Anyone who loves learning and books as he does,” Elizabeth
declared, “is a man after my own heart, not to mention he could be my eyes and ears on the Continent with his many travels.”

“So you are not coming here just to humor me or to show him the astrolabe?” Robin said, seemingly as much to himself as her. “I knew you had an ulterior motive for accepting this visit at last. And if Dr. Dee ever gathers foreign political information for you, I could be his intermediary instead of Cecil.”

Suddenly something compelled Elizabeth to glance into the thick trees along the riverbank. Since her lutenist had fallen to his death, more than ever she’d felt she was being watched, even through her bedroom windows, as if someone stalked that fatal parapet and could peer closely in. She’d put a guard up there two nights, but she didn’t like the idea of him seeing in the windows either and had revoked that order. It was simply too warm this time of year to pull all the draperies.

Dr. Dee and his elderly mother hurried out their garden gate to greet them. Robin had sent Stephen Jenks ahead to tell them of the visit, though Jenks had disappeared somewhere and annoyed Robin by not joining their entourage. Elizabeth studied their hosts. The old lady was frail, and Dr. Dee, tall and slender, handsome but somber, dressed all in black as if he were a cleric. Yet for some reason Elizabeth liked the man instinctively.
“Dr. Dee, Lord Robert has told me so much about you,” she greeted the smiling man as he swept her a low bow. They exchanged courtesies as they strolled into the small, square courtyard of his house, actually his widowed mother’s place, he said, since he often went abroad. He mentioned Antwerp and Paris, and it struck the queen that these were places she would never see with her own eyes.

“I brought something to show you, sir,” she announced, feeling like a child who could barely keep from displaying a new gift. She nodded to Mary Sidney, who removed the astrolabe from a velvet sack and unwrapped it.

“Robert gave me this,” Elizabeth explained, “but I haven’t yet learned all its possibilities.”

“Ah,” Dr. Dee said in obvious delight as he took it in his long-fingered hands, “you can navigate by the stars with such a fine astrolabe, and I shall show you how. Come, Your Majesty, step inside, and I will demonstrate my quadrant, prisms, and mirrors.”