The Queene’s Christmas (22 page)

“Then it makes even more sense than I thought,” she told them. “And what part do the others play?”

“Of course,” Wat said, glaring at Giles as he sidestepped again to be in the queen’s line of sight, “you perhaps heard my voice as narrator of it all. Randall portrays our mighty England, and Giles is the new year with all its blessings and bounty to come, later to be draped in garlands of apples and walnuts,
et cetera
”

“And Ned?”

“The old year which passes,” Giles put in before Wat could respond. “Being much older in appearance and outlook than I, he’ll be weighed down by a garland of regrets, I don’t doubt.”

It was the first time the queen had disliked the handsome man. The slur against Ned had been subtle but sly. “But do we not all have regrets?” she asked, staring at Giles. “Do you have none, even recent rueings of mistakes or sins, Master Chatam?”

“I, Your Most Gracious Majesty? I rue that I did not come to see my old playfellow Hodge Thatcher before his untimely death, of course. And that I cannot continue to live in Londontown, however much I admire this company of players and enjoy the countryside of fair England. Frankly, I rue that Ned Topside has a place in your court and in your regard I would die for.”

She almost asked the brazen boy if he would kill for it, too. Surely he had not somehow set up Ned to look guilty of something he himself had done. All the mummers from last night, including Giles, Wat, and Randall, had sworn to Baron Hunsdon that they did not leave the presence of the other players and had no notion of which disguised man had produced the two dolls at the end.

Unfortunately, Elizabeth thought, Ned’s own actions kept testifying against him. Today he’d disobeyed her by leaving his post here, as he had several other times recently. “Where is Ned, then?” she inquired, as if it were an afterthought. “I believe the old year is just as essential as the new one in this rehearsal.”

“Don’t know why,” Wat said, “but he had business outside on the riverbank and said he’d be back in a trice.”

“But a trice has come and passed,” Giles said.

However angry she was at Ned, the queen came to mistrust Giles then and silently scolded herself for being taken in by his fine face and form ere this. A long shot he might be in this search for the Christmas killer, but he bore watching, and that tricky Ned was not here to do it. This time she wasn’t sending Jenks or anyone else to look for him but was going herself.

Trailing Rosie and Anne, the queen hurried to her apartments to don her boots and hooded, fur-lined cloak. Kat sat alone in the early afternoon sun slanting through the windows. But that was not what seized the queen’s attention; she stopped dead still where she stood.

Earlier this morning she, Cecil, and Harry had been minutely examining the two parchment signs Robin’s attacker had bound to him. They had left them on the window ledges here. Now, with sunlight streaming in, something they had missed stood out starkly.

The two large sheets of stiff parchment, which were obviously of fine grade, not only showed the slashing strokes of dark letters and words but, beneath that, revealed even more.

“ ’S blood and bones!” Elizabeth cried, stomping over to the windows.

“What is it, lovey?” Kat asked from where she’d apparently been contemplating sunbeams.

“Rosie,” Elizabeth said, turning to her startled ladies-in-waiting, “please take Kat for a slow stroll in the gallery, and I’ll rejoin you here later.”

“But I can stay here with you, if there’s a problem,” Rosie said, nervously plucking at the folds of her skirts.

“I’m not leaving if anything’s amiss!” Kat cried.

“Neither of you is to worry,” Elizabeth insisted. “Lady Anne will be quite enough company for now.” When Rosie looked as if she’d balk, the queen began to panic that perhaps Sussex
had
told his niece to keep an eye on her queen. “Rosie, perhaps you can look for my lost bracelet while you are walking in the gallery,” she added pointedly.

At that, Rosie hustled Kat out while Anne remained. “Whatever is it, Your Grace?” she asked.

“I want you to go fetch both your lord husband and Cecil for me, quickly,” Elizabeth told her as she pounced on one piece of parchment and held it up close to her eyes in the sun.

When Anne hastened to obey, Elizabeth seized the second sign, then darted to her table, where a pile of documents still went unread. She scrabbled through her papers until she came to what she wanted. When Cecil and Harry came in with Anne, the queen had three pieces of parchment, the two large ones with big, bold lettering and a smaller one with regular script, set on the windowsills.

“A clue right under our noses we missed!” she said by way of greeting and pointed at the parchments.

“You are brilliant as always, Your Grace,” Cecil clipped out as he hurried to the windows and stooped to get on eye level with each parchment in turn. “How could we have missed this? Sometimes it’s the tiniest, most everyday thing that escapes us.”

“It is indeed, my lords, but I’ve learned the hard way that is the important thing about solving crimes. Do you remember the old adage 'For want of a nail, the shoe was lost, for want of the shoe, the horse was lost, for want of the horse, the rider was lost'?”

“ 'For want of the rider,’ “ Cecil added, “ ’the battle was lost, and for want of the battle the war was lost.’ “

“But you have not gone far enough, Cecil,” she added, “and that’s what worries me. 'For want of the war, the kingdom was lost,’ and I’ll not have that here!”

“But the clue you're speaking of here still escapes me,” Harry said, shaking his head. “What in heaven’s name are you two talking about? We already went over all that writing, but it was too big and crude to try matching to any of our possible villains’ regular hand script.”

“The watermarks in the papers,” Elizabeth said.

“They all match,” Cecil muttered, nodding.

“But those indicate only the place the parchment was made or purchased,” Harry protested, though he too bent to look at the ghostly watermarks on the three parchments. “I’ve seen it done, Your Grace. A wire in a shape to identify the parchment’s maker or seller is pressed into each piece of wet rag before it’s dried.”

“Harry,” the queen said as Anne came up behind her husband to also peruse the papers in the sun, “some watermarks indeed identify the prospective buyer, if he or she is of great wealth or power—or of righteous reputation…”

“But what, exactly, does this watermark depict?” Cecil asked, turning the smallest parchment upside down. “I just hope we can trace its dagger-like shape.”

Almost giddy with excitement to be getting somewhere in this labyrinth of leads—and to be outthinking Cecil—Elizabeth could not help but smile. “The watermarks are not dagger-like shapes, Cecil, but the now burned spire of St. Paul’s.”

“Aha,” Harry said, sounding pleased to be following at last.

“Which,” the queen went on, “was not replaced after the fire, because I would not allot the Bishop of London and Vicar Bane the money they wanted for it. As you recall, the city needed additions to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. Bane dunned me hard for the funds, but I have a duty to my treasury, to Parliament, and to my people. So I did not give in to building the steeple rather than helping the hospital when I had already donated much toward the rebuilding of the cathedral’s roof.”

“And revenge for tying the purse strings, which made Grindal and Bane look bad, could be a secondary motive,” Harry declared. “Your Grace, perhaps your declaration of a festive Christmas is only rubbing salt in their already open wounds.”

“Exactly,” she said, hitting her fist in her palm. “Now look closely, my lords and Anne, at the small parchment which matches the others. That is an epistle charging me to 'clean up Christmas’ which Vicar Bane sent me just yesterday.”

“Aha!” Harry repeated. “But would an educated man like that be so stupid as to tie signs to Leicester with the bishop’s water-mark on them?”

“We didn’t think to look for watermarks at first,” Elizabeth argued while Cecil put the small epistle close to his face and sniffed at it.

“Remember, Your Grace,” he said, “when my sketches of the boot print and of Hodge’s head wound took on the scent of that flowery
potpourri
of Mistress Milligrew’s?”

“You mean you smell that there, too?”

“No, I smell smoke, as if the very pores of the paper have soaked it in. Smoke and the faintest whiff
of
—something sweet, I think it is.”

He extended it to her, and she sniffed at it. “I warrant you are on the mark, my lord,” she told him.

“But those very scents could have come from this room,” Anne put in. “Smoke from the hearth here, sweet scents from the strewing herbs or even the queen’s fine-scented clothes.”

“No,” Elizabeth said, shaking her head so hard her pearl drop earrings rattled. “Unlike these larger pieces of parchment, this letter from Vicar Bane has been somewhere unique. He’s hardly one to have sweet scents on his person, so perhaps it’s a question of where he wrote this letter or kept the paper. Now where could this have been stored or written that these other, larger parchments were not?” She took up both of the mocking signs, sniffed at them, then passed them to the others.

“No,” Cecil concluded, “it’s only the epistle from Vicar Bane that reeks of that strange smell, not these two signs. So does that mean Bane did or didn’t knock Leicester unconscious and truss him like a roast boar—or bore, as this sign says?”

“I believe,” the queen said, “I shall now look forward a bit more to my meeting with Vicar Bane today, to discuss,” she added, taking his letter and reading from it, “'
that signs from heaven are wreaking havoc on our pagan, impure court and city Christmas which could soon spread to all the kingdom
.’ You know,” she added, looking at each of her cohorts in turn, “the smoke of this letter reminds me of the burning of the boathouse. Cecil, I’d appreciate it if you could spare a man to keep an eye on Vicar Bane for me, after I speak with him—unless he gives himself away and I have him arrested.”

“I’ve just the man.”

“Harry and Anne, I was about to take a walk outside to find Ned Topside, and I just had a thought that I may know where to look.”

“Where’s that?” Harry asked.

“Either where the stones were taken from this building’s very foundation or, more likely, the place where Cecil, Jenks, and I were almost baked alive.”

In the biting air on the riverbank, Ned Topside had no idea what he was looking for, but he knew he had to find it. The idea had occurred to him when he’d looked out the window of the Great Hall. He’d climbed to the top of a ladder from which two pillow-cases of cut lace would be dumped, sending snowflakes from heaven onto their makeshift stage during their little drama on Evergreen Day. From the ladder, he could gaze out the high windows at the riverbank, where he’d seen four workmen raking up the rubble of the burned boathouse.

Being forced to leave off watching Giles and taking a chance on disobeying the queen’s orders, Ned had made excuses and set out.

“Find anything unusual in this mess?” he’d asked the workmen, hoping the queen hadn’t given them those very orders. He should have come out here ere this to look for evidence left behind.

“Metal oarlocks,” the big-shouldered one told him as they raked through the ruins, which had finally stopped smoldering. “Fire started underneath and went up, so’s not much wasn’t charred real good.”

“Charred bad,” his loutish-looking fellow worker corrected him, as if they were tutors about to give a lecture on good grammar. “ 'Course things that was dragged out, like the royal barge, was saved.”

Starting to feel cold instead of warm in his excitement, Ned nodded as he gazed at the big barge, wrapped with layers of protective hemp like a massive mummy.

“Where did they get that much hemp?” he asked the workers. “I could use some of that for a court entertainment I have coming up.”

“Don’t know,” the big-shouldered one said to him.

“I do,” muttered the lout, who suddenly wasn’t looking so loutish after all. “The boatmen good as robbed the chandlery of it, and there was a real fuss, 'cause hemp’s needed to make extra torches for the holidays. You know, like the one I saw way over here,” he added and shuffled to the very edge of the charred pile to lift the remains of a short torch called a link.

“Was that found in the charred remains?” Ned asked, walking through snow and ash to look closer at it What was left of its wax showed it had been dyed red for Yule, so it must be a current one. “But why didn’t it burn up, too?” he added.

“ 'Cause it was over here a ways!” the man told him, vaguely pointing in the direction of the Bishop of London’s Lambeth Palace. “It didn’t come direct from this burnt pile,” he added as if Ned were a dunce.

Ned knew link torches were made by pieces of hemp being dipped in precious beeswax and rolled together, then attached to a short pole, though little was left of this one but a red stub of waxed hemp and the shaft. The point was, Ned thought, as his pulse quickened, it was an expensive link only someone of wealth or position would use. And it had been evidently heaved out of the way of the burning building, or perhaps dropped when someone fled.