The Queene’s Christmas (6 page)

“Should I not be at your side with Sussex? His festering hatred of Leicester has made him difficult to keep in line lately. Military men like our illustrious Thomas Radcliffe, Earl of Sussex, don’t know when to keep quiet or calm. They think life must be all assault, attack, and violence,” he protested before his eyes darted to the corpse again and he shuddered.

“Ordinarily, I would take you with me, my lord, but I need you to oversee this dreadful situation. While I am gone, fetch Roger Stout back and have him survey this cluttered worktable. I pray you make careful notes of what is here and, more important, what may be missing. See that the coroner is summoned, then clear the table so he can examine the body here, while you are still in the room, silently making your own observations. After the banquet tonight, I will hold a Privy Plot Council meeting in my quarters, where you will report all you—and Jenks—have learned.”

“Yes, Your Grace,” Cecil said. “Leave it all to us, unless you can send Topside to help, too.”

“He should be back by now, but I hardly intend to do nothing until the meeting. I will later summon Stout for more questioning. With his information and your close observances from this site—best send Jenks to speak to the porter, too—we shall decide whether to pursue the matter further or let the conundrum be buried with Hodge.”

Jenks came back in with Roger Stout, each carrying two lanterns; the small room filled with light Though the queen edged toward the door, she thought of two things she could not bear to leave unasked and went back to stand under the corpse again.

“Master Stout, what is that gritty material on the floor?” she asked, pointing. “I stepped in it, but I see other prints there, which I want well noted and drawn to size. It is not sugar or ginger, as you suggested before, for in this new light the grains look too dark.”

Stout took a lantern closer and squatted to sniff at the fine reddish dust “Yet it looks like a spice—cumin, I warrant, Your Majesty,” he reported. “It’s what the peacock’s innards are always dusted with before it’s served.”

“And this stack of gold leaf?” she asked, moving away to lift from the table a thin slab of marble as big as her palm, upon which lay an inch-thick stack of fine sheets of beaten gold. She had seen it before even in the muted light of the single lantern but had been too distracted to pay it heed. Now it shone like a small, square sun.

“He must have stopped—or been stopped—in the very act of dressing the bird for your banquet table,” Stout said, as he glanced at what she held. “You recall, Your Majesty, how the bird’s beak is always covered with gold foil for Yule.”

“So,” she said, “whether or not Hodge killed himself, we do have another mystery. When such a small amount of gold leaf is needed for the beak, why did he have here enough to cover a rich man’s effigy? And if someone killed Hodge, why was this pure gold not stolen?”

“Perhaps because, if a man kills himself,” Stout ventured, “he is too distraught or despondent to care for worldly wealth. Or Hodge himself was going to abscond with it but in self-loathing at his planned evil—and for other reasons—took his own life.”

“Or,” Jenks put in, “the gold wasn’t taken because the killer was in a rush to flee once he spotted it. He’d already taken time to hang the corpse and deck it out. And he didn’t want to get caught with stolen royal property on his person.”

“Or just the opposite,” Cecil said. “Mayhap it was a murder well planned ahead of time, and the killer’s motive has everything to do with the message, so he did not want to distract from that with what would be petty theft—petty not in what was stolen but petty compared to the murderer’s true intent. Discern that and we have our killer.”

The queen sensed her clever Cecil would say more, but he did not. Perhaps his deductions were for her ears alone. She too feared that this death did not just strike at Hodge but that, indeed, someone diabolically devious had killed the messenger in order to send the message.

Chapter the Third

Hippocras (Used as a digestive or to sweeten one’s stomach. A worthy potion for after feasting.)

From the cellar take 2 pints red or white wine. Place ½ teaspoon each of ground cloves, nutmeg, and ginger and 2 teaspoons of ground cinnamon all bruised together in a mortar, and 1 cup of sugar into a conical bag of felted woollen cloth (in the shape of the sleeve of Hippocrates, the brilliant Greek physician, for this is as much elixir as drink). Add some rosemary flowers and let the concoction sleep all night. Pour 2 pints of wine through the bag, for as many times as it takes to run clear. Pour wine into a vessel. If it be claret, the liquid will be red; if white, then of that color also. Seal down the drink until called for
.

ELIZABETHS STOMACH FELT KNOTTED LIKE THE NOOSE
that must have choked away Hodge Thatcher’s life. With her Lord Chamberlain and other household officers trailing behind her, she beat a retreat from the kitchen block back into the corridors of the palace. The scent of suspended green garlands permeated the vast place, and servants were setting up the Great Hall for tonight’s feast.

She was no doubt late for the audience she had promised the Earl of Sussex, but it wouldn’t hurt to let him cool his heels. She was hardly in the mood for his rantings about Leicester’s growing power at court and his influence over his queen. Had she not proved time and again that even those she favored would not be trusted overmuch?

“Oh, Your Majesty,” came a woman’s voice as Elizabeth ascended the grand staircase toward the royal apartments, “there you are!”

Margaret Stewart, Countess of Lennox, waited at the first landing, so she was trapped. That smiling face always looked like a mask to Elizabeth. Beneath it, the queen imagined, lurked the countenance of a woman who was at heart a treacherous harpy. Though Margaret was fifty, her former beauty still haunted her plump face, but now everything about the woman seemed overblown: her big body, broad mouth, large teeth, prominent nose, even the hint of red in her graying tresses, which peeked from her velvet cap—and her ambitions. Yet Elizabeth tolerated her, for the older woman was niece to King Henry VIII and so another of the queen’s female cousins who were her cross to bear.

Margaret and Matthew Stewart, the Countess and Earl of Lennox, were Lord Darnley’s parents, covert Catholics, and rapacious relatives of both the English and Scottish queens. Elizabeth knew the Stewarts were plotting to wed their heir to Queen Mary in defiance of her own apparent plans for Dudley. She had promised to let Darnley go to Scotland to join his Scottish father, then changed her mind more than once. At least that was how this web of intrigue appeared to everyone but Elizabeth and Cecil.

“Cousin, how are you on this Christmas Eve day?” Elizabeth asked, nodding but not stopping. Margaret lifted her skirts and charged, puffing up the stairs after her. Elizabeth waited at the top and held out her hand to stay Margaret where she was, four or five steps down. When Elizabeth was a girl and out of favor with her royal father, more than once Margaret had gloated to take precedence and to keep the younger woman in her place.

“Oh, did you wish to speak to me?” Elizabeth inquired.

“I will be brief, Your Majesty. May not my son go north after these holidays to visit his father in Edinburgh? You had said before that he could go. My dear husband is petitioning the Scot queen’s council for the return of our lands, and Lord Darnley would be of great help in this endeavor.”

Oh, yes, she’d wager, Elizabeth thought, that Darnley would be of great help there. Not only with those dour Calvinist Scots lords but with the pliable Queen Mary herself. Indeed, Elizabeth was planning on that very thing, but she wanted to be certain both the bait and the big six-foot fish were hungry for their reunion when the English queen finally let him go, apparently under duress.

But she said only, “I shall consider it, Margaret You must excuse me, but we shall speak more of this later.”

“I heard there will be no peacock on display at the feast,” Margaret said as Elizabeth turned away. “That is, none but the one Leicester’s rivals call by that sobriquet, ’the peacock.’”

In the shock of realization, Elizabeth could have tumbled down the flight of stairs. She was hardly surprised that word of her privy dresser’s death was out and about, not even that Margaret too must hate Leicester, whom she perhaps still believed to be her son’s rival for Queen Mary’s hand.

A new thought struck the queen with stunning force. If Hodge Thatcher had been murdered and was intentionally decked out with peacock garb, the mockery and threat could be aimed at the controversial Earl of Leicester.

“If you intend to rant about my heeding Lord Leicester’s advice upon occasion,” Elizabeth began with Sussex moments later in her presence chamber, “I do not wish to take my time. You are beginning to sound like your own echo, my lord, but I would ask you one thing about that.”

“Of course, Your Grace,” he said. “Anything I can ever do to help with, ah, anything …”

Sussex was hardly an orator, but that did not keep him from commanding a large faction at court. And did the man not realize that his hand perched on his ceremonial sword always rattled it in its scabbard, and to a regular beat? It was like listening to a ticking timepiece until one became a lunatic. ’s bones, but the ache in her belly was growing, and in these precious holiday times.

“I am ever at your beck and call for all service,” Sussex plunged on, sweeping her a bow with the offending sword lifted so it wouldn’t scrape the floor.

Thomas Radcliffe, third Earl of Sussex, had been her Lord Deputy of Ireland and had led and fought bravely there if with little ultimate success, though it seemed no one made much headway in the Eire’s fens and forests. His health had suffered, and he had petitioned to be brought back to court, a request she had granted. But since he’d returned, he’d spearheaded the anti-Leicester group more zealously than he had ever fought the Irish rebel Tyrone. If the queen had not been so fond of his kin, her lady Rosie Radcliffe, and had not had a soft spot, too, for his wife, Frances Sidney, he just might be heading back for another tour of duty.

Once bright blond but now graying and balding, Sussex still had fine military bearing at age thirty-eight. She did trust the man to keep state secrets and would not usually mind having him nearby—if he would only stop that damned sword rattling!

“Instead of your asking me whether I am heeding Leicester’s words on such and such an issue,” the queen said, “I wish to ask you some questions about him, and I ask you tell me true.”

“About the earl—ah, of course,” he said, hardly managing to cloak his surprise.

“As to those who speak ill of him—and I shall not mention nor request names—by what nicknames might they call him?”

“You don’t mean like 'Robin? I’ve heard you call him that”

“Hardly, my lord.”

“Ah, I believe Your Highness knows he used to be dubbed ’the gypsy’ because of his dark hair and eyes.”

“And for his tendency to mesmerize certain people, namely me, I have heard.”

“I suppose that could be part of why he was called so. Also, no doubt, the fact he came with little fortune to court but has man-aged to—ah, find such good fortune here, some might say through sleight-of-hand or even gypsy-like theft. Indeed, Your Majesty, those people of Romany are known for such.”

“So I have heard, but that trait attributed to Leicester would be wrong. ’s blood, Sussex, the man loaned me money once when I was declared bastard by my father and did not have two groats to my name. When I was sent to the Tower, though I was innocent in a misguided plot to overthrow my sister, he was imprisoned there, too, and sent me flowers and kept my spirits up. I mention these things so that those who might dislike the earl will realize he is not some border reaver sweeping in to plunder something here.”

He looked astounded at her passionate outburst. His sword in its scabbard even stopped its confounded clatter.

“Any other sobriquets?” she prompted, wanting to get back to the business at hand.

“Well—ah, you’ve heard, of course, he’s widely called of late ’the peacock.’”

“Widely called? I won’t ask by whom, but why?”

“Some observers think he tends to strut, Your Majesty. And no one—but the Tudor monarch, and rightly so, of course— tends to attire oneself as finely as he does. Certainly, I can’t hold a candle to the gleam of his satins, silks, and gems. I heard Martin Bane, for one, say such display is, well—absolutely sinful…”

Though his voice had gone from a trot to a canter, when she narrowed her eyes at Bane’s name, he stopped talking. “Forgive me if I overspeak, Your Majesty, but it was at your bequest.”

“Yes,” she said, almost to herself. “I myself have goaded Leicester with the term
peacock
when he vexed me sore. But I will not have sniping among my subjects in my court during this holiday time. Is that understood, my lord Sussex?”

“It is. Of course,” he said and punctuated that promise with a brief rattle.

“Then what more do you have to say to me today?”

“Only that I am heartened to see how lovingly my dear cousin Rosie serves you as maid of honor, Your Majesty. That is all, for we Radcliffes are ever grateful for your leading and wise counsel.”

“Who could not favor your Rosie?” Elizabeth responded, though she knew full well he’d hardly requested this interview for that.