The Twylight Tower

My lute, awake! Perform the last
Labor that thou and I shall hast,
And end that I have now begun;
For when this song is sung and past,
My lute, be still, for I have done.

— THE EARL OF ROCHFORD

Yanking on her robe and shoving her feet in her woolen mules, Elizabeth did not await her ladies. That voice had surely been Ned’s, but who did he think was dead?

The queen’s first impulse was to go to the privy staircase that led to both the roof and garden, but if foul play were afoot, that could be dangerous. As the startled Kat and Mary scrambled into robes behind her, Elizabeth ran through the empty withdrawing room and banged a fist on the double doors to the gallery. Her yeoman guards, halberds still crossed, swept it open and gaped to see her.

“Someone’s hurt in the courtyard below,” she told them, shoving through. “Bring lanterns.”

Both hulking men fell in behind her. With them, Kat, Mary, several of her other women, and the night porter strung out behind her, the queen hurried down the lantern-lit staircase. She gestured to more startled guards to unbolt the front door, and she burst out into the courtyard.

“Ned?” she cried. Her little entourage halted behind her. A fine falling mist muted sounds and sights, but she could swear she still heard the weird wind music from the towers. “Ned Topside!”

“Here, Your Grace,” he answered, his voice breaking. She saw him huddled over a fallen form directly under the tower opposite her window. “It’s Geoffrey,” Ned choked out, “fallen to his death.”

She traversed the slick paving stones and bent next to the kneeling Ned. Her lutenist sprawled facedown, his blond hair fanned out, his arms and legs spread as if he’d tried to fly. His face was turned to the side, the angle of his neck askew. A trickle of blood from his ear puddled on the pavement.

“I—I didn’t turn him over,” Ned whispered. “That’s the way he landed, but I felt for the pulse at his neck. He’s gone.”

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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“ ’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’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.

“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.

“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.”

“Mirrors, sir? I did not take you for a vain man,” Elizabeth said with a smile. Her courtiers knew to laugh, but Dr. Dee only nodded. Leaving everyone except Robin in the courtyard partaking of raisin cakes and ale with the doctor’s mother, Elizabeth preceded Dr. Dee inside as he indicated.

“I hope to experiment with mirrors as signaling glasses across rivers or from ship to ship, Your Majesty,” he explained, his voice becoming even more animated. “I am also fascinated by numerical codes and all sorts of secretive devices of intelligence, you see.”

She didn’t precisely follow him, but said, “A man with so many ideas can be of much import to his monarch and country.”

“Robert told me you were wise in all ways,” Dr. Dee said as he nodded to indicate a room with several shelves of books. “I’d gladly beggar myself for books,” he admitted, while he kept moving his hands together as if he were washing them. “I sense we have a great deal in common, though I am the commoner here,” he added in a quiet voice.

Unsure if he had made a jest, she nodded and walked over to a table with mirrors and prisms and an open book full of scribbles she, who knew Greek, Latin, French, Italian, and Spanish, could not read. “So all of this—your life,” she said, “is to gain outside knowledge, but not to look within.” She held up a strange, concave mirror that made her distorted image lunge at her.

“We must all look within, Your Majesty,” Dee said solemnly, “even when we don’t think we recognize ourselves there.”

“Robin—Lord Robert—tells me you can make people appear to fly,” she said, and put the glass down with a slight shudder. The stupid, curved thing had made her look ugly, as if some darker self were watching her. “Could you make me fly, Dr. Dee?” she asked.

“Only if we have some sort of high ceiling, and if you’re not afraid to fall if something goes awry,” he replied, and glanced at Robin instead of her. The queen thought of poor Geoffrey again and moved toward the window, where more instruments were displayed.

“Her Majesty is born under the sign of Virgo, the spinster, doctor,” Robin said behind her, “and you know Virgos have their feet planted firmly on the ground.”

John Dee glanced from Robin to her, then back to his former student again. “This, Your Majesty, is a radius astronomicus,” Dee said as if to change the subject. He hastened toward the window to join her. “Besides peering up at the stars, one can see miles away on earth with it as if one were close-up. I call it my observation cylinder.”

Elizabeth studied the odd thing, a long tube hanging in a leather sling, its larger of two glass end-pieces aimed out the window. For one moment she wondered if Dr. Dee had been watching her approach with it, but that would hardly explain her odd feelings other times and places of late.

“Look through here, Your Majesty,” he told her as Robin came closer. “There!” Dee said triumphantly when she gasped at how trees across the river leaped at her. “See how close and clear everything becomes?”

“Invisible wires and signal mirrors and magic glasses,” the queen marveled as she squinted to fix her gaze again. “A thousand ideas and possibilities. Dr. Dee, I believe I shall visit you again or send for you some day to come to court.”

MEG THOUGHT KAT ASHLEY LOOKED LIKE SHE WAS SITTING on pins and needles instead of a bale of straw. They’d talked her into joining them on the sly, since she’d seen Geoffrey Hammet play for courtiers on numerous occasions where they had not and might have something to contribute. If Her Majesty wouldn’t look into poor Geoffrey’s death, Ned, Jenks, and Meg intended to.

They’d even included the twelve-year-old, angelic-faced Gil Sharpe, the queen’s favorite artist, who had helped them investigate a previous murder. No worry Gil would ever talk about their doings, as the boy was a mute. So the servants of the queen’s Privy Plot Council gathered while Her Majesty rode to Mortlake. Jenks claimed this would be the safest place, even if the queen suddenly returned, since she hated how the stables stank.

Actually, Meg did too. She’d known only one other who was more fretted by bad scents than the queen and her—Gil’s mother, Bett Sharpe, who’d been left back in London. Since Gil couldn’t talk, Bett had taught her boy a signal language of sorts, and after two years everyone sitting here was pretty good at it, though never as clever as the queen and Gil, who would rattle on with face and hand signs so quickly no one could keep up.

“The perfect positioning of his lute and the fact he would never steal—and didn’t like to drink that malmsey spilled on him—points to someone else’s hand in this,” Ned finally concluded his lengthy opening statement, grand gestures and all, as if they were an audience.

You might know, Meg thought, the queen’s so-called fool and principal player had taken over this meeting just the way the queen herself did when she called her council to order. Of course, they were missing William Cecil and Her Grace’s Boleyn cousin Lord Henry Carey, now called Baron Hunsdon. But Meg didn’t doubt Ned would try to run things with the lofty likes of them here too.

“What worries me,” Ned went on, “is why Her Majesty—Bess, I mean,” he added, using the name Elizabeth insisted on in meetings when they had solved the earlier crimes, “is so taken with Lord Robert, she’s ignoring facts and proofs about Geoffrey’s death.”

“Mayhap,” Meg put in with a shake of her head, “the queen will only solve crimes where the victim is of the nobility or she herself is threatened, like in the earlier investigations.”

Gil bobbed up and began signaling madly about how the queen had helped save his mother from hanging. He rolled his eyes and stuck out his tongue as he mimicked a noose tightening about his own neck. “True,” Ned said. “I know she cares for all of us just as she does our betters, but let’s not get off the subject here, and that is Geoffrey’s demise.”

Jenks frowned and shifted, and Ned kept quiet for a moment as Gil sat back down. It was finally Kat who spoke. “I have found that Her Grace cares dearly for all her people,” she insisted. “I’m sure when you inform her—carefully—of the evidence about the malmsey and stress again the placement of the lute, as well as anything else you can turn up …” She frowned. “Mayhap Geoffrey’s wife was disgruntled he’d been gone so much and sent someone to insist he come home, and push came to shove up there on that tower walk, or—”

“You mean that someone breached Richmond’s security, stumbled on him playing on the parapet in the middle of the night, and did him in?” Ned countered, his voice incredulous.

“No,” Kat said, angry now, “it would have to be someone clever hired to follow him about who knew his every move and blended in.”

“Oh, pish,” Ned insisted. “If spouses sent hired persons to kill their mates for being at court without them, we’d have a bloodbath here, starting with Lord Robert Dudley.”

Kat rose and brushed straw off her skirt. “You just let me know what you decide to do next. I’ve got the queen’s ladies and wardrobe to oversee, and today or tomorrow my Lord Cecil’s bringing Bishop de Quadra, the Spanish ambassador, to court,” she added. She peered out the half-open stable door like a felon, then darted away.

Ned stood and started to pace as if, Meg thought, he would plunge into another long soliloquy. “Let’s remember that Bess and Cecil—I mean Will,” he said, using the man’s nickname during the queen’s privy investigations, “always stress that the motive to the crime is the key to finding the criminal. Sui bono, who profits? Marital desertion aside, why would someone want to kill Geoffrey? What could he have possibly had that they want?”

Suddenly Ned held up his hand and tipped his head. Meg heard it too, the queen’s bell-clear laugh. Close. Too close. And then Lord Robin’s voice just outside the half-open door.

“Wait until you see this new chestnut Barbary foal, my queen. We’ll have to leave it behind when you move the court to Windsor, but I’ll have him sent to London before the winter roads become impassable.”

“Talk about murder,” Meg whispered. “She’ll kill us for going behind her back.”

Jenks, who usually reasoned at the speed horses did, leaped up and grabbed Ned by one arm and Meg by the other. Gil, always quick on his feet, darted after them. Jenks yanked them down the walkway between stalls to an open area and shoved them both up against the railing there. Meg’s breasts bounced so hard against a board she whoofed out a breath; Ned banged his nose and muttered a curse. Meg was considering throwing herself flat on the ground and covering herself with straw until her betters passed, but she saw that stupid Jenks had hauled them right to the place the queen was coming. A mare and obviously new foal stared at them through the widely spaced rails.

“Oh, Lord Robert!” Jenks blurted, sounding very surprised, when Meg was afraid to so much as turn around. “And Your Majesty! I thought maybe Gil could sketch it—the new colt—and I just wanted to show it off, my lord.”

“A fine—ah, little stallion,” Ned choked out with a quick look at the colt’s privates as they made their obeisance to the queen. Meg punched Gil in the shoulder to remind him to bow, as he was madly signing something to the queen, who was nodding.

“A fine stallion, but destined to be a gelding,” Lord Robin muttered ominously, staring at Jenks, not the horses.

“We didn’t hurt it.” Ned stammered, “Jenks said that we shouldn’t pet it or anything like that.”

“Meg,” the queen said, frowning, “I don’t believe you’ll find many strewing herbs out here. Unless you’ve taken to gathering horse apples, you’d best—all of you—get back to business, though Gil may return to draw the mare and foal. I’d rather fancy that as a gift for you, Robin.”

“And where were you, lad,” Lord Robin asked Jenks, “when I wanted you in the escort to Mortlake?”

“Didn’t know I was to do more than take the message to Dr. Dee,” Jenks said smoothly, getting on much better, Meg thought, than the honey-tongued queen’s player. Even Gil was doing better than Ned. But Meg could tell, even though the queen had a perfumed glove stuck in front of her nose and mouth, she was not smiling. Meg dropped another crooked curtsy and beat both her confederates out the door.

Chapter the Second