The Twylight Tower

The dread of future foes
Exile my present joy
And with me warn to shun
Such snares as threaten my annoy.

For falsehood now doth flow
And subjects’ faith doth ebb.
Which should not be if reason ruled
Or wisdom wove the web.

But clouds of joys untried
Doth cloak aspiring minds,
Which turn to rage of late report

By changed course of minds.
The tops of hope suppose,
The root of rue shall be
And fruitless of their grafted guile
As shortly you shall see.

The dazzled eyes with pride,
With great ambition blind
Shall be unsealed by worthy men,
Who foresight falsehood find.

— QUEEN ELIZABETH

THE NEXT MORNING, THE QUEEN MET PRIVILY with Ned and Jenks, garbed for their ride to Cumnor, and with Dr. John Dee, who had recently arrived. “Has Dr. Dee made it clear to you how you can use the signaling mirrors he is lending us?” the queen asked again. “And if you break that precious observation glass, I shall break your skulls.”

“We will not harm a thing nor get caught,” Jenks vowed, “and be back to report to you as soon as we can—if Ned can keep up a fast pace.”

“If you can keep up with posing as a traveling player,” Ned put in, affecting an educated London voice.

“And that,” the queen said, seizing both their wrists in a hard grip, “is what I mean by you must get on with each other for this trip. No lording it over him, Ned. And, Jenks, no gibes about your outracing or outfighting him.”

When they went down the back way as she had bid, the queen turned to Dr. Dee again. “I cannot thank you enough for your help and the use of your brilliant devices, doctor. I would reward you with a sinecure or coinage, but I do not want it noised abroad that you are in the service of the queen. I regret to tell you there are spies about my court who would proclaim that to their hostile foreign masters.”

His eyebrows hiked higher. “It will ever be honor enough for me to be covertly in your employ, Your Majesty.”

“You mean you will dare to use the flying rig again?” he asked, glancing at the big bag of ropes and harness he’d hauled in with him. “Since you didn’t send it with your men, I surmised so.”

“I would speak of that, but come with me now, and I shall show you the drift of my gratitude from one bibliophile to another.”

“Bibliophile?” he said, sounding puzzled for once, though she realized full well he knew what that word meant.

She led him from her privy chamber down the short hall to the small, wainscotted room that served as her library when she lived here. His swift intake of breath when he glimpsed the rows of volumes was reward enough for her.

“I bring only a small portion of the royal library with me on progress from London but have numbers of books at all my palaces,” she explained, waiting for him to follow her into the room. “But I want you to select three books for yourself from these, one for each of your clever devices you have entrusted to me so that I might climb from the pit my enemies think I have fallen into—or mayhap we shall call it a book apiece for the three deaths we must solve.”

“Oh, Majesty, choose from all these? I said it is my joy and honor to serve you,” he said, staring at the books instead of her.

“And serve me you shall. But this will be our coinage, good doctor. You shall build a fine library over the years and tell no one its source, and if either of us needs to borrow aught from the other—books or ideas, intelligence, as you say—we shall.”

She left him staring at those crowded shelves with the same intent expression on his face she had seen on Robin’s when he’d gazed upon her with her skirts up and stocking down.

THE FIRST THING CECIL NOTED IN ROBERT DUDLEY’S SMALL manor house at Kew was that no lamps nor tapers were lit and the draperies were pulled closed. He nearly stumbled in the front hall when Dudley’s steward closed the door behind them. One would think it were night outside instead of broad afternoon.

“Ah, some light in here at least,” Cecil observed to the queen’s prisoner in this velvet cage as the steward led him to the short walking gallery. Hand outstretched, Dudley hurried to greet him. Though there was a row of windows here, the sun did not enter in late afternoon, and the gallery too seemed muted and grim.

This manor the queen had given Dudley—it had once been the dairy house of a fine estate—had no more than twenty chambers and was tucked away under a slant of hill. Still the land gave him tenants, rents, and men to draw on in his climb back to respectability. But that, Cecil thought, might be all water over the mill dam if Her Majesty learned that Dudley had betrayed her. That was what he was here to discern, yet the man looked actually glad to see him.

“How fares Her Grace? What is her feeling toward me now?” Dudley began to pepper him with questions as soon as they shook hands. He sounded desperate, but was that a mark against him? As ever, his focus centered on his own status and only the queen’s welfare as it served his own.

“Her Majesty is endeavoring to stay purposefully busy about the realm’s business and prays that all will be settled by the coroner’s jury of inquiry,” Cecil told him as they fell into stride together down the length of the old flagstone floor.

“She is stronger than I,” Dudley murmured, folding his arms across his chest.

“Stronger than most of us, if the truth were known—and it must be known, Lord Robert.”

“Yes, but I am sent to ask you straight if you had any foreknowledge that your wife would come to harm.”

“That she would try to harm herself, you mean? And did I encourage her suicide?” he asked, acting either intentionally or obstinately dense. “No, Cecil, and believe me, I could have. With the tumor in her breast, she was, of course, in pain and deeply melancholy at times.”

“But you were hardly pained nor melancholy to hear of her death, I take it,” Cecil threw at him. “You would see that as clearing your way to the queen, I have no doubt.”

Dudley stopped walking. His chin lifted. “No, my Lord Cecil, I was not saddened by her death, except the loss of life of one so young and that she suffered greatly alone these last years when I was absent to earn my family’s way back in the world. I will not—cannot—pretend to grieve for her loss in my own life. Amy and I burned our flame out long ago and had little in common after that, but she was my wife. I sent condolences but not false feelings to her family and do not express them now. But as to your original question,” he said, his voice rising again, “I would not doubt the shallow, spoiled woman could kill herself just to spite me!”

Cecil stared straight into Dudley’s steady gaze. A frown—perhaps a perpetual one now—furrowed his high brow and his eyes blazed. But in them, the seat of the soul, lurked not deceit but flamed raw self-serving arrogance. The blatant honesty was a mark for his innocence, Cecil decided, however much it condemned him as a dreadful husband.

Cecil cleared his throat, uncertain he could find his voice for once. “You realize the evidence, such as we know of it now, looks suspicious for foul play,” he told Dudley as they began to walk again. They changed directions often as the corridor had nothing of the length of the queen’s galleries or even the one he and Mildred walked in inclement weather at Stamford or in their small country seat at Wimbledon. Suddenly Cecil pitied as well as detested this man: He’d never had a wife capable of comforting him and had been through hell for his family’s fierce ambition. And Cecil, of all men, understood ambition.

“As for suspicious evidence, I heard,” Dudley was saying, ticking things off on his long fingers, “that her neck was broken and her head at an odd angle, yet her cap was not awry. Two, her body bore no discernible bruises. Three, that Amy had insisted everyone but Mrs. Owens, the doctor’s old widow who gets about only with a walking stick, leave for the fair. Bowes also said they questioned Amy’s lady’s maid, Mrs. Pirto, and she said Lady Dudley had a strange mind. Hell’s gates, I could have told them that!”

A muscle kept working in Dudley’s jaw, Cecil observed. “No one but my brother-in-law in a letter—he sits on the coroner’s jury—has told me aught of her demise, I swear it,” Dudley insisted, his voice rising in pitch to sound nearly hysterical again. “I have lost my wife, my position at court, my reputation, my hopes, my men … my queen. I went to the Tower once and nearly faced the headsman, Cecil, and cannot bear to again.”

“If! Does Elizabeth not believe me—believe in me? Then I am doomed indeed!”

“Keep calm, my lord. Since you are innocent, once things are settled, you will be returned to court, I believe.”

Dudley clasped Cecil’s hand and looked intently into his eyes again. “If I can but believe that—that she will take me back …”

Cecil gently pulled away from him. “But if she does, it may be only as Master of the Horse, Lord Lieutenant of the Castle, and not as her favorite. I believe you are clear-sighted enough to see all the ramifications of that reasoning. I leave you to contemplate them, as I must be heading back now.”

“You know, I entertained her here once when she was at Richmond,” Dudley said, almost as if talking to himself. “All glittering and happy, she came riding in for dinner with her ladies and praised all I had done for her, our friendship. Her voice rang out here and her very presence lit this quiet tomb of a place like a torch.”

Dudley’s voice drifted off as he stared dazedly around the gallery, no doubt seeing, hearing the ghosts here. Cecil shivered.

“I can only pray your name—and hers too—will be soon cleared, my lord,” Cecil said. Strangely, he found he meant it. Though he had often wished to run Robert Dudley through with the sharpest sword, this living death, suspended in dark exile, reminded him too much of his own recent plight. And made him almost, but not quite, regret the lengths to which he’d gone and would yet go to keep Dudley from ever being king.

“Cecil, I am deeply grateful you came to see me, even if she commanded it, and that you have listened to my side. Tell Her Grace I am innocent of all but adoring her. If I come back …” he said, and his voice drifted off again as he turned away to stare down the length of flagstone floor.

“If you come back, we must find a way to work together for the common good—her good,” Cecil said. Though he didn’t want to, he clapped the man on the shoulder before he headed for the door.

“Are the guards treating you well enough?” he asked, turning back. “You said you’ve lost your men, but they may be returned to you. Do you have a word for them, then?”

“I command they see to the royal stables in my stead, but there is one close groom I may indeed have lost. He disappeared even before any of this happened. I trusted him but fear he might have pilfered the pearls I sent by him to Amy and disappeared with the profit. I long favored and trusted him, one Edmund Fletcher. So if he turns up, tell him I demand an accounting of where he’s been or I may send him permanently packing.”

“I’ll pass the word along,” Cecil said, intrigued at how Dudley could do unto others what he did not want done unto him. That hardened his heart for the whole of what he had been sent to do—to confront, not comfort. Hoping it seemed an apparent afterthought, Cecil waited a moment, reopened the door to the gallery, and stuck his head back in.

“I forgot to tell you, Lord Robert, the queen is beginning to believe whomever that lutenist Felicia Dove worked for may have spied on her and urged Felicia to cause Geoffrey Hammet’s and Luke Morgan’s strange falls too when they got in the way. Put it in writing to me if you can think of any possible ties the lutenist could have had to any courtier who might have wanted your wife dispatched. After all, Felicia was sprung from her confinement two days before your wife’s death, so who knows she wasn’t sent to Cumnor too.”

He went out quickly and, this time, slammed the door as loudly as his heart slammed again his ribs.

IN LATE AFTERNOON STEPHEN JENKS AND NED TOPSIDE rode through the remnants of the country fair in the small town of Abingdon before wheeling back and reining in. Only the booths of a few itinerant vendors who had not yet moved on remained on the central town green. They could see where the crowd’s feet had trod the grass between the aisles of makeshift tables of wares and the burned-out circles where meat had been cooked and sold on the day Lady Dudley died nearby.

Splendid, Ned groused to himself. Her Grace had sent them to look for one girl and an unknown man in the area where a popular country fair had drawn people from all over. Talk about a needle in a haystack.

“Yer a wee bit late for the festivities,” a big bear of a man called to them, emerging from a low-slung tent and shading his eyes from the setting sun.

One more person they might as well question, Ned thought. He and Jenks had stopped to question numerous people on the road, showing them the drawing of Hester Harington, saying their sister had run off, mayhap with a man on a single horse. Absolutely no one had claimed to have seen her, though many remarked on the fine portrait and touched Gil’s charcoal sketch with their dirty, calloused fingertips until they’d smeared it. At least they had a second one. They were completely out of sorts, late, tired, and so hungry that even the smell of rank meat made their mouths water.

This man did not blend in with the rest. He had massive shoulders, a bull neck, no waist at all, and spoke in a broad Scots accent. “Abingdon Fair coupla days over, lads, ’cept for those of us stayed to sell off wares,” he told them in a friendly enough voice, though, of course, not every Scot had to be crude and rude, Ned thought magnanimously.

“What a pity,” he said, with a hand to his chest and a doleful look at Jenks, who just nodded. “And we’d heard it was at next week’s end, not last. We’re players, you see, my good man.”

“We coulda used a bonny bit a that,” he told them, handing a pig’s trotter up to each of them from a rusted iron grill over a cook fire that had long gone out. Beads of lard had congealed on the edges of the pig’s feet. However hungry, Ned just held and gestured with his while Jenks gobbled his down and heaved the bone into a common refuse pile crowded with loud crows vying with the local dogs for scraps.

“In other words,” Ned went on, doing most of the talking as he and Jenks had agreed, “no excitement at the fair.”

“Oho, dinna say that,” the Scot told them, rocking back on his heels. His thick hair was so slick to his head, Ned wondered if that’s what he did with the trotter grease. “Dinna ye hear,” he said with a smirk, “the queen’s fancy Lord Robert Dudley’s wife got kilt nigh here, coupla miles over at Cumnor House? Folks been buzzing and some gone over to look at the place, ’cept they’re not letting anyone in to see the stairs where the lass got thrown doon.”

“Nay, lad, but everybody kens someone was hired to do it for Lord Robert or even the clever queen. Elizabeth been besotted by a man and may carry his bastard, but Mary, Queen a Scots, now there’s a fine figure of a woman!”

“Now see here!” Jenks exploded, and spurred his horse before Ned nudged his own mount forward to cut him off. “You and others who don’t know—” Jenks shouted.

“Dinna ken what?” the Scot challenged, glaring up and around the back of Ned’s horse at Jenks. “ ’Sides roasting the best trotters, I warrant I can take on one more braw lad in the wrestling ring for a healthy wager!”

“He meant,” Ned put in, glaring at Jenks, “you and the others don’t know how sorry we are to have missed the fair and all that excitement. So where is this Cumnor House anyway, and are folks sure the poor lady was really ‘kilt’?”

“I hear the staircase wasna steep or long enough for a fatal fall, ’lest someone broke her neck first,” the Scot told Ned, ignoring Jenks now and lowering his voice conspiratorially. This lout, Ned thought, ought to be on the stage with all his dramatic aplomb. “And there’s a coroner’s jury convened to hear the case and all, but ’tis said her waiting maid, one Mrs. Pirto, overheard the poor lass at her prayers.”

“Overheard her praying aloud and loudly too, I warrant,” Ned prompted. He was studying not only what the man said but how he said it. Not often he’d heard the Scots brogue to learn to ape it.

The man nodded. “ ‘Deliver me from desperation,’ the poor, sad, thin thing was saying on her knees with her hands clasped and tears apouring doon her pale cheeks. Goes to show she ken someone was out to harm her,” he added, shifting stances and his tone again. “And any jackass would ken who. Now, how aboot doing some bloody war scenes for me, in ’change for them trotters?” he asked as Ned put a booted foot out to kick Jenks and keep him from charging the lout again.

“We’ll just have to do that, perhaps tomorrow,” Ned said, jerking his head toward Cumnor with a glare at Jenks. They were starting to draw a curious crowd from the scattered cottages and tents. He realized they’d best be done with this man and show the sketch around. “We may even work up some scenes and call the new work ‘The Sad Case of the Lady Dudley.’ But you see, we’ve lost two others of our players, a man and a girl, through a misunderstanding. The girl, brown hair and eyes, sometimes goes about garbed as a lad, for our work, of course. And often carts her lute with her, or if she’s sold it again, she still likes to sing.”

“Och, lad, ye ken, I did see such a pair, day we was setting up,” the Scot said, scratching his slick head. “A man and a lad on one horse and the lad holding a lute, real careful like.”

“Bull’s-eye,” Jenks muttered, while Ned just wished he’d keep his trap shut and not stir this brawler up again. He could see Jenks had been reaching for Gil’s sketch in his saddle pack, but he obviously let it be since the man had only seen her at a distance. “That’s them all right,” Jenks said excitedly. “Name of … Meg and Ned, and we’ve got to find them and tell them no hard feelings for the fight we had.”

“The man, not the one holding the lute,” Ned said, leaning down excitedly, hoping Jenks left off his chatter. “Can you describe him?”

“Hmm, a thin lad, ye ken. Good rider. Wore dark common garb, both a them. Their horse looked winded and was a fine one too, well-curried, a chestnut mare with four white feet and a white forehead and strange, dappled mane. The two of ’em eloping together or stole something, did they?”

“That lute,” Jenks blurted in the same moment Ned, deciding it was time for bribery and no more blatant lies, fished out a coin to give the man.

“No need,” the man protested, puncturing Ned’s theory that all Scots were tightfisted. “Ye not even eat your trotter yet,” he said to Ned, looking almost hurt.

“This money’s for the rest of your pile of them over there,” Ned explained, then while the man walked away to gather the other pigs’ feet in a swatch of greasy cloth, he whispered to Jenks. “No need to tarry with these others just to get the same information and tip them off we’ve been around asking, especially since it sounds like Felicia and the man were just skirting the fair. I’d bet the rest of those larded trotters and a throne that was her and the link to whomever sent her here. It couldn’t be just coincidence she fled here from Eton, and I doubt if she came to play the lute at this louse-ridden country fair.”

“No, ‘cause he’d have remembered that,” Jenks said, making Ned roll his eyes. “But I can tell you the man was probably Edmund Fletcher, Lord Robert’s man.”

“Not just ’cause he’s a bony rake of a man. That’s his horse, Firkin, and it disappeared the day Felicia-Hester did, right along with Fletcher too.”

“Fletcher, Firkin, Felicia, Hester! It sounds like one of her damned songs,” Ned muttered through gritted teeth. With all his hard work and brilliance, it annoyed him to no end it might be Jenks’s knowing horseflesh that could link Lord Robert to his wife’s murder.

THE SUN WAS SETTING AND THE QUEEN WAS CLOISTERED with her ladies. She had kept herself inside all day, working, seeing only Cecil and her intimates, including Meg, who was one of the few who knew how devastated the queen actually was—not so much over the death of Amy Dudley but the death of her tenuous trust of Lord Robin.

Since the queen was staying inside, Meg decided it was now or never. From her lookout site among her roses, she had seen Ben Wilton working alone on the barge landing. And with no one suspecting a thing, she had contrived to get in and out of the royal wardrobe rooms.

In her tiny distillation chamber, Meg managed to dress herself but for a partially unlaced bodice back. After sneaking out the side servant’s door, she ducked outside Windsor’s walls, garbed in the queen’s clothes: huge sleeves, brocade bodice, and a bush of satin skirts over a farthingale that hung on her hips like a massive birdcage. Best of all for the disguise, she wore a dark blue velvet cape with a huge hood she could try to hide inside. While the court was at supper in the great hall, she had to make both her entrance and her exit on the wooden boards of the barge landing—the stage for her very own masque.

“Oh, Ned,” she whispered, hustling through a break in the hedges to hide herself from the castle guards, “wish you were here and would help.”

She must pull off a good enough rendition of the queen to convince Ben, but it would not have to be the performance of her life in that respect. It wouldn’t be like trying to convince someone who really knew the queen. Meg had always feared imitating her before a person who knew Her Majesty well, but now she must playact before someone who had known her well. Meg shuddered in outright fear. This little performance meant her peace of mind and maybe her entire future.

Holding her skirts off the damp grass—for the queen was slightly taller—Meg kept behind the hedges and made her way down to her rose and herb beds above the river. Yes, facing the water, Ben was still alone on the wooden landing, his turn to guard the barges, no doubt. The castle guards proper had stationed themselves farther along the bank. Holding herself erect, she sidled down the slope and strode toward the landing.

“Sirrah,” she clipped out as she tried to mimic the queen’s commanding voice with what Ned called her metallic tone.

“Ah—you?” he cried, squinting into the setting sun to see her better. She wondered which you he meant until he blessedly fell to his knees.

“You may rise,” she intoned, then wanted to kick herself that she hadn’t let him stay down.

“But you—alone—out here, Majesty?” he stammered, trying to shade his eyes with the cap he had swept off.

“As you must know, I have received a blow of late and need some time alone—to walk out to think. And I thought when I saw you here—you are the Ben Wilton they said was the bridge shooter from London, I believe …”

“Oh, yes, Majesty, that’s me. Took many a boat through at high tide, saved many a soul.”

“So I hear, and that is why I am sending you back to that duty, Ben Wilton.”

“But there are other shooters back in London,” he said. “I just got hired on royal duty here last week.” Meg moved carefully away, keeping her back toward the sun and not letting him get too close. Their shadows flung themselves long and lean across the landing to the barges. Meg was tempted to pull her hood farther forward but she didn’t want to overdo it on this warm day.

“Yet I am sending you back to oversee them all—with this warrant and these coins,” she added, thrusting forward the document she’d carefully written with the queen’s signature—thank Ned again for teaching her to read and write, and the queen for paying her a stipend. Though she treasured anything Her Grace ever gave her, she would part with her entire fortune to have this man go away.

“But, you mean back to London—afore you go?” Ben demanded, sounding either angry or suspicious now.

“I have a care for my people,” she said, her voice catching as she aped exactly words and tone she’d heard Her Grace use. “And I send my best barger back to have a care for my people in my capital city.”

To her dismay he shuffled slightly closer, head cocked. Mercy, she’d overstepped. He would realize it was her, however long she’d been gone from him, however much he probably thought that she was dead if that old friend of her mother’s had not told she came back. When he went down again on one knee to put out his hand for the parchment and the purse of coins, she realized she shaded him now and he was looking up at her with some emotion she could not name.

She wanted to flee. He must be on to her. Ned had not taught her well enough, or her courage to command herself like the queen had failed her. Elizabeth Tudor had been foolish to keep her close so that she could have a double to stand in for her if there was a need in solving a crime or running a realm. She was doomed for sure, she feared, as Ben Wilton frowned up at her and she stepped aside to get the sun in his eyes again.

“Majesty,” he said, his burly shoulders shaking, his brash voice as tremulous as hers had been, “I shall ever obey. And I shall never forget this day you commanded Ben Wilton to do your bidding.”

Meg knew an exit line without Ned’s prompting. Her knees nearly knocking, she turned and strode as quickly as she could in queenly fashion back toward the distant castle. But she kept her head high and her shoulders squared the way Elizabeth of England always did in public, no matter what her burden.

Chapter the Fifteenth