Murder at Hatfield House (20 page)

She pushed herself out of her chair and whirled around to stalk to the window. She stared down at the world outside, her palms braced on the glass as if she would push it out and soar free.

“I wonder sometimes if
they
felt like this, as if they would scream with fear and rage. Scream and scream, and never stop,” Elizabeth said quietly, musing to herself.

“‘They,’ Your Grace?” Kate asked, uncertain.

“My mother. And my young cousin, Lady Jane. They have been much in my thoughts lately, Kate.”

“Lady Jane does seem to have appeared much in the house these last few days. The play, the pamphlet . . .”

“They say she made a brave end, with her faith to sustain her. She always did seem—not quite of this world.” Elizabeth’s finger tapped at the window, the band of her ruby-and-pearl ring clicking on the glass. “But in all her months of being trapped in the Tower, that terrible place, surely her mind could not always have been on a heavenly reward. She must have sometimes been afraid, longed for home, for her family. For the free, country breeze on her face.”

Kate’s heart lurched at the quiet sadness, and she hurried over to stand by Elizabeth at the window. Queen Mary’s guard loitered in the courtyard below.

“This is not the Tower, Your Grace,” she said. “And those men will soon be gone.”

“Nay, this is not the Tower. It’s meant to be my home, the home my father left me in his will, and once I felt safe here. But now it is a prison like any other. And I do think of them.”

Kate didn’t know what to say to that. Prisons, danger—they were always there, always fearful. And the dead were never entirely gone from them.

“They say the queen did not want to sign the warrant for our cousin’s death,” Elizabeth said. “That she had shown much mercy to the Greys after she ascended the throne, until Suffolk betrayed her and joined Wyatt’s Rebellion. She wept for Lady Jane, but in the end her evil advisers persuaded her that it must be done for the safety of the realm. They say Lady Jane haunts her to this day. But would she weep to sign
my
death warrant?”

Suddenly Elizabeth turned around with a sweep of her silk skirts, and the cloud of old memories vanished from her eyes. “Kate, I need your help now.”

“Of course,” Kate answered. “I will serve you however I can—you know that.”

“I do know that. You and your father are good and loyal servants, and I treasure that—but I fear what I ask may prove dangerous. I would not ask it if I hadn’t seen how strong you can be.”

Kate often feared she wasn’t strong at all, that such terrible things as her father’s arrest and finding dead bodies would send her weeping to her bed like Penelope. But she hadn’t broken yet. She wouldn’t until everyone she loved was safe.

“I will try, Your Grace.”

Elizabeth nodded. She went to the table and poured out two goblets of wine. She handed one to Kate and said, “I cannot leave my rooms, but you can leave. You can slip in and out quietly, behind the backs of these guards.”

“Oh, yes,” Kate said. “I can use the secret passages if needs be.”

“Then I need you to go to the village and talk to everyone you can. Find Master Payne, go after the actors to see why Master Cartman vanished, anything to find who might have killed Braceton. You are a sweet, personable girl; I have seen how people will talk to you.”

Kate felt a tiny thrill of excitement to know she truly had the princess’s trust. “I would be happy to do all that, Your Grace. I will go this afternoon.”

Elizabeth nodded, and went to unlock a small covered chest that stood in the corner. She took out a purse heavy with coins and tossed it to Kate. “Use as much of this as you need. And, Kate . . .”

“Yes, Your Grace?”

“Be very, very careful,” Elizabeth said solemnly. “I could not bear to lose anyone else.”

CHAPTER 16

“S
o Master Hardy was detained in London?” Kate asked Anthony as they picked up documents scattered across the floor of the lawyer’s chambers. She had walked back to the village as soon as she could slip past the guards at Hatfield, only to find everything shuttered and silent. The queen’s men had searched Master Hardy’s rooms, but were now gone, leaving a mess behind them.

“Aye. He returned here for a short time, only to hurry off again, saying he had most urgent business,” Anthony said as he examined a torn sheet of parchment and tossed it on the fire. The flames crackled with documents they’d burned, but was it too little too late? The rooms had already been searched, Master Hardy arrested. “It was most odd.”

“He said nothing of what that business could be? You have no patrons in trouble that required his assistance?”

“Not a word. He has been doing much work for the princess and the Clintons of late, as well as the Eatons at Leighton Abbey, but Master Hardy is usually a most cautious man. His message to me after he was intercepted on the road was only to clean up the offices and be most careful with the papers.”

Kate swept up scraps from under a writing table and added them to the fire. “It is surely impossible to be cautious now. Even people who live most quietly are thrown into trouble.”

Anthony shook his head, his green eyes full of sympathy as he looked at her. “How does your father fare?”

“Well enough for the moment. I left him some clean clothes and more blankets before I came here, and he’s hard at work on his lost Christmas music since the gaoler let him have paper and quills. If he has music, he doesn’t care where he is. But I worry.”

“Of course you do. We will have him out soon.”

“Princess Elizabeth says so as well. But I know we have to find who is really behind these murders before the queen’s men will free my father. Her Grace has asked for my help, yet it seems such a tangled knot.” A knot she was most determined to unravel.

“What do you know so far? Here . . .” Anthony found some blank sheets of paper, a quill, and ink in the writing desk, and righted a fallen stool for her. “Write down everyone you suspect and why. Perhaps we can find some connection between them, or with Braceton.”

Kate laughed. “Your lawyer’s mind at work again, I see.”

“We must be logical, even as events would seem to have no logic at all. It’s the only way we can begin to unravel your tangled knot.”

“‘We’?”

“I’m here to help you however I can, Kate. I’m your friend, am I not?”

Kate glanced up at him as he leaned against the table next to her, his jaw tight and his eyes darkened as he looked down at the paper. Her friend—aye, he had long been that, and she was grateful for it. She’d had few enough friends in her life. But now she felt doubly happy to think she was not alone. That Anthony would stand with her, that in the midst of all the fear and confusion, she could hold on to him.

Yet she felt something else as she looked up into his eyes, something new and strange—yet another confusion. She thought of a line from one of her favorite songs, a plaintive tale of lost love and impossible hopes.

There was no time now to dwell on such things. No time
ever
, really. He had a future as a prosperous lawyer to look forward to, and he needed money and connections to do that. She was merely a musician singing for her supper. No matter how handsome and kind he was, how much she liked him, they could never be a match. Better to focus on what she
did
have some hope of solving—the mystery of Braceton’s murder, not to mention the other tragedies that had fallen upon Hatfield recently.

She turned away from Anthony’s steady gaze and dipped the quill into the inkwell. Her thoughts were racing.

“The main difficulty is that we know nothing of Lord Braceton’s life at court,” she said. “He made so many enemies here, in the short time he was among us, that I’m sure he must have dozens of them in London.”

“Anyone who lives by the monarch and the court makes enemies,” Anthony said. “But who is near enough physically to have done this thing? Let us just start with what we
do
know.”

Kate nodded. “There is the vicar, Master Payne. I saw him just before we found Braceton’s body, and he seemed wilder than ever, damning all the sinners. Braceton was a Catholic, a queen’s man, surely associated with those who ousted Master Payne from his church and his comfortable vicarage. If he thought Braceton had something to do with leaving Ned in the church in such a vile way—”

“What if he killed Ned himself to leave a strong message for the papists?”

Kate glanced up to find him frowning down at her so far blank page. “Would he do such a thing? A churchman? I am sure they are connected, but I know not in what way yet.”

“If his mind is disordered, who knows what he might do? Perhaps he thinks one sin would remedy a greater one, would punish the wicked Catholics and show them what he sees as the evil of their ways. A necessary sacrifice for the greater good. And when that did not work, he killed Braceton himself.”

Kate could see in his words a terrible kind of logic. So many people, Catholic and Protestant, had been willing to die terrible deaths for their beliefs. Would not some kill for them as well? Especially those like Master Payne, so obsessed with sin and sinners. She wrote “Master Payne” on the list, as well as her reasons for suspecting him.

But would the vicar have been cool and steady enough to fire those arrows so accurately? Kate tapped the quill on her chin as she considered that, and then added it to her list with a question mark.

“Who else could there be?” Anthony said.

“There is Ned’s father, I suppose. He vowed revenge on whoever killed his son, and now he has vanished. Perhaps he thought Braceton was responsible for Ned’s death and killed him before fleeing.”

“Most plausible. But surely he did not kill his son, or shoot Braceton’s servant with that arrow before they even arrived at Hatfield.”

“He could have used the arrows to kill Braceton to throw people off his trail and make them think it was someone else, if he was involved in some plot.”

“What do you know of the man before he came here?”

Kate shrugged. She had asked around the kitchens just such questions, but there weren’t many answers. “Not much. Poor Ned couldn’t speak, and I took little notice of the man, for I didn’t know he was Ned’s father. He worked in the stables at the Rose and Crown, I think. It was the innkeeper who asked Princess Elizabeth to take Ned into her household for kindness.” She tried to remember what she had been told since Ned’s murder. “I think he was in the army, perhaps with King Philip and Robert Dudley in France. And surely Elizabeth would take in anyone who knew Dudley.”

“If he was a soldier, he would have the skills and nerve to do such a thing,” Anthony said. “And the first bowman could have just been a highwayman, a random crime.”

“Possibly,” Kate said. “But it would be a strange coincidence indeed if Braceton was attacked with an arrow twice. It must be someone with some military expertise of some sort. And then there is Master Cartman, the actor. He has also disappeared.”

“Ah, yes. The actors,” Anthony said wryly. “They must always be considered.”

“What have you against Master Cartman and his men, Anthony?” Kate said, unaccountably piqued that he would so dismiss the Cartmans. Rob especially.

“Did you not think it strange, the way they appeared so fortuitously at Hatfield while Braceton was there?”

“Sir William Cecil sent them.”

“And did Cecil have them perform that play you told me about? The one that made Lord Braceton so angry?”

Kate shook her head. “Master Robert said that his uncle claimed so, but Sir William has ever been a prudent and cautious man in the past.”

“Aye. How else has he stayed out of Queen Mary’s prisons?”

“He would not have brought Jane Grey to Braceton’s attention, or the princess’s, surely. But who would have sent that play? And for what purpose?”

“To make trouble, of course. Yet trouble for the princess, or for Braceton? What did Braceton have to do with Lady Jane?”

“I don’t know. We must find out.” Kate wrote Master Cartman’s name on her list, along with a question mark. Master Cartman himself might have vanished, but perhaps Rob knew more than he had said thus far. “They have gone to Leighton Abbey, where they were engaged to perform before Master Cartman disappeared.”

“Leighton Abbey. The members of the Eaton family are firm Protestants, and have lived most quietly since Mary took the throne. I wonder why they would want plays and merriment now.”

“Their home was once one of the largest religious houses in the area, I think,” Kate said. “At Brocket, the cook told me many Catholics have been trying to seize Protestant estates before Queen Mary makes them forfeit to the church again. Perhaps the Eatons were one of the families so targeted. Maybe Braceton even had his own eye on the property. And Lady Eaton was great friends with the Duchess of Suffolk, Lady Jane’s mother. Surely something would be known there about this scheme for grabbing estates before it’s too late.”

Anthony glanced down at her sharply. “You aren’t thinking of going to Leighton yourself, Kate?”

“I might have to. The princess said I should find out whatever I can, and there isn’t much to discover here.”

“You will not go alone, then. I will go with you.”

“Anthony, nay! You must stay here and watch over Master Hardy’s offices.” Kate suddenly realized she had taken over her friend’s time to help with her own troubles, when he had plenty of trouble of his own.

“Master Hardy has been swept up in the events just as everyone else has. I can best help him by helping you.” He quirked his brow at her. “And as your friend, I can’t let you go running around the countryside by yourself. It isn’t safe.”

Kate knew better than to argue with him when he sounded like this, so assured and determined. It was the lawyer’s mind again, not to be swayed. And truth be told, she would be very glad not to be alone now. “Very well. Tomorrow we will go to Leighton Abbey. For right now, our list is very small.” She read aloud what she’d written. “Master Payne. Ned’s father, who as far as we know is still at his sister’s house recovering from his grief. Someone who wants an estate that belongs to someone else, or an owner who wants to hold on to it. Master Cartman, or someone connected to him who gave him that play. Lord Ambrose, perhaps, or one of his enemies? He is a queen’s man.”