Murder at Hatfield House (8 page)

She took in the scene with one darting glance, only half-aware that things had gone terribly quiet for such a large gathering. The small courtyard, which led via narrow gravel pathways to the neat beds of herbs and vegetables, was crowded. Braceton’s men hurried by, piling up firewood in a hastily dug pit, while the man himself loomed in front of the cook and her cowering kitchen maids.

For a tiny woman of advancing years, Cora would not back down from the hulking man before her. She stared up at him, her fists planted on her bony hips, glaring.

“I have to prepare supper, which will never be ready in time now,” she cried. “I can’t have this nonsense in my garden.”

“Do you call this
nonsense
, woman?” Braceton said coldly. He held up a ripped pamphlet, which Kate recognized as one smuggled out of Geneva in recent months and circulated among the countryside. “This filth was found in a cupboard in your own pantry.”

“I can’t help what others here might do—I have too much work at my hearth, which I need to be getting on with,” Cora said. “And I don’t call that nonsense, or anything at all, because I can’t read a word, you dolt.”

Suddenly, Braceton’s large hand, shimmering with jeweled rings, shot out and slapped Cora hard across the face. With a sharp cry, the slight old woman tumbled backward, caught by two of her maids before she could fall onto the paving stones.

“I will not have such abuse in my house, Lord Braceton!” Elizabeth suddenly shouted. She hurried out from under the sheltering eaves of the roof, where she’d been standing half-hidden with Penelope behind her. Her pale cheeks were bright red, her eyes glittering with fury and pain. A shawl was wrapped hastily around her plain gown and her hair hung in loose red waves over her shoulders. She had obviously been rousted quickly from her sickbed.

“These are my servants,” she said. “I will not allow you to treat them thusly.”

“Madam, your servants—and anything else you have—are yours only by sufferance of the queen,” Braceton answered, turning his back on the weeping cook. “And yet you repay her by allowing such treason in your midst.”

“Not even Bedingfield dared to treat me thus,” Elizabeth said with icy dignity, mentioning her most careful gentleman-gaoler from the terrible time at Woodstock. “The queen shall hear every detail of your deplorable behavior.”

“Indeed she will, because I will tell her myself,” Braceton answered. He tossed the pamphlet into a puddle. “You have been treated most mercifully by the queen, madam, and you have repaid her by sheltering vipers in your house. But no more. I am here to discover the truth and that I shall do, by whatever means necessary.”

“The truth, Lord Braceton, is that my sister has no more loyal subject than myself,” Elizabeth answered. “That is all you will discover in your brutality.”

Braceton just laughed, and turned away as one of his men set a fire in the pit and others carried boxes into the courtyard. Penelope beckoned to Kate, and she hurried over to her friend’s side. Penelope held tightly to her hand as they watched the flames crackle to life.

The fire recalled terrible images of burning Protestant heretics, brought by the clouds of acrid smoke stinging their eyes.

“What is happening?” Kate whispered.

“Braceton forced the princess to rise and come down here, along with these servants you see,” Penelope whispered back. “For what purpose but to harangue us yet again, he has not said. But surely it can be nothing good. Even Pope and his ever-watchful wife have kept away, as you see.”

Elizabeth stared, white-faced, as Braceton opened the boxes and tossed the contents out onto the wet paving stones, just as he had done in the entrance hall that morning. Some he threw back into the case, one or two he tucked away in his doublet. The minutes ticked past, horribly drawn out with uncertainty, the only sounds the booted footsteps of Braceton’s servants and Cora’s sobs.

A stack of letters tied up with a black ribbon landed in the dirt. Penelope’s eyes widened when she saw them, and Elizabeth took a step forward.

Kate recognized the writing. They were missives from Elizabeth’s cousins, Henry and Catherine Carey, children of her aunt Mary Boleyn, who had fled abroad to freely practice their Protestant faith.

“Those are no heretical tracts, sir,” Elizabeth said. “They are merely letters from my family, which have been read over by my sister’s people and which I have been given permission to receive.”

Braceton gave a contemptuous snort. “Letters from Boleyn traitors.”

“From my family,” Elizabeth said simply, but there was a world of danger and pain in those three words. Elizabeth never mentioned her mother and very seldom her mother’s family, but Kate knew she was very close to the Careys and missed them desperately. The few messages she was allowed to have from them were treasured.

Braceton tossed the letters onto the fire, where they immediately burst into flame and crumpled to ash. Elizabeth froze, her lips tight, white at the edges.

A small piece of embroidery sewn in faded colors in the pattern of Anne Boleyn’s falcon badge followed into the fire, and a manuscript of Elizabeth’s Latin translation of some writings of Catherine Parr. Somehow Braceton had found Elizabeth’s smallest, most treasured keepsakes, and since they held no clues to treason, they were destroyed. It was as if the people whose memory they evoked were being snatched away all over again.

“Nay, you must bring that back, I say!” Kate suddenly heard her father cry. “I must have that back, it is not finished.”

Her desperate gaze swung toward the open kitchen door just in time to see one of Braceton’s men emerge with a sheaf of parchment in his hands. Matthew Haywood stumbled out after him, leaning heavily on his stick. Tears streaked his gaunt, lined face.

“Father, no!” Kate cried. She ran over to him, catching him as he tripped on the last step. When she’d left for the village, she had made sure he was warm by their own hearth, with a glass of the princess’s good wine beside him and hard at work on his Christmas church music. He was having a good day, relatively free of pain.

Now here he was, barely able to walk, desperately lurching through the house, another victim of Braceton’s mission.

“Father, you must go back to bed,” Kate whispered urgently.

“He took my manuscript,” Matthew said, pointing a shaking hand at the servant as the man handed the papers to Braceton. As Braceton carelessly flicked through them, Kate saw it was her father’s Christmas church music, the work he had been laboring over all summer in hopes of cheering the princess’s holidays. The composition that was his only distraction, his only passion.

“My father must have that back,” she insisted. “It has naught to do with any treason. My father is only Her Grace’s musician, and that is his livelihood.”

“What is it, then?” Braceton said, frowning down at the notes as if he tried to decipher words in the Araby language.

“A Christmas service for Princess Elizabeth’s chapel, that is all,” Kate said. Her father’s breath sounded strained and wheezing, and he leaned against her heavily. She feared he could not speak at all, that the exertion had only increased his illness.

“A Protestant service?” Braceton casually tossed the manuscript into the fire.

Matthew moaned and sagged against Kate’s shoulder as his months of work, his art, burned away. Elizabeth rushed over to wrap her arm around him and help Kate hold him up.

“Be of good courage, Master Haywood,” she whispered. “They can burn paper, or even flesh, but never what is in our hearts. Here, Kate, let us get him back to his chamber.”

But as they started to turn away, worse was coming toward them. Another of Braceton’s servants emerged from the house, and in his hands was Kate’s own lute. The lute that had belonged to her mother, whose spirit seemed to be with her every time she touched the strings.

“I hear tell they sometimes hide messages in instruments, Lord Braceton,” the man said. “This was near that manuscript.”

“Indeed so,” Braceton answered. “Good thinking, my lad. They do say that even that traitor Wyatt sent letters in a spinet. Let me see it.”

As the man handed Braceton the instrument, Kate was so blinded by fury she strangled on the words crowding in her throat. But Elizabeth shouted, “That you shall not have!”

She gestured to Penelope, who hurried over to take her place holding up Matthew. Then Elizabeth strode forward and actually snatched the lute from Braceton’s meaty hands. The hands that were defiling the delicate inlaid wood and precious strings. Kate had never felt such anger.

“How dare you, madam?” Braceton shouted. “I am under orders from the queen to search every inch of this snake pit. You shall not gainsay me.”

“Search my own rooms to your petty heart’s content,” Elizabeth said. “But Mistress Haywood is a young, innocent lady who has done nothing to earn your abuse. This is her personal possession.”

Braceton and Elizabeth stared at each other for one eternal moment. Finally, astonishingly, Braceton stepped away and went back to searching the boxes. All was silent, but Kate knew very well that a price would be paid later.

Elizabeth pressed the lute into Kate’s hand. “We have little enough left of our mothers,” she said quietly. “We must guard what we can. Take your father to bed now, Kate. Then wait on me in my chamber.”

Fearing she might burst into tears if she spoke, Kate merely nodded. She would
never
cry in front of the likes of Braceton.

“Let me help you,” Penelope said, and together they turned her father back to the house. He seemed to be in shock, sagging against their shoulders, muttering to himself. Kate’s heart ached as they helped him up the stairs and into his bed. What would she do if his mind snapped over this sad business?

For a long time after Penelope left them and Kate wrapped her father up in their warmest blankets, he merely lay there, staring up at the bed curtains, plucking at the sheets with his callused fingers. Kate was so afraid; she had never seen her father like this. Even in his illness he always tried to be strong for her, her father and friend, her teacher, her only family.

Yet losing his work so suddenly and brutally, so casually, seemed to have broken something in him. She knew she had to be strong now for them both, but her anger toward Braceton threatened to overwhelm her.

She did the only thing she knew would calm her. She reached for her lute, the cherished instrument Princess Elizabeth saved, and started singing.

Hark! You shadows that in darkness dwell,

Learn to contemn light.

Happy, happy they that in hell feel not the world’s despite . . .

“Eleanor,” her father suddenly said, clearly and calmly, just her mother’s name. “Eleanor.”

“Nay, Father, ’tis me. Kate,” she said, carefully laying aside the lute and leaning closer to smile at him. “Are you feeling better? Shall I fetch you something to eat?”

“Kate,” he said, shaking his head as if he was emerging from a dream. If only she could make it a dream for him, erase that terrible afternoon. “I am only weary. You played that song so beautifully. It was one of your mother’s favorites. She would play it for you before you were even born.”

“I know, Father. I love to play it.” It was the only thing that could take her out of herself, out of the fearful world they lived in now. It was her mother’s gift to her, and she had so nearly lost it.

“You do look so much like her.” He suddenly reached out to take her hand. “That man has brought evil into this house.”

Kate swallowed hard. She had heard those words from the madman Payne already that day. “He will soon go, just as all the queen’s men have. There is nothing for him to find here.”

Matthew shook his head. “He is different somehow. Be careful of him, my Kate. Stay far away from him.”

“That commandment I can happily obey,” Kate said. She gently took her hand back and tucked the bedclothes closer around him. “Now you must rest, Father. We can start to re-create your Christmas music this evening after supper. I do remember quite a lot of it.”

“Someone must do something about him,” her father muttered as his eyes drifted shut. “He must be made to leave us alone. . . .”

*

“Ah, Kate, there you are.” Elizabeth was pacing the length of the floor in her bedchamber, a book held tightly between her hands but unopened. Her hair was still loose. Penelope and Lady Pope sat in the window seat, watching her in silence. Penelope still looked a bit stunned by all that had happened that day, her blue eyes wide and distant.

The faint, sour scent of smoke drifted up through the partly opened window.

“How does your father do?” Elizabeth asked.

“He is resting now, Your Grace,” Kate said. “I will help him to re-create his music, but he is—we both are—much comforted to still have my mother’s lute. You have our greatest thanks.”

Elizabeth waved the thanks away, and turned to pace back toward the chairs grouped around her fireplace. “I fear my friends suffer so much for their kind services to me. But be assured I will always help whenever I can. I do not forget loyalty.”

Elizabeth sat down in the cushioned cross-backed chair farthest from the window and gestured for Kate to sit on the low stool beside her. “What news in the village?” she asked quietly.

“Little enough, I fear, Your Grace,” Kate answered. She told her of the scraps of gossip she’d heard in the shop and from Anthony, and of seeing Master Payne in the churchyard and of what she found in his house. She wished she could have provided more news, that she could have found more.

“Could the parson have done this thing, do you think?” Elizabeth said, tapping her fingertips anxiously on the armrest.

“I am not sure, though I did try to find out. I think perhaps he did see something—it is difficult to make sense of his ramblings. He ran away before I could question him further.” She didn’t mention the bit about fornicators.

“Aye, he has been sadly out of his right wits for some time, even when he was parson,” Elizabeth said with a sigh. “It was brave of you to even try to question him; most people won’t go near him. And you say Lord Braceton was at Bacon’s house before he came here?”