The Queene’s Christmas (20 page)

As for keeping this attempted murder quiet, she agreed with Robin. She did not want him privily or publicly mocked by his enemies. Such ridicule must be the motive behind Hodge’s death and now this. But these were also affronts against her. She had no doubt Queen Mary of Scots would laugh herself silly if she knew the illustrious Earl of Leicester had been displayed as a boar, a pig. Those rag dolls so lewdly tumbled together were bad enough—but this …

“Meg, Jenks, Ned,” she called as she stood, “enter!”

“Yes, Your Majesty?” Ned asked, as if he were spokesman for the group.

“First of all, I hold the three of you accountable to keep what happened here a secret. If our Christmas culprit wants to cause more chaos, he must fail at least in having this noised abroad, or if someone gossips of it, we shall trace the source and have our man. Meg and Jenks, stay here while I question my lord Leicester. It is obvious he may have beheld our murderer, though the horrid experience has made it hard for him to recall.”

“The blow to my head,” Robin explained, his voice much stronger.

Elizabeth set down the flagon of wine and stooped to look closer at his head. “You didn’t say that before. Hodge was hit on his head, too, yet I see no blood on you. Will it hurt if I touch it?”

“Never. Not your touch,” he whispered for her ears only.

Perhaps the real Robin was back now, she thought. He looked almost smug. She felt through his thick, glossy hair, her fingertips skimming his scalp. He flinched. “There,” he said. “I was hit there with something from behind, that’s all I know. I can’t remember anything else until I heard your voice at the door and tried to call for help.”

Elizabeth realized she did not want Ned to hear all this lest she had to question him later. “Ned,” she said, turning toward him, her hands still on Robin’s head. “Oh—I didn’t see you take those insulting messages out with you,” she noted when she saw the parchments in his hands. “Leave them here, and go make a list of all those who were among the mummers tonight. Then I will have you as well as Lord Leicester and his servants peruse the list and mark off which men they are certain were in armor, and perhaps which one came late to be costumed and was the last one from the room with those damned dolls.”

“What’s all this about dolls?” Robin asked.

“I’ll explain later.”

“So by process of elimination, you hope to discover who hit me and arranged this part of tonight’s performance—ow!” he cried, jerking from her touch on his head. “That must be the very spot I took the blow.”

Strange, she thought, but unlike poor Hodge, not a bit of blood, scab, nor so much as a bump marred Robin’s pate. The tender spot she’d just touched was
inches
from the first place that had caused him to flinch. But the man was hardheaded in more ways than one; a lump would no doubt rise like a goose egg on the morrow.

“So the last thing you recall,” Elizabeth prompted after Ned left, looking much dismayed, and Meg and Jenks stayed by the door, “is running up the back servants’ stairs. Those twist and turn so someone could be close to you yet remain out of your sight, even if you turned around to look back down.”

“Which I didn’t,” he said, then added, “at least I don’t think so.”

“And, pardon, Your Grace,” Meg put in from across the room, “but there’s a small room off those stairs someone could have popped out of.”

“Yes, that’s true,” Robin said, frowning. “I regret to say that I’m going to be about as much help in this as poor Hodge was.”

“Jenks,” Elizabeth said, “take a torch and search the entire length of those stairs to see if something was dropped. Look in the anteroom Meg mentioned, too.”

“Yes, Your Grace. Shall I take these two signs, then? Mayhap we can match handwriting like we tried to do with the murderer’s boot pr—” he got out before he evidently recalled that Leicester knew nothing of their investigation.

’S blood, Elizabeth thought, perhaps he knew now, so she might as well tell him everything. “Yes, when you go, Jenks, put those signs in my rooms. They are clues indeed.”

“Wait!” Robin said. “Your Grace, I didn’t see the signs you speak of, though I have suspected that you were privily looking into what seems to have gone so awry this holiday. Let me see those, man,” he ordered.

Elizabeth gestured for Jenks to show Robin the stiff parchments with the heavy slashes of dark lettering. “It’s someone clever with words,” Robin said, frowning at one message and then the other. “He’s clever but so evil that he’s actually enjoying this, making a game of it all. And he hates me with a passion.”

“And therefore hates and defies me,” Elizabeth added. “All right, then, Meg, remain with me, and Jenks, be off with you.”

“Sit again, please,” Robin pleaded, patting the bed.

Instead, she shoved the nearest chair close and sat, leaning for-ward to hold his hand. “I assure you, I have a list of those who could want to shame or harm you, Robin. Sussex at the top, for obvious reasons.”

“I’d wager my entire fortune on that.”

“But he is so obvious, we must not jump to judgment. The wily Scot MacNair obviously resents your slighting, and therefore insulting, his queen. Lord Darnley and his mother detest you, since they want Darnley to wed Mary and probably think you're simply playing hard-to-catch with her, though I have reason to believe Darnley did not harm Hodge. Some suspicion for Hodge’s demise has been thrown on that new blond player, Giles Chatam, but I can’t fathom he’d dare all this. Oh, and have you had harsh words of late with Vicar Bane or his master Bishop Grindal?”

“I have indeed. A fortnight ago Bane warned me in no uncertain terms to steer completely clear of you but for council business. He believes I’m a bad influence, of course, a libertine who draws you even farther from the stern Protestant faith.”

“His
version of it,” she amended. “Cecil and his wife have Puritan leanings, yet they are hardly harbingers croaking doom for such things as snowballs and a little fun at Yule.”

“Exactly. At any rate, I saw Bane huddled with Sussex, so he may have put Bane up to warning me off. As Bane snidely put it, our relationship, yours and mine, my queen, might look morally compromising if I had the queen’s ear—and perhaps had even more of her than that.”

“He said that? The weasel! Then he is to be watched even more than I thought. And I saw him throw down his mumming mask tonight as if it were a gauntlet and stalk out early. Pray God he didn’t do this to you and then don armor to try to shame me with that crude mummery of the dolls. My father was right to outlaw mummery however much everyone loves the tradition.”

“Speaking of the mummery tonight,” he said, “pray tell me about those dolls.”

“All right The last mummer to leave the hall pressed together two small figures which mimicked us in a most lewd way.”

“Or in a loving way?” he countered. “Lucky dolls.”

Though his grin was more of a grimace, she at least knew she had her Robin back. But things were different now. She would allow him to help her in the investigation. Cecil might balk, but she could use the extra help, and Robin must now be protected at all costs.

“I don’t want to leave you alone,” she told him. “Why haven’t your servants returned?”

“I gave them leave to watch the festivities in the hall, then take their leisure with the kitchen workers tonight,” he explained, scooting down in the bed as if he’d take a nap, “but it’s not of my servants I must speak.” He squinted toward Meg, then added, even more quietly, “You see, now I do recall seeing a single person on that staircase tonight”

“Meg?” the queen whispered.

“No, Ned Topside.”

The next day, December 30, was Bringing in the Boar Day, originally a time to replace the domestic hogs supposedly eaten so far during the holidays with fresh meat. But, despite wanting to cling to tradition, the queen canceled the hunt, claiming cold weather. The truth was she could not face some other dreadful occurrence. She still was not sleeping well, for the same horrid dream had disturbed her more than once.

In it, she and Robin walked the riverbank after their wedding. The marriage was not the nightmare of it, for she rather relished that, at least until the horrid part began. Down they went, holding hands, their feet and legs, then bodies, sucked into the bog along the banks. And all around them, as river water rushed in to drown them, stood a pack of dogs howling at the skies and baying for their blood.

Even now, she shook her head to clear it. She must ignore such sick fancies and solve what crimes had already been committed. She must stop whatever dreadful deed her tormentor planned for New Year’s Eve and the first day of 1565, the seventh year of her reign.

“You wanted to see me, Your Majesty?” Ned’s voice carried from the door of her privy apartments. She had told her yeomen guards to let him in where she and Cecil sat catching up on writs and decrees that could not wait for the new year.

“We did,” she said, gesturing him in. She could tell that he was not happy to see Cecil and that he took note when her favorite yeoman guard, Clifford, stepped into the room instead of simply closing the door behind him.

“Ah,” Ned said, “Secretary Cecil here, too. I heard there was a Privy Plot Council meeting earlier this morning without me, so I assume you want to catch me up on everything now. Your Grace, must I really stick so tight to Giles Chatam? He’s starting to think I favor him, when I want him out the door when the players head for the shires again.”

“Would you like to sit, Ned?” she asked.

“If it please you,” he said and sat across the table from her and Cecil.

“Anything else to report on Giles?” she asked.

“He’s got the heart of a rustic but the brain of a courtier, I fear. Sad to say, if he can’t win me over—which he cannot—he’d probably just as soon knock me on the head to get my post”

“Knock you on the head? An interesting turn of phrase. Are you hinting that he might have knocked the earl out and wants to do the same to you?”

“I would not go that far—yet,” he said.

“Then how far would you go?” Cecil demanded.

Ned had seldom been afraid, but he was now. Surely Her Grace could not believe, after all they’d been through together, that he was guilty of heinous acts. Ned knew how she still cared for Robert Dudley, her damned precious Robin. Why, if Dudley hadn’t been suspected of murdering his wife several years ago, he’d probably be in Elizabeth’s lap in more ways than one, and Ned would give anything to counter that.

But now he was starting to be terrified he wouldn’t be around to keep that from happening. A few years back when the queen had discovered Meg had defied and lied to her, there’d been hell to pay, and that wasn’t even a question of murder. However much she cared for Meg and valued her skills, the queen had banished her from court.

“How far would I go?” Ned threw back at Cecil, knowing he was about to play one of the most important scenes of his life. “I’d go to hell and back to help Her Grace.”

“Then tell us,” Cecil went on as if he’d suddenly become the queen’s inquisitor, “why the Earl of Leicester saw you on that staircase where he was struck and from which he was, no doubt, carried or dragged to his room to be trussed like a dead boar. Ned, you really should have volunteered that you saw him rushing up that back staircase, to help jog his memory.”

Ned’s insides cartwheeled, but he fought to remain calm. “I thought it best to let the earl tell his tale while things were fresh in his mind, and then the queen ordered me away. The plain facts are that I saw him run out of the mumming preparations last night and thought he might need help, so I followed him. Of course, I would have brought all this up later in a Privy Plot meeting—if I’d been invited to the meeting.”

“You say you thought you’d be of help to the earl, but you haven’t been, have you?” Cecil parried, folding his arms over his chest. “To him or us?”

Ned didn’t like the staging here, sitting across a table facing both queen and Cecil, but too late to change that now. He’d have to carry this off with commanding eye contact. “I called to him,” he explained, speaking slowly, “but he was a ways ahead of me on that twisting staircase. When I caught up to him, he said I should head back down and keep an eye on things. If he doesn’t recall all that, I would attribute it to his head blow, which must have been delivered by someone else when I left him. I immediately did as he said, went back downstairs, got into my armor—”

“On your own?” Cecil interrupted. “It seems no one recalls helping you don your armor, and most remarked they needed aid with it.”

“Yes, on my own, my lord,” he said, trying to keep his rising dread in check. Cecil had just given away the fact that they’d been questioning others besides Leicester. “After all, I’ve been in and out of stage armor half my life, and that’s what that was, most of it,” Ned plunged on. “The weather was too cold to send someone to the Tower to fetch pieces from the royal armory, so some of it was the property of my uncle’s troupe.”

“Yes, we heard. But back to the topic at hand.”

Ned swallowed hard. Cecil was too wily to give things away without intending to, so he must mean to make him sweat a bit Now he’d let on they were asking the Queen’s Country Players about his behavior. Ned had not tried to change the subject just now, and curse Cecil for implying that in front of Her Grace. He prayed they hadn’t questioned Meg about his trying to get her to vouch for him, because she’d said she wouldn’t He to the queen or even to Cecil.