The Queene’s Christmas (23 page)

He’d take it to the chandlery in the back buildings of the palace and see if one was missing or if someone had asked for an extra, especially just before the boathouse burned. After all, individual types of lights were doled out by rank, and these colored Yuletide ones might be carefully counted. Most of the men the queen suspected could probably lay their hands on a fancy link like this, though Ned was around the palace enough to get his hands on one, too.

Sadly, this evidence did not bode well for him to throw suspicion on Giles Chatam: Besides the fact that a man of his station would not have access to such a link unless he stole it, Chatam had not been staying at Whitehall when the boathouse burned or when Hodge was killed. Although Giles might have burned his own parents alive in their house, Ned finally faced the fact his own goose was cooked unless he could link this link to someone else the queen suspected.

Holding it gingerly, Ned spun to hurry back into the palace. Standing in his path, Jenks waited not ten feet away, legs apart and arms crossed over his chest. But worse, slightly behind him stood Baron Hunsdon and the queen herself.

“I—I believe I’ve found a clue,” Ned blurted, looking straight at Elizabeth as he rose from his shaky bow and held the link out toward her.

“Of…?” she said, not budging. He thought she looked livid; surely the wind could not have polished her usually pale cheeks that red.

“A link… that is, a torch, no doubt a fairly recent one from the palace that appears to have been heaved aside in haste—from over there,” he added, gesturing toward the general direction of Lambeth Palace. It was then, as rattled as he was, inspiration hit him. “The Thames was fairly well frozen that night of the fire,” he plunged on, “so someone could have slipped across the ice from that direction, from Lambeth.” Though his arm was shaking, he pointed directly at the Bishop of London’s property and prayed the wily queen took his bait.

“But you just said it appears to be a torch from my palace,” the queen countered, narrowing her eyes in the wind—or at him.

“Yes, but Bishop Grindal’s emissary Vicar Bane is in and out of the palace like a specter day and night!” he insisted.

“Let me see that,” she said, and Ned hastened to hand it to her.

“What if,” Baron Hunsdon said, “its scent matches that of Bane’s epistle and the stench of this burned boathouse? It’s all circumstantial evidence, but it’s starting to add up.”

“Bane’s epistle?” Ned declared. “I hope not more condemnations and threats against the queen’s Christmas?”

“Let’s not get off the subject of your behavior, Master of the Queen’s Revels,” Elizabeth said, her voice as cold as he felt “I asked you to remain with Giles Chatam, and yet here you are out by the boathouse. It reminds me of the night of the fire when I commanded you remain with Meg in my apartments and yet you left her and went out who knows where.”

“My stomach was indisposed. Yes, I stepped outside for a breath of fresh air. I—I simply wasn’t myself that night.”

Ned knew he was talking too fast. He hadn’t dressed warmly enough; he was shaking, and his teeth were chattering. Jenks and Baron Hunsdon seemed to block him in now, as they all stood facing the queen. He hoped Jenks didn’t know he’d been trifling with Meg, but both men would do anything for Her Majesty, even, no doubt, turn on one of their fellows of the Privy Plot Council. Her Grace had looked only worried when she’d questioned him before, but now she looked outright angry.

“You weren’t yourself—so you said. You didn’t come out here that night to torch the boathouse in your anger at me for naming Leicester as Lord of Misrule, did you?” the queen demanded.

“How can you even ask such of me, Your Grace?”

“Stow your flippant rejoinders for now, Ned! I’m not suggesting you thought I was in the boathouse at the time, so it could have been mere coincidence that you burned it in a sort of protest and now came out to destroy the link you pilfered—”

“No!” he shouted and stepped back only to bump into the solid strength of Jenks, who had somehow shifted behind him. To Ned’s utter horror, he heard Baron Hunsdon scrape his sword from its scabbard.

“I want to believe you, Ned,” the queen said, “but I cannot take that chance right now. You tried to sneak the two lettered signs from the Earl of Leicester’s room last night, didn’t you?”

“What? No! As for this torch—I was going to check in the chandlery to see if anyone had taken an extra. Since the stubs are collected and remelted, I thought I could tell, especially with one colored for Christmas, as surely they keep close track of those— this, I mean.”

He was losing control of himself in this nightmare. How long had it been since he hadn’t commanded a performance, hadn’t known all his lines and just where to stand and move?

“The chandlery! Of course,” she said, nodding at Hunsdon. “That could be the source of the combination of scents on the epistle. Ned, you are relieved of your duties for now. I am sending you to stay at Greenwich for a while because—”

“But no one’s at Greenwich! Just a skeleton staff! No one’s coming to Greenwich for the Twelve Days!”

He knew at the moment of his outburst that he should never have interrupted her. Worse, he should never have tried to cover his tracks or conceal his resentment and anger at her. He fought to get hold of himself, to stand up straighter, to keep his voice in check.

“You're exiling me to Greenwich for the holidays, Your Grace?”

“Yes, we shall put it that way. And when people ask where you are, I shall say—like that night I went to the kitchens and then the boathouse—you are indisposed.”

“I was only trying to help, always,” he said, his voice suddenly sounding very small.

“We shall see. I’m afraid,” the queen was saying to Baron Hunsdon and his wife, Lady Anne, “that locking up everyone I suspect of not dealing straight with me may be the answer, but then there would be so few left for the New Year. Jenks, see that Ned gets inside, and then have my yeoman Clifford escort him downriver.”

Accompanied by Baron Hunsdon and Lady Anne and carrying the burned red link, Her Majesty headed back toward the palace. Ned saw her sniff at the link again as if it were a bouquet of flowers some fond, departing lover had given her.

He stumbled as he turned away with the grim, stoic Jenks walking behind him, now not a companion but his guard. He craned his head to look back at Elizabeth of England, suddenly fearful he’d never be summoned or scolded and smiled upon, mayhap never see her again. He prayed that his years with her would not soon be mere memories. What if he would never again make her laugh, or trade puns with her, or help her privily to ferret out someone who would harm her people or her person? However could this Christmas and New Year, his favorite season of the year, have gone so dreadfully, deadly wrong?

Edward Thompson, alias Ned Topside, once called the queen’s fool, Master of Revels and Lord of Misrule, only realized he was crying when his tears iced on his cheeks.

Chapter the Twelfth

Wassail

As the word
wassail
means
drink hail
or
drink health,
it is the perfect libation for the Twelve Days. Heat 3—4 pints of ale or beer and add ⅓ cup of sugar and ¼ cup mixed spices such as 2 cinnamon sticks, 1 table-spoon of whole cloves, and 1 tablespoon of allspice. Cut up 2—3 small, sweet apples, sprinkle with brown sugar, and bake in the oven for half an hour. After heating the liquid and apples together, beat egg whites until very stiff and float them on the drink so it looks like lamb’s wool to help keep the tipplers warm. Place the drink in an outsized bowl, the more ornate the better. Sing wassail songs going from door to door, carrying the bowl, wishing all folk well, and hoping they refill the bowl so the merriment may continue all the night
.

THE QUEENS FIRST THOUGHT WAS THAT THE PLACE THAT
made lights for her palace looked very dim indeed.

But for the kitchens, structures that employed open fires were set apart for safety, so the chandlery huddled among the back buildings near the smokehouse and laundry. The large room with its vent hole in the ceiling and pots of molten wax simmering over wood fires was one place at White-hall she had never visited. It smelled of the soot that encrusted the walls and ceiling, but—her heart beat harder—there was also the faint hint of floral scents.

“All here within,” Harry’s voice boomed out from the door set ajar, “your queen is paying you a holiday visit!”

His voice echoed in the domed room; the three women stopped stirring and gaped. The only man in sight, bent over his desk writing, exploded to his feet and bobbed a bow while the workers, still holding wooden paddles dripping red or green wax, curtsied. Their full-length canvas aprons, stiff with wax, crackled.

As Elizabeth’s eyes adjusted, she saw that ropes strung with different-size candles, links, and torches draped the stone walls. Great loops of woven wicks, ready to be cut to proper lengths, hung like wreaths on hooks; rolls of hemp and linen and stacks of torch poles were piled around the room.

“I can see you are all hard at work,” she told them and threw back her hood in the warmth, though she kept her cloak wrapped tight to avoid splatters. “You are the master of my chandlery?” she inquired, regretful she did not know the man when she could rattle off the offices, tides, and names of so many in her service.

“Aye, Firk Bell, Most Gracious Majesty,” the small, thin man replied. He looked as jumpy as if his feet were being held to a fire under the vats. “Ah, something wrong with that link, then?”

She handed him the stubby light. “I am wondering how much you can tell me about this and the person to whom it might have been allotted. It is from this chandlery?”

“Aye, made just a few weeks ago,” he told her, squinting at it “Melted us a new batch of the same Surrey beeswax Penny’s been astirring, much demand for colored, scented lights for the rest of the Twelve Days.”

“I can’t tell if that link is scented.”

He sniffed at it. “If ’tis, the odor’s light, but with real good candles they only give out scent when they're burned, Majesty. As to who could have had it—pardon if I look in my books,” he said as he scuttled over to his table, walking backward so he wouldn’t turn away from her, “Hm,” he said, then louder to his staff, “all of you, back to work or the vats will crust over. You know that, and I shouldn’t have to tell you—pardon, Majesty.

“Links this length,” he went on, bobbing up from his desk again, “shorter than the torches for your chambers and the Great Hall, go to many nobles and advisors, but I’m trying to recall who got the red and who the green, 'cause we didn’t mix them, but I’m not sure we had a method, that is, we have a method and I keep good books, but not with colors, 'cept for Vicar Bane, of course.”

At that, Elizabeth could have fallen into a vat of wax. She glared at Harry and shook her head to warn him from blurting something out She’d been intending to work up to mentioning Bane,

“Except for Vicar Bane?” she said. “And why is that?”

“When he’s here at Whitehall, a great deal lately, must say, won’t accept scented candles—smacks of popish incense, he says, told us that several weeks ago.”

“So you make special unscented and plain candles for Vicar Bane?”

“Unscented, of a certain, Majesty, but he wants red ones, picks them up himself, the color of martyr’s blood, he says.”

“Although lights are always allotted and then delivered to everyone’s rooms, he comes here to pick them up himself, Master Bell?”

“Oh, aye, likes it here better than anyplace else in the fancy palace, he says, 'cause it ’minds him of where the scribes and Phar’sees of the day are headed, you know, to Hades, to burn forever, preached me quite a sermon on it 'bout a fortnight ago, said fancies and fripperies at Christmas was the devil’s work. And sat here just a few days ago at my writing table to wait for his allotment of candles and links, working on his ’spondence.”

She fought to remain calm while her heart nearly beat out of her chest. It must be Bane behind all this. “You mean his correspondence?” she asked.

“Aye, that’s it. So other than the red and unscented—which this one might be,” he added, sniffing again at the link in question, “not sure who got scented red ones.”

She would burn it herself to discover if it was scented, the queen thought, as she took the link back from Firk Bell. And then she would await her once dreaded interview with Vicar Martin Bane today with great relish. He was all too obviously a creature of darkness, who was working hard to provide hell on earth for the peacock Leicester and his fancy Christmas queen.

“What do you mean you can’t find him?” Elizabeth cried when Harry, Jenks, and her yeoman guard Clifford returned empty-handed. When Vicar Bane had not kept his appointment with her, she’d sent them to bring him here. Now, at her outburst, all three of them looked mute.

“Well?” she went on, jumping up from the table on which the unscented red candle still sat smoldering. Both Robin and Lady Anne were with her. Once again, Elizabeth had sent Rosie out with Kat, then had summoned Robin to explain to him all their efforts to discover who was behind the bizarre insults and crimes.

It was Robin who spoke before the others could. “You heard the queen, men. Clifford, did you look in the chapel as well as in Bane’s chamber? Jenks, has he taken a horse from the stables? He’s not the sort to enjoy the Frost Fair, but for all we know, he’s gone out to chastise those having a good time out there. Best we send guards, armed if need be, to both Lambeth Palace and the bishop’s house at St. Paul’s, should he be visiting his lord and master, Bishop Grindal!”