The Fatal Fashione: An Elizabeth I Mystery (Elizabeth I Mysteries) by Karen Harper

Author:Karen Harper [Harper, Karen]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2006-11-28T05:00:00+00:00

Monday morning, Hugh Dauntsey requested an early audience with the queen, so she summoned him to the privy gardens, where she was taking her morning constitutional with her ladies trailing behind. The brisk breeze tugged at their clothes, and everyone’s feet crunched gravel on the angular paths.

Besides hearing what he had to say, Elizabeth hoped to learn more from him about his ties to her other starcher. Now that the Greshams had a motive to silence Hannah—to keep her from perhaps extorting funds from them, embarrassing them, or even alienating them from their daughter’s affections—the queen was desperate to prove someone else had murdered her. Even if she lost her master starcher and the entire ruff market crashed to ruins, she could not lose Thomas Gresham.

“Your findings so far?” she asked, looking not into Dauntsey’s rimless eyes but straight ahead as she walked.

“I simply wish to give you a preliminary inventory, Your Majesty,” he said, walking briskly to keep up with her. He wore a doublet and matching cape of canary yellow, but at least it was not adorned with jewels or slashings. Did the man actually visit that dirty, smelly stock market in such garb? The stranger thing was that each time they took a turn onto the path facing eastward, between the sun in her eyes and his pale clothes and coloring, he almost seemed to disappear.

“But,” he went on, “I have a question, too. Although Hannah von Hoven’s starch shop seemed quite untouched, but for her body being found there, of course, her earthly personal goods in her privy chamber nearby were obviously picked over, to say the least.”

“I cannot account for that,” she told him, not mentioning she’d taken a look at the place the night she’d seen the body. “Whether someone heard that she had died and broke in to pilfer her things, or the murderer himself went through looking for something that might implicate him, I know not.”

She forced from her mind the image of Thomas ransacking Hannah’s room, looking for something that would link him to her. No, she told herself for the hundredth time, it cannot be Thomas.

“You assume the murderer and pilferer was a man, Your Majesty,” Dauntsey went on. “But in speaking yesterday with Chief Constable Nigel Whitcomb, he mentioned the murderer could well be a woman. That is, I’m quite sure he said ‘she,’ not ‘he.’”

Elizabeth nearly stumbled. “He has told me no such thing,” she declared. Could Whitcomb have found a link to Anne Gresham so soon?

“He mentioned he was coming here with particular proofs and even a warrant for you to sign—to question someone under duress, I think he said. Here are the separate inventories of the shop and house of the deceased,” he went on, handing her two folded lists from the soft leather pouch at his waist. She noted for the first time that his fingers were stained with black ink. “I also have quite a list of those who must have ruffs or fees returned, so that will cut into her estate a bit.

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