The Fyre Mirror: An Elizabeth I Mystery: 1 (Elizabeth I Mysteries), Page 6

  “I’m going to order these closest tents to be pitched on the other side of the encampment,” she announced to Lavina and Heatherley as she returned to the entry of the tent. “It won’t do anyone any good to try to sleep near this site. I suggest you go inside the palace to get something to eat, then attend the memorial service. Afterward, you will find your tents on the far side of the encampment with everything moved for you.”

  Both of them looked immensely relieved, as if they had just been exonerated from any wrongdoing. They had no notion that she, Cecil, and Dr. Dee were going to give their tents a thorough tossing before they saw them again.

  As if he weren’t on edge enough, Gil fumed, the queen kept him waiting outside her apartments a good hour after she sent for him. He paced the grand, ornate staircase up and down. Each time on the ground floor, Gil studied the frescoes of cavorting gods and goddesses that Master Kendale had boasted he’d painted in the six months he’d lived here while the palace was being built. Gil could almost hear the man’s voice now, for his bragging last night had been as bloated as his flesh. But now that the blowhard was dead, Gil had regrets.

  “Great King Henry visited many times to see the progress we builders and artists were making, and he complimented me especially,” Kendale had boasted just the night before, after he’d invited Gil into his tent and, stupidly, Gil had gone. The man had been drinking overmuch; he reeked of wine and slurred his words. “Complimented me especially” had come out more like “come peaceably.” He’d looked unsteady on his feet too, though the cause of that might have been balancing his excessive girth on those spindly ankles.

  Gil had replied, “Her Majesty fondly recalls how proud her royal sire was of Nonsuch.” As he pictured Master Kendale’s annoyed expression again, suddenly the entire encounter came rolling back in a vividly colored scene in his mind.

  “Oh, flaunting that you’re more’r less her foundling again, eh?” Kendale had goaded. Gil could tell that Niles, the young artist’s assistant, was vexed with his master for baiting another young man, or at least that’s the way Gil read things.

  “I’m just recalling something she said yesterday,” Gil replied, and sidled toward the open tent flap.

  “As if she’d share personal mem’ries of her royal family with a vagabond like you,” Kendale said with a hiccup. “A pox on you wi’ your inflated sense of worth, you rough-edged whelp. So what if you had three years’n Urbino or wherever—”

  “And a four-month visit to Venice,” Gil said, his bile rising at Kendale’s insulting tone and glare as well as the pointed words. This man annoyed but didn’t frighten him. What scared him to death was the possibility that he’d been followed here from Urbino. Master Scarletti had said the guild of artists would kill to keep its secret. Could it have hired the man who might have been following him in Dover and again in London?

  “Venice, eh?’S’at so?” Kendale needled, but Gil could tell he was impressed despite himself.

  “Aye, Venice, where I met the artist I admire most in all the world, Tiziano Vecellio, called Titian.”

  “Who? Well,” Kendale said, moving his bulk to deliberately block Gil in the tent, “Her Majesty’ll be sad to hear you ven’rate a foreigner over a pure English painter, like at least two of us she selected to do her official portrait.”

  “One thing I’ve learned on the Continent, Master Kendale,” Gil countered, “is that the talent of true artists knows no boundaries. Henry Heatherley and you are pure English, as you say, so perhaps your work will remain provincial. However, Titian sells paintings to King Philip in Spain, as well as—”

  “You young whelp, half schooled, thinkin’ you’ve all the answers! You’re outta your el’ment!”

  “My element, Master Kendale, is to serve Her Majesty with my hands and head and heart.”

  “Heard you were born deaf and dumb, but you’ve got a quick lip now, however dumb you still act to be so flippant with your betters!”

  “I was not born either deaf or dumb, but was scared into silence as a lad by an explosion. Aye, the queen good as plucked me off the streets to help make me what I am today. And whatever I am, that which you are so disdainful of, best you’d complain to her then!”

  “If you open that quick mouth to tell’r one thing about what I said—”

  “Good night then, Niles. And Master Kendale, buone notte ed arrivederci, lei il maiale grasso!”

  He prayed Kendale had no idea he’d just been bidden good night as a “fat pig.” Gil turned sideways and managed to get past the man. He hoped Kendale wouldn’t take his temper out on his boy.

  “Boy! Gil Sharpe!” a tall queen’s yeoman guard called over the banister to where Gil glowered and even gestured at Kendale’s frescoes. “Her Majesty will see you now.”

  Taking two steps at a time, Gil hurried upstairs and into the first chamber past the guards. The queen sat at a table, eating figs and drinking wine. After Gil bowed, she pointed to the chair across the table and pushed the dish of figs toward him. Compared to her high mood yesterday, her spirits seemed low. She looked both weary and wary, but surely not of him.

  “I have so much to ask and you so much to tell, yes, my Gilberto Sharpino?” she said with her mouth half full.

  “Oh, yes, Your Grace, of artists, and Italy, and anything else you would know.”

  “In due time. My lord Cecil and I want to discuss your impressions of politics and papists as well as paintings. But for now, tell me about your contretemps with Master Kendale last night.”

  Gil sat up straighter, his heart pounding, though he knew by now not to be surprised that the queen seemed to know everything. “Yes, Your Grace.”

  “Then I want you to go up on the roof with Jenks to view the way we’ve laid out the things from the burned tent and see if you can add or change anything. And sketch it for us again, lest we need to store the things away.”

  As he explained to her his encounter with Master Kendale, he tried not to sugarcoat what had passed between them on the last night of the man’s life. But he intentionally muted his own anger.

  “So he was drunk,” she said. “Perhaps his besotted state is why—besides his weight and girth—he might have been slow to move when his tent began to smoke and flame. Beyond the fact, of course, that someone had laced the fat man in his tent as tightly as a fat woman is laced into a corset.”

  “What is it, Your Grace?” he asked as she jumped up and began to pace. “Murder for certain, you mean?”

  “We’ve already established that. But I hadn’t thought of something before, that those ties were laced the way a woman would close a corset with a single, flat bow at the bottom.”

  “A woman did it?”

  “I don’t know! Never mind for now. Gil, I must ask you something else. Although Master Kendale insulted you last night, you did nothing to retaliate, did you? I know you will ever answer me truthfully.”

  Her dark eyes burned into his. He silently thanked God she had not asked another question, for it was nearly impossible to lie to her. “I tried to insult him back—circumspectly, Your Grace—and did manage to get him doubly vexed. And one more thing.”

  “Which is?” she asked, still looking worried. He realized again how blessed he was that, for some reason he would never grasp, Elizabeth of England cared deeply for his well-being. It was his amazing, grand good fortune of all time, even more precious to him than his gift to draw and paint people.

  “I do admit at least, Your Grace, I reviled him all the way back to my tent with every foul, cesspool Italian curse word I ever knew.”

  She smiled stiffly. “Then, if that was your only retribution, I may need your services, not only to paint a portrait or sketch a tent, but to help Cecil and me with the investigation into Kendale’s and the boy’s deaths. But best you go now. Find Jenks before you go up on the roof, for I must attend the memorial service I have ordered in the chapel. As he bowed and headed for the door, she called after him, “Gil, one thing more.”

 
; He turned back to face her. His heart began to pound again.

  “Why did you return from Italy two years earlier than expected? I suggested five years of study, and you agreed to that.”

  He almost blurted out the truth—all of it, painful and terrible. But instead what came out was, “Because I yearned for England and to serve you.”

  The corners of her mouth tilted into a hint of a smile. “And I am glad you are back.” She stared at him strangely, with misty eyes. “In a few days,” she said, “I shall pose for you and the two others, and then we shall see what you have learned.”

  He bowed again, turned, and went out, but his hair prickled along the nape of his neck as if he’d been out in a field when lightning struck. She had stared at him so eerily, as if she’d seen a ghost. In his mind’s eye, he could almost see one himself, which haunted him. It was Kendale, screaming and burning as if he were trapped in hell itself, and Gil regretted that.

  After the memorial in the chapel, in which the queen had the minister give a little speech for calm among her courtiers, she was escorted out by both the Earl of Arundel and the Earl of Leicester. During the short service she’d been agonizing about who the arsonist-murderer could be. But it was only when Arundel began to comment about the large size of Kendale’s coffin that she recalled something else: Arundel had once called Master Kendale a “flap-mouthed magpie full of bombast” and urged her not to include him among her official painters at court. And so their host himself, who surely knew each stride of the Nonsuch park and grounds, must have held some sort of grudge against Kendale.

  “My lord Arundel,” she said as they walked across the half-shadowed courtyard toward her apartments, “though none of us like to speak ill of the dead, pray tell why you advised against my employing Master Kendale for my official portrait.”

  “The man turned out to be trouble, did he not? Rumors are flying about his relationship to the dead boy, he argued with your other artists, was full of braggadocio, I hear, and then did something to get himself killed.”

  Frowning at that cruel assessment, she merely inclined her head, biting back the urge to rebuke him. Had he just revealed more about himself than about Kendale?

  “The reason I advised against Kendale, Your Grace,” Arundel went on, “was that, quite simply, the man was a baseborn braggart, just trading on his talent.”

  Elizabeth bit her lower lip and let him talk, however much she wanted to tell him that she fully intended to encourage such men who traded on their talent to serve queen and kingdom, no matter what their social rank. But if what Arundel was saying of Kendale’s birth was true, it flew in the face of Kendale’s rejection of Gil for being baseborn and trading on his talent. Evidently, Kendale not only had hidden his own humble beginnings but dared to lord it over those who reminded him of his past.

  “You see,” Arundel continued with a sharp sniff, “Kendale did a portrait of me about ten years ago that was passable but not inspired. He made me look dour, actually, stuffy and old-fashioned.”

  “Imagine that,” Robin said, his face stoic despite its rising color.

  Elizabeth bit her lip harder. Robin was getting red in the face, and she feared he’d burst out with one of his guffaws. Arundel not only did not have a sense of humor, but usually failed to recognize it in others.

  “The wretch charged me a pretty penny for it too,” Arundel plunged on, “and told everyone I adored his work, which I’d never said. That was as good—as bad, I mean—as lying, if you ask me. Not to mention the man paid too much heed to my page boy, of all people, while he was around, and the lad was too young to know better. This was before Kendale turned as corpulent as your fath—” He stopped talking midword.

  “As corpulent as my father,” she finished for him. “I do see the picture you paint, my lord.”

  Robin stifled a snicker, which, fortunately, Arundel did not hear. “Of course, you have every right not to heed what I advise,” Arundel said, tugging his ruffled satin cuffs down over his beringed hands. “God knows, your royal sire did not. When he saw the site for Nonsuch—I was with him, you know, on a boar hunt—I suggested he build the palace at the far end of the meadow and use the little village of Cuddington as a place where courtiers and servants could live. But no, he would have it exactly here on the rise of ground and said leaving Cuddington would ruin the view, so out the village folk and the family of the manor went and down came the buildings.”

  But Elizabeth was only half listening now. She could see through the ornate gate into the outer courtyard, where three riders were dismounting from lathered horses, and she was suddenly certain who had arrived.

  “Well, my lords,” she said, looking back over her shoulder to catch Cecil’s eye, “it seems Queen Mary’s Lord Maitland has arrived from Scotland—via London, if he went there first. I’ll see him forthwith. Despite who his royal mistress is, I have found him a forthright man with only his country’s best interest at heart, and who can ask more of a man than that? Cecil, with me, if you will.”

  Just as the chimes rang four of the afternoon, the queen and her secretary of state walked together to greet Maitland under the tall clock-tower gate. He had been the Scottish secretary of state for years, appointed before Mary was queen. Though Mary had not officially demoted him, she’d used him lately more as an envoy or liaison to the English court, partly because he was a staunch Protestant and frowned on her increasingly reckless behavior. But Mary could not argue with the man’s wily ways or the fact that he and Cecil had lately managed to keep peace between the two countries.

  “My lord Maitland,” Elizabeth called in greeting, and the man swept off his hat and shaded his eyes before a low bow. “You are welcome here at Nonsuch.”

  “I take it the court’s movement was a sudden decision, Your Most Gracious Majesty,” he replied, “for when I crossed the border, I heard you were still in London.”

  Sir William Maitland of Lethington was tall and sturdily built, a jouster in appearance but, like Cecil, a lawyer at heart. Bearded, approaching age forty, he seemed bluffly honest and had the brains not to favor Lord Darnley as his mistress did, so Elizabeth liked the man despite her aversion to his Catholic queen.

  “Who can resist this country air after such a winter, my lord,” she said. “Come inside, and I’ll see you and your men are well cared for. And what is the message from my cousin, dear Queen Mary?” she added as they walked toward the royal apartments.

  Maitland’s clear blue gaze met hers, then Cecil’s. “I regret to inform both of you,” Maitland said, his voice so low and rough that it sounded as if he were grinding out his words, “she is yet besotted with Lord Darnley and, I fear, will have him.”

  Elizabeth tried to convey both surprise and concern. “I feared so too, and in defiance of my counsel.”

  “And mine. God’s truth, Your Majesty, this is something upon which you and I agree. I know young Darnley’s your second cousin, but he’s a preening milksop and he galls me sore. She’s beyond listening to either me or the Earl of Murray on it.”

  The shadows of the arched entryway leaped over them as they entered the building, and for a moment, the three of them blinked like owls to see better. A lad appeared with three goblets of wine on a silver tray, and Maitland took his readily.

  “I wish we could drink to better news,” the queen told the men solemnly, though she could hardly contain her excitement. Mary had not only bit on the bait, but was going to be quite caught in the net. Darnley would surely drag her down. Maitland might call the pompous lad a milksop, but indeed he was a sodomist, who must be playing Mary for all she was worth. The man’s passion must surely be only for her power, not for her person, so there might not even be an heir from their marriage that Cecil so feared.

  They emptied their goblets silently. Let the pretty Queen of Scotland gaze in mirrors and jest about taking England from its rightful queen, Elizabeth thought grimly. Just let her try.

  While Maitland and his men refreshed themselves and rested
, and two tents were pitched for them, Elizabeth, pretending she was merely going for a stroll, went out with Cecil and Dr. Dee to look through Lavina Teerlinc’s and Henry Heatherley’s tents. The servants who lived here were being kept busy in the palace, so although others walked or rode the grounds, no one was nearby now.

  “Even if we disturb the order of their things,” Elizabeth assured her companions, “they’ll think it just happened when their domiciles were moved.”

  Dee and Cecil took Heatherley’s tent while Elizabeth looked through Lavina’s more carefully than she had before. She peered into and sniffed at pots of paints, bottles of what smelled like linseed oil, and something more acrid in which a single, short brush sat, so perhaps it was some sort of cleansing liquid. Lavina had bouquets of brushes, from squat and short to lean and long, all made with various animal hairs, soft sable to stiff boar. There were, of course, lanterns in the tent, three of them with fat, halfburned candles. Could a candle have begun the blaze by being thrown up on the roof?

  “Dr. Dee,” she said, going to stand in the opening of Heatherley’s tent as the two men searched his things, “could a candle heaved on one of the slanted tent roofs catch and start a fire?”

  “Canvas doesn’t catch easily, Your Grace,” John Dee told her, straightening from his own perusal of paint supplies. “Granted, tallow could have melted and the wick burned in the blaze, so we’d find no evidence. But I’d say a candle is as likely to gut itself out as catch an entire tent afire. Now a torch might be a different thing.”

  The queen suddenly broke out into a sweat. It had been flames larger than a candle which had caught afire that gay, brightly hued pavilion when she was thirteen. That had not been sturdy canvas, but mere material in pretty colors with fluttering flags and pennants … .