A Murder by Any Name Read online

  A MURDER BY ANY NAME

  AN ELIZABETHAN SPY MYSTERY

  Suzanne M. Wolfe

  For Magdalen, Helena, Charles, and Benedict

  Confusion now hath made his masterpiece!

  Most sacrilegious murder hath broke ope

  The Lord’s anointed temple, and stole thence

  The life o’ the building!

  —Macbeth

  PROLOGUE

  The Palace of Whitehall

  “God’s bollocks, girl! I’m freezing my tits off!”

  Lady Cecily Carew murmured an apology while she fumbled with the last of the bodice hooks. Finally, the bodice came undone, and she stepped back, her head lowered so the Queen could not see her expression. She had only been a lady-in-waiting a few weeks, but she despaired of ever getting used to the Queen’s way of speaking. She swore like Dicken, the irascible and wizened stable hand on her father’s manor, who addressed his four-legged charges and sometimes his two-legged betters in language liberally laced with the dung he shoveled all day. It was unseemly for the great Virgin Queen, Elizabeth the First, ruler of the greatest nation on earth, to use such language, Cecily thought. When her father told her she had been chosen to wait on the Queen, she had been overjoyed, envisioning a monarch who surrounded herself with poets and musicians, a court which echoed to the sweet notes of madrigals and the honeyed words of sonnets, the court her grandmother had known in the early days of Henry VIII, before the king got fat and ugly and homicidal.

  Eleanor, the prune-faced Countess of Berwick, dug Cecily sharply in the ribs and thrust at her the bodice she had just removed from the Queen’s bony shoulders. Heavy with embroidery and studded with pearls that shimmered in the candlelight, the sour smell of sweat coming off it and its greasy feel made Cecily want to wrinkle her nose, although she was careful not to do so in the royal presence. A week ago she had helped fill the Queen’s bath with hot water, sprinkling rosemary, lavender, and rose petals in the water, then carefully testing it before the sagging, skeletal royal body lowered itself stiffly beneath the surface. Cecily had been horrified to discover that the Queen’s body was not milk-white as she had imagined, but gray like unbleached fustian, fingernails rimed with black, like her teeth. Used as Cecily was to frequent summer dips in the river that cut through their land at home, or daily ablutions from the ancient well that stood in their courtyard and had been giving the sweetest water in all of England since the time of the Conqueror, or so Cecily’s father claimed, she was appalled. Naked and stripped of the white paste she wore thickly smeared on her face, throat, and hands to cover up the small pox scars she had received in her youth, the Queen’s grimy, ill-smelling body reminded Cecily of an old woman she had seen begging outside the palace.

  But the Queen was adamant: only once a month would she endure the perilous and foolhardy ritual of bathing. Even a numbskull, she was fond of saying, knew that the hale and hearty were carried off after bathing by rheums and catarrhs and God knew what other poxy ailments of the lungs. So once a month, her ladies-in-waiting cleaned the cobwebs and rat-droppings from the great copper bath in the storeroom, dragged it to the Queen’s inner chamber, set it before the fire, and began the laborious and tedious task of filling it with buckets of boiling water hauled up the myriad palace stairs by the scullery maids from the cavernous kitchens below.

  Cecily draped the Queen’s nightgown over a stool before the fire to warm, careful not to scorch it as she had done the previous week, and then picked up a silver bowl and linen towel from the hearth and carried them over to the countess.

  “Stand here,” the countess ordered, indicating Cecily should hold the bowl directly in front of the Queen. “And don’t spill it. You’re all fingers and thumbs tonight.”

  Cecily kept her eyes lowered as she had been instructed, relieved she would not witness the uncovering of the royal flesh as the countess dipped the towel in the water and stroked it carefully over the Queen’s face and throat, rinsing it out in the basin, the water swirling gray grit as the chalk and lead cosmetic dissolved.

  “What ails you, girl?”

  It took Cecily a moment to realize the Queen was speaking. Glancing up, she saw the royal eyes, brown as two old pennies, assessing her with shrewdness and not a little kindness.

  “I am quite well, thank you, Your Majesty.” She gave a little bob, careful not to splash water onto the Queen’s chemise.

  “Bollocks,” the Queen replied. “She’s either homesick or dreaming of a lusty suitor, mark my words.” This last accompanied by a lewd wink directed at the countess who tut-tutted priggishly.

  “Up the spout, up the spout,” a voice chirruped from the four-poster bed in the corner where Codpiece, the Queen’s diminutive Fool, was insolently stretched, with his stubby arms folded behind his head on the pillow, his short legs crossed at the ankles.

  “Don’t be cheeky,” the Queen admonished, but not before Cecily saw the corner of her mouth twitch.

  Codpiece was a constant irritant in Cecily’s life and, she suspected, in the lives of all the ladies-in-waiting and the entire court. Of indeterminate age and four feet high in thick-soled boots, he followed at the Queen’s heels like an undisciplined puppy, making verbal messes wherever he went and gnawing on subjects best left alone. Seldom checked and outrageously spoiled, he thought nothing of interrupting the Queen in the middle of an audience with the Dutch or French ambassador, freely giving his opinion on matters of state, but couched in puns and euphemisms so convoluted and paradoxical they made Cecily’s eyes cross. Just the other day, Cecily had been horrified when he had suggested to the Queen in the middle of an audience that she need do nothing about the French, as the pox would soon decimate their population and give her a bloodless coup. The Queen guffawed, and the ambassador walked out in a huff. In vain did Baron Burghley and her other advisors complain that the Fool’s bawdy and only marginally witty interjections during crucial negotiations put the realm—not to mention the Queen’s dignity—at risk and made her the laughing stock of Europe.

  “Are you a traitor then, Codpiece?” the Queen had said. “Shall I cut off your head?”

  “If you wish, Your Majesty,” the Fool replied, giving a low, mocking bow, the absurdly long feather in his velvet cap wafting perilously close to the royal nose. “But then where would you be without a cod in a piece?”

  “I am already cod-less, Imp,” the Queen replied, rapping him on the head with her knuckles.

  “So you are, O wise Virgin,” he retorted. “Less cod and more peace. Precisely my advice about France.”

  The Queen snorted and threw him a sweetmeat, which he caught in his mouth like a dog. Cecily and the rest of the court had tried not to look appalled.

  “Well, child,” the Queen was saying, “have you a suitor?”

  Cecily felt her cheeks flame as she remembered, too late, the advice given her by her friend, Mary, also one of the ladies-in-waiting, only a year older but already wise to the Queen’s eccentricities and the raucous life of the court.

  “Never look the old bat directly in the eyes,” she had told Cecily on her second day at court. “She once said the eyes are the windows to the soul. Too bloody right. And she’s got a front row seat.”

  Cecily was, in fact, dreaming of a suitor, but her virginal and romantic mind would never have characterized him as lusty. She barely knew what the word meant. Never once, in all her sixteen years, had she equated the goings-on of the animals in the fields in spring and Dicken’s anatomically rich invective—not to mention the Queen’s—with what a man and a woman got up to in the privacy of a bedchamber. When she thought of suitors, she envisioned a lovesick gallant plucking at a lute while he stared soulfully into her eyes, or rose-scented missives declari
ng undying love, chastely slipped down the front of her bodice.

  Her mind wandering, she recalled the one event in her brief sojourn at court that had fulfilled all her romantic expectations: the lavish ball given annually by the Queen at Hampton Court to celebrate the anniversary of her accession to the throne on November 17, 1558. The sumptuous ballroom had blazed with the flames of a thousand beeswax candles shimmering off the gorgeous rainbow of jewels worn by the ladies and, most of all, by the Queen herself. Cecily had been dazzled, so much so that Mary had had to give her an elbow to remind her to lift the Queen’s cloth of gold train from under her feet so that Gloriana Regina did not face-plant on the gleaming floor in front of the entire court. Once safely settled on her throne, Elizabeth had dismissed the ladies-in-waiting to dance. Only the countess remained by the Queen’s side, scowling in disapproval as the women ran joyously into the whirling, stamping fray.

  “Just look at the old battle-ax,” Mary hissed into Cecily’s ear as she dragged her onto the dance floor. “She looks like she just sat on one of those monstrous long hairpins she wears. She can’t bear anyone to have any fun. Bah!”

  Cecily giggled, then blushed to the roots of her hair as a young man gave her a low bow. Mary blew him a kiss but moved on, dragging her friend with her.

  “That’s Sir Hugh,” Mary said. “You need to watch out for him. He thinks he’s God’s gift.”

  Cecily glimpsed a humpbacked man standing in the shadows. His face was pale and his clothes dark. The deformity of his back made his head twist up at an angle so that he appeared to be craning his neck forward. His dark eyes were fixed on Cecily, an enigmatic smile on his lips. “Who’s that?” she asked, shivering despite the tremendous heat of the room.

  “The Spider,” Mary said. “Cecil. He runs the spy network for Sir Francis Walsingham.”

  “Isn’t he a bit young?” Cecily asked. Despite the deformity which made the Spider’s body look old, his face was that of a young man in his early twenties.

  “Baron Burghley is his father,” Mary explained, “and pulled strings to get him appointed. Sir Robert’s supposed to be studying at Cambridge but he’s being groomed to succeed Sir Francis. Stay away from him. He’s dangerous.”

  It was a chilling reminder that beneath the glitter and pomp of the court moved dark, dangerous currents. Currents, Cecily knew, that could kill. She looked hastily away and saw a dark-haired man leaning nonchalantly against a wall, with his arms folded and a sardonic expression on his face. He seemed to be watching the Spider. When he caught her looking at him, he winked. Cecily smiled back, the threat of the spymaster forgotten.

  The rest of the night passed in a frenzy of dancing. Cecily lost track of how many courtiers she danced with, but when Sir Walter Raleigh took her hand to lead her into a galliard, she was so overcome with awe that her legs almost refused to hold her up, until a stocky man in plain attire, a soldier by the look of him, cut in and whirled her away from the dashing explorer. Only one partner displeased her—a man dressed in sulfurous yellow who ogled and smirked at her the whole time and whose hands felt like dead fish.

  The love note she had longed to receive at the ball had indeed finally appeared that very morning, but in the most unlikely of places, and it smelled more of tallow than of roses.

  As the most junior of the ladies-in-waiting, she had taken up the rear of the little procession following the Queen as she swept out of the chapel after matins like a blazing comet at the head of a rainbow-hued tail of velvet and silk that rustled like a summer’s breeze over the tiled floor. Eager to catch the ear of the Queen before her never-ending round of audiences with foreign ambassadors and meetings closeted with Baron Burghley and the Privy Council in the Star Chamber, the ladies and gentlemen of the court pressed thickly into the aisle behind Cecily, pushing and shoving, occasionally stepping on the back of her gown, causing her to stumble. It was in the crush at the door, when the Queen stopped to speak to someone and her ladies milled about waiting for her to proceed, the countess moving irritably among them to chivy them into some order, that Cecily felt someone slip something into the pocket of her skirts. Fishing it out, she saw a tiny rolled piece of parchment. Heart fluttering like a trapped bird, she scanned the faces around her, but no eyes were fixed on her with veiled yearning, no lips discreetly kissed the tips of fingers. Courtiers began to fall back as the Queen moved on, her ladies following. Tucking the note back into her pocket for safekeeping, Cecily hurried after them.

  Cecily had to wait until the Queen had broken her fast and stomped off to her first audience before she had a chance to read the note. She asked the countess permission to go to the privy, set in an alcove off the staircase leading to the royal apartments.

  “If you must,” the countess replied, as if a call of nature were a deplorable flaw of character.

  Once she had drawn the curtain across the doorway, Cecily extracted the scrap of paper from her sleeve and, with trembling fingers, unfurled it. There was just enough light from the barred casement window, set high in the wall for ventilation, for her to read the words written there:

  Meet me in the chapel after compline at midnight. Come alone. Tell no one.

  Signed, A heartsick admirer

  Suppressing a tiny stab of disappointment that the note was so brief and not more flowery—O Diana, Chaste Huntress of my Heart or even the less exalted and more shopworn Sweetheart would not have gone amiss—Cecily focused on the word heartsick, reasoning that if the note were penned in haste, there would be no time for a more effusive and elaborate salutation. She was also a little miffed that her secret admirer, although “heartsick” (she kept returning to that), did not think she had the wit to come alone or keep their assignation secret, feeling it necessary to instruct her accordingly.

  If Cecily’s innocent head were not so peopled with lovelorn swains and shepherdesses, pining poets cruelly separated from their Beatrices and Lauras, she would have noticed the note’s rather chilly, schoolmasterly tone.

  As it was, she could hardly keep her mind on the endless tasks of the day, a day that somehow must be got through before she could discover the identity of her “heartsick” (it was growing on her) admirer. She had been set to repairing a billowing mountain of the Queen’s petticoats. She worked at it until her fingers ached and she thought she would go blind, the countess insisting on tiny, precise stitches. This was followed by rubbing stinking animal fat into the soft leather of the Queen’s shoes—another huge pile. Rich as her father might be, she had never in her life seen so many pairs of shoes, petticoats, stomachers, sleeves (individually sewn onto the Queen’s dress each morning), stockings of wool and finest linen, lawn handkerchiefs and belts and vests and … It made Cecily’s head spin to think of it all. She was certain the contents of the royal wardrobe could have clothed the women of an entire village, if not the whole of London.

  But the job she hated most—absolutely loathed, she guiltily confided to Mary—was when she was set to combing and curling the royal wigs, a task she equated with currying a dead sheep. Yet another cherished illusion brutally done to death on her arrival at court. She had thought the Queen’s fiery red locks were her own, a miracle of longevity deservedly bestowed by Mother Nature on such an august monarch. Ravished by the piles of intricate curls, frizzes, top-knots, and braids crowned with pearl, amethyst, emerald, carbuncle, and sapphire headdresses or smothered with tiny diamond stars as if they had been sprinkled with heavenly dust, Cecily was initially dazzled. Yet the hair itself, though brilliant of hue and adornment, was as wiry and coarse to the touch as the fur of her father’s favorite brindled hound, Nellie, woven as it was onto a linen cap that, astonishingly and horrifyingly on her first night, had been tenderly lifted off the Queen’s head by the countess to reveal a flaking scalp barely furred with white stubble. It took all of Cecily’s training and good breeding not to shriek aloud with shock.

  “Bald as a coot,” was how Mary had put it later when they were cozily tucked up in their share
d truckle bed, the attic filled with the soft feminine snores of their fellow ladies-in-waiting and the occasional porcine grunt. “And scurvy too,” Mary added with relish.

  “Shh,” Cecily whispered. “Someone will hear.”

  “Like I give a toss.”

  As always, she was both scandalized and titillated by Mary’s derisive manner when speaking of the Queen. She couldn’t help but think it a little treasonous but would find herself dissolving into giggles nonetheless. Healthy as horses and blessed with strong teeth; shining, cascading tresses; supple limbs; and cast-iron constitutions, neither girl could imagine herself at twenty-five, let alone fifty-two.

  As she stitched at the clothing and rubbed at the shoes, Cecily’s mind had continually circled around then landed on likely candidates for her secret admirer. Like a bee drowsing among the gillyflowers in her mother’s walled garden, her thoughts bumbled happily from one face to another: the handsome page of the Duke of Sussex, said to be a distant cousin, whom she had caught staring at her across the banquet hall as he stood behind his lord, ready to carve his meat; or the young tenor, second row, third from the left, in the Chapel Royal, whose golden voice sent shivers of delight running up and down Cecily’s spine, the purity of his voice more than compensating for the impurity of his complexion. Perhaps it was someone she had danced with at the Accession Day Ball, she wondered, although she sincerely hoped it wasn’t the man in yellow with the clammy hands.

  At last the long day was over. Gloriana Regina was put to bed with much ceremony and a soothing tisane for wind, now a staple of the bedchamber since the menu at court reflected the fasting season of Advent and was comprised extensively of a volcanic combination of lentils, beans, and dried peas. Cecily was dismissed from the royal bedchamber, thanking God it wasn’t her turn to bed down on the straw-stuffed bolster before the fire in case the Queen should want something in the night. But just as Cecily was leaving, the countess called her back and instructed her to mend the torn lace on a stack of royal handkerchiefs. Trying to hurry in the dim light of a solitary candle, Cecily fretted that she would miss her assignation. The tower clock chimed the quarter hour after midnight just as she was biting off the thread on her last stitch. The countess herself had long since taken herself off, no doubt to get her feet up before the fire in her private rooms across the hall. Feeling guilty for lying to her friend about sneaking off to the chapel before bed, Cecily tiptoed out of the room, closing the door quietly. But Mary had been laid up with a cold all day. Looking in earlier to see if she needed anything, Mary had raised a bleary, red-nosed face from the pillow and, in a voice very like that of a frog in the pond back home, croaked that she needed nothing, thank you very much. The politeness with which she said this convinced Cecily that Mary must surely be at death’s door.