Tudor Rose Read online

  Reaching the walkway leading out of the park, Rose saw that the red carpet had been torn up and she stamped the snow off her shoes into the frozen mud. She hurried into the palace just as the guards were coming out. They didn’t seem to be in any particular hurry.

  Shivering and wet, Rose couldn’t wait to talk to Sybille, and with her friend’s help laugh this mad idea into oblivion.

  Instead of finding a friend in her room, however, Rose found only more destruction.

  “No!” Rose cried. Once again, she was greeted by torn fabric and slashed gowns. This time, however, there appeared to be no survivors of the cutting rampage. And the flames in the fireplace were helping see to that. Strips of fabric were strewn half in and out of the fire as if someone had tried hurriedly shoving them all into the fire.

  All those late nights, all the effort and expense of scrounging for fabric … gone, wasted. From the size of the flames, Rose could see the vandal must have just left the room. A rage still hung in the air that was almost tangible.

  Just then, a drunken Sybille, stinking of wine and beer, stumbled in behind Rose.

  “Oh, Rose!” Sybille took in the scene and fell to her knees to gather up the pieces of her destroyed garments, as if she could somehow put them back together. Her feet kicked the door shut as she crawled about.

  “What happened, Rose?” Sybille’s wild eyes went to the last intact garment in the room, hanging on the back of the door where the slasher must have missed it. It was the plain brown and gray gown studded with the dead fish-eye crystals. Sybille reached for it.

  “Sybille!” Rose said. “No!”

  But Sybille wasn’t listening. She stood and yanked the gown from its hook. Rose needed that dress for her gala in just two days—she couldn’t let Sybille destroy it!

  Fueled by instinct, Rose spun Sybille around by the shoulders. Already unsteady on her feet, Sybille stumbled again and both girls fell onto the side of the bed and slid to the floor, limbs flailing, the dress between them.

  “Damn you, what are you doing?” Sybille demanded, her tongue sounding thick.

  She shoved the dress at Rose, and both girls got to their feet, breathing hard.

  “Why, Sybille?” Rose’s voice cracked. “Why?”

  Sybille blinked. “You think I did schis? Schis. Schis.” She was trying to say something but the wine wouldn’t let her. Finally she pantomimed using shears, and said, “I did before but not me now.”

  Even though the words were garbled, Rose believed them.

  “Avis,” she said, naming the real perpetrator.

  Sybille nodded. “That harlot—” She closed her eyes as a bout of dizziness hit her. She climbed onto the bed, and lay on her back with one arm flopped over her face. “Dorothie told me about her smelling trick cause Avis slapped her, I think,” she mumbled. “And I showed Avis tonight. I gave her something to smell about, and gala ruined … oh, and sorry she might think it was you, Rosie … sorry … ”

  Sybille trailed off and within moments she was snoring. Looking down at her drunken friend, Rose tried to imagine what Sybille might have done to Avis to so utterly wreck her gala—whatever it was, it sounded like Sybille might have implicated Rose in the process.

  Was that on purpose to make sure that Avis would come after Rose? She gazed around the ransacked room covered with tattered cloth, and imagined what the enraged Avis would now do to Rose’s event—all fueled by the extra vitriol provided by her good friend who was currently unconscious in their bed.

  In the morning, Rose was sure that Sybille would argue that framing Rose had been nothing personal. It was just her impetuous nature. That same impetuous nature that made Rose glad that she had not been given the chance to share her frightening notion with Sybille.

  Maybe it wouldn’t be tomorrow or even next week, but sooner or later, Sybille would have too much to drink or get angry with Rose at a large event and ask, “Has everyone heard the latest gossip courtesy of Rose? It turns out our Virgin Queen is not appropriately named. Why? Because Rose is her daughter.”

  If Howell hadn’t been wide-awake at one in the morning, he might have missed the intruder.

  This time it was more than just lustful thoughts about Sybille keeping him from sleep and wandering the passageways. Now Rose’s words rang in his head. Could what she said be true? Would the only home he have left be taken from him?

  Holding up the nub of a flickering candle, Howell Digby peered through the door of the cell he had shared with Ben. “Are you in there, my friend?” he whispered.

  Howell had already checked the room earlier that night and had just returned from searching nearby streets.

  He desperately hoped to find the boy, but Howell hesitated to go inside the cell. The small palettes on which they had often huddled together looked so pathetic in the cold, shadowy candlelight. Howell felt a stab of something unfamiliar. Was it self-pity? No, that kind of selfish emotion wouldn’t do. Instead, he would call it mourning for a habit. This musty, confined space had been a home with a friend and two warm meals a day.

  “Come on out, little man,” Howell said quietly.

  Howell wasn’t sure why he bothered whispering. After all, nearly everyone else had fled the monastery thanks to Rose’s dire warning that Lord Northwood had turned the queen against the Catholic monasteries. They would be closed immediately and with violence if necessary. And Rose would know, after all Sybille had told her and Sybille was an acquaintance of the queen herself.

  Beside Howell, only a few stubborn monks and students remained. They all stayed for mostly the same reason: they had nowhere else to go. For Howell, the trip home to Gordonsrod would be costly and there was nothing for him in that miserable village anyway. During the winter his decrepit parents subsisted mostly on begging and the charity of others. Howell would just be another mouth that needed feeding.

  Of course, the true reason Gordonsrod held no appeal was that it lacked the one thing he needed more than anything else.

  Sybille.

  That morning, upon learning his monastery would be closed, Abbot Carrey had offered none of the inspirational words one might have expected. Instead he said with a sad shrug, “Save yourselves. You can be sure I’ll be doing the same.”

  Now young Ben might be somewhere in the priory, and Howell wouldn’t abandon him. Once he found him, Howell decided they would stay in the priory’s great room, at least for the night. The cells in the back would be traps if the monastery was attacked, but the great room offered multiple ways out.

  After searching for a half hour more, and going through two more candle nubs, Howell returned to the great room. He decided to bed down here, next to the cold, dark fireplace, and resume his search in the morning when he—

  Someone was already here, over near the window, or at least Howell thought it was a person. He couldn’t be sure, the dim candle in his hand barely lit six inches ahead, let alone across the room.

  Howell’s feet kept moving. Yes, now he could make out the features of a small boy—or maybe a girl?—wearing dark clothing, face hidden beneath a hood. “Ben?”

  The figure didn’t answer. Instead it ducked down under the long table that was used to hold prayer books while the acolytes lay prostrate on the ground in front of the cross.

  “You there, what’re you up to?” Howell demanded and hurried toward the table.

  Before he got there, the figure emerged followed by a trail of smoke. Flames crisscrossed the room. The sudden fire grew so quickly that Howell continued walking toward it, uncomprehending.

  “Stop!” Howell sputtered as he stepped over a line of flame. The intruder rushed to make an escape through the open window but was tackled to the ground by Howell. The two rolled around in a struggle for a few seconds. Howell’s size and strength quickly gave him the upper hand. After the bout of wrestling, he knew it was a small but overweight man he had pinned to the floor. “Who are you?” Howell demanded.

  “Your dr
ess is burning, you bloody idiot,” the man said in a scratchy voice that he was clearly trying to disguise. Still there was something familiar about his way of speaking—a certain upper class lilt—that sounded familiar to Howell. “Hope you gotta piss,” the man said. “Your legs could use it.”

  As if on cue, Howell felt something biting at his calves. He turned his head to find the bottom of his robe on fire. With Howell distracted for just a moment, the man squirmed halfway out of his grasp, knocking into the table and nearly upending it. Howell grabbed hold of the man’s ankle and began to pull him back. All the while, Howell’s robe continued to burn as the flames around the room intensified and filled the air with smoke. The man flailed and kicked, landing a heel on the bridge of Howell’s nose, sending blood streaming out of his nostrils.

  “You might not care about yourself,” the man said as he kicked again and missed his mark. “But what about the others? Shouldn’t you warn them?”

  It was just the right thing to say to Howell. Yes, he had to get the remaining students and monks who might be sleeping out of the monastery before it burned to ground. And he couldn’t do that while dragging this kicking and scratching man around, or with his body ablaze.

  “Damn you,” Howell said, and let the man go. He scuttled out the open window in a flash, leaving Howell to thrash on the floor a few moments longer to extinguish the flames on his robe.

  Even with the only home he had burning around him, he felt a tug at his heart. If he had to leave the city, he would never have the encounter with Sybille in two days’ time.

  Ridiculous. You are ridiculous, Howell told himself as he leapt to his feet to warn the others.

  With her head throbbing with each heartbeat and her mouth tasting like the wrong end of a mule, Sybille woke in the empty bed to something jabbing her in the cheek. For a moment, she wondered if Avis had put a poisonous spider in her bed. But no, it was an envelope with her name scrawled on it in simple swipes of charcoal.

  Was it from Rose? Where is she? Sybille wondered, noticing she was alone in the room.

  She touched the envelope for a moment before opening it. Inside was a card with more words slashed with the same dull writing instrument.

  With only your single greatest treasure on display,

  Come garbed in nothing but browns, blacks, or gray!

  The Richmond Priory at Saturday’s last breath

  For a gala in honor of Regina Elizabeth.

  It took a couple times through for Sybille to comprehend each of the words, but when she got them all, she laughed and rolled back and forth on the bed, wrinkling the cheap paper beneath her. Then she sat up quickly. Wasn’t celebrating in someone else’s misfortune exactly something Avis would do?

  You’re not being a kind friend, Sybille.

  Still, she was amazed that Rose could be so self-harming and stupid. Why had she picked the priory as the location for her event? Why not the servant’s common privy? The queen despised the monastery and all the trappings of Catholicism it stood for. In fact, she had made it quite clear that she planned to shut it down and possibly imprison the Abbot.

  She must have chose the priory to be near Howell! Sybille understood what it meant to have your mind clouded by her high ambitions and lustful desires … but over the heart of a boy? Rose was throwing her future away over the hope of winning Howell Digby!

  Sybille scanned the invitation again. Come dressed in colors of shit, scabs, and pus? It was as if Rose was begging the queen to stay away.

  For a heartbeat or two, Sybille thought about her friend Rose and what she must have been going through. The girl had even fewer resources than Sybille. Yes, she had sworn to give Sybille anything she gathered to fuel her gala. Or at least that was the way Sybille half remembered it. And clearly she had been lying to Sybille all along about planning her own event. But it was rather sweet that Rose had made the required dress for the party so simple—it must be for Sybille’s sake. After all, almost her entire wardrobe had been shredded by Avis.

  Rereading the invasion for the tenth time, Sybille was struck by a new question. Since when did Rose Castletown write showy verse like this? The only person who Sybille knew in the palace who fancied herself a writer was Dorothie. Was that curly-haired harlot playing all sides at once? Such a betrayal could not go unanswered!

  After climbing out of bed and into the same dress she’d been wearing for days, Sybille hurried into the drawing room, aware that Dorothie made a morning ritual of writing on the room’s window seat. Today was no different.

  Sybille stormed over and waved the invitation in Dorothie’s face. “Did you write this?”

  Dorothie blanched. She gently pushed Sybille’s wrinkled invitation away, and held up her own. “This drivel?” Dorothie said. “You’re talking to me, you’re aware of that? You’re talking to Kit. Those last lines don’t even really rhyme. Beside the priory is gone.”

  “Gone?” Sybille asked.

  “You mean you haven’t heard?” Dorothie said, and pulled Sybille down on the cushion next to her. She had much news to report.

  For a full quarter of an hour, the monastery blaze was the only topic discussed at court, making it one of the most talked about subjects of the young queen’s reign.

  From her seat on the throne, Her Royal Highness issued a swift denial, proclaiming that that she had absolutely nothing to do with the nearby inferno. But when she added with one raised eyebrow, “Heaven’s vengeance appears swifter than our own,” the courtiers took her words as an invitation to entertain her with their own clever observations.

  The lords and ladies quickly attempted to outdo each other with bons mots. Lady Vivian, the newest of the ladies in waiting, quipped, “I do believe the Catholics’ hell is a bit hotter than even they predicted.”

  Lady Emily composed a bit of verse in French, which translated roughly as,

  “The Pope himself would eject the host

  Before fleeing like a fiery ghost.”

  Three lords placed themselves in a tableau, with one playing the fire itself while the other two portrayed unsuspecting monks.

  And then …

  Like the monastery fire itself, the subject was extinguished in the room. The courtiers were already experts at spotting the easily-bored queen’s silent yawn, a tiny shake of her head, and the slight downturn of her gaze. They knew better than to continue with a topic when it had died in Elizabeth’s eyes.

  But that didn’t prevent the rest of the palace from buzzing with the news. The third and final Challenge gala had gone up in flames even before it began. All day, servants and masters alike waited to hear if there would be a new location.

  Wherever the masque might take place, it would have to be outside Richmond Palace—everyone was well aware that not a single closet or pantry was available within the palace walls.

  Then, late in the day, word spread that the event would go on as planned.

  Rose Castletown’s gala would be held in the great room of the still smoking monastery.

  SIXTEEN

  When Rose stepped inside Richmond Priory with one tentative foot and then the other, the ground still felt hot.

  She wasn’t sure if that was an after-effect of the inferno over a day ago, or the culmination of so many of her machinations occurring at the same time. Was it possible that invisible plans could create enough friction to actually burst into flames in the air itself? Or that through all the scheming and betrayal she had summoned a little bit of hell to Earth?

  Whatever the answer, it would not change the fact that today had finally arrived. The third event of the Challenge. Rose’s gala.

  Unable to resist, she had arrived at the burned-out priory far too early. The gala was set to begin at eleven o’clock in the evening. Where the other girls had relied on most of the day or at least a good chunk of it, Rose had allotted only a little more than an hour for hers.

  The blacked walls were still upright and, three stories abo
ve, the roof was still intact, but everything in between, from the fire-heated earth to the tiles of the roof, was gone, creating a dark and cavernous space. It had cost twenty-five pounds to have the wreckage hauled away. Rose had paid another twenty pounds for a carpenter to put in a black-painted thirty-foot long platform that ran the entire wall of one side of the room. Atop the platform sat an enormous dark chair, which some might describe as a throne.

  The biggest expense, however, had been the series of six lanterns—more similar to beacons used in lighthouses than anything else—that lined the wall opposite the platform. Dark now, they were being carefully filled with oil by three of the six adult workers she had hired for the gala.

  All was nearly ready.

  Even the twelve children she had continued to employ were wearing their “costumes.” All were dressed in simple black robes with loose hoods that shadowed their faces. She had come to know the children over the past week or so, and the hoods didn’t prevent her from easily spotting her favorite worker who was rehearsing a job he’d been perfecting: carrying a tray filled with cups.

  “Hello, Absurd,” Rose called to him.

  “My lady,” he responded, showing off his skill by giving the tray he held out in one hand a little spin. Not a single cup fell. He pushed back his hood as he scampered closer to her. “We all want very much to thank you, my lady,” he said as his large dark eyes gazed adoringly up at her. “For the work in the grand palace, for the work here, for all the practice you’ve given us—”

  Rose gave a shake of her head to stop him, and then softened the gesture with a smile. “You have … and will … more than pay me back.” She touched his chin affectionately. “Now off with you, I think Mr. Wootton will be wondering what you’re about, don’t you?”