Murder by Misrule

CHAPTER 8

  The bell at St. Margaret's tolled the third quarter. Nearly ten o'clock! Tom and his friends had to hurry. The dancing master was French and a fiend for punctuality. As they stripped down to their shirtsleeves for an hour of vigorous exercise, Trumpet said, "We're going to have to speak with Lady Rich."

  Ben grimaced. Stephen drew a hissing breath between clenched teeth.

  Tom asked, "What? Do you think she'll refuse to see us?"

  "Don't you know who she is?" Stephen goggled at Tom as if he were an idiot. "She's Stella, you buffoon. The Stella. From the sonnets of Astrophel and Stella?"

  Tom's breath caught in his throat. He had forgotten. Lady Rich sounded like a matronly personage, wide of girth and wobbly of jowl. Instead, she was none other than the beauteous Penelope Devereux, renowned throughout Europe as the object of the late Sir Philip Sidney's unrequited love, made immortal by his poetry. Catching a glimpse of the glorious Stella had been high on his list of desires when he first came to London.

  But to meet her, face to face, speak words to her, and hear her voice in answer? It was beyond imagining.

  "God's teeth," Tom said. "She'll never receive us. We're nithings. We're worms."

  "Speak for yourself," Stephen huffed.

  "She might," Ben said. "It's little enough to ask. One brief question: What is the name of your limner?"

  "Any favor from a courtier is significant," Trumpet said. "We'll have to bring a gift." He spoke grimly, as if facing a quest worthy of a Ralegh or a Drake.

  Tom frowned. "Something symbolical, don't you think? Like a perfect rose?" He knew he'd be paying for it from his dwindling allowance.

  "A perfect rose in late November would be more miraculous than symbolical," Ben said.

  Tom racked his brains for a gift that was in season, not too horribly expensive, and suitable for one of the kingdom's premier ladies. He came up empty.

  "What about Mr. Bacon?" Stephen said. "His connections at court are the main reason we chose him as our tutor."

  Ben frowned. "One of the reasons. But yes, certainly we should ask him. We should make a full report."

  Dance practice went well, considering how preoccupied they were by the Lady Rich problem. Soon they'd be ready to start rehearsing in their performance costumes. La volta was challenging enough in everyday clothes. Stiffly padded formal doublets and upper stocks added another whole level of difficulty.

  After their lesson, at Tom's insistence, they went back to the house near the murder scene to look for the limner. The woman who opened the door claimed to have no knowledge of any such person. She'd seen no portrait painting or signs of such. She and her husband had recently arrived from Warwickshire to seek permission to travel to the Low Countries to visit her husband's relations. She pointed out that the house wasn't terribly comfortable and suggested that a lady of Penelope Rich's standing might have moved to better chambers inside the palace proper. Tom felt thoroughly deflated. His angel could be anywhere by this time.

  They barely made it back to Gray's in time for dinner at noon. The meal was followed by the usual two hours of case-putting, in which the students learned to think on their feet. Nathaniel Welbeck put Ben on the spot in front of the whole assembly, skewering him with precedents concerning a hypothetical case that pitted the claims of a bastard son against a legitimate minor daughter.

  Ben, stammering and blushing, blurted out a completely irrelevant maxim. Welbeck turned to sneer at Francis Bacon, who had lately begun dining in commons. "It appears that Mr. Whitt's knowledge of the law is waning rather than waxing under his new tutelage."