The Twylight Tower Read Free

upon you in this great endeavor.”
    “I pray so—for the sake of queen and kingdom,” he said to her alone as he rose and replaced his cap on his slick head. “Your Grace, I also pray you’ll not heed seductive Siren voices while I am away—”
    Thunder made him look like a mute mouthing words. No one waited until he and his men were mounted. When the queen made it back inside and wiped the rain from her face, her palm showed smeared crimson.
    “Vile thorns. Jenks,” she called when she saw him at the fringe of the soaked crowd, “did you find who tossed those roses?”
    “Probably,” Kat Ashley, her First Lady of the Bedchamber, put in, “the same person who sneaked in and hacked them from your privy garden during the night. Least that’s what your herb girl said.”
    “These were up on the top windowsill,” Jenks said, and extended a handful of wilted roses. “Nearly up to the roof—see?”
    “But who threw them so carelessly, or did the wind just sail them amiss?” Elizabeth demanded.
    “Don’t know,” he said, frowning and shrugging. “No one was there.”
    “It was, no doubt,” Robin said in the awkward silence, “some secret admirer so driven by passion he did not heed the proper way to give flowers to the queen of his heart.”
    “Then I shall have music to soothe the savagebeast,” Elizabeth retorted despite her annoyance and unease. “Someone fetch my master lutenist for a song about a sunny day!” she ordered, and clapped her hands as everyone scattered to fall into line behind her again. Except, that is, for Robin, who walked backward up the broad staircase, holding her hand and leading the way.

Chapter the First
    Pastime with good company

I love and shall until I die.

Grudge who will but none deny

May God be pleased, thus live will I

For my pastance, hunt, sing, and dance

My heart is set on goodly sport

For my comfort, who shall me let?
    — KING HENRY VIII
JULY 28, 1560
    WILLIAM CECIL STRODE RAPIDLY FROM HIS hired barge through the edge of town to Richmond Palace. Though but forty years old, the pounding ride from Edinburgh had made mincemeat of his muscles, so he’d managed to come the last few miles on the Thames. Usually he was glad to see the tower-topped silhouette of Richmond, the queen’s favorite summer home, but today he wasn’t so sure.
    Rumors the queen was besotted with Robert Dudley were rampant, even in the northern shires, and he could tell from afar she was letting her royal duties slide. Did she think the business of her kingdom could go on a holiday at her whim? He’d been away from court two months, and that was two months too long.
    Cecil stopped and stared at the looming palace.Situated eight miles outside London with thick orchards and a game-filled park embracing it, Richmond offered all sorts of pleasant diversions and escapes, though this visit promised neither. As he gripped the leather satchel with his important papers close to his chest, hoping something would calm him, his eyes skimmed the balanced beauty of the place.
    Unlike jumbled Whitehall, the queen’s principal palace in London, the main structure here had been laid out in a planned and orderly fashion. It was a place after his own heart, he thought as he trudged across the outer quadrangle. The first Tudor ruler, the queen’s grandfather, King Henry VII, a stern and disciplined man, had overseen Richmond’s construction. Ironic, Cecil mused, that his heir, Henry VIII, was of the opposite disposition, all passion, appetites, and swagger. And their heir Elizabeth? Somehow she was both personalities at war with each other.
    “Good for you, Lord Secretary, settling the Scots war with profit for our England!” someone called to him from a cluster of courtiers as he entered the gate to the middle court. He lifted his free arm in reply, but kept going toward the entrance to the state apartments, a series of rooms with the finest views in the vast place. Out one set of windows was the