The Fatal Fashione by Karen Harper Read Free Book Online

she’d lost her voice, her thoughts. Lost herself. Desperately, she’d been trying to remember something—or was it to forget?
    “Not’scaped from a forced betrothal or some such, have you? You look frighted. Someone been bothering you? We’re whitsters, see? We wash, bleach, and dry linens, that’s our trade. You don’t belong here. You just keep clear of trouble on the streets, hear?”
    She nodded. Her head hurt, and her eyes ached from staring so long at the bright sheets in the wind and sun—and then at the high, open window across the way. Its slanted planes caught the sinking sun now and nearly blinded her, but she kept staring. She wanted to run from something, but her feet felt like lead, as in a nightmare. Was she dreaming? Something dreadful had happened. She’d seen it. But what?
    “You hungry?” the woman asked, holding out a hunk of bread with a piece of yellow cheese.
    She shook her head.
    “Cat got your tongue, then?”
    No, I’m fine, she tried to say, but she didn’t hear her own words, her voice. She just kept hearing a muffled scream—and then nothing else.
    But she did know one thing. The mere sight of food almost made her sick. She’d vomited in the hedges of this field earlier. She wanted to walk away from this place, this view, but she couldn’t bear to go home. Not now. She was not even sure where home was.
    “Here now, mistress,” the same woman was saying, “you look peaked. Can I fetch someone for you, then? My name’s Ursala Hemmings, so what’s yours, eh? I’ve a friend near here, has a starch shop, and you could rest there out of the wind and sun while we find your folks.”
    A starch shop … starch shop.
    Either she screamed No! at the woman or just thought she did. Some kind of sound like a shriek echoed, echoed, trapped in her head, trapped in a big attic. She gripped her laced fingers tighter as if she were praying. But she wasn’t. She was just trying to make all the grief and horror stop.
    Wending her way through the women with their linens, she turned away and started out of the busy field. Her shadow was long now, as if someone dark followed her. She didn’t feel her feet. It was almost as if she floated, as if she had to swim through a thick, white haze. She gazed one last time at the high, open window, then forced her feet at a quicker pace away.
    “You sent for the Reverend Hosea Cantwell, Your Majesty?” Cecil asked as he came in with a stack of bills and grants for her to sign. “He’s been put in the corridor anteroom to await you and seems mad as a wet hen—a dour Puritan one.”
    The queen stopped walking so fast her skirts swayed. She’d been pacing, waiting for word about the body in the starch vat. Cecil knew naught of that yet, though he’d been a key member of her Privy Plot Council. Over the last eight years, a small group of trusted friends and servants had helped her solve several murders that had struck close to the crown.
    Besides that distress, she’d been praying her men who had fanned out over the city with Thomas Gresham’s staff would find his daughter. Never had her little band searched for a missing person who was not a murderer, but she had silently vowed the Gresham girl would be found.
    “’S blood, yes, I sent for Cantwell, but it slipped my mind,” she admitted, and smacked the heel of her hand against her forehead so hard she rattled her pearl eardrops. “My lord, I cannot abide Cantwell’s public pulpit rantings against me. Or against current fashions, as he’s likely to damage the ruff-making industry or the starch market. That, in turn, would affect the dyers, the seamstresses, and the tailors,” she plunged on, flinging gestures.
    “I completely agree, Your Grace. Indeed, one man could affect the balance of crafts and trades, and just now while the mercantile exchange is being built.”
    “Exactly. Hosea Cantwell makes far too much out of little things, not to mention he’s one of the most vocal agitators in