The Fatal Fashione by Karen Harper Read Free Book Online Page B

this man, but his demeanor and delivery were not what she had expected. Was he one who could change his leopard’s spots quickly and at will, like Satan himself?
    This man bore watching, she decided, and not just because he was quite clever. She didn’t trust those whom she knew opposed her yet tried to get in her good graces. The man had criticized her garments, her judgment, and her morals, yet done it so cunningly she had found no sure footing to scold him in turn.
    “That is all for now, as I have much to do,” she told him, and waited until he bowed himself out. No good if he’d be hanging about to hear there could have been a murder in a starch house today—and in a vat of the very thing he had labeled “the devil’s liquor.”
    Elizabeth barely had time to tell Cecil that Hosea Cantwell was not only a critic of morals but a chameleon of moods when her trio of servants trooped back in via the privy staircase that faced the river. Her lady-in-waiting Rosie Radcliffe, now her most trusted confidante since her dear friend Kat Ashley had died, had opened the door for them behind the arras when they knocked.
    “We decided to come by this entrance, for you told us to go the back way, Your Grace,” Ned explained.
    “Good, but never mind all that. Was there a dead woman in the vat?”
    “No—and yes,” Meg said, out of breath. “Someone had lifted Hannah out—”
    “It was Hannah von Hoven?”
    “Yes, I regret to say so, Your Grace. Between the time I fled and the time we got back, someone, perhaps her murderer, had pulled her from the starch bath and laid her out on a shelf.”
    “She looked—Hannah looked, not Meg,” Jenks put in, “like she’d been dipped and set out to stiffen. And she was starting to, in more ways than one.”
    Ned rolled his eyes and shook his head at Jenks’s dull-witted rendition of things. Cecil and Rosie moved to stand on either side of their queen as she sank into a chair at the head of the long table where her paperwork awaited in Cecil’s neat piles.
    But life wasn’t neat, wasn’t fair, Elizabeth thought. Hannah had been young, ambitious, and comely, just setting out on a great endeavor in England. Even before promoting her to Thomas Gresham, the queen had hoped to champion the young woman as a symbol of competition in the kingdom. Like Elizabeth Tudor, Hannah von Hoven was a woman making her own way despite the odds against her. After all, Hanna’s rival starcher had a husband, one who perhaps really ruled the roost.
    “Even if we might think she slipped into the starch by accident,” Elizabeth said with a half-groan, half-sigh, “we can hardly tell ourselves she got herself out and onto a shelf as if she were her own starched goods for sale. Yes, I wager we have a murder on our hands, unless, like Meg, someone else just stumbled on her, chose to pull her out, then panicked and fled.”
    She thought again of Cantwell’s prediction of a curse caused by starch and the results rippling through her kingdom. Pure coincidence, she thought, that one of the royal starchers now seemed to have been fatally punished.
    “Your Grace,” Cecil said, “are you quite all right? Shall I send for something, or do you need one of Meg’s calming potions?”
    “If so, I should share it with her for being the one who found Hannah drowned—or however she died. Were there marks on her throat or any other discernible bruises?” she asked the three of them.
    “I—she’s so slippery and sticky with starch,” Meg said, “we didn’t wash her off to look closely, but ran back here to tell you.”
    “Your Grace,” Cecil put in quickly, “do you mean to pursue this and not just turn it over to the constable and coroner?”
    “The men of my city’s criminal law enforcement will be informed in the morning, after we’ve had a good look around the place and at the body.”
    “We?” Cecil repeated. “But, Your Grace, surely you don’t intend to go there yourself to—”
    “The