Haunt Me Still

PROLOGUE

BLADE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

INTERLUDE

WOOD

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

INTERLUDE

MIRROR

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 33

CHAPTER 34

CHAPTER 35

INTERLUDE

CAULDRON

CHAPTER 36

CHAPTER 37

CHAPTER 38

CHAPTER 39

CHAPTER 40

CHAPTER 41

INTERLUDE

A DEED WITHOUT A NAME

CHAPTER 42

CHAPTER 43

CHAPTER 44

CHAPTER 45

CHAPTER 46

CHAPTER 47

CHAPTER 48

INTERLUDE

EPILOGUE

AUTHOR’S NOTE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

November 1606
Hampton Court Palace

WRAPPED IN A
gown of blue-green velvet trimmed with gold, a queen’s crown on his head, the boy sat drowsing on the throne near the center of the Great Hall, just at the edge of the light. Tomorrow, it would be the king who sat there. Not a player king, but the real one, His Majesty King James I of England and VI of Scotland. Tonight, however, someone among the players had been needed to sit there and see just what the king on his throne would see as Mr. Shakespeare’s new Scottish play, blood-spattered and witch-haunted, conjured up a rite of nameless evil.

The boy, who was not in this scene, had volunteered. But the rehearsal had been unaccountably delayed, stretching deep into the frigid November night, until it was almost as cold inside the un-heated hall as it was in the frost-rimed courtyards below. The heavy gown, though, was warm, and as the hours crawled on, the boy found it hard to keep his eyes open.

Well out of the torchlight illuminating the playing area, a grizzled man-at-arms in a worn leather jerkin, gaunt as a figure of famine, leaned against the wall at the edge of a tapestry, seeming to drowse as well.

At last, movement stirred in the haze of light. Three figures, cloaked head to toe in black, skimmed in a circle about the cauldron set in the center of the hall, their voices melding into a single chant somewhere between a moan and a hiss.

“
What is it you do?
” rasped the player king as he entered, eyes wide with horror.

The answer whined through the echoing hall like the nearly human sound of the wind, or maybe the restless dead, seeking entry at the eaves:
A deed without a name
.

Not long afterward, a phalanx of children, eerily beautiful, drifted into the light, gliding one by one past the throne. In the rear, the smallest held up a mirror.

On the throne, the boy-queen sat bolt upright.

Against the wall, barely visible in the outer darkness, the old soldier’s eyes flickered open.

A few moments later, the boy slid from the throne and melted into the darkness at the back of the hall. Behind him, the man followed like an ill-fitting shadow

Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury, was wakened by his manservant in the small hours of the morning. Behind him in the darkness, two more faces floated in a double halo of candlelight, one slipping from black hair toward gray age, and the other just rising into the fullness of his prime, but both Howards and both smug. The earl of Northampton and his nephew the earl of Suffolk.

Salisbury was instantly awake. He did not know what the Howards had to look smug about at such an hour of the morning, but anything that happened in the palace without his knowledge disturbed him. When it involved the Howards, it invariably meant danger.

“It’s the boy, my lord,” said his manservant, coughing discreetly. “The players’ boy,” Suffolk specified. “He is missing,” purred Northampton. “Along with the mirror.”
Wherever that boy is,
Salisbury thought with an inward sigh,
the Howards know about it.
Aloud, he said, “rouse Dr. Dee,” and painfully sat up, aware of Northampton’s stare aimed at the hump on his back. “And send for the captain on duty.”

To the captain, he simply said, “
Find him.
”

Half an hour later, Salisbury led the way, splay-footed and limping, toward the waiting chamber off the Great Hall, aware at every step of the proud, straight stalking of the tall Howard earls flanking him. He did not like working with either of them, especially Northampton. Generally speaking, Salisbury was fastidious about his person and his apparel, small and misshapen though he was, but not about people, whose talents he assessed with a cold, accurate eye and then used as necessary. But the Howards curdled something within his soul, making him long to step out into the nearest rose garden, whatever the weather, to rid himself of some not-quite-detectable stench. The king, however, had fallen under Northampton’s spell and had made the occasional partnership unavoidable. Witness this unsavory business of the boy. When it came to the kingdom’s safety, Salisbury was not above using anybody, but he did not enjoy baiting traps with children.

Dr. Dee was waiting for them, his dark robe and long white beard fairly shaking with indignation. “You told me you were keeping them here for their safety,” he charged. “The boy and the mirror both.”

Salisbury sighed. Not for
their
safety. For the king’s. For the kingdom’s. Why couldn’t men as undoubtedly brilliant as Dr. Dee make that distinction?

The earl did not give much credence to such things as magic mirrors and conjuring spirits. But just in case, he kept his finger on the pulse of what was happening among the kingdom’s conjurors, John Dee foremost among them. His brilliance as a mathematician and navigator was, after all, unmatched, and he had done Salisbury’s father and the old queen good service in the field of cryptology. If even a fraction of Dee’s claims about conjuring angels or transmuting base metal into gold turned out to be true, Salisbury wanted a handle on the old man.

So when Dee had come running, spouting a wild tale of blood and fire seen in one of his show-stones, Salisbury had listened with a seriousness that had shaken Dr. Dee even as it gratified him, and then he had interviewed the boy who claimed to have done the actual seeing. For, as Salisbury already knew, but Dr. Dee did not, there were indeed plans afoot among some renegade Catholics to blow up Parliament and, with it, the king.

To Dr. Dee’s chagrin, however, Salisbury had kept the boy, who seemed to have foreseen not only the Gunpowder Plot but also a mysterious woman holding a knife. And he had kept, too, the mirror the boy claimed to have seen them in.

That had been a year ago. The Powder Plot had not come off, as Salisbury had all along known it would not. The plotters had been caught and either killed in the capture or executed with the full ferocity of the law. Only one figure was still at large: the kingmaker who Salisbury was certain had been behind the plot from the beginning, but whom he had never been able to identify. Someone among the great of the kingdom who had meant to take the reins of rule amid the chaos. Someone who was most certainly among those who fawned daily on the king he had plotted to kill.

Salisbury had naturally assumed that this person was a man, but the boy’s vision of a woman with red hair and dark eyes, holding a knife engraved with letters the boy could not read, had brought him up short. If the earl had believed in ghosts, he might almost have said that the boy had seen old Queen Elizabeth. But the enemy he sought was surely still among the living. The old queen’s blood ran in other veins, though—thinly, to be sure, but there. Women with Tudor and Plantagenet ancestry, and the telltale red-gold coloring to prove it, were not hard to come by at court. The king’s widely scattered family of Stewarts among them.

When it came to these royal families, that touch of flame in the hair often came with a Machiavellian ruthlessness that made the Howards, dangerous as they were, seem as innocent as kittens. It was one reason the Plantagenets, Tudors, and Stewarts had occupied thrones for centuries, Salisbury reflected sourly, while the Howards had lost the lone dukedom that had been their pinnacle of achievement—unless you counted the two queens whose crowns Henry VIII had cut off, along with their heads. Tudors and Stewarts, though, had produced women of more formidable mettle, Queen Elizabeth and her cousin, the present king’s mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, prime among them. So why not a woman?

Or a woman in concert with a still unknown man.

So Salisbury had set out to discover the identity of the face in the mirror. He’d tried the boy in various positions at court—but there were limited opportunities for a young boy to observe great ladies unnoticed, and the child had never encountered her. In the end, it had been another of Mr. Shakespeare’s plays that gave the earl the idea of installing the boy among the King’s Men, giving him both a perfect excuse and a prime vantage point from which to observe the courtiers drawn around the king. He’d had to use Suffolk, the lord chamberlain, whose job it was to organize the king’s palace and all the entertainments within it, for that. But he’d bypassed the Howards when commissioning a play to touch on plots against a king’s life; that he had done himself. It wouldn’t be only the boy, of course, scanning the crowds for reactions. But only the boy could identify the particular face of his dreams.

Except that now, on the eve of the performance, the young idiot had gone missing. If it hadn’t been for the Howards, he’d have concluded that the young rascal was in the kitchen pinching puddings, and gone right back to sleep. As it was, he listened wearily to the tramping feet of soldiers fanning through the palace.

An hour later, the captain skidded back into his presence. “We’ve found something, Your Lordship,” he panted. But when asked what, he just shook his head. “I think, sir, you had better come and see for yourself.”

And so they had marched through long winding ways back into the oldest part of the palace. The chamber where they stopped was marked as unassigned on the lord chamberlain’s list, but the door was locked from the inside. Stranger still, several of the captain’s men swore up and down that they had heard an ungodly cry from somewhere in this corridor—though all the other rooms were open and empty. Grown men, all of them, but Salisbury could sense the ooze of fear on their breaths.

“Break it open,” he said shortly, aware of the Howards clenching in anticipation beside him.

It took axe-work; Hampton Court had been made to last. With a wrenching groan, the door at last split down the center and the soldiers stood aside, allowing the earls to pass.

Even from the threshold, it could be seen that the room was empty. There were no rushes on the floor, no hangings on the walls, and no furniture cluttering the space. A fire, however, had recently warmed the grate, though it had been allowed to die out. The air still bore faint traces of some stew or broth that had seethed there. In the midst of this emptiness, the only object to stop the eye was a body lying stretched out on the flagged floor in front of the hearth. Draped over it was a heavy gown of peacock blue.

Dr. Dee darted forward, plucking a small slice of darkness from a fold in the velvet. With precise fingers, he held up a dark disc of polished stone: his missing mirror. The old conjuror rubbed it with his sleeve, peering into its depths as Suffolk leaned forward with unseemly eagerness. “What do you see?”

Dr. Dee looked up, the skin below his watery eyes sagging, and shook his head. “There is a dark veil drawn across it.” A shudder passed through his entire body. “Whatever this mirror has seen, it is evil.”

A boy is dead,
thought Salisbury.
We need no magic to tell us that.
In a flicker of irritation, he twitched the gown aside.

Beside him, Suffolk and Northampton went preternaturally still. Their surprise was momentary, so quickly smoothed over that they would have fooled almost any other man, but Salisbury could often tell what a man was thinking before he was aware of the drifts of his own thoughts—to the point that some men muttered that it was Salisbury, not Dr. Dee, who bent strange spirits to his will. Now, beneath his rigid mask of revulsion, he felt a sly curiosity waken and stretch through every vein and sinew. Whatever the Howards had been expecting, this was not it.

The body at their feet was naked and strangely bound. But it was not the boy.