Free Murder at Hatfield House by Amanda Carmack

had found Elizabeth’s smallest, most treasured keepsakes, and since they held no clues to treason, they were destroyed. It was as if the people whose memory they evoked were being snatched away all over again.
    “Nay, you must bring that back, I say!” Kate suddenly heard her father cry. “I must have that back, it is not finished.”
    Her desperate gaze swung toward the open kitchen door just in time to see one of Braceton’s men emerge with a sheaf of parchment in his hands. Matthew Haywood stumbled out after him, leaning heavily on his stick. Tears streaked his gaunt, lined face.
    “Father, no!” Kate cried. She ran over to him, catching him as he tripped on the last step. When she’d left for the village, she had made sure he was warm by their own hearth, with a glass of the princess’s good wine beside him and hard at work on his Christmas church music. He was having a good day, relatively free of pain.
    Now here he was, barely able to walk, desperately lurching through the house, another victim of Braceton’s mission.
    “Father, you must go back to bed,” Kate whispered urgently.
    “He took my manuscript,” Matthew said, pointing a shaking hand at the servant as the man handed the papers to Braceton. As Braceton carelessly flicked through them, Kate saw it was her father’s Christmas church music, the work he had been laboring over all summer in hopes of cheering the princess’s holidays. The composition that was his only distraction, his only passion.
    “My father must have that back,” she insisted. “It has naught to do with any treason. My father is only Her Grace’s musician, and that is his livelihood.”
    “What is it, then?” Braceton said, frowning down at the notes as if he tried to decipher words in the Araby language.
    “A Christmas service for Princess Elizabeth’s chapel, that is all,” Kate said. Her father’s breath sounded strained and wheezing, and he leaned against her heavily. She feared he could not speak at all, that the exertion had only increased his illness.
    “A Protestant service?” Braceton casually tossed the manuscript into the fire.
    Matthew moaned and sagged against Kate’s shoulder as his months of work, his art, burned away. Elizabeth rushed over to wrap her arm around him and help Kate hold him up.
    “Be of good courage, Master Haywood,” she whispered. “They can burn paper, or even flesh, but never what is in our hearts. Here, Kate, let us get him back to his chamber.”
    But as they started to turn away, worse was coming toward them. Another of Braceton’s servants emerged from the house, and in his hands was Kate’s own lute. The lute that had belonged to her mother, whose spirit seemed to be with her every time she touched the strings.
    “I hear tell they sometimes hide messages in instruments, Lord Braceton,” the man said. “This was near that manuscript.”
    “Indeed so,” Braceton answered. “Good thinking, my lad. They do say that even that traitor Wyatt sent letters in a spinet. Let me see it.”
    As the man handed Braceton the instrument, Kate was so blinded by fury she strangled on the words crowding in her throat. But Elizabeth shouted, “That you shall not have!”
    She gestured to Penelope, who hurried over to take her place holding up Matthew. Then Elizabeth strode forward and actually snatched the lute from Braceton’s meaty hands. The hands that were defiling the delicate inlaid wood and precious strings. Kate had never felt such anger.
    “How dare you, madam?” Braceton shouted. “I am under orders from the queen to search every inch of this snake pit. You shall not gainsay me.”
    “Search my own rooms to your petty heart’s content,” Elizabeth said. “But Mistress Haywood is a young, innocent lady who has done nothing to earn your abuse. This is her personal possession.”
    Braceton and Elizabeth stared at each other for one eternal moment. Finally, astonishingly, Braceton stepped away and went back to searching