Free The Fatal Fashione by Karen Harper Page A

Meg and Ned removed the six wide rolls of fabric. Stiff as a stone effigy—body, garments, and hair—Hannah von Hoven lay as if encased in crystal.
    “Now that it’s gone dark, even in our lantern light, she seems to glow,” Meg whispered, sounding awed. “You know, the pollen from the cuckoo-pint herbs the starch is made from glows in the dark.”
    “She is not glowing in the dark,” Elizabeth insisted. “She just looks pearl-coated because of our lights on that sheen of starch. Men, lift her over here and carefully.”
    Ned grimaced as he helped Clifford, and not, she suspected, from the weight of the corpse. “Never felt anything quite like this,” he muttered. “She’s slick but sticky, too. And she looks like—like she’s flying with her hems and hair like this.”
    “Or been caught in the big breezes outside,” Clifford put in.
    Elizabeth nodded. In the starch vat, Hannah’s hair must have drifted or floated, then set into this bizarre shape, which made it look as if her tresses were wings sprouting from the sides of her head. Her skirts—she wore a brown work gown with only one petticoat—also had assumed a strange shape, perhaps that of the coffin-like vat.
    Elizabeth jumped as Meg broke the solemn silence. “She looks peaceful with her eyes and mouth closed, not like she’s met a violent end, but gone to sleep.”
    “Or has been arranged in death to look so,” Elizabeth surmised, “just as someone might close the eyes of a corpse and compose the features before burial. Men, stand away for propriety’s sake and search the loft for anything you deem unusual. We women will examine the corpse.”
    Wiping their hands off, Ned and Clifford seemed only too eager to obey. They took one lantern, and Rosie held the other over the body.
    “I only met Hannah once,” Elizabeth said, “but she was so bright, in more ways than one. This is foul play, I fear, and I mean for us to discover what happened here. I will not have unwed women who strive to make their own way in my kingdom become victims of brutal men.”
    Elizabeth’s own words to Parliament danced through her brain again: Fatal fashions are treasons, greed and lust, adultery and murder, in my kingdom …
    Both Rosie and Meg looked at her wide-eyed, as if they had caught on to another reason—besides affordable, fashionable ruffs—the queen had favored Hannah von Hoven.
    “I see,” Rosie said, and Meg nodded solemnly.
    “Then let us see what we can discover here. Untie that little neck ruff of hers, if you please. It looks crushed in places, yet seems to have sprung back in others.”
    “Mayhap,” Meg murmured, “in its starch bath, it popped back.”
    But they had to find scissors and cut the stiff, S-shaped curves of the four-inch-deep ruff carefully away. Discolored bruises lay not under it but lower on her neck, like a mottled necklace against Hannah’s alabaster throat.
    “Choked or strangled,” Elizabeth whispered, “but that does not mean for certain it was the cause of her death. Pin that ruff back on, and let’s see if we can find other marks on her.”
    Pulling up sleeves so stiff they crackled, they scanned her white flesh and found blue and brown bruises on both wrists.
    “She struggled,” Meg whispered, tears in her eyes, “but someone bigger and stronger held her down in that starch. A killer strong enough or tall enough to lift her up into the vat’s liquid, either to drown her or hide her.”
    “Yes,” Elizabeth agreed, “strong enough to lift her high so the vat did not tip and, evidently, not that much of the liquid starch sloshed out. Men,” she called over to them, “see how stable that long vat is and what holds it.”
    They moved immediately to peer under it and tried to move it.
    “Seems solid,” Ned called to her. “It’s set in a sturdy wooden base, kind of like a wooden cradle, but one that doesn’t rock.”
    “There was some starch spilled on the floor,” Meg put in. “Not the first time