Free The Twylight Tower by Karen Harper Page B

she added, staring at him pointedly, “I believe Geoffrey’s demise was naught but sad mischance.”

    “SHOULD THE LAD SING AS WELL AS PLAY, YOUR GRACE?” Harry’s voice boomed across to her that evening.
    Sitting in her darkened bedchamber window, Elizabeth shook her head and rolled her eyes. She had sent everyone but Kat from the room to keep this secret, and Harry was shouting from the tower. Did he not know other windows opened onto this courtyard?
    “ ’S blood,” she hissed across the short distance to him, “melody, my lord, just melody. Something sweet and soothing merging to a tune more dissonant, I cannot recall exactly what.”
    Franklin’s lute knew what she wanted, even if Harry did not. But Elizabeth could tell that Harry had Franklin sitting too far over, no doubt not even above the fatal spot in the courtyard. The wind was picking up again, playing its haunting music, blending with the night. Then, devil take him too, her lute lad began to play that tune about fickle friends again.
    “I’m going out there myself,” the queen told Kat.
    “But your ladies and guards will all know if you go out—”
    “Out the back stairs. Come if you will,” she added, snatching and lighting a fat beeswax candle before Kat could lay her cloak about her.
    Going out the small back door and down a short hallway, Elizabeth climbed the curving stairs inside the tower’s thick stone skin. At least Harry had left torches at regular intervals, for, as on the night of Geoffrey’s death, no lights lit the parapet. Not waiting for Kat, whom she could hear laboring on the stairs behind her, Elizabeth banged the wooden door openagainst the wall as she joined the others. Her candle sputtered out, but she could see better here.
    “Ah,” she said, looking up into the vast heavens, “the stars are out.”
    Luke Morgan, standing closest, swept her a bow. “It takes the dark to make some things clear,” he said, like some sage philosopher. She thrust her candle at him and pushed past on the narrow walkway toward Harry and Franklin.
    “Sit at least two more niches that way,” she ordered her lutenist, pointing. “Harry, where you stand was, so I hear, the place the lute was leaned on this low wall.”
    “These natural seats are so deep here,” Franklin put in, doing as she bid, “and have such a solid backrest, I cannot fathom anyone just toppling over from lost balance.”
    “He had been drinking heavily,” the queen countered, though she realized he’d had little time to do so between playing for the dancing and starting his music up here. Had she just been so angry with him for falling and for smelling of strong drink that she’d blamed him unfairly for his own death? Or had she not wanted anything dire to interrupt her fine summer with Robert and resented Geoffrey for that?
    “At least, Your Grace,” Harry’s voice broke into her agonizing, “Geoffrey carefully preserved that lute you gave him, honoring mayhap both his music and you before he—he must have fallen or leaped, as you say.”
    “It could have been thus,” she put in as she pictured it all. “He had recklessly mixed his sack and my malmsey and knew he would puke. Wanting toprotect the lute, he put it carefully down a bit away from him,” she explained, pacing and mimicking motions, “then leaned over the edge to throw up—and simply toppled.”
    “Whatever we can deduce, one thing is sure,” Harry said when she stood gazing overlong into the night. “Though it was no doubt as black as this, you must be the only eyewitness. How much time elapsed between the moment he ceased to play and when you heard Ned Topside shout from below? How much could you really see?”
    Harry was cleverly playing on her guilty conscience, but it was hardly her fault that the man died, she thought, growing more frustrated and furious each moment Harry kept meddling. In each of the other two murders she had solved, she owed a debt to the deceased or was at