Free The Queene’s Christmas by Karen Harper

queen at first. Meg’s cloak was thin compared to hers. She must give the girl one on New Year’s Day to ward off the sting of winter. At least this had a hood to pull up and gather close about her neck.
    They had not brought a lantern, for they knew the palace windows overhead would light their way, and a nearly full moon shone off thin snow and thickening river ice. The queen’s stomach growled, as if in foreboding; she realized she should have eaten something more, however unsettled she’d felt.
    “The Thames is near frozen clear across,” Jenks said. “We’ll have that Frost Fair for certain.”
    The lights of Lambeth Palace, home of the Bishop of London and Martin Bane, when Bane wasn’t at court protecting their interests, shone across the expanse of ice. Lambeth had its own barge with oarsmen, but with the Thames gone nearly solid, Elizabeth realized that the churchmen must have been traveling rutted roads and crossing crowded London Bridge. They’d be happy enough to soon use a cart or sleigh. When ice must be traversed, horses wore studded shoes, and wheels had nails pounded through them for traction.
    Before the river tidal flats began, though they were but frozen mud now, a small path wended its way around the palace’s stony skirts, and they followed that One more turn and they could see the torchlit porter’s door that guarded the kitchen block from the public street on the other side of the walls.
    “That reminds me,” Elizabeth whispered. “Jenks, did you inquire from the day porter if anyone unusual came in or out of the kitchen-block gate this afternoon?”
    “Yes, Your Grace. No traffic for once. All the Twelve Days supplies were already in, he said, and no one wants to leave where all the good times are—that’s how he put it. Except for Ned.”
    “Ned put it how?”
    “No, I mean, Ned went out the porter’s door this afternoon, looking most distraught, too, didn’t even answer the porter’s 'heigh ho’ to him. The poor man—the porter, Your Grace— thinks Ned’s really the hail-fellow-well-met he plays in the come-dies.”
    “Why would Topside be going out this back gate today?” Cecil asked sharply.
    “He learned his old troupe of players is in town,” Elizabeth explained, “so I gave him permission to invite them for a performance or two before all this happened. And he was vexed because I named Leicester as Lord of Misrule. Cecil, get us past the porter, won’t you, as I have no wish for him to know it’s me.”
    He walked ahead and knocked on the bolted door; his words floated to Jenks and the queen. “My lady and I have been walking by the river with a guard, but it’s far too cold. We want to get back in by the kitchens, get a bit of warmth from the big hearth fires.”
    “Oh, my lord secretary, certes,” the man cried and rattled his keys overlong opening the gate. With Elizabeth holding her hood close to her face, the three of them hustled past before he caught a glimpse of anyone else. Icy wind even here in the courtyard swirled up Elizabeth’s skirts, but once inside, it was warmer, almost steamy with mingled, succulent smells. Despite the work they’d come to do, the queen felt even hungrier.
    “I told Stout to seal off the dresser’s workroom and let the man who replaced him work elsewhere for a few days,” Cecil said, “lest we should need to return like this.”
    “Good planning, my lord,” she said. “Jenks, go find Stout and tell him that we’re here and why—and bring back some lanterns again.”
    He hastened to obey while Cecil unwrapped the thick twine stretched across the door from latch to hinge. Neither rope nor string, it looked to be the same sturdy stock that had been used in multiple strands to make the hangman’s noose. Cecil opened the door. The darkness within seemed profound, almost a living, breathing being. In the pale slab of light from the hall sconce, the queen’s eyes adjusted slowly. She imagined she could see the corpse