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about?”
    “No, but I can’t bear to go back again, Your Grace,” she insisted, twisting the handkerchief. “That hand just came floating up through that starch bath, probably made with my cuckoo-pint. And just think how red and raw starch makes skin … and a whole body steeping in there … bad enough to drown in water, but …”
    “You must go back now,” Elizabeth repeated, and pulled open the door only to have Ned nearly tumble into the room. Ordinarily she would have scolded him, but not now.
    “Ned, help Meg settle herself, then fetch Jenks and a yeoman guard—take Adrian Bates, but tell him not to wear his livery—and the four of you head immediately for Hannah von Hoven’s starch house, where there may have been a fatal accident.”
    “Hannah’s dead?”
    “Meg isn’t sure. Hie yourselves there before someone else walks in, then report back to me forthwith. Leave the guard to watch the door. Tell him to just hang about there, not to look as if he’s guarding it, but no one else must go in until we can look around. I must send a message to Thomas Gresham not to visit Hannah’s today, for I fear I might have ordered him into a compromising situation. I only pray this will not turn out to be some sort of foul play, not only for Hannah’s sake but for the stability of the starchers’ booming trade here in London.”
    “You mean,” Ned said, as he helped Meg to rise with his hand on her elbow, “that the insults and threats the van der Passes have made toward Hannah might make your chief starcher look guilty and, if Hannah’s gone, you’d lose both of them?”
    “What?” the queen cried, snagging Ned’s arm so that he swung Meg back around and stood between the two women. “Ned, you jump far afield. I pray it isn’t Hannah, and I have heard of none such threats from the van der Passes.”
    “Oh, yes, Your Grace,” he insisted, “everybody knows it. Disparaging remarks about Hannah’s work to customers, mostly from Dirck, Mrs. van der Passe’s husband. A blowhard who towers over most men and flaunts that he was a knight in the service of the low countries before they came here to—”
    “Oh, no,” Meg blurted, gripping her hands together between her breasts. “He may be the man I bumped into in the street. Cursed me, he did, and said words odd, like ‘ja’ instead of ‘you,’ but then so many folks in London talk strange these days, including Hannah.”
    “Get Jenks,” Elizabeth insisted, as foreboding made her shiver. “And keep your eyes open, all of you. Go the back way. I fear the twists of this so far, and we don’t even know who’s in that vat of starch.”
    The queen pressed her royal insignia into the wax seal of her hasty note to Thomas Gresham and took it to the hall doorway herself. “Clifford,” she ordered her big yeoman standing guard there with his ceremonial halberd, “this must go straightaway to Gresham House on Bishopsgate to Sir Thomas Gresham, or if he’s not there, to the building site of the mercantile exchange.”
    But as she glanced beyond him at the clusters of her ladies, chatting with each other and the courtiers who stood about, she saw Thomas Gresham himself coming down the corridor with great speed, especially for one who limped so badly. His walking stick thumped out a quick beat on the oaken floor as if someone were pounding on a door. He looked frantic.
    Thank God he was safe, but his haste boded nothing good. As she snatched the note back, she realized Gresham might have been to Hannah’s loft and found the body. He’d probably already reported it, and a public inquiry might turn up that Dirck van der Passe had been in the vicinity—or that her servant Meg was.
    “Your Majesty, may I have leave to speak?” Thomas cried out when he was yet twenty feet away.
    “Enter first,” she called to him, and gestured toward her withdrawing chamber.
    She could tell he was loath not to shout to her from where he was, yet he followed her into the