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stow it, man?” Ned demanded. “This isn’t the river.”
    Meg watched as the breeze, through the open window over the starch bath, made the surface seem to shudder. Both Ned and Jenks were making her so overwrought she’d like to shove their thick heads into this thick stuff.
    “Just find me a stirring stick or hand me one of those poking rods, and I’ll show you,” she ordered. “I know I saw part of a body in there, a dainty hand, graceful, too.”
    “Was it limp?” Jenks asked.
    “Not,” Ned said, “in a stiffening vat of starch.”
    “Leave off, both of you!” she demanded. As she took another step toward the vat, the soles of her shoes stuck slightly to the floor. She looked down and saw that they were standing in a half-dried, flaking puddle she was certain had not been there when she saw the hand. She knew she hadn’t splashed anything out.
    “Someone else has been here for sure,” she whispered wide-eyed, as Jenks thrust the long wooden stirring stick into her hands. Suddenly even more scared, Meg stood still as a statue. Air through the large window moved loose tendrils of her hair against her sweating forehead and cheeks. Out the window, she could see the patchwork of drying linens and hear in the distance a woman’s shouts. Shaking, she pushed the long stick down by inches into the starch bath and moved it slowly toward each of the sides of the vat, then the corners. Nothing. Nothing.
    “God as my judge, I saw a human hand in here!” she wailed.
    Ned took the stick from her and stirred to make slow ripples swirl. “Could it have been some sort of apparition? Some twist of light in this strange brew, perhaps a reflection of your own hand?”
    Almost ready to explode into sobs, she just shook her head wildly.
    “Then,” Ned went on, “the body’s either been pilfered or it’s taken itself for a walk. Maybe those were ghostly footprints on the stairs we came up.”
    “What?” Jenks challenged. His feet making light crunching sounds, he went over to stare down the steps. “Oh, those small spots of pale white? But they only go partway down and then seem to just fade into nothing.”
    “See what I mean—spirits abroad,” Ned insisted.
    Meg tried to speak calmly, rationally. “The queen will have our heads if we’ve been traipsing through footsteps and evidence and such and she decides to call a Privy Plot Council meeting to investigate.”
    Properly chastened, they searched the rest of the large, irregularly shaped loft and finally found six fat rolls of ruff fabric, two each of cambric, linen, and lawn, standing on end on a deep shelf in the farthest corner—a shelf that was dripping onto the shelf below and then onto the floor.
    “That’s just Hannah’s rolls of patching pieces,” Meg whispered. “They don’t make ruffs here.” She refused to go closer until Jenks took her arm and tugged her along.
    Without another word, the men lifted the partially wet rolls of fabric away to reveal a wet, clothed corpse on the shelf. The three of them gasped in unison, then stood, shoulder to shoulder, staring as if they worshipped at a shiny marble effigy of a saint on an altar.
    At first glance, the graceful, petite woman seemed asleep, but her slender body was glazed with a pearly film, drying from slick to crusty. It matted her pale eyelashes to her cheeks and her long, loose blond hair to her head and neck, at least where her tresses didn’t stand straight out. Still sopped with starch, her sea-blue skirts formed fantastical shapes, but the edges, hems, and fringes—and her little neck ruff—had already gone sharply stiff.

Chapter the Third
     

    “HEY, THERE—YOU, GIRL!”
    The woman’s voice meant nothing until she came close and stuck her face nearly nose to nose.
    “You all right, then?” the woman asked. “You been standing there for hours, I seen you. And I can tell by your clothes you’re not a street girl.”
    She hoped this woman would leave her alone. Strange, but