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at her—or, for that matter, at the sea captain Drake.
    N ow that Cecil had joined them, the queen intended to call a Privy Plot Council meeting later in her chambers. For now, with Cecil, her court, and the Loseley household, she sat on the back lawn pretending to enjoy Ned Topside’s ghostly fantasy, Robin Hood Returns.
    The real sheriff, the blustering Adrian Barnstable, was evidently also a blundering one, for he had not yet returned with his quarry as he had promised, though he had sent word back with Jenks that he was personally searching for the man, a hedger and birder named Tom Naseby. If he didn’t produce the man by morning—though the queen could not fathom why some rural laborer would want to kill anyone—she was going to send Jenks and her yeoman Clifford after both Barnstable and Naseby.
    “Of course, many of fair England’s sheriffs are honorable men, but the Sheriff of Nottingham was most disloyal to our good King Richard, ” Ned, decked out as Robin Hood’s spirit come back to life, was declaiming. To glow ghostly in the distant flickering torchlight, the clever actor had smeared some sort of sticky substance on himself, then evidently rolled in
crushed flowers—Meg’s yarrow, perhaps, which had not managed to save poor Fenton.
    The queen’s thoughts drifted. Richard Gilburne, the local coroner, had done little more than pronounce Fenton Layne “deceased of blood loss by an arrow to the most vital part of his chest.” She was getting nowhere, relying on the local, rustic upholders of her laws. Tomorrow she must take matters more into her own hands, beginning with a thorough search of the area from which the crossbowman must have shot.
    From asking other servants who knew Fenton, Ned had learned naught about the falconer’s private life that could be a motive for murder. Elizabeth was beginning to hope it was just some demented local lad or pure accident, a poacher letting a bolt fly wrong. How much simpler her life would be without some convoluted motive to trace.
    She tried to listen to the play, but she could not concentrate. Instead, she kept pondering the Spanish problem, which Cecil had also weighed in on today, and the letter he’d brought from Mary of Scots, carping about “how depressing it is to live in the countryside where chill winds blow, you cannot imagine …” Chill winds indeed, the queen fumed—winds of possible civil war.
    She worried, too, that Meg had greatly gone back into the shadows of her past. And, as much as the queen intended to trust Francis Drake, she had argued with Cecil over Drake’s being a hothead. “Then I’m a hothead against the Spanish, too!” she’d ranted at Cecil, when she’d actually been so glad he had come.

    “An outlaw bold was Robin Hood,
Clad in Lincoln green,
’Mong Sherwood Forest’s leafy boughs,
He could be scarcely seen.
He drew six feet of English bow
To aid plain folk in their despair.
Resistance’gainst the sheriff
And loyalty to England’s throne
Was needed then and there …”

    Ned’s fine message drew the queen’s thoughts back. She rather liked the words; at least Ned knew how to bolster the monarchy in these tenuous times. Too bad Robin Hood had been dead for nigh on three hundred years, for she could use him now to draw his yew longbow and shoot evil shooters.
    It took her a moment to realize that a commotion off to the side, which she’d thought at first was Robin’s Merry Men entering the impromptu stage, was obviously some other ado, for Ned, trained as he was to keep in character, finally turned, put his hands on his hips, and frowned. As if part of the fantasy—though it suddenly seemed a farce—Sheriff Barnstable stumbled through the leafy scenery of Sherwood Forest, dragging a man bound hand and foot. Two others, burly lads, entered, too, blinking in surprise to see either such bright lights or the assembled audience.
    In the front row, the queen stood as Sheriff Barnstable evidently spotted