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me aid in this?”
    No one stirred or even blinked. “I thank you one and all. Jenks, you indicated to me a short while ago that you were surprised that the hedger, Thomas Naseby, took his own life.”
    “Yes, Your Grace. He seemed steady and sure of himself when the sheriff first spoke to him, afore he was manhandled a bit.”
    “Quite a bit from the looks of him,” Cecil said.
    “Aye. He was bloodied and bruised when Barnstable hauled him out of his cottage, so those men of his worked him over inside.” The big man hesitated, frowning, his fists clenched before him on the table.
    The queen knew Jenks well enough to know he would have liked to interfere. She rued the fact she’d told him to just observe and report to her what happened. “Say on,” she urged.
    “Nothing made Naseby waver in his story of not shooting the arrow. He insisted some of his bolts had been pilfered—all
but for two, to be exact, Your Grace, and he admitted right out that he was in the area. Checking, he said, on a broken part of a hedge where someone of a sudden had built a stile for climbing over it.”
    “Wait,” she said, holding up both hands. “When Thomas Naseby readily admitted he was in the area from which he could have shot that easily identifiable bolt, had Barnstable already cuffed him about?”
    “It was those two men with him hurt Naseby, but no. Not yet. Admitted all that freely from the first, like he knew naught about why they’d be asking. Said he’d been out in the fields all day, so I can see why he hadn’t heard. That was when I was standing in the doorway of the man’s cottage, afore one of Barnstable’s louts closed the door on me and latched it inside, too.”
    Elizabeth groaned but fought the desire to put her head in her hands. “Did this man have a family to—to live for?” she asked.
    “Heard his wife’s dead but that he had two boys, though they weren’t about the cottage then.”
    The queen saw Meg lift her head and turn toward Jenks; she seemed to come to life at the mention of the children.
    “Your Grace,” Cecil said, “you are thinking that the sheriff was overzealous to please you, and the hedger may have well been innocent, matching bolt or not?”
    “We’ve come to a pretty pass if you can read all my thoughts, my lord, but yes. Yes, I fear so, and I partly blame myself.”
    “Your Majesty,” Drake put in, “if I may say so, a captain of a massive ship—like you commanding this nation—can’t always be at the helm. Your officers, so to speak, are expected to and must be trusted to do their parts.”
    “Thank you—all of you, for your present and future support. We must move quickly now before we have more dead innocents on our hands, perhaps because they were snared in someone’s trap who only wants to harm me—or you, Captain.”
    Ned put in, “If the man didn’t hang himself, that means someone else did, that is, eliminated him so he couldn’t continue to claim he was blameless of shooting the arrow. I hardly
think Barnstable, bootlicker that he is, is capable of murder. He’d want Naseby to sing like a bird to you so he could get the glory. I’d wager he fully intended to question the man—of course, mayhap under duress—this morning.”
    “I fear you’ve all learned your lessons of deduction far too well. Jenks, I am relying on you to go to Naseby’s cottage and find his sons. Rosie will give you a pouch of coins for them, and you are both to inquire who might take them in—or are they of an age to fend for themselves?”
    “I know not, Your Grace.”
    “Then assess it when you tell them that their queen grieves the loss of their father, and that we shall try to keep his name from being tainted with accusations of murder or attempted regicide. Ned, you will come with Meg, Rosie, and me to examine the area from which the arrow was supposedly shot. Fetch my guard Clifford to come along, because I need protection and he knows the area from the earlier