Air of Treason, An: A Sir Robert Carey Mystery (Sir Robert Carey Mysteries) by P. F. Chisholm

snapping brown eyes under her red wig, the red lead giving bright colour to her white-leaded cheeks.
    Nephew. That was an important message to him in itself. He was also her cousin through his grandmother, Mary Boleyn, sister to the beheaded Ann. But he was the Queen’s nephew through his father, bastard son of Henry VIII, and her half-brother. That meant that this was Tudor family business.
    “Mistress,” he began as tactfully as he could, “I’m afraid I’m too young and ignorant to…”
    “This death is that of Amy Dudley, née Robsart.”
    All his breath puffed out of his chest. Carey knew that name.
    “The Earl of Leicester’s first wife…” he asked, just to be sure, “who fell down the stairs at Cumnor Place and…?”
    “And died,” said Thomasina. “Sir Robert, something happened two days ago that upset Her Majesty and put her clean out of countenance. She has been in a rage ever since and was even let blood out of season for it. When she had news that you were coming, she told me to…I was told to tell you to look into it.”
    “Look into the death of Robert Dudley’s first wife?”
    “Or her goddamned murder, as the Queen calls it,” added Thomasina quietly.
    “She knows it was murder?”
    Thomasina nodded. “But…but…” Carey was horrified. The Queen was telling him to look into it, a direct order. Usually she allowed at least the polite semblance of choice. Of all things the Queen could have ordered him to do, this was surely the most perverse, the most ridiculous, the most—well, for God’s sake, the most dangerous. To him. He was being ordered to go and stir up a thirty-two-year-old nest of vipers. There had indeed been family gossip about it when Carey was a boy and worse than that. Carey knew that his father had quietly bought up and burned a number of inflammatory pamphlets published secretly by the English Jesuits until the presses could be found and destroyed. Those pamphlets accused the Queen and her then-favourite, Robert Dudley of murdering Dudley’s innocent wife between them. Other suspects in the case were, of course, Sir William Cecil; later Lord Treasurer Burghley; Christopher Hatton, the attorney general who danced his way into the Queen’s favour and never married; even Lettice Knollys, the Earl of Leicester’s eventual second wife and the Earl of Essex’s scandalous mother. There had been something going on that his father dealt with when he was fourteen, something about a man called Appleyard, Amy Robsart’s brother.
    Quite possibly every single member of the 1560 Privy Council could be a suspect for the killing.
    “But why?” he burst out. “The woman has been in the ground for thirty-two years and…”
    “In Gloucester Hall chapel in Oxford, in fact,” Thomasina corrected him.
    “In Oxford and…Why now?”
    “The last time she came to Oxford was in 1566,” said Thomasina, seemingly at random.
    “Yes?”
    “She’s very clear, Sir Robert. She wants the death investigated and she wants you to do it, but she will not tell you why. She shouted at me when I pressed her about it.”
    “But, mistress,” said Carey carefully, “the Queen must know she is by far the most…er…the one most likely to be suspected as the murderer now as well as then. What were the words she used to you exactly?”
    “You do it as you see fit, and you report to her through me—directly to her if necessary.”
    “She knows that this is a very ugly swamp and she may not like the smells that come up if I stir the mud?”
    Thomasina smiled shortly. “She wants it done and she will have you do it.”
    “And if I find irrefutable proof that she was the murderer?”
    The midget’s eyes were cold. “She didn’t tell me, but no doubt she would expect you to keep it quiet.”
    He could do that, of course, he wasn’t a fool, but God, he hoped he wouldn’t have to. “And what if it is simply that the evidence I find points to her?”
    Thomasina shrugged which made her look