The Puzzle Ring Read online

  Hannah had found it easy to forget that she was back in the sixteenth century when they had been tramping through the forest, but in Edinburgh the difference between times was all too clear. The streets stank, and even the people looked quite different. They were smaller than Hannah was used to, both shorter and thinner, and many were scarred with pox marks. Most had lost some or nearly all of their teeth, and she saw one man who had had both his ears carved off, leaving him with ugly stumps.

  So little light struck down between the towering buildings that it was dim and shadowy in the alleys. Angus led them up steep cobbled lanes and stairwells, his square, indomitable figure a source of secret comfort to them all. At last he led them to a broad, sunlit street that ran along the bony spine of rock that connected Edinburgh Castle on its high rampart at one end, and the glowing bare rock of Arthur’s Seat at the far end.

  ‘Less than a mile from here,’ Angus said, panting slightly from the climb. ‘If we hurry, we’ll make it before sunset.’

  By the time they reached Arthur’s Seat, it was growing dark. The great hill, shaped like a crouching lion, reared above them, bare and windswept, blocking the light from the setting sun so that Hannah and her friends were climbing into sombre shadow, although behind them the firth blazed scarlet and gold. Hannah’s breath was coming sharply, hurting her side. She stopped, and turned to look back on Edinburgh and the palace of Holyrood, glowing golden in the last rays of light. She could see all the way to the river and the firth, and across the grey winter fields. Rooks’ nests swung precariously in the delicate tracery of twigs, bare against the pale sky.

  On the hill above was a picturesque ruin, its gothic arches gaping black. Hannah hurried up the path, eager and impatient to reach the fairy well, where Linnet had danced and where maidens came on May Day to wash their faces and make themselves beautiful.

  A few more steps and Hannah reached the great boulder from which water gushed down, swirled in the stone basin, and overflowed to be lost in the heather. Hannah bent and drank gratefully, washing her hot, grimy face. The water was crystal clear and icy cold, and utterly delicious.

  It was growing almost too dark to see. Hannah plunged her hands into the basin and let her fingers explore within. She found nothing. She searched all around the roots of the boulder and under the basin. Nothing. More and more frantically she searched. By the time the others scrambled up to meet her, she was lighting one of her candles with shaking fingers. Even by its wan, flickering light, Hannah could find no slender golden loop. There was nothing to find.

  ‘It’s not here,’ she said blankly.

  ‘It’s been a while since the ring was broken,’ Donovan said. ‘And people would come here, to this little well, wouldn’t they? If it’s meant to have healing powers. Maybe someone found the ring.’

  ‘I’ll look through the hag-stone,’ Hannah said. Disappointment weighed on her heavily. She fumbled in her pocket with cold, numb fingers and brought the hag-stone to her eye.

  ‘Where now is the golden ring, found and taken from this spring?’ she asked.

  Hannah’s gaze was dragged, helter-skelter, down the hill to the graceful building that lay at the foot of Arthur’s Seat, outside the tall grey walls of Edinburgh town. She saw through a window into a small, richly decorated room where a group of woman were laughing and dancing, to music played by a trio of men with lutes and drums and pipes.

  One woman was far taller than the rest, and very richly dressed in black velvet with a great white ruff that framed her long aristocratic face. Her hair blazed golden-red under the candles, and her eyes were a most extraordinary golden colour, almost exactly the same shade as her hair.

  Closer and closer Hannah’s vision raced, until all she could see was one white, long-fingered hand, gesturing languidly from within its ruff of white lace. On one finger she wore a thin, oddly twisted gold band.

  Hannah lowered the hag-stone from her eye.

  ‘The ring is down there, at Holyrood Palace,’ she said in a low, shaken voice, pointing to the graceful stone building at the foot of the hill, with its round turrets topped with pointed roofs. ‘It’s . . . it’s on the finger of the queen.’

  The Queen of Scots

  ‘Och, it’s a bad business,’ Angus said. ‘The court of the queen is a dangerous place.’

  Hannah ignored him. ‘All the books say Mary, Queen of Scots, loved music and singing. We’ll pretend to be travelling minstrels. I’m sure she’ll want to hear us! Then we can ask her for the ring.’

  ‘Tomorrow is the last Sunday before Lent,’ Angus said gloomily. ‘No merry-making allowed during Lent.’

  ‘Then we’ll have to do it tomorrow,’ Hannah said with determination. ‘We can’t wait forty days.’

  ‘So we’ll get to sing for the queen!’ Scarlett cried, clasping her hands together over her heart. ‘Glory hallelujah!’

  ‘Maybe,’ Angus replied stolidly. ‘It’s a good enough plan, I suppose. The queen’s known for her open-handedness, and often gives away rings and brooches and suchlike to those who please her.’ He shook his head disapprovingly.

  ‘I wonder how she got the ring,’ Max said.

  ‘Probably someone found it and gave it to her,’ Donovan said. ‘Maybe trying to win her favour.’

  ‘What shall we sing?’ Hannah asked.

  ‘Better not to do anything too modern,’ Donovan said.

  ‘Everything we do is modern compared to these days!’ Max cried, running his hands up through his dark hair and scrunching it in despair.

  ‘That makes a nice change,’ Scarlett said sarcastically.

  Hannah was running through songs in her mind. ‘“Over the Sea to Skye” is no good, it talks about Bonnie Prince Charlie and he isn’t even born yet. What else do we know that’s really old?’

  ‘How about “Greensleeves”?’ Max suggested.

  Everyone’s face lit up. It was a favourite song of Lady Wintersloe’s and so they often played and sang it for her. Donovan liked it because they let him do a horn solo, and Hannah loved the words and the melody. Scarlett thought it was musty and dusty, like so much of the music they played, but she was used to that, and besides, it suited her high, sweet, ethereal voice.

  On Sunday morning they washed themselves and brushed the leaves and mud off their clothes, and went nervously down the hill to Holyrood Palace. This was much smaller than the palace Hannah had visited in her own time, a small stone building with round towers and narrow windows, dwarfed by the gothic pile of the abbey behind. To their surprise, they were permitted entry as soon as the guards saw their musical instruments.

  It seemed there was a wedding that morning, between Queen Mary’s favourite valet, Sebastian Pagez, and one of her maidservants. Sebastian was Italian, and a singer and musician as well as a valet. He often designed the queen’s masques for her, and so to celebrate his wedding Mary had organised a day of carnival and celebration. The four friends, with a surly Angus towering over them, were taken to see the queen’s lute player, John Hulme. He was richly and extravagantly dressed, in embroidered silks and velvets, with lace at his wrists and a stiff white ruff. He examined their instruments with interest, particularly Hannah’s guitar, exclaiming over how big it was, and how many strings it had.

  ‘Where did you get such an instrument?’ he asked. ‘In Spain? I hear they have big guitars like this there.’

  ‘My teacher gave it to me,’ Hannah replied truthfully. ‘I do not know where he got it.’

  ‘Very well, sing to me then,’ John Hulme said. ‘Don’t play yet. I just want to hear your voices.’

  Nervously, the four friends sang. The lute player stroked his pointed beard thoughtfully, then nodded his head.

  ‘We haven’t heard anything quite like you before; the queen will adore it. You will need some other clothes. Molly! Find some costumes for these performers! All in white, I think, perhaps with roses in their hair . . .’

  ‘At this time of year?’ the maidservant said sarcastically.


  ‘I’m sure you’ll contrive,’ he replied with a grin.

  The maidservant led them away, chattering excitedly about the wedding, and asking them all sorts of questions they found hard to answer. Luckily, she did not pause to listen. She told them the queen loved a wedding, for it gave her a chance to dance without arousing the ire of the preachers, and that she had given the bride seven ells of the loveliest blue brocade to make her dress. The queen herself, Molly said, was to be dressed all in black and silver, with her famous black pearls about her neck.

  She chattered on the whole time she helped the four friends dress. They needed her help, as they did not know how to put on the clothes, which had no zippers or buttons or velcro to fasten. It turned out that formal clothes in Tudor times were pinned onto the body, and then unpinned again at night. It was like being a dressmaker’s dummy. Molly laughed at them all and called them foolish bairns, as she shoved them this way and that, and pricked them unmercilessly.

  ‘This is more like it!’ Scarlett cried, swinging her white brocade skirt from side to side. ‘Much better than those horrible old brown things.’

  Hannah saw Angus scowl, and wished Scarlett would remember Angus had spent all his savings on their clothes. She could not help liking her own dress, though, which was also white and gold. The boys looked handsome too, if rather uncomfortable, in white tights and padded white and gold doublets. The girls could not help giggling at their codpieces.

  Linnet brushed out the girls’ hair, as Molly found them gilded garlands to wear. ‘Och, you look like angels!’ the maid cried.

  Max and Donovan cast agonised glances at each other.

  The palace was crowded and busy. People rushed everywhere, carrying great trays laden with jugs and cups, or barrels hoisted onto their shoulders. Three maidservants carefully carried a velvet dress heavy with gilt embroidery. Two fat dwarves pushed past, dressed in red and yellow motley, scowling and grumbling about the crowd. A little later a white horse’s head ran past, followed soon after by the tail, the man within calling petulantly, ‘Where have you got to, you clod-pole!’

  Molly led them to an antechamber where they were told to wait, holding their instruments and feeling increasingly nervous.

  ‘I need to go to the bathroom,’ Scarlett whispered to Hannah. ‘Surely I won’t need to go and squat in the bushes here in the queen’s own palace?’ Of all the discomforts and difficulties of the sixteenth century, the girls had found the lack of toilets the worst. They asked Molly, who took them to a little stone chamber at the end of the hall. Here there was simply a stone shelf with a round hole in it, above a deep stone shaft that fell down to the outside of the palace wall. Straw and dried twigs of herbs had been scattered on the floor, and clothes were hung on hooks above. When Hannah asked Molly why the toilet was also used as a wardrobe, she looked at them in blank surprise. ‘Why, the smell keeps the moths away, of course!’

  The antechamber where the children waited was freezing, and so they were very glad when at last a cranky-looking page came and ushered them into the banqueting hall. It was painted, gilded, crowded and very noisy. A long table ran the length of the hall, filled with people in ornate costumes eating and drinking and talking. Musicians played in a small gallery, elevated at the end of the room, while entertainers roamed the room, telling jokes, tumbling head over heels, walking on stilts. Wide-eyed, Hannah saw the remains of a roast swan being carried away from one table, its neck still lifted proudly, its great feathered wings folded neatly alongside its bony carcass. She winced and looked away, only to see other servants carrying away great platters of roast boar, the massive tusked heads still mostly intact.

  Angus took up position by the door, looking around with narrowed eyes for escape routes and possible sources of danger. Linnet, who had seemed almost invisible since they entered the palace, melted once again into the background.

  ‘Your job is to sing while the musicians have a break and wet their whistle,’ the page whispered. ‘Give the servants a chance to clear the tables before the next course.’

  Hannah nodded, her gaze flying up to the long table at the top of the room. Men and women sat there, reaching for food from the platters before them, laughing at the sallies of a female dwarf who was capering before them, pretending to be a simpering bride preparing for her wedding day.

  Queen Mary was delicately washing her fingers in a bowl held for her by a richly dressed young man on bended knee. She was magnificently attired in black velvet and satin, with silver embroidery. Her ruff was small and folded back to show the white skin of her throat and breast. Around her neck hung loops of enormous black pearls, glowing against the pallor of her skin. Her hair shone richly from under its simple snood of pearls.

  Hannah stared at her in awe. The queen was not beautiful, exactly. Her nose was too long, and her eyelids were strangely heavy, giving her a brooding look. She was tall, her regal head on its long neck higher than nearly all of the men who clustered around her. Then the man next to her bent his head and said something to her, and she threw back her head and laughed, her topaz eyes flashing. At that moment she seemed the most strikingly lovely woman Hannah had ever seen.

  ‘Is that her husband?’ she whispered to the page, for the man beside the queen—a strong, vigorous-looking man with thick black curls and a neat moustache and beard—was also dressed in black and silver.

  The page looked at her in scorn. ‘Him? Of course not! He’s Lord Bothwell, you fool, the queen’s closest advisor. His Majesty is not here. He is sick still, out at the provost’s house at Kirk o’ Fields. He does not come till the morrow.’

  The name stirred a faint chord of memory in Hannah. Kirk o’ Fields . . . Where had she heard that before? She had no time to wonder, though, for the page gave her a rough push. ‘Well, get on with it then!’

  Hannah took a deep breath and marched up to the high table, her friends beside her. Hannah carried her guitar and Donovan his flugelhorn, while Max had the old-fashioned flute he had taken from Wintersloe Castle, and Scarlett had her tambourine, newly tied with gold ribbons.

  ‘Your Majesty, lords and ladies, begging your favour, we would like to sing and play for you today,’ Max said. Since he had hidden his glasses in his pocket, he was squinting in his attempt to see. Queen Mary inclined her head graciously, and the children bowed and curtsied, as Angus had instructed them. ‘We will sing “Greensleeves”.’

  Donovan lifted his flugelhorn to his lips. The familiar music rang out. They waited for his solo—deep, haunting, filled with loss and longing—to finish, then Hannah began to strum her guitar.

  To her surprise, everyone stirred and a small hum of shock and displeasure rose. But the sound died away as soon as she and Scarlett began to sing, their voices in perfect harmony.

  As the song died away, there was a little pause. Hannah loved that small moment of silence. The greater the pause, the wilder the applause, it seemed to her, and so she was pleased and relieved when the nobles all clapped and shouted out words of praise.

  Queen Mary was smiling. She stood and raised her hand, and the noise died down. ‘This is a pretty sight indeed, and a pretty sound too. You play very sweetly for ones so young. We have not seen you at court before . . .’

  ‘Surely that is because their mother’s milk is still wet on their lips!’ Lord Bothwell quipped.

  ‘Where do you come from? You speak French very well. Have you come from Paris?’

  Hannah was astonished. She did not speak French at all. She looked at Scarlett and Donovan and Max, and saw the same flustered surprise on their faces. Then she realised it must still be the magic of the hag-stone.

  ‘No, your Majesty. Though my teacher played there for many years.’ Hannah smiled at the thought of old Mr Wheeler, who often told her stories about his years playing in the jazz nightclubs of the French capital. He had once played trumpet for Nina Simone there.

  ‘Ah, that explains it. Your teacher, is he here?’ Queen Mary looked about her.

&nb
sp; ‘No. He’s a long way away.’ Sadness touched Hannah’s face. She did miss her old friend and teacher.

  ‘You are alone? You have no parents, no protector?’

  Hannah shook her head. ‘My father is dead,’ she said huskily. ‘Or so we think. My mother too is far away.’ So far away it was impossible to think of the distance that separated them. Tears started to her eyes, for the fear that she might never be able to find her way back to her own time had weighed on Hannah ever since she had first realised when she was.

  Pity softened the queen’s face. ‘So you wish to stay here at court?’

  ‘No!’ Hannah said hastily. ‘I mean, I thank your Majesty, but we must go on just as soon as we can.’

  ‘Ah! Travelling troubadours, I see. Well, then, you will want my protection. I will arrange a pass for you.’ She waved one hand at a soberly clad man standing against the wall, who nodded his head and bowed. ‘We would not like four such pretty young people to be branded on the cheek for singing in public without a licence.’ Although the queen smiled, Hannah felt a little shock at her words. She had not realised that travelling musicians needed a licence.