The Queene's Cure Read online

  “Fell asleep and lost track of time and all else I hear went on.” Elizabeth could see the truth of that, for Kat's coif had gone flat on one side and the underpinnings of her farthingale had slid awry to make her skirts look lopsided. Elizabeth suddenly cursed herself for letting Harry Carey go home to Blackfriars, but he said he'd felt nauseous. 'S bones, so did she! She hurt all over and had a good notion to send for him to come right back, ill or not.

  As Jenks slipped out, Kat shuffled a bit closer to the body. “Lord have mercy, no!” she cried, pressing her fists to her mouth. Gil's charcoal stick stopped whispering on the paper.

  “You know her then?” Elizabeth asked. “It isn't that lace girl Lucinda, is it? But poxed?

  “Never saw this slip of a thing before, but ugh, I see what someone's done to her.”

  “Drowned or dumped the poor poxed thing in my fountain!”

  “No, that's not what's all over her,” Kat explained, walking boldly closer to the corpse. “Someone's overbled her, that's what happened here.”

  “You see lancet scars somewhere?” Elizabeth demanded, holding her ground ten feet away. “You mean she's been stabbed too?”

  Shaking her head, Kat came over to Elizabeth and put her arm around her slender shoulders to draw her slightly closer to the corpse. The queen could feel Kat trembling too.

  “This woman may look poxed, lovey,” Kat said, “but I think some mountebank or quacksalver passing for a physician has bled her near dry with a legion of leeches all over her skin. Don't you recall that time my leech bites wouldn't heal for days? Next to the pox itself, not much you and I hate more than leeches.”

  JA, LADY ASHLEY IS RIGHT,” DR. BURCOTE PRONOUNCED AFTER viewing the corpse two hours later. “Not the pox but far too many leeches.” He shook his head and stroked his chin. “Any dumkopf should have known it vould kill a female of this size.”

  Elizabeth stared at the little man through the haze of her exhaustion and horror. “But if it was leeches, they were placed so regularly on her—all over,” she stammered, “instead of at some specific site to drain bad blood for a particular malady. Was it intentional—to overbleed her, and she was too ill or weak, or perhaps given some sleeping potion so she didn't resist?”

  “I'd say she did resist, or at least her leecher feared she vould,” he muttered, “even vit that broken arm.”

  “Broken arm?”

  He pointed to her right arm, swollen and at a slightly strange angle, then at both wrists. Elizabeth could see what he meant. “I don't hold vit tying patients down,” he went on, “especially ones vit a bone that should have been set, ja.”

  “Tied down, with a broken arm,” Elizabeth marveled at his deductions. Shuddering, she squinted at the slightly rough, red marks around each wrist and at the crooked elbow-to-wrist bone. She saw now that the skin was discolored each place he pointed. Also the body bore a walnut-sized strawberry birthmark at the base of the throat.

  “As to the wrists, mayhap she had bracelets or sleeves that were too tight,” Elizabeth suggested. “It is simply that I cannot bear to think the worst, but I must learn to. Can you tell if she was gagged to keep her from crying out during all this?” she asked as an afterthought.

  He shrugged, frowned, but looked closer at the mouth and cheeks, even her earlobes. “Not vit a gag that vas tied around her head with her mouth open or closed. But she could have had something stuffed in her mouth, then pulled out—after.”

  Elizabeth was trying to discern if this girl must have been tortured and killed in a place where there was privacy from witnesses overhearing, but that seemed a dead end. All her ideas were too much of that lately, but she wasn't giving up.

  “Doctor, do you think she was deceased before being brought to the palace, or could she have somehow been brought or escorted in, then drowned? It was dark a good half hour before my retinue went outside.”

  “Her face seems calm as if there was no final, fitful death throes—at least ven the leeches began to do their slow, steady vork. Yet she is newly dead, for rigor mortis is only setting in now. Bled to death first vit leeches applied in the pattern of the small pox, ja.”

  Elizabeth seized a tall chair back to steady herself. Some desperate or demented mind was behind all this. And to exactly what horrid purpose had this corpse been delivered, almost ceremoniously, to the Queen of England?

  “Besides,” he said, lifting the sheet from the body and peering under it, “the girl was unclothed ven the leeches vere applied, and I don't think garbed after that.”

  “But certainly not carted through my palace or over the garden walls stark naked!”

  “Ask the one who wrapped her up ver he found this sheet,” he said. “The blood specks on it seem to match her vounds, so I vould say it came vit her. After her being dead and in the vater, the leech sores vould not dot the sheet like this.”

  “Yes,” she whispered. “The guard I questioned before you came said he saw the sheet on the ground and did not fetch it from the palace as I had first thought. So—she was brought in wrapped in that sheet. That's how,” she said almost to herself, “I pictured the other being delivered too.”

  “Vat other?” he asked, looking sharply up at her.

  “No—nothing. If you would discover if there are any other telltale or identifying marks on her besides that birthmark, I will leave you to your task. We will hold her body for a few days to see if it is claimed, then see she is properly buried. My Lord Cecil is instructing my courtiers only to say that some half-witted girl wandered in and drowned herself here—not the rest of it.”

  “As you vish, Majesty,” he said and turned away as if he were dismissing her. As she put her hand to the door latch, he said, “In the morning, have someone take a good look at the fountain vater to see how much she bled in it. Some leech vounds ooze for hours after.”

  “I know,” she said. “Years ago, a country doctor leeched Kat for a migraine, and it was—terrible. I vowed then, only quick cuts from lancets, not this ugly, lingering …”

  She thought she would be sick again and stayed her hand on the door, partly to hold herself up. “Tell no one anything I've said or asked,” she ordered. “And if I have need, I shall send for you again.”

  A CCOMPANIED BY TWO GUARDS WITH LANTERNS, Elizabeth returned to her state apartments and through them to her privy chamber. With her yeomen opening doors for her as she went deeper into her secure world, she tried to tell herself she was safe here, but she felt the barriers had been breeched.

  “Post double guards to seal the back river entrance,” she ordered Clifford. But as he hastened to obey, she realized she should have waited for that command until her covert Privy Plot Council left this night, if they were still waiting for her after all this time. They would just have to go out the front entrance and damn what people said. They would chatter that she had sent for her longtime guard Jenks because she was afraid, that she had summoned her fool Ned Topside to cheer her. They would whisper that, because she was besotted with her own beauty, she kept the boy Gil up all hours to draw her. Gossip was going to gallop everywhere about this night.

  Instead of going directly into her presence chamber, she had the sudden urge to see the plaster-faced effigy again. Would the pattern of pox marks on it indeed resemble the leech bites on the corpse? After all, though the dead woman's face did not look like her own, the corpse's size and coloring were much the same. Mayhap someone was trying to drive her to a doctor. What profit to make her fear for her own health, when she did so already?

  The queen had ordered the effigy stored in her library because so few entered there, and guards stood at both corridors giving access to it. Two doors, the one from her rooms and one from this blind corridor, opened into it. Yet when she peeked in though the latter, Ned Topside stood there, bent over the effigy with a knife in his hand as if he would stab it.

  “Ned!” she gasped out. “Sheath that knife this instant in my palace and my presence!”

  He spun, all too obvi
ously shocked to see her. “Oh, Your Grace, you gave me a start.” Quickly, he stowed the knife. “I was simply—ah, going to take a small snippet of the effigy's wig for when we visit that Chelsea wigmaker Cecil, Kat, and I were just discussing. You know, Honoria Wyngate.” Nodding in the direction of her chambers, he rushed on, “I could compare this to any hair swatches she has. I assume that's how she would have things set up there, as that's the way actors who make wigs do it.”

  “First of all,” she said, stepping in to see he had a red tress in his hand already tied with a black ribbon, “have you dared to begin that council meeting without me? And I thought you said you were going to take a tress.”

  “Oh, of course we haven't begun the meeting without you, Your Grace. We were simply sharing information, that's all,” he explained as he smoothly dropped the tress in his pouch.

  “But only Mary Sidney and I knew so far about the Chelsea wig-maker, especially her name,” she pressed him.

  “Mary must have told Kat, and she told us,” he admitted.

  “I have been meaning to ask where such skilled artificers as you actors obtain the wigs, paint, and occasional plaster masks that are your stock-in-trade.”

  “When I was with my father and my uncle's traveling troupe, we made them ourselves,” he blurted out, shrugging as if her question meant naught. He seemed overly casual about it all now. Still, she trusted Ned. He had no motive in the world for upsetting or threatening her. She'd plucked him from a life of rural obscurity and set him high—something, she recalled, in a far grander way she'd done for Robin Dudley. She must not become a victim of this horror by fearing to trust those closest to her.

  “You know, Your Grace,” Ned said, his voice much quieter, almost beseeching now, “I think there may be a link to the doctor at the Royal College who Lord Cecil says keeps quoting Sir Thomas More.”

  “Cecil's been speaking to you of that already too?” she demanded, sweeping through the second door, which led directly to her privy chambers. Ned followed in quick pursuit. “You have been thrashing it all out about wigmakers and doctors without me?”

  “But, Your Grace,” he said, “it all fits like pieces of a puzzle. Dr. Peter Pascal lives in Sir Thomas More's old home in Chelsea, and, according to Kat, that's nearby where the royal wig-maker lived under your father's and sister's reigns!”

  “That proves naught by itself. Sir Thomas More's old home is also near a house where I lived once with my stepmother, Queen Katherine Parr!”

  Her blurting that out gave Elizabeth pause. That was the house where she'd seen her first pox victims up close. Chelsea was a place with painful memories she had no desire to visit again, but neither did she want to send someone who could foul up a meeting with this almost mythical wig-maker.

  Things seemed to be spinning out of her control, and she would not have that. She turned back to face Ned in the narrow passageway. “It's not only Dr. Pascal who bears watching. Dr. Caius was Queen Mary's doctor and wanted to be mine until I sent him packing. But, whatever any of you have discussed, I realize that a little sojourn to Chelsea is called for, and I would speak to this old woman of the wigs myself.”

  The others of her Privy Plot Council must have heard that tirade, for they were all standing like silent sentinels at their chairs around the table in her presence chamber when she entered.

  “Is the meeting over, all things decided, and you are ready to disperse?” she inquired of them, her voice dripping sarcasm.

  “Not at all, Your Grace,” Cecil dared. “I, for one, have much to tell. Not only does it appear that the physicians of your Royal College are not to be trusted, but I've discovered through their accounts that said doctors have definite ties to two of your most pressing problems and that they wish the best to the third.”

  “The doctors, of course,” she put in, “are Caius and Pascal.”

  “Indeed. But as we briefly touched upon before, Your Majesty, then decided to set aside until there was more solid proof, there are three women possibly involved, all kin to you, ladies of lofty rank.”

  “You mean of royal rank and my most dangerous rivals. Curse those three greedy, Catholic furies. I hate to admit it, but they are powerful and vicious enough to be plotting against me, never mind that one is in Scotland and the other two in prison—one in the Tower itself!”

  THE SEVENTH

  Build not your faith upon tradition. 'Tis as rotten as a

  rotten post.

  NICHOLAS CULPEPER

  The English Physician

  THESE EVENTS HAVE TOSSED ME TOPSY-TURVY, Cecil,” the queen admitted. “I thought my next trip must be to Chelsea, but this is of a sudden more important. And I swore once that I would never be rowed to the Tower again, but here I am, of dire necessity,” she groused, shaking her head. “Still, I am not going to enter through that damned water gate!”

  Knowing full well that that entry was traditionally called Traitor's Gate, Cecil shifted on the bench next to her. Through early morning mist, they had set out from Whitehall in a plain working barge, though six of her regular men-at-oars and four guards were aboard in civilian garb. The queen and her principal secretary sat under a three-sided, roofed canvas canopy, partly to seek shelter from the wind and partly so that others on the bank or in river craft would not recognize them.

  “I quite understand, Your Grace,” Cecil assured her. “Those were not good days for any of us when your sister sent you there.”

  “At least I lived through it. My mother was taken in that way and never came out. My stepmother, Catherine Howard, the same. And poor Lady Jane Grey …Well, I need not rehearse all that to you.”

  Blinking back tears, she leaned out of their shelter to stare at cattle grazing on the south bank of the Thames. The choppy water seemed to mirror the cloudy sky and thrashing trees. Memories almost capsized her calm.

  But now, she thought, here she was, under the guise of taking to her bed with a migraine for a second day. After church yesterday, claiming illness—indeed, she was greatly disturbed—she had passed the day consulting only with Cecil and her Privy Plot Council. She'd slipped away from her duties this Monday morning for a few hours to interrogate Katherine Grey, Lady Jane Grey's younger sister. Because the Grey girls stood in close proximity to the throne, they had always been thorns in her royal sister's side and now hers too.

  Indeed, she even fretted over Robin's loyalty to her. After all, he was the son of the man who had tried to place the Greys—and through them, Robin's brother, who had wed Lady Jane—upon the throne. Or did Robin merely hope to make her realize her femininity or mortality, to admit she needed an heir, and to agree at last to wed him and bear his child to inherit the throne someday? He had been chafing under her strict handling of him lately, but would he stoop to actual plots involving effigies and corpses? He still had that squire who used to dress his dummy at the quintain to look like Queen Catherine de' Medici, so mayhap Jenks should sound out that clever servant.

  “No, it cannot be, not Robin,” she muttered, her fist pressed to her lips.

  “What's that, Your Grace?” Cecil asked, trying to peer around her. “Which way will you go into the Tower then?”

  She sat back and looked straight ahead again. “We shall both alight at the public stairs at the foot of Thames Street and walk in the gate of the Middle Tower,” she told him. “You shall handle the Earl of Lennox as we discussed, and I shall cross-question my cousin, who has already betrayed me more than once ere this. And we shall both keep calm at our distasteful tasks to make them give themselves—and their ties to Pascal and Caius—away.”

  “I fear affairs of the heart mix dreadfully with affairs of state, Your Grace.” They both held on to their seats as a wave from another craft rocked them. “I believe Katherine Grey eloping with Edward Seymour against your express wishes and bearing him a son has more to do with passion than politics.”

  “That lying, insolent chit knew full well a woman with her royal blood must wed an approved man from a tr
usted family, Cecil. I would never have approved of the Earl of Hertford, not a man from another brood of serpents in our bosom, not a Seymour!”

  “Precisely why she acted so rashly, Your Grace.”

  “You sound like a lawyer defending her at the bar. But, Cecil, she kept the marriage a secret for months until her breeding belly betrayed her, and all the while her Catholic leanings and rebellious character entice both Scottish and Spanish traitors to rally round her deceit and treachery! I will not have it!”

  “What I cannot abide is the tilt the stories take on as your people bandy gossip about,” he groused, throwing out an arm that seemed to encompass all of London. “Hell's gates, the rabble gets taken in by the romance of sad stories and lost loves, never mind the hard, cold facts of the necessity of securing this realm!”

  “Bett and Nick have told me of public sympathy for the Hertfords, for everyone else seems afraid to let me know. Katherine and Edward so young, so in love,” she repeated what she'd been told, “pining away in prison, separated by the cruel queen. 'S blood and bones, those two have made their own bed and now they must lie— well, I meant not to say it that way,” she amended, looking off into the distance again.

  Cecil, for once, kept his mouth shut. Even he dared not expound on the fact that Lady Jane Grey had borne a healthy male heir with the Grey strain of Tudor blood in his veins while the queen was a virgin and unwed. That's why, though Katherine's husband was prisoner in the Tower too, the queen had ordered them kept apart. She needed no more plotting between members of powerful families and no more new male heirs that were not hers.

  “But we shall do our best today,” she told Cecil, “to focus on the visits they have had from Drs. Caius and Pascal, supposedly to treat their ailments, in the Tower. What you found in the doctors' accounting book points the finger, yet we must close the fist of accusation around them—all of them—in this plot.”

  Cecil's report to the Privy Plot Council late last night had been enough to seal the doctors' fates with the queen, at least for severe questioning. Yet she bided her time for having them arrested, because they could not have personally deposited the effigy in her coach and perhaps not the corpse in the fountain either. She must cast her net wide and catch whoever worked for them—or for whom they worked. The queen knew she had misjudged those she had trusted before, so she might misjudge those whom she did not trust.