The Queene's Cure Read online

  Yet Cecil's fine barrister's brain had turned up three clues that they could use. First and most negligible, both doctors had recently purchased herbs from a Cheapside apothecary that could be used to cure pox, so they were interested in the deadly disease, which the effigy's markings had mimicked.

  “But I would expect my doctors to buy such herbs,” Elizabeth had pronounced last night in her chambers. “I've pressed them to be prepared to treat both personal disease and public pestilence.”

  “Secondly,” Cecil had told them all, “Pascal's run up a big bill for Papist votive candles, outrageous numbers of them.”

  “I have made it clear to my people they may worship as their consciences dictate as long as they are loyal to their Protestant queen,” Elizabeth had countered. “But you say huge numbers of them?”

  “Mayhap,” Ned had put in, “he's supplying all the Catholics of London and you can lock him up on graft or embezzlement of Royal Physicians College funds or some such. That would at least take him out of commission.”

  “We knew both physicians were staunch Papists,” Elizabeth had said, not heeding Ned's idea. “Say on, my Lord Cecil.”

  “I saw a scribbled note in the margin of their account book,” Cecil explained, “that candles would be burned in the Tower in honor of both St. Thomases.”

  “Both St. Thomases!” Jenks had cried. “I thought there's only one.”

  “Pascal nearly worships his former mentor,” Elizabeth said, ignoring Jenks's outburst. She was so exhausted she only wanted this to be over. “He has probably made some sort of memorial to him. But why in the Tower?”

  “Mayhap because that's where Thomas More was imprisoned before he went to his death, Your Grace,” Kat had muttered.

  “That is possible,” Elizabeth said, pleased her dear friend seemed to be following everyone's conversation. “Aught else?” she had asked Cecil and held her breath when she glimpsed the expectant look on his usually inscrutable face. Cecil was a genius at keeping the best—or worst—till last.

  “And thirdly, both doctors have been paid for their services to two prisoners in the Tower of London, unnamed patients. But their sexes, ages, and maladies were noted with the fees, quite handsome ones, compared to similar service to others with the same afflictions.”

  “Which are?” Elizabeth demanded as everyone held their breath and leaned forward.

  “The man, aged forty-six, has the common gout. The woman, married with one son, is aged twenty-two and being treated for a malady which is too blurred to read. But I warrant the word was either unknown or untold.”

  “The exact ages,” Elizabeth had reasoned aloud, “of the troublous Scottish Earl of Lennox, husband to my greedy cousin Margaret Douglas, whom I have under house arrest at Sheen. That she-wolf wants my throne either for herself or her son, Lord Darnley.”

  “Exactly, Your Grace,” Cecil seemed to egg her on. “Even if it means sharing the throne—and strengthening their claim to it through Darnley's marriage to another of your dangerous cousins, Mary, Queen of Scots.”

  “The three furies who would take my throne,” Elizabeth muttered. “Mary, Queen of Scots. Margaret Douglas, Countess of Lennox. And—”

  “And,” Kat had interrupted, “that snide little snippet Katherine Grey, who was ever treacherous down to her toenails.”

  DR. CLEREWELL, I'VE BEEN WAITING TO TELL YOU,” MEG said, then lowered her voice as he came closer to her work counter, “that I've had some success with your special project.”

  “The Venus Moon?” he asked with a smile. “And you've kept it quiet?”

  “I've sworn the two patients, or should I say subjects, to utmost secrecy. I did use it on Bett Sharpe as you suggested. So far it's worked wonders to cover her scar, but I don't know if it's changed it.”

  “Time, Mistress Sarah,” he intoned almost solemnly, tapping his knuckles lightly on the counter. “Time and repeated treatments will tell.”

  “The other patient is a customer, a man who was kicked by a horse, even as I once was. I always sympathized with him, though the accident merely left a scar on his cheek while mine took away my senses.”

  “Then why is it, Mistress Sarah, I believe you have more sense than most apothecaries I have met since I've been in London?” As he smiled broadly from the depths of his hat, she felt herself blush. It wasn't that he was really trifling with her, she told herself, but his praises were sweet to her ears.

  “I'm waiting for you to say the rest of that,” she told him coyly. “You know, that most apothecaries have no sense to begin with, so more than nothing isn't much.”

  “Ah, you've been taking to heart the strictures and criticisms of the physicians of the Royal College,” he said, shaking his finger as a tutor would. “Indeed, those learned men believe I have no sense either, mistress, not so much for my petitioning to sell Venus Moon Emollient but for my espousal of the infectious water droplet theory of pestilence. No doubt they have laughed me to scorn behind my back more than once.”

  “But belief in the four warring humors and the heavenly constellations' power over human health has been the custom since the Greeks,” she protested, proud to be able to demonstrate her knowledge. “Infectious water droplets flying through the air—well, unless someone throws sweat or sneezes, it's just not fact or tradition.”

  “Damn tradition. Progress is what's needed, as with my Venus Moon, eh?”

  “I can't argue with that, doctor. Oh, that reminds me, I was thinking about the possibility of your curing young Gil Sharpe's muteness, like you said.”

  “Ah, were you? Do you think the queen would allow it, perhaps let me treat him at the palace? Or if not, he could be brought to my shop in Cheapside.”

  “Would you use valley lily distilled in wine? That's the herbal lore I recall is good for the dumb palsy. Her Majesty used to employ my herbal cures, especially when we lived in exile, before she was queen. She was afraid both of physicians and being poisoned then, but she trusted me. I've longed to try to cure Gil, but I know apothecaries are not to prescribe or treat whatever ails—”

  “Mistress Wilton,” he interrupted, “amateurs—doc-tors' cooks, as they call you—could get things wrong and do harm. To wit, it is rosemary, not valley lily, which restores speech to those possessed of the dumb palsy. I warrant your simple herbal cure would turn out to be just that—simple.”

  Surprised that, for the first time, Marcus Clerewell sounded exactly like one of the other doctors, and had switched his tone so fast, Meg didn't argue. She wasn't sure why, but she had the strongest memory that her parents had used valley lilies more than once, back in the days when apothecaries held some sway.

  “I'm sorry, but I can't act as intermediary to the queen about Gil's being healed,” Meg answered the question she'd pointedly ignored before. “Gil's parents must decide, and then ask Her Grace if need be, as they—they run the occasional errand for her.”

  “Do they? Then let's arrange it,” he went on, smiling at her again, evidently when he saw how crestfallen she looked. “Have the boy's father bring him, for Nick knows my shop from his occasional deliveries. And let's not tell the queen in case it doesn't work, for who knows if the boy's damage is permanent or curable.”

  “And charge at least most of the reckoning to me without telling his parents. Will you?”

  “If the child is so important to the queen, perhaps she herself will pay, if I effect a cure, eh? At any rate, it will be a great honor to treat one of Her Majesty's household servants, even as it has been an honor to know you, a former one,” he said and took her hand.

  “You don't mean you're not coming back?”

  “Of course I don't mean that,” he whispered, lifting the sack of supplies she'd packed for him but not loosing her hand. “I—”

  “Not much traffic in the shop today, eh, Meg?” Ben's voice blared on the staircase behind them. He must have just come downstairs; he wasn't there a moment ago. Meg yanked her hand free.

  “But,” Ben went o
n, “I heard someone with a deep voice lingering, talking low, and here it's Dr. Clerewell. Bet you got a great deal to do today, busy man like you and all.”

  “Ben …” Meg began in warning as the telltale vein in her husband's forehead began to throb.

  “I do at that,” Marcus Clerewell said, depositing a stack of coins on the counter, touching his hat brim with a flourish, and backing away from them as the bestschooled courtier might from the queen herself. “Master Wilton, mistress,” he said at the door and was gone.

  But as Meg rounded on Ben, she almost thought she saw her husband give a brisk wave to the departing doctor. Knowing Ben, it was some sort of obscene gesture.

  “Ben, why on earth would you insult our best—”

  “Mistress, that's a good one,” Ben interrupted as he came behind the counter and swept up the stack of coins.

  “Meaning what?” she dared.

  “Meaning there's more than one meaning to that.”

  Meg just turned back to her mortar and pestle, but Ben grabbed her arm and spun her around so hard that the pestle thudded to the floor. “Leave me be,” she ordered. “You come in late last night and just flop in bed and expect me to welcome you with open arms—”

  He hooted a sharp laugh. “Open arms wasn't what I was looking for, Mistress Sarah. But I see now I'd better be here day and night like some kind a watchdog. I used to think that fancy foreign doctor—”

  “Marcus Clerewell is from Norwich. He's not foreign—”

  “—was here buying our goods just because I'd told him you used to serve the queen and he liked the palace connection. I thought he was hoping you'd put in a good word for him with Her Majesty or some such. But now I'm thinking there's some other reason. Maybe I been wrong you're pining for that slippery player Topside. Maybe you're set on Dr. Scarface, eh? Not wed, is he?”

  “Don't be ridiculous. And if you want to know, we were discussing Gil's muteness, because he used to talk before that gunpowder blast sent him flying into a wall. It's got to just be his throat that's the problem, because it's not his ears or head.”

  “Oh, just whispering with him about poor Gil, huh, having him hold your hand for poor Gil, who's sitting pretty in the queen's lap where you ought to be.”

  “Just leave off.”

  “Now I know why Her Mighty Highness really tossed you out. 'Cause she can't trust you behind her back, that it? It all went to your head, still does. I can see you're always trying to look down on your own God-given husband, the way you're wishing you could just shuck your wifely duties and play virgin just the way her great and glorious majesty does.”

  When he fixed his hand in her hair to tip her head back and pressed her hips hard against the counter, she almost brained him with the marble mortar. But there was only one thing worse than this, and that would be going to prison and then being burned alive for her hus-band's murder. So Meg let him drag her up the stairs and bit her lower lip until the bitter blood in her mouth nearly gagged her.

  THE WALLS OF THE TOWER OF LONDON LOOMED HIGH and gray as if rising from the river. Clots of morning fog still hung in the air.

  “Put in before you reach the water gate,” Elizabeth ordered her men-at-oars, though she'd told them the same earlier. “The public steps will do.”

  The barge bumped the busy wharf. Pulling her plain gray velvet hood over her head, she let Cecil help her out. With her guards scrambling to surround them, they quickly made their way to the street entrance called the Middle Tower, then over the moat to the Byward Tower. Elizabeth had not been here since her recognition parade had gone through the city the day before her coronation. And she had hoped never to be here again.

  Cecil banged on the narrow wooden door, though the big portcullis gate next to it was kept up for daily deliveries. “Ho, there!” he called. “On queen's business to see the Lieutenant of the Tower.”

  The door opened immediately, and the guard bid them enter. A chill shot through Elizabeth as she walked up the slanted cobbled walk, at least, thank God, surrounded by her own guards and not her sister's this time. Passing beneath the stone skirts of the Bell Tower, where she had been housed in those nightmare days, she glanced up at the ramparts where she used to walk to take the air. It always seemed she was short of breath in here. As they entered the grassy stretch within the walls and series of surrounding towers, her gaze jumped to the Wakefield Tower, where her mother had been tried and condemned. And then, the other direction to the now bare spot where her scaffold had stood. Gripping her hands against her belly as if to quell its roiling, the queen turned away.

  Someone must have run for Sir Edward Warner, Lord Lieutenant of the Tower, for he emerged from the lieutenant's house and hurried toward them, strapping on his ceremonial sword. The man was near sixty and spare of body though his face and jowls were flaccid and his turkey neck bounced as he ran. He had enjoyed this sinecure of royal trust and remuneration for years. When he saw it was her in person, he went down on the dank cobbles on one knee and swept off his cap.

  “I had no idea, Your Majesty. You should have sent me word.”

  “I did not want to send word, Sir Edward. I am simply here to ask you some questions and then to visit my cousin Lady Grey.”

  “Oh, of course, and my Lord Cecil here too,” he said, looking even more green at the gills.

  “I would speak with the Earl of Lennox while you escort Her Grace,” Cecil clipped out. He went his way with but one guard, while the other three trailed behind the queen and her host toward the Bell Tower.

  “I suppose because you are no stranger here,” Sir Edward said, his voice and gestures both jerky, “that is why you have assigned your cousin and her family to this very tower.”

  As they entered the squat stone edifice, Elizabeth suddenly fell as mute as Gil. On the first coil of the stairs, she stopped to gaze out a slitted window as if she cared for the gray-on-gray view. She shut her eyes to steady herself. The belly-clenching dampness from the river, the distant clank of keys still rattled her. The city bells were distant here, but the piercing shriek of a raven or the clatter of delivery carts in the courtyard could echo in one's soul. The stones seemed a heavy burden, like the weight of water pressing down to drown her….

  Her eyes flew open. “Before I see my cousin, I meant to ask which cell was Sir Thomas More's,” she said.

  “Sir Thomas More's, from in your f-father's day?” he stammered.

  “Obviously. Take me there straightaway.”

  She followed him up one level. He took overlong fumbling with his keys until she nearly seized them from him to open the door herself. “No one within, but so carefully locked?” she inquired.

  “Just tradition, for safety's sake,” Sir Edward muttered and, reluctantly it seemed, swung wide the door. She stepped into a long, narrow, vaulted room with its shutters closed. Yet the chamber was bathed in the soft light of banks of flickering votive candles surrounding a makeshift altar on which sat a crucifix and a framed painting of a man she did not recognize but knew full well.

  “Sir Thomas himself,” she observed.

  “I believe so, Your Majesty.”

  “Since you were here in his day, I warrant you know so, sir. Who has placed this here? Catholics you allow to meet secretly in my royal Tower?”

  “In truth, 'twas Dr. Peter Pascal, one of your physicians of the College, who admired the man and has recently arranged this as a personal remembrance—for himself, privily.”

  “And for a fee? To you?”

  He cleared his throat, and his jowls quivered. “I did not think Your Majesty would mind a man's remembering someone who was imprisoned here and died so sadly.”

  She glared at him, then slowly approached the portrait and examined it more closely. A bit crude yet quite detailed, a pen-and-ink drawing. She could not recall More herself, though she'd once seen a Holbein portrait of him and his family. This drawing bore no signature. She reached across the rows of candle flames and plucked it from its perch, then turned it o
ver. Nothing on the back of the stretched canvas.

  She handed it to Sir Edward by smacking it into him. “Pascal set this up during his visits to tend my cousin Katherine?” she asked as she made for the door. Her lieutenant had to run to keep up, thudding on the stairs behind her, the portrait under his arm until he set it down in the corridor.

  “Ah, yes, though another doctor sometime comes instead to—”

  “To treat not only my cousin but my other cousin's husband, the Earl of Lennox,” she finished for him. “And that physician is Dr. John Caius.”

  For one moment he gaped at her like a beached fish. “Yes, that's right, Your M-Majesty. But surely there is no harm in either of them, as they are among the elite of your College of Phys—”

  “Is this the very chamber?” she asked as she stopped at the too-familiar door, one she herself was once certain she would exit on her way to the scaffold.

  “Of the Lady Katherine, Countess of Hertford, and her son, the Viscount Beauchamp? It is. I put them here because this chamber is the best—”

  “No chamber in this godforsaken place is best. This was mine, and I know it like the back of my hand. Now let me in and do not announce me.”

  But she had forgotten how voices carried through the peepholes. As the wooden door swung inward, Katherine Grey stood facing them with her young son held tightly in her arms. Imperious as a queen, she glared down her nose as if she were the visitor and Elizabeth Tudor the prisoner again.

  THE EIGHTH

  The distilled water of the flowers of rosemary being