The Fyre Mirror: An Elizabeth I Mystery: 1 (Elizabeth I Mysteries) Page 13

  Just to make their queen need the services of Dr. Dee or Giles and his players? Perhaps he—or Katherine, since she was on site that morning—had randomly selected a tent to ignite. When Lavina’s at the edge of the encampment did not catch fire, the arsonist tried to burn the next tent and succeeded. No, it could not be at random, because Kendale’s tent was tied shut from the outside. Or was that act disrelated to the fire?

  “In case Kat is tired,” Elizabeth told Floris, “there’s a bench by the inn with the old couple who owns the place.”

  “Oh, no need,” Floris said, squinting at the Garvers and shading her eyes even though the flashes of light hardly hit her here. “You’re not tired, are you, Lady Ashley? If so, I can take you inside to bed.”

  “I never felt better,” Kat declared, however fragile and feeble she looked.

  Despite all the chaos and Elizabeth’s fears, that was the best thing she had heard all day.

  Notwithstanding her exhaustion, the queen could not sleep again that night. Too many people were crammed together at this inn. She kept drifting in and out of dreams, hearing creaking boards, no doubt one of the men upstairs getting up or shifting in his sleep. Someone somewhere was snoring in a muffled roar. And it was strangely dusty in this cleaned and painted chamber; the acrid scent scratched at her throat. Again as she pondered old Simon Garver’s sad story of Cuddington, she heard his deaf wife’s crackling voice, speaking of dead children.

  Her mind had been in whirls, trying to think through who could be behind the fires at Nonsuch. It could not be Dr. Dee, not her Gil. And yet, how to prove it was someone else? The sweet spring sun had now become an enemy. She should pray for cloudy days to keep the killer at bay, should return her retinue to London, yet she could not bear to leave until she caught her deadly prey.

  Her eyes began to sting and water. She rolled over again and stared into the gray, stale air in the room. Had fog or mist crept in clear up here? As she had earlier in the day, she marveled at the way the reflected light on the Thames threw flickering patterns on the ceiling. A full moon must have risen, which acted as the sun had earlier, but these colors were not silver or even pale gold. They were hot hues, something Gil would paint. And it was so bright out the windows of this room, suddenly even bright inside.

  Smoke. It was thickening smoke!

  She sat straight up in bed, her heart pounding. Flames! Flames close outside, crackling and throwing deadly light through the eastern windows. Had the thatched roof caught fire? What if the doors were locked, what if her people perished with her?

  “Fire!” she screamed. “Fire!”

  Chapter the Ninth

  ELIZABETH LEAPED FROM HER BED AND WENT PARTWAY to the window. The Garvers’ thatch-roofed cottage next door was crowned with crackling flames. It took her a moment to realize that the inn was not afire—unless it burned too.

  As her women woke, some hacked at the smoke, and several screamed.

  “Listen to me!” the queen shouted, coughing herself. “Stop to take nothing with you. Rosie, go next door and wake Kat and Floris and see they get downstairs. Anne, run to the attic steps and scream the men awake. And tell them to come with me.”

  “To where?”

  “Just see that everyone gets out! I’m going ahead.”

  Lest she found fire awaiting her downstairs, Elizabeth grabbed the sheet from her bed and dumped the two closest ewers of wash water to soak it. She wrapped it around her like a shroud from shoulders to knees and ran barefoot into the hall.

  “Thank God!” she cried when she realized the smoke was lighter here. The yeoman who should have been at her door wasn’t there.

  “I told the guard to go up and rouse the men!” Floris cried, coughing, as she led Kat from the room next door. The old woman looked frenzied, like a horse caught in a stables fire. She pulled back and cried, rolling her eyes. Floris could barely control her. Taking Kat between them, Floris and Elizabeth led her toward the staircase and helped her down it as heavy-footed men thundered behind, shouting to each other.

  Blessedly, there was no fire downstairs but smoldering embers in the hearth of the common room. Yet Kat was still panicked, gasping for air and shrieking so that Elizabeth feared she’d collapse. “Kat, Kat, it’s all right!”

  “Your father and Queen Katherine will send me away, send me to the Tower for this.”

  “No, no, they won’t!” Elizabeth promised, gripping both her shoulders to make the distraught woman look straight at her. “I’ll tell them it was my fault. They won’t send you away. I won’t lose you.”

  “But you can’t! They’ll banish you again!”

  “Floris,” the queen cried, “you must see to her and keep her calm. I must go outside to help—to see …”

  Pushing Kat into Floris’s arms, she fled outside.

  Though she was sweating from fear and exertion, the cold sheet made her chill and clammy. But, wearing just her night rail under it, she kept it wrapped around her.

  The moment she was out the door of the inn, she saw that the Garvers’ cottage flamed like a giant torch. Its thatched roof had evidently caught, and the flames were working downward.

  “Are they out? Are they out?” she screamed as she ran to her men, who stood helpless amid the growing crowd of villagers watching the blaze.

  Jenks dodged falling cinders and pieces of burning thatch to run to the wooden front door and pound on it with both fists. “Garvers! Master Simon! Fire! Fire!”

  Someone put a heavy cloak around Elizabeth’s shoulders—Robin. She nodded, but turned immediately back to the crisis.

  “Your Grace,” Jenks shouted through the roiling smoke, “the door latch is tied to the hinges with rope. It won’t lift.”

  “Is it hot?” she shouted.

  “Not very.”

  “Then the lower floor might not be in flames yet. Robin, have the men get the Maypole and knock the door in!”

  Elizabeth moved slightly to the side. Even from here, in the blinding light and the wreaths of smoke, she could see the window shutters were also tied shut with rope. For the first time since this new terror began, she thought not only of her and her people’s survival, but of the riddle of the fire mirror.

  This blaze had been ignited at night; it could not have been started by reflected sun from a mirror, not even from Dee’s signal mirror. That had been removed from the pole after it was taken down hours ago. But the marks of the mirror murderer were here: the flames had started on the roof after the escape route was tied closed.

  She both sweated and shivered. “Jenks, get back from there!” she shouted as another clump of fiery thatch barely missed him.

  To lift and move the massive pole, Robin worked with yeomen guards, villagers, and actors. She saw Cecil and Gil at the very back of it as they rushed toward the burning house. Dr. Dee appeared in the crowd with a disheveled Katherine at his side. She stood among the queen’s women, the goodwives and children of Mortlake, her eyes wide but streaming silent tears. Elizabeth noted she was one of the few completely dressed and shod.

  As if it were a Roman battering ram, the Maypole took down the front door. Everyone’s gaze was fixed upon the opening, which now belched smoke. Inside, they could glimpse burning timbers falling from the cottage ceiling. The house was collapsing from within. The Garvers were doomed, she thought. No one could be alive in there.

  She turned to see if Gil was still at the back of the pole. He was, but she glimpsed just behind him a child who must have bolted from his mother’s care.

  The small boy darted out of the crowd and ran headlong away. Someone else terrified of the fire, she thought. Even as the men moved the Maypole and her guards kept everyone back from the inferno, she stepped from the crowd to watch the boy.

  Someone should comfort him, she thought, and wondered where his mother was. Was he terrified of the fire, like poor Kat? She must go inside to comfort her. But why did the child run toward the river and not to one of the houses here? Or could he merely have gon
e around to the other side of the burning cottage, which, like the Garvers’ inn, backed up to the river?

  “Clifford,” she shouted to her yeoman guard, “come with me. There’s naught that can be done to pull the Garvers out if they don’t walk out themselves.” She gestured for him to join her, and he and Jenks, who soon pounded along behind them, ran with her toward the Thames. The dewy grass was cold against her bare feet, but the dust of the river path felt warmer.

  “You aren’t thinking we can get river water on that fire somehow, Your Grace?” Jenks cried.

  “I fear not. I saw a small boy run this way. He looked so desperate. I don’t want him to run half crazed into the river.”

  “A boy running?” Clifford asked, his breathing ragged. “Short, kind of squat, all in brown?”

  “You saw him too?”

  “At least someone like that. But not tonight. It was in the hunt park at Nonsuch, in the distance when you sent me there after your portrait went up in flames.”

  “’S blood, man, why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Just a child, Your Grace, and too far in the distance. The thing was, when he started to cross an open patch of meadow where the deer were feeding, he just disappeared—and I was looking for bigger game.”

  Silent now, they scanned the black width of the Thames, gilded by the house fire. Nothing. No sounds on the path, no one as far as they could see.

  “Could he have run toward Dee’s place or into the inn?” Clifford asked. “Your Grace, there’s just no one here.”

  “I hardly imagined him—nor did you. We must go back and tell the mothers to account for their sons, so—”

  A cheer went up from the green. They tore back around the inn toward the cottage. Bent over, blackened, his clothes and hair burned away, Simon Garver pulled his prone, unconscious wife from the roiling smoke into the yard, where others rushed to help them.

  “At least,” Elizabeth cried, “there is something good which came from this tragedy. Jenks, ride at once to fetch my physician from Nonsuch!”

  Everything happened so fast the rest of that night. Dame Garver died of smoke in her lungs. Simon was burned badly on his limbs and kept coughing up black bile, even as the royal physician tried to tend him.

  “Dr. Forrest says old Simon will live,” Meg, poking her head in the door, reported to Elizabeth as the queen and Floris sat next to Kat’s bed at the inn. Though Meg had dosed Kat with a powerful sleeping potion, she kept her voice low too. “But the doctor ran out of aloe, so I’ll be sending back some of my alkanet-andeglantine salve from Nonsuch for the old man.”

  “The question is,” the queen said, whispering too, “since the method of starting this fire is obviously different from those at Nonsuch, was it set by the same arsonist-murderer?” She longed to put her head in her hands and sob, but she sat erect, becoming angrier by the moment. The entire village smelled of smoke and death.

  “Your Majesty,” Floris whispered, “I can care for Lady Ashley if you wish to rest. Maybe you should drink some of that powerful sleeping stuff—”

  “Poppy-and-primrose cordial,” Meg put in.

  “I don’t want to sleep,” Elizabeth insisted, glancing toward the golden glow of dawn out the eastern window. “I have much to do this morning.”

  “Will we be heading back, or staying here to look into this fire, too?” Floris asked as Meg went on her way.

  “I mean to survey the fire scene, but this large an entourage cannot remain at Mortlake, not long anyway.” Her thoughts were slowing; she felt she was slogging through mental mud.

  “Your Majesty,” Floris said, “may I be so bold as to ask what passed between you and Lady Ashley last night about the fire she fears? Were you there then, at that other fire long past?”

  Elizabeth leaned her head on the back of her chair and closed her eyes. “I was—nearly twenty years ago.”

  “If you would trust me enough to tell of it, I might be able to help Lady Ashley more when she carries on so.”

  “How things from the past can haunt us, Floris.”

  “Yes. Yes, I know.”

  “Like the fire tonight, it came at such a happy time. Late in his reign, King Henry had been triumphant in a French war and was coming home. Queen Katherine Parr had brought all three of his children together as a family to wait for him at Oakham Manor, the Countess of Rutland’s fine home. The previous years I’d been banished from court, and I was delirious with joy to be with my brother again. I was but thirteen.”

  “And were you not glad to see your royal sister?” Floris asked when Elizabeth paused.

  “The princess Mary never cared for me—the problem with our mothers and our different faiths—but I was glad to be with her. Even though I was still on edge from something I had done to annoy my stepmother, we were playing one afternoon in a bright pavilion—Edward, the male and heir, ever ordering his sisters about,” she added with a tight smile as the scene took on detail and color before her. “He commanded that we build a fire to keep warm, and I fetched a lantern. Kat was the only adult with us for some reason. We could see the windows of the manor, where the queen met with her advisers.”

  “And somehow the tent caught fire?”

  “Not somehow. It was Kat’s fault, for she was appalled we had lit a small fire in the pavilion. She tried to snuff out the flames but only spread them. The tent became so quickly engulfed that we almost didn’t get out.”

  “A tent fire that caught quickly, like the other day.”

  “Yes. It brought everything back.”

  “So Kat took the blame?”

  “No. Only Mary and I saw who really was at fault, and Edward, all sooty, had fled inside to change his clothes.”

  “Like that running boy you told me of this evening—the ghost.”

  “Don’t say that!” Elizabeth ordered, opening her eyes and glaring at Floris. “I saw that boy, and my yeoman Clifford also saw him, the day Lavina’s portrait burned. He’s a link somehow, and we must find him, but he is not a ghost.”

  “Yes, of course. But a child could not be behind these current fires, could he? So Kat was blamed for that early fire and has never gotten over it.”

  “Not so,” Elizabeth said, slumping at last to put her head in her hands with her elbows propped on her knees. “Like now, I could not bear to lose her, the only mother I had ever known. And so, though I had been banished before and could not bear to be again, I said I’d spread the fire. For I knew Kat would be sent away for good, perhaps imprisoned, if she took the blame. Only my half sister Mary knew what I’d done, but she did not gainsay my lie, for she was glad to have me gone again.”

  “So poor Lady Ashley blamed herself for starting the fire and sending you back into exile.”

  “She was as relieved as I that we were not separated. I regret my lie, but not its intent or result.”

  “I understand, Your Majesty. Truly, I do.”

  When the sun rose above the housetops, the queen, Cecil, Dr. Dee, and Jenks examined the ruins of the Garvers’ cottage. Townfolk had already reappeared to gawk, standing silently around the smoking pile. Elizabeth scanned the crowd for children. Quite a few had gathered, but none of them, she was quite sure, was the boy she had pursued last night.

  Lavina Teerlinc was in the front row, sketching, and Henry Heatherley too, who looked as if he’d been through the mill. Pasty-faced and disheveled, whatever his state from swilling bottles of his favorite Bordeaux the previous night, he had pulled himself out of bed for this. He looked both curious, the queen thought, and angry. Occasionally, she overheard snatches of whispers as onlookers pointed to places on the green or the edges of other roofs where burning thatch had floated to darken but not ignite a spot.

  “Thank God,” Cecil said, shaking his head, “that there was no wind to fan sparks on other roofs.”

  “Mere sparks would probably not ignite good thatch,” Dr. Dee put in, gesturing toward the roof of the inn as well as the burned ruins. “Densely packed, thatch is mo
re likely to smolder than ignite, unless something like a strong-burning torch is put directly to it, or a flaming roof actually abuts another. It’s one reason, Your Majesty, that London’s roofs should be converted from thatch and shake shingles to tiles. Packed in as the city dwellings are, if one goes, many could.”

  She shuddered but merely nodded. For once, no one else so much as looked surprised at one of Dee’s bits of random knowledge or far-thinking theories. Everyone knew they needed to keep to the task at hand.

  “You did all note last night,” Elizabeth said, “that, like the tent fire, the blaze started high and spread lower?”

  “But,” Cecil said, “it certainly wasn’t the sun in a mirror that began it this time. Dr. Dee’s mirror and the pole were down by then, and a bonfire two miles away could hardly start a fire through reflection as the sun’s rays can.”

  “Indeed it could not!” Dee said. “By the way, Simon doesn’t recall a thing that happened before the heat awoke him,” he added hastily, as if to shift the subject. The old man was being nursed at Dee’s house rather than at the crowded inn while plans were being made for his wife’s burial in the graveyard next to Mortlake Church. “The old man said,” Dee went on, “he thought he’d fallen asleep outside, and the blaze of the sun had awakened him—and then he thought he’d died and gone to hell.”

  They were all silent for a moment before the queen said, “I noted something significant from the window at the inn this morning. Though the torches for the Maypole dance were extinguished last night, most were left in their sconces—all but one, there, between the inn and the burned cottage.”

  “Indeed,” Cecil said, craning his neck, “all the others seem yet to be in place. I suppose that one could have been taken during the fire, but it was hardly needed, since the flames illumined everything so brightly. Shall we theorize that someone relit and threw that missing torch onto Garver’s thatched roof to start the fire?”

  “If so,” Elizabeth said, “the evidence has probably been consumed too—as have the ropes which tied the shutters over the windows.”