The Fyre Mirror: An Elizabeth I Mystery: 1 (Elizabeth I Mysteries) Read online

  Dee stayed bent over his work, hastily putting the final touches on the diagram below the written section. It might take Katherine a minute to find him, a few more moments of peace … .

  “There you are!” she sang out, standing in the door with her hands behind her back. “You will never guess what I found!”

  “I don’t like guessing games, my dear.”

  “You should! That’s what you do all the time, guess at some wild theory, then set about to prove it,” she said, pouting prettily, he must admit.

  “All right, then,” he said, straightening behind his drawing board, “what is it?”

  “Look!” she cried, and held the missing mirror out toward him. “I couldn’t believe it!”

  “You had misplaced it in the house all this time?” he cried, rushing to her.

  “No, I was walking toward the fields to get some sun and fresh air, and stumbled on it, hidden in a patch of violets, mirror side up so it caught my eye. I warrant whoever came over the wall to take it decided not to be caught with it and simply tossed or dropped it.”

  He took it tenderly in his hands. “Thank God, it did not break,” he whispered, turning the mirror over to check its back, too. The frame and surface weren’t so much as dirty or smeared, but perhaps Katherine had cleaned and polished them.

  “So now,” she said, her cheeks flushed rosy with the excitement of her great find, “I am back in your good graces, and you have a reason to visit the queen again. And I will gladly go along to explain to her. I shall tell Her Majesty that it’s almost as if some magic hand put it where I could find it again, some sprite or guardian angel—”

  “And not the evil one who spirited it away?” he said, a sharp edge to his voice. “Katherine, I must go to her with the mirror, but alone this time. You’ll need to stay with our patient.”

  “Well, at least tell the queen that I am not there because I’m sitting with him and keeping company with Mother Dee. You know,” she added, plucking at his sleeve, “all Dame Glenda Garver did was sit and look out her front window at people passing. I felt she was watching me all the time.”

  “When one is deaf, one’s world shrinks, my dear.”

  “I suppose. But Mother Dee prefers her own kitchen and hearthside. She has many memories of times long past, but she’s not a busybody like Dame Garver.”

  “My dear, best not to speak ill of the dead, especially with her husband in our house. But I am grateful you brought me this precious mirror straightaway, for I believe one like it could have been used to burn that artist’s tent at Nonsuch. Before all this happened, had you ever heard of such a thing?”

  “Of course not, my lord. I know you have many ideas for mirrors like this, but it is of use to me only in my toilette.”

  He wanted to believe that Katherine had simply found the mirror. Its return did give him the perfect reason to ride to see the queen again. But it all seemed too easy, too—fantastical.

  He studied her face; Katherine stepped quickly closer to embrace him. As he hugged her back, over her shoulder his eyes fell on the drawing of the signal mirrors he’d done for Her Majesty. He had to admit that in reflected light as in life, certain angles could create distortions—and then one couldn’t read the signals right at all.

  When Clifford reported that Gil Sharpe was in his tent in the privy garden, ailing—retching and puking, that was for sure, he said—Elizabeth ordered Meg to dose and keep an eye on him. Gil was not to leave his tent until he was much cured and the queen sent for him. Then, before the sun set, she went to see the patch of ground where Clifford had sworn that the running boy had simply disappeared. Leaving everyone behind but Jenks, Clifford, and Robin, garbed in hunting attire and riding her favorite palfrey, she set out through the hunt park toward the meadow.

  The shadows of tree trunks slanted sharply sideways, making her blink as first sun, then shade shot past her gaze. “Start us exactly where you first spotted the lad, Clifford,” Elizabeth ordered as they drew their horses up.

  Robin reined in beside her and asked, “You don’t really believe some strange child pops up here and there to set the fires, Your Grace?”

  “I am pursuing each fork in the road—and there are many.”

  “I warrant,” Clifford said, surveying the area, “it was nearly here. Though he was running away, I hardly reacted at first, set on looking for an adult.”

  “Could you tell if he had anything in his hands as he ran?” Elizabeth asked.

  “Too far to tell, though I guess he could have hidden a mirror. Then, when I spotted no one else around, I rode through that break in the trees to follow him a bit, but he disappeared.”

  “Disappeared,” Robin said. “If you were a good distance from him, perhaps he simply lay in the grass or ran down a hill. A child from one of the surrounding villages could have sneaked in to have a peek at the queen or court and then taken off when the hubbub began. Cheam lies on the other side of the hunt park, though it is a good four or five miles through thick woods and dales.”

  “I have thought of all that, Robin,” Elizabeth said. “Let’s ride anyway to the spot where you think he disappeared, Clifford.”

  They followed her yeoman guard out of the hunt park into a small meadow where grazed three of the fallow deer with which the park was stocked. The moment the animals heard the riders, they lifted their heads, froze for one moment, then bounded off.

  “It makes me wish we had time for a hunt,” Robin muttered.

  The queen turned back to Clifford. “But you said that the deer did not flee when the boy ran into this meadow.”

  “God’s truth, Your Majesty, they didn’t startle or turn. It was as if he wasn’t even there, and then he just went poof.”

  Despite the warm glow of the setting sun, Elizabeth shivered. She would not accept that the lad they sought could be a ghost. “Let’s ride to the very spot,” she said, noting well that the others had become nervous and quiet.

  As they reined in about one-third of the way across the patch of meadow, Clifford whispered, “I think it was about here he disap—seemed to vanish.”

  Elizabeth stood straight-legged in her stirrup and braced herself one-handed on her sidesaddle to look around. “There!” she cried. “I see flat stones over there.”

  “Flat stones?” Robin said, craning his neck. “Oh yes, perhaps the remnants of some old building that was taken down when the village was razed.”

  They rode over to survey two layers of stones, roughly mortared still, barely protruding among the grass and weeds. Behind the stones was a hole in the ground, perhaps four feet square, also lined with mortared stones. Grass grew through the spaces and cracks of mossy stones that had, indeed, been here a while. Elizabeth saw no remnant of cloth or any sign of human life left behind.

  “Aha!” Robin cried. “There’s your answer. You should have ridden closer and you would have caught him, man. The boy knows the area well and hid in there, that’s all.”

  As they dismounted and looked into the small hole, Elizabeth breathed a sigh of relief. Ghosts didn’t need holes to hide in.

  “But what exactly is or was this?” she mused aloud.

  “I wonder,” Jenks said, “how many deer have broken their legs in there. I’d best fill it in, lest we do have a hunt and someone’s horse comes through here.”

  “Fill it in,” Elizabeth echoed, neither giving a command nor asking a question. She suddenly pictured where she’d seen a similar configuration of stones: on top of the hillock where she’d spoken to Kat and Floris the day of the tent fire. And, come to think of it, on the rise just inside the hunt park. But neither of those elevations cradled a cavity like this.

  “Yes, fill it in tomorrow,” she said. “Men, we must find and question that child, perhaps more for what he could have observed than for what he himself did. Mayhap it was mere coincidence, not even the same boy that I saw flee at Mortlake. Jenks, ride back there, and if Simon Garver is yet able to speak, question him to see if he knows the p
urpose of the two hillocks on the west edge of the Nonsuch grounds—and this hole in the meadow. If he does not know, see if he can give you some names of others who might be able to tell us, however scattered he told me the former inhabitants of Cuddington are now. We are looking for any information we can find—any.”

  “Yes, Your Grace. I can be there by nightfall and return at first light.”

  The three men walked her to her horse. Clifford held the reins while Jenks linked his hands to give her a boost and Robin steadied her elbow until she was seated.

  “But why bother to interview those who recall Cuddington?” Robin asked. “It ‘died’ nearly three decades ago.”

  Elizabeth gazed out over the meadow to the hunt park with the parapets of Nonsuch barely visible above the trees. “Perhaps because I feel sad about the ruination—the murder—of the place, that’s all. But in this fire-mirror madness, nothing fits, nothing matches. The only connection I can fathom between why the Garvers and Will Kendale and the boy Niles could have been attacked is that Garver the Carver and Will the painter were once artisans who worked on the decor of Nonsuch.”

  “I was thinking, when you mentioned a ghost,” Robin went on, “about a theory that the running boy Clifford chased is Niles’s spirit, yet trying to escape the site where he met his fiery death.”

  Elizabeth gaped down at him. “Robin, ghosts do not cavort about in the open in broad sunlight, and why would Niles’s ghost be six miles away in Mortlake?”

  In truth, she had not thought of Niles as the ghost any more than she had considered him the intended victim of the first fire. She would not accept that the running boy was some sort of specter at all. No, the only kind of ghosts she believed in right now were ones that ran through her head, the memories of the fire in her youth and deep regret for what her father had done to Cuddington.

  As dusk fell, the queen considered questioning the still ailing Gil Sharpe through his tent flap in the crowded privy garden, but soon gave up on that idea. Firstly, it always helped her to observe as well as hear those she interrogated. Secondly, since her courtiers were now crowded in such a small space, everyone would overhear her suspicions about Gil. And thirdly, if the boy was really ill, and Meg said he was, she didn’t want to catch his condition herself.

  “My lord Cecil,” she told her master secretary as they sat at her council-chamber table that evening while she read and signed writs and decrees he handed her, “I fear my desired respite in the countryside has too much put the business of the kingdom to the side. I do not wish to leave here until we can solve these arsons and murders, but I cannot in good conscience remain much longer.’S blood,” she cried as another thought hit her, “I should have had Jenks bring back Dr. Forrest with him from Mortlake for Gil!”

  “You don’t think old Garver will live?”

  “It’s not that. Both Forrest and Dee believe he will, though he will be dreadfully scarred. But I need his opinion—Dr. Forrest’s—on what ails Gil Sharpe.”

  “Speaking of good conscience, we must hope it is not a bad one making Gilberto Sharpino ill,” Cecil muttered, handing her another decree to be signed and sanded.

  “Do you believe, my lord, the boy is really to blame for any of this?”

  “I only know, as you do, something he won’t confess is eating at him.”

  “Granted, so—”

  Clifford’s loud knock sounded at the door. “Enter!” she called.

  Her yeoman guard stepped in and closed the door behind him. “Dr. Dee has ridden in, Your Majesty, with good news, he says.”

  “I can use that. Send him in.”

  John Dee looked windblown and exhausted as he trudged toward them across the tiled floor and bowed. “Old Simon is doing as well as can be expected with those burns,” he told them, out of breath, “yet I also have other fortunate news.” He swung from his shoulder a saddle pack, which he placed carefully on the floor and bent to open. Within it lay the black tooled-leather box that used to hold his stolen mirror.

  “The lost mirror has been found, Your Grace. Whoever took it must have abandoned it quickly, perhaps when he saw it had a glass which magnified and distorted rather than simply reflected, and didn’t know the mirror’s worth.”

  “I am delighted but surprised that the thief didn’t at least sell it for its fine metal frame,” she said, rising and walking over to take the mirror from his hands and examine it closely. Her reflection made her jump: she was all huge eyes and big nose. What would her preening cousin Mary of Scots think if she peered in this strange mirror? Elizabeth had half a notion to send her one like it.

  “Or perhaps,” Dr. Dee went on, “the thief feared being captured with it and so discarded it straightaway.”

  “And yet risked climbing a garden wall for it with people living in the house who could have seen him?” she challenged.

  At that, the usually talkative Dr. Dee said nothing.

  “Precisely where was it found and by whom, Dr. Dee?”

  He cleared his throat. “By my wife, out for a brief walk—the strain of caring for Simon in such pain, you see. Precisely, she said, in a bed of violets not far from our house.”

  “I see. Quite a fortuitous turn of events.”

  “Ah, yes. Katherine herself said that.”

  “Not to change the subject, Dr. Dee,” she said, “but perhaps you can help me with some local information about Mortlake. Someone told me of a strange boy running away from the fire at the Garvers’ cottage. Dressed in brown broadcloth, perhaps even hopsacking. Rather broad-chested, I hear, squat in form, with short legs but ones that moved all too fast. He supposedly ran toward the river path and disappeared. Does he sound at all familiar to you?”

  He looked at her wide-eyed, then shifted his gaze to the parchment he held in his hands. She could see his writing on it—not in code this time—and some sort of drawing with mirrors and dotted lines to signify angles. His tone wary as she glanced back to his face, he said, “Do you mean one of the village children?”

  “I do not know but am curious to find out. Have you ever seen his like?”

  “Not I, God’s truth, but rumors say a few others have over the years. A man of logic and rationality, I don’t give it much credence, but best you warn whoever saw that boy. I should have asked Simon if his wife had seen the apparition, for supposedly it appears only to those soon doomed to die.”

  Chapter the Eleventh

  STILL HOLDING DR. DEE’S MIRROR, ELIZABETH MOVED TO the closest chair and sank into it. Cecil came to stand behind her; though he did not touch her, she felt his support as if he had clasped her shoulder. She stared down into the mirror again. This time it caught her mouth with her lips pressed tightly together but looking huge and trembling.

  “Tell me more about this ghost, Dr. Dee,” she said.

  “May I inquire who saw the apparition, Your Majesty?”

  “Just tell me more.”

  “They say, you see, the boy was one of many country folk who died in an early plague—not the Black Death but the sweat. Victims were buried in a mass grave on the edge of a farm, which is no longer there. As the site was not designated by tombstones, the name of the place became its only marker.”

  “The name of the place?”

  “Why, Mortlake.”

  “Ah, mors, mortis—Latin for ‘death,’” she whispered. “Lake of death.”

  “It was never really a lake, I take it, but a pond which the Thames evidently overflowed. I’ve read that the sweat carried off hundreds in the last century,” he went on, his hesitant voice now taking on that tutor’s tone he often fell into. “The addition to the cellar dug for the Riverside Inn about thirty years ago disturbed the old burial pit, according to my mother. Rumors of hauntings have been sporadic at best ever since, or I would have warned you not to stay there.”

  “I’m glad,” Cecil muttered, “we didn’t know we were sleeping above a plague pit.”

  “Dr. Dee,” Elizabeth said, “since the hauntings began only
after people learned a plague pit was there, could we not just as well theorize that the ghost is a figment of men’s imaginations and not a specter whose bones have been disturbed?”

  “I’ve always thought so, but someone once warned old Simon he’d be cursed for disturbing those bones.” Dee gestured with his rolled parchment as if it were a magician’s wand. “I asked him several years ago if he’d ever seen the running boy, but he said no.”

  “Dr. Dee,” Elizabeth said, looking up steadily at him, “I have seen that boy, or one who could be so construed. He was running away from the fire at the Garvers’ as if he had been burned.”

  Dee’s eyes widened; he squeezed his parchment so hard it crinkled. “I thought at first you might mean you’d seen him, Your Grace, but I dared not ask. Running away as if—I suppose the plague pit could have extended over to the Garvers’ cottage area.”

  She jumped to her feet. “’S blood, that may be the first completely irrational thing I’ve ever heard you say!” she cried. “I heed not that sort of superstitious curse. Besides, my guard Clifford, the yeoman on the door just now, also saw such a boy running, and not at Mortlake. Here, at the edge of the hunt park, just after a fire mirror was evidently used to mar one of my portraits and incinerate another.”

  “But not after the tent fire?”

  “Not that anyone reported, though we did not search the hunt park then.”

  “It may well be all superstition and happenstance,” Dee said. “Can you tell me about the boy who was glimpsed here at Nonsuch?”

  “He was no ghost—we’ve discovered that,” the queen exclaimed, her voice gaining strength again. “His disappearance was made quite simple by a small stone cavity in the meadow, exactly where he supposedly vanished.”