The Queene's Cure Page 4

  “But the queen doesn't favor me,” she said quietly, when she got hold of herself again. “And I told you we're doing well enough without your tales to impress customers,” she went on in a rush, fighting back tears. “God's truth, the queen wants nothing to do with m—”

  He banged his fist so hard on the counter that her scales jumped and swayed. “You promised me you'd work on changing that!” he bellowed. “Like I told you, we need something that'll rattle her good, make her want your cures again. Hell's gates, if 'n you went back to her, the word'd get out, the coins'd roll in then.”

  “We had a high-paying, well-spoken customer about a fortnight ago who wanted ground unicorn horn,” she protested, “so it's not just Dr. Clerewell and a few other courtiers carrying us.” She went over to her display of elixirs, syrups, juleps, decoctions, and cordials sitting on the sill and on the three shelves above it Nick had built for display. She rotated the bottles to turn the other sides to the sun in the bull's-eye, thick-paned window.

  As she stretched to reach for the top row, she ached, just remembering Ben's hamhock fists the last time he got overmuch beer and lust in him at the same time. With Ben, maybe like with too many folks, love and hate got twisted up sometimes, and they committed demented, daring acts they didn't really mean. But then it was too late.

  THE SMALL POX,” ELIZABETH WHISPERED TO ROBIN AS they stared down at the ornate figure. “This depicts the Queen of England with pox scars all over her face and hands!”

  She pulled her feet back from the effigy, which seemed to crowd the coach between them. She pressed her trembling hands over her eyes to shut out the sight of the plaster face with its ravages of deep, rounded pits and smears of scars. In her mind's eye, she saw the horror of the dread disease again.

  She had been a gangly, young girl that summer and was so thrilled to have the continued affection of her fa-ther's sixth queen, the kindly Katherine Parr, who had been recently widowed by King Henry's death. At her stepmother's house at Chelsea, west of London on the Thames, a garden of hollyhocks and roses grew, surrounded by a wall and locked gate that opened on the narrow lane behind the house. Beyond grew fragrant fields of meadowsweet and woodruff which smelled like new-mown hay. Perhaps that place, that memory was why she loved those strewing herbs yet today.

  But the garden was a haven, and Elizabeth, up to that point, had been sheltered from the ugliness of life, from people who were not attractive, for that was what her father favored.

  That long past day, slipping away from both the Queen's Grace and her companion, Kat Ashley, Elizabeth took the key, hidden in the chink of the brick wall. Outside the gate the entire world was splendidly beckoning—until she saw them.

  At first she told herself it was only a mother and her two little ones, the girl still in leading strings, the babe held in arms. Even when the princess saw they were ragged beggars, no doubt scurrying from back door to back door in the rural village, she was not afraid and rummaged in her small dangling purse for a stray coin to give.

  But then she saw their faces fully in the sun. The mother's, perhaps once comely, deeply pocked and ravaged, the children's, too, a marred mass of scars and pits—

  Princess Elizabeth's courage and charitable heart failed her. Gasping, she backed away and tripped to bounce her bottom in the dirt. The toddler came to stand over her, looking down, holding out a dainty hand, also poxed and pitted.

  “Tell the young lady yer name now,” the mother prompted as if the precious day and world had not just turned upside down.

  “Me 'Liz'beth,” the child said in the sweetest voice.

  That other 'Liz'beth, Princess of England, had scrambled to her feet and scurried in the gate like a craven coward. But ever since, even when she saw her brother, young King Edward, waste away from the great pox, which the physicians called syphilis, even when she once glimpsed lepers, even when she saw the grotesque neck swellings of scrofulous folk that the monarch traditionally blessed each year, she always saw the face of that mother and her two little ones and hated how she'd run from them. Yet she ran still in nightmares that plagued her in her sleep.

  Now in the coach the queen pulled her hands from her hot face and thrust them unladylike under both armpits and clasped them there to steady herself.

  “I can have this counterfeit corpse covered and carried into the doctors' hall,” Robin said, evidently heedful of her agitation. “You can command them to destroy it or store it, then we will be on our way and put out the word that you simply stumbled getting in the carriage, scraped your hand or face, and cried out, or—”

  “Enough!” she told him, seizing her cloak from him and throwing it over the figure. “The queen must not stumble or cry. We are taking this wretched thing back to Whitehall where it can be studied, probed, and whatever I must do to discover who put it here and why. And we must be sure,” she added, sitting up straight as the thought struck her, “that it was put in the coach here and not at the palace. Summon Boonen for me.”

  Robin whispered to Jenks, who produced the driver. Rotating his flat cap in nervous hands, the burly man squinted into the dim coach to see her. Elizabeth leaned toward him in the door so he could not catch a clear view inside.

  “Boonen, did you look inside here when you hitched the team this morning?” she asked, careful to keep her voice down so the others would not hear.

  “Oh, aye, Your Majesty, that's part of my charge and duty, it is. Swept it out good and all. And the window flaps were down. We were moving all the way, so no one could of throwed refuse in—not till we got here—if that's what happened, Majesty. Begging your leave, but what's that thing there I can see right—”

  “That will be all, and tell no one aught of this—re-fuse.”

  As Boonen bowed himself back into the crowd, the queen told Robin, “Get out and tell the guards to announce that the crowd should return early on the morrow because they will receive a token of their kindnesses to me today.”

  “What?” Robin said, his handsome face crumpling in a frown. “You start doing that to crowds and you'll have bedlam next time you so much as show your face at a window.”

  Elizabeth could tell she was thinking way ahead of him, but then she usually did. “I say that, Robin, so that I may have a few trusted men here tomorrow to question people about what they saw today. Otherwise, we'd have to somehow track them all down. Do as I say.”

  But he still could not move fast enough for her. The queen slammed the door after him when he climbed out to do her bidding. “Let everyone mount for the ride back,” she called out to Jenks through the still partly opened window. “Driver, on!” she cried and slapped down the leather flap.

  The entire way back to the palace, Elizabeth did not look out again. It was dark and stale in here, and that thing at her feet shifted and shuddered as if it were alive. The queen felt sick to her soul, but she'd be damned if she wouldn't uncover the villain behind this, and quick.

  GRACIOUS, CREATING THIS TOOK TIME AND TALENT,” Kat observed as she watched Jenks and Robin Dudley lay the effigy on the table in the queen's privy chamber and remove her cloak from it. They had brought it up the servants' stairs from the stables. The queen had ordered the room cleared but for the four of them—and that thing. “Would you believe it?” Kat marveled, evidently missing Elizabeth's baleful stare. “It's really quite good.”

  “It's appalling,” the queen corrected her. “Accursed! Look at that poxed face.” If it would have been anyone but Kat, still looking unsteady and wan, she would have rounded on her. “Thank you, Lord Robin, that is all,” Elizabeth went on with a dismissive nod, “but I would deem it a favor if you would send Secretary Cecil to me. He cannot be far,” she added pointedly when he still hovered. “And do not broadcast to others what—and who— this looks like.”

  He hesitated as if he would argue, then evidently saw the foolhardiness of that. He opened his mouth, then shook his head and kept going.

  “Jenks,” she said the moment the door closed behind
Robin, “go find Ned and Lord Hunsdon and bring them up the back privy stairs. And fetch Gil, too, as I shall want several sketches of this thing. Kat shall relock the door behind you, but we shall hear your knock and let you in.”

  As ever, her dear Jenks hastened to obey without question, taking the private back way her father had ordered constructed in almost all of his palaces and lodges. Its entry in her bedroom was hidden by an arras. At the river gate of the palace it was guarded by yeomen, but Jenks could get out and back in.

  Returning her gaze to the thing on the table, Elizabeth jolted anew at the sight of it, so cold, lifeless, yet lifelike. It was mostly the skin and hair, she surmised, for they were well done: the complexion seemed to give off a warm glow though it was cold to the touch. Seeing it laid out like this as if at a state funeral rattled her to the bone, but she refused to let on.

  “Now, my question to you, Kat, before you take your afternoon respite, is do you recognize the gown on this creature?”

  “Oh, that I do,” Kat replied, fingering the tawny branched brocade overskirt, appliquéd with dainty, daisy blooms of topaz gems and embroidered leaves. “One you haven't worn for months, but the skirts—yes, bodice and both sleeves—the pieces are yours. I must needs consult my records, since I can't recall if this was the assemblage of them the last time you wore it. It must have been nigh on two years ago.”

  Women's gowns, both plain and great, were a compilation of separate bodices, skirts, pairs of sleeves, and accessories, so that they could be completely mixed or matched by fastenings of laces, pins, or fancy flapped ties called points. At least, the queen thought, the gown bore none of her precious pins to hold the parts together nor scattered about as she was wont to do.

  “I would like you, as Mistress of the Royal Wardrobe,” Elizabeth said, “to do all you can to trace how these garments could have disappeared from under lock and key in a supposedly guarded building.”

  “I'd be able to tell you when you wore it last for sure, but my past ailments have fogged me up a bit, you know that, lovey.”

  “I do not blame you, Kat, but someone is to blame, and I mean to find out who and why. Something is afoot here that reeks of insult, injury—”

  “Or plot?” a masculine voice inquired. They turned to see at the door to the hall William Cecil, her principal secretary, Master of the Wards, and trusted adviser. He quickly closed behind him the door to the gallery that linked this privy suite of rooms to the more public presence chamber beyond.

  “Dudley told me I could come directly in,” Cecil explained, approaching them after a smooth bow, “but I was already on my way when I heard. And this is the amazing replica everyone is buzzing about.…”

  “ 'S blood, I knew I'd never keep it quiet!” Elizabeth cried and stamped her foot. “Now it will be noised all over my realm, and every whoreson lickspittle Papist spy will write his royal master in Madrid or Paris—or tell Mary, Queen of Scots, in Edinburgh—that someone in my realm wishes me ill, with pox if not worse, and is mocking—if not threatening—me!”

  “Then we must put a better face on it,” Cecil said as he bent over the effigy, “and I mean that not as a pun. We shall have it told that someone, an artisan of some sort, an anonymous sculptor or lovestruck subject, as all your subjects are, Your Grace, made and shyly presented this as a gift to his serene royal highness. We shall baldly deny any rumors about the poxed skin as a trick of the light— or say the face and hands were scratched or marred in being carried or placed in the coach.”

  “Aha,” the queen said, clasping her hands before her mouth. “What would I ever do without you, my lord?”

  Cecil's brown eyes lit at that compliment, and he made another slight bow. The queen and her most loyal man had worked together and struggled with each other through numberless difficult situations. Their bond was closer than ever of late, except when he took the perilous path of suggesting she must make a foreign marriage match, and soon.

  William Cecil was a brilliant, if ambitious lawyer who had served her well for years, even when she was in disgrace and lived in terrible times with two other royal lives between her and the throne. Now forty-two years of age, he looked older, with his long, shovel-shaped beard and solemn face, but his eyes could sparkle and his wit was sharp as a sword. Cecil was both a devoted family man and a skilled statesman, just the sort of adviser she could build her kingdom on. She worked him hard but rewarded him well, and he was ever up to any task she set before him.

  “I shall hastily convene the Privy Plot Council,” she said, beginning to pace, “whose members I have already summoned, and we shall ferret out what wretch stands behind this. If it is one of our eminent physicians who has dared to try to challenge me, I shall have him dismissed at best and imprisoned at worst,” she went on, gesturing broadly. “If this comes from my political enemies, especially my cousins, who have defied me already, I shall let them rot in the prisons they already inhabit.”

  The queen's gaze met Cecil's over the figure between them, and she stopped walking so fast, her skirts swayed. “I swear this means something dire,” she whispered to him, as a knocking sounded from the next room and Kat went to open the Thames-side privy entrance. “This face, even the hands, are so real…it could almost be embalmed ….” Avoiding the pox marks, she touched the chin of the effigy, marveling again at the suppleness of the skin.

  “I'm afraid it must be from someone who knows you well,” he replied, “someone who is aware you dread the pox. Best I don a thick pair of riding gloves for protection and have a look up its skirts, if you'll forgive the impertinence, Your Grace,” Cecil suggested, as Jenks, Ned, and Harry came in, with Kat explaining things to them as fast as she could talk. “Who knows,” he concluded quickly, “what sort of viper or harmful substance could be hidden in its petticoats, up its sleeves, or even in this red-wigged head?”

  THE THIRD

  Saffron causes headache and is hurtful to the brain, for

  the too much use of the brain cutteth off sleep, through

  want whereof the head and senses are out of frame.

  JOHN GERARD

  The Herball

  MY HEAD IS SPINNING WITH ALL WE MUST DO,” Elizabeth Tudor told her assembled band, with the effigy laid out before them on the table as if in repose or death. “And I'll not sleep until we discover who is behind this. Even if we do suggest to others that someone is trying to compliment and laud their queen, I am not flattered!”

  Silence reigned as they gazed at the effigy. Of course, Jenks had seen the thing before, and her cousin Baron Hunsdon was a man of few words. But her chief fool and principal player of scenes—and one of her best sets of eyes and ears about the court—the curly-haired, greeneyed Ned Topside was seldom silent.

  And yet, Elizabeth noted, something was slightly askew about it, some facial details not quite hers. If it had been stripped of the hair, cheap attempt at a crown, and the ornate garments, would it look like her at all? Nonsense, she chided herself. Any lackbrain could tell it was a good enough likeness, and the royal trappings showed it was intended to be her.

  “Pray tell us what you would have us do,” her cousin Harry Carey declared, perching his hand on his sword hilt in a swaggering stance as if ready to do battle for her.

  Harry was the queen's first cousin through their mothers, who had been sisters. Now thirty-six, he looked as much Tudor as Elizabeth with his chestnut-hued hair, though his once-fair, freckled complexion was burnished by the sun and ruddied by manly, out-of-doors pursuits. Sporting a close-cropped beard, he was of middling height; the two of them saw eye to eye in more ways than one.

  Harry, who had gone into exile on the continent during her Catholic sister's reign, had been ever loyal to her, and she had created him Baron Hunsdon and Master of the Hawks at the time of her accession. Lately, she had given him and his wife, her lady-in-waiting Anne Carey, fine lodgings in Blackfriars so they would be near their children even when serving at court. Like Robin, Harry was a man of action who ch
afed under a sedentary life, and she could see him champing at the bit even now.

  “I would ask certain favors of each of you,” Elizabeth began.

  “At least we don't have a murder on our hands this time,” Kat said. “But will this secret assembly function as we did the other three times you had need of covert actions, Your Grace?”

  “Indeed, we must,” Elizabeth admitted as she turned from one intense countenance to the other. Cecil looked as grim as she felt. At least Kat seemed animated for the first time in days. Jenks, like Harry, looked ready to take on the world with fists or swords. And Ned Topside, above all the others, seemed utterly fascinated by the replica.

  “My favorite player of parts and staged counterfeiting,” she addressed the handsome man grandiosely, for Ned loved fine speeches, “what think you of this playacting likeness of your queen? You have been oft skilled with wigs, costumes, and false faces.”

  “Yes, Your Grace, but only to amuse and please—and you are neither now,” he murmured, still studying her second self on the table. Since too many men had let her down, Elizabeth tried to read his expression. Was it dismay that she implied he had the skills to produce this effigy? Shock at seeing what a fine job it was? Wanting to leave nothing to chance, she studied Ned the more as he finally cocked both brows and looked up.

  “I think, for a molded mask, someone's done a fine job of it, Your Grace, though never,” he hastened to add, “could a work of art capture the rare essence of your beauty. Yet this portraiture would make an audience suspend disbelief whether they sat in the great hall at court or in the gallery, cockpit, or—”

  “But it was not meant to fool anyone, my favorite fool,” she countered, feeling relieved he was back to his bombastic self again. “It was meant, I believe, to intimidate and threaten, to warn, and even to harm me through unease or fear of the deadly pox or death itself.”