by Karen Harper
Elizabeth forced a smile. Who could not respond to Mary's graceful and generous gestures? “What sort of a surprise, dearest Mary? Lately surprises are not as amusing as they used to be. But I thank you for your help,” she added, leaning closer to her friend, “in trying to trace the red hair. I intend to discover if that old woman is still making wigs.”
Glancing askance at the other ladies, Mary whispered, “But since you had already heard of her from another source, how did I help?”
“I did not know she was still working with wigs, or exactly where she lived, so I have you to thank for that. Nor did I know her name was Honoria Wyngate before you told me so.”
“And I have you, my queen, to thank for being my beloved friend—mine, my lord's, and, of course, Robin's,” Mary said as she produced a small, velvet box from up her sleeve. “See, this is only the first part of the surprise.”
“And is this gift from you or from Robin too?” the queen inquired cautiously, as she took the box.
“From my lord and me, though Robin's seen it and approved.”
“Very prettily said, worthy of Cecil's political answers,” the queen remarked as she lifted a finely tooled, gold and gem-encrusted pin from the box. “Ah, a mermaid! How exquisite!”
“I knew it suited you, for like you, a mermaid is beautiful and luring and yet men know her not,” Mary said. “But you must come outside to the fountain in your privy garden now and see the rest of the surprise we have planned.”
“Mary, I thank you, but I've called Cecil, Lord Hunsdon, and a few others to a privy meeting—a discussion of policy.”
“But this will only take a moment, Your Grace,” she wheedled. No wonder, Elizabeth thought, Sir Henry Sidney had wed Mary and made her Countess of Pembroke and lady of the great estate and house of Penshurst. Henry had declared Mary the most beautiful woman in the kingdom, after his queen, of course.
“All right then,” Elizabeth said, pinning the mermaid on her bodice and rising. She waited until everyone stood so she wouldn't have to pick her way through the puddles of skirts to the door. “The Lady Mary Sidney says a surprise awaits us in the privy garden,” she announced to the others.
Knowing smiles, rolled eyes, and titters told Elizabeth that they were all in on it. Probably, she thought, some little play or masque about mermaids, or a new madrigal for all to sing around the fountain. If they thought she would abide another water battle like they had staged a few weeks ago where everyone ended up laughing and drenched, they were much mistaken. If so, they had misread her mood. She wanted no part of frivolity this night, for she was dying to know what her Privy Plot Council had uncovered.
When she saw her male courtiers awaiting them in the gallery, she realized they too were in on the covert charade. They trooped down the grand staircase and outside together into the large, walled garden with its grassy lanes, fruit trees, and thirty-four high, painted columns topped by gilded, mythical royal beasts and flapping pennants.
Ned Topside appeared and, as she emerged into the evening air now greatly cleared of fog, began to recite a poem about Venus emerging from the sea. But e'en Venus is ne'er so fair as our fair queen, went the chorus as everyone joined in. Passing the sundial they approached the central, triple-tiered fountain.
Reading their minds, she refused to go closer. After all, it was she who had oft secretly signaled her gardener to turn up the force of the water to douse courtiers and even Cecil when it pleased her. Did they think she would fall for her own trick, especially when they were deeming her a mermaid this night?
But two half-walking, half-swimming human mermaids emerged from the crowd, both Mary's servants, if Elizabeth recalled aright. Lightly draped in gauze and most comely, they made graceful, undulating motions with their bare arms, but they had trouble walking, encased in satin fish tails from their waists down.
As the mermaids broke into song, everyone began to laugh and clap while Ned recited the same words loudly so everyone could hear. The water did indeed spout stronger, though not full force, to play airborne rivulets above their heads. Six other Dudley and Sidney servants emerged with torches to light the scene as others flapped long bolts of blue, green, and white fabric to mimic the waves of the sea. Entranced, Elizabeth came closer as the mermaids sat upon the slick lip of the fountain, still singing.
The crowd edged closer. Evidently on some sort of cue, the mermaids lifted their tails into the fountain and stood there as if they would sink into the depths. Torches held aloft on either side of her, the queen stepped forward to thank her dear Mary for this double gift. To her surprise, Mary's husband, Sir Henry, took one of the royal hands and Robin quickly seized her other.
“I knew you had a part in this,” Elizabeth mouthed to Robin. “But if you think to throw me in with them, you had best think again.”
“I live only to adore and protect you,” he whispered.
His smile was so ravishing she almost slipped on the damp paving stones where the mermaids had sloshed water out. Mayhap, she thought, she'd been wrong to hold Robin off so, to punish him so long for the scandal they'd barely survived when his wife had died so mysteriously. She knew he longed for her to rely on him as she had once, turn back to him and—
“Hell's gates!” Robin shouted, looking down into the torchlit, roiled waters of the fountain between the two mock mermaids. He loosed Elizabeth's hand and threw out his arm before her as if to keep her back. “Mary, was there a third one?” he demanded, pointing between the mermaids. “What's this?”
Surely this, too, was part of the fantastical surprise, Elizabeth thought. She leaned over Robin's restraining arm to gaze down through the shifting surface at a naked woman drifting, faceup, eyes and mouth wide in the halo of her gold-red hair, as if swimming, floating forever free.
For the second time in three days, Robin stood at her side in a crowd to pull her back when she found what appeared to be a corpse.
THE SIXTH
Violets admonish and stir up a man to that which is
comely and honest … for it would be an unseemly and
filthy thing, for him that doth look upon and handle fair
and beautiful things, to have his mind not fair, but filthy
and deformed.
JOHN GERARD
The Herball
THIS TIME THERE WAS NO WAY ELIZABETH COULD keep everyone from seeing the prone female form. Pushing forward, then jumping back in horror or awe, ladies shrieked and men cursed. The queen did not scream as she had when she saw the effigy, but she struggled not to show the fear that racked her.
“Guards,” she cried, not trusting Robin with this, “to me!”
Six big yeomen, halberds in hand, came clattering through the cluster of courtiers. “Send everyone inside except the Sidneys and Lord Dudley but keep the torches here. We need more light.”
As the guards hastened to obey and the two mock mermaids were assisted from the water, Elizabeth forced herself to gaze down upon the body again.
A complete stranger. A slender, young blonde, so pale and—dear God in heaven—with tiny, round pox marks on that face, each limb, and over all of her body.
Elizabeth shoved past the hovering Mary, Henry, and Robin and was sick upon the grass with her back to the fountain. As she wiped her mouth with her handkerchief, Mary came to her aid, but the queen shook her off. Her friend had led her to this with everything so planned. Could she trust even Mary Sidney now?
“Your Grace,” Mary said, her voice choked with emotion, “I swear by all I hold dear I had naught to do with this. My Lord Henry and Robin—none of us did.”
“They will have to answer for themselves,” Elizabeth insisted. “Another poxed body—this one real.”
“But this one is not tricked out to look like you,” Mary protested. “What if someone heard about the other, then with cruel intent and forethought aped the first perpetra-tor's filthy work?”
Elizabeth rounded on her. “In other words, these two bizarre events were not masterm
inded by the same villain? No, Mary. Too few saw the other, and this one mimics the effigy, which mimicked me. That dead woman is of an age with me and fair of face—or was!”
“Your Grace,” Robin said, sidling closer and taking Elizabeth's arm, “you must not let this shake you.”
“A woman's poxed corpse appears in my fountain in my walled, privy garden you three lure me to as if on cue, and I should not let it shake me?”
“But, my queen,” Robin went on, “the entire court knew of this—of our plans for a little masque to cheer you. It is naught we alone planned or knew of.”
“And you, my lord,” she told him, pulling her arm free of his grasp, “just happened to be at my side when I found that dreadful image of myself in the coach, did you not?”
“I long to ever be at your side, my queen! I beg you, never suspect nor punish me for that.”
“Your Grace,” Mary said, her tear-streaked face slick in torchlight, “my Lord Henry and I—Robin too—wish you only well.”
“We shall sift this out later,” Elizabeth declared. “I warrant this act is the doing of a deformed mind, and I want from the three of you by sunset Monday a complete listing of everyone—courtiers, servants, seamstresses, gardeners, musicians, whomever—who knew of my coming to this fountain this evening. If the three of you had naught to do with this, you will find who did. Now leave me!”
“Here with that—that drowned soul?” Mary cried. “I'll not desert you.”
“Go!”
Mary fled in sobs with her lord hard on her heels, while Robin dared to linger. “Go from me,” the queen repeated, almost afraid she would break down and throw herself into his arms. She suddenly longed for someone else to shoulder her burdens, to take on this threat to her composure, health, and life.
Finally, Robin obeyed even as Elizabeth turned to her guards, grateful to see one had fetched a sheet to wrap the poor wretch in.
“Put the sheet in the water to fetch her out wrapped so none will directly touch her pox sores nor gaze upon her nakedness in the open air,” Elizabeth ordered them. As they did so, she stood back in the shadows, her gaze skimming the palace windows and seeing there silhouettes of her curious courtiers. Surely none of them could be behind the appearances of the effigy and the body, these implied deadly threats to her person. Not those with whom she mingled freely, daily. Not those she trusted, who needed her even more than she needed them.
She turned to gaze at the dark line of fruit trees standing before the outer brick wall. That was the only side of the garden not enclosed by buildings. If someone had invaded her palace grounds from that direction, could that someone still be watching? Racked by an icy shudder, she wrapped her arms around herself as if to buffer the chill night wind.
“Clifford,” she summoned the guard closest to her, “go inside and find Stephen Jenks, Ned Topside, and Gil Sharpe and send them to me forthwith.”
He hastened to obey as four guards lifted the ghostly, shrouded form. It dripped water as they shuffled toward the palace. Like a hired mourner in a funeral cortege, Elizabeth walked behind them, followed by other guards with torches.
GLAD YOU HAD US STAY TO SUPPER,” NICK COTTER TOLD Meg and gave a hearty belch. “Good chine of beef.”
“Bett shopped for the food and prepared it so I could finish the grace plasters before the mix went hard, so no reason you shouldn't enjoy it with me,” Meg assured him.
She rose wearily from the table in the largest room above the shop. “Besides, Ben's long overdue and has probably settled into some tavern for the night with his old bridge shooter companions.” She'd sent him on a very special errand, one he'd readily agreed upon for once. And she knew he'd taken enough coin to get over his distasteful task afterward.
She touched Bett's shoulder as she rose from the table, and Bett patted her hand in return. Bett saw Meg's predicament with Ben and, Meg knew, felt deeply for her. The thing was, did Bett know how deep the pain cut of losing her former life at the palace? Did she sense to what lengths Meg was willing to go to get that life back? Though Nick and Bett worked for her, they were sent out now and again to gather information for Her Majesty. That was a good one, Meg thought, perversely amused: Meg Milligrew and Bess Tudor sharing servants.
“Bett, could I talk to you downstairs before you head home?” Meg asked, stacking their pewter plates to take with her. As long as she was going down, she'd clean them out proper in the shop wash water instead of just wiping them with a crust of bread up here.
While Nick leaned back in Ben's chair, putting his feet up on the bench the women had shared, Bett lit a fat tallow candle and lighted Meg's way downstairs.
“You can talk in front of Nick,” Bett said, sounding a bit annoyed. “I mean about Dr. Clerewell's mention he'd consider a cure for Gil's muteness.”
“I know,” Meg assured her. “Though Nick is not truly Gil's sire, he loves him like he was.”
Meg sighed silently. She did not want a baby with Ben Wilton, yet she sometimes longed for one to love. Though Gil was hardly a child anymore, Meg had come to care greatly for him. Too bad, she thought for the hundredth time, that apothecaries were legally banned from prescribing cures. But now she had hopes for Gil, thanks to Dr. Clerewell's suggesting he could help.
“What is it you want to say then?” Bett asked, interrupting Meg's agonizing. “Or has Ben been at you bad again?”
Meg shook her head as she dropped the plates in the wash water and lit a second candle. “I have something special for you here, just so you can tell me how you think it does.”
Handing Bett her candle too, Meg motioned her over to the cabinet of deep drawers that lined the wall behind the counter. In the one where she usually kept dried spring flowers, she had hidden the precious box of Venus Moon Emollient.
“How something smells, you mean?” Bett asked. “If it's medicine for me, I'm healthy as a horse.”
But when Meg produced the alabaster box, Bett was all eyes and ears. “Even looks pretty,” she said solemnly. “What is it then?”
“A skin cream that covers and treats scars at the same time. And you're not to tell anyone where you got it, because it is both rare and—well, being investigated for its effect right now, so you mustn't try it if you're afraid. But I've seen someone who used it with fine results.”
Peering as suspiciously into the box as if it were Pandora's, Bett frowned, then shrugged. “If you say so,” she said with a sniff at the substance.
“And you won't tell a living soul about this, not even Gil, because he chatters so,” Meg insisted.
“Chatters, that's a good one. My mute boy chatters,” Bett said, and they exchanged smiles.
While Bett held both candles, Meg put a bit of the thick cream on her index finger and smoothed it over the jagged mark on Bett's chin, caused by a gunpowder explosion years ago, the same accident that had thrown Gil into a wall and made him mute. The substance felt both smooth yet slightly grainy to her touch, but it went on well. It was even closer to Bett's pale skin hue than it had been to Marcus Clerewell's complexion.
“There!” Meg pronounced as if she'd done an entire portrait fine as those Gil produced. “Don't wash your face till I get a good look at you in the morning, and if anyone but your family asks, don't trust them. Just say it's evidently starting to fade after all these years, praise God.”
“Praise God for a friend like you,” Bett said with tears in her eyes as she stared into the small square of polished bronze mirror that Meg held before her face. “Laws, I just knew I'd be scarred forever, but I didn't figure on this.”
KEEPING HER DISTANCE FROM THE BODY, ELIZABETH paced back and forth in the large anteroom down the hall from her state apartments, where she had ordered the corpse laid out on a table. It was all too eerily reminiscent of what she'd been through with the effigy, and she was certainly not taking this into her privy chambers. No matter that the best medical knowledge declared that pox was spread either by the wrath of God or by foul air from a living, inf
ected person. She was taking no chances touching or getting overly close to this victim, so she needed others to observe it.
It—she—lay covered to her armpits with the soaked sheet in this well-lighted room. She almost looked asleep as water dripped on the parquet floor, which the queen had ordered covered with a second sheet.
“I just don't want my court doctors privy to our investigation,” Her Majesty rambled on to Ned and Jenks, while Gil sketched the dead woman's face from his perch on a windowsill. “They might let something slip to their illustrious colleagues over on Knightrider Street. So I'm forced to have you, Ned, fetch that irascible German Dr. Burcote who tended Kat. Well, hie yourself after him now!” she shouted, smacking her hands on her skirts. “And where is Cecil? He should have reported to me an hour ago for our scheduled secret meeting. And Kat? Lord Hunsdon?”
Ned seemed only too glad to escape. The queen kept pacing, not touching anything. If this woman had died from drowning and not the pox, her disease could recently have been in its virulent stage. The small, round sores had not yet turned to pockmarks, and the winding sheet looked speckled with tiny drops of blood, so the onset of pox—and death itself—must be recent.
Besides, she knew bodies went stiff after several hours and this one was still pliant, unless floating in the water had done that to it.
“I also need to find out how whoever left her got in my privy garden!” Elizabeth went on to the nervous Jenks. “If he or she can breech that, what else is safe?”
“He or she?” Jenks asked. “You mean mayhap this girl wandered in when she was sick with delirium fever, took her clothes off, died, and just toppled in?”
“Don't be simple! Of course that's not what I mean!”
“You want me to check the grounds now?” he said, all too eagerly edging toward the door.
“By dawn's first light. Oh, Kat,” she cried when the hall guard opened the door to admit her, “where have you been?”
