by Karen Harper
“Mm,” Nye said, bent over one parchment for a long while. “They do smell horrid, so you'd best tell Her Grace that. Physicians are supposed to buy herbs fresh from the apothecaries.”
“The Royal College is on a crusade to shut them down if they don't toe the line, so maybe this tripe is evidence against them,” Harry muttered.
“That's what a lot of these other papers are about,” Nye said. “Lists of apothecary shops they intend to raid or examine somehow, some with charges already against them.”
“No correspondence with Katherine Grey or the Stewarts?”
“Ah, no, just a fascinating letter from a London doctor from Norwich, about a water droplet vapor theory of spreading disease. It really makes sense that plagues and pestilence are not just God's judgment, since the good die as fast as the evil. At least, I always thought so. You know, my lord,” Nye went on, “had my family money or position, I'd have wanted to be a physician, but here I am, Lord Cecil's scrivener—and covert informant.”
“Damn it, if there's nothing in that pile worth a fig, stop dawdling. At least we found no sign of effigies no matter how well Pascal can paint or Caius can mix plasters. And no skeleton or corpse; that's what the queen was fearing, I warrant. Come on, man. Let's go!”
IT WAS TIME FOR THE QUEEN TO DEPART, BUT ELIZABETH hated to leave the afflicted. She wished she could do more, speak with at least one individually, encourage another. It was tempting to break the pattern of the ritual, to tell each sufferer she grieved for them, would pray for them. But that might sound as if she doubted their cure. On cue, with a final hard look at Drs. Caius and Pascal, she rose, then waited for her ladies to lift her train.
Faces of people she knew and those she didn't blurred by as she made her way down the long aisle in stately fashion, looking straight ahead. Cecil had half vouched for Pascal's truthfulness about losing his timepiece, as her secretary of state recalled the man told him that he lost something at least. 'S blood and bones, so many strands of this web must be unwound.
First, she must confer with Harry and Cecil's man about their search of the cellar of the Royal College of Physicians. Cecil was also trying to discover whether Caius and Pascal, when they were supposedly called to Oxford and Cambridge instead of tending to poor Kat, could have visited Margaret Douglas and her son at Sheen.
Suddenly, just ahead of her, a disturbance … a reedthin girl with a sad countenance kneeling in the aisle.
“Please, Your Gracious Majesty,” her tremulous voice carried to Elizabeth as guards hastened to step between the women. “If you please, Your Majesty …”
“Stay your hands!” Elizabeth called to her guards as they converged to move the girl back into her place. “Does she need the queen's touch or to ask a boon?”
Behind the young woman, on the edge of the aisle, half sat, half leaned a handsome man with piercing gray eyes and a slightly swollen face on one side, though not in the neck where scrofula showed itself. Mayhap he was the woman's husband or brother, and a toothache had puffed half his face like that. He knelt now as did others, even in their pews when they saw the queen deigned to stop.
“Another angel?” the queen asked. “Is there another coin?”
“The number was counted exactly,” someone answered, a voice like Dr. Caius's, from the retinue behind her.
Elizabeth placed her hands on the girl's trembling, thin shoulders. She had her hands thrust into her sleeves, and her mouse-brown hair spilled partly over her face. Her complexion looked perfectly smooth and pale, yet her eyes seemed overly bright, feverish, unlike the other sufferers. Though she wore a sort of wrap around her neck, the queen could discern no tumorous swellings there.
“Is it the scrofula?” she asked the girl.
“More than …” she got out before she nodded or hung her head.
“Be bold in the face of the hard times,” Elizabeth told her. “The queen touches thee but may God heal thee.”
She lifted her hands to the sufferer's head. As if her companion could sense the girl would falter or swoon, he reached for her, evidently to steady her shoulders or help lift her chin. No, he pressed a sachet of some sort to her nose to keep her from fainting. But the thin thing exploded into a series of violent, racking sneezes.
The queen stepped back. “See to her comfort and care,” she told the girl's companion, who nodded and pulled her back into their pew, covering her nose and mouth with a large handkerchief. Exhausted now, the girl seemed to swoon in his arms. “My lady,” Elizabeth said, turning back to Mary Sidney, “see that she gets some coins if not an angel.”
“You are the angel of us all,” the man with the girl said in a deep, fine voice. That very moment the queen glanced across the rapt crowd and saw Meg Milligrew in the shadows of a gray stone pillar, her clasped hands pressed to her mouth, watching. For the first time in two years, their gazes held. As the former herb girl lifted her hand in a weak wave, Elizabeth thought Meg looked guilty—caught at something.
While Mary Sidney spoke to the man with the girl, the queen turned away with a brief nod at Meg, then walked from the Abbey into clear light and fresh air.
THE TWELFTH
My opinion is grounded upon reason too, not upon fancy
nor hearsay…. All modern physicians know not what
belongs to a sympathetical cure, no more than a cuckoo
knows what belongs to flats and sharps in music.
NICHOLAS CULPEPPER
The English Physician
YOUR GRACE, I WISH YOU WOULD HAVE TAKEN AND tried that powder from your cousin Margaret,” Mary Sidney protested. “But then I wish you'd wear my mermaid pin again,” she added under her breath, with a little pout.
“Don't let Margaret Stewart take you in too, Mary, with her cleverness and charm.” The queen answered only Mary's first concern, for she saw the mermaid pin as a reminder of a dreadful night. “She may be my kin, but she is not my friend.”
“Oh, I would not, Your Grace,” she insisted. “I just meant the powder was such a soft color, and it smelled fabulous, if a bit strong. I think the scent was lavender and meadowsweet, but I wormed out of Margaret that it had madonna lily root crushed in it too. I've oft said, the bright red face powder we English use on our cheeks is so stark against our white-as-milk complexions.”
“Mary,” Robin Dudley said sternly, “our queen needs naught to enhance her charms, especially not something sent from the Queen of Scots.”
“Thank you, Robin,” Elizabeth said and smiled his way. She felt so free and alive out here on the Thames, with the crenellated walls and chimney clusters of Hampton Court coming into view above the bright autumn trees. But the way Robin kept eyeing her, top to toes, made her blush in the cool breeze.
The royal barge, easily discernible by size as well as by its banners and crimson bunting, shot smoothly upstream with twenty men-at-oars bending their backs together. For once, the queen felt sorry for their labors, as her back ached. Yet whether commons or courtiers, ashore or adrift, folk they passed cheered and hurrahed to lift the royal spirits.
Perhaps after all, she would not have to dismiss the realm's chief physicians, thereby dealing the English medical arts a severe blow. Her cousin Harry and Cecil's man Nye had found nothing amiss in the cellar of the physicians' hall, though they had found plenty that was distasteful. But should she turn up more proof that her physicians were in league with the Stewarts, who were no doubt in deep with Mary, Queen of Scots, she'd mete out justice to them all.
“I'd swear that was Ben Wilton just shot past us in a rowboat,” Ned Topside interrupted her thoughts.
Elizabeth threw off the blankets of crimson velvet from her legs and stood, arching her back. “In that distant craft?” she asked, pointing.
“The same.”
“Not with Meg again? This far from London?”
“Not Meg, this time, unless she was hunkered down in the bottom of the boat. She's been known to hide herself.”
“Meaning what?” Elizabe
th demanded as she sank back onto her seat and Ned folded his legs to sit again on a plump cushion at her feet. “I saw her plain as could be in the Abbey at the healing service two days ago,” she went on, when he did not forthrightly answer. Though Elizabeth had wanted to set out for Hampton Court that very day, forty-eight hours of cold, pounding rain had much delayed them. “Ned,” she pursued, “you look like the cat which swallowed the canary. Tell me flat what you mean by Meg hides herself.”
“When you are in public, she likes to watch you from a little distance,” he began, then seemed to wilt under her narrow-eyed gaze. “All right,” he blurted, “I've learned that she was standing in an alley on Knightrider Street the day the effigy appeared in your coach. I even questioned her about it.”
“On your own, without telling me?” she demanded, smacking her hands on her skirts.
“Nothing really came of it you don't already know, Your Grace, and for months—years—we weren't to speak of her.”
“Mayhap not, but I have sent my courtiers and servants to buy from her nigh on since she left, though without telling her who sent them. Just as, dear Ned, should I dismiss you for keeping things from me, I would send Jenks and my other guards to hear you reciting doggerel in some tavern.”
Ned jerked even more alert. “If you must know, Your Majesty,” he blurted, “without telling her why, I did take a cutting of Meg's hair to compare to the effigy's wig.”
“I caught you at that, and you still did not explain your actions. Your findings?”
“Its hue came close, I must admit. You see, you were so set on doctors being the ones skilled with plasters, wax, and false faces—”
“Doctors and actors,” she said, hitting his shoulder with her fist.
“Yes, well, the point is, apothecaries are skilled with those things too. I went off on a wild-goose chase, panicked it could be Meg. But now I—it just can't be,” he added, rather lamely, she thought. “She could never have pulled all that off. And then, as Cecil always says, sui bono, what's the motive? I cannot fathom she'd want revenge, as she adores you—still.”
“Unless she thought that by rattling my inherent confidence with threats of disease I would take her back. She used to dose me with herbs. Meg is at heart a healer. But even if she managed to buy or filch some effigy, she's not a murderess. Still,” she mused aloud with a little shudder in the river breeze, “there is that ambitious husband who managed to be an eyewitness to some supposed doctor climbing my privy walls. When you met with Meg, how did you judge her emotional temperament?” Elizabeth asked, motioning Robin away when he looked as if he would interrupt.
“She misses you, Your Grace,” Ned said. “She is clearly frustrated by being sent away from your service for something she believes Sarah Wilton—her former self—got her into. The marriage with that lout, I mean.”
Elizabeth gripped the arms of her chair. “Yes, nothing worse than that, I'm sure. She'd lied to me, and I thought she must repair her marriage, but mayhap it is broken beyond repair.”
“Oh, it always looks so beautiful in its autumn garb!” Kat Ashley cried. Elizabeth swung around to see her dear Kat pointing at vast, pink-bricked Hampton Court Palace set in its parkland and orchards. “So romantic,” Kat enthused about her favorite place.
“By that, I hope you mean,” Elizabeth called to her ladies, clustered a short distance from her own canopied seat, “that the view is exquisitely fair and you do not refer to the fact my father brought five of his six brides here to honeymoon.”
Though she had meant it as a jest, everyone quieted. It was common knowledge that the queen's mother's initials, once entwined with King Henry's, had been chiseled off when she was beheaded to be hastily replaced by Queen Jane Seymour's. Still, Elizabeth loved the place and felt close to both her parents here.
The infamous Cardinal Wolsey, who had presented the building and grounds to the king as a gift that was really a bribe, had chosen this site because the air was so salubrious. The cardinal had been obsessed with good health, so Elizabeth was doubly glad to be here. God forgive her, she wanted to distance herself from those poor souls afflicted with the scarring of the Queen's Evil and get miles away from poxed effigies and dead women's bodies. She wanted to shake off the cloying scent of the Scots queen's gift of bloody-hued powder offered by the wily Margaret Stewart, the odor of intrigue all around her.
She shook her head to clear it of too many disturbing images, like the face of that poor girl who had kneeled in the aisle at the Abbey. Mary Sidney had inquired where she had lived and found it was in some dreadful place called Gutter Lane. Yet when she and Harry had tried to take an angel there, the landlady claimed she'd never heard of the girl or the man with her. Then Elizabeth recalled again Meg's face as she stood behind the ill girl and her doctor, fearful, hopeful.
“Ned,” she said looking down him, “when this barge returns to London to fetch more of my things, bring Meg Milligrew to me on it. Just Meg, not Ben Wilton. Say only the queen has need of some of her favorite strewing herbs, personally delivered. And do not set yourself up as Meg's interrogator on your own.”
“Of course, Your Majesty, I wouldn't.”
“Ha,” she said only, as she turned her eyes toward her safe haven of Hampton Court.
THE FIRST TWO DAYS IN THE COUNTRYSIDE, ELIZABETH tended to state business but also led her courtiers on constitutional walks and pulse-pounding rides through the surrounding forest. On her way back to her royal apartments, she passed through Base Court, then under the Queen Anne Gateway, named for her mother, and into Clock Court. With everyone close around her, she looked up at the ornate astronomical clock above the arch.
“Tempus fugit, my queen,” Robin whispered, but she ignored the fact he dared to add, “and for a beautiful young woman, adored by one particular man, who has loved her always, carpe diem.”
Elizabeth was thinking that she must indeed seize each day, hold to each moment she was queen. She must protect her realm from all plots that would do her person and her people harm. Staring at the intricate copper dials she read the hour, the sign of the zodiac, the month and day, and the number of days since the beginning of the year. Even the moon's phases and the time of high tide at London Bridge were clearly marked. It was a brilliantly conceived, ornate machine, a far cry from Peter Pascal's physicians' timepiece, and yet it could not give her the answers she must discover and link.
“I have much to do,” she said only and walked briskly upstairs with everyone scurrying behind her. But she paused at the top of the stairs to catch her breath. She had perhaps overdone her exercise lately, for her back hurt even more. If truth be told, she ached all over. Her heart pounded, and she was perspiring overmuch.
“Mayhap I should lie down for just a moment before my next meeting,” she told Kat quietly as she reached her privy chambers and went in. She walked directly to the windows and threw the casements open to look out over the fading evening sky that silhouetted the twisted chimneys, mazes of rooftops, and the proud statues of heraldic animals called the queen's beasts. As if she dozed standing, disjointed images danced through her tormented mind: queen's beasts, queen's evil, queen's cure, queen's kingdom.
TIME?” ELIZABETH SAID, SITTING UP IN HER BED, WHERE someone had pulled a coverlet over her. Darkness had descended. Only a few candle flames flickered. “What time is it?” she demanded.
Kat came close with Mary Sidney. Dr. Huicke, with two other household physicians, appeared over their shoulders.
“It's near morning,” Kat said brusquely, pushing Elizabeth's shoulders back so she lay down again. “You were running a slight fever from all your exertion yesterday, so we thought it best not to disrobe you, and just let you sleep, though Dr. Huicke plans to bleed the fever out of you.”
“No bleeding,” the queen commanded. “I am fine and—'S bones, Kat, you let me miss my meeting with Cecil and the others last night!”
“My Lord Cecil thought this best too,” Mary put in. “Please, just lie back, Your G
race.”
“Stuff and nonsense! I have much to do!” she protested and sat up again until the rush of dizziness hit her. “Give me something to drink. If I have a little fever, I need to replace the liquid I'm sweating out, don't I, doctor? I'm parched. Well, do not just stand there. Someone fetch me ale or beer!”
Mary instantly offered white wine, which the queen drank straight down. The aftertaste revealed some sort of medicine was in it. She realized her hair was loose and matted to her forehead; her gown felt clammy. Oh, hell, she'd caught a chill on the river or hunting. Perhaps she had best sleep this off. How had it come on so fast?
“I need to make a diagnosis, Your Majesty,” old Dr. Huicke muttered, daring to swipe at her wet throat then smell her sweat as if she'd given him leave to do so. “I fear something more than fever.”
“Just let me sleep!” Elizabeth shouted, but her own voice sounded as if it came from far outside her. “I'm just fine!”
I'M SCARED TO DEATH,” MEG ADMITTED TO NED AS THEY alighted from the royal barge on the landing at Hampton Court. She was also thrilled to death, merely to be in Ned's company. She carried the smaller sack of her crushed strewing herbs, and Ned, bless him, hefted the one that was nearly as big as a woolsack. “I prayed for this, Ned,” she bubbled on, “dreamed of it—that she'd summon me for strewing herbs or for anything!”
“Don't get your hopes up too high,” he warned as they walked up toward the sprawling palace together.
But Meg could have danced across the moat and not even used the bridge. “Even when her Tudor temper blows,” she told him, “she does seem to get over it. But it's taken her so long to want to see me, mayhap to ask me to serve her again.”
“Hell's gates,” Ned muttered, “she still cares for Robin Dudley, too, but she's never quite let him back in her heart, so stop this silly prating!”
