by Karen Harper
“But he's a man, and you know the queen with men …” Meg went on, then let her words trail off. The moment they entered the palace proper, she could scent something amiss. Messengers ran to and fro while courtiers stood in clumps whispering. No one smiled or laughed. Ned, too, picked up on it.
“I'll bet bad news has come about the Scots queen,” he confided, keeping his voice low. “Up in Edinburgh, she is, just biding her time to cause trouble. Why, if she weds again before the queen and has an heir— Look, there's Jenks.”
Meg was dismayed when Jenks's face did not light to see her. He barely slowed his feet as he went by. “The queen's sore ill,” he muttered, keeping his voice low as if Her Majesty would overhear and cuff him.
“Of what?” Ned called after him, but Jenks didn't turn back.
“Come on,” Ned said. “I've always been able to cheer her when she's low, even with one of her headaches, and I wager she'll be glad to have your strewing herbs too. What's in them, did you say?” he asked, bouncing the aromatic bag he carried for her.
“Mostly meadowsweet and woodruff,” she said, then added calmly, however hard her heart was pounding, “and I've something else to tell her of, though it's back in London. You know how she always fusses about her complexion. I've something good to hide scars or blemishes, should she ever need it.”
FACES. SOLEMN, SAD FACES LEANED OVER HER, CAME and went. Kat's, Mary's, Cecil's. Beloved Robin's. And someone else, a doctor, more than one, prying in her throat and probing with needles to draw blood before she cursed them away. Which doctor was that? Surely Cecil would not let Pascal or Caius near her.
They spoke darkly of diagnosis. No matter. She wouldn't let them bleed her, screamed when they tried to use a lancet. “And no leeches,” she was sure she told them. “No leeches and don't you dare tie me down or I'll have your heads!”
But those familiar faces merged with dreadful demons. The faces of beasts, queen's beasts. And a loud ticking, ticking of a gigantic clock, her mother's clock or that evil doctor's, dropped in the mud when he tried to kill that old woman.
“Lovey. Lovey, you have a rash of little spots. You must let the doctors treat you. It could be the pox.”
“Get away from me! Just let me sleep!”
Kat is an old woman. Kat is ill and doesn't know what she says. Call that foreign doctor. The doctors of the realm cannot be trusted. Don't let Kat die.
“Do not let Kat die,” she ordered them.
Or was someone trying to kill her, Elizabeth, the queen?
Sounds and senses slowed, dragged. Dizziness sat on her chest and poked in her head. She seemed to be spinning, even when she clung to Kat, even when she thought she must be lying still and exhausted on her bed.
“That's all right now, lovey,” a voice said, a nice voice. “Just drink this for Dr. Huicke then.”
Something cool spilled down her throat, clear down between her breasts. Was she naked and floating in a fountain? Was she dead? No, she was so hot, and her head hurt.
“It doesn't look good,” a man's voice said. “Those pustules clearly indicate the pox. We'd best send for Lord Cecil.”
Elizabeth screamed and sat straight up, hitting at all of them, fighting, flinging halfhearted curses and fists. “No, no! Get away from me! I don't have the pox, never have the pox. No doctors. No doctors!”
She fell back gasping. She couldn't breathe. Everywhere she looked—in the box of French powder, in the fountain and the coach, was a scarlet river deeper than the Thames. In her veins, behind her eyes, behind the plot to hurt her, she saw only bloodred fear and evil.
HOURS, DAYS LATER, WILLIAM CECIL SAT OUTSIDE THE doors to the queen's chambers, as if he were another of her guards. He could not bear to sit inside any longer, listening to the terrified and terrifying ravings of the most brilliant woman he had ever known. He shook his head, angry with himself that he had thought of her in the past tense. But clearly showing the pox on her hands and face, she had been delirious for five days. She was barely clinging to life with a disease that killed one-fourth of those it assailed. He was scared to death that he and England were going to lose her.
Other members of her advisory council kept coming up to him with ideas and questions. Who would rule if Elizabeth died? She had no heir and had named no one. Surely, not that Papist, French and Scots Queen Mary. And Cecil didn't trust the queen's hovering Stewart kin any farther than he could throw her Grey kin, though the latter had been sent away to permanent house arrest. Though Dr. Peter Pascal from the Royal College of Physicians had arrived and was demanding to see the queen to diagnose and treat her, Cecil had ordered him not to be admitted unless Her Majesty expressly asked for him. And then Cecil intended to go in with the man, who hung about like some bloated harbinger of doom.
Cecil sniffed hard and wiped his nose as his eyes skimmed the others, crying, whispering. Every now and then the exhausted Mary Sidney would pop out of the sickroom to give her brother and everyone the latest word on how the queen was faring. Dear old Kat Ashley had refused to leave Elizabeth's side.
Her stalwart cousin Harry paced the corridor until Cecil almost screamed at him to stop his footfalls back and forth, softer, louder, as maddening as dripping water. The Stewart contingent of Margaret and Matthew sat on chairs, probably imagining themselves on the soon-to-be-vacated throne of England. Earlier, he'd noted they were whispering with Dr. Pascal. Gil Sharpe was crouched like a whipped pup by the queen's door, scribbling circles on a paper with black chalk.
And then Cecil lifted his gaze to note Ned Topside with Meg Milligrew huddled in a distant corner with two plump sacks at their feet. Seeing the herb girl here after her long exile brought back memories of earlier days when the motley band of what Elizabeth had always called her Privy Plot Council had struggled to save her so she could claim her throne.
Cecil rose from his seat and motioned Gil to follow. The boy leaped straight up with his hands still on the paper. He'd never yet, Cecil thought, lost the amazing agility of a thief who climbed on roofs and in and out windows. With Gil on his heels, Cecil made his way through the crowd toward Ned and Meg.
“Ned, mistress, with me,” he said quietly and led them and the glum Gil down the corridor, away from the clumps of courtiers.
“How fares our queen, my lord?” Ned asked.
“God's truth, man,” Cecil said as he slumped into a window seat and they dropped their sacks to stand before him, “events are not encouraging. It is the pox for certain.”
“Can I not go to her?” Meg cried.
Cecil frowned and shook his head. “Her Grace summons up the strength to curse or throw off her household doctors' hands and, in the end, they are afraid to restrain or tie her down.”
“Frail as she looks, she's strong,” Ned insisted, his usually robust voice gone shaky. He put a hand on Gil's shoulder as if to steady himself or the lad. “She'll pull through.”
“God grant it,” Cecil said wearily. “And what is Mistress Milligrew doing here, and what is in the sacks?”
“Her Grace sent Ned for me and strewing herbs,” Meg declared defiantly.
“Where is your husband then?” Cecil inquired.
“I haven't seen him for two days. I told Bett to tell him where I was when he came back, but as he hasn't showed up looking for me …” Her voice faded to nothing but a sigh.
“You do know that Ben Wilton was lurking a fortnight ago near the privy garden walls of Whitehall?” Cecil asked. “He claims he spotted a man who appeared to be a doctor climbing a ladder there.”
“The night a woman's corpse was left in the privy fountain,” Ned blurted before Cecil could stop him.
“A corpse? I—no,” she said, looking shocked but angry too. “I didn't know. Of course, that's a public bargelanding there, and Ben, being once a barger, has friends around the place, no doubt.”
One thing about the girl, Cecil thought, was that she was easy to read—at least she used to be. Yet how smoothly she had just slipped in an alibi
for her husband. Cecil had never been as convinced as the queen that Meg could not recall her past—in a Papist family that had once served Queen Mary Tudor and had sworn to keep Elizabeth from her throne. Hell's gates, he scolded himself, this was no time to be going off the deep end mistrusting everyone in sight.
“I swear,” Meg said, propping her hands on her waist, “Ben told me naught of that, though I don't know why. He's always asking me things about the queen and boasting anytime he's near her.”
“I thought you could tell me,” Cecil said, “and perhaps the queen thought you could tell her. Think on it. But it may all be moot,” he added, shaking his head again, “if the household physicians can't calm her down in there and treat her—”
“My Lord Cecil!” Harry Carey called and windmilled his arm from a ways down the hall.
Cecil bolted to his feet, pushing between Meg and Ned while Gil jumped lithely aside. “Has Her Majesty come to the crisis?” Cecil cried.
“No, she's talking again, but making terrible sense. She insists she's of sane mind and, should she die, wants to name Robert Dudley as Protector of the Kingdom.”
ELIZABETH HAD TO GASP FOR EACH WORD, EACH BREATH. “I will not have my tricky female cousins on my throne—none of them,” she managed. She gripped Cecil's wrist. His skin felt icy. Her skin was on fire, as she always felt when Robin Dudley looked her way.
Robin had stood by her when they were facing death in the Tower. He had sent her flowers, loaned her money. He could not help it that his wife took a tumble down the stairs. And as sick as Elizabeth felt, she knew Cecil would bring back Katherine Grey to be queen if she died, because of her Protestant leanings. But she could not die. No one was getting her throne, not the Stewarts, not the Greys. Not that Scottish queen, whatever her name was. And not her Catholic sister, Mary Tudor. Or had Mary died and become an effigy, staring at her?
“Robin—Robert Dudley—I name as Lord Protector of England until a suitable regent—or monarch—can be found—if I—do not survive,” she rasped out, speaking directly to the distraught-looking Cecil, though her entire council crowded around her bed. “Swear you will do it—swear,” she demanded in a rasping wheeze.
Looking sick unto death themselves, each man, beginning with Cecil, nodded or murmured assent. She seized a thought then, before it flew away. Few could stomach Robin any more than Cecil could, but she knew they would have to work with him if it came to that. If not for their dead queen's sake, then for the kingdom's.
Exhausted to her very bones, swimming in the sweat of the fountain, she fell back on her pillows and was instantly asleep. But she heard voices floating, wrapping themselves around her after most of her council filed from the room.
Kat spoke. “She claimed she was sound of mind just before she said that, Lord Cecil, but she must have still been delirious.”
Cecil's voice. “The damage is done. I'm taking things into my own hands before that traitor's son sits the throne. Protector, indeed. He'll try to become king. We'll have another war, like when the Greys and Dudleys tried to seize the Tudor throne from Queen Mary.”
Kat. “We must tie her down and treat her. Her doctors have tried feverfew and figs to make her sweat out the poisons. Bleedings, which she fought, marigold in white wine, avens root, and much saffron, lupin, and snakeweed. And, of course, precious ground unicorn horn that helped me so, and then Dr. Huicke sent for the physicians from the Royal College in London and—”
“You must hold them off. I am fetching someone else.”
“Not Dr. Caius? Pascal already waits without these doors!”
“Kat, I am going to find your own savior, if I can get there and back in time.”
Again Elizabeth sank into the depths of velvet darkness. People kept fussing over her, wiping her face with a cool cloth. Was she dying? If so, maybe her own mother's hands were on her, sweet and soothing.
You shall not be afraid of the terror by night, nor the arrow that flies by day, nor of the pestilence that walks in darkness. Psalms, Elizabeth thought. Was a minister here reading Psalms, or were they in her own head? They should recite the one that would keep her safe from doctors who would harm her: I have enemies against me. I will repay them. An evil disease, they say, clings … clings … to me.
“I don't have the pox, cannot have the pox,” she tried to tell the minister, to tell her mother, to tell her father too, if he would listen for once. “I don't have a rash and see no pox on my skin. See?” she insisted and groaned to find the strength to lift one hand before her own eyes.
But there, clear as can be even in this dim light, were the pustules in the pattern that had been on that mother and her children in Chelsea so long ago, and on that effigy, the effigy that had been made for a queen's funeral.
Elizabeth the Queen screamed and screamed.
MY LORD CECIL,” MEG CALLED AND DROPPED HER BAG OF strewing herbs to chase him down the corridor. Lord Hunsdon was hard on his heels too, but Cecil did not break stride, even when a woman's faint scream sounded, echoing behind them.
Meg wished that had been Catherine Howard's ghost screaming again, for she walked these halls at night, but she knew it was the queen.
“Come with me, mistress,” Cecil ordered, not turning back, but flicking a wrist at her. “No reason for you to stay longer. I'll leave you in London. And Gil Sharpe, to me!” he called, and Meg saw the queen's young artist materialize from somewhere. “It does you no good, lad, to be moping around here. Best you be with your parents now and come back when Her Grace is—is much recovered.”
“I don't know about Gil, but I want to be here,” Meg protested. “I'll give her my herbs, at least. And I know a doctor who could help in London, a fine, learned one from Norwich, one who has worked with pox patients, the man she saw with that sick girl in the Abbey's aisle.”
“Not now, mistress. Hold your tongue like Gil does and walk as fast.”
But a shout behind them halted their haphazard parade down the hall. They stopped and turned to see Lord Robert Dudley hurrying after them. The man had a cluster of courtiers with him, including Matthew and Margaret Stewart. And Dr. Peter Pascal was clinging like a burr.
“My Lord Cecil, you cannot leave now,” Dudley insisted. “The queen—and I, as possible, future Lord Protector—might have need of you. Where are you going?”
“On important business of the realm,” Cecil clipped out and didn't bow, though Meg dropped the queen's former favorite a quick curtsy, and Gil bent in a half bow. “Now, if you'll excuse me, Lord Robert,” Cecil said and left the man sputtering at being summarily dismissed.
“Where is the man Her Grace said is keeping an eye on Dudley?” Meg overheard Cecil whisper to Baron Hunsdon, who walked at his shoulder, while she and Gil came behind. She pricked her ears up even more.
“ 'Tis me, my lord,” the queen's cousin said, “along with an informer who reports to me and is serving as his new footman. So we are leaving Dudley behind, basically unwatched.”
“Thank God Her Grace is surrounded by watchers right now,” Cecil said. “Kat's turned guard dog, and even Mary Sidney would die before she'd let anyone—including her own brother—harm the queen. I believe Her Grace will be safe here, as safe as someone stricken with smallpox can be.”
“Tell me where we're going then?” Lord Hunsdon said.
“I believe you know where to find that German Dr. Burcote from fetching him before.”
“Aye, if he's still in town, or in England, for that matter.”
“If he's not, we're doomed.”
THE THIRTEENTH
Diverse physicians do boil with the root of alkanet and
wine, sweet butter until such time as it becomes red,
which they call red butter. It be good to drive forth the
measles and small pox, if it be drunk in the beginning
with hot beer.
JOHN GERARD
The Herball
GRAY SHADOWS CLOTTED IN DOORWAYS AS MEG AND Gil trudged up the Strand f
rom the Whitehall landing where the royal barge had put in. En route Meg had overheard that Cecil and Lord Hunsdon planned to ride posthaste to fetch a German doctor, then return to Hampton Court. It was not at all the way Meg had planned things, hoped for things. Though Cecil had put Meg off when she'd tried to mention Dr. Clerewell, she was determined to contact the physician and beg him to hie himself and some Venus Moon Emollient back on another barge with her.
Meg and Gil passed a few people who whispered furtively, scurrying through the dim, windy evening. The parish night watchman trudged toward them with his lantern yet unlit.
“The queen dire ill at Hampton Court!” he called in his loud, singsong voice. Meg grabbed Gil's arm so hard he winced. “The queen dire ill of fever at Hampton Court!” He went on, passing them with a solemn nod, as if to verify his dreadful words. “Time o' night to stay within. The queen dire ill …” his voice trailed off as he disappeared around a corner.
Gil's wide, watery gaze met Meg's. So Londoners did know and were waiting, like everyone at the palace, to learn the queen's fate. At least the watchman had not blurted out that Her Majesty had the small pox, for that could cause even more panic.
When Gil shuffled along even slower, Meg gave him a poke in the ribs. Ordinarily, if she had been gone nigh on six days with the apothecary shop untended, she'd drag her feet too, afraid Ben would beat her and accuse her of dreadful things. But when he heard she might soon be back in the queen's good graces—if Her Majesty lived— Ben would surely even run her errand to fetch Dr. Clerewell so she wouldn't have to send Gil or Nick.
Poor Gil seemed as sunk-in-the-depths over the queen's illness as she was. He'd hardly responded when she'd signaled to him on board the barge to ask how his cure for muteness was faring.
Medicine made my throat sore, he'd finally answered her.
“Have you tried to talk more than usual?” she'd asked. “Have you really wanted to talk more?”
