The Queene's Cure

by Karen Harper

  He'd shaken his shaggy head.

  “Gil, that's part of any cure or healing, wanting it. But,” she'd muttered, “I still say valley lily is what's needed and not the doctor's rosemary cure.”

  Gil had only shrugged and plunged back into his dark mood. Now her insides plummeted farther as she saw that the shop was black as pitch. She wondered if Ben had just gone out again or had he left her for good—it would be for her good, all right. She'd expected him to follow her to Hampton Court, demanding his due if the queen took her back. She fumbled for her key tied in the corner of her cloak and unlocked the door.

  But Bett and Nick clambered down the dim stairs to greet them. “We been staying here, since folks knew you were gone,” Nick said. “Didn't want these herbs to get thieved.”

  “We were going to bed,” Bett went on. “The queen— she's not—not …” she stammered as she hugged Gil.

  “Still hanging on, but the truth is she has the small pox.”

  “Lord have mercy,” Nick said, starting to cross himself before he jerked his hand down. Bett began to cry while Gil just hung his head.

  “Secretary Cecil's gone to fetch some special doctor to take back by barge posthaste,” Meg explained. “But I want to have Dr. Clerewell go to the palace with me to offer his expertise. If he will, considering that he said the doctors haven't yet approved his Venus Moon …Oh, curse it,” she muttered. “I wasn't supposed to tell who made the emollient. Bett, Nick,” she went on, clasping their hands hard, “you've got to swear you won't tell anyone I let that slip—or that Her Grace has the pox either. She refuses to let any doctor make the diagnosis or treat her for it, stubborn to the end.…” Her words trailed off, and an awkward silence ensued, as if they were grieving her loss already.

  “You want me to go fetch Clerewell then?” Nick offered. “I can slip 'round the night watchmen, see if the doctor will agree to try to help Her Grace. If only Ben were back, you could have him row the doctor to the palace.”

  “Row me and the doctor,” Meg added. “You haven't seen Ben, then, either of you?”

  “No,” Bett admitted, reaching out to squeeze Meg's shoulder. “But then he always did stay out nights more and more of late.”

  “As much as I don't want him here, I hope no ill's befallen him,” Meg said, walking behind the work counter to feel in the waning twilight shadows for the herb drawer she wanted. She'd get the Venus Moon out next, but she wanted to give Gil some chopped valley lily to chew. She owed Bett, Nick, even the boy so much for being here with her through the bad times as they once were through the good. And if it was the last thing she did, she was somehow going to get the good times back again.

  “I'll return soon's I can,” Nick promised. He darted upstairs and came down with his coat on and a lantern lit for them. He kissed Bett and ruffled Gil's hair, then hurried out the still-open door.

  Meg seized a handful of dried lily valley stalks and thrust them in Gil's hands. “This is my own herbal cure for your muteness. Even if you continue to take Dr. Clerewell's rosemary tonic, chew this when you can. And practice trying to talk or you'll stay as rusty as …”

  Her words trailed off as four men, three of them clearly armed with drawn swords, filled her front door to block out the last remnants of daylight. In the single, dim lantern glow inside, she could see their silhouettes but not their features. For one moment she thought Ben was back with some of his cronies, for several of them were large men with beefy shoulders. But the one in front, legs splayed, who must be their leader, was gaunt as a rail.

  “What do you want at this hour?” she demanded.

  “A look around your shop, Mistress Sarah Wilton, alias Meg Milligrew,” the gaunt man said ominously. He extended to her a piece of parchment with a blob of wax on it. “Fetch more lights for this den of darkness!” he ordered his men.

  “Now, see here! You can't—” Meg protested as they produced and lit lanterns.

  “This, mistress,” he interrupted, “is a warrant duly signed and sealed by the London Royal College of Physicians and is being served to you in person by Dr. John Caius, president of said college. Read it yourself if you can. Our license from the queen gives us ex officio authority to search the property of apothecaries and make arrests against those of you acting illegally.”

  “But I have a license too and permission papers, which—”

  “We deem you have been cooperating with and selling illicit drugs for an unlicensed Dr. Marcus Clerewell, providing him with herbs et cetera—and, I might add, for just now prescribing something of your own accord I overheard, when you ‘physicians’ cooks' are never to prescribe. Ergo, you, mistress, are under arrest. Search this shop, men, sparing no space where anything might be hidden.”

  IT WAS AFTER MIDNIGHT WHEN CECIL AND HARRY, WITH Dr. Burcote in tow, glimpsed the lights of Hampton Court from the royal barge.

  “The vay you describe Her Majesty, my lord,” the little German said, “I may already be too late.”

  Cecil and Lord Hunsdon had rousted the man from an early bed, forcing him to dress quickly and gather up his things. He'd been muttering to himself in two languages ever since. But those last words sat so hard on Cecil's heart he could not answer.

  “Ach, if I am too late, I vill be blamed for not saving her life or her beauty,” Burcote groused, sliding down the bench and shifting his gear with him. “Vould they hang me for a scapegoat?”

  “I'll hang you from this canopy,” Harry threatened, “if you don't keep a tight hold on that bag of tricks you've got there. Here, let me carry it off the barge and to the palace for safekeeping.”

  He snatched the large hemp sack the doctor had been guarding, but let him keep his worn leather satchel. “What's in here, anyway?” Harry demanded. “Why can't you doctors do a better job curing or healing pox?”

  “See?” Burcote challenged as the queen's oarsmen bent their backs to edge out of the main current toward the landing. “See? Blame for those ve fail, but no praise for those ve save. And vat's in there? Something that may save her, that is all. Alkanet leaves, flowers, and roots. Because they dye the hands a bloody color, ve know they fight the diseases of red rash.”

  “Hell's gates,” Cecil put in, “she's far past the rash stage.”

  “Ja, so the best French alkanet is her only hope!”

  “French?” Cecil and Harry remonstrated together as the barge bumped the landing.

  “The best is from France, like this, though, if I had time, I vould fetch some from Margate.”

  “If she's conscious when you use it,” Cecil said, “don't tell her it's French. But we're going to just tie her down to treat her. I swear I never saw a more willful woman in sickness or in health.”

  “What else is in here?” Harry pursued, bouncing the sack as they stood to get off. “What's the big, soft thing I feel?”

  “A crimson cloth, of course,” Burcote told them as if they were dunderheads. “Ja, to vrap her in to draw out all the red pox and poisons.”

  Cecil and Harry had just helped the doctor out onto the landing when they heard running feet. It was Jenks, looking harried and out of breath.

  “She's not taken a turn for the worse?” Cecil demanded.

  “Dr. Huicke says she's reached the crisis. Dr. Pascal is demanding that her ladies let him in to treat her or the queen's death will be on their heads.”

  Pushing past Jenks, Cecil and Harry each took one of Burcote's elbows and half hustled, half carried him up the gravel path toward the palace.

  “Dr. Caius hasn't showed up too, has he?” Cecil threw over his shoulder as Jenks jogged behind them. “Or have we heard from the man we assigned to stick with him?”

  “Haven't so much as heard from either,” Jenks said. “But Lord Robert says he'll let Dr. Pascal in soon if the queen doesn't rally, despite all her women's and her own protests. But wait. What I wanted to tell you is that you'll never get this man in through the courtiers and doctors. I came down the back privy steps, and that's the way
we should go in—if it's—” Jenks's voice caught. “If it's not too late.”

  FORCED TO REMAIN IN THE APOTHECARY SHOP, GIL AND Bett stood by the stairs, as upset as Meg. She leaned with shaking legs against her work counter while her bins, jars, drawers, and shelves were searched in such a roughshod manner it amounted to a ransacking. Curse their black souls, they'd been tearing her precious property apart for hours. She still held the warrant in her hands but had not opened it. It must invoke the queen's name, and Meg could not bear that.

  “And what is this?” Dr. Caius demanded, extending before her the alabaster box of what remained of Venus Moon Emollient. It was the moment she had dreaded.

  “I—I am not at liberty to say right now—until I receive permission,” she said, knowing how lame that sounded. She could only hope that Nick brought Marcus Clerewell, he would see her plight, and explain everything. After all, he'd said he'd applied for a license to sell it. If only she had not sworn to him she would keep secret the source of this miraculous emollient.

  “These papers stashed in the same drawer may explain, doctor!” one of Caius's ruffians told him. Sick at heart, Meg saw him extend to the doctor the letters she and Marcus Clerewell had exchanged over her helping to bring his scrofula patient before Her Majesty in the Abbey.

  “Those are privy correspondence,” Meg insisted.

  “Naught is privy here,” Caius said, smoothing the letters out side by side to read them on the counter.

  “Well, well,” he said, taking his time to peruse them fully and rubbing his skeletal hands together as if he were washing them. “Spero meliora. I believe we may have stumbled on more than just illicit practices by yet another wayward apothecary.”

  “A person not in the formal list of scrofula victims is permitted to sue for the queen's healing touch!” Meg insisted.

  Carefully refolding both letters, Caius muttered something to his men, who shoved Bett, Gil, and Meg upstairs and began to search things there. Meg noticed the window overlooking the street had been left ajar, probably since Nick and Bett first spotted them. How she wished she could just fly out it, back to the palace to be near the queen. Once, Elizabeth Tudor would have rescued her from any harm.

  Meg gazed at Gil, whom the men had pushed into a corner as they sliced her mattress apart with knives, throwing straw and wool batting everywhere. They fanned the pages of her four precious books and threw them down, only to step on them as they banged through her few pewter plates and cups. They tossed her box of tiny treasures, ribbons and pins, trifles the queen had given her, and Ned Topside's cherished handkerchief on the floor and crunched through them.

  As they ripped clothing from the large, humpbacked chest at the foot of the bed, she protested, “My hus-band—those are his goods too.”

  “We've already questioned him,” Dr. Caius said.

  That jolted her. “Have you been holding Ben? He's missing.”

  “You're the apothecary here, he told us. But I see our net must widen,” Caius said, not answering her question. “We'll also take this shop woman and the lad with us for further inquiry, men,” he added with a nod toward Bett. “And that Cotter aide Mistress Wilton sent out a while ago to fetch Marcus Clerewell.”

  Nick. They had Nick and had evidently stopped him right outside the shop hours ago. Then Dr. Clerewell knew nothing about helping the queen. And no one could bail her out of this new nightmare but Clerewell. They must already have him too and had gotten out of him something about her helping test his Venus Moon. But if he was still free from them …

  The moment Caius looked back toward his men, Meg turned to Gil and signaled to him. Try to find and bring Dr. Clerewell. If you can't find him, tell Ned or Jenks of this. Can you get out the window?

  Gil did not even take the time to signal in return. He bolted lightly to the window, squirmed through it to stand momentarily on the sill with his torso outside, and reached high for something Meg couldn't see. Then, silently, long legs and all, he disappeared upward. Her captors didn't even notice Gil was missing for a good while, and their hue and cry on the street snagged them only night air.

  IT'S BEEN THE LONGEST NIGHT,” KAT GREETED THE FOUR men as Jenks, Cecil, and Harry brought Dr. Burcote and his goods through the privy entrance into the queen's bedchamber.

  “You must sleep,” Cecil told Kat. “Too many nights you and Lady Mary have stayed with her like this.”

  “Ach,” Dr. Burcote said the moment he saw the queen, “I said you should have fetched me sooner, Lord Cecil. Quick. Quick now. Help me vrap her in this cloth,” he ordered. He took his bag from Harry and flipped the crimson sheet open. “Then ve lay her before the hearth and build up the fire to make her sweat it all out into this red color. How long has she been insensible like this?”

  “Off and on,” Mary said as they uncovered the sweatdrenched queen, clad only in her shift. But for her head, they wrapped her mummylike in the crimson cloth. The four men lifted her carefully onto cushions on the hearth. As if they were palace wood fetchers, Cecil and Harry hastened to build up the flames. Soon the chamber was hotter than the hinges of Hades, Cecil thought, as they all perspired with the queen.

  Evidently the increased heat or jostling made her stir. She slitted her eyes open; they fixed on Burcote, kneeling at her side.

  “They think I have the pox,” she said, weakly but distinctly.

  “Ja, Your Majesty. God's truth, you have the pox and bad. But now you know your enemy, you vill fight to defeat it.”

  “My enemy,” she said. “I've been thinking—dreaming that it's those doctors.”

  Burcote shot a puzzled look at Cecil, who only shook his head. The queen seemed to nod, but before she drifted off, Burcote raised to her cracked lips a goblet of alkanet in hot beer. She drank it greedily, though some spilled.

  Cecil sent Kat to bring in Robert Dudley so he could see the queen was being treated and halt his clamoring outside to be let in. “You sneaked that man in,” Robert remonstrated, pointing at Burcote, when he saw the situation. “And without my express permission.”

  “Hold your tongue,” Cecil told him curtly. “Her Majesty is not dead, and it will take that for you to be giving orders or permission for anything. You can see she is a bit more peaceful, and surely you want that.”

  “Of course, I do,” he muttered, raking his hand through his hair as he bent over her. “But I'm staying.” “Staying outside,” Dr. Burcote put in, coming to stand at Cecil's side. “Ve call you soon as ve know anything.”

  Dudley went beet red, or else the heat of the chamber was getting to him too. “I'm staying,” he whispered. “I'll be by the door, but on this side of it, after I tell everyone out there that all that can humanly be done is being done—but not by whom.” He glared at Cecil, then Burcote. He walked away to open the door only wide enough to slip out, then left them.

  “Shall I lock him out?” Kat asked, despite how Mary kept wringing her hands.

  “No, Kat. He'll serve to hold the hounds at bay, and he—he loves her too.”

  Even when Dudley returned and didn't keep well back, Cecil and the doctor let him hover. This was no time to argue; they still might have to work together to keep the realm going if Elizabeth was lost.

  They all sat or knelt on the floor by the hearth, clustered around the queen's prone, thin form until their knees locked or their backs ached and they had to move or stand.

  Cecil had just started to doze off, leaning on the mantel, when his head jerked and he bolted awake. Burcote was comforting Mary Sidney, who kept shaking her head and crying. Panicked, Cecil bent to be certain the queen was still breathing. She was. Then he noted that Burcote was pushing Mary's sleeve up her arm and pointing out something on her wrist. She recoiled in horror and clung to the closed draperies, sobbing silently into their deep folds. Robert noticed, too, got up, and rushed to comfort her.

  AT FIRST LIGHT, CHURCH BELLS BEGAN TO RING ALL over London. Meg panicked that the queen was dead, but then remembered it was the sabba
th day. And she recalled where she was: in a filthy, straw-strewn cell at Bridewell Prison.

  They had put her by herself, though she'd insisted she not be separated from Bett. She'd heard strange screams and cries all night. Bridewell had inmates publicly flogged and even hanged, but surely not in the middle of the night.

  Aching all over, she lay flat on her back, staring at the vaulted stone ceiling as it went from black to gray when muted morning light made its way in. Bridewell had once been a palace but now was a sprawl of separate entities: a workhouse for vagrants, a hospital, and this dank first-floor prison. Desperate for a sniff of fresh air, she rose and looked out her slit of slatted window.

  She could see the great Thames glittering below where the smaller Fleet River poured into it. Pressing her cheek to the cold, damp stone window frame, she could barely glimpse the famous Bridewell landmark on the Thames. A wooden bridge, built in Venetian style, arched over the Fleet between Bridewell and old Blackfriars Monastery lands. The queen's father had ordered this palace built but soon abandoned it when the summer stench from the garbage-ridden Fleet became so rank. Even now, in fairly brisk weather, the smell made Meg want to puke.

  She jumped away from the window as a key grated in the lock. The same crude, beefy woman who had locked her in here last night entered and thrust a dented pewter mug full of gruel at Meg.

  “Eat quick 'cause you got a 'terr'gation coming.”

  She banged back out. Meg could not stomach the cold, congealed stuff. How far away the fancy fineries she'd used to eat at court, some from the queen's own table.

  Soon she followed the woman down the hall and up a curving flight of stone stairs into a chamber with a deep window overlooking the Thames and a single table and chair. Dr. John Caius sat at it; behind Meg was a secretary, standing at a small, rickety lectern, with his pen evidently poised to take down all she said.

  “Who is Dr. Marcus Clerewell to you, Sarah Wilton, alias Meg Milligrew?” Caius asked without ado.