The Queene's Cure

by Karen Harper

  Cecil and Kat had been left at Hampton Court. Cecil would see to the nation's business while Kat buffered everyone from Meg Milligrew. For the first time in two years, Meg was portraying the queen of England, albeit from behind a veil, claiming she needed more bed rest for the time being. The queen had vowed to help Meg Milligrew discover where Ben Wilton had sent her poor child. Meanwhile, the barge had just dropped Bett and another guard off at the public landing near Whitehall so that she could return to the ransacked apothecary shop in case Gil, Nick, or even Ben returned.

  Dr. Burcote, richly rewarded with a fine leather satchel and much coin, had remained behind to tend Mary Sidney. Elizabeth did not want him where the Royal College physicians could sanction him. She was tempted to simply have them arrested, but she'd promised herself she would not set back the English medical arts by gutting the leadership of her London College— unless it came to that.

  “Now,” Elizabeth said, even as they stood on the windy barge-landing, “do not fret for me, for I will be fine here with the Hunsdon household men for extra guards. Each of you must hire a barge at the public landing, be about your given tasks, and report back to me here as soon as possible.”

  Murmured assents and nods. Good, the queen thought, for she was leaving no stone unturned, even backtracking to the earlier clues.

  “Anne, I pray you,” she told her friend, “do a better job of cross-questioning the workers in the Royal Wardrobe than poor Kat did. Go now. We have immediate and important work to do!”

  THE QUEEN PACED THE DINING CHAMBER OF THE Hunsdons' house at Blackfriars, listening avidly to each report. She had ordered them all to sit but her, a breech of protocol, but she wanted them to realize only their tasks of discovery mattered now.

  “So, Anne, the new guard was also able to describe the man who came to lease my gown,” Elizabeth asked excitedly.

  “He's not so new, Your Grace, but one who alternated with the guard who fled with the lace girl,” Anne explained. “But yes, he glimpsed the man with the very gown that turned up on that poxed effigy in your coach. 'Twas a sketchy description, but something to go on, I reckon. The man who leased the gown had a grand, feathered hat. Oh, and as Kat had ascertained afore, he spoke very well, mayhap with some foreign phrases.”

  “Dr. Caius, with his incessant Latin,” Harry put in smugly.

  “I think not,” Elizabeth corrected. “That hat makes him sound like that Dr. Clerewell Bett and Meg told us of. If so, hat or not, I wager he's the man with the girl who knelt in the aisle at the Abbey.

  “Ned and Jenks?” she prompted. “Your findings?”

  “Nick was seen trying to track down Dr. Clerewell,” Ned reported, “just as Bett said. We talked to an old woman at the place the doctor let for a time on Gutter Lane, a vile flea-trap. Under my clever cross-questioning, she admitted Nick was there, but says she told him she had no idea where Dr. Clerewell had gone, nor did she know where Nick went after he left her place.”

  “It must be that same old woman who put me off,” Anne declared indignantly. “You know, when I tried to take some coins to that sick girl after the Queen's Evil ceremony. An old beldam said Clerewell had never lived there!”

  “I can see why you believed her, but Ned, reader of parts and people, did you?” the queen demanded, hands on her waist.

  “She was beady-eyed,” Ned said, “and nervous, as if she hadn't learned her part well.”

  “Let's cut to the quick,” Elizabeth insisted. “The crone was lying. This entire plot is stitched together with lies, and we cannot afford to believe anyone.”

  “We can go after her with more force,” Ned said, “and—”

  “Move on for now,” Elizabeth ordered. “She could, no doubt, be put to the rack and not be able to tell us where to find the mastermind. Cousin Harry, I daresay you have something to contribute. Did you find any records of Dr. Caius's interrogation of Ben Wilton at Bridewell?”

  “If Dr. Caius interrogated Ben Wilton at Bridewell, Your Grace, it wasn't recorded—no records of Clerewell, either, and you think the royal doctors would have hounded him as they did Meg.”

  “Then either Caius questioned Ben and Clerewell elsewhere,” the queen concluded, “or they are in league with him. The rest of your report, then, Harry. Tell us of your new search of the cellar beneath the Royal College Hall after you left Bridewell.”

  “This, Your Grace,” he said, extending a piece of paper to her, “could be a key clue. My Latin's a bit rusty, but Cecil's man Nye translated the body of it last time I was there. I didn't think it of import till Meg told us about Dr. Clerewell. And, now that he could be tied to the taking of your gown that turned up on that dummy …”

  Elizabeth snatched the piece of paper and walked away to get window light. She held out the hem of her veil to see it more clearly.

  “What is it, Your Grace, my Lord Hunsdon?” Ned finally asked.

  “A petition, entirely in Latin, to the Royal College of Physicians,” Elizabeth said, beginning to pace again. “From said Marcus Clerewell, late of Norwich, now practicing his craft in Cheapside. A request for the recognition of something he calls the water droplet vapor theory of spreading disease. And he lists here several Italian doctors who promote the theory.”

  “Italians,” Ned echoed with a sniff. “Catholics, in short. Do the names include that Italian doctor who wants to cut up bodies, the one who is Dr. Caius's friend?”

  “You mean Andreas Versalius,” the queen interjected. She put one hand on the tall back of a chair to steady herself. “No, his name is not here, and the word you want is dissect.”

  “All right, dissect,” Ned muttered. “Then what about that Italian doctor's name who fashioned the so-called life mask or bust of Katherine Grey?”

  “Yes, Stefano Natus is noted here,” she told them, slapping the paper down on the table for them to see. 'S bones, she wished Cecil were here to help sort all this out. “See the notation in a second hand—also in Latin— there? That florid, robust writing? It reads that Marcus Clerewell is not licensed in Norwich but is a runnagate— a mountebank.”

  “A fake doctor?” Jenks asked, turning toward her wherever she paced in the room. “A quacksalver? Then why wouldn't the royal doctors have him arrested straightaway when they found this out?”

  “Unless he's in a different prison,” Harry said.

  “Or unless it was somehow to their benefit to blackmail Clerewell,” she added. “Or if he's in thick with them.”

  “What?” several people chorused.

  Her veil bounced as she nodded, and she kept fingering the mermaid pin as if it were a talisman of good luck. “As you see,” she explained, “there is also scribbling on the page in a third hand, the tight, spare writing. That says Marcus Clerewell may actually be one Mercury Blackwell, who was banished from Norwich for selling fake cures for pox scars.”

  “But who wrote what?” Anne asked.

  “I don't know,” Elizabeth admitted. “But I could hazard a guess that the crisp, tight hand is like Caius and the robust, broader strokes like Pascal. We'll need more proof.”

  “So what's this water droplet theory?” Harry asked.

  “As Dr. Burcote explained the theory,” Elizabeth said, each word spoken deliberately as she reasoned everything through again, “it is the spread of certain vile diseases or contagions by an ill person's sneezing or coughing tiny droplets which are then inhaled into another's pores, mouth, or lungs. No one knows what causes the pox or bubonic plague either, so this could be valid.”

  “What's our next step?” Harry inquired.

  “Harry, you must return yet again to the Royal College of Physicians to find samples of both Pascal's and Caius's written hands—in Latin—and do not confuse which is which. I believe that whoever merely noted that Clerewell is a runnagate may not be in on this plot, but the doctor who pursued Clerewell and learned he had faked cures and had worked with the pox—that doctor could have bribed or blackmailed him to help in this plot, even tryin
g to set Meg up somehow.”

  “I'll bet it's Caius,” Jenks muttered. “He's the one in charge. But then, it could still be both doctors, working together.”

  “It could indeed,” the queen admitted as her stomach knotted again. “Harry, as soon as you find those handwriting samples, come to Cheapside. The rest of us are going shopping there for a runnagate doctor.”

  THOUGH IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON, LONDONERS STILL scurried from shop to shop on crowded Cheapside. Food mongers, trying to sell the last of their day's wares, shouted above the din, hawking pigs' trotters, oysters, and fried fish. The veiled queen and Lady Anne stood back under the overhang of Goldsmith's Row. Ordinarily, Elizabeth would have loved to be incognito to wander from shop to shop, to mingle with her people unseen and purchase pretty things, but today she had ugly business to see to.

  Jenks and Ned soon returned from their task of inquiring where a Dr. Pribble practiced. “Bett's right,” Ned said, out of breath. “It's that one on the corner, and he's in. We saw a man just enter with a bloody nose, like maybe from a fight.”

  “Ned, Jenks, and Anne, come with me,” the queen commanded. “The rest of you wait here, but do not clump together nor call attention to yourselves. And keep an eye out for Lord Hunsdon, as he should join us soon.” They left Clifford in charge of the four other armed guards, all doing their best to hide their weapons and blend into the crowd.

  At the doctor's front door, Elizabeth and Anne stood back as Ned and Jenks argued over who they should say they were. Annoyed but hesitant to scold them in public, Elizabeth glanced through the narrow bull's-eye glass window next to the door. When she had looked in the wig-maker's window, she'd seen her body. Now, despite the distortion of the glass, she startled to see another old woman, but very much alive, facing away, leaning intently, one hand to her head as if it hurt.

  “I thought you said a wounded man went inside,” she interrupted Ned and Jenks.

  “True,” Ned said, stepping back to look through the window too. “Oh, that's the old beldam who answered the door to let him in. Heard her tell the injured man she had to run back upstairs to clean, but guess she didn't.”

  Elizabeth swore under her breath and shoved Jenks aside to rap on the door herself. “It doesn't matter what we say to get in to see the doctor,” she told them. “What matters is what we can get out of him.”

  THOUGH NICK WAS NEARLY DYING OF THIRST, HE'D QUIT drinking the flat beer the keepers of this hellhole provided. It must be drugged. So he'd been dribbling it on his filthy body instead. His head was clearing some, though he'd almost rather be unconscious or dead, considering things he'd seen in here.

  Whole jars of leeches put on screaming, tied-down people. Slowly they quieted, died, and were carted off to another chamber, where who knows what went on. He'd seen some steaming, creamy stuff, like maybe molten wax or plaster, smeared on people's faces, then peeled off. Tumors, like the ones from scrofula, had been cut off people's necks and packed in jars.

  “A gift fit for a queen,” he'd heard Ben Wilton say of the tumors. Ben was the main guard here, though he usually just sat around with a whip or whacked noisy people with a club. The fact he knew Nick and Gil cut them no slack, so Nick thought they weren't getting out alive.

  Fit for a queen, Nick thought. Deuce it, surely the queen wasn't coming here.

  When Gil was conscious and not having something thrust down his throat, the boy tried to signal across the cages to Nick until Ben reached in with a club and knocked him down. Nick wanted to rip his bars apart, but he still played like he was drugged. He knew that gutter cur'd just as soon club him too, and then he'd be leech food. He was pretty certain poor Gil had signaled, I been eating Meg's cure. Makes my burning throat better. But he knew he couldn't have read his boy right when he thought he added, men in next room, chopping corpses.

  I SAY WE SHOULD HAUL DR. PRIBBLE TO THE TOWER AND tear the truth out of him,” Ned groused as they dejectedly left the doctor's shop and moved away through the swirl of pedestrians. The doctor had insisted he'd never met Nick or Gil, nor did he know where to locate Dr. Marcus Clerewell if he wasn't in his chambers on Gutter Lane. He had admitted, though, that Dr. Caius had recently come looking for Clerewell too.

  “And probably found him and either eliminated him or joined ranks with him,” Elizabeth said with a weary sigh. Old Pribble had been such a bumbler that she believed him. Besides, she had another plan, pure woman's instinct, or maybe that of a cornered animal when it scents its hunters are too clever.

  “Anyway, that's what I'd do,” Ned muttered, trying to see through her veil. “I'd use the thumbscrews or the rack to make anyone involved tell all they knew.”

  “Oh, yes, I'll just decree they all be hauled into Bridewell or the Tower,” Elizabeth said, her exhaustion and frustration edged with sarcasm. “Including the old crone from Gutter Lane, my Stewart cousins, Katherine Grey, and her little son. 'S blood and bones, I am the one on the rack, so you'll not tell me what to do. Ned, go back to Dr. Pribble's and bribe that old woman to come talk to me. I swear we saw her eavesdropping.”

  The queen was getting more dismayed that Harry had not come yet, but she didn't want to upset Anne by saying so. It wasn't long before Ned returned with the old woman in tow. While the others stood scattered at a distance, Elizabeth and Lady Anne huddled with the woman at Goldsmith's Row. She was grinning to have received an entire crown and bent a crooked curtsy to Elizabeth and then Anne.

  “I warrant you know I'm the one who asked the questions inside,” Elizabeth said. “Your name?”

  “Millicent Mabry, milady,” the white-haired woman answered readily, almost feistily, gripping her coin tighter. “Dr. Pribble's elder sister, I am, the one should have been the physician in the family had I been born a man.”

  “Is that why you listen at his door when he thinks— and you make a point of saying—you are going upstairs to clean?” Elizabeth prompted. “I assure you I will not tell him. I understand your yearning to be the one in command when your brother is instead.”

  “Oh, aye, milady. Well, since you caught me at my game, I'll tell you straight I heard what you asked him afore, about that half-handsome Dr. Clerewell and the mute boy.”

  “And his father,” the queen prompted.

  “Oh, aye, saw him too. More dim-witted than the boy, though the boy's mute. You won't believe this, but the lad's an artist for the queen!”

  “Indeed? Say on.”

  “He made Dr. Clerewell angry not wanting his cure, biting off his tongue stick, and arguing with his hands, like he does. Peeked in as well as listened that day, I did. Such an int'resting malady, muteness.”

  “Have you seen other doctors here,” Elizabeth went on, “important ones, perhaps to see Dr. Pribble or even Dr. Clerewell?”

  “A tall, gaunt one, several weeks ago, came to see my brother but wanted Dr. Clerewell. Chief physician, the visitor was of Maxima Regina's Collegium, that's the way he put it.”

  “Yes, I heard Dr. Caius came calling. I will see more crowns are yours if you tell me true what else passed between them.”

  “Don't know for a certain. My brother sent me for hot ale for the two of them, and that Dr. Caius wouldn't even stay to drink it when I brought it down. On his way out the door, but heading for Dr. Clerewell's place, I warrant, since my brother shouted out to him which way was Gutter Lane.

  “Now,” Millicent Mabry went on, “if that fancy Dr. Caius would have asked me—like you're doing, mi-lady—where else to look for Dr. Clerewell, I could have told him. Overheard him say once to a patient scarred near as bad as he was—till he got his face mostly cured, that is—that he'd take her to his doctor friend in Chelsea, to a sort of hospital to cure her.”

  “To Chelsea?” Elizabeth cried. “Chelsea, not Cheapside?”

  “Why,” she said, drawing herself up to her full, short height, “guess I know Chelsea from Cheapside, milady. I'm no fool.”

  “Indeed you are not. And this doctor friend of Clerewell's
in Chelsea was named Dr. Pascal, was it not?”

  “If he said that, didn't hear it. But I know Dr. Clerewell was interested in curing scars on faces, like on his own. Is that why you're searching for him, then? I mean, with your veil and all …”

  “Partly, yes,” Elizabeth said, pressing three more crowns from her hanging purse into the old woman's hands. “I tell you, Millicent Mabry, if there were women doctors, your sharp mind and keen observational skills would have made you a fine one. I warrant your queen would have made you the first female fellow in that vaunted Collegium of Royal Physicians,” she added as she turned away. Her entourage materialized around and behind her as she headed at a breakneck stride toward the Thames.

  “What did she say and where to now?” Ned asked.

  Elizabeth stopped to face them. “Anne, you must go back with one of your guards and wait for your lord to come to Cheapside and then follow us to Chelsea—Peter Pascal's house. It will be dusk soon, so there is no time to return to Blackfriars for the barge or extra guards.”

  “But—you mean you're going to Chelsea now, Your Grace?” Anne asked, her face and voice alarmed. “Without even one lady with you?”

  “Dear Anne, I have been in worse scrapes before. I have men I trust, and none know who I am. Besides, the last time I went calling on Peter Pascal, I did so openly and that was a mistake. I have been surprised for the last time in this, and now it is their turn.”

  THE SIXTEENTH

  Those of our time do use the flowers of Borage … for

  the comfort of the heart and to drive away sorrows.

  Borage is called in shops Borago. The ancients thought

  it always brought courage.

  JOHN GERARD

  The Herball

  THE CREAK OF BARGEMEN'S OARS AND THE JERKING thrust of prow did not lull the queen but unnerved her. Elizabeth had once said that all roads in this effigy plot led to little Chelsea. Now that she thought of this treasonous attempt on her life and danger to her people as the pox plot, clues still led there. Wishing she had some herb or potion to buck herself up, she tried to stir up her courage. “I sought the Lord and He heard me,” she recited repeatedly, “and delivered me from all my fears.” But she still shook like a reed in the wind.