The Queene's Cure

by Karen Harper

  Though surrounded by armed men, she did not feel safe. When dealing with unscrupulous doctors, the fear of something invisible, some creeping blight or plague, haunted her. The little hamlet of Chelsea was Peter Pascal's realm. Yet Dr. Caius was the president of the Royal College, and his accusatory interrogation of Meg and of Gil's family—as well as his being seen looking for Dr. Clerewell—made him seem the guiltier party. Unless they were all in league.

  “What will we do when we arrive?” Ned's voice broke into her agonizing.

  Because she could not bear to admit she was acting as much on instinct as intellect, Elizabeth told him and the other five men, “Ned, you will go into the tavern where Jenks asked questions on our other visit. You will inquire if a Dr. John Caius is known in the village. Describe him, if you must. And I warrant they will tell you that he has been a frequent visitor to Pascal's home and is there now. And then you must describe Dr. Clerewell, both of his faces.…”

  Her voice snagged, and her fingers tightened on the hem of her veil she held down so it wouldn't flap in the river breeze. If only Dr. Clerewell, whom Meg had trusted, was someone who had truly found a cure for pox scars, if not the pox itself. As he spoke briefly in the aisle of the Abbey, the man's voice had been so compelling and caring, and yet the poor girl with him …

  “That's it!” the queen cried, smacking her fists on her knees.

  “What's it?” Jenks asked.

  “In the Abbey aisle, Dr. Clerewell, alias Mercury Blackwell, passed a sachet before that ill girl's nose, not to keep her conscious or soothe her but to force her to sneeze on me. Whether he acted on his own or under Dr. Caius's aegis, his actions intentionally threatened my life!”

  The rooftops and skeletal trees of Chelsea loomed at them, lit by the crimson sinking sun. “Someone give me a dagger,” the queen ordered. “And keep your sword arms free.”

  PAYING THE BARGEMEN WELL—SHE HAD SEARCHED each face to be certain Ben Wilton was not among them—the queen ordered them to wait here no matter who else tried to buy their services. “And if another London barge arrives,” she told them, “inquire if it is Lord Hunsdon and his entourage, and tell them we are probably going to be at Pascal's looking for him and his cohorts.”

  “We could make our Chelsea headquarters in the old wig-maker's place,” Ned suggested as they left the barge landing, “especially since it's getting dark.”

  “It's a secondary site we may have to search again,” she admitted as the lights of the tavern came into view across the familiar green. “But the darkness is on our side.”

  They waited anxiously while Ned went into the tavern. As she paced, Elizabeth kicked through piles of autumn leaves on the fringe of the green. Finally, Ned came out and broke into a run toward them.

  “Pascal's here but he's not the only doctor oft in Chelsea,” he told them, out of breath.

  “Clerewell or Caius?” Elizabeth demanded.

  “They never heard of a Clerewell or Blackwell. But, as you surmised, they say Caius has oft visited Pascal here.”

  “I'll warrant he's here now, and we'll take them in one fell swoop!” she cried.

  “But something else I picked up in passing,” Ned said as they started toward Pascal's. “Pascal oft comes and goes not from the old water stairs by his house nor the public landing, but from Sir Thomas More's old boathouse on the far edge of his grounds. It's a place he's been enlarging and refurbishing for years with workers from the city—no local help.”

  The queen's head jerked up. “The boathouse was Thomas More's, and Pascal's been changing it? But he won't allow anything his beloved mentor touched to be one whit changed. Jenks, when you searched Pascal's stables, did you see such a building?”

  “In the distance, but it didn't look like much. You told me to hurry, so I didn't have time to get close. I was thinking later, though, more horses might be there, 'cause I heard distant whinnying from the old place.”

  Her heart pounding, Elizabeth knew her next move. “Lord Hunsdon and Anne should be here soon, so I'm sending one of you men of his household—you,” she said, indicating the shortest and thinnest of the lot, “to return to wait with our barge to bring Lord Hunsdon to us when they arrive. The rest of us, Ned, Jenks, Clifford, and you two from my Lord Hunsdon's household, will come with me.”

  “To where, Your Grace—I mean, milady?” Jenks asked as he scraped his sword out.

  “Ned, take one of Lord Hunsdon's men and keep an eye on Pascal's house. With Jenks, Clifford, and Lord Hunsdon's other man,” she indicated the brawnier of the two guards, “I shall take a distant look at this boathouse, then join you.”

  AS ELIZABETH AND HER THREE GUARDS WADED THROUGH rustling, knee-deep autumn leaves to skirt Pascal's property, her thoughts turned to Gil again. She had come to care deeply for the boy, as if he were a foster son. Gil had God's blessing with his raw, artistic talent. He had both a restless and a reckless streak in him she saw in herself, though she had learned to bridle her deepest desires. Even his muteness had served her well, for, like Cecil, Gil kept her secrets. If anything had happened to him—

  “Dark as sin,” Jenks whispered, pointing toward the boathouse on the bank of the Thames as dusk bled to darkness. “No one's here, at least now.”

  The place was a hulking pile of stones, barely one story high. “I'd say this is a dead end and we should join the others at Pascal's,” she told them. “Yet the fact he's supposedly been rejuvenating the place … That's just not like Pascal, unless there's some driving need or passion. Let's go a bit closer.”

  But the four of them froze in their tracks. On the wind came a half moan, half scream.

  “Is that what you thought horses sounded like?” the queen asked Jenks.

  “I guess so, but this close, it sounds like a human voice,” he whispered. The sound had been so unearthly that Elizabeth began to tremble again. She was not alone, for someone's scabbard rattled.

  “We're not going in, but we can try to look in,” Elizabeth said. “If it's something strange, we'll go fetch the others, even the bargemen.”

  As they approached, the place seemed darker yet. At least from the land side, they saw no windows, no light outlining doors, just a hump of stones like a headless gi-ant's shoulders. But then another cry, a keening sound.

  “Jenks,” she said, almost mouthing her words, “go fetch the others here.”

  “Send Clifford, milady. I don't want to leave your side.”

  “Go on! You know the layout, and the stables lie between us and the house!”

  She actually thought he would argue more, but he plunged headlong into the night. Keeping close to the line of gnarled tree trunks, Elizabeth, Clifford, and Harry's man edged closer. They could hear the river slapping the bank now. Still in the shadow of the skeletal trees, they inched forward.

  Under the tree nearest to the boathouse, a huge, heavy net dropped on them. They stood under its weight a moment, clawing, thrashing until dark forms thudded from the trees and yanked them to the ground. Men around her—more than her own—fighting, struggling, sprawled. A clang of muted metal.

  “We owe that tavern tapster for more fresh blood,” someone muttered and laughed.

  A voice she knew? Clerewell, the man who had spoken in the Abbey? You are the angel of us all, he had said to his queen.

  “Stop,” she cried. “I command you to unhand m—”

  Pressed to the ground she tried to scream, but someone stuffed veil and net into her mouth with something bitter-tasting. The blackguard held her down while she gagged and swallowed. And then she tasted nothing at all.

  ELIZABETH AWOKE. DIZZINESS ASSAILED HER. NAUSEA. Aches. Voices. And then one she knew.

  “Lady. Lady!”

  Whose voice? Not Ned's or Jenks's. Mayhap Nick Cotter's. But what about her men Jenks went to fetch? Why hadn't Harry come? Harry was her cousin too, the only one who didn't covet her throne—or did he? 'S bones, it hurt to turn her head.

  “Lady! Lady Elizabeth!”


  Lanterns hung from wall pegs and the ceiling. She tried to move but was strapped, arms and legs, to a narrow, wooden table in a long, low chamber filled with cages.

  Ah, she was caged too, like an animal. Katherine Grey's monkey had jumped on her shoulders, but hadn't there been a net in the trees? She fought to focus her thoughts. In trying to set a trap, she had obviously walked into one. These cages, smaller than hers, lower to the ground, held human beings. Poor Meg so long in prison, but worse that her own mother had been trapped in the Tower, waiting to die.

  Elizabeth's vision was blurred: things were foggy, though her veil was gone. She must have been drugged, and she struggled to turn her head. Yes, Nick Cotter across the room had been calling her name. But it was the person in the cage next to her that made her gasp.

  Gil. Gil on a bed of filthy straw. Gil, keeping close to the floor but signing up at her, Bad doctors here! Make people sick. Then kill and cut them up!

  “Dear God, help us,” she murmured. And turned to look the other way, only to hear her cage door clang and have two gray eyes—one with a drooping lid—stare close into hers. The half of the face she saw at first was handsome, even striking. The other side was a mass of welts and ridges and pits.

  “Since we meet, both scarred at last, I have something to show you, Your Majesty,” the man said in his deep, pleasant voice as if nothing were amiss. She knew instantly who he was. The entire scene in the aisle of the Abbey flashed before her. “You see, we doctors have decreed that everyone here must earn his or her keep.”

  He moved a lantern to a hook above her. Brushing her loosed hair from her face, he produced a small alabaster jar of white cream and with a small knife proceeded to smooth it on her skin exactly where she knew her pox marks were.

  “Your pits aren't deep or numerous,” he said, his voice soothing, though it and his gaze made her feel sick to her stomach. “I had hoped for more so my Venus Moon Emollient could make me rich and powerful, but too late for that now. My wealth and power will come from my ability not to heal, but to sicken people at my will. You'd be a prime example of that too, but the doctor has other plans for you.”

  He was demented. But she must deal with him. Just let him talk, she told herself. Gather strength and sense, find an opening. Calm him. Stall until her people came looking for her. But she had no doubt she would appear to have vanished into thin air. She saw not one window in this place as she glanced around, though she could feel cool air coming from somewhere, perhaps from the roof. The stench of unwashed, ill bodies was so bad in here, no breath seemed fresh.

  “Perhaps,” Clerewell was saying, “we'll have to see if we can infect you with the Queen's Evil and then work on your neck tumors. Now, that would be justice, would it not? Oh, by the way, never mind looking around for help. Your two companions as well as the one you sent to Pascal's are—shall we say—sleeping until we need them. And we're sending word to your bargemen that you saw your missing servants being taken away in a boat and gave chase in another. I suppose they'll jump back on your barge and chase you down the river till dawn, when here you are, all ready and willing to help us in any way.”

  He dropped his hand to her slender throat and tightened his grip. Across the room, Nick went wild in his cage until she heard someone stomp over and quiet him, evidently with a cudgel that slammed the metal bars.

  She heard Gil rattle his too, felt him rock his cage. For some reason, Clerewell loosed his grip, and she sucked in a breath of air. Ben Wilton suddenly appeared, cudgel in hand, and swung at Gil through his bars. Ben Wilton, another piece in this puzzle. Gil quieted at once, though she hadn't heard him hit and couldn't turn her head far enough to see.

  No other protests sounded from the other sick souls she'd seen here, so she assumed they must be drugged or simply beyond help. She forced herself to speak.

  “If you had such a marvelous cure, why did you not come to me, petition me, Dr. Clerewell?” It took such an effort to think, to form her words. Her tongue felt swollen, and her throat hurt. She wanted to stay as mute as Gil.

  “I had planned that at first,” he said, straightening to survey his handiwork on her, then, without a mirror, to apply the stuff on his own scars. Thank God, it must not be acid or poison then. “But,” he went on, “my plan to use Mistress Wilton to reach you took a turn, when I found one of the doctors of the Royal College was not hostile to my ideas, at least not privily so, if I could assist him.”

  “Dr. Caius,” she said. “He came looking for you. He's made some deal with Ben Wilton to torment Sarah Wilton. He's evidently hired her husband as he has you.”

  “Caius?” a new voice cried. “I swear if he knew aught of my experiments or intentions he'd cast me out of the royal college and you wouldn't even have to. Caius?” the dreadful, high-pitched voice went on with a hooted laugh. “Then you are a fool, and I never took you for that, though I must say I did take you for the Protestant bitch daughter of the great whore Boleyn and of the Tudor Antichrist who ruined the true church and my mentor's …”

  The words rolled on. Pascal. His huge shadow loomed over her before he did. When he elbowed Clerewell aside, she saw Pascal was stirring a bowl of white slop. Porridge? No, plaster!

  “I do hope you've kept that effigy Dr. Clerewell and I worked so hard on,” Pascal said, “though I'm now going to do a life mask of you instead of that imitation we had to use. We'll return your body to London in pieces after its dissection and beheading—in memoriam of Sir Thomas More, of course. But I shall donate this new mask for your effigy, as I'm sure the nation will want to hold a fine funeral for you before your Catholic cousin Mary's coronation.”

  NED TOPSIDE WASN'T SURE WHETHER TO BELIEVE THE stranger at all. “What do you mean, the veiled lady has left in a boat?” he cried. “What boat?”

  “The only one left at the boathouse after some men took off in another one with her servants Nick and Gil. I think those are the names the veiled lady said and gave me a crown for running to you—see?”

  In the man's grimy palm lay an identical crown to the ones the queen had been bribing and paying their way with.

  “She said tell you,” the man gasped out, “take the barge you came in and come after her downriver. She can't lose sight of her men—man and the lad, I mean. She said I'd have to tell you because she needed the other three men with her so she'd be safe.”

  “Yes, all right,” Ned agreed. “Keep this quiet then,” he ordered the man.

  “Aye, that I will,” the man said as Ned and Hunsdon's man ran hard for the Chelsea public barge-landing. Thank heavens, Lord and Lady Hunsdon were just arriving.

  “Where is she?” Harry demanded as Lady Anne peered anxiously over his shoulder.

  “Set off downriver in pursuit of mischief, and we're to follow posthaste,” Ned shouted, out of breath. “Now we can take both barges. Did you find samples of the two doctors' handwriting?”

  “After my last visit, Pascal sent word all his papers were to be burned in the back alley,” Lord Hunsdon called to him as both barges cast off and caught the current. “I had a deuce of a time pawing through halfcharred paper. It's Pascal's writing that's spare and taut, not Caius's. The lady won't like she's been wrong in thinking Caius was the mastermind.”

  ELIZABETH LAY TERROR-STRUCK AS THE PLASTER HARDENED on her face. She felt the stone boathouse roof closing in on her, the cells with bars crushing her down. Two straws were stuck up her nostrils so that she could breathe, but she felt she was suffocating. Breathe slowly, she told herself, carefully.

  Though they had strapped her head down now too, and two leather bands restrained her body, that traitor Ben Wilton hovered over her with a knife blade to her throat so she would lie completely quiet. Pascal was a perfectionist, it seemed, carefully smoothing the plaster over her oiled skin. Nothing, not even the pox, had been worse than this. She felt she was in her coffin already or encased in a huge stone sarcophagus under the age-old weight of Westminster Abbey.

  When the plaster on her
face had gone stone hard, Pascal himself returned to peel the mask off and walked away with his prize. Though she could not stop shaking, she saw her opportunity to talk to Ben.

  “Dr. Caius tells me you have a daughter, one sadly poxed,” she said. She sounded like a stutterer. Her teeth were chattering though she was sweating worse than with fever.

  “How'd he dig that up? Pascal says he's not in on none a this,” he muttered, tossing the knife—it looked like the one she'd borrowed from Jenks—from hand to hand. Now she had nothing pointed on her person but a mermaid pin.

  “Where is your and Meg's child?” Elizabeth pursued. Even if he told her, she had no hope she'd live to tell Meg.

  “Seein' you won't tell,” Ben said with a snicker, “I'll let you in on it, Majesty. Fostered out with a fam'ly on Hampstead Heath who have a farm. Just couldn't bear to look at her.”

  Elizabeth thought of her own reaction to poxed people before, but no more. If she could only live, she vowed the ill and the maimed would be dear to her.

  “But Meg, I mean Sarah, surely did not agree to give up the girl,” Elizabeth prompted him to go on.

  “Fought me about it, but I had the little wench sent away when she was out deliv'ing herbs once. 'Bout went crazy, 'n ran off, thinking she'd find her. Didn't see her for a coupla years then, and wouldn't you know, the new Queen of England shows up with Sarah in service. I thought I'd be set for life, but you had to toss her out. It's all your fault, see?”

  “How long have you worked for the doctors? Was it before or after you claimed you saw someone climbing my garden wall?”