The Poyson Garden (5 page)

But there were no wrapped arrows in the interior of the wooden box he peered in, then showed her. Not his boyhood ones or those that had been used to murder Will Benton. Cursing under his breath, Harry ransacked the shelves of the shed, knocking things off, then throwing them.

"Did anyone know you put them here?" she asked, raising her voice over the din he made.

"I told no one--didn't want to keep the dreadful things in my chamber, but I see I should have." He looked ready to tear the place apart. She realized and understood his devastated poise; no one had ever taught him to stand stiff and still no matter what befell. Besides, she'd seen the result of choleric humors all her life, especially in men. His face clenched in a frown, he hunched against the crooked doorway.

"We've two gardeners I'll question," he said, his voice tight. "And that herbalist Meg uses this place, as is evident enough with all this hanging

rubbish."

A sweep of his good hand bounced bunches of thyme, marjoram, and rosemary hanging over their heads by tiny nooses from the crossbeam. On their way out he shoved a spade into a wooden rake until a row of tools toppled as he slammed the door of the ramshackle place.

Elizabeth let the incident go at first. She wouldn't blame a gardener or herb girl for burning or burying some horrid, bloodstained murder weapons kept in the garden shed he or she used. For one moment she almost wondered if Harry himself hadn't destroyed them in a fit of rage. Or perhaps he had been annoyed he hadn't kept them and didn't want to admit his hasty, ill-reasoned mistake to her. She had seen that inbred arrogance from men before too.

Though she had a good nerve to question the servants herself, she spent the waning afternoon with her aunt, treasuring Mary's memories of her mother from their girlhood days. Mary described their home of Hever Castle in Kent, their days being educated at the French court, their heady return to England when first Mary caught the king's eye and then Anne. Elizabeth asked about her Uncle George, who had died on the block with her mother, and asked Mary to describe her Boleyn grandparents. But she did not pry into how Mary became the king's mistress before he turned to the lively, clever Anne--and Anne held out for marriage and the crown.

"I was ever the fond, gentle one," Mary whispered, as a tear tracked down her wan cheek, "and she so clever and strong. You, of a certain, are like her."

The hours slipped away and Elizabeth became more exhausted, more weak with the pounding in her head. But she told no one and even let them talk her into attending the entertainment tonight. "My dearest," her aunt had said before she slipped off into one of her instant slumbers, "don't fret anyone will guess it is you at the play. We're having only the manor staff in, and if they don't think you're really Lady Cornish--I overheard Glenda has her doubts--they will think you are merely my Meg ..."

That snagged Elizabeth's attention again. She wanted to see this girl who looked like her, who so held her aunt's affections when others seemed to dislike her. She decided to speak with her before she

left, no matter what.

She ate an early supper with her aunt and Harry in Mary's bedchamber, dreading the coming entertainment, then her departure, and the long ride back to Hatfield. Though Mary drank a good deal of what she called mead, which Harry later said was hard cider sweetened with honey, she ate only a few small saffron cakes.

"No wonder you are thin, aunt," Elizabeth said, leaning toward her chair where she reclined against plumped cushions. "Cannot you take a bit of this meat pie to build your strength?"

"No appetite anymore, my dearest," she replied with a tiny shake of her head that was almost imperceptible from her constant trembling. "Not for food, not for much but my happy memories."

Harry put his goblet down a bit too hard and wine slopped out. He reached to clasp one of their hands in each of his. "Three of Boleyn blood gathered together," he intoned as if in prayer. "That is a memory to cherish." He cleared his throat and frowned. "And that would make the queen choke on her own bile, eh? Pray, don't tell your sister I said so, Your Grace," he added, his serious face almost gone playful for a moment. He loosed her hand and lifted his goblet. "To the next queen of England!"

He saluted her and drank, but Elizabeth read despair in his voice and eyes. Mary tried to lift her tankard of mead, but again, Elizabeth had to help her get it to her trembling lips.

"Fresh-come from the streets of fashionable London," Ned Topside announced with a flourish of his short cape and a graceful sweep of his feathered hat after he had introduced himself, "our band of players oft does histories and tragedies. But tonight we shall play mostly trifles and tomfooleries to lift hearts and light smiles, especially for the Lady Stafford."

By rushlight and sconce, the five men who dubbed themselves The Queen's Country Players had swept into the center of the great hall to present themselves before their scenes and speeches. Mary Boleyn, Lady Stafford, had loved such pleasantries in her day and often, as the fairest lady at court, Harry told her, played the parts of Diana or even Venus. Tonight she

segued between smiles and stupor, her head tipped back on her chair cushions.

Elizabeth sat on her right and Harry on her left while manor folk, including Jenks, crowded two benches along the side.

Elizabeth scanned the women's faces for someone who could be Meg Milligrew, but there was nonesuch. Besides, Harry had said she was still puking and he hadn't talked to her yet. The gardeners had denied any knowledge of seeing or taking the arrows, and he said he believed them.

"We hope to amuse and amaze," the older man named Wat Thompson intoned with his deep bow as he introduced himself.

"And to sweep you away from this place to other sites in this world, though none so grand as our fair England," Randall Greene announced, with entirely too much gesturing and posturing for such a simple sentence, Elizabeth thought.

Lastly, the costumed and wigged lads who would play the women's parts curtsied and lay small, ribboned boughs of sharp-scented pine at the Lady Mary's feet. "So keep your spirits evergreen, e'en as these fond fantasies we strew at your feet for your favor."

Elizabeth was surprised to see that Ned, who had supposedly saved Harry's life, was not the senior member of the troupe. That position was apparently taken by the one called Wat, and the almost effeminate Randall held a loftier place too. Still, as the hour flew by, she thought the young, rugged-faced Ned the most glib and clever. He knew, as they used to say, which side his bread was buttered on, for he played directly to her cousin and aunt with only an occasional glance her way and never a look at the benches. 'So blood, she'd been used to being overlooked like that for years during her brief stays at court. But someday, God willing, all the players in the realm--including this sharp fellow with the well-turned leg--would bow and say their pretty speeches for her.

"And now," Ned was declaiming as the others took their temporary leave to reenter with some new piece of costume or prop, "we shall present a few speeches and scenes from the new and fashionable Italian comedy The Potion of Pleasure.

Drink up and dream you are in sunny Florence and have found such a magic liquor there as to make anyone who drinks it fall in love with you. ..."

He was, this so-called Ned

Topside, rather a good-looking rogue with his black curly hair and green eyes. Elizabeth noted that a hundred expressions plied his face. His eyes could sparkle with a range of passions from mischief to malevolence. He could speak volumes with the mere lift of a sleek eyebrow or tilt of lip. She noted well he could ape a lordling's pompous demeanor or a cowherd's lumbering walk. And most fascinating, he had the ear and tongue for all types of speech, court or country, familiar or foreign.

Though her heart was heavy with her aunt's imminent demise and the murder of Harry's man, she found herself smiling more than once. How grateful she and Harry both felt when Mary Boleyn smiled too.

Elizabeth helped her cousin tuck her aunt back into bed and said her final farewell. Though she and Jenks must leave before midnight, she was swaying with exhaustion. At last she gave in to Harry's pressing her to take a brief rest in an extra bedchamber.

But she didn't think she slept. ... She must not be asleep because there it was, clearing through the fog, the stone Tower of London with the gray Thames rippling by it when the queen's guards rowed her in through the iron jaws of Traitor's Gate.

She walked the Tower's dank, dark corridors, looking for her mother. Anne Boleyn had been imprisoned and beheaded here. She was buried under the cold floor stones in the small chapel of St. Peter in Chains, so the place horrified and haunted Elizabeth. Yet she went on, step by step, looking, calling for her.

"Mother! Queen Anne Boleyn! Mother!" she shouted bravely.

She saw her form, all in flowing white, standing on a parapet within the Tower confines. Her mother held to the banister and leaned over it and called down to her, "Elizabeth, my dear Elizabeth." Her voice echoed off the walls, off her tomb. "He poisoned my love. ... Your royal father poisoned my love long before he took my hand, my heart, my head. ..."

Over Elizabeth's head Queen Anne held a heart with an arrow stuck right through it.

Blackest blood made a huge spot where it pierced the heart. "Dig me up, and you'll see," she called as her form and voice drifted away in the fog. "Poison ..."

Elizabeth jerked straight up in bed, her heart pounding, her body drenched with sweat. At first she didn't know where she was, but then it all came tumbling back. Wivenhoe ... her aunt ailing ... Will's death ... those stolen arrows.

She got up, seized her cloak, and swung it around the boy's garb she had already donned. Wishing Kat were here to help, she shoved her feet in her riding boots. Still shaking, seeing the dark corridors of the Tower before her, she went down the dim hall to Harry's chamber door and knocked quietly on it.

She heard his feet hit the floor, heard him coming. He opened the door, fully dressed, prepared to see her off. "Already time?" he asked. His hair was mussed from his pillow, with a cowlick standing straight up. When he stared closer into her face, he whispered, "It isn't Mother?"

"Not yours."

"What?"

"Never mind. We must find out if those arrows that killed Will were poisoned. I've got to see those black spots on him. We can retrieve the arrowhead you said you left in him. Send for my man Jenks, and we'll dig him up ourselves posthaste, then put him back."

He gaped at her as if she were speaking some barbaric tongue.

"If they used poison, mayhap we can trace it," she explained. "I don't want to do it, but we must have answers. Now."

He nodded jerkily and disappeared. Within a quarter hour she, Harry, and a shaken Jenks had taken a lantern and two spades from the garden shed, unlocked the graveyard gate, and begun to delve.

Chapter The Fourth

She loved the night because she didn't have to wear the veil. It suited her, the blackness, the very void of it, like the deepest reaches of her soul.

She stood in the shadows of the church, watching the trio digging across the small graveyard. At first she thought it must mean Mary Boleyn had died, for her lass said it was almost time. Her burial would be

in secret, since she had been officially dead nearly twenty years, but they would surely inter her beneath the church floor with her lord. So they must be digging up the man her little band had killed when the simpletons should have executed Henry Carey.

She shifted slightly closer and peered around a big tree. They were so intent, they would not see her. She realized they had come through the gate she had planned to slip through to meet her girl, using the copy of the key she'd had made. They were too close to it for her to risk entering the grounds of the manor now. A curse be on them, for she would be delayed. If this was to be the night Mary Boleyn died, she wanted to be under her window, staring up, knowing one more Boleyn had been dispatched to the fiery bowels of hell.

The tree limb creaked overhead, and the breeze danced dry leaves through the frosted grass. Autumn had come early this year, as unnatural as the summer disasters that had plagued the kingdom because these wretched Boleyns still were drawing breath, waiting for one of their ilk to take the throne.

She strained to hear what the two cloaked men and the lad digging for them said. The lad's face, too, was hidden, for he had some sort of handkerchief tied over his nose and mouth. Then the wind shifted, and she caught their words.

"The poor wretch been in the ground near on four days, milady," the digger said. "Best pinch your nose, 'cause I know how a dead horse is after that time, 'less it's in the deep of winter."

A servant, but not one Essex-bred, the eavesdropper thought. Off and on she'd been in these parts enough to hear the way the local rustics slurred their words. But who was that lady the lad addressed, and one garbed like a man? Mary Boleyn was too weak, so perhaps this was the Lady Cornish her lass had mentioned. But if they were digging the man up to rebury him somewhere, why at night? Or were they exposing his corpse for another reason?

"Just dig, Jenks," the lady said, "then I'll slit the winding sheet."

The watching woman spun to press her back against the tree trunk; she covered her mouth with both hands. They suspected something about the corpse. But let them be puzzling over it, she thought, let them find her hellebore and aconite

on those tips and shafts, if congealed blood and earth and worms had not annihilated the deadly concoction. Before they could try to trace her, she would have Mary Boleyn dead and then be on to her real passion, her royal victim, that she would--

"Oh, 'So blood!" the cloaked lady cried and turned away, retching loudly on the grass near the grave in scraping, gasping sounds. The watching woman peered back around the tree. The lady still held the lantern but jerked it so quickly it threw sharp, tilting shadows of the trio on the brick manor wall. She wiped her face on her cloak and her hands on the grass. But she came right back to the grave, even bent over it, one hand now covering her mouth and nose. Whoever she was, the watcher had to admire her mettle. In form she resembled Meg the herbalist, but her voice was a far hue and cry from hers. She wished she'd shine the lantern at her face inside that hood. And why was she garbed like a man?