The Queene's Cure (10 page)

She darted out of line before Penny, the oldest of the staff, could grab her back. “Here now, you're not to fetch and carry gowns!” Penny cried and ran after her. “I'll get it. I shifted the befurred gowns and the embroidered smocks on the other side of the bodices. Here now, you just come back!”

But they both returned empty-handed with their caterwauling ended, and that gave Kat the excuse to go down the line and grill each one of them. She kept Lady Anne waiting an extra hour before they headed back to the palace, because it took that long before the new lace and ruff girl, Lucinda, finally broke down in tears.

She admitted she'd let a fine foreign gentleman who spoke real fancy lease those pieces for a fortnight just to show his friends, and he'd never brought them back. At that distraught display, Kat pulled the guard off the door and ordered him to take the sobbing girl straightaway to the queen at Whitehall.

T
HE QUEEN SHIVERED AS SHE ALIGHTED FROM THE
royal barge at the Thames water gate and climbed the steps toward the old Palace of Westminster. As her companions fell in behind, a late afternoon mist closed off the city and river like a vast gray curtain.

Elizabeth Tudor's destination was Westminster Abbey, the place of her joyous coronation. But it was also the solemn site of a Tudor cemetery, where her paternal grandparents, one of her stepmothers, her brother, and her sister were entombed. She shuddered and went on, anxious to have this quest over and angry with herself that she had lost her temper at Kat before she had set out.

“I've found a link,” Kat had crowed when she'd returned from Blackfriars, “to who stole the effigy's gown,
and I'm having the wench brought in direct for questioning!”

Delighted, the queen had delayed coming here while they waited for the lace girl Lucinda to be delivered by the wardrobe guard. When no one arrived, the queen had sent her own men to fetch them. It was they who learned that Lucinda and the guard were more than fast friends. Further inquiries revealed that both servants had disappeared into the teeming city with the queen's questions for them unasked and unanswered. Who was the man who supposedly leased the gown? Or if his name was unknown, what was his appearance? Now standing in the mist-swept gray shadows of Westminster, Elizabeth was not even certain what her questions here must be.

She had brought four of her ladies and a covey of guards. But, telling her women she wished to be alone to pray, she sent them into the palace nearby to wait for her and went on foot toward the Abbey with but two guards. It annoyed her that Jenks and Ned had not returned from Knightrider Street yet or she would have brought them, but perhaps they at least had turned something up.

She did not enter through the main west door to chance meeting the deans and canons of the college who had replaced the abbots and monks. The protectors of this place would be put out she had not announced her visit so they could make a fuss for it, and they would ask a thousand questions of their own.

She pulled her sable-lined hood and cape closer and walked around to go in through the north door. Fortunately, it was not locked, or she would have had to send one of her men to open it from inside while she waited. The metal hinges, however, protested their entry with a shrill, scraping sound.

It was even more dim and chill inside with the day's wan light washing in through high stained-glass windows. Silence hung heavy under the lofty ceiling's soaring vaults, vast arches, and stone carvings. The Abbey's musty breath seemed to seep into her bones from floor stones, chapels, and carved effigies of long-dead kings and queens.

Seeing several of the abbey staff clustered before the high altar, Elizabeth skirted behind it, her footsteps whispering, her two guards hurrying to keep up. Here, where distant, disembodied voices echoed, she strode by the recessed chapel of John the Baptist. Pulling her cloak closer, she remembered how he had been beheaded, with his head then brought in upon a platter. She pictured again the head of her effigy, wondering if the maker of it wanted her real one on a platter too.

Weak-kneed, she heaved a huge sigh. Gripping her hands as if in prayer, she paused at the coronation chair, set behind the high altar when not in use. She vowed she must do all she could to keep herself and her kingdom safe.

She quickly passed the vault under which her sister's
body lay, but slowed her steps at the chapel deepest in the nave. Here stood the grated, gilt resting place that the founder of the Tudor dynasty, King Henry VII, had built for himself and his queen, Elizabeth of York. A single, flickering lantern illumined its sheen and etched its shadows deeper. Behind the altar, above the ornately enclosed tombs, her paternal grandparents' gilded forms, guarded by cherubs, lay side by side, staring up toward heaven. But these glorious, golden effigies were not the ones she sought today.

Passing other chapels, she crossed the south transept and passed through to the cloisters, the old grounds of the monks who had once tended this sacred place. Elizabeth nearly jumped out of her skin when her guard spoke, even though he whispered.

“Do you not wish this lantern lit now, Your Grace?” the taller guard, Clifford, asked, producing it and a flint box from under his cloak.

“Yes, all right. This cloister is always dim, even during midday.”

She waited, looking nervously about, as they lit one glass-paned lantern and, when she nodded, the other. If this took too long she was going to be late for the Privy Plot Council meeting she had called.

“It seems darker than it really is in here,” Clifford observed as if sensing she needed encouragement.

It was an astute comment, but she did not answer. Indeed, where she was going was called the Dark
Cloister, for it lay beyond this arched, more open section where the monks used to take their air in bad weather. She only hoped the effigies she sought to examine—life-like ones of some earlier monarchs that had been paraded in their funeral processions—were still kept downstairs in the Undercroft, which had served as the monks' common room. Once she viewed them, she would decide whether to privily summon their caretaker or maker to Whitehall for questioning.

Her guards each holding a lantern, they walked a ways down the Dark Cloister until they reached a narrow stairway down that loomed like an open mouth. “Wait here,” she told her men, taking one lantern. “Come if I call, but call me only if you are challenged for your presence here.”

One hand holding up her hems, the other lifting the lantern high, she went slowly, carefully down the stairs. She had only been here once years ago with her three Grey cousins, Jane, Katherine, and little Mary, on a lark during the days of her father's fifth queen, Catherine Howard. It was long before Lady Jane found herself a figurehead in a revolt against Elizabeth's sister, Mary Tudor, long before Jane was beheaded in the Tower of London where her younger sister Katherine was now imprisoned for her treasonous deceit against her current queen. Ah, those were happy days when they were young and sneaked down here to see the effigies and jested about them as if they were great dolls they could
toy with. And yes, Elizabeth realized, Katherine Grey knew all about these royal effigies, and she—along with Margaret Lennox, their cousin—were women Cecil had suggested could be behind all this.

Elizabeth shook her head so hard her pearl earrings rattled. The girls had been caught and scolded that day, then thoroughly lectured by the Duke of Norfolk about how the effigies were carved here, painted, garbed, and made ready to be displayed on funeral hearses or tombs.

As she descended, the queen's heart began to pound even harder. She neared the bottom of the stairs before she realized it was not just her lantern throwing shifting light upon the walls. Someone else was here already.

Prepared to call for her men, she peeked from the stairwell into the pillared and vaulted stone room. What she saw made her mute. She lurched backward and dropped the lantern, which exploded to glass shards at her feet. In blinding torchlight thrust close to her face, the ghost of her dead sister lunged at her.

THE FIFTH

T
HE APPARITION SOUNDED LIKE HER SISTER, MARY
, with its rough, masculine voice. Elizabeth couldn't catch the words over the banging of her heart. Nor did its mouth move or wide stare change.

“I said, sorry, milady, but you gave me a real fright,” the thing repeated when she just gaped at it.

She felt like a ninnyhammer, though it took her but a moment to realize that this was no ghost of her sister but a fully garbed effigy which could compete with the one of herself. The gown of crimson velvet, the replica of the scepter it held all seemed so real. Whoever had done that face had captured Mary's bland features and sullen stare.
And the limbs of the short, squat form had moved with such lifelike suppleness, and its head had turned.

Elizabeth's guards, who had evidently heard the shattering of her lantern, came thundering down the stairs, but she held up her hand to stay them. In half stride, swords drawn, they waited.

This time when the effigy spoke, a man's blond head popped out from behind the wigged, crowned one. “Oh, no!” he cried as his torch illumined Elizabeth full in the face at the bottom of the staircase. “It cannot be—Your Majesty?”

“Stand away with that torch and figure,” she commanded, but her voice shook. A quick glance around made her realize this man was alone. Thinking she'd do better questioning him without her men here, she motioned them back up the stairs. Slowly, they retreated.

“Forgive me, but no one warned—informed me you would be coming, Your Majesty. I was just moving this image of your royal sister, Bloody Ma—I mean Queen Mary—to the table to dust it when I saw your shadow and grabbed a torch. I really had no idea, so perhaps the dean or canons forgot to tell me.”

As he spoke, he fumbled one-armed with the figure to lean it against the wall, then backed away, bowing so low to Elizabeth, though it looked like his obeisance was to Queen Mary, that it seemed the torch would singe his hair.