The Queene's Cure (11 page)

“Your name?” she inquired.

“Percival Oldcorn, Your Gracious Majesty, assistant to the dean, at your service,” the man introduced himself with another bow.

Over the grit of broken glass, she stepped into the room and glanced around. Two other torches in wall sconces cast fitful light into the deep recesses of the barrel-vaulted chamber. One chair, a long table, and a set of deep wooden shelves were the only furniture. Other effigies, as she correctly recalled, lay on the shelves, wrapped in sheets like winding cloths as if waiting for someone to call them forth from the tomb like Lazarus.

Despite Percival Oldcorn's low voice, he seemed a mere lad, she thought, with his beardless, smooth skin, and protruding ears. She was not used to men with no sun color; he looked as if he lived underground yearround.

“And your business here, Master Oldcorn?” she inquired, thinking he was yearning to ask the same of her.

“I see to the needs of these memorials of our realm's royalty, that is these funeral and tomb artificial personages,” he told her proudly, gesturing toward what must be the newest effigy, the one of her sister. He placed the torch in its sconce, then, as if to make the slumped figure presentable, he darted over to brush dust or cobwebs from Mary Tudor's velvet sleeves.

“Indeed, then I am pleased to find you here, for there are some things I would know,” Elizabeth told him, striding toward the effigies at the end of the room, where
he hastened to follow. “I was told once how these are made, but I would see them and hear it from you, Master Oldcorn. Tell me all you know, especially about their heads, of what they are fashioned and who does such clever artifice.”

The man knew a great deal, so Elizabeth suffered him to lecture her about how the ancient Greeks and Romans first modeled the heads of revered family members to keep in their homes. “Though most of those were of stone, metal, or wax and these are painted wood or plaster,” he explained as he located the figures of King Henry VII and his queen. Oldcorn unwrapped them for her as he talked.

Elizabeth was amazed to see her grandmother's slender figure attired in a mussed but exquisite gold satin, square-necked gown, edged with red velvet. A fine fakery of a crown was wired to her wig, much more realistic than the crude one on the effigy in her coach. These painted wooden hands, one clutching an imitation scepter, were graceful, long-fingered, and so like Elizabeth's own.

“Even the limbs look real,” she observed, pressing the effigy's supple wrist.

“The Tudor images are jointed at the shoulder and elbow, and Queen Mary's that gave you such a start even turns her head. Their skins are leather or canvas stuffed with hay and herbs,” he added.

“To mold or sculpt, then paint these faces takes great skill,” she observed to prod him further.

“Oh, yes,” Oldcorn said smugly, as if he'd done the work himself. “See here on the king's face, the sunken lips, mouth gone askew, even the hollow cheeks and hard-set jaw. Features of a cadaver. Like these two, the best ones are from death masks.”

“Death masks?” she gasped as a bolt of fear shot through her.

“Indeed, though masks can be modeled from life too. With the assistance of the subject, of course, and breathing straws in the nostrils while the plaster hardens.”

She shuddered at the mere idea of her face being encased in a stiffening mask, whether she was dead or alive. But that reminded her of something else: Ned Topside had mentioned last evening that the poxed face on her effigy was a
molded
mask and she had not heeded him. Perhaps she'd best speak with Ned again about all he knew of how actors fashioned such a mask.

“But of course, it's much easier to make a death mask,” Oldcorn was saying. “Plaster is smoothed on the corpse's oiled face, then, when that hardens and is removed, a second batch is poured into that oiled mold to get the features true before it's painted. But I've heard that, on the continent, the future of such modeling lies not in plaster, but in a return to the old way of wax, which has the flesh color poured directly into the molten mixture instead of painted on.”

She was hardly listening now as she stared at, then touched, the copies of her grandparents' dead faces.
They felt hard, whereas the poxed face on her effigy had seemed slightly malleable. Mayhap it had not quite set yet. And this false flesh seemed not so real and luminous as on her figure.

“Do the plasters harden and paints fade over time?” she asked.

“I've only tended them for several years, but I believe so. 'Tis said the coloring is mixed from the same pigments and flax seed that oil painters use on wood or canvas.”

She watched Oldcorn rewrap the form of her grandmother Elizabeth, for whom she had been named. Suddenly, the entire room closed in on her. The stone ceiling holding up the Abbey floor seemed a huge, cold plaster mask stopping her breath. She hastened to the door, taking one of the torches.

“I need the name of the man who did the plaster and paint of this one,” she informed him, pointing to but not looking at her sister's effigy, which seemed to guard her escape up the stairs. “And of its wig-maker,” she added, turning back.

“The wig-maker I can tell you,” Oldcorn said, annoying her by coming over to brush at Mary's gown again, “but the man who did this face of your royal sister—”

“Half sister.”

“—half sister, Your Majesty, fled to the continent, they say, when you ascended the throne. Whether he's come back, I know not, nor his name because I've asked
around before, just for the record, of course. I heard he was trained abroad as a doctor or some sort of surgeon.”

Elizabeth's knees went weak again. She prayed Cecil would find something she could use to tie Caius, Pascal, or their continent-visiting ilk to that effigy back at Whitehall.

“But the wig-maker lives out in Chelsea still,” Oldcorn went on, “a former prioress, who used to procure her supply of hair from novices and nuns. She may not be yet alive, for I hear she was aged when she did Queen Mary's wig, and that, of course, is nigh on four years ago.”

“I shall have someone look into it.”

“Forgive my curiosity, Your Majesty,” his words floated to her as she started up the stairs, “but surely you are not personally planning your own funeral effigy, and you so young and healthy?”

She stopped and turned back to him. “Inquire again most circumspectly as to who molded and painted the former queen's face and send word to me if you learn aught,” she ordered, clipping out each word. Then, desperate to escape this catacomb chamber, she nearly ran up the stairs.

C
ECIL'S MAN BANGED THE ORNATE BRASS KNOCKER ON
the front door of the Royal College of Physicians, then stood back as he'd been ordered. Cecil straightened
his shoulders and spread his legs to a wider stance. When the door was swept open by Dr. John Caius himself, Cecil didn't budge nor speak.

“My Lord Secretary,” the doctor said, sounding not one whit riled, which, in turn, riled Cecil even more, “what an unexpected visit, though, of course, not an unwelcome one. No doubt you've come to explain more fully about some effigy discovered in the queen's coach that we've been able to glean from rampant rumors and street gossip.”

“Do you always answer your own front door, doctor?” Cecil countered, rather than answering. He swept past the man with his two secretaries in tow. Two other men stayed with the horses in the street as the fog thickened and daylight fled. At least Cecil saw that lamps were lit in the front room.

“I happened to be in the council chamber and glanced out to see you,” Caius countered, following him in. “How fares our dear queen after that unfortunate incident in the street as she took her leave yesterday, and what might we do for you—or her?”

Cecil turned into the council chamber Caius had indicated and sat at the head of the long table. He brazenly gestured to his men to take chairs on either side of him. It was then he noted Dr. Peter Pascal in the dim corner of the room, where he'd been either trying to hide his great bulk or had been squinting sideways out the window to watch the street.

“Pascal,” Cecil intoned, “I haven't seen you for years and would hardly recognize you with that shiny pate.”

“Lost so much hair, I shave it now.”

“Ever thought of wearing a wig?” If Pascal thought he was making light conversation, Cecil thought, so much the better.

“I used to, but it's not worth the bother—and I am not a vain man.”

“Have a seat, won't you, while Dr. Caius sends someone for the college account books. No good purpose served by lurking in corners.”

“It wasn't that,” Pascal declared defiantly. “I misplaced something dear to me. It's simply vanished.”

“So that the remnants of my patience does not follow suit, sit here,” Cecil said, pointing across the table.

“But—the college account books?” Caius parroted, making Cecil turn to study him again.

“Aye, man. 'Tis by the queen's goodwill you have your charter and your power and by my goodwill you aren't all marched to prison to be questioned for what you know about what she found in her coach outside your door.”

Pascal grabbed the tall, carved back of a chair, while Caius blanched at that frontal assault. Over the years Cecil had learned that might did not make right, but it could produce fright and that made even wily and wicked men blurt out the truth. He had nothing against these two—yet—but that they'd dared to treat their queen shabbily and had both means and motive to try to
scare her with that damned, poxed dummy. He worked hard to keep Elizabeth Tudor on an even keel and didn't need her being distracted or distressed.

“Outrageous,” Pascal sputtered. “We only do our duty against disease and death. As Sir Thomas More put it,” he went on, hooking his thumbs in his broad belt, “ ‘We never ought to look on death as a thing far off.’ We, Lord Cecil, the queen's loyal physicians, should not fall under any sort of suspicion for merely trying to help Her Gracious Majesty and her people.”

“Very grand, doctor, but fetch the books. Geoffrey,” he told the clerk on his left, “take down Dr. Pascal's comments. After all, that effigy in the queen's coach seemed a harbinger of ‘looking on death as a thing not far off,’ not far off indeed from this very council room and college.”

“Now, see here,” Pascal insisted loudly enough to drown out the noisy scratching of Geoffrey's quill, “I oft quote my beloved mentor, Thomas More, so I meant naught. But what has that to do with our books?”

“Let's just say,” Cecil said, picking his words as carefully as he chose his quills, ink, paper, and sandpot from the satchel his other secretary offered, “that when one wants to know what people are plotting, one looks at their books or the refuse they throw out, and I prefer books to refuse. John,” he said, addressing his younger assistant, “please accompany Dr. Caius as he calls for all the college's latest accounting records, say going back one year.”

“We are plotting naught but our God-given—even queen-given—duties to cure and heal. And we would be happy to come to the palace and speak with Her Majesty about anything she wants to know,” Pascal insisted, all the while looking as if he'd swallowed some vile elixir.

“I fear we may have upset her,” Caius put in, “with our request for corpses for study to improve our—”

“Some sort of inquiry on that may come later,” Cecil interrupted. “And to quote Sir Thomas More's wellknown words when he was climbing the steps of the scaffold, ‘Help me up with your hand. As for my coming down, let me shift for myself.’ We all must shift for ourselves, doctors, and I am always shifting to be certain the queen comes to no harm. Questions about that effigy will come apace, but for now, your books of purchases and payments quickly,” he said, calmly folding his hands over his papers on their table.

He saw the two men shoot each other helpless glances before Pascal sat and Caius hastened to obey.

E
H, NICK, I TOLD YOU TO KEEP STIRRING THAT WHILE
it boiled! It'll stick to the bottom if you're not careful. Laws, I'd better do it, even if I can't stand the smell.”

Listening to Bett scold her husband, Meg smiled as she cut different shapes of thin linen for the skin of the grace plasters. Nick Cotter had vowed he'd stir the medicinal plaster of betony, verbena, and pimpernel leaves
mixed with wax and sheep's suet, but his wife, Bett, was a stickler for things done right. That, Meg thought, and Bett's sharp nose, were two things the woman had in common with the queen.