The Queene's Cure (31 page)

“Hell's gates,” Cecil put in, “she's far past the rash stage.”

“
Ja
, so the best French alkanet is her only hope!”

“French?” Cecil and Harry remonstrated together as the barge bumped the landing.

“The best is from France, like this, though, if I had time, I vould fetch some from Margate.”

“If she's conscious when you use it,” Cecil said, “don't tell her it's French. But we're going to just tie her down to treat her. I swear I never saw a more willful woman in sickness or in health.”

“What else is in here?” Harry pursued, bouncing the sack as they stood to get off. “What's the big, soft thing I feel?”

“A crimson cloth, of course,” Burcote told them as if they were dunderheads. “
Ja
, to vrap her in to draw out all the red pox and poisons.”

Cecil and Harry had just helped the doctor out onto the landing when they heard running feet. It was Jenks, looking harried and out of breath.

“She's not taken a turn for the worse?” Cecil demanded.

“Dr. Huicke says she's reached the crisis. Dr. Pascal is demanding that her ladies let him in to treat her or the queen's death will be on their heads.”

Pushing past Jenks, Cecil and Harry each took one of Burcote's elbows and half hustled, half carried him up the gravel path toward the palace.

“Dr. Caius hasn't showed up too, has he?” Cecil threw over his shoulder as Jenks jogged behind them. “Or have we heard from the man we assigned to stick with him?”

“Haven't so much as heard from either,” Jenks said. “But Lord Robert says he'll let Dr. Pascal in soon if the
queen doesn't rally, despite all her women's and her own protests. But wait. What I wanted to tell you is that you'll never get this man in through the courtiers and doctors. I came down the back privy steps, and that's the way we should go in—if it's—” Jenks's voice caught. “If it's not too late.”

F
ORCED TO REMAIN IN THE APOTHECARY SHOP, GIL AND
Bett stood by the stairs, as upset as Meg. She leaned with shaking legs against her work counter while her bins, jars, drawers, and shelves were searched in such a roughshod manner it amounted to a ransacking. Curse their black souls, they'd been tearing her precious property apart for hours. She still held the warrant in her hands but had not opened it. It must invoke the queen's name, and Meg could not bear that.

“And what is this?” Dr. Caius demanded, extending before her the alabaster box of what remained of Venus Moon Emollient. It was the moment she had dreaded.

“I—I am not at liberty to say right now—until I receive permission,” she said, knowing how lame that sounded. She could only hope that Nick brought Marcus Clerewell, he would see her plight, and explain everything. After all, he'd said he'd applied for a license to sell it. If only she had not sworn to him she would keep secret the source of this miraculous emollient.

“These papers stashed in the same drawer may
explain, doctor!” one of Caius's ruffians told him. Sick at heart, Meg saw him extend to the doctor the letters she and Marcus Clerewell had exchanged over her helping to bring his scrofula patient before Her Majesty in the Abbey.

“Those are privy correspondence,” Meg insisted.

“Naught is privy here,” Caius said, smoothing the letters out side by side to read them on the counter.

“Well, well,” he said, taking his time to peruse them fully and rubbing his skeletal hands together as if he were washing them. “
Spero meliora.
I believe we may have stumbled on more than just illicit practices by yet another wayward apothecary.”

“A person not in the formal list of scrofula victims is permitted to sue for the queen's healing touch!” Meg insisted.

Carefully refolding both letters, Caius muttered something to his men, who shoved Bett, Gil, and Meg upstairs and began to search things there. Meg noticed the window overlooking the street had been left ajar, probably since Nick and Bett first spotted them. How she wished she could just fly out it, back to the palace to be near the queen. Once, Elizabeth Tudor would have rescued her from any harm.

Meg gazed at Gil, whom the men had pushed into a corner as they sliced her mattress apart with knives, throwing straw and wool batting everywhere. They fanned the pages of her four precious books and threw
them down, only to step on them as they banged through her few pewter plates and cups. They tossed her box of tiny treasures, ribbons and pins, trifles the queen had given her, and Ned Topside's cherished handkerchief on the floor and crunched through them.

As they ripped clothing from the large, humpbacked chest at the foot of the bed, she protested, “My hus-band—those are his goods too.”

“We've already questioned him,” Dr. Caius said.

That jolted her. “Have you been holding Ben? He's missing.”

“You're the apothecary here, he told us. But I see our net must widen,” Caius said, not answering her question. “We'll also take this shop woman and the lad with us for further inquiry, men,” he added with a nod toward Bett. “And that Cotter aide Mistress Wilton sent out a while ago to fetch Marcus Clerewell.”

Nick. They had Nick and had evidently stopped him right outside the shop hours ago. Then Dr. Clerewell knew nothing about helping the queen. And no one could bail her out of this new nightmare but Clerewell. They must already have him too and had gotten out of him something about her helping test his Venus Moon. But if he was still free from them …

The moment Caius looked back toward his men, Meg turned to Gil and signaled to him.
Try to find and bring Dr. Clerewell. If you can't find him, tell Ned or Jenks of this. Can you get out the window?

Gil did not even take the time to signal in return. He bolted lightly to the window, squirmed through it to stand momentarily on the sill with his torso outside, and reached high for something Meg couldn't see. Then, silently, long legs and all, he disappeared upward. Her captors didn't even notice Gil was missing for a good while, and their hue and cry on the street snagged them only night air.

I
T'S BEEN THE LONGEST NIGHT,” KAT GREETED THE FOUR
men as Jenks, Cecil, and Harry brought Dr. Burcote and his goods through the privy entrance into the queen's bedchamber.

“You must sleep,” Cecil told Kat. “Too many nights you and Lady Mary have stayed with her like this.”

“Ach,”
Dr. Burcote said the moment he saw the queen, “I said you should have fetched me sooner, Lord Cecil. Quick. Quick now. Help me vrap her in this cloth,” he ordered. He took his bag from Harry and flipped the crimson sheet open. “Then ve lay her before the hearth and build up the fire to make her sweat it all out into this red color. How long has she been insensible like this?”

“Off and on,” Mary said as they uncovered the sweatdrenched queen, clad only in her shift. But for her head, they wrapped her mummylike in the crimson cloth. The four men lifted her carefully onto cushions on the hearth. As if they were palace wood fetchers, Cecil and Harry
hastened to build up the flames. Soon the chamber was hotter than the hinges of Hades, Cecil thought, as they all perspired with the queen.

Evidently the increased heat or jostling made her stir. She slitted her eyes open; they fixed on Burcote, kneeling at her side.

“They think I have the pox,” she said, weakly but distinctly.

“
Ja
, Your Majesty. God's truth, you have the pox and bad. But now you know your enemy, you vill fight to defeat it.”

“My enemy,” she said. “I've been thinking—dreaming that it's those doctors.”

Burcote shot a puzzled look at Cecil, who only shook his head. The queen seemed to nod, but before she drifted off, Burcote raised to her cracked lips a goblet of alkanet in hot beer. She drank it greedily, though some spilled.

Cecil sent Kat to bring in Robert Dudley so he could see the queen was being treated and halt his clamoring outside to be let in. “You sneaked that man in,” Robert remonstrated, pointing at Burcote, when he saw the situation. “And without my express permission.”

“Hold your tongue,” Cecil told him curtly. “Her Majesty is not dead, and it will take that for you to be giving orders or permission for anything. You can see she is a bit more peaceful, and surely you want that.”

“Of course, I do,” he muttered, raking his hand through his hair as he bent over her. “But I'm staying.” “Staying outside,” Dr. Burcote put in, coming to stand at Cecil's side. “Ve call you soon as ve know anything.”

Dudley went beet red, or else the heat of the chamber was getting to him too. “I'm staying,” he whispered. “I'll be
by
the door, but on
this
side of it, after I tell everyone out there that all that can humanly be done is being done—but not by whom.” He glared at Cecil, then Burcote. He walked away to open the door only wide enough to slip out, then left them.

“Shall I lock him out?” Kat asked, despite how Mary kept wringing her hands.

“No, Kat. He'll serve to hold the hounds at bay, and he—he loves her too.”

Even when Dudley returned and didn't keep well back, Cecil and the doctor let him hover. This was no time to argue; they still might have to work together to keep the realm going if Elizabeth was lost.

They all sat or knelt on the floor by the hearth, clustered around the queen's prone, thin form until their knees locked or their backs ached and they had to move or stand.

Cecil had just started to doze off, leaning on the mantel, when his head jerked and he bolted awake. Burcote was comforting Mary Sidney, who kept shaking her head and crying. Panicked, Cecil bent to be certain the queen was still breathing. She was. Then he noted that
Burcote was pushing Mary's sleeve up her arm and pointing out something on her wrist. She recoiled in horror and clung to the closed draperies, sobbing silently into their deep folds. Robert noticed, too, got up, and rushed to comfort her.

A
T FIRST LIGHT, CHURCH BELLS BEGAN TO RING ALL
over London. Meg panicked that the queen was dead, but then remembered it was the sabbath day. And she recalled where she was: in a filthy, straw-strewn cell at Bridewell Prison.

They had put her by herself, though she'd insisted she not be separated from Bett. She'd heard strange screams and cries all night. Bridewell had inmates publicly flogged and even hanged, but surely not in the middle of the night.

Aching all over, she lay flat on her back, staring at the vaulted stone ceiling as it went from black to gray when muted morning light made its way in. Bridewell had once been a palace but now was a sprawl of separate entities: a workhouse for vagrants, a hospital, and this dank first-floor prison. Desperate for a sniff of fresh air, she rose and looked out her slit of slatted window.

She could see the great Thames glittering below where the smaller Fleet River poured into it. Pressing her cheek to the cold, damp stone window frame, she could barely glimpse the famous Bridewell landmark on
the Thames. A wooden bridge, built in Venetian style, arched over the Fleet between Bridewell and old Blackfriars Monastery lands. The queen's father had ordered this palace built but soon abandoned it when the summer stench from the garbage-ridden Fleet became so rank. Even now, in fairly brisk weather, the smell made Meg want to puke.