The Queene's Cure (33 page)

M
EG RETURNED TO CONSCIOUSNESS, FLAT ON THE
stone floor of the interrogation room. No one else was there.

She tenderly fingered the bump on her forehead and moved her limbs. Bruised, shaky, she did not try to sit up. If they thought she was still unconscious, maybe it would give her a little reprieve from the terrible things Dr. Caius had been saying. She still heard his voice echoing deep inside her.

No, that
was
his voice. Maybe in the hall. She closed her eyes and concentrated on what he was saying. He was obviously conferring with someone, but that per-son's voice did not seem to carry. Or was Caius dictating to his secretary again?

“… enough evidence to have her summarily hanged …”

Whatever did
summarily
mean? Meg wondered. But she sat bolt upright at the import of his other words.

“With the queen at least indisposed and the court in upheaval, they won't even know until it's over.
Maxima Regina
ordered us to hasten to our business, so this will show her … Make a dramatic example of an apothecary, but for a high crime, not mere misdemeanor. How I have longed to get even with the queen for dismissing me—
me
—from royal service as she did, yet I need her goodwill. And disposing of a would-be assassin who played on the queen's worst fears which she learned as an intimate at court before being dismissed …”

The words rolled over Meg, but she could grab so few of them. Concentrate—she must concentrate. She rose groggily to her feet and pressed her ear to the door. But the sound was not filtering in there. She moved again into the center of the room, then realized his voice was coming along the floor, from under the heavy wooden door.

She lay back down, this time on her belly, pressing her ear to the ground just the way Jenks had taught her to listen for the beat of distant horses' hooves.

“… to keep her in the queen's prison, I had thought I'd have to use the abandonment of her daughter against her, charging murder …”

Daughter? Whose daughter? The queen had no daughter.

“… but the child is not dead, just given away and …”

Curse it. She'd missed something.
Whose
daughter?

“… but won't have to now with the two letters she and Blackwell—ah, I mean Clerewell—exchanged. Nasty business when a child gets involved anyway, especially a poxed six-year-old who's best left where she is out on the heath.”

His voice came closer, clearer. “I'd best go look in on her again, but I think I have plenty here to get her on the execution list. Imagine that—the queen, if she lives, will
lose her former herb girl, who yet adores her. After
Maxima Regina
,” he went on, his voice dripping sarcasm, “dismissed me from a post that should have been mine yet, after she refuses to give me the corpses we need … Ha,” he shouted an exultant laugh, “now I shall give
her
a corpse, one she knows well this time.”

Daughter. Six years old. Poxed. Out on the heath?

Caius returned to find his prisoner standing by the window, breathing hard.

“I heard what you said,” she accused. Her head was throbbing, spinning.

“You hit your head and must have been delusional so—”

“No! Did you mean
I
have a six-year-old daughter? You see, there are years—things I can't recall.”

“Now that's convenient. I rather think—”

“Where is she?” Meg screamed.

“—you are very dangerous,” he got out before Meg launched herself at him, fingers curved like claws. He was so surprised he went off balance, slamming into the wall, tipping to hands and knees on the floor while Meg tried to scramble for the open door.

But his secretary and a guard filled it to stop her flight.

E
LIZABETH'S STRENGTH CAME BACK SLOWLY, SOMETIMES
in waves, but then ebbed. They still kept the room dim. Mostly just Dr. Burcote and some of her
ladies were in attendance, especially Anne Carey, Harry's wife. Elizabeth had been told Kat was exhausted and Mary needed her sleep. God bless them for tending her for…

“How long was I—not myself?” she asked Dr. Burcote as he bent near to time her wrist pulse.

“Today is Saturday, October the seventeenth, Your Majesty.”

She tried to recall when she first fell ill. On the fifth. Twelve days ago! Twelve days her kingdom had gone on without her. A dozen days she had not pursued whoever had tried to frighten her and—mayhap—to kill her with the pox. She had so much to do.

“Send for Lord Cecil,” she ordered Burcote, snatching her wrist back. “But do not go far. And do not let my royal court doctors nor those from the Royal Physicians College bully you,” she added as he nodded and obeyed.

She felt better already. God had spared her life. And Dr. Burcote had assured her she had relatively few and shallow pox marks. Her mind was working. She was giving orders, making plans.

Cecil joined her immediately, or had she drifted off to sleep again?

“I believe we have our beloved queen back with us,” he told her as he took the hand she offered. Tears shimmered in his eyes.

“My lord, I know you and Dr. Burcote tell me true.
How many marks on my face? They won't give me a mirror. Count them.”

He leaned closer. “Two high on your forehead, Your Grace, two along your chin, a few scattered on your cheeks, but Burcote says you are healing.…”

“I have them on my arms and legs, but I am praying they will heal shallow, all of them.”

“Praise God your life was spared. Your beauty always came from your strong spirit and marvelous mind, as well as from your face and form.”

“Spoken like a fond suitor, as well as a wily lawyer and my principal secretary, my dear Cecil. But—the God of my salvation forgive me—I cannot bear to be marked and scarred.”

“We had your old herb girl here for a while waiting to see you before I took her back to London. She mentioned something special to cover pox marks, something about a doctor …I cannot recall, but I can fetch her for you again.”

“But first, I want to find the person who did this to me. Cecil, I swear, my being smitten with the pox was part of a hateful plot. The effigy of a poxed queen, the leeched body of the wig-maker's granddaughter in the fountain—now this. I have been thinking there were certain incidents which might have caused this.”

He looked amazed. “Such as?” he asked gently as if she were delirious again.

“Margaret Stewart's special gift of bloody-hued powder
from Mary, Queen of Scots, of course! It made everyone sneeze. God only—and Mary and Margaret— knows what was in it.”

How dare he smile. “Do not coddle me, my lord!” she told him.

“I am simply overjoyed that your brilliant powers of deduction are back already, Your Majesty. As ever, you are astute, for through the man watching Matthew Stewart, I have intercepted and had copied—the original has been sent on—a letter Margaret wrote to Queen Mary in Edinburgh.”

“It says the powder was poisoned, or carried pox or—”

“No, but it clearly suggests that, should the Scots queen wish to wed Lord Darnley, so that their heir might bind the Tudors and the Stewarts, and should you— sadly—die of the pox …”

“The treasonous bitch—both of them!” Elizabeth exploded, smacking her fists onto her mattress to bounce the bed.

Dr. Burcote poked his head through the other side of the tapestried hangings. “Please, Your Majesty, Lord Secretary, she must not become so excited that—”

“I'm fine, doctor,” she said with a dismissive gesture. “Cecil, be certain that neither the Stewarts nor their son leave these grounds. And send for Meg Milligrew again. Meanwhile, I still want Caius and Pascal watched day and night. Well, what is it?” she demanded when Cecil shook his head.

“Pascal was here for days, insisting he treat you,” he explained. “But he disappeared in a fit when he heard we'd brought in Dr. Burcote, and in the confusion of your crisis, we lost him. Nor have we heard from our man with him. The same with Caius, only he never appeared here, nor did the man watching him report to us.”

“It's them, perhaps in league with the Stewarts and the Scots queen,” Elizabeth vowed. Yet she knew full well that, besides Pascal's patient's coughing to fleck her with spittle, the young girl who had kneeled in the aisle had done so too.

Anger and energy coursed through her. She slid her feet to the side of the bed while Dr. Burcote appeared again, holding up his hands as if to stop her.

“Cecil, send for Kat and Mary Sidney,” Elizabeth ordered. “I long to see and thank them—and I will need their help to get dressed. What is it now, damn the two of you. Stop shooting each other glances as if you are my mute artist and I some silly fool!”

“Your Grace,” Cecil said, grasping her hands, both of them, though she had not indicated he might do so, “Mary Sidney is ill of the pox too.”

“Mary? Beautiful Mary? And caught it from me—or from whoever did this to me?”

She tried to stay strong, but could only seize her hands back, cover her face, and sob in great gasps. She shuddered again as if the fever were on her, the marks all over her.

“Fetch Kat Ashley,” she heard Cecil tell someone.

Burcote kept repeating, “Calm down now,
ja
, keep calm or those marks vill get all fiery again.…”

“ 'S blood and bones! How can I calm down,” Elizabeth yelled, “when no one will tell me anything? And when I have both revenge and justice for myself, poor Mary, and two dead wig-makers to tend to now!”

N
ICK KNEW HE'D BEEN DRUGGED, BUT HE COULDN'T
shake off the heavy weights that held him down. He remembered now—Dr. Clerewell had not been tending the other doctor's shop in Cheapside, so he'd gone asking for him along Gutter Lane where he'd said he lived.

Nick tried to sit up but his limbs were made of stone. And those terrible sounds, the moans and shrieks. Closing his eyes tight shut, he tried to remember more.

“A Dr. Clerewell, you say?” an old crone had asked on the fourth floor of a crooked, narrow building on Gutter Lane, where someone had sent him.

“Aye, the same,” Nick had assured her, wishing he had so much as a groat in his purse to loosen her tongue, but the Bridewell guards had cleaned him out. “Large feathered hat, has—or used to have—scars on his face, that's him,” Nick had told her.

“Oh, thought tha's who ye meant. Lives in Chelsea, 'e
does, only rents a room 'ere so's 'e can say 'e's a fancy London doctor.”

“Clear out in Chelsea?” Nick had asked. And here he couldn't hire a boat to go find him there. He'd have to run home to Bett, tell her what he'd learned, get some money, and head out again. He'd been about to turn away when the old crone had spoken again.

“A man downstairs knows just where 'e lives, so you can ask 'im direct.”

Nick had gladly followed her back downstairs—and he'd seemed to be going down, down ever since. He could remember asking the man about where Clerewell could be found. The man had pointed out into the street, and Nick had turned to look before the whole world had gone black.

“No, no, not the leeches again!” a woman screamed so close that Nick jerked upright, craning his neck to see. Not the Gutter Lane crone's voice this time, but someone young. Someone terrified.

Shock after shock rolled through Nick Cotter as he looked groggily around. The scene was the way he'd always thought of hell, but this was hell with artwork. On the stone walls were crude drawings of what must be corpses: people cut open, parts of bodies, all drawn in black and white.

He heard before he saw it then. Two men dragged a gaunt, limp body from a cage. Must be a corpse, leeched white as it looked, a young woman in a shroudlike shift.
Nick squinted as the men pulled the corpse into a distant room. And then he saw something that shook him even more.

Looking every bit as mean as a Bridewell guard, Ben Wilton sat across the stone-ceilinged room before a dark door, holding a coiled whip. Between Ben and himself, Nick was looking at rows and rows of caged human beings. Ill. Scarred, maimed, half-dead. He knew better than to yell to Ben for help, because he was seeing this through his own set of bars. But worst in all this horror, he saw Gil too trapped in one of the cages, wild-eyed, his mouth open in a silent scream.