The Queene's Cure (38 page)

“Dark as sin,” Jenks whispered, pointing toward the boathouse on the bank of the Thames as dusk bled to darkness. “No one's here, at least now.”

The place was a hulking pile of stones, barely one story high. “I'd say this is a dead end and we should join the others at Pascal's,” she told them. “Yet the fact he's supposedly been rejuvenating the place … That's just not like Pascal, unless there's some driving need or passion. Let's go a bit closer.”

But the four of them froze in their tracks. On the wind came a half moan, half scream.

“Is that what you thought horses sounded like?” the queen asked Jenks.

“I guess so, but this close, it sounds like a human voice,” he whispered. The sound had been so unearthly that Elizabeth began to tremble again. She was not alone, for someone's scabbard rattled.

“We're not going in, but we can try to look in,” Elizabeth said. “If it's something strange, we'll go fetch the others, even the bargemen.”

As they approached, the place seemed darker yet. At least from the land side, they saw no windows, no light outlining doors, just a hump of stones like a headless gi-ant's shoulders. But then another cry, a keening sound.

“Jenks,” she said, almost mouthing her words, “go fetch the others here.”

“Send Clifford, milady. I don't want to leave your side.”

“Go on! You know the layout, and the stables lie between us and the house!”

She actually thought he would argue more, but he
plunged headlong into the night. Keeping close to the line of gnarled tree trunks, Elizabeth, Clifford, and Harry's man edged closer. They could hear the river slapping the bank now. Still in the shadow of the skeletal trees, they inched forward.

Under the tree nearest to the boathouse, a huge, heavy net dropped on them. They stood under its weight a moment, clawing, thrashing until dark forms thudded from the trees and yanked them to the ground. Men around her—more than her own—fighting, struggling, sprawled. A clang of muted metal.

“We owe that tavern tapster for more fresh blood,” someone muttered and laughed.

A voice she knew? Clerewell, the man who had spoken in the Abbey?
You are the angel of us all
, he had said to his queen.

“Stop,” she cried. “I command you to unhand m—”

Pressed to the ground she tried to scream, but someone stuffed veil and net into her mouth with something bitter-tasting. The blackguard held her down while she gagged and swallowed. And then she tasted nothing at all.

E
LIZABETH AWOKE. DIZZINESS ASSAILED HER. NAUSEA
. Aches. Voices. And then one she knew.

“Lady. Lady!”

Whose voice? Not Ned's or Jenks's. Mayhap Nick
Cotter's. But what about her men Jenks went to fetch? Why hadn't Harry come? Harry was her cousin too, the only one who didn't covet her throne—or did he? 'S bones, it hurt to turn her head.

“Lady! Lady Elizabeth!”

Lanterns hung from wall pegs and the ceiling. She tried to move but was strapped, arms and legs, to a narrow, wooden table in a long, low chamber filled with cages.

Ah, she was caged too, like an animal. Katherine Grey's monkey had jumped on her shoulders, but hadn't there been a net in the trees? She fought to focus her thoughts. In trying to set a trap, she had obviously walked into one. These cages, smaller than hers, lower to the ground, held human beings. Poor Meg so long in prison, but worse that her own mother had been trapped in the Tower, waiting to die.

Elizabeth's vision was blurred: things were foggy, though her veil was gone. She must have been drugged, and she struggled to turn her head. Yes, Nick Cotter across the room had been calling her name. But it was the person in the cage next to her that made her gasp.

Gil. Gil on a bed of filthy straw. Gil, keeping close to the floor but signing up at her,
Bad doctors here! Make people sick. Then kill and cut them up!

“Dear God, help us,” she murmured. And turned to look the other way, only to hear her cage door clang and have two gray eyes—one with a drooping lid—stare
close into hers. The half of the face she saw at first was handsome, even striking. The other side was a mass of welts and ridges and pits.

“Since we meet, both scarred at last, I have something to show you, Your Majesty,” the man said in his deep, pleasant voice as if nothing were amiss. She knew instantly who he was. The entire scene in the aisle of the Abbey flashed before her. “You see, we doctors have decreed that everyone here must earn his or her keep.”

He moved a lantern to a hook above her. Brushing her loosed hair from her face, he produced a small alabaster jar of white cream and with a small knife proceeded to smooth it on her skin exactly where she knew her pox marks were.

“Your pits aren't deep or numerous,” he said, his voice soothing, though it and his gaze made her feel sick to her stomach. “I had hoped for more so my Venus Moon Emollient could make me rich and powerful, but too late for that now. My wealth and power will come from my ability not to heal, but to sicken people at my will. You'd be a prime example of that too, but the doctor has other plans for you.”

He was demented. But she must deal with him. Just let him talk, she told herself. Gather strength and sense, find an opening. Calm him. Stall until her people came looking for her. But she had no doubt she would appear to have vanished into thin air. She saw not one window in this place as she glanced around, though she could feel
cool air coming from somewhere, perhaps from the roof. The stench of unwashed, ill bodies was so bad in here, no breath seemed fresh.

“Perhaps,” Clerewell was saying, “we'll have to see if we can infect you with the Queen's Evil and then work on your neck tumors. Now, that would be justice, would it not? Oh, by the way, never mind looking around for help. Your two companions as well as the one you sent to Pascal's are—shall we say—sleeping until we need them. And we're sending word to your bargemen that you saw your missing servants being taken away in a boat and gave chase in another. I suppose they'll jump back on your barge and chase you down the river till dawn, when here you are, all ready and willing to help us in any way.”

He dropped his hand to her slender throat and tightened his grip. Across the room, Nick went wild in his cage until she heard someone stomp over and quiet him, evidently with a cudgel that slammed the metal bars.

She heard Gil rattle his too, felt him rock his cage. For some reason, Clerewell loosed his grip, and she sucked in a breath of air. Ben Wilton suddenly appeared, cudgel in hand, and swung at Gil through his bars. Ben Wilton, another piece in this puzzle. Gil quieted at once, though she hadn't heard him hit and couldn't turn her head far enough to see.

No other protests sounded from the other sick souls she'd seen here, so she assumed they must be drugged or simply beyond help. She forced herself to speak.

“If you had such a marvelous cure, why did you not come to me, petition me, Dr. Clerewell?” It took such an effort to think, to form her words. Her tongue felt swollen, and her throat hurt. She wanted to stay as mute as Gil.

“I had planned that at first,” he said, straightening to survey his handiwork on her, then, without a mirror, to apply the stuff on his own scars. Thank God, it must not be acid or poison then. “But,” he went on, “my plan to use Mistress Wilton to reach you took a turn, when I found one of the doctors of the Royal College was not hostile to my ideas, at least not privily so, if I could assist him.”

“Dr. Caius,” she said. “He came looking for you. He's made some deal with Ben Wilton to torment Sarah Wilton. He's evidently hired her husband as he has you.”

“Caius?” a new voice cried. “I swear if he knew aught of my experiments or intentions he'd cast me out of the royal college and you wouldn't even have to. Caius?” the dreadful, high-pitched voice went on with a hooted laugh. “Then you are a fool, and I never took you for that, though I must say I did take you for the Protestant bitch daughter of the great whore Boleyn and of the Tudor Antichrist who ruined the true church and my mentor's …”

The words rolled on. Pascal. His huge shadow loomed over her before he did. When he elbowed Clerewell aside, she saw Pascal was stirring a bowl of white slop. Porridge? No, plaster!

“I do hope you've kept that effigy Dr. Clerewell and I worked so hard on,” Pascal said, “though I'm now going to do a life mask of you instead of that imitation we had to use. We'll return your body to London in pieces after its dissection and beheading—in memoriam of Sir Thomas More, of course. But I shall donate this new mask for your effigy, as I'm sure the nation will want to hold a fine funeral for you before your Catholic cousin Mary's coronation.”

N
ED TOPSIDE WASN'T SURE WHETHER TO BELIEVE THE
stranger at all. “What do you mean, the veiled lady has left in a boat?” he cried. “What boat?”

“The only one left at the boathouse after some men took off in another one with her servants Nick and Gil. I think those are the names the veiled lady said and gave me a crown for running to you—see?”

In the man's grimy palm lay an identical crown to the ones the queen had been bribing and paying their way with.

“She said tell you,” the man gasped out, “take the barge you came in and come after her downriver. She can't lose sight of her men—man and the lad, I mean. She said I'd have to tell you because she needed the other three men with her so she'd be safe.”

“Yes, all right,” Ned agreed. “Keep this quiet then,” he ordered the man.

“Aye, that I will,” the man said as Ned and Hunsdon's man ran hard for the Chelsea public barge-landing. Thank heavens, Lord and Lady Hunsdon were just arriving.

“Where is she?” Harry demanded as Lady Anne peered anxiously over his shoulder.

“Set off downriver in pursuit of mischief, and we're to follow posthaste,” Ned shouted, out of breath. “Now we can take both barges. Did you find samples of the two doctors' handwriting?”

“After my last visit, Pascal sent word all his papers were to be burned in the back alley,” Lord Hunsdon called to him as both barges cast off and caught the current. “I had a deuce of a time pawing through halfcharred paper. It's Pascal's writing that's spare and taut, not Caius's. The lady won't like she's been wrong in thinking Caius was the mastermind.”

E
LIZABETH LAY TERROR-STRUCK AS THE PLASTER HARDENED
on her face. She felt the stone boathouse roof closing in on her, the cells with bars crushing her down. Two straws were stuck up her nostrils so that she could breathe, but she felt she was suffocating. Breathe slowly, she told herself, carefully.

Though they had strapped her head down now too, and two leather bands restrained her body, that traitor Ben Wilton hovered over her with a knife blade to her
throat so she would lie completely quiet. Pascal was a perfectionist, it seemed, carefully smoothing the plaster over her oiled skin. Nothing, not even the pox, had been worse than this. She felt she was in her coffin already or encased in a huge stone sarcophagus under the age-old weight of Westminster Abbey.

When the plaster on her face had gone stone hard, Pascal himself returned to peel the mask off and walked away with his prize. Though she could not stop shaking, she saw her opportunity to talk to Ben.