The Queene's Cure (39 page)

“Dr. Caius tells me you have a daughter, one sadly poxed,” she said. She sounded like a stutterer. Her teeth were chattering though she was sweating worse than with fever.

“How'd he dig that up? Pascal says he's not in on none a this,” he muttered, tossing the knife—it looked like the one she'd borrowed from Jenks—from hand to hand. Now she had nothing pointed on her person but a mermaid pin.

“Where is your and Meg's child?” Elizabeth pursued. Even if he told her, she had no hope she'd live to tell Meg.

“Seein' you won't tell,” Ben said with a snicker, “I'll let you in on it, Majesty. Fostered out with a fam'ly on Hampstead Heath who have a farm. Just couldn't bear to look at her.”

Elizabeth thought of her own reaction to poxed people before, but no more. If she could only live, she vowed the ill and the maimed would be dear to her.

“But Meg, I mean Sarah, surely did not agree to give up the girl,” Elizabeth prompted him to go on.

“Fought me about it, but I had the little wench sent away when she was out deliv'ing herbs once. 'Bout went crazy, 'n ran off, thinking she'd find her. Didn't see her for a coupla years then, and wouldn't you know, the new Queen of England shows up with Sarah in service. I thought I'd be set for life, but you had to toss her out. It's all your fault, see?”

“How long have you worked for the doctors? Was it before or after you claimed you saw someone climbing my garden wall?”

“A short while before, though Clerewell and I made sure Meg thought I was real jealous of him. She was afeared I'd knock his teeth in, 'cause I was knocking her around good when I fancied to.”

Outrage and contempt racked the queen. Ben Wilton was a demon. Now, she thought, as Pascal came back into her cell, she had to try to reason with Satan himself. But words utterly failed her when she saw Pascal was carrying a large, glass-blown jar of writhing leeches.

A
S TIME TICKED ON, CLEREWELL SAT ON A LOW BENCH
outside her makeshift cell, for his job was now to watch her. She could hear and smell that he was drinking, for all the good it would do her if he got drunk.

She tried to keep her mind on anything else but the
numerous leeches applied in the pattern of the pox to her temples, throat, and limbs. The vile knaves had lifted her skirts nearly to her hips and ripped her sleeves off to apply them, so she felt half-naked under Clerewell's increasingly drunken inspection. Each time he'd come in to take her neck pulse, she saw Peter Pascal's timepiece dangling from Clerewell's belt.

“Did he give you that fancy timepiece before or after the two of you killed the old wig-maker?” she asked.

“Actually, oh queen of royal blood,” he said with a snicker, pulling off one fat leech, “I first filched it from him right under his nose at the college. I figured since I'd helped him by sneaking down an alley and planting that effigy in your coach, he owed me a little something extra,” he went on with a loud hiccough. “But when I told him I'd get the leeched girl's body into your fountain, he had to give it back a second time after I lost it—the timepiece, that is.”

“Lost it after you killed the old woman for Pascal.”

“She didn't feel a thing,” he insisted, putting a new leech in place where he'd pulled the other off. “She didn't even see it coming, though her poor lass did. Just like you—leeched into oblivion, then stripped to take a swim in your fountain.”

Elizabeth gritted her teeth and tried to free her arms from the straps as Clerewell dared to slide a hand up her left leg, ruffling her petticoats even higher. “I could put
some of these leeches a special place on a special virgin,” he muttered.

“Stand back!” Pascal ordered, coming into Elizabeth's cell. “I was appalled to hear you had stripped that dead girl naked, Clerewell! Sir Thomas More was a religious man, and I'll tolerate no debauchery in this.”

At that, the queen had to fight hysteria, desperate to turn her head away, to scream and laugh and cry. But with the strap across her forehead she could look only straight up, not over at Nick anymore nor at her Gil so close. It was just as well, she tried to console herself. If she could turn her head, she would see the leeches as well as feel them. And then, before she died, she might go as insane as her captors. Already she felt weak, so weak.

“Gil,” she whispered when both men went out, and she finally heard Clerewell snoring close by, “I don't know if you can hear me, and I can't see your signals—or make them myself.”

“P—p—,” she heard him say. Her entire body tensed even more. It was the first vocalization she'd ever heard from Gil other than screams one time years ago. She waited for Clerewell to wake, to react. Had that been Gil? If so, maybe he was trying to spit in contempt at Clerewell.

“P—p—pin.”

“What?” she barely mouthed, trying to turn her head, her eyes, but she still could not see him. “Gil, if that's you, don't let Ben Wilton see you,” she whispered.

“P-pin. Fish,” he hissed over and over.

Gil was talking. He saw her pin dear Mary had given her, the mermaid. He wanted her pin?

Despite the strap across her chest, she tried hard to lift one arm to unpin it. Then she knew why Gil wanted it. He had always used pins to pick locks.

She reached it and fought to undo it. Concentrate. Try. But the safety hook was so difficult in best of times. And she was so damned dizzy, swimming in that fountain, floating faceup …

She gasped as Gil somehow appeared in her line of sight. He was hanging from the top of his tiny cage, though still inside. Her Gil in and out of windows, stealing things, in and out of her life, stealing her heart …

Somehow she had the pin between her finger and thumb, but he could not reach it. Horrified at the sight of her arm laden with leeches, she moved her hand to free the pin and extend it to Gil. He worked his arm through his bars, then through hers. He seized the pin and disappeared from her sight.

A scraping. A creak. She heard Clerewell snort, then move. Across the way she heard Nick start to make a racket, shaking his cage, screaming like a man gone mad. Clerewell lumbered to his feet, staggered against her cage, then evidently made toward Nick to silence him.

Other prisoners began to stir or wake. Gil was in her cage, leaning over her. Had he picked her lock, or did Clerewell leave her door open? The boy yanked at the
strap that held her head down and scratched at her forehead. He loosed her body bindings. The leeches. He was scraping off the leeches.

“Get 'way from her!” Ben Wilton shouted from across the room. “Dr. Pascal!”

Gil helped her sit up in time to see Nick snake an arm from his cage and grab Clerewell as he tried to quiet him.

“R-run. Run!” Gil croaked out as he pulled her off the table.

Dizziness spun her around; her legs buckled. She fell on her knees against the cage door. But on the floor lay the spatula with which Clerewell had spread the emollient on her face. Grabbing it, she scraped away one leech after the other from her arms. Bleeding. She was still bleeding.

Ben came with his cudgel raised, seized Gil by the throat, and slammed him back against the bars of her cell. That jolted her. She must forget all else and save herself and Gil.

Furious, Elizabeth rose to her feet behind Ben. He had a knife raised now, the one he must have taken from her earlier. He was going to stab Gil! She clanged the cell door into the back of Ben's head and saw him crumple.

Gil sucked in rasping breaths and pointed down at Ben. She saw he had fallen on her knife. A chest wound, one that quickly soaked his shirt and sleeve in his own blood.

“Take his club and knock out Clerewell too,” she told
Gil, grabbing the cudgel and thrusting it at the boy. “We've got to get out of here, get help for everyone. Which way out?”

Gil pointed toward the riverside—a door to a room, then evidently remembered he could talk. “K-k-keys— b-b—his b-belt,” he managed, pointing at Ben, then ran to help his stepfather. Elizabeth saw that Nick had managed to pull Clerewell down, choking him so he was nearly sprawled against his low cage. Gil knocked him out cleanly and bent to pick Nick's lock.

Elizabeth took Ben's big single key from the growing puddle of his blood and ran from cage to cage, opening doors, though Gil was just as quick with the pin. A few weak, bewildered victims crawled out; most just stared at her or backed farther in. But as Gil and Nick ran to her, Peter Pascal filled the doorway.

“Stand back,” Elizabeth ordered, advancing on him. “All of us are leaving now.”

“How I prayed you would never sit the throne,” Pascal cried, his eyes glowing in the lantern he held and gestured with. “I even tried to enlist the aid of the Scottish Stewarts, but it seems they have their own plans and just laughed at me.”

She didn't like the way he was gesturing with his lantern. “Move aside, Dr. Pascal,” Elizabeth commanded, though she could barely stand. “You have done more here than sully the name of the good man who was your
mentor. You have played God. Sir Thomas More would not be proud, but shamed unto death—”

“To death. To death!” he shouted to echo her words and heaved his lantern at them.

It shattered and flamed the straw on the floor between them. He threw yet another lantern from the wall and ran out, slamming the door. She heard him shoot a bolt.

Not only straw but rags and layers of bedding caught fire. It licked in one area, then seemed to spew everywhere. The room belched heat and smoke.

“Water?” Elizabeth asked.

“Not in here,” Nick bellowed, then began to hack. “Nothing like that—to put it out.”

“Then we must get to river water. Where is the air source above?” she demanded over the rising cries of their fellow captives.

Gil pointed upward. Black as the night beyond, a hole in the ceiling.

“If we stack some cages,” the queen shouted over the mayhem, “can you climb through it, Gil, maybe unlock that door from the other side?”

With two other victims, they struggled to stack the closest empty cages, three of them. That was enough for Gil to scramble up and out. The smoke was so dense they could hardly breathe. The queen and Nick herded everyone who could walk to the corners of the room by the door and pressed them to the floor where the thick air was slightly clearer. But when Gil did not come back,
Elizabeth, who had scraped off every last leech she could feel, knew she must go up too.

“I cannot let Pascal win,” she told Nick as she gasped for air. “Can you get me up to the top of that first cage? And then you'd best follow me.”

She half climbed and pulled herself up; he boosted her. Exhausted, drained, less agile than Gil, she twice slipped back. She had prayed that the air would be clearer here, but the smoke in the room vented upward toward the hole as if it were a chimney.

Then, above, it was not Gil's face she saw, peering through the smoke, but Ned's. Then Harry's. Hands reached for her and hauled her up.

“The door that way near the river!” she shouted, pointing. “There's a bolted door! And Nick Cotter's right behind me.”

Ned and Harry scrambled down the curved roof to the ground. Shouts. Cries. Then smoke pouring out from the doorway as well as the vent behind them.

“Where's Gil?” she asked Ned.

“Gil broke his leg, Your Grace, and we found him crawling and jabbering. Once we realized you weren't on the river in a boat, we came back—then saw this smoke.”

“Did you see Pascal?” When he shrugged, she shouted, “Find Peter Pascal! Search his house!”

Ned and Harry helped her edge off the humped stone roof and, with two other armed men, ran to obey. Below,
others—even some Chelsea citizens now—carried or dragged the drugged Jenks, Clifford, and Harry's man, as well as the other ill and maimed, from the flaming, smoking boathouse. Anne was bent over Gil, who sprawled on the ground, his leg bent at a bad angle, but his throat working as he cried, “Ma—je—sty! Majesty!”

They all looked in the direction Gil pointed. Not far away, brightness bit into the sable sky. Pascal's house— Sir Thomas More's—flamed like a funeral pyre.

AFTERWORD

This verifies our English proverb, “Far fetched and dear
bought is best for ladies.” Yet it may more be truly said
of fantastical physicians, who when they have found an
approved medicine and perfect remedy near home …
yet not content seek for a new farther off.…

JOHN GERARD
The Herball

A
FORTNIGHT LATER, ONLY A FEW OF THE QUEEN'S
intimates knew the real reason Her Majesty had a sudden urge to visit her father's longderelict hunt lodge on the edge of Hampstead Heath. She felt much stronger now, she told everyone, and needed an outing. She was wearied, she said, of meetings with the London Royal College of Physicians to set new precedents and fill the vacated post Dr. Pascal's accidental death had left.

It was known far and wide that Peter Pascal had
burned to death with his house steward, though the rest of his staff escaped the late-night conflagration, which was evidently sparked by a lantern igniting draperies. Elizabeth saw to it that word did not get out that Pascal's large skeleton was found, with an antique axe nearby, beheaded before the flames devoured the house. Somehow, too, Chelsea gossip said, the flames had leaped to the old boathouse and left only a charred and empty interior.

As for Dr. Caius, Elizabeth had pretended to believe he had been misguided in his zeal to punish Meg and subdue all apothecaries. In truth, she had been so relieved he knew naught of Pascal's demented doings— and she needed a brilliant man in charge of her London College who owed her his very life—that she fined Caius heavily but did not imprison him. Word had flown far and wide that the once stiff-backed Dr. Caius was suddenly working closely with the crown.

But no one except Meg knew that the queen had sent Ned Topside ahead today to find a farm in Hampstead Heath where a six-year-old poxed child resided and then to meet their entourage on the road.

“I'm so scared,” Meg told the queen as they jolted along in the queen's coach. Elizabeth had come the six miles from London on horseback with many of her courtiers, but since it would never do for her herb girl to ride with her, Meg had made the journey in the coach. Besides, the queen had reckoned, it would serve well for a privy reunion hidden from prying eyes. But near
Hampstead Heath, the large retinue had halted at last, and the queen had joined Meg in the coach.

“You must not be afraid,” Elizabeth, fingering the mermaid pin on her bodice, tried to comfort Meg. “I daresay you—we—have both been through worse than a reunion with one's own flesh and blood. Partings are far more terrible.” She thought of Mary Sidney, greatly scarred, but recovered from the pox. Her friend had insisted on leaving court for her family home at Penshurst in Kent.

“But what if my own child hates me, blames me?” Meg cried, sniffling. “And I mean not to rip her from all she's known if they love her there, if they are her parents now.”

“That is true love, my Meg,” the queen told her, staring out the window so the girl would not see her own tears. “To give up that which you desire deeply for the betterment of others who are your charge and care. You know, I'm thinking of sending Gil, when his leg heals, to Italy to study his art. Look, here's Ned. Halt, driver!”

The footman opened the door and put down the steps for Ned. He dismounted and climbed in to sit across from them.

“I've seen the girl and spoken with her and the family,” Ned told them. Meg clasped her hands to her mouth. As ever, Elizabeth had to jolt him from his dramatic pause.

“ 'S blood, say on, man!”

“The parents have tried to explain things to her. She came to them as a small child and knows no other home. They have named her Sarah, but call her Sally.”

“Ah,” the queen said. “And?”

“They beg you, Your Grace—and you, as her natural mother, Meg—not to take their child. The woman never bore a child,” he said, with a nervous, darted glance at the queen, “but they have loved this one as their own. 'Tis a simple farm, a good, wholesome place, Meg, on the very fringe of the heath.”

He leaned across to take the hand she offered him. “So much, all at once, I know,” Ned said, his voice comforting. “To be widowed, to be returned to court—now this.”

“I count it all blessings,” Meg said, dashing tears from her face with her free hand until Ned fished out a handkerchief and handed it to her. “Believe me,” she said, crying even harder, “when I tell you both, this is one of the best days of my life.”

“Tell her all you know of the girl, parents, and their farm, Ned,” the queen commanded. “I shall ride horseback the rest of the way so Meg and the child can have the coach.”

As ever, Robin was waiting outside to help her down, and she let him. The brisk breeze and autumn sun felt fine on her face, for amazingly, her pox marks seemed to
be healing faster than before and she would employ no more veils.

She gasped to see what Ned had not yet said. On a swaybacked horse sat a stout but comely woman with a young girl seated before her—a reddish-haired girl with a poxed face.

The queen strode closer. A few courtiers clustered around, but most of her entourage awaited farther up the road. The mother's eyes grew wide as the queen smiled and nodded up at her. And then to everyone's surprise, the child squirmed from her mother's grasp and tried to slide to the ground.

Elizabeth caught her and held her close. Tears blinded her eyes, for she saw in her soul that long past day at Chelsea she had fled the poxed mother and her children. She hugged the girl tight.

“Are you my other mother come to visit?” the little wench asked.

“No, but I am her—her friend,” the queen said, her voice catching in her throat.

“This doll is Sally, and she looks just like me,” she declared, producing a rag figure with a smooth linen face.

“Then bring Sally, and we shall go to meet your other mother.”

Ignoring Robin and Jenks, who leaped forward to help, the queen carried the girl to the open door of the coach and put her down on the top step. She caught Ned
kissing Meg's hand, but he had the good sense to make a hasty exit out the other side.

The last thing the queen saw as little Sally and Meg shared a trembling embrace was the girl's dropped doll lying faceup on the floor of the coach, like a little effigy.