The Queene's Cure (6 page)

He hesitated as if he would argue, then evidently saw the foolhardiness of that. He opened his mouth, then shook his head and kept going.

“Jenks,” she said the moment the door closed behind Robin, “go find Ned and Lord Hunsdon and bring them up the back privy stairs. And fetch Gil, too, as I shall want several sketches of this thing. Kat shall relock the door behind you, but we shall hear your knock and let you in.”

As ever, her dear Jenks hastened to obey without question, taking the private back way her father had ordered constructed in almost all of his palaces and lodges. Its entry in her bedroom was hidden by an arras. At the river gate of the palace it was guarded by yeomen, but Jenks could get out and back in.

Returning her gaze to the thing on the table, Elizabeth jolted anew at the sight of it, so cold, lifeless, yet lifelike. It was mostly the skin and hair, she surmised, for they were well done: the complexion seemed to give off a warm glow though it was cold to the touch. Seeing
it laid out like this as if at a state funeral rattled her to the bone, but she refused to let on.

“Now, my question to you, Kat, before you take your afternoon respite, is do you recognize the gown on this creature?”

“Oh, that I do,” Kat replied, fingering the tawny branched brocade overskirt, appliquéd with dainty, daisy blooms of topaz gems and embroidered leaves. “One you haven't worn for months, but the skirts—yes, bodice and both sleeves—the pieces are yours. I must needs consult my records, since I can't recall if this was the assemblage of them the last time you wore it. It must have been nigh on two years ago.”

Women's gowns, both plain and great, were a compilation of separate bodices, skirts, pairs of sleeves, and accessories, so that they could be completely mixed or matched by fastenings of laces, pins, or fancy flapped ties called points. At least, the queen thought, the gown bore none of her precious pins to hold the parts together nor scattered about as she was wont to do.

“I would like you, as Mistress of the Royal Wardrobe,” Elizabeth said, “to do all you can to trace how these garments could have disappeared from under lock and key in a supposedly guarded building.”

“I'd be able to tell you when you wore it last for sure, but my past ailments have fogged me up a bit, you know that, lovey.”

“I do not blame you, Kat, but someone is to blame,
and I mean to find out who and why. Something is afoot here that reeks of insult, injury—”

“Or plot?” a masculine voice inquired. They turned to see at the door to the hall William Cecil, her principal secretary, Master of the Wards, and trusted adviser. He quickly closed behind him the door to the gallery that linked this privy suite of rooms to the more public presence chamber beyond.

“Dudley told me I could come directly in,” Cecil explained, approaching them after a smooth bow, “but I was already on my way when I heard. And this is the amazing replica everyone is buzzing about.…”

“ 'S blood, I knew I'd never keep it quiet!” Elizabeth cried and stamped her foot. “Now it will be noised all over my realm, and every whoreson lickspittle Papist spy will write his royal master in Madrid or Paris—or tell Mary, Queen of Scots, in Edinburgh—that someone in my realm wishes me ill, with pox if not worse, and is mocking—if not threatening—me!”

“Then we must put a better face on it,” Cecil said as he bent over the effigy, “and I mean that not as a pun. We shall have it told that someone, an artisan of some sort, an anonymous sculptor or lovestruck subject, as all your subjects are, Your Grace, made and shyly presented this as a gift to his
serene
royal highness. We shall baldly deny any rumors about the poxed skin as a trick of the light— or say the face and hands were scratched or marred in being carried or placed in the coach.”

“Aha,” the queen said, clasping her hands before her mouth. “What would I ever do without you, my lord?”

Cecil's brown eyes lit at that compliment, and he made another slight bow. The queen and her most loyal man had worked together and struggled with each other through numberless difficult situations. Their bond was closer than ever of late, except when he took the perilous path of suggesting she must make a foreign marriage match, and soon.

William Cecil was a brilliant, if ambitious lawyer who had served her well for years, even when she was in disgrace and lived in terrible times with two other royal lives between her and the throne. Now forty-two years of age, he looked older, with his long, shovel-shaped beard and solemn face, but his eyes could sparkle and his wit was sharp as a sword. Cecil was both a devoted family man and a skilled statesman, just the sort of adviser she could build her kingdom on. She worked him hard but rewarded him well, and he was ever up to any task she set before him.

“I shall hastily convene the Privy Plot Council,” she said, beginning to pace, “whose members I have already summoned, and we shall ferret out what wretch stands behind this. If it is one of our eminent physicians who has dared to try to challenge me, I shall have him dismissed at best and imprisoned at worst,” she went on, gesturing broadly. “If this comes from my political enemies,
especially my cousins, who have defied me already, I shall let them rot in the prisons they already inhabit.”

The queen's gaze met Cecil's over the figure between them, and she stopped walking so fast, her skirts swayed. “I swear this means something dire,” she whispered to him, as a knocking sounded from the next room and Kat went to open the Thames-side privy entrance. “This face, even the hands, are so real…it could almost be embalmed ….” Avoiding the pox marks, she touched the chin of the effigy, marveling again at the suppleness of the skin.

“I'm afraid it must be from someone who knows you well,” he replied, “someone who is aware you dread the pox. Best I don a thick pair of riding gloves for protection and have a look up its skirts, if you'll forgive the impertinence, Your Grace,” Cecil suggested, as Jenks, Ned, and Harry came in, with Kat explaining things to them as fast as she could talk. “Who knows,” he concluded quickly, “what sort of viper or harmful substance could be hidden in its petticoats, up its sleeves, or even in this red-wigged head?”

THE THIRD

M
Y HEAD IS SPINNING WITH ALL WE MUST DO
,” Elizabeth Tudor told her assembled band, with the effigy laid out before them on the table as if in repose or death. “And I'll not sleep until we discover who is behind this. Even if we do suggest to others that someone is trying to compliment and laud their queen, I am
not
flattered!”

Silence reigned as they gazed at the effigy. Of course, Jenks had seen the thing before, and her cousin Baron Hunsdon was a man of few words. But her chief fool and principal player of scenes—and one of her best sets of
eyes and ears about the court—the curly-haired, greeneyed Ned Topside was seldom silent.

And yet, Elizabeth noted, something was slightly askew about it, some facial details not quite hers. If it had been stripped of the hair, cheap attempt at a crown, and the ornate garments, would it look like her at all? Nonsense, she chided herself. Any lackbrain could tell it was a good enough likeness, and the royal trappings showed it was intended to be her.

“Pray tell us what you would have us do,” her cousin Harry Carey declared, perching his hand on his sword hilt in a swaggering stance as if ready to do battle for her.

Harry was the queen's first cousin through their mothers, who had been sisters. Now thirty-six, he looked as much Tudor as Elizabeth with his chestnut-hued hair, though his once-fair, freckled complexion was burnished by the sun and ruddied by manly, out-of-doors pursuits. Sporting a close-cropped beard, he was of middling height; the two of them saw eye to eye in more ways than one.

Harry, who had gone into exile on the continent during her Catholic sister's reign, had been ever loyal to her, and she had created him Baron Hunsdon and Master of the Hawks at the time of her accession. Lately, she had given him and his wife, her lady-in-waiting Anne Carey, fine lodgings in Blackfriars so they would be near their children even when serving at court. Like Robin, Harry
was a man of action who chafed under a sedentary life, and she could see him champing at the bit even now.

“I would ask certain favors of each of you,” Elizabeth began.

“At least we don't have a murder on our hands this time,” Kat said. “But will this secret assembly function as we did the other three times you had need of covert actions, Your Grace?”

“Indeed, we must,” Elizabeth admitted as she turned from one intense countenance to the other. Cecil looked as grim as she felt. At least Kat seemed animated for the first time in days. Jenks, like Harry, looked ready to take on the world with fists or swords. And Ned Topside, above all the others, seemed utterly fascinated by the replica.

“My favorite player of parts and staged counterfeiting,” she addressed the handsome man grandiosely, for Ned loved fine speeches, “what think you of this playacting likeness of your queen? You have been oft skilled with wigs, costumes, and false faces.”

“Yes, Your Grace, but only to amuse and please—and you are neither now,” he murmured, still studying her second self on the table. Since too many men had let her down, Elizabeth tried to read his expression. Was it dismay that she implied he had the skills to produce this effigy? Shock at seeing what a fine job it was? Wanting to leave nothing to chance, she studied Ned the more as he finally cocked both brows and looked up.

“I think, for a molded mask, someone's done a fine job of it, Your Grace, though never,” he hastened to add, “could a work of art capture the rare essence of your beauty. Yet this portraiture would make an audience suspend disbelief whether they sat in the great hall at court or in the gallery, cockpit, or—”

“But it was not meant to fool anyone, my favorite fool,” she countered, feeling relieved he was back to his bombastic self again. “It was meant, I believe, to intimidate and threaten, to warn, and even to harm me through unease or fear of the deadly pox or death itself.”

“Then,” Ned declared, “the maker of it doesn't know you at all, for you will not take this lying down—I mean—”

The queen cut him off with a slash of her hand. The truth was she felt deeply, repeatedly shaken by it. Not only that someone had laid this thing out as if dead in her own coach, but that it had appeared as magically as if it had materialized from empty air, with a council table full of brilliant physicians, her own retinue, and the street full of people close by. Still, it was that ravaged face and hands, that hellish pox that made her go cold in the pit of her stomach.

“And where would you have us look for the villain or villains, Your Majesty?” Ned asked with a sweeping gesture that seemed to encompass the entire city.

“Here's my plan,” she said, “though of course, as always, when we meet in a Privy Plot Council, you may
speak your minds.” But immediately, giving no one else space or leave to speak, she began to assign each a task to be done on the morrow.