The Poyson Garden (13 page)

"I left my curse writ clear in your meadow!" she screamed like a banshee. "Come looking in Kent for me, Boleyn bitch!"

"Not that way, girl. How oft must I tell you?"

Ned Topside bounced back off the bench under the window in the princess's old schoolroom and rounded on Meg again. Hellfire and brimstone, but this girl was a slow study--or tongue-tied around him. At least this time he was the one giving directions instead of being chided and chastised by Uncle Wat and that damned Grand Rand. Ned knew he was about to throw a fit of choler, but, hating that in others, he reined in his voice.

"Now, heed my words, Meg. Her Grace

takes more measured strides, with her head up and shoulders back, in this fashion."

He imitated Elizabeth's walk again along the sun-struck oaken floor, past the large window where he pivoted and strode back toward the flustered, frowning girl. He hadn't, he thought, played female parts in the beginning for nothing.

"And her elegant hands," he added, "are either clasped or carried gracefully--like this. You can tell she's proud of them. If our motley band ever goes to court hanging on her royal petticoats, you'll have to wear gloves when you're digging about in the soil with those hands. Just look at them now."

He seized her wrists and turned her palms up, running the pads of his thumbs over her skin. She gasped throatily as if he'd done something entirely more intimate.

"Calluses no lady would ever have," he plunged on, ignoring her reaction, "and broken nails moated by dirt, though at least your fingers are almost as long as Her Grace's."

Blushing, she snatched her hands back, thrusting them behind her. She backed away several steps, almost coyly. "Can't you find a thing to say I done right this past hour?" she asked, in a voice hurt, not harsh as he'd expected. "Did no one ever tell you honey catches more than vinegar? You think I fancy your making me mimic a fine woman like her, the finest in the land, when I-- I--"

He watched her hug herself and spin away so hard her meager skirts belled out. "I meant to say," she went on, lifting her head and straightening her back, "when I know where I come from--"

"Came from," he corrected.

"Came from. Only I don't really have a notion about that. 'Cept--ex-cept at Wivenhoe, how kindly the princess's aunt dealt with me, and her once a great lady." Slowly, as she spoke, she turned toward him. "All I know is, I'm not made to put on airs, but I'm not made to be browbeat neither." Her voice clipped along faster and she became more animated. "I'd rather be back out in the rabbit meadow gathering dried flowers for winter wreaths and strewing herbs. I found a whole spot of lady's-mantle already dried right where they grew, just waiting for me this morning.

"Another sign of fair fortune's star, under which you must have been born, Meg Milligrew," he said with a sweeping mock bow. He almost regretted his subtly sarcastic tone, but she usually didn't catch on to it.

"Meaning what?" she asked warily, drawing herself up even taller. He certainly didn't say so, but looking at her recovery from the verbal drubbing he'd just given her, he almost dared to hope this girl might find the backbone and pride to carry off looking like Elizabeth of England--if the room were dim or from a distance, of course.

"I mean," he said, one hand on his hip, one gesturing as if he were center stage, "how you so auspiciously stumbled into Lady Mary Boleyn's house and reminded her of her own daughter living in exile or of the princess, so much that she readily favored you. And after someone poisoned her 'twas just happenstance you found all about the poisoner Nettie, which led us to that poison pit of Bushey Cot--which you, Kat says, were the one to locate during the fair in Bushey."

"I heard some folks speaking of her--the old hag witch who lived at Bushey Cot," she protested, her voice rising.

"As the princess keeps her tones well-modulated, why don't you practice the same?" he interjected, narrowing his eyes at her. "After all, Her Grace was born under fortune's star too, so there is something else you hold in common besides the face and form the world sees.

"Now, Mistress Meg," he went on, "as

I was telling you afore we began, to imitate someone truly you must study them privily, listening to every word that falls from their lips. You do that with the princess, don't you?" he added, trying not to sound as suspicious as he felt about the girl.

"She's good to me, and her lady aunt told me to come to her--a-course I do."

"Of course," he corrected.

"Of course," she mimicked perfectly.

He nodded again, glad she had gone wide of the mark of what he'd implied but dared not accuse her of--yet. As he had told the princess yesterday, his inquiries at Bushey had revealed that the old hag of Bushey Cot was not necessarily old at all but walked upright and quickly. And she was not of a certain ugly, despite her loose-draped garments and some sort of lawn veil draped from her hat over her face. No

one had so much as seen her countenance, so she could have features fine and fair to launch a vast array of ships--a line from one of his favorite roles in The Tragedy of Queen Helen, in which he'd taken to inserting comments subtly critical of Queen Mary these last years.

And, playing the part in Bushey of a London-born merchant looking for his lost herbalist aunt, he'd discovered that the lady of the white peacock, as he'd dubbed her, had been visited by two rural maids a hunter had spotted more than once. One of the wenches sounded as if she could have been the poisoner Nettie, as Elizabeth and Jenks had described her. The other was taller and paler, but walked with a bit of a shuffling slump.

"Now," Ned said, clapping his hands so sharply that Meg jumped, "let's walk together again, just as Her Grace would if she were here. So this time do not shuffle or slump."

Harry Carey watched William Cecil cast his favorite gyrfalcon, Nonesuch, to the winds from the leather gauntlet. The brown-and-white bird flapped aloft into the scudding winds, soared, then swooped, the tiny foot bells on its jesses jingling. They heard it hit the slower game bird with a thud and a scream as it bore it to earth. One of Cecil's falconers ran to recover the prey before the hawk could rip it to pieces.

"Raw weather for October," Harry said, hunching his shoulders into his fur-lined cloak and stamping his booted feet.

"A wretched year--ungodly weather on top of this royal mess," Cecil muttered, scanning the sky.

In nearly a fortnight as a guest at Burghley House in Stamford on the edge of the wool-rich midlands, Harry had learned his host was a man of few but well-considered words. The thirty-eight-year-old Cecil had not been high born, but his fine schooling at St. John's Cambridge and his study of law at Gray's Inn in London had prepared him well. He had served the late Lord Protector Edward Seymour and as a secretary in young King Edward's government, until Mary Tudor came to the throne and dismissed Cecil for his

Protestant, humanist leanings.

Cecil had been wily enough to take the Catholic oath and keep his conscience to himself, waiting for the wind to shift. Now, as a family man--which made Harry miss his own wife and children even more--and as a sheep farmer in the countryside, Cecil bided his time awaiting Elizabeth's ascendancy.

But the wily lawyer had already made himself of great service to Her Grace, not only publicly as the surveyor of the meager lands her father had left her, but privily as her adviser. Just last night Cecil and Harry had discussed a missive Cecil would send her with information she had requested--and with additional advice she had not.

Now, with a sideways glance, Harry saw that Cecil was not watching for the return flight of his hawk but more likely for him to say something more. Cecil's long face looked solemn, older than his years, even more so with his shovel-shape beard. Harry had noted that his mouth barely moved, hardly bounced his beard when he talked. His eyes were a piercing brown, quick as a falcon's swoop of wing.

"I know the times here have been terrible," Harry said, propping one boot on a rock fallen from a stone fence. "I hope you do not think I acted in a cowardly fashion to flee while others stayed. I try to keep up with events here while we all wait for the tide to turn in the princess's favor."

"About the weather you mentioned," Cecil countered, as if a host of royal spies hovered nearby. "In July a windstorm in Nottingham knocked down houses, and the River Trent flooded to wipe out two small towns. Quartan fever raged like the very plague during the dog days, hailstones fell, and the wind--marry, it stunk from London to the shires with the charred flesh of the queen burning men and women she insists are heretics."

"But in God's truth are really martyrs," Harry added grimly, shaking his head. "The poor people. I heard inflation is the highest ever recorded in the kingdom," he added, hoping to show Cecil he'd tried to keep abreast of English affairs. "And that some unemployed laborers are grinding acorns to make their bread."

"Aye, that too," Cecil said with a sniff. Suddenly, he lifted his arm and Nonesuch came swooping back, fanning his great wings for balance before folding them tightly to his sleek

body. His talons gripped the leather glove, and Cecil skillfully turned to keep the bird's beak pointed into the stiff wind. If it got its feathers ruffled, its powerful wings could beat Cecil black and blue. The falcon's eyes looked keen but expressionless, rather like its master's.

When Cecil had its leather hood back on, Harry said, "I've been on edge in Europe too. Mayhap distance makes waiting even worse." Cecil nodded, and Harry followed his lead back toward the copse where they'd tied their horses.

"You know," Harry added, his voice rising on the breeze, "I've been wishing like hell I had some great gauntlet to throw down in their smug Catholic faces to champion the princess at all costs."

"We all have hoods over us, just waiting to fly --to attack if need be, eh, my lord?"

"Exactly."

"But, marry, even this bird knows to sit patiently till he is cast, till the prey is ripe, and the time has come."

"Aye, but I keep hearing that cry of those assassins who would have killed me in the woods." He glanced about nervously, though only two of Cecil's men waited at a distance. "I heard them talking while they stalked me, but I was so shocked by being attacked and thrown that their words did not stick. But that curse on the Boleyns one man cried--I have been trying to place the regional origin of the assassin. If the princess is so sure that girl Nettie, my mother's poisoner, had ties to Kent, I ask myself, could it have been a Kentish brogue? But the wretch's voice was rather lilting, singsong in a way I cannot place."

"You've heard King Philip's people at court, have you not?" Cecil asked. "You know," he prompted, "the way their Spanish tongues dance and lisp over their words?"

Harry halted dead in his tracks, so Cecil stopped too. "Heard it but only briefly before I left the court. It could be--not just some rural English speech, but foreign. And who hates our Elizabeth and ever the Boleyns more than the Spanish?"

"You may write an addendum to my letter in your own hand when we send her man back to Hatfield

on the morrow," Cecil said. "Who more than the Spanish indeed, though that can hardly be news to Her Grace. But that is much of what I mean to write to her--and to remind her that the two places she intends to seek this master poisoner in Kent have ties not only to the Boleyns but to dangerous and hostile foreign elements."

As he mounted, despite hearing of new dangers to his royal cousin, Harry felt better than he had in days. They would send a key clue and warnings to Her Grace. And, finally, clever Cecil had trusted him enough to speak of something else besides the weather and sheep, farming and falcons, though every time he did there lurked second meanings there. He spurred his horse harder to keep up with the older man.

"No, I cannot take you to Kent with me tomorrow," Elizabeth told plump, flat-faced Cora Crenshaw, one of the Hatfield cooks, in the corridor outside her chamber door. Kat and Blanche had gone down to air sheets and bolsters on the bushes.

"I tell you, cook," Elizabeth went on, "I shall regret it, too, for I shall miss your fine pigeon pies and that carp in orange sauce. But I cannot offend Lady Cornish by bringing my own kitchen staff to that small country house."

The woman bowed her covered head, and Elizabeth thought that would be the end of it, but she had not spoken to her recently and had forgotten her stiff backbone. Clasping her flour-dusted hands, Cora spoke the next words to their feet, but her voice was still strong.

"But e'er sin' I come to you, my Lady Elizabeth, you had nary a stomach complaint nor fear of tainted food, not from my hand. And in these times--"

"In these times, aye, but my answer is no. You must not gainsay me more. But should I ever be called back to court--my sister's court, I mean," she amended hastily, "you have my word I shall take you with me there so that--"

A woman's shriek shredded the air. Elizabeth pressed her back against the wall and glanced both ways in the corridor. Had that been Bea? Blanche, Kat, or even Meg? From the courtyard or outside?

When no one came running for her, she gestured

for Cora to follow and ventured down the hall toward the grand staircase, glancing into every room that had an open door. Strange, but the memory that bombarded her was that one time she had heard the midnight scream of her cousin Catherine Howard's ghost at Hampton Court years after her beheading. She was begging for her husband king to listen to her pleas, not send her to the Tower, though she had been unfaithful. She was shrieking for the Great Henry to show her one shred of mercy. ...

Goosebumps shivered Elizabeth's flesh. She hurried down the stairs to find the front door wide open but empty.

Cora close behind her, she stepped to the side and peered out. Bea was dragging Sir Thomas by his wrist across the drive toward the meadow, pointing, shouting, as demented as a bedlamite. Several grooms and sta2oys came running, their feet spitting gravel. She wished Jenks were back from taking her letter to court and a quick dart up to Stamford to Cecil and her cousin Harry, but she'd have to face this without her favorite man. At least, ever curious, Ned appeared with Meg from another secret schoolroom lesson, even as Kat and Blanche dashed out from the side of the house.