The Poyson Garden (14 page)

Elizabeth strode out. Long tendrils of red hair sprung loose to whip her face in the wind. She blinked in the bright sun. Whatever were they looking at? Pray God, not a body they had found in the tall, dry meadow grass, which they didn't let the stupid sheep crop lately since it was a rabbit warren of holes to break legs.

Her stomach clenched. Bea had covered her eyes and Pope was pinching his nose as they peered down at something in the blowing grass.

"What's amiss?" Elizabeth's bell-clear voice called out.

At first no one looked at her. The wind shifted, and she caught the stench. She shook off Kat when she tried to pull her back. Elizabeth stepped closer. She had to see what it was--who lay here. ...

She went past the Popes and gasped. Scores of rabbits lay dead or twitching at their feet. And one moaning, bleating sheep on its knees that must have got through the hedgerows somehow. At first her mind could not encompass what she saw. Then Meg spoke close behind her.

"Poisoned--I seen foxes go down like this with hellebore."

"Have you now?" Ned said much too quickly, before Elizabeth lifted her hand to halt more he might say.

"Poisoned?" Sir Thomas bellowed, swinging about to glare at Elizabeth and her little band of people. "What evil intent is this?"

"Look," Meg added, pointing, "pasty balls here and there in the grass they may been licking or eating. Pasty balls someone's been rolling in her--or his--hands."

"And some shiny vile stuff smeared on the low clover leaves the frost hasn't got yet," Kat added and stooped to point at a clump of grass that ants had covered in a writhing, black mass. It reminded Elizabeth of poor Will Benton's wounds. She almost dry-heaved but put her hand over her mouth and quelled the impulse.

When Kat looked as if she meant to examine the stuff closer, Elizabeth shrieked, "Don't touch it!" and yanked her back. "Any of you, don't touch it. Sir Thomas, get someone to dose that sheep with purgative, but bury the dead rabbits."

"I'll give the orders here to keep you safe and sound," Thomas insisted, his voice booming. "Now, you just go on, my lady, get back in the house. I'll order some men to take care of things, ride circuit to question folks. It's a blessing in disguise we'll hie ourselves to Kent tomorrow. But for now, none of you ladies are to leave the house till we are ready to ride. My lady" --he addressed his wife now--"see to it that no one goes out. No one!"

Elizabeth glared daggers at him. He shouted as if they did not stand close enough to see the veins pop out like ropes on his florid neck. Despite his tirade, she dragged her gaze away from the pitiable carnage to scan the meadow and the rim of trees beyond to look for--for whoever had committed this cruel outrage, as if she did not know.

Her pulse pounded in her head. She clenched her fists so hard at her sides her fingernails bit into her palms. She fought to control herself. At this moment she could have thrown things, shoved people--kicked down the bricks of this house. In moments like this she knew she was her father's heir indeed, no matter what some traitors had dared

to accuse at her mother's treason trial.

As she turned her back on the Popes, her dark, narrowed eyes in her white face met Ned's, then Kat's, and finally Meg's. They fell in behind her, striding pell-mell to keep up.

"I'll see her soul in hell," Elizabeth hissed, "if She fathoms I'm the next dumb beast she'll torment and kill."

Chapter The Tenth

Her retinue's jogging, jolting, three-day progress toward Kent was an ordeal she and Jenks, hard riding, could have covered in but one, Elizabeth groused silently. Her flesh crawled as they entered the thick woods of the Weald, for she could not shake the feeling that poison arrows could fly from the trees. Frustration, fear, and fury obsessed her. And a wretched toothache bored into her jaw and patience, though Meg had dosed it twice with periwinkle and rosemary in wine.

All the way she had felt that she was being watched. Not just by the Popes, nor by stolid fellow travelers gaping at a passing party of their betters. She didn't mind the common folk gawking as they picked walnuts or gleaned the last of the rye harvests with huge rakes or pruned the hop vines. She was watched by someone she could not see or identify. Someone who stooped low enough to poison rabbits and dared reach so high as to poison--

"Lady Elizabeth," Bea Pope's voice interrupted her frenzied thoughts. She sidled her horse close to Elizabeth's Griffin to nose out her own husband's, who dropped back for a bit, while the ever watchful Jenks rode on Elizabeth's other side.

"Did you not hear me?" Bea said, twisting in the saddle to peer at her. "I said, we are almost there. No wonder ordinary travelers never stop at Ightham Mote, and Her Majesty gave you permission to visit such a godforsaken part of Kent."

Elizabeth ignored the insult. The fact that the manor was tucked deep in this maze of tunnellike lanes between the two main roads was part of its allure for her right now.

"You know," Bea chattered on, not daring to look

at her now, "I believe I shall soon make a sampler 'broidered with a knot of these dreadful vines that keep snagging my hat." She reached up to rip at one. "My work shall bear the saying Abandon all hope, ye who enter here."

She laughed musically, as if she had made some brilliant jest. "I believe," she went on, when Elizabeth did not deign to reply, "your fool, Ned, said that's from a speech he did in The Tragedy of Aeneas in Torment or some such when he was with The Queen's Country Players. The knave's frightfully clever, you know," she added, gesturing behind them with a flutter of gloved fingers.

"Someone told me so. It's why I took him on, of course." And why, Elizabeth added to herself, I told him to keep a watch on you. With the slightest nod of her head to Jenks, they kicked their mounts to leave Bea riding alone in their wake before she could think to inquire who had recommended Ned.

But Bea, like an apothecary leech, was not to be deterred as she caught up and clung. "And did he tell you why he took the sobriquet Topside?" she asked with a chortle, as if she caught naught of their snub. "Because the groundlings took to heart his braggadocio naval captain of that name, who insists he always be topside when he goes to sea or beds a wench." She dissolved in gales of laughter again.

It was all Elizabeth could do to keep from hanging Bea Pope with the next noose of vine they rode under. Her chatter was the least of it, for as far as Elizabeth was concerned, Bea had been topside in Cecil's warning letter.

'So blood, she wished she could have reread it several more times before they had to set out, but Jenks had been delayed getting from London to Stamford and back. She'd had time to skim the epistle only twice, then burn it, but its message was burned in her brain.

Sui bono, he'd written and underscored, her wily lawyer, for the letter was entirely in Latin. It mattered not: She could have read it in Italian, French, Spanish, or Greek.

Though Kat Ashley had been her first teacher, she had spent years under the tutelage of two brilliant scholars, even during her exile from court. Sui bono was a Latin law phrase

meaning Who will profit--who is to gain? It was the way lawyers delved for motive in a crime. Sui bono--cold and calculating, but clever. The very way she would have to act to save herself so she could get the throne and then bind such men as Cecil and Harry to her as advisers.

Always--semper--Cecil had written and underscored also, look for who will profit monetarily, politically, or even passionately in affairs of the heart--including vengeance.

Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord. Elizabeth recalled the biblical warning, but she had known a hundred believers who had not believed that, including her royal sister.

However, in this instance of the so-called poison plot, Cecil had written, he had concluded that Mary Tudor's consort, King Philip of

Spain, as well as his courtiers, his Catholic church, and his country had the most to gain if Elizabeth died. At least Cecil had not dared treason to include Queen Mary as the puller of strings behind the plot. Yet in the dark of night and those places in her own soul, that was Elizabeth's worst fear--and best guess.

Cecil had listed as possible suspects some Spaniards currently in power who would lose all influence should she ascend the throne, names from the Count de Feria, the Spanish ambassador, to others--names she had not had time to learn by rote.

But he'd written and underscored that since the poison victims included Boleyns of the past as well as the present, they'd best look first to those who could lose much now but were also tied to Catherine of Aragon--a sort of double sui bono. And so that second detailed list was of some members of Queen Catherine's household. Though several of them were dead, they either had offspring or retainers who were fanatically loyal to the Catholic queen, daughter and wife of Spanish royalty:

Miguel De la Sa was C. of A.'s loyal personal physician. The man was with her during her darkest days and was overheard to vow vengeance on Anne Boleyn and her rapacious family--rapacious, a direct quote, not my term, Cecil had carefully added. And, of course, as a physician, De la Sa knew something of lethal herbs. He is dead, but he could have passed on his hatred--and knowledge of the herbs, so I

shall look into that. His heirs have much to lose should you rule.

De la Sa, Elizabeth thought. Yes, she remembered him, another stale old fellow from the past who had not lived long in Mary's reign. Had he not been of such lofty age when Mary took the throne, she would have probably appointed De la Sa as her own royal physician in her mother's honor. But he had often visited and had pronounced Mary's old beekeeper dead on the grass at Whitehall that day Elizabeth was there. Queen Mary had buried one old beekeeper and one physician and replaced them both with younger retainers that first month of her reign.

Secondly, John de Scutea,

Cecil wrote, who lived to a ripe old age in London, passionately dedicated to the Spanish cause and Popish religion, was once Queen Catherine's apothecary, working closer with De la Sa. Dr. Scutea had a daughter named Sarah Scottwood--whether she had wed a Scottwood or taken an Anglicized approximation of her father's name for anonymity, I am not sure. Sarah also knew the herbs, and the queen, and upon the event of her father's death last year, disappeared from London and could not be traced.

Elizabeth had made a mental note to herself to have Cecil pull some strings to find out what this Sarah Scottwood, [email protected] Scutea, looked like. And if any of De la Sa's heirs were women.

He had included other names on the list, but it was his final item that most angered and alarmed her. And you know, do you not, he had written, though I see no herbal connection here, that Maria de Salinas, faithful lady-in-waiting to Queen Catherine to the bitter end, who had publicly claimed that Anne Boleyn's people had slipped poison to her predecessor, was foster mother to Beatrice, Lord Thomas Pope's wife you have ever with you. ...

Not ever with me, Elizabeth fumed, for she finds excuses enough to visit her sister in Kent. But she bears thorough watching, even if she goes off to nearby Maidstone again.

Just as upsetting, Cecil had warned her that both Kentish houses--Hever Castle and Leeds Castle--where she intended to pursue Boleyn

connections were linked to dangerous foreign elements. He would send her word posthaste on these if she did not already know of this herself.

And Harry, in his own hand, had written of his loyalty and devotion to her. She stopped rubbing her sore jaw and let her lips rest in a smile at the memory of her dear cousin. He had explained he was more certain than ever that his would-be assassins had shouted their cursed battle cry with a foreign accent. He and Cecil had discussed it, and it could well have been Spanish with its lilt and Castilian lisp.

"Are you quite well, Lady Elizabeth?" Bea interrupted again. "This journey was all your idea, yet you have looked pained and pale all the way. And your testy temper and refusal to converse civilly tells me it is more than a toothache."

"I am certain," Elizabeth declared, staring straight ahead, "the company in Kent will much improve my disposition. Ah--look there through the trees. How I love these old moated manor houses. They once knew how to keep the enemy out."

Bea only sputtered as Elizabeth spurred Griffin to ride at the very vanguard of the group.

"Now, remember, Jenks, your story is that you are my body servant, and we've been living abroad," Ned said as the two of them rode into the little town of Edenbridge late the next morning. "Since our personae don't know much of what's going on and are heading for London, we need some information about the tenor of the times from the townspeople. And don't stand agape or clap me on the back this time when I assume an educated London accent."

Edenbridge was the only decent-size village near the Princess Elizabeth's ancestral home of Hever Castle and about ten miles from Ightham Mote, where everyone else was settling in and resting today. With its row of crooked, half-timbered shops downstairs and living chambers up, all overhung with drooping thatched roofs, the place looked like a hundred other hamlets Ned had seen on his theatrical tours. A small church with a graveyard at its skirts, a few scattered wattle-and-daub houses, and only one place with pretentions crowded a narrow, rutted lane.

Several people stopped and stared at them but gave no greeting. Though their horses' hooves came not near, a woman yanked two children back into an open door and slammed it. Several people peered from second-story windows until an old woman with a wrinkle-webbed face shut hers with a smack and the others followed suit.

The two men reined in at an ivy-fronted public house probably called the Queen's Head. No words named the place, but a weathered sign of a crowned woman squeaked in the breeze. She had hair so black she must be either Catherine Howard or--in these parts, where it could not be Catherine of Aragon--Anne Boleyn.

Jenks began to look as nervous as Ned felt. Usually rural folk were friendly or at least curious about strangers. Jenks's eyes kept darting about to watch their flanks, but it didn't keep him from continuing their conversation.