The Poyson Garden (28 page)

The smell hit her first, stronger than the usual in the woman's other chambers of horror, but she did not hesitate to close the door behind her. Tonight they must capture--mayhap execute --Desma Ormonde. What putrid hatreds and foul vengeance had driven her was not important now, only stopping her.

"Aragh," she whispered at the stench of the garlands. She saw a veil tossed on a tabletop and a sampler with a circlet of some sort of leaves stretched over an embroidery hoop. She ignored all that, even the coffer in the corner--the one, no doubt, that held rotting mushrooms and fungus, mayhap even the St. Anthony's fire rye smut. She went straight to the bed, praying that under it she would find the long, narrow box

she'd seen there in Desma's room at

Hever. She had wanted to peer into the box even then. Although she had heard something in it clink together, it could be where she kept privy messages, mayhap royal ones.

Holding her nose and breathing through her mouth, in the dim light she lifted the counterpane high from the floor. Boldly, she thrust her hand under the bed, groping for the leather box.

She touched an arm--a stiff human one. And snatched her hand back out.

She sat, kneeling, bent over with her hands pressed to her mouth, certain she would be sick. She had been wrong. Meg was here, dead. Her sleeve was damp. With blood? Or had Desma broken with her practice of poisons to drown her?

It was all her fault. Her fault for trying to stop this poison plot, for using the girl like a sacrificial lamb. But the body beneath this bed-- was that arm too thick, the corpse itself too long to be Meg?

She blinked back tears. She only wanted to flee, but she had to know. She reached in again, then decided she must have a light.

She fumbled with a flint box she found on the table before the window overlooking the lake. Hurry. Hurry. Dusk and mist were swirling outside as if to trap them here all night. The flint struck; she lit the fat tallow candle, then carried it back across the room to the bed.

"If it's you, I'm so sorry, my Meg," she whispered, kneeling as if in prayer for the dead. "So sorry ..."

She bent to look under. "Oh, thank God. But who are you?"

Elizabeth emerged from the depths of hell, shrouded in a sheet, waving her arms and weaving across the rush-strewn floor. Playing a lad who was playing a ghost here in the heart of the enemy's castle, her voice quavered, but that was just as well. At least her memorized words kept her from shouting at the audience that they were all foul traitors and harbored and served murderers.

"I bring a curse to all," she half-whispered, then moaned. "I curse all who would harm our God-given Queen Mary and those of the true and holy church." She could have vomited at those words; her stomach had gone sour anyway.

She banged her shin into the long bench as she climbed on it, for she could barely see through the eyeholes. She adjusted the sheet as she stood rocking and shaking during the supposedly frightened Wat's speech. Now she could scan the entire torchlit audience as she had not been able to from behind the arras before she made her entry.

The likes of stable hands, scullery maids, and laborers stood along the back wall of the great hall, with its long single table on the slightly raised dais still uncleared from the evening meal. The players had been given supper, but Elizabeth had told them to dump it down the public jakes chute, however sure she was their ruse was working.

The house servants with more status sat cheek-by-jowl on long benches, behind the three men they had come to call the Irish guards. That rabble bore watching. They spoke little English to each other, and what there was of it was rank and heavily accented. They had been loud and rude at first--like the groundlings in London, Wat had said importantly--but they had quieted a bit now, either nodding off or else intrigued by ghosts and blood curses.

But they had seen no one who could be Desma Ormonde. No one veiled at all, except Elizabeth and the two lads in their ghostly attire.

Suddenly, as she made her exit by slithering to the floor to return to the bowels of hell, then bending down to hurry out the door, an errant thought pierced her. She realized how Desma must view the world from behind her veil. The woman must feel separate and secret. And very alone. Her poxed face was like a second mask of the woman she had once been. Mayhap all that had made Desma believe she could judge and poison others and hide from what was true and just.

"Are you demented?" Elizabeth muttered to herself. "No softness or sympathy here."

In the corridor they were using for a tiring-room, she whipped off her sheet and threw it on the pile of costumes. From here on out there would be just two ghosts--the lads--while Ned, Wat, and Randall kept the crowd enthralled. Soon Jenks and Ned could slip out to join her, and they would continue to search for Meg, this time in the upstairs rooms of the Gloriette and in the Maiden's Tower.

She went out to the kitchen to wait for her men to join her. Standing in the door someone had left

ajar, she looked out toward the now bare gardens and the grassy bailey. Darkness had obliterated dusk's mere shadows, and a thick fog from the lake hovered like a blanket. But for the strutting peacock, this had earlier looked like a benign, deserted village green to her, sheep, cow, and all. That was probably deceptive, just as everything here was--including herself.

And then she heard a woman's sobs, muted on the breeze.

Her stomach cartwheeled. Meg?

Staying close to the wall, she sidled toward the sound, the sort of crying and gasping where one could barely get a breath. Emerging from the gray mist, beyond a clump of frost-blasted hollyhocks, a square stone well appeared. Could Desma have put Meg down the well and she was gasping for air? No, the sobbing came from behind it. Her heart thudding, Elizabeth leaned forward, peered around, and shuffled closer.

Chapter The Nineteenth

Even this close to the weeping woman, in the dark and fog Elizabeth could not tell if it was Meg. She was seated, slumped with her back against the rough stones of the well, her head in her hands.

But no, she was heavier than Meg. Something told her to tiptoe away, yet why should Ned do all the questioning here? Surely, this was not a trap. She knew she'd have to try to sound like the lad she looked.

"'Scuse me, girl. Need some help?"

The wench looked up through splayed fingers as Elizabeth squatted down, her back against the well. She could see her round face was smooth and slick with tears. The girl shook her head wildly.

"Only if you got the stomach--I don't-- to make me take this stuff--to end it all," she said, between gasps and sobs.

The hair on Elizabeth's neck prickled. The girl had gestured to a small pile of mushroom caps at her feet. Could it be another of Desma's herb girls?

"What's happened, then? Can't be anything so

bad."

"I'd do it flat--if it warn't for--the babe," she said, wiping her face with her apron. Her voice sounded as if she spoke from inside a barrel.

"You're a new mother and don't want to leave behind--"

She shook her head again. "Gonna be. 'Cause of that cur, Colum McKitrick."

An Irish name, mayhap one of the guards watching the play. "And now that you're with child, he wants no part of you?" Elizabeth prompted. She felt sorry for the poor girl, as stupid as she must be to have trusted a man outside of wedlock --or in. But she either had to get information fast about the veiled woman or get back to wait for Ned and Jenks.

"Kind of," the girl choked out. "It's her, my mistress. He always wanted her, and--he left me and went to her room--and she kept him. And she said he wants no part of me no more, and I'm too scairt of her to cross her."

"Your mistress ... the veiled lady? She kept him in her room?"

The girl nodded, then frowned, finally surveying Elizabeth suspiciously from head to toe. "You one o' the lads with the players?"

"Oh, aye, and we wanted to invite the fine lady we heard lived here, 'cause our play is set in Ireland, but we couldn't find her. You know where she is?"

She shrugged. "Somewheres on the grounds. Best keep clear. I am 'cause she got other things to do, and now Colum's one of them." She began to wail again, choking on her words. "He left here --without me, she said--left to wait--for her."

Elizabeth's hopes crashed as she watched the wench pull her apron over her head and sob. She knew she could make her an ally, tell her that Colum was still in Desma's chambers, dead. But the obtuse girl must not be privy to her mistress's doings, including where she was holding Meg. Besides, it would mean more hysteria for the girl and time lost for Elizabeth. She had to get back to the kitchen.

As Elizabeth stood, she deliberately ground the poison mushroom caps into the grass with her boot toe. Then, recalling the dead rabbits, she tried to shove the remnants against the well, where even sheep could not eat them. She

crept away, but stopped in her tracks when she heard a voice. She would swear it was her own, drifting through the fog as if from the sky.

"'So blood, treason it is, treason to touch the next queen of England!"

"Meg," Elizabeth whispered. "Meg as me."

She tore back to the kitchen. No Jenks, no Ned. Was she early or late? She raced into the hall, scrabbling in a pile of props for a stage sword, though she had her dagger drawn. Peeking past the arras, she saw that Wat and Rand held sway on stage, with the two lads as ghosts, but no Ned and Jenks. She had misjudged the timing and they came out, saw she was gone, and went looking for her. But where? Or had they heard Meg's ringing tones and had gone to trace her too?

Just before she let the arras close, she noted that two of the Irish guards were gone from their bench. She had to warn her men about that, too, but get to Meg first.

She dashed out and across the green toward where she had heard Meg's voice. It must have come from the Maiden's Tower, one of the upper stories. Those guards or Desma had Meg in the tower and thought she was Elizabeth, and Meg, God bless her, was brazening it out.

She smelled the manure pile again before the tall, solid tower loomed from the night and fog. Yes, lighted top windows, four floors up. She bumped into a clump of sheep, which shifted easily out of her way, and then came face to face with the pallid peacock.

Elizabeth slid to a stop, staring at it, waiting for its warning screech. Its tail still folded, it merely pecked at grain on the ground and walked disdainfully away.

A good sign, she told herself. And thank God she looked like a mere lad. If someone stopped her she could say she heard a woman's cries, seized a stage sword, and went to help. She had no real notion of what she would do to rescue Meg, but she had surprise on her side.

As she stepped inside the open doorway, she saw that the single large chamber on the first floor was indeed a makeshift stable and barn. A single hanging lantern illumined the scene. The cow had wandered in to munch hay from a wooden manger.

Piled hemp bags of grain cluttered one corner--some yellow kernels had fallen from one. Next to the single staircase going up, a wood-slatted bin looked to be full of threshed grain, too, but these were dark, pointed kernels. Rye!

She shuddered. The bin was narrow but seemed to extend clear up to the second floor. Taking the lantern, keeping clear of the dribbles of grain that had fallen through the slats, Elizabeth edged up the steps.

"'So blood, you think my people won't trace me and punish you?" Meg's voice rang out, strangely echoing both from the windows and down the stairwell. "Even if I'm dead?"

Elizabeth froze as she heard a low laugh --Desma's. She spoke, but her voice was lower pitched and didn't carry, just as at Hever. She gripped her sword hilt and dagger handle so hard--she held the lantern in the same hand as the dagger--that her fingers cramped and she had to flex them. She forced herself upward again.

The second floor appeared to be divided into two chambers with windows, no doubt from which her parents had once surveyed the pretty scene. She went on, foot above foot, keeping her back to the wall, which at the third floor changed from wainscoted wood to raw stone. She tried the four doors exiting the landing lest she needed a hiding place when she and Meg escaped, but they were all locked.

The grain bin continued even up here, built to fit into the side space of the curving stairwell. Recalling her and Ned's entrance to Hever, she considered starting a fire by catching the wood slats with her lantern flame, but that might trap Meg as well as Desma upstairs, and it would bring too many people.

She willed Meg to keep talking, but there was silence above. Her feet felt leaden. She should have taken Cecil's warnings to heart. She should not risk herself, her future, like this, but Desma had to be stopped before there was no future. Surely Ned and Jenks must look here for her soon, unless those Irish guards had followed them out into the kitchen and the grounds.

Come on, my Meg, she sent her command silently upward, keep talking. In this situation, I would keep talking.

"'So blood," Meg cried from above, as if in

answer to her wish, "I have informed both my Lord Cecil and my cousin Lord Carey who you are and that you reside at Leeds, Desma Ormonde, so you will not carry this off!"

"Do you think I care if I am caught after I'm finished with you here? Final judgment day for the Boleyns, that's all that matters now, that and Queen Mary ridding herself of her heir so that she can name another before she dies--a Catholic kin, even Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, would do--that's all that matters."

Elizabeth was so intent on Desma's words and outraged at their import that at first the thud of feet on the stairs below did not register. But someone--at least two heavy-footed men--were coming up fast. Surely Jenks and Ned would not make all that noise, unless they, too, had heard Meg's voice and panicked.