The Poyson Garden (30 page)

Her hands still snagged behind her back, she hit Desma hard and took her down with her. Elizabeth rolled away, tugging at her bonds. The vial broke on the floor, and Desma slipped in the stuff, trying to scramble up. Elizabeth yanked her hands apart, numb, but--

Desma made it to the door, fumbled with the latch, got it open. She tried to flee, screaming, "Brian McKitrick! To me!"

Elizabeth pulled her by her skirts, seized her shoulders, and threw her back into the room. Desma's hips hit Meg, who was still tied, and she rolled to the floor again, her hands in the spilled poison. Elizabeth bent to retrieve her dagger, which Desma had dropped.

"Oh, no. Oh, no, it eats through skin!" Desma shouted, then made it to her feet and charged Elizabeth with both sticky hands raised. Elizabeth swung the dagger at her in an arc, managing to dance out of her way. Some advantages to being dressed as a lad, she thought erratically. For a moment they played a mad game of fox and geese, with Desma trying to smear the stuff on her. Elizabeth kicked her away and managed to make a quick slice through Meg's bonds.

And then they heard men's voices--in Gaelic--as at least three of them thundered up the stairs. Desma made another dash for the door, and Elizabeth let her go so she could free Meg.

"Mistress Desma," a voice shouted in heavily accented English, "we got all the players locked up in the castle's wine cellar."

"Up here! I've got two traitors to our cause we must rid ourselves of. Help me!"

On her knees, Elizabeth sawed hard at Meg's leg ties while Meg managed to free

her wrists. "They'll be coming up,"

Meg said, "too many of them. If they got our men, it's just us. What can we do?"

"God knows," Elizabeth muttered. "And if He wants me to rule this kingdom as His realm, it is He who must help us now."

She dragged Meg out of the chair, though she staggered from being tied too long. Desma had run down to meet her men. They stood, swaying against each other at the top of the stairs.

Elizabeth's mind raced. She could shout to Brian--who evidently had the same surname as the corpse in Desma's room--that Desma had murdered Colum and that she could prove it. She could heave the vials of poisons in their faces when they rushed them. But neither tactic would guarantee salvation. Here she stood, everything to lose, with a single dagger to fight them off.

Below in the darkness of the turn of the staircase, they saw jumbled shadows leap upon the walls. Someone had brought a lantern up as they prepared to rush them. Desma and two or three men. The flickering shadows of sword points danced in the air.

Elizabeth thrust the dagger in Meg's hands so she could have both hers free. She went down two steps to reach the iron latch on the door of the slatted bin. If this was Desma's poison rye, even if it was not--

A shout in Gaelic, then Desma's shrill one: "Death to the Boleyns, even the royal one!"

The charge from below began. Elizabeth meant to pull open the door of the bin, but it shoved out of its own accord the minute she shifted the bolted latch. A river of dark grain--and its musty smell--roared out. She ran back up the steps as it bounced and slid downward. The force of it made her wonder if there was more on the roof, for it spilled out until it was knee-high into the onslaught of the men below.

"Down! Back!" Desma shouted. "Don't get it in your mouth! Let it pass us; go back down."

"Get me Desma's veil," Elizabeth ordered Meg, "and some of those linen bindings. We have to loose the grain on all the other floors."

"What? How? They're down there waiting." "Go!"

Elizabeth slashed two eyeholes in the

veil, and then tied the hems around her neck with the linen. She could not breathe well, but it would keep her from inhaling or swallowing that grain dust Desma had warned her men about. Slipping on the rye, plowing through it and sliding where it had piled up, she started down. She heard them coming up again, but she prayed she'd get to the third-floor landing before they did. She opened that door, too, and steadied herself by hanging on the slats in the dusty torrent.

Shouts below. Scrambling. A scream.

She risked it once again, sliding down to open the latched door on the second floor. No good retreating upstairs and trying to get out a window as she and Ned had at Hever. Nothing to tie together, and it was much too far. Besides, there was no going up in this flood of grain, only down. Her men--she had to free them.

By the time this grain was gone, she heard no footsteps below. Unless it was a ruse, they had probably retreated outside the building to plan another attack. But she could wait no longer.

"Meg," she shouted up the stairs, her voice muffled through the veil, "hold a piece of petticoat to your nose and mouth and get down here. Try not to breathe, though I think you have to eat it to get ill."

She continued down the now darkened stairwell, sliding, skidding where it had piled up so deep on the lower flights of stairs that she was amazed. Absolute silence reigned below, and someone had lit another lantern. The river of rye had come to rest in a pool of it perhaps four feet deep on the ground floor. A cloud of dust hovered thick in the air.

She heard Meg coming down. Then she noticed a sword point sticking up through the rye.

Someone had dropped it in their hasty scramble. At least it would give them a weapon. Panting through the veil, taking care not to cut herself on the blade, she pulled at it carefully.

It didn't budge. With her foot she shoved grain away and followed it down. A hand held it. A man's big hand.

She cried out just as Meg slid around the last turn. Elizabeth shoved her away from the sword.

Meg kept coughing; for the first time Elizabeth realized her eyes were watering. Or was she crying? And to see the world through this veil, as if she were that

ungodly woman ...

"Why are you shoving me?" Meg protested, then saw the man's hand. "Oh!"

"I think--they may all be under here--somewhere," Elizabeth wheezed. "Feel for his pulse."

For once, without question or argument, Meg obeyed, plunging her arm into the depths. "Nothing. I think he's dead."

"Desma could be here too. We'll try to dig them out, but we've got to free the others first. The wine cellar must be under the kitchen. This may be the only man here."

"But here's a boot with a leg in it," Meg murmured, pointing a distance over. "Can't be the same one."

Elizabeth seized her hand and pulled her away. "We'll be hidden by the fog outside, but be careful."

They ran in the direction of the castle as Elizabeth tore off the veil with her free hand. Meg had the dagger, she the sword. At the kitchen door they heard voices from beyond the deserted room, so they darted into it and toward the cellar door.

"I only hope the key to the wine cellar isn't on one of those dead Irishmen," Meg whispered.

"At Greenwich it's right by the cellar door. One time, years ago," she went on, so nervous and relieved she could not stop talking, "Tom Seymour took me down and stole one of the king's ..." Her voice faded as they saw that a light burned down here. It could easily be that one of the Irishmen stood guard.

She gripped her sword handle. She was but twenty-five years of age yet felt worn out fighting her own battles. How she longed for an army to command, a navy and--

"Listen," Meg whispered and gripped her arm, "what's that? Can't be singing."

"I will personally bury those bastards in that poison grain if they've gotten drunk in there while ... while ..." Elizabeth sputtered.

No one guarded the door, which was a fine oak one with a bunch of grapes carved into it. Elizabeth seized the big key from an iron ring and unlocked it. Meg lifted the lantern.

"A glorious sight, our next queen, crimson hair loosed to the winds of heaven." Wat spoke first and raised a mug in salute

to Elizabeth. Both lads and the four men blinked into the brightness of the lantern. Mugs and a leather bottle lay at their feet, and stacked barrels hemmed them in.

"Deliverance, earthly salvation," Rand cried and staggered to stand to sweep her a bow, though he fell over into a pile of heavy firkins, which didn't budge. One had been uncorked and dribbled dark wine across the flagstones.

"They were drinking to your continued health, my lad," Ned put in hastily. "They knew those ruffians were no match for you. Obviously, you have found and stopped the Lady of the White Peacock. Jenks and I, even in the dark, were trying to pick the lock with this iron barrel hoop, should you need our help, right, man?"

At least, she thought, Jenks had the sense to look sober and sheepish. Yet he wiped his eyes and grinned, going down on one knee before Elizabeth with but a quick darted look at Meg. "I told them no one could stop you, Your Grace, and never the two of you together."

"We have no time for chatter," Elizabeth announced. "Wat and Rand, sober up and now, or I'll leave you locked in here. Jenks, fetch our horses and take them to the barbican and be prepared to go up and force the guard to open the gates for us on my signal. Let the lads sneak into the corridor and try to gather what they can of the costumes and props, especially the other weapons. Ned and Meg, follow me."

Back in the Maiden's Tower, the three of them dug in the grain with their hands, then with the iron hoop Ned still carried. There had been more rye than she had ever imagined in that bin. Now it seemed they shoved great piles of it around as it kept shifting.

"I want to leave, but I have to know she's gone for good," Elizabeth explained, falling to her knees to dig harder, bare-handed.

She knew she had to keep talking and moving or she'd collapse. Her jaw throbbed in rhythm with the head pain she'd borne for days. She was both afraid Desma wouldn't be here and that she would. Despite it all, she could almost pity the woman, a bastard, betrayed by her father and bereft of her mother.

"It would be God's justice," she went on, "that she killed by poison and died by it. I'll have Cecil threaten Lord St. Leger that if this grain isn't all destroyed--Ah!" she gasped and

gazed into the face of her nemesis, which her hands had uncovered for the second time today. Ned and Meg waded over and stared down in silence.

Though she had suffocated to death, Desma Ormonde seemed at peace. Like a swarm of bees, dark kernels of rye rested on her eyes, in her gaping mouth, even in her ears and nostrils. Strange, she thought, how Desma's poison decorated her in death. In the wan lantern light, rye smut and dust glittered from each pockmark on her face. Her raven-dark hair, streaming out from her head, seemed adorned with black pearls of grain.

"Let's ride," Elizabeth said, forcing back a sob and standing. "It's all over now. Whether or not she worked for the queen or only because of the queen, it's over."

"Not until you're queen," she heard Ned say, but, tugging Meg's hand, he was hard on her heels out the door.

Ahead of them as they neared the barbican through the fog, Elizabeth saw that Jenks had not waited for her word to open the gates. Everyone was mounted before the raised portcullis and Jenks held her horse. He had somehow recovered his sword, which he held in his right hand. He gave a little cheer when he saw them all safe, then turned immediately to Elizabeth.

"No one was there, so I raised the grate myself, Your Grace."

"I'm so filthy and thirsty, I've a good notion to dive in the lake," she said as he boosted her up.

"If you'll forgive us, Your Grace," Wat slurred amidst hiccups, "we did bring 'long a few firkins o' St. Leger's wine. Din't want him to owe us, as we're off 'fore they pay our fee."

If she had not been so sore and exhausted, she would have laughed. But as she urged her horse toward the gate, she seized the mug from Wat's hands and downed the rest of the wine.

Malmsey, she marveled, her father's favorite. Never had it tasted so sweet and good.

Afterword

17 November, 1558

Despite her triumph in solving the poison plot against her, Elizabeth had been in a grim mood the week since. Although she and her privy plot council had not been caught returning to Ightham Mote or accused--yet--for the deaths at Leeds, she felt she had lost Cecil's loyalty. And her cousin Harry was with him in London, so Cecil might have swayed him too.

Cecil had been the one to tell the queen that crowds had cheered Elizabeth in Kent. Therefore, he was the cause of the queen, even from her sickbed, writing to Thomas Pope to take Elizabeth back forthwith to Hatfield. Now, she waited here again as she had for years, watched doubly close by him. He was in as beastly a mood as she, for his wife had not gone to her sister's house at all but, rather, had disappeared--he felt that she had deserted him. Still, not even that or a makeshift picnic when Elizabeth just had to get out of the house really cheered anyone today.

"I suppose this long, boring winter," Ned told her, juggling three walnuts, "we could take up the mystery of where Bea Pope has gone and discover whether she deserted the Pope indeed or it is foul play."

"Did you so fancy a real lady doting on you, Ned, even an enemy spy, and now you long to find her?" Elizabeth said, her voice more goading than teasing. She didn't realize she'd hurt Meg's feelings by that remark until she saw her sour face, but she plunged on. "I swear, I'd become Queen of Araby before I'd lift a finger to look for Bea Pope, the traitor. Besides, I warrant, our mystery-solving days are over."

She tossed an apple at his flying hands, sending the walnuts tumbling. Ignoring Jenks's hand extended to help her up, she rose from the Moorish rug they had been sitting on and strode down the lane toward the village. After she and Jenks had outdistanced the Pope again the other day, he had forbidden her to ride. She glanced back over her shoulder to see he kept his distance, but doggedly, he followed on foot, curse him.