The Queene's Cure (17 page)

T
HE WALLS OF THE TOWER OF LONDON LOOMED HIGH
and gray as if rising from the river. Clots of morning fog still hung in the air.

“Put in before you reach the water gate,” Elizabeth
ordered her men-at-oars, though she'd told them the same earlier. “The public steps will do.”

The barge bumped the busy wharf. Pulling her plain gray velvet hood over her head, she let Cecil help her out. With her guards scrambling to surround them, they quickly made their way to the street entrance called the Middle Tower, then over the moat to the Byward Tower. Elizabeth had not been here since her recognition parade had gone through the city the day before her coronation. And she had hoped never to be here again.

Cecil banged on the narrow wooden door, though the big portcullis gate next to it was kept up for daily deliveries. “Ho, there!” he called. “On queen's business to see the Lieutenant of the Tower.”

The door opened immediately, and the guard bid them enter. A chill shot through Elizabeth as she walked up the slanted cobbled walk, at least, thank God, surrounded by her own guards and not her sister's this time. Passing beneath the stone skirts of the Bell Tower, where she had been housed in those nightmare days, she glanced up at the ramparts where she used to walk to take the air. It always seemed she was short of breath in here. As they entered the grassy stretch within the walls and series of surrounding towers, her gaze jumped to the Wakefield Tower, where her mother had been tried and condemned. And then, the other direction to the now bare spot where her scaffold had stood. Gripping her
hands against her belly as if to quell its roiling, the queen turned away.

Someone must have run for Sir Edward Warner, Lord Lieutenant of the Tower, for he emerged from the lieutenant's house and hurried toward them, strapping on his ceremonial sword. The man was near sixty and spare of body though his face and jowls were flaccid and his turkey neck bounced as he ran. He had enjoyed this sinecure of royal trust and remuneration for years. When he saw it was her in person, he went down on the dank cobbles on one knee and swept off his cap.

“I had no idea, Your Majesty. You should have sent me word.”

“I did not want to send word, Sir Edward. I am simply here to ask you some questions and then to visit my cousin Lady Grey.”

“Oh, of course, and my Lord Cecil here too,” he said, looking even more green at the gills.

“I would speak with the Earl of Lennox while you escort Her Grace,” Cecil clipped out. He went his way with but one guard, while the other three trailed behind the queen and her host toward the Bell Tower.

“I suppose because you are no stranger here,” Sir Edward said, his voice and gestures both jerky, “that is why you have assigned your cousin and her family to this very tower.”

As they entered the squat stone edifice, Elizabeth suddenly fell as mute as Gil. On the first coil of the stairs, she
stopped to gaze out a slitted window as if she cared for the gray-on-gray view. She shut her eyes to steady herself. The belly-clenching dampness from the river, the distant clank of keys still rattled her. The city bells were distant here, but the piercing shriek of a raven or the clatter of delivery carts in the courtyard could echo in one's soul. The stones seemed a heavy burden, like the weight of water pressing down to drown her….

Her eyes flew open. “Before I see my cousin, I meant to ask which cell was Sir Thomas More's,” she said.

“Sir Thomas More's, from in your f-father's day?” he stammered.

“Obviously. Take me there straightaway.”

She followed him up one level. He took overlong fumbling with his keys until she nearly seized them from him to open the door herself. “No one within, but so carefully locked?” she inquired.

“Just tradition, for safety's sake,” Sir Edward muttered and, reluctantly it seemed, swung wide the door. She stepped into a long, narrow, vaulted room with its shutters closed. Yet the chamber was bathed in the soft light of banks of flickering votive candles surrounding a makeshift altar on which sat a crucifix and a framed painting of a man she did not recognize but knew full well.

“Sir Thomas himself,” she observed.

“I believe so, Your Majesty.”

“Since you were here in his day, I warrant you
know
so, sir. Who has placed this here? Catholics you allow to meet secretly in my royal Tower?”

“In truth, 'twas Dr. Peter Pascal, one of your physicians of the College, who admired the man and has recently arranged this as a personal remembrance—for himself, privily.”

“And for a fee? To you?”

He cleared his throat, and his jowls quivered. “I did not think Your Majesty would mind a man's remembering someone who was imprisoned here and died so sadly.”

She glared at him, then slowly approached the portrait and examined it more closely. A bit crude yet quite detailed, a pen-and-ink drawing. She could not recall More herself, though she'd once seen a Holbein portrait of him and his family. This drawing bore no signature. She reached across the rows of candle flames and plucked it from its perch, then turned it over. Nothing on the back of the stretched canvas.

She handed it to Sir Edward by smacking it into him. “Pascal set this up during his visits to tend my cousin Katherine?” she asked as she made for the door. Her lieutenant had to run to keep up, thudding on the stairs behind her, the portrait under his arm until he set it down in the corridor.

“Ah, yes, though another doctor sometime comes instead to—”

“To treat not only my cousin but my other cousin's
husband, the Earl of Lennox,” she finished for him. “And that physician is Dr. John Caius.”

For one moment he gaped at her like a beached fish. “Yes, that's right, Your M-Majesty. But surely there is no harm in either of them, as they are among the elite of your College of Phys—”

“Is this the very chamber?” she asked as she stopped at the too-familiar door, one she herself was once certain she would exit on her way to the scaffold.

“Of the Lady Katherine, Countess of Hertford, and her son, the Viscount Beauchamp? It is. I put them here because this chamber is the best—”

“No chamber in this godforsaken place is best. This was mine, and I know it like the back of my hand. Now let me in and do not announce me.”

But she had forgotten how voices carried through the peepholes. As the wooden door swung inward, Katherine Grey stood facing them with her young son held tightly in her arms. Imperious as a queen, she glared down her nose as if she were the visitor and Elizabeth Tudor the prisoner again.

THE EIGHTH

E
VER SINCE HE'D NEGOTIATED A TREATY WITH
England's northern neighbor two years ago, William Cecil had hated the wily, stiff-necked Scots. And Matthew Stewart, Earl of Lennox, husband to Elizabeth's cousin Margaret Douglas, was one of the worst of that dyed-in-the-wool ilk. Lennox was forty-six years old, but looked ten years younger, as if that raw climate to the north somehow preserved the wretches.

“
Och
, if it isna the queen's own secretary come calling in the flesh,” the strapping, sandy-haired earl greeted
Cecil when he entered his Tower cell without the ado of announcement.

Amazing, Cecil thought, how this blackguard could make a greeting sound like a drubbing. And he detested their guttural Scots burr, as if they had caught in their throat those prickly thistles they so venerated as their prideful symbol. Lennox no doubt only rose from behind the small table where he'd been writing because he was tall enough to look down his nose at Cecil. As if this chill cell suited him, the earl wore only an open-necked laced shirt, hose, and breeks of crosshatched muted hues that Highland rebels always favored.

“I was in the vicinity,” Cecil said with a small shrug, “and thought I'd bring you a bit of news.”

“Naught amiss wi' my lad?” the man blurted. “He isna ill?”

“Not that I've been informed. Nor your wife, since, of course, you have a care for her health too.”

“My countess is of braw constitution, so I dinna inquire after her.”

“Even in here, I've no doubt that someone slips you word of how she's faring, as you two have always been skilled at covert communications.” Cecil let his eyes dart to the letter the man had been writing, then looked briefly ceilingward.

“
Och
, mon, you should not listen to vile rumors. Her Gracious Majesty must surely ken we dinna wish her but goodwill and a long reign,” Lennox insisted, gesturing
that Cecil might take the only chair in the spartanly furnished cell. When Cecil didn't budge, he added, “And Her Grace kens full well how forces swirling aboot one close to the throne can be mistaken to be rebels by the monarch's counselors.”

That little rejoinder, Cecil thought, was less a slap at him than an allusion to Elizabeth's stay in the Tower for supposedly encouraging a Protestant plot. Though the earl and his countess had lately professed Protestantism, more than once, the Lennoxes had been put under close watch for plotting with Catholics against her. But the queen had a long memory: Cecil knew she would never forget that Margaret Douglas Stewart, Countess of Lennox, had once tried to garner proof to send her to and keep her in this place.

“Must I lecture you on the vast differences between you and Her Grace, Lennox?” Cecil countered. “Her Majesty was proved innocent of malicious, slanderous accusations, whereas the bedrock facts against you and your countess …” Cecil rolled his eyes yet again. “But I came to inquire for your health, my lord. How goes the treatment for gout in the second joint of your left big toe?”

Only for a moment did surprise almost betray the man. Cecil could see him thinking: If the crown knows that small detail, what else do they know? But the earl soon vexed him again by laboriously explaining how badly his toe pained him and made him walk shoeless
with a halting limp he demonstrated ad nauseam back and forth in the small cell.

But then, Matthew Stewart had never been a simpleton, however much his wife actually seemed to overshadow him when they were together. Even if he had not wed Margaret Douglas, Henry VIII's niece through the former king's sister, Lennox had his own convoluted family claims to the throne of Scotland. However, it was now held by Mary, Queen of Scots, Margaret's second cousin, to whom the Lennoxes were obsessively if covertly loyal.

And the Stewarts were canny enough, as the Scots themselves would put it, to know that, since it would mean a bloody war to claim the throne themselves, a marriage between their son, Henry, Lord Darnley, and the young widow Mary must now be their righteous cause. They'd even sent the boy, aged seventeen, to France to court Mary when she was newly widowed there, before the English managed to fetch him home and put him under house arrest with his mother at Sheen while the earl languished here—or limped here.

“Enough of this damned demonstration,” Cecil insisted, though he had a good nerve to let the man keep walking since it did seem to pain him. “Is this particular malady of yours being treated fully?”