The Queene's Cure (22 page)

“The old wig-maker may have known Sir Thomas too,” Ned posited, “and is not just a hireling, but a fullfledged accomplice.”

“Let's not jump to too many conclusions,” Elizabeth warned. “But if Honoria Wyngate or her staff, if she has aught, can identify who bought the wig”—she glanced down at the bag Ned held—“then we can begin to lay the blame at someone's door. And I'll warrant it's the same someone who bribed the missing lace girl and her lover to hand over my gown from the Royal Wardrobe.”

“But didn't the girl tell Kat he sounded foreign and spoke fancy or some such?” Ned interjected.

“Any educated person could flummox a lace girl,” Elizabeth said. “Even some medical Latin strung together would do; though, of course, if we are dealing with a group of plotters, foreigners could be involved. I
would wager all the gold angels I'm giving out at the healing ceremony tomorrow that someone Spanish sent Katherine Grey those little dogs and that the Lennoxes, who will be reunited with us at court this week, are covertly communicating with the former queen of France, my clever cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots. But I'll catch them at spinning their webs. People who should be watched will be, and those whose conversations should be overheard—”

Gil tapped her foot and signaled wildly.
What if I talk?
the boy signaled.
If I talk and draw, I stay with you?

“But of course,” she said, then signaled the rest of her thoughts to him with flying fingers:
But your finest talking will always be through your art, and I'd not have it any other way.

“I think, whether or not it is a conspiracy,” she went on to her men, “that doctors are involved. Mayhap their prodigious and pompous intellects are fed by taunting me before they strike.”

“If not a doctor,” Ned muttered, “it's someone who wants us to think so, to point a finger toward a tooobvious scapegoat he—or she—can hide behind.”

“Look, Your Grace!” Jenks shouted so close to her ear she jumped. “In that small barge there—that man!”

“Has Dr. Pascal spotted us?” she asked. “Where is he?”

“No. It's Meg with her husband. See?”

Elizabeth did see. Meg was at the tiller in the stern of a small skiff while Ben rowed mightily against the tidal
current. Gil began signing something to Meg about
no talking yet.
The queen looked into Meg's eyes in the moment it took to pass their small craft at close quarters. So much for not being recognized, at least by Meg, Elizabeth thought, but the girl sat silent and stoic as a fine lady while that big-shouldered lout Wilton hooted. Meg looked sad—angry too—and hardly happy to see her queen.

“I've noted her before when we've been on the river,” Ned said, “but usually when we were in the barge of state.”

“Hard to miss us then with all that red and gold, queen's coat-of-arms, and thirty men-at-oars,” Jenks muttered as he craned around to see the last of the Wiltons.

“Yes, but what coincidence they passed us now,” Ned mused, “and we're supposedly making this jaunt in secret.”

“Meaning what?” Elizabeth demanded. “Heading the opposite direction, they can hardly be following us.”

“Nothing,” he murmured, but she saw his mouth silently move to add, “yet.”

“I told you Ben Wilton claims he saw a man peering over the privy garden wall and volunteered to come in to testify,” Elizabeth pursued the topic. “No doubt it's a question of his angling for more reward, for I fear the man is lazy but greedy.”

Ned nodded, looking surprised, she supposed, that
after all these months she was willing to discuss the Wiltons. “I am no longer angry with her,” she said, looking straight ahead again. “I simply find it best not to speak of her—of those early days, for they distract me from my necessary business, that is all.”

But it was not memories of Meg that moved her as they approached the hamlet of Chelsea. Despite its proximity to her capital city, she had not visited it for years, though she had oft seen it from the river as her royal barge passed by en route to her several palaces to the west.

In sleepy, rural Chelsea, Elizabeth had once lived happily with her stepmother, Katherine Parr, and her husband, Tom Seymour, before everything had gone to pieces. Elizabeth had been sent away for losing her young, yearning heart to Seymour, a man who merely wanted her for what she was, a Tudor princess, then but two lives from the throne.

“Her Majesty wishes to put in at the public stairs,” Ned's voice interrupted her agonizing as he called to the men-at-oars.

Chelsea seemed ever the same, Elizabeth observed. The facades of the manor houses that could be seen from the river were set back across gardens and wide lawns, each with its own water gate and stairs. Smaller, thatched village houses hoved into view. Chimneys, tall ones on lofty roofs and squat ones on cottages, peeked above treetops
and trailed crooked fingers of smoke into the brisk September breeze.

“There's the house which used to belong to my stepmother.” She pointed it out as the barge made for shore. “And that one farther down was once Sir Thomas More's, though he was dead years before I lived here, and one of his heirs had the house then. And, of course, Pascal has it now.”

“After we see the wig woman, you still want me to knock on its door and order him to Whitehall to see you forthwith, Your Grace?” Jenks asked. “If he hasn't returned to the city yet, I mean.”

“Let's decide after we hear what old Dame Wyngate has to say.”

Ned helped her out. Grateful no crowds gathered as in London, they made their way onto the grassy village green and waited, the queen with Jenks, Gil, and the six guards, while Ned went into the only tavern to inquire after the wig-maker's location.

“Cottage at the end of the village,” Ned called to them as he emerged and led their little procession across the green. “They say she's deaf as a stone and has a granddaughter living with her, who's been apprenticed to the trade. In other words, we can either shout our wishes at Dame Wyngate, or the girl will do it for us.”

“At least she's still alive and obviously isn't going anywhere,” Elizabeth said as they spotted the hunchbacked
thatched roofed place on the opposite end of town from the finer houses.

Honoria Wyngate's dwelling was grown higgledypiggledy all on one floor. Its plaster had grayed, and its wig of thatch looked ragged and balding. A once-tended garden sprawled to riot and ruin, with everything blasted by early frost so that only dead hollyhocks bobbed in the breeze.

“Ned, Jenks, with me,” the queen said, “and the rest of you wait here within call.” She nodded and Jenks, his hand instinctively resting on his sword, rapped sharply on the door while she and Ned stood back a few paces. Jenks knocked again, his fist rattling the door in its frame, but no one answered.

“I said she's deaf, Jenks, or are you too?” Ned needled him. “Knock harder or just shout for her granddaughter.”

“You're the one with all the fancy, foreign stage voices you can throw about!” Jenks shot back.

“Stop carping at each other and look in the windows,” Elizabeth ordered. “They are fine glass, so you'd think she'd have the money to keep this place up better than this. Knock on the glass, as the sound may carry better.”

The men worked their way around the irregularly shaped exterior, knocking on windows. Elizabeth, trailing four guards and Gil, walked to the back door. An oriel window overlooked a length of lawn to a small,
noisy stream, and morning sun poured through the many leaded panes of glass.

Honoria Wyngate loves sunlight to see by and warm her old bones, the queen thought, in a sudden rush of affection for the old woman. And, no doubt, she needed light to do her fine work of sewing strands of hair.

Feeling like a Peeping Tom, Elizabeth nonetheless stepped up to the bow of window and glanced in. Baskets of hair sat beside a long workbench directly under the window, all lit by splashes of sun. Raven-dark hair; nutbrown, blond, russet tresses, and the same red-gold hue as the effigy's wig.

“She'll have answers for us,” Elizabeth said as Jenks, Ned, and Gil joined her. “Or her granddaughter will.”

The queen stood on tiptoe and looked beyond to a ladder-backed chair near the empty, cold hearth. Her own shadow fell across the sunny space. Then she saw the old lady, sitting on the floor with her head on the seat of the chair. But the tilt of her neck was strange, and those thin, old limbs were sprawled in sleep at an awkward angle.

“Jenks, open or break down that door!”

He obeyed, but before he could draw his sword to lead the way in, Elizabeth pushed past him.

THE TENTH

T
HE EVER-SWIFT JENKS REACHED THE WRINKLED
, hoary-headed Honoria Wyngate with Elizabeth, and Ned came close behind.

“Is she dead?” the queen whispered.

“Mayhap she just stumbled or got a dizzy spell and knocked herself out!” Jenks said, resheathing his sword with a loud scrape.

“Or she's just asleep and didn't hear us,” Ned offered.

Elizabeth touched the wig-maker's arm as if to rouse her. It was stiff and cold. “See,” the queen said, her voice still hushed, “a puddle of blood on the chair seat where
she must have struck her head. But let's make certain she's gone.”

When she did not budge to touch her again, Ned felt for a neck pulse, then shook his head.

“If a long life is any kind of good life, she had that,” Elizabeth said, as if pronouncing a benediction. “She looks so frail. No doubt she could have slipped and fallen, but in this instance, I cannot help but be suspicious.”

After all, she thought, this would not be the first time lately that someone she needed to question had been snatched from her grasp. No one had seen the effigy placed in the coach on Knightrider Street; both Lucinda, the lace girl, and her paramour had disappeared; and a corpse had materialized in the royal privy fountain of a crowded palace with no one to question but a greedy bargeman lurking outside who saw but shadowy form with no face. And now this.

She stepped back and turned away to survey the room. It was immaculately kept, but for one thing. The ashes from the cold hearth were trailed and smeared far into the room, even across a Turkish carpet the old woman surely must have valued. The queen walked closer to the hearth.

She knew her people watched her, waiting for a command to leave this sad scene. She straightened and stepped back. “Guards,” she called to her four men who had followed as far as the door, “two of you draw swords
and search this house for an intruder or signs of one.” They instantly obeyed, clattering through the single interior doorway to the sprawl of small rooms.

“Despite her age and frailty, you're thinking foul play, Your Majesty?” Ned asked, coming to stand beside her at the hearth.

“I'm fearing it. Look at this.”

She bent closer to study the ashes that marred the clean-swept floor and bright-colored carpet. This soot told a tale as clearly as one of Gil's charcoal drawings.