The Queene's Cure (23 page)

“Gil,” she said to the boy who had begun to sketch Honoria Wyngate, “draw the pattern of these ashes on the hearth first, then the body.”

“I see what you mean, Your Grace,” Ned agreed.

“I believe someone set this room aright, but either in haste or carelessness forgot to clean this evidence left underfoot. Something has been dragged through the remnants of charcoal residue. And see here,” she said, pointing to the smears on the old woman's skirts and slippers.

They all jumped when a guard asked from the door, “Shall we search this room, too, Your Majesty?”

“No, just the others,” she said without looking at him.

“We did and no one's hiding here'bouts and nothing seems amiss,” he reported.

“Two of you stay at the back door and the others search outside for fresh foot- or hoofprints. For anything!”

The men clomped out again, but Elizabeth kept staring
at the fine, filmy trail of ash that was thick on the edge of the cold hearth but dissipated near the chair. “See,” she said, pointing, then blocking their approach with both arms when Ned and Jenks came too close and nearly tipped Gil into the ashes. “The proof of her struggle, feeble though it may have been, is written on the hearth and on the bottom of her skirts.
She
is what was dragged or lifted to the position she is now in.”

“Maybe her granddaughter helped her to the chair when she felt faint, and ran for help,” Jenks surmised.

“And never came back?” Ned challenged. “More like it was their family argument that put the old thing here like this. Perhaps the girl wanted to take over the trade sooner than Dame Wyngate thought she should. Or the girl had a lover of whom the old dame did not approve,” he added, pointing to the prints. “It looks like a man's and a woman's steps here.”

“It does indeed, and not Dame Wyngate's,” Elizabeth theorized. She turned back to remove a linen slipper from the woman's right foot. “See?” she said as she held the ash-smeared slipper over the print of a woman's shoe. “Honoria Wyngate's foot is smaller, and there is no heel on this slipper as the other woman wore. We must find her granddaughter to see if this could be hers.”

“Then you credit my theory the girl—a girl, at least— could be guilty?” Ned said, his eyes lighting.

“I suppose that could be one reason she's evidently not come back and the body has already gone into what the
doctors call rigor mortis, which takes several hours. But what if foul play has struck the girl too? Mayhap she has been abducted from here.”

“To what purpose?” Ned asked.

Elizabeth shrugged as she placed the slipper back on the woman's foot should the local sheriff or justice investigate this. “The possibilities do boggle the mind,” she admitted.

“The man was big, I warrant,” Ned surmised, dangling his own foot over that longer print.

“It may be the very sole that Robin and Henry Sidney obscured in their fall off the ladder in the privy garden,” the queen mused. “Jenks, when we are ready to go, I want you to run ahead to inquire in the village whether the granddaughter's been seen. And get a description of her in case she's guilty and a fugitive. But we will not report this murder until we are ready to leave, so that Gil has time to complete his drawings. Meanwhile, Ned and I will minutely inspect this place for any correspondence or receipts she may have naming someone who bought a red wig.”

Meg was proud of this letter, for she seldom wrote out that many words at once. She wished she could show it to Ned, who had taught her to read and write. She even wished she could show it to Her Majesty, to prove how
far she'd come since Her Grace took in that bedraggled, befuddled kitchen herb girl four years ago.

Sadly, she'd never dare show it to either of them. But to buck herself up for what momentous deed lay ahead, Meg made a copy of the missive. Drying the ink carefully, she rolled it up like a little scroll and stuffed it down her darned stocking with the note from Dr. Clerewell.

But as she started down the stairs, she began to fret. Ben might not read well, but he could pick out people's signatures. So she went back, took both notes, and hid them instead in an herbal drawer downstairs behind the alabaster box of Venus Moon.

L
OOK, YOUR GRACE,” NED CRIED, FLOURISHING THE
small piece of paper he'd found stuck on a nail in a raft of others on the mantel. “Maybe Dame Wyngate meant to burn this but didn't get to it. It was under these other receipts.”

Annoyed he took so long to tell her what it said, Elizabeth snatched it from him. “ ‘For a fine red wig with a slight sheen of blond, two pounds, four shillings,’ ” she read aloud. “ ‘To be in upswept fashion in current court style, suited for light coronet.’ That's it, Ned, for all the deuced good it does us when she's dead, because there is no name of the buyer here. Do those other receipts have names?”

“Most do,” he muttered as he scrabbled through them.
“Just a few without, and I don't see any pattern. Some have dates, some don't.”

“This one doesn't. Then we must immediately locate her granddaughter, and she will know who bought the wig.”

She heaved a huge sigh. “Keep looking here,” she ordered him, “and bring Gil out with you when you're done.”

Elizabeth motioned for her two guards to remain at the door and stepped out into the sun. The little world of a woman's works and long life had suddenly seemed to close around her with foreboding. The stench of death was not yet in the room, but she felt it was, like some foul disease clinging to her skin or hair, or insidiously seeping into her lungs. What could be the link between the demise of an anonymous young woman bled to death by leeches in London and an old woman who hit her head to draw blood in her home in Chelsea?

She spun and rushed back into the house. “I didn't want to move her body, but lift her head off the chair,” she ordered the startled Ned.

He looked as if he'd argue, then obeyed, pulling the body up a bit by the shoulders and awkwardly lifting the head from the sticky pool of blood. It had pulsed from a small, neat, shallow stab wound in her temple, at the very site physicians bled patients for disorders of the head and mind.

“A lancet wound,” Elizabeth said. “She's been bled
too! First a poxed effigy that looks like me, then a young woman leeched in the pattern of the pox, then an older one, lancet-bled. Definitely done by a doctor!” she cried. “I knew it—one of those Papist physicians who holds a grudge against his queen!”

“Or some layperson or quacksalver who's worked cures in the past when she or he shouldn't have,” Ned mumbled.

The queen strode back outside. Sucking in a breath of fresh air, she walked the stretch of lawn toward the brook. Beyond it, frost-blasted, tall grass waved in a fallow field mostly gone to weeds. She stared at the remnants of wildflowers and herbs, trying to calm herself. But instead, back leaped that tormenting memory of that long dead day she'd seen the poxed mother and her children begging near the herbal fields of Chelsea, though at the other end of the village. And then it hit her.

This field had obviously been full of meadowsweet and woodruff this summer, the two herbs with which the linen body of the effigy had been stuffed. Those herbs could grow elsewhere, but things were starting to point to someone who had a certain familiarity with Chelsea. Mayhap the old woman did not include the name of the buyer of that red wig because she knew him and where to find him, just on the other side of the village, ensconced in the home of his deceased friend and mentor Sir Thomas More.

“Ned, Gil, guards, to me!” she cried.

Two of her men emerged from the bank of the stream
on a dead run, as if they'd already been on their way. The others gathered around her too. “When we get back, I'm issuing a formal warrant for the arrest and questioning of Dr. Peter Pascal,” she announced. “But right now, we are going calling on him at his house on the other side of the village.”

“But it's likely he's gone to London, Your Majesty,” Ned reminded her. “You said before he was to spend the day with Dr. Caius, vetting victims of scrofula for the ceremony tomorrow.”

“I know that, but I don't want to see him until I have him under arrest—until, as Cecil would say, we have our case prepared to argue before the bar. I'd rather see his house when he is not there. I will tell his family or servants I was out on the river and decided to stop.”

“Which he won't believe,” Ned muttered.

“Neither you nor he will gainsay me. I don't believe him, either, anymore, so it is checkmate.”

“And the queen is a far more powerful chess piece than one of the pawns,” Ned put in quickly.

“If he is not home, I will leave two guards behind to watch for his coming should we miss finding him in the city,” she said and turned to walk away.

“Your Majesty,” her guard Clifford called to her, “we were just coming up from the stream to tell you there's fresh hoofprints in the mud. Maybe Jenks should check local stables for a horse with muddy shoes. And maybe its rider dropped this.”

As she spun back, Clifford extended to her on a thick chain a muddy, gold-encased timepiece the size of a fist. “Got some fancy scrollwork on it, right there,” he added, pointing his big finger at the open cover.

Ned stuck his nose close before Elizabeth could see it clearly in the sun, but she elbowed him and he stepped back.

“Didn't wash it off, 'cause the mud makes it easier to read,” Clifford explained. “If 'n I could read.” “The timepiece has not even run down yet,” she noted, “so it was not dropped long ago.”

“Bull's-eye,” Ned whispered to her. “The kind of mechanical timepiece a well-to-do physician would carry to count pulse beats.”

“With his engraved initials back-to-back in a special design,” she observed, her voice rising in excitement. “A fancy
P
—no, two of them entwined! My instincts are exactly right!”

“At least it looks,” Ned said, “that Peter Pascal's our man.”