Her Majesty said a loving goodnight to her people and then paced out to the sound of trumpets, leaning on the arm of the Earl of Essex, who was looking pleased with himself. The Gentlemen of the Queen’s Guard went ahead and behind, making red and gold borders around the maids of honour and the ladies-in-waiting, who were following the Queen, the younger ones rolling their eyes sulkily at having to leave the dancing so early.
Carey could see Emilia amongst the Earl’s followers at the end of the procession, the tilt of her feathered hat unmistakeable. Ah well. Perhaps another time. (A lucky escape, you idiot, said the puritanical part of him.)
Carey caught Hughie’s eye and beckoned him to bring over the flagon and pour for him. The lad started and looked guilty, dived into the scrum of servingmen by the large silver spiced wine bowl and disappeared. Finally he emerged, wading upstream against the flood of other servingmen, dodged a couple of whirling dancers, and came over. Carey lifted his silver cup and Hughie served him quite well, pouring carefully and using a linen napkin on his arm to wipe any drips.
When Carey sipped the wine, he nearly gagged—it was a spiced wine water, very sweet, mixed with brandy and spices and a hint of bitterness from the cloves. The attempt to hide its dreadful quality hadn’t worked. Still it was wine, so he drank it.
As soon as the Queen had gone, the musicians had struck up an alemain and the roar of voices went up another notch. He watched the peasant dance for a while, wondering if he wanted to dance anymore.
God, it was hot. Carey changed his mind about dancing, moved out again into the darkness, feeling for rain first because he did not want to damage his (still only half paid-for) Court doublet and hose. There were torches on some of the trees so you could see something in the flickering shadows.
Carey was still thirsty, so he followed the sound of water back to the stream, tipped out half of the syrupy wine in his goblet and refilled it with water caught carefully from a small rapid over a mossy stone. You never knew with water, but he’d found in France that wine generally cleaned it well.
Sipping cautiously, Carey decided it was much better and even the bitterness of cloves in it was refreshing, like well-hopped beer. Away from the torches and candle-lit tent, the evening was still and some stars were coming out, powdering the velvet cloak of the sky with diamond dust. The evening must be much warmer than you’d expect at this time of year, despite the clearing sky. Carey was burning up in his Court suit.
He spotted the dim outline of the church spire and went toward it. The clerks would no doubt be bundled up asleep inside, along with other courtiers’ servants, since there, at least, they wouldn’t be rained on despite the hardness of the floor.
Once in the churchyard he wondered what he was there for, since he wasn’t about to go and roust out John Tovey from his sleep just for the sake of it, after all. Still the church pulled him as he gulped the watered wine. Perhaps it would be cooler in there. He opened the door carefully, shut it behind him carefully and paced with great caution down the aisle. On either side were dozens of bundled figures, quite tightly packed, wrapped in their cloaks. Some had managed to beg, borrow, or steal straw pallets to ease the stone flags under them.
It wasn’t cooler in here, damn it. He went up toward the altar, still too hot and still dry-mouthed with thirst. All the Papistic nonsense had been cleared away years ago, the altar had been moved so that it was a proper communion table, the saints of the altar screen had lost their heads and been whitewashed, the Lady chapel had no figure of the Madonna on the plinth at all, though there was a puzzling carved frieze of deer around the walls. They looked oddly alive, even seemed to move.
The soft snoring from behind him was forming itself into a strange rhythmic music. He looked up at the boarded windows, one or two left intact with the old style full of scriptural pictures for the illiterate. Those were their only way of learning the gospels as they were denied hearing the Word of the Lord by the Vulgate Latin of the old Mass. That you couldn’t see the sky though the silvery light told him that the moon had risen. What were the reiving surnames up to on the Border? It was a church. Perhaps he should pray?
He drank again, took his hat off belatedly and thought about Amy Dudley née Robsart, poor lady. She had died on the 8th September 1560, the year of his own birth, perhaps not very long after he was born, a summer baby. He smiled, thinking vaguely of his wet nurse and how he had loved her when he was tiny, when his mother sometimes frightened him on her visits back from Court with his quite terrifying father. They had become better friends when once he was breeched and he had realised how kind they were, compared to the parents of most of his friends.
He knocked back most of the rest of his wine, wondering why nothing seemed to ease his dry mouth, and sat on one of the benches against the wall. Nobody was sleeping there, perhaps because the stones were broken. There was more old destruction in the Lady chapel than the rest of the church. The plinth the statue had stood on still had a crescent moon, stars, and a snake carved on it.
Why was he so hot and thirsty after drinking so much ale earlier and then a whole flagon of watered wine? And another peculiar thing was that he didn’t need a piss at all. His insides seemed to have turned suddenly into a strange desert.
And now something really odd was happening. The whitewashed stone of the church was seeming to billow around him slowly, as if it were only painted curtains at a play. The whitewashed walls thinned and thinned and swayed in and out and back and forth like the dancers, to the rhythm of the snore-music around him.
He couldn’t stand the heat anymore and his head was hurting, his mouth glued with drought. He had to cool down. He fumbled for the buttons of his doublet, undid them with hands full of thumbs, then had to feel around the back where his poinard hung for the points and then he thought of taking his belts off, which he did, and then he broke a couple of laces and the doublet came away at last. He took the thing off his shoulders, wondering why it had got so much lighter and hung it on a headless woman saint holding a wheel.
He was still too hot and his eyes weren’t working right. Everything was blurring and billowing in front of him, and the moon must be shining through a window somewhere because he could see well in the darkness, make out the outlines of snoring clerks and Court servants on the floor. The vest that held up his paned trunk hose and canions was making him hot now so he set about undoing the buttons and laces for that. It was a nightmare of inextricable buttons and laces so he broke the damned things and wobbled as he pulled those off as well and hung them on a saint holding a castle next to the pearl-covered doublet and stood there in his shirt with his hose dropping down and his boots still on. He burped.
Blinking, rubbing his eyes which were getting worse and worse, licking lips like leather with a tongue of horsehide and panting with heat, a small part of him finally thought to wonder, “Am I ill?”
The last time he had felt so bad was on the Elizabeth Bonaventure, Cumberland’s ship, chasing the Armada north through the storms of the North Sea. He had been hot, dry, dizzy, blinding headache…
Well, said the sensible part of him, it couldn’t be a jail fever because that was what nearly killed me in 1588 and you never get it twice.
Was it plague? Christ Jesus, had he caught plague in London and brought it to the Queen?
His distant hands trembled as Carey felt himself for buboes, as his head started to swell to twice its size and then four times. No lumps, nothing. He wasn’t bleeding anywhere either, but the furnace of his heart was pounding louder and louder like the drum for the acrobats and the church itself was dissolving around him into gauzy billowing curtains.
He had to get out. But he couldn’t. He was standing still, his legs too far away to command. He was panting like a hound. He needed help. Was there anyone? The clerk? What was his name?
“Mr. Tovey,” he croaked, “Mr. Tovey…”
He tried again, he couldn’t shout, the voice that had flowed so well earlier was now a cracked whisper. He ha
d to lie down or fall down. So he carefully put his goblet on the bench again and sat cross-legged on the flagstones as if he was in camp in France. His whole body had turned into an oven and at least the stones were cool. In fact they looked very inviting and as the stone church had somehow turned to a tapestried tent and billowing fine linen, so the broken stones of the Lady chapel were becoming pillows and bolsters specially for him.
He lay down full length on them, liking the cool and softness on his burning face.
There was quiet movement behind him. Somebody was lighting a candle end at the watchlight by the altar.
He moaned in protest, the light was far too bright as it came too close, it hurt his eyes. He tried to push it away, punch whoever was trying to hurt him with a spear made of light. Through tears he saw Tovey’s bony anxious face, shape-shifting to a skull amongst the soft billowing stones and the saints singing headless.
“Sir Robert!” Tovey’s voice cracked through his headache. “Are you sick, sir?”
“Ah’m not drunk,” Carey told him. “Don’t think s’plague…”
Tovey flinched back for a moment but to his credit, didn’t run. Carey felt a bony hand on his forehead, saw the frown, the candle brought close to his face, Tovey feeling his armpits and groin, oh God, do I have the tokens on my face? Carey wondered, because he felt as if there was a bonfire on each cheek.
Tovey frowned suddenly, one of his fingers brushed Carey’s leather lips, then the damned candle came near again.
“Sir, please look at the candle flame,” Tovey said. The boy suddenly had some authority in his voice. Carey frowned at the yellow-white blaze in his eyes but did his best to look straight at it. Splots of light danced in his vision, strangely coloured, and the stone saints sang the Spanish air from earlier, rather well in chorus in a different setting.
Maybe it was plague after all? “Don’t…come…near…” he whispered. “Get everyone out…Might be plague…”
The boy felt his forehead again as if he was a mother. He shook his head.
“Sir Robert, what have you drunk?”
“’M not drunk…” He knew that. It took more than a couple of quarts of mild ale and a goblet of not very good spiced wine to make him drunk.
“I know.” The boy looked about, spotted the goblet, took it from the bench, sniffed the remnants in it, stuck a finger in them and licked it. There was recognition on his face, “Mother of God,” he said, papistically. Then something in his expression hardened. “Sir Robert, you’ve been poisoned.”
Had he? Good Lord, why? Or was it an accident when the poisoner was after bigger game? Fear swooped through him and the saints started singing a nasty discord. He reached up and grabbed the boy’s woollen doublet front. “Tell the Earl…of…” Damnit, who? Wossname? “Essex, tell Essex. Don’t le’ the Queen…”
“I have to make you purge, Sir Robert,” he said. “Get the poison out of your stomach…”
Rage gave him more strength than he realised, and he swiped the boy away, got to his feet. “Tell…Essex first!” he shouted. “Queen! Lord Norris! Don’ le’ ’er drink spiced wine.…”
Burning with rage at whoever had done this, he started for the door, heard shouts, found more people around him, holding him back. Lots of them. He knocked a couple of them down, found his arms held, damn it, somebody swept his legs from under him and he landed on the stones, half a dozen people were sitting on him. He was fighting and roaring incoherently at them to stop the Queen drinking spiced wine and then Tovey’s face with a fat lip and a bruised chin was close to him again and the mouth moving and making words and he finally heard the boy.
“Coleman and Hughes have already run to the manor house, s…sir,” said Tovey. “We’ve warned her. If she hasn’t already drunk it, she won’t.”
It penetrated. Tovey was shakily holding a wooden cup and the other clerks were cautiously letting him sit up enough to drink. He was even more thirsty than before, dry as dust, dry as death. Interesting, who could have done it? Emilia? Hughie? One of the musicians or chapel men? Somebody else? Please God, the Queen was all right. She had survived so many attempts, many not recorded, let God keep her safe still…
Somebody else had arrived, was panting breathlessly, saying something to Tovey. “Sir, the Queen’s people have been warned,” he said slowly and clearly, “P…please drink this, sir, we must purge you.”
He drank whatever it was and found to his annoyance it was salted water, spat it out. The young clerks still sitting on him and holding his shoulders were turning themselves into the singing saints and the whole church was billowing. He gulped more seawater, damn it, the storm was terrible, he was sinking through the floor and…ach…Jesu…
Suddenly the wisps of church had blown away and he was lying on something soft, saints holding his arms and legs whenever he tried to shake them off. Was he in heaven? Well, he couldn’t hear harps though the singing of that Spanish air was starting to annoy him, no visible angels. Maybe? He was looking down on something that looked like a wonderful map made of cloth with green velvet grass and fringed trees and blocks of stone poking through. Perhaps he’d turned into a bird.
Green, came the thought, so not autumn.
“Sir Robert, please drink this, sir, please…”
Christ, he was thirsty. The lip of a wooden cup (they had wooden cups in heaven?) knocked his teeth and he smelled water, downed it in one. Seawater again, ach, salty…
His belly twisted and heaved and his body jackknifed. Sour stuff gushed out of his mouth. He couldn’t see properly, everything was flaring and blurred, part of him was on a cloud somewhere high up, the other part felt the rough staves of a bucket and he puked into it helplessly.
“Again, please, sir.”
He drank again, hoping for plain water or mild ale, but no, more brine. Ach. He hated being sick, but sick as a dog he was, violently, coughing and sputtering disgusting bitterness. In a distant part of his overheated skull, the wry thought came: At least I don’t have the squits as well, that’s a small mercy.
“Good, that’s better. Sip this please sir, just sip.”
He was cautious after the saltwater, but this time it was just well-water with a little brandy. He sipped, then gulped, had to puke again.
“This is good, sir,” Tovey’s voice said soothingly. “It’s washing you out…”
There were voices above him, Tovey answering steadily. Somebody else looked in his face with the candle held near again, he recognised one of the older Gentlemen Pensioners, behind him one of the Queen’s ladies in a fur-trimmed dressing gown, red-haired, didn’t know which one, might be a cousin, tried to blink at the goddamned candle still blazing like the sun in his sight.
“You’re right, Mr. Tovey,” said the lady-in-waiting. “His pupils are fixed wide open, it must be belladonna.”
“The Queen?” He had to know. What if his aunt had had her usual nightcap of spiced wine?
“She’s well, Sir Robert, she hasn’t had any of this at all. She knows what’s happened and we are searching Rycote now for the poisoner. Please sir, lie down.”
“I’ve brought my pallet for you, sir, please lie on it until we can move you.” Tovey’s voice.
Really he preferred the stones which were cooler, but his stomach cramped and twisted humiliatingly again and Tovey’s blurred angular face was wobbling and stretching, drawn upon the finely woven veils around him.
Looking down from his straw-smelling cloud was fun. He laughed at the sight of men on horseback, riding hell-for-leather across country along the line of the old Giant’s Wall. He recognised the man at their head—good God, was that what he looked like in a jack and morion? Not bad, quite frightening in fact, and from the look of his face, he was in a rage about something.
Carey peered with interest over the other edge of the cloud to see more riders, a remarkable number, in fact. It looked like a full-fledged Warden raid, though for some reason all the riders were heading eastward rather than north or south, riding b
unched in their surnames. From the quilting on the jacks there were Dodds, Storeys, Bells, a lot of Armstrongs, Grahams…good God, Grahams? Following him? What the hell was going on?
And somehow he saw in a flash what it was that had enraged him, which was Elizabeth Widdrington in nothing but a bloodstained shift, locked in a storeroom, with a black eye and a swollen face and dried blood on it.
The bolt of fury that drove through him at that sight knocked him right off his cloud and into the uproar of his body which seemed to be fighting the people trying to strap him to a litter. He could ride, he needed his sword, where the hell was Dodd…? More light blurred into his useless eyes making his enormous head hurt. Had he been struck blind? Dear God, please not?
Heavy weights coloured red and gold twisted his legs from under him and landed on his shoulders and hips, pinning him down. There was murmuring in the background. Someone with a foreign voice was advising caution, the delirium from belladonna or henbane could make a man four times as strong as normal.…
The war drums were beating around him but he could still hear Tovey dropping to his knees and stammering something. What was he saying?
“Y…your M…Majesty?”
The fear in the boy’s voice was what suddenly cut through his rage. Despite his agonising headache, his heat, the suddenly more distant rage, the drought, and the unsettling discovery that the world was really made of the finest, most delicate silk, Carey smiled.
“Robin, Robin, can you hear me, my dear?”
Yes, it was the Queen. He knew his aunt’s voice, though when he squinted to see her she was a blotchy pink and white moon, framed by sable fur and topped with a thatch of grey-red. Red and gold lumps were next to her, behind her was a dark column with a doctor’s cap.
He managed a grunt through a throat too dry to make any other sound and he couldn’t think of words. Some of the rage was draining out of him, despite the pounding of his heart. Garbled foreign noises surrounded him. She was talking to Tovey in Latin and the boy responded, he couldn’t understand a word of it, now the doctor was talking it too. Bloody hell, he hated learned people talking about him in Latin.
Air of Treason, An: A Sir Robert Carey Mystery (Sir Robert Carey Mysteries) Page 10