by Karen Harper
“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.”
THIS SUDDEN, UNANNOUNCED VISIT TO HIS SANCTUARY, as you put it, will no doubt tip him off,” Ned warned as they approached the large, frame and timber house overlooking the Thames. “His family or servants will surely tell him straightaway we've been here, especially if you have his portable timepiece from near the site of a murder.”
“First of all, no one is going to mention a murder or that timepiece,” she said, raising her voice. “Is that understood?”
Murmurs of acquiescence and nods all around. Elizabeth felt the timepiece resting heavily in the pouch hanging from her belt. “Clifford,” she ordered, “knock on the door, but Ned Topside will announce me, and no one mentions that Jenks has gone to snoop around their stables.”
A male servant of middling years, lantern-jawed with graying hair, opened the door for them. His mouth fell open at the size of the armed retinue, though their swords were sheathed. His gaze darted to Elizabeth, standing in the center of her men, but no recognition lit his face.
“James Witherspoon, house steward, at your bidding, milady,” he said with a half bow.
“ 'Tis your own queen who stands before you, sirrah,” Ned announced with a sweeping gesture, “Elizabeth of England.”
At that, the man nearly fell backward. He looked so stunned they could have walked right in.
“My good man,” she said, stepping forward, “we were passing by on the Thames, and I said I had a good notion to see the home which Dr. Pascal now owns, the former abode of Sir Thomas More, of whom the doctor thinks so highly. May we not come in?”
Whatever the man's orders to guard the place, he stepped back and bowed low. Elizabeth entered and, with Ned, Gil, and two guards in tow, began to take a tour while the others waited outside.
“I have always been curious about Sir Thomas More,” she told the man as she glanced around the first room, one with such dark, old-fashioned walnut wainscoting that it seemed to keep sunshine at bay outside. Assuming this man would also venerate Sir Thomas, Elizabeth tried to sound impressed with the place. And, though she gracefully accepted the glass of Rhenish she was offered by another servant from a silver tray, she did not drink it.
“ 'Tis the very room,” the steward told her, soon warming to his task, “where Sir Thomas sat with his family for a Hans Holbein painting. The doctor tried to recover it, but the crown keeps what it has, pardon my saying so, Your Majesty,” he added hastily. “Holbein was sent by the king, your father, before His Majesty turned on—before the times shifted.”
Elizabeth could tell this James Witherspoon, house steward, was used to giving these explanations slanted toward those who favored the Catholic Mores over the terrible Tudors. Yet she held her tongue.
Numerous, only slightly different sketches from the one of More that Elizabeth had seen in the Tower decorated the walls here.
“My master has a fine hand for faces,” the man told her.
“Ah, a doctor who can draw.”
“Many do, I hear, Your Majesty,” he countered.
Elizabeth gave Gil a sharp look to stop his signaling that he thought the sketches were flat and eyes too close.
In each room they entered, more servants peeked from doorways or down staircases to catch a glimpse of their queen, but if she looked at them, they scurried away like mice.
“And the doctor's family?” she asked.
“Sadly, he is a widower with no heirs,” the steward said, shaking his head. Elizabeth set her wine goblet on a heavy chest she passed in the hall to go upstairs. All the furniture was of her parents' or grandparents' eras, probably possessions of Sir Thomas. She suddenly fancied it had never been moved nor the arrases or hangings taken out-of-doors and beaten. She had the continual urge to sneeze.
The staircase treads squeaked in protest as the large party climbed them. At the top hung a life-sized, threequarter oil portrait of Sir Thomas, garbed in black, somberly holding a copy of his book Utopia.
“Did your master do that one too?” she inquired.
“Oh, no, Your Majesty. Hung there for years, that has. Belonged to his widow—Sir Thomas's, that is.”
She realized that Pascal's clinging to the past indicated he was hardly the forward-looking physician Dr. John Caius seemed to be, but what she saw here proved little else. Whatever dire deeds the two doctors might have planned, Elizabeth sensed that this servant knew naught of them. So as not to tip her hand that she was overly suspicious, she did not ask to see the cellars. However, that reminded her that she must have the College of Physicians' cellars on Knightrider Street thoroughly searched. They were the only part of their building she had not seen.
The rooms upstairs were all linked by doors, yet most also had access to the narrow hall. The floors creaked when they trod them, as if ghosts walked here.
“The chamber that is closed at the very end of the hall,” she observed, “would overlook the river, I believe, and catch both morning and evening light.”
“ 'Twas Sir Thomas's library, but now Dr. Pascal's and quite sealed off,” he said, pointing to the large lock on the door.
Hair prickled on the nape of her neck. “Ah, but I would love a look inside. Imagine, men, a glimpse into not only the library where Sir Thomas wrote his great masterpiece, but where the brilliant preserver of his memory works to further the art of medicine. Cannot it be entered through one of these other chambers?”
“Your Majesty, I beg of you!” the poor man cried and looked as if he'd dare to throw himself in her path as she entered the chamber next to the locked one. Both Clifford and Ned stepped between him and the queen.
She found the adjoining door in this room, evidently Pascal's bedchamber, closed too. The steward's reaction—which could be simply his rightful instinct to protect his master's privacy—piqued her curiosity even more. She opened the back door to the study, shivering when it creaked in protest.
“I hear that oft at night from my chamber in the attic,” the steward admitted,
strangely making no further protest. Could he be curious to see in too? “The doctor works all hours,” he explained, “but he said I'm not to oil the hinges. And the staff is never to touch or move anything but in the kitchen or our rooms above.”
Elizabeth peered around the door she'd opened. As with Sir Thomas More's cell in the Tower, the shutters were closed, but no candles burned here. Instead, sword-edge-width bands of sunlight sliced into the shadows, revealing the contents of the room.
A spartan desk, one piled with books that smelled of mold and lay an inch deep in dust. Writing pots of ink long gone dry. Quills with their nibs cracked and feathers eaten by moths. Bookshelves laced with spiderwebs hovered on each wall but the one with the altar and priedieu draped in faded folds of black velvet like a mourning pall. On that altar, unlit banks of votive candles, a gold crucifix, its gleam dulled by dust. And spread across, like an altar cloth, an animal pelt of some sort, as if there had been a sacrifice, though not—this time—a human one.
She almost jumped out of her skin when Ned said, “Shall I open a casement, Your Majesty?”
She shook her head as she reached out to touch the rough fur of—a shirt. A hair shirt, such as ascetics, martyrs, and, she'd heard, the fanatical, Spanish-born Queen Catherine of Aragon used to wear. But this one, no doubt, once rubbed raw the back of Pascal's second St. Thomas. People had whispered that More did not even take it off upon the scaffold.
“Oh, he's left it home tod—” the steward blurted before he evidently realized his mistake.
“So Pascal wears this or another hair shirt as other tortured souls who wish to augment their penance of sin?” she asked, turning away from the altar. “And what sin would a well-respected physician wish to do penance for?” she demanded, more of herself than the poor servant. She had to flee this chapel chamber; once again she felt the walls closing in.
As she was ready to pass back through the partly closed door, she glimpsed something hanging behind it. Though it disgusted her to think Pascal was finding ways to bleed even himself, she seized the thing by its rawhide handle and took it with her. The thongs, tied with pieces of sharp bone on the ends, snagged at her skirts as she walked, and she hid the whip called a scourge beneath her cloak as she exited the house. She was not certain if the servants knew it was there or if she had taken it, but poor James Witherspoon looked as stunned as she felt.
“You may tell your master, when he returns,” she said to the man, now blinking in the bright sun as he followed her outside, “that I found his private Chelsea cathedral dedicated to Saint Thomas More most enlightening.”
As she headed for the barge at the water stairs, trailed by her men, Jenks joined them, out of breath.
“Did you find a horse with muddy hoofs?” she asked, still striding toward the barge.
“Not that I saw, and the stableboy claims Pascal's too fat to ride anymore.”
“Ha!” she said, but she felt deflated. Why didn't all the pieces of the Pascal puzzle fit? “He may be bald as a marble ball, but that does not mean he still couldn't visit the wig-maker,” she insisted.
“But before I approached them, I did overhear the two grooms mention the wig-maker's granddaughter, running their mouths with village gossip,” Jenks told her. “Guess the girl fell and broke her arm Friday. Since Pascal wasn't here, she hired a barge to London to get it set and never came back. A pretty wench, that's what they were saying.”
Elizabeth felt sick to her soul. “Broke her arm … couldn't find Pascal and went to London for help,” she whispered. “To find him or any physician? Ned,” she ordered, gripping her hands so tightly together her fingers went numb, “go back to the tavern and get a more complete description of that girl. I'll wager a throne I can tell you what she looked like down to a strawberry birthmark on her throat.”
THE ELEVENTH
The pimpernel is of the power to mitigate pain,
to cure inflammations and hot swellings and to
help the King's Evil.
JOHN GERARD
The Herball
WELCOME BACK TO COURT, DEAR COUSIN, AND my Lords Lennox and Darnley,” Elizabeth declared with a set smile on her face and a slight inclination of her head. A few hours after returning from Chelsea, Elizabeth Tudor sat on a raised dais in her presentation chamber, under the scarlet and gold canopy of state emblazoned at its top with E.R. Though she tried to sound pleasant and pleased, her voice could have etched steel.
The queen's cousin Margaret curtsied, as her husband, Matthew Stewart, and their son, the seventeen-year-old Henry, bowed. As ever, the woman somehow overshadowed both her handsome heir and her brawny husband. But, Elizabeth vowed silently, she shall never again overshadow her queen.
A few well-chosen advisers stood below the throne, and the ladies-in-waiting surrounded her, but by usual standards the vast room was greatly devoid of courtiers. It wouldn't do to make this anything broaching a state occasion, Her Majesty had told Cecil. He was presently conferring with his man who had examined both Katherine Grey and her husband before they'd been sent into exile. Obviously, that news had not spread yet, or Margaret Stewart would not dare to look so smug.
“We are grateful to be with you again, beloved cousin,” Margaret replied with a broad smile that flashed her large teeth. She had some sort of metal filigree box in her hands, mayhap a gift, Elizabeth noted.
“It has been far too long,” the queen declared, “though you seem to thrive distant from our presence. Clever doctors, I take it, have kept you and your entire family hale and hearty.”
If that barb pierced the Stewarts' bubble of a triumphal return, no one showed it. The attractive Margaret, curse her, had always been popular at court. If she soon had the usual contingent clinging to her skirts, so much the better. That way the Stewarts would not so easily spot the spies assigned to each of them the moment they'd stepped off their barges.
“How I have missed Whitehall and London,” Margaret went on with a dramatic sigh that would have done Ned Topside proud. “Though of course,” she added, almost preening, “I was reared at Greenwich with your sister and know all of her—now your— palaces intimately, Your Grace.”
This half-Scottish daughter of King Henry VIII's sister had been treated almost as a sister to Mary Tudor, while Elizabeth used to be oft sent away for suspected disloyalty. Even now the forty-seven-year-old Margaret craned her neck to look about as if she owned Whitehall and everything in it.
Elizabeth dug her fingernails into her clenched palms. When Mary Tudor was queen, Margaret had been assigned precedence over the Princess Elizabeth. Even now, with her fate in the current queen's hands, Margaret dared to stare down her prominent nose at Elizabeth as if she would shriek a laugh, point, and shout again, “Protestant usurper! Daughter of the great whore Boleyn! Walk behind your sister and me! Your father has made a fine marriage match for me, but he can't even stomach you in his sight.”
“And my young Lord Darnley,” Elizabeth said as she rose and descended but one step to tower over the Stewarts, “how does your lute playing these days? Did your parents mayhap send you to France to find a better tutor than we English can provide?”
The rustling of satin gowns, all sounds, stopped. Everyone knew full well that Margaret and Matthew Stewart had defiantly dispatched their heir to the French court for a daring and dangerous reason last year. He was to entice the newly widowed Mary, Queen of Scots and France, to fall in love with him, for his royal Tudor blood made him a political marriage prize. Damn the Stewarts, connivers all.
“Indeed, Your Grace,” the lad replied, straight-faced, “I learned a good deal while in France and would play for you, if you wish.”
“When you do I shall closely watch your fingering to see what I can learn anew from you and your parents' endeavors and desires,” Elizabeth replied as her gaze snagged her cousin's again.
“And that reminds me,” Margaret said, lifting the filigree box, “that our son brought back for you from the queen herself a special gift.
Sadly, kept away from you as we were, we could not present it to Your Grace until now.”
Elizabeth came down another step. “From our kin Mary, you say? What is it then?” she asked warily, keeping a good distance as if some viper would coil from the depths of the small box.
“The latest rage in French cosmetics, Your Majesty,” Margaret explained, “cochineal and alabaster facial powder. 'Tis such a lovely shade of rose I was tempted to try it myself, but Queen Mary told our dear son it was for you alone.”
Elizabeth loved pretty, new things, but for all she knew, the shimmering stuff she saw within the box could be some dreaded poison. If only Meg Milligrew were here, she'd recognize the substance for what it truly was.
“It looks lovely,” Elizabeth declared, “but I would be pleased to share it with you, cousin. I will see that some is sent you and have someone report back to me on how it looks on your face.”
From the box Margaret extended, stiff-armed toward the queen, emanated an enticing aroma. Indeed, a floral or herbal fragrance must be included with the powdered shells and alabaster. Yet, considering the source, the queen scented a trap.
She reached out to click the box lid closed, nearly in Margaret's face, but the scent of powder had already permeated the air. Elizabeth jammed her finger under her nose to keep from sneezing, but several others, including Mary Sidney, exploded in racking ca-choos.
“I have no doubt, Cousin Margaret,” the queen said, sounding stuffed-up now, “that you will report by hook or crook to Queen Mary concerning what I have said and done in the reception of this gift—and in all things.”
For one moment, Margaret's face froze and her eyes stayed wide, as if she might sneeze herself but was determined not to. As if painted, her counterfeit smile did not shift nor did the brazen woman blink.
Elizabeth swept from the room while everyone dipped or bowed. The family wars, both domestic and foreign, would continue, the queen thought. But at least now the most intimate battles would be under her watch and on her playing fields.