Mouse adjusted the embossed leather sword strap around his waist for the twentieth time since they had started the walk to Whitehall Palace. The right shoulder of his quilted red doublet sagged above its tight sleeve.
Viper puffed the material out to its fullest extent. “We should appropriate clothes tailored to your size. You wear your vestments like a sack.” She held back the choke in her voice that would expose her insecurity. “Your face hath not enough hair on it. Elizabeth prefers maturity in her men’s beards. Yours bears a meagre growth. Let us take a fortnight, or e’en another month, to sprout it manly.”
They had discussed this day several times. Each time, Viper found a reason to delay Mouse’s meeting with Elizabeth. To further stall him, Viper and Turstin gave Mouse a gentleman’s education before introducing him to Elizabeth.
Living hidden from the world, Viper and her Foundling faced no further threat from men like Melazine’s captors. Being with Turstin had helped Mouse cope with his bereavement over his father. The Sisters’ Foundling was the link to the humaines that Mouse sought, the father-figure that he needed.
“No, no. I would be no less comfortable in finery that fits me better. As for my face,” Mouse said, the moisture of his breath swirling above the fine stubble on his chin, “our queen governs like a king, though she needs not a beard to prove it; nor do I to prove my manhood. Mistress, believe me, my queen-mother will see as much of herself in me as she will of Lord Robert. Oh, yes. She will know me to be true and accept me.”
“Elizabeth may carry the strength of a man, but she hath the heart of a woman.” Viper risked one last appeal. “Deliberate upon the fragility of her emotional state. Many of her life-long companions hath died. And what of the petty Nobles’ gossip? After Robert’s death Elizabeth locked herself in her room for days and spake unto no one. ’Twas a depressive episode worse than her melancholy over her execution of her Catholic cousin, Queen Mary.” Mouse averted his eyes. Viper pressed him farther, determined to break through his resolve. “Mayhap she is not recovered from the treason of Lord Robert’s stepson, the Earl of Essex, and of his execution. Elizabeth may fear you are another of Robert’s sons come to woo her heart only to plot against her throne.” In preparing to introduce Mouse to Elizabeth, Viper had kept her ear to Court gossip and educated Mouse accordingly.
Mouse countered with the perfect rebuttal. “Then there is no problem, for I do not want to be a member of the Court and live the life of a Prince. No, not I. I only wish to lay claim to a portion of Elizabeth’s heart, and stay at her side, in secret, until her cousin becomes King of England.” He spoke of King James VI of Scotland, the Protestant who inherited the Scottish Throne after the beheading of the Catholic Queen Mary of Scotland. Elizabeth had been grooming James as her successor since his Coronation. “Elizabeth’s son should be with her when Fate comes for her, do you not think?”
Viper grasped at any form of rational thought she could argue. “If the Court, or those annoying Lords of the Parliament who are gaining power, scrutinize your years and notice that you do not change such as they, Elizabeth would be accused of witchcraft.”
Mouse wouldn’t let her cancel this auspicious day again. “Mistress, our life of comfort,” he said, his hand over hers, “hath come with the burden of isolation. Without making peace with my past, how am I to understand my present, or plan for my prolonged future? Your beauty and strength do remain unchanged in each of my years. I grow faster than a man doth grow, and you hath assured me that I shall not die sooner than they. You mend my wounds and the perversions of your elldyr creft upon my body. I hath nothing to offer you but that which is already my bond and duty: my body and life, to be as ready to yield itself for your service, as from you it hath received all good things. With that in mind, my beloved Mistress, neither am I human nor Daoine Tor. Without the benefit of my past, so am I broken. I ask that you mend this wound within me.”
Tears brimmed in Viper’s eyes. Her view shifted over his shoulder in the direction of the Towyr, her line of sight as blurred as her relationship with his mother. Viper didn’t know who’s righteousness was correct any longer, hers or the queen she had crowned.
The time for disclosure had arrived. “Elizabeth wanted you, the child she had promised to me,” Viper said, slowly wringing her hands. “In refusing herself a husband, she denied herself the love she could give unto a child of her own. Elizabeth knew no true family. Her mother was killed when Elizabeth was three years old and her father disregarded her. She would have raised you as her Prince, yet I took you from her. I would not let Elizabeth, nor any humaine, tarnish my magic within you. I am confident that she hates me for it. For, why else would she seek my enemy to win the battle in the Channel? Or, if she is under the control of Annys, then both our lives are at risk.”
Mouse paled at her confession. Viper had never told him about how he came into her guardianship, especially after his reaction to Robert’s death.
“I hath no other secrets.” Viper straightened the lines of her gown. “Stay here. I sent a message to Elizabeth of my arrival, with words a-humbled and kind. It is your petition I entreat before her, not my own. Unto you do I promise that if ’tis safe, I will take you to her. Though she may be fickle, Elizabeth loves ideals and ideally loves. To her, you will be perfection. You hath her spirit, Robert’s body, and my magic.” She turned away from Mouse, unwilling to show him her tears. “Fear not. She will not reject you.”
Viper strode to Whitehall Palace in central London without his answer, her footfall muffled like a thief’s upon the stone. The fog blocked her view of Mouse, protecting her from the emotions on his face.
Her reluctant feet carried her through the skeletal, cold passages of Whitehall until she came upon the addition built by Elizabeth for her marriage negotiation with the French Duke of Anjou over two decades ago. The grandiose room, named the Banqueting House, echoed with emptiness.
Elizabeth would soon depart for Richmond, a building warmer and drier than Whitehall, as she had every winter after her Coronation. Every furnishing she wanted had been sent on ahead via the Thamys when the river’s frost cleared and allowed passage for her heavily laden barges.
Sculpted plaster panels of dancing men and women in brightly coloured costumes bedecked the double high walls, permanent guests in gay repose. A wooden divider, carved with hundreds of roses on snaking vines, segregated a narrow portion of the room off from the rest. Elizabeth once flirted through the holes in the screen with the large-nosed Duke of Anjou hidden behind it, much to Lord Robert’s disgust and Viper’s amusement. The building survived the failed courtship with the French Duke. Viper wished she could say the same of her friendship with Elizabeth as she could of the structure.
A gilded portrait leaned on the wall across from the main entrance. Viper instantly recognized the frame of Tudor roses. She took a moment to do the same with the subject of the portrait. The words Semper Eadem, Always the Same, floated above the head of a gaunt, aged Elizabeth on a black background. Turstin’s painting of Viper and a younger Elizabeth had been eradicated, the newer paint strokes firm and precise, without Turstin’s elldyr-enhanced realism. The posed Elizabeth wore her typical display of England’s wealth in a cloth-of-gold dress, embroidered, slashed, and augmented with gems and peals. A gold-trimmed ruff encircled her neck and the sheerest silk veil dangled from her crown.
Elizabeth gripped a small black snake in her right fist, a reptile representative of Viper.
Viper’s body turned colder than Death’s kiss. Not only had Elizabeth removed her from the portrait, the humaine had reduced Viper’s significance to a mere beast Elizabeth could strangle.
A woman’s scolding voice caught Viper’s attention from outside the hall. Viper concealed herself with her glamour. A woman, with an unflattering face that showed her many years in great detail, chased after an older yet more agile Elizabeth. Neither of them reacted to Viper.
“Majesty, you hath recently o’ercome a bad cold. You cannot conduc
t yourself about the palace with your bodice so open!”
Elizabeth wore a damask dress of black and white shot with silver thread. Crimson taffeta pulled through the slashed sleeves. The front of her bodice opened beyond the waist, exposing her sagging breasts. She twisted and pulled at the several strands of pears around her wrists as she swept past Viper into the banqueting room. Her ceruse-caked skin looked dead.
Viper didn’t recognize the other woman. The manner of her clothes and sycophantic tone, suggested that she was one of Elizabeth’s ladies-in-waiting.
“I know you feel the heat flash of an older woman’s years,” the Lady said. “If you let your surgeon bleed you, you will be much improved. Let him bring your humors back into balance.” When she reached the doorway, the woman’s tone softened. “My queen, you hath outlived eight Popes, four French Kings, and many assassination plots. The French Ambassador writes most unflatteringly of your late life changes, Bess. I warrant that you might not survive the poison of his pen.”
Elizabeth spun on her heel and the bite in her eyes crushed her attendant’s demeanour. “God reward thee treble fold for thy keen observation of my deportment!” Elizabeth gesticulated with increasing swings of her arms. “How is it that I am not free in my own palaces to conduct myself as ’twould please myself? I do not wish to eat or drink, and yet it is thrust upon me. My Privy Council defied me about Mary, Essex plotted against me, and now the women who attend me chastise my virtue!” she yelled. Her wig, festooned with vibrant red curls and shining diamonds, careened to one side as she spoke. The other woman reached forwards to adjust her queen’s disheveled appearance. Elizabeth slapped her hand away. “I have no need of you. Be gone!”
Elizabeth may as well have slapped the Lady-in-Waiting in the face, judging by her reaction. Viper didn’t doubt that Elizabeth had done exactly that on at least one occasion. The woman curtsied, her head low, then retreated from the room, facing Elizabeth until her feet reached the hall. Then the Lady bustled back to her own rooms, snivelling.
“Few maids escape to seventy years such as hath I lived.” Elizabeth’s bitter voice echoed across the barren wooden floor. She turned away from the entrance and walked to the plaster sculptures, where she traced her finger on the painted shoe of a dancing maid. “If I had birthed babies and raised palatial structures, as had my father had afore me, how infinite would be my legacy? As long as the immortality of the magic child you spirited away from me?”
Viper no longer held pretense at her presence. “You knew I was here?” She kept her voice neutral, hiding her conflicted emotions.
When Elizabeth turned, she held the Parhelion in her hand. “I was aforewarned.”
Viper’s skin turned as pale as Elizabeth’s. “The amulet. How? You threw it away.”
“Robert retrieved the Parhelion from the field during the latter part of the same day you ripped a child from my womb. Knowing well the variability of my temper, he kept it with his person. In thanks for the medicine and doctors I hath sent unto him upon his illness after the battle in the Channel, he returned the amulet with his unending love and humble gratitude.” Recounting her life-long friend, lover and key member of her Court, made Elizabeth’s chin quiver. “The last missive he wrote unto me was the last letter he would ever write me, arriving, as it did, days after his death. Little would he know, the Parhelion came too late.”
“Too late because you hath colluded with my enemy?”
“I sold my soul to a V’Braed demon long before Annys conquered the Spanish Armada,” Elizabeth spat. Her anger flushed through the lead mixture on her skin.
Any love Viper held for Elizabeth boiled off. The immortal leapt forwards, long nails ready to tear her old friend apart.
The Parhelion bombarded Viper with its powerful protection before she reached her target. Her body flew across the room and her back collided into the carved divider. Viper pitched forwards at a sharp angle, piling into the floor planks. Dark blood trickled from a jagged laceration at her temple.
Elizabeth’s upper lip curled into a sneer. “Annys spake true. You do not care for me, elsewise you would offer your sympathies at the loss of my beloved, my Robin, not attack me with your asperity like a wild boar.” Elizabeth brandished the Parhelion like a knight’s shield in front of her. A searing energy beam, fed by Elizabeth’s aeir, exploded from the talisman into the floorboards. The smell of burning lacquer curled Viper’s nose. Elizabeth advanced upon her seelie wicht. The power of the Parhelion burned a line in the floor ahead of Elizabeth’s steps.
“You wanted me to be Queen of England to satisfy your hunger upon the people of my kingdom. I was more your pawn than any man, or woman, was a pawn of mine.” She swung her arm and the Parhelion’s brilliant light arced on the floor beside the immortal. Viper retracted her left arm and howled in agony. A long mark had scorched the ground. Its twin burned her left arm. Erupting blisters stuck to her the tatters of her clothes.
Elizabeth’s eyes flashed with loathing. “Hath you come upon me now, to feed upon me in my late years? I am not so feeble as the rumours would make me. You are not welcome here. I belong to my people, not to your gluttony.”
Viper pushed herself up with her good arm. “I saved your life!”
“You cursed my life!” Elizabeth open and closed her empty hand, leaving deepening nail marks with each reflexive action. She circled Viper like a predator. “Burghley wanted me wed and you pushed me to indecision. My womb was not barren by nature, but by your unnatural influence.”
“Merry, your kingdom hath bettered for it.”
“Did it?” Elizabeth wielded the amulet’s power. The energy passed behind Viper and pigeonholed her where the two lines crossed. “You are not the one who o’erthrew the Spanish for me.” Lines of sweat tore apart Elizabeth’s makeup.
Viper realized she couldn’t reason with Elizabeth’s escalating madness. The immortal thought of Mouse and his request to meet his mother. If Viper wounded Elizabeth, Mouse would never forgive his guardian.
Viper placed her hands on the polished floor. She eased herself up onto her knees. Elizabeth slashed a third time, searing a line into the floor on Viper’s right. A segment of her overskirt lay on the other side of the line, where it had been cut off by the beam.
“Elizabeth,” Viper whispered, the queen’s name her final plea.
Elizabeth glowered in front of her and scored the fourth line of the trap with the power of the Parhelion, slow and intentional. A yellow flame smelling of sulphur, erupted around Viper when the four lines connected. Viper realized too late: this was a trap.
The Sage of Mort Lake jumped out from behind the dividing wall. “Marvellous, Your Majesty!” John Dee had arms full of equipment and glass objects of varying shapes. “My alchemic mixture and your amulet hath brought forth your seelie wicht to my eyes.” Traces of the sulphur powder that had been disguised on the floor dusted his knees and black robes. A flat, polished obsidian pendant hung low from a chain around his neck atop a lengthy grey beard. Thick white hairs jutted out from his eyebrows like claws.
“Him!” Viper’s stomach turned to lead. Dee leaned in to examine her, despite her vehement reaction. A sphere of obsidian rolled out from among the objects he carried. He fumbled to catch the ball and a polished gold ball slipped to the ground without denting. Viper would have laughed at the man’s folly, if she didn’t hate him so much. Spheres rescued without damage, he set up his equipment around her. A second, unidentified man loomed in the shadows beyond the screen.
“Elizabeth sent thee from her Court after that night you brought your Medium to Hampton, charlatan,” Viper growled, disgusted that Elizabeth still kept the company of this magus. “Burghley would turn over in his grave if he saw thee here.”
“How dare you speak Lord Burghley’s name?” Elizabeth’s tears doubled. “He was as near a father to me as I had ever wanted. In his last months, I fed him porridge by the spoonful and read to him when his eyesight failed. I wonder now what life, what legacy, wo
uld be mine, had I lived in deference to him, not you.” A sob made her chest heave. “A husband and children may hath stayed my tears, that I would not end my days so alone.”
Viper seized her opportunity. “You hath a child, Elizabeth.” She eased herself upwards.
“Who? The man who styled himself my bastard because the Spanish fished him out of the waters in San Sebastien?” Elizabeth didn’t hide the scorn in her laugh. “Arthur Dudley was a pigeon of King Phillip for three years. I never met him, nor hath I a care to know him. He, and his false claim, vanished from Walsingham’s network of spies some thirteen years ago. Or,” she said with her hands on her hips, “do you speak of the child you put in my womb, then did reave from my body? The selfsame infant I could not prove to his father existed whilst his father lived? That child was never mine to love.”
The lengthy answer distracted both Elizabeth and Dee long enough for Viper to bring herself into a crouch beneath the fullness of her skirt. She extended her powerful legs and aimed for the ceiling. Her left fingertips grazed a painted roof beam. The injured arm was too weak to grasp the wood. Viper extended her elldyr creft from her right hand as she descended towards the floor. Like a rope and grapple hook, the purple energy fastened around a decorative corner of the beam. She suspended high above the floor, straining with effort.
Elizabeth threw the strands of pearls from her wrists at the Daoine Tor who had once been her closest ally. “I am your queen! I command you to come here!” The strands split when they impacted upon Viper and her elldyr, raining pearls upon Elizabeth below.
Elizabeth thrashed her hands over her head in protection and her wig slipped off, exposing thinned hair that had recessed into the crown of her head. Old age had eclipsed England’s virgin moon goddess.
The Queen's Viper Page 39