She avoided the grand dockhouse she remembered from her previous visit. Instead, she asked the oarsman to take her to the servants’ wharf, where deliveries were made. From there, it was easy to mingle with the palace servants, who all thought that she worked in a different quarter of the palace than theirs.
It wasn’t long before Petra found the kitchens, and Jessie.
“Hello,” said Petra, “I’m—”
“Oh, I remember you. You’re Kit’s friend. What’s this?” Jessie pointed at Petra’s sack.
“Turnips. Do you want them?”
“If you’ll help me chop.” Jessie passed Petra a knife. “I’m guessing that, since you don’t look like a lady today, you don’t mind not acting like one.”
As they cut the vegetables, Petra asked, “Do you remember the morning Gabriel Thorn died?”
“Didn’t Kit tell you?”
“Tell me what?”
“What I told him. The same thing I said to the queen’s councillors—Walsingham and Dee—when they questioned me. What curious eyes you have, girl! Well, I don’t mind repeating to you what I said. You can’t keep a secret here.” She waved a rough, red hand at the kitchen. “We’re a pack of gossips.”
No wonder Kit knows the kitchen staff so well, Astrophil commented.
“The guards who walk the hallway by the library say that Thorn never met anyone that morning,” Jessie began, “and as far as I know or care, he didn’t. But I was the one who popped upstairs to see if Thorn needed anything. And from the smell of him, he’d already had plenty of wine, and it being early in the morning, too! He was muttering to himself. Total nonsense, as far as I could tell, but I would have thought that even if Thorn didn’t meet anybody that day, he meant to, because he was saying, ‘Cotton’s got the globe. I have to tell him. Why isn’t he here already?’ ”
“Cotton? A globe? Tell who? Tell Cotton, or tell somebody else? Who’s ‘he’?”
“How am I to know?”
Ask about Raleigh and Dee, Astrophil suggested.
“Could Thorn have been talking about seeing Walter Raleigh?” Petra asked.
“Raleigh?” Jessie grinned. “He was in the palace, all right, but he went nowhere near the library that morning.”
“How do you know?”
“Why, because he’s a rake.”
“A rake?”
“A flirt. He was making pretty with Eleanor over there, and if you doubt that, her blush will tell you the truth.”
Petra glanced over at the young woman standing within earshot, stuffing a game hen, her cheeks on fire. “I see. Well, do you think Thorn wanted to meet with John Dee?”
“Maybe. They’re both on the queen’s council, and see each other often. I hear they don’t much care for each other, though.”
Ask about Walsingham, said Astrophil.
Him? Petra remembered the self-important man, with his pointed beard and hair oil that smelled like dead flowers. Why?
On that day you went to this palace for the first time, Walsingham was very convinced that Thorn died of heart failure. A murderer would, of course, want everyone to think that the victim died of natural causes.
“What about Francis Walsingham?” Petra asked Jessie.
“Well, I suppose that whatever’s true for Dee is true for him, right? It’s just as likely that Thorn would have met with one as with the other. And Walsingham’s got more power, politically speaking, than Dee. Walsingham’s the South, and he sure lets us know it when we have to prepare a special dish for him!”
“Thanks, Jessie.” Petra handed her the knife.
“You’ll always get a straight answer from me. And I’ll tell you something else: you and Kit are two peas in a pod. Here you are, echoing the very same questions he asked.”
Astrophil said, What I would like to know is this: why has he not shared this information with you, Petra, if he really wishes to help?
“Jessie . . . have you seen Kit lately?”
Jessie paused before replying, and Petra instantly regretted her question, because it made her sound like someone who had been kissed and forgotten—and this, it seemed, was exactly the case.
Sympathetically, the woman said, “No, dear.”
Petra left the kitchen, left the palace, left the grounds, and left the servants’ wharf, but as the hired boat rowed toward the center of London, Petra couldn’t leave behind the dull weight of rejection and disappointment. And by the time her boat docked cityside, anger had kindled within her. Kit owed her some answers.
Petra walked through west London, searching for Shoe Lane. This was where she and Kit had stopped, and he had said his home was nearby, and he had confessed that he didn’t want her to leave England.
Was this why he hadn’t told her about his conversation with Jessie? Was Kit only pretending to help Petra? Maybe he was really just trying to keep her in London.
Petra sped up her pace. When she reached Shoe Lane, she began to stop strangers, asking after Kit. She turned from street to street, but with no success.
She kicked at a pile of trash.
Where was he?
“TOM.” Neel nudged him.
Tomik was staring straight ahead as they walked toward the Liberties.
“Hey,” Neel persisted.
“I’m not talking to you. If you don’t want to try to find Petra, that’s your—”
Neel grabbed Tomik’s shoulder and dragged him to a halt. “Look!” He pointed at Tomik’s pocket.
It was glowing. Tomik snatched the crystal from his pocket.
Neel and Tomik had almost reached the Liberties when they veered west with eager feet. They began to run, the Glowstone shining a deeper and brighter blue in Tomik’s palm.
Neel gasped, and Tomik wrenched his gaze away from the crystal.
There, standing not ten feet from them, was a tall girl. Her dark, glossy hair was loose, her chin a little square. She was scowling in a way they knew very well.
Tomik’s shout was triumphant. “Petra!”
26
In the Liberties
SHE TURNED at the sound of her name. Her silver eyes lit up like stars. Then she hurtled across the distance between them and leaped into Tomik’s arms. He caught her and spun in a circle.
“Put me down!” She laughed, not meaning what she said.
And that was a good thing, because Tomik didn’t let go of her until Neel cleared his throat.
A tin leg poked out of Petra’s hair and swept it aside. “Tomik! Neel!” Astrophil, perched as usual on her ear, waved another leg. “How extraordinary to find you here! Is it really you?”
Petra went to Neel. He stood, uncertain and still. She slipped her hand into his. It had changed since the time they had sworn a blood oath to each other. It had grown hard, like an animal’s paw. Neel shifted his fingers to turn her palm up toward the sky and pressed his thumb against her fencing calluses.
Slyly, he said, “All right, Petali. What have you been up to?”
Petra smiled, and her face held a joy that bursts to life only when an impossible dream has come true.
She bubbled with questions as her friends led her through the Liberties. This part of town, which had once intrigued Petra, suddenly became uninteresting in the face of the miracle that had made Tomik and Neel appear before her.
“How did you get here?” she asked.
“By ship,” said Tomik.
“But how do you and Neel even know each other?”
Neel warily glanced at Tomik.
“Um,” Tomik began, “when you disappeared from Okno, I tried to find you and . . . got lost. I ran into Neel, and . . . we didn’t know who the other was at first. But then we figured it out, and . . . became friends.”
“Exactly,” said Neel.
“How did you find us?” Petra asked.
“And how did you know that we were in London?” Astrophil added.
Tomik jammed a closed fist deep into his pocket.
Neel answered, “Just luck, I g
uess.”
“Luck?” said Astrophil.
“I don’t believe you,” Petra stated.
“Well, it’s a bit more complicated than luck,” Neel admitted. “We went to a scryer, and—”
“You scryed?”
“No need to count the ways in which I’m not the wisest fellow ever born. I’ve heard it all before. But the scrying did give us a clue to where you were. During the scrying, Tomik asked about you.”
“Neel said, ‘London,’ ” Tomik added. “And then he mentioned something else that we don’t understand. He said an English word: cotton.”
“Wait,” said Petra. “You don’t mean Robert Cotton, do you?”
THEY SAT IN Neel and Tomik’s room at the Sign of the Spoked Wheel. Crowded around a small table by a smaller window, the friends talked for hours. They didn’t discuss everything that had happened to them since they last saw each other, but they came close.
Then Petra said, “Tell me more about the Celestial Globe.”
“The globe doesn’t matter,” Tomik curtly replied. “We found you. We’ll sail away as soon as we tell Treb and Andras.”
“Right.” Neel rolled his eyes. “Treb’s going to be oh so pleased with that idea.”
“Petra cannot leave London,” said Astrophil, and then explained.
“You can’t be serious,” said Tomik, when the spider had finished telling them about Dee’s hold on Petra.
Neel groaned. “Pet, you’ve got to break that mental link with Dee.”
“I’d love to. Just tell me how.”
Neel spread his hands helplessly. “I’m not a mind-magician. But we’re talking about something that’s a lot like scrying. So my guess is that you should get him to look at something shiny long enough, then control his attention, and . . . well, I don’t know what you do next.”
“You and John Dee handle metal on a regular basis,” Astrophil reminded Petra. “It would not be hard to make him focus on a shiny object.”
Though Petra didn’t think Dee would be easily deceived, she nodded. “I can try.”
“Now,” said Astrophil, “let us discuss the globe.”
“Why?” Tomik tilted his chair back, folding his arms across his chest. “What’s the point? Before, we didn’t know whether Neel was talking about the Celestial Globe or Petra when he scryed. Now we do. The globe’s not here. Petra is.”
Astrophil jumped to the window and began to pace along the sill. “At the scrying, you asked Neel about Petra. Treb asked him about the globe. Neel gave the same response to you both. Perhaps the globe and Petra are in London.”
They all turned to Neel.
“What’re you looking at me for?” he asked. “I don’t know.”
“Say the Celestial Globe is here,” Tomik said. “So what? It’s got nothing to do with Petra.”
“No?” said Astrophil. “Then why did Ariel mention ‘the heavens pressed into a ball’? That description sounds a great deal like the Celestial Globe. If the word terrestrial refers to the earth, then celestial refers to the sky—the heavens.”
Petra studied Tomik. “You’re worried, aren’t you?” she told him. “Not because you think that the globe isn’t here, or that it has nothing to do with me, but because it is and it does, and you think it’s dangerous.”
Tomik brought his chair down with a thud. “All I know is that the two globes combined would give someone too much power.”
“Enough to die for? Enough to kill someone for?” Petra dug Robert Cotton’s title page out of her pocket and spread it on the table. “Look at this: An Account of My Many Astonishing Voyages, by Gerard Mercator. Neel, you said that Mercator made the globes. This title page is a copy of a book that belonged to Cotton. What if he had the globe, and was murdered because somebody wanted it for himself?”
“That is an excellent deduction,” said Astrophil. “It is a pity, however, that you are solving the wrong murder. What about your wager with John Dee? What about Thorn?”
“The deaths are connected.”
“How?”
Petra wasn’t sure, but she knew she was right. “Well . . . they were murdered around the same time.”
“Yet they were killed in very different ways,” Astrophil said. “Thorn was poisoned. Cotton was beaten with a blunt object. This does not suggest the work of the same person.”
Then Petra remembered. “Jessie.”
“Pardon?”
“Jessie! She said that Thorn was talking to himself in the Whitehall Palace library. He said, ‘Cotton’s got the globe. I have to tell him. Why isn’t he here already?’ It’s so obvious! Cotton had the Celestial Globe, and Thorn found out. He arranged a meeting to tell someone about it. The guards claim that no one was in the library except Thorn, but let’s say our murderer is well connected—he could have bribed the guards to keep quiet. Or maybe he’s magically talented enough, like Dee, to slip in and out of the library with no one noticing.”
“You don’t need magic to do that,” Neel reminded her.
“The murderer meets with Thorn, hears about the globe, and gives him wine mixed with quicksilver. Thorn’s a drunk. It’s morning, but he’s already had some wine, and wants more. He takes the poisoned cup.”
“But who carries poison around with them?” Tomik asked skeptically.
“I don’t know,” Petra replied, frustrated. “Dee might.”
“Perhaps,” said Astrophil. “However, please try to be objective, Petra. Continue with your explanation of what you think happened.”
There wasn’t much more to say. “After the murderer killed Thorn so that nobody else would know about the globe, he went to Cotton’s house. Cotton gets his head bashed in. The globe is taken—or, at least, the murderer tries to take it.”
“Let me get this straight,” said Tomik. “If we figure out who killed Thorn, Dee won’t try to stop Petra from leaving England, and he will give her information about Master Kronos.”
“That is what he promised,” said Astrophil.
“And this murder mystery is definitely connected with the Celestial Globe,” Tomik continued.
“Seems like,” said Neel.
“Then let’s make a list of everything Ariel said, everything it could mean, and all of our suspects.”
“An excellent suggestion,” said Astrophil. He loved lists.
Neel rubbed his temples. He hated lists.
“So who could have killed Thorn?” asked Tomik.
Petra counted them on her fingers. “John Dee, Francis Walsingham, and Walter Raleigh.”
“What about Dee’s wife?” Neel asked. “She’s got plenty of reason to kill Thorn.”
“She said she didn’t do it,” Petra replied. Then she realized how silly that sounded.
Neel scoffed. “You’re too trusting by half.”
“According to Jessie, Thorn planned to meet a man,” Astrophil pointed out. “Thorn was wondering when he would arrive.”
“Just because this Jessie person said so? You’re putting an awful lot of faith in the word of somebody remembering something she eavesdropped. Put Agatha Dee down on the list,” Neel insisted, so Tomik did. He and Petra hunched over the table, and Astrophil walked across the list, imperiously ordering them to add a detail here and there. Neel stretched out on one of the two pallets on the floor. He didn’t know how to read or write, and saw no reason to learn.
“You could at least pay attention,” the spider lectured Neel.
“I am.” He crossed his arms behind his head. “And I’ll prove it. In my humble opinion, you’re all thinking about something in the wrong way.”
“Would you care to elaborate?” said Astrophil.
“Ariel said ‘murder,’ ‘betrayal,’ and ‘assassin,’ and you’re clumping the three together as if they were the same thing. Well, I guess Thorn and Cotton were betrayed, ’cause someone snuffed ’em. And sure, you could say they were assassinated. But when Dee conjured that air spirit—and believe me, Pet, that was a crazy thing to do. Don’t you
know Ariel could have ripped your spine out of your throat?—it was asked about Petra.” He faced her. “Dee’s eager to train you. But in what? Swordplay? Predicting his moves? That ain’t normal. Those are exactly the sort of tricks you’ve got to learn to kill someone on the sly. What if Ariel wasn’t talking about Thorn or Cotton? What if the word assassin means you?”
27
The Queen’s Council
JOHN DEE WAS WORRIED. He tucked his arms into the belled sleeves of his cloak as Robert Cecil moved to stand by him. Cecil said, “You cannot protect her forever, John.”
“That is for the queen to decide.”
Cecil nodded as best as his crooked back would allow. When the doors to the queen’s reception chamber were opened, Dee and the rest of her councillors filed in.
Seated next to the queen was Prince Rodolfo, who looked up in surprise. When he spoke, his English was perfect. “Your Majesty, surely you do not need your council. My request is such a little matter.”
“Your Highness, my councillors merely honor you with their presence,” Queen Elizabeth replied.
“Of course.” The prince fidgeted in the uncomfortable (if grand) chair next to the queen. “I believe that, somewhere in your great realm, there is a girl—”
“I daresay there are thousands of girls in England. What of it?”
“This particular girl is mine. She is Bohemian, which makes her my subject. Her name is Petra Kronos, and I ask that she be given to me.”
“If she happens to be in my country.”
“She is.”
“Are you suggesting that I do not know whether she is or is not?” The queen’s tone was dangerous.
“Certainly you must know,” answered the prince.
“Then you accuse me of hiding her from you?”
The prince looked flustered. “No. But if she is here, I demand that she be turned over to me.”
“Demand?” The queen turned to her councillors, catching Dee’s eye. “Am I to be ordered about by a stripling boy? You”—the queen pointed a knobby finger at the prince, and it did not shake—“what are you, Prince Rodolfo? A third son. A ruler of a forgettable country. Do you truly believe Emperor Karl will choose you to succeed him? Go, you political nothing, and return to make demands of me when there is some possibility that I will listen.”
The Celestial Globe: The Kronos Chronicles: Book II Page 21