Air of Treason, An: A Sir Robert Carey Mystery (Sir Robert Carey Mysteries) (12 page)

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 had 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 bunched 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.

He felt the Queen’s hand on his shoulder which was going numb because of the large Gentleman Pensioner kneeling on it.

“Robin, I have brought my own Doctor Lopez who is an expert in poisons, one of my lord Essex’s physicians as well,” said the Queen’s voice. He frowned. The last thing he wanted was a doctor—he didn’t want to die.

“He has purged, Your Majesty,” said Lopez’ nasal Portuguese voice. “He has drunk some water. I recommend the empiric treatment of this belladonna poisoning, as suspected by Senhor Tovey. I ’ave a decoction of beanpods which has been efficacious in the past…” A click of fingers, somebody trotted off into the night, he heard them, what the hell was a decoction of beanpods?

He tried to shift the weight of the two Gentlemen Pensioners with their knees bruising his shoulders and couldn’t. The Gentlemen were not scrawny young clerks to be knocked sideways like ninepins. There was another argument going on above him, this time in English.

“No, he certainly can’t stay here. So long as this is no illness, not plague…”

Nobody thought it was plague, especially not Dr. Lopez. That was good to hear. The argument went on while he drifted in and out, sometimes on his cloud, sometimes wishing they’d stop holding him down so he could go and kill the bastard who had hurt Elizabeth Widdrington.

Cool bony fingers touched his forehead.

“Robin, listen. I’m having you moved into the manor house,” said the Queen in a voice that brooked no argument. “We’ll kick out one of Essex’s pack of hangers-on and make room.”

She patted his cheek and he heard the rustling of dressing gowns as she left with her two ladies. It wasn’t the first time he’d seen his aunt in her dressing gown, after all. Not that he’d seen her this time, since his eyes weren’t working at all.

The weights came off his shoulders and hips, but something was tangling his wrists so he couldn’t lift his arms. He tried to sit up, was pushed down firmly and a strap came across his chest. Goddamn it to hell, he had to get up, he didn’t have time for this nonsense, he needed his broadsword, he had to save Elizabeth. He tried to shout, but couldn’t, he wanted to piss but couldn’t. He wanted to see but couldn’t. He was hot as hell again and the world was turning back to silk veils as he somehow jerked high in the air, blinking at the shadowed stone forest of the church, the branches in their orderly stone patterns and the gargoyles laughing at him. Christ, where was his sword, where was Dodd? He was somehow bobbing along on his back, a stone lintel went past above him and now he was flying through the sky where the stars were and now he was on the other side of the fake painted silk walls of the world.