Chantress Alchemy (4 page)

“Close that window,” he commanded, looking at me. This time I reluctantly followed orders.

The last thing I saw before the curtain fell were children leaping into the air for grapes and biscuits.

“Boudicca blesses you, lady!” The cry came as the curtain sealed out the light.

The syllables rang out plainly:
Boo-di-kah
. But all the same, I was sure I’d misheard. The only Boudicca I knew of was the warrior queen who tried to drive the Romans out of Britain. Lady Helaine had told me the story, for female power was something she had prized, and Boudicca, though not a Chantress, had been a woman to be reckoned with.

Why would anyone now be talking of Boudicca, dead these thousand years and more? And talking of her here and now, in this stricken town? Surely there was some mistake. The only concern here was hunger.

Putting the words out of my mind, I sank back against the cushions. The carriage lurched forward, and I was trapped in my velvet prison once more.

Still, there were worse fates. . . .

Bread more than twice the price that it was last year, and wheat in short supply everywhere
. That’s what the King’s men had told Norrie. And I hadn’t bothered to listen, let alone think about what it might mean for ordinary people.

Perhaps it was just as well I’d been dragged out of my safe haven.

The next day the weather warmed up, and the carriage wheels had to plow through mud. Encased in the nauseating confines of the carriage, I was unable to see the outside world. I only guessed we were drawing close to Greenwich Palace when we made several wrenching stops, each accompanied by creaking gates and guards shouting for passwords.

I braced myself as the carriage swerved once again and slowed to a halt. From somewhere outside, Knollys shouted, “We’ve arrived, my lady!”

Apprehensive, I reached for the curtain. Before I could tug it back, the carriage door swung open, revealing a footman in bright red livery, who offered me his gloved and spotless hand. Behind him a riot of men, horses, and dogs gamboled in a courtyard bounded by high brick walls.

“You’re a day late, Knollys,” a young man called out. His tawny hair and striking good looks set him apart from the crowd, and he wore his high boots with a swagger.

“We made the best time we could, Lord Gabriel,” Knollys said with dignity. “And we had to take great care, given who was with us.”

“The Chantress?” Lord Gabriel’s dark eyes gleamed. “She’s in there?”

My throat tightened. Already it was beginning: the curiosity, the whispers, the calculations. And I had only just arrived.

But there was no going back now. Squaring my shoulders, I took the hand the footman had offered me and stepped out of the carriage.

“My lady Chantress.” Lord Gabriel swept a deep bow and approached me with a devastating smile. He was perhaps a year or two older than I was, and even more handsome up close. “May I escort you inside?”

“I will escort her inside myself,” Knollys said curtly. “My lady, if you will follow?”

I let him lead the way, but out of the corner of my eye I saw Lord Gabriel sauntering behind.

When we entered the palace, more footmen came rushing up to us. “The King commands that the Lady Chantress be brought to her rooms, where she may rest for a short while before joining him in the Crimson Chamber,” one announced to Knollys.

“If that is what the King wishes, then so be it,” said Knollys.

After he left me, I followed two of the footmen up a grand staircase. At the top, Lord Gabriel caught up with me.

“You must be tired from your journey.” He matched my pace with easy grace.

“Not very.” I didn’t want to admit to a stranger how exhausted I was, or how the horrible lurching in my stomach still hadn’t quite gone away, but my feet betrayed me: I tripped.

He caught my arm. “You are perhaps more tired than you think. But never fear. I’ll see you safely to your room.”

Righting myself, I pulled back from him. “I thought that’s what the footmen were for.”

He gave me a lazy grin. “Ah, but will they look after you as I can? I think not.”

He spoke in the witty tones that courtiers used when flirting with grand ladies. I felt out of my element, and yet flattered as well. Nat might have no time for me, but it seemed others did.

“Besides, you can never have too many guides in Greenwich Palace,” Lord Gabriel continued as we followed the footmen through a room bedecked with portraits and silk-fringed furniture, on a carpet so thick and soft it was like walking on sand. “It’s a calendar house, you know.”

“A calendar house?”

“Twelve courtyards, fifty-two staircases, three hundred and sixty-five rooms.” He waved a careless hand as we passed through another grand salon. “Well, more or less, anyway. The place wasn’t so big in Plantagenet times, I’m told, but the Tudors and Stuarts more than doubled it. And now here we are, in a palace like a labyrinth.”

“With a monster in the middle?” Wasn’t that how the story of the labyrinth went?

His eyes met mine, suddenly watchful. “Indeed.” He bowed
once more as we reached the door leading to my rooms. “I will leave you here, my lady. If I can be of any help to you, you have only to call on me: Charles, Lord Gabriel, at your service.”

As he walked away, the footmen opened the door. Both this and the inner door had golden lions on them, with glorious manes. After I murmured my thanks, the footmen withdrew.

Alone, I surveyed my new quarters. The room I stood in was as large as the entire cottage I shared with Norrie in Norfolk. Despite its size it was surprisingly warm, owing to a great fire blazing in the marble hearth and tapestries that lined every wall, sealing out the cold. Cozy, however, the room was not. The tapestries, enormous and dramatic, depicted a royal hunt in merciless pursuit of a unicorn. In the corner stood a bed as big as a boat, an extravagant affair of red and gold with hangings that reached nearly to the ceiling. Even the ceiling itself was decorated: an elaborate cloverleaf pattern twined across it, high above my head.

Glancing through an open doorway, I saw another room adjoining mine: smaller and less showy, with a much more modest bed. While it, too, was hung with tapestries, they looked from here to be much plainer, and the room overall was much darker, having merely one tiny window.

Still chilled from the journey, I retreated to the fire. Only after I’d let the heat soak into me did I walk over to the window, large and cantilevered, with a seat carved in the bay beneath it. I’d hoped for a view of the Thames, which Knollys had told me ran right past the palace. Instead, I saw the gardens, the clipped hedges like a stark maze in the low February light.

Behind me, I heard the door open. I turned, and my breath left my body.

Nat was standing in the doorway.

We stared at each other without moving, and for an instant I could have sworn that I saw longing in his eyes. But then he advanced into the room, shoving the door shut behind him, and all I could see was a desperate fury.

“What are you doing here?” His voice was raw. “Why couldn’t you stay away?”

I’d thought I was prepared for rejection. In that moment, I discovered I was not.

I tried to contain my shock and hurt. “It’s the King who called me here. It’s nothing to do with you.”

“It’s everything to do with me.” His eyes were as fierce as I’d ever seen them. “You shouldn’t have come.”

My hurt turned to anger. “And who are you to speak so? You never came at Christmas. You haven’t written since November. If you think I’m going to listen—”

“Lucy.”

It was all he said, my name alone. But the pained confusion in his face stopped me cold.

“They wouldn’t let me go to you for Christmas,” he said. “But they said if I agreed to that, I could still write. I wrote to you all through November and December and January. Did my letters not reach you?”

“No.” A sharp joy blossomed inside me: He
had
written. He
had
.

“You didn’t get them? Any of them?” He drew closer, and I saw
that what anger remained in him was not directed at me. “Lucy, is that why you stopped writing to me?”

“I—I thought you had stopped writing to
me.
”

“No. Never.” He took my hand.

Such a small thing, holding hands. A very long way from the kisses we had shared last summer. Yet as his fingers gripped mine, my heart beat faster.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have greeted you like that. I should have guessed you didn’t know—”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, and it was true. It didn’t. Not now. “But I don’t understand. Who said you couldn’t visit me?”

“The King’s Council,” he said.

“But you’re
on
the Council.” Nat was only a little older than I was, but he had been a key figure in the Invisible College—an alliance of mathematicians, engineers, and natural philosophers that had led the resistance against Scargrave. He had also helped the King cope with the immediate aftermath of Scargrave’s fall. All this had led to his appointment.

“In name only, these days,” Nat said. “I’ve been away most of the autumn and winter, and even when I’m here, I’m hardly ever called to meetings anymore. It’s the Inner Council—the men at the top—who are running things now.”

I tried to picture Sir Barnaby Gadding, the dapper aristocrat who headed the Council, forbidding Nat to see me. “But why would Sir Barnaby do such a thing?”

“He wouldn’t,” Nat said bleakly. “But he’s not on the Council anymore.”

“He isn’t?” I was surprised—and worried.

“The last time I saw Sir Barnaby was in early September, when he sent me out to investigate the wheat blight. I didn’t get back to Court till late October, and by then he’d already stepped down. He’d started having fits, I was told; it made him too ill to do business. So new men had to take his place.”

“But why would they stop you from visiting me?” I persisted.

Nat’s hand tensed around mine. “It’s complicated. Tell me, what was the last letter you had from me?”

“Your note in early November, saying you couldn’t come for Christmas as we’d planned.”

“The one they dictated to me?” His voice was bitter.

“Dictated?” I stared at him, hardly able to believe it. “Nat, what’s been going on here?”

“I’ll tell you—”

The outer door handle rattled. Releasing my hand, Nat sprang back, touching a finger to his lips. “Don’t let on that I’m here,” he whispered.

I reached the door just as a footman opened it. “The King has called a meeting of the full Council in the Crimson Chamber, my lady, and he wishes you to attend. If you will come with me?”

“Of course I will. But first let me have a moment to collect myself,” I replied. While he waited beyond the outer door for me, I went and found Nat in the adjoining room.

“It’s a meeting of the full Council,” I said, keeping my voice down. “And I’m invited. Believe me, I’ll have some fine words to say when I get there.”

“No,” Nat said, low but firm. “You must not say anything. And you must not let them know that you’ve seen me. That will only cause more trouble.”

“But why—?”

“I’ll find you later and explain,” he promised, his lips close to my ear. “But in the meantime, don’t worry if I’m quiet when in Council. In fact, don’t think of me at all. Just guard yourself well. The entire Court has gone mad, and this place grows more dangerous by the day. I wish for your sake that you were anywhere but here.”

My second walk through the palace proved as bewildering as my first. Lord Gabriel was right: the place was a labyrinth. As I followed the footman through a multitude of opulent rooms and halls, I lost any sense of direction. Instead, my mind whirled with what Nat had told me.

“The Crimson Chamber, my lady.” The footman pointed to the grandest set of doors yet, spangled with gold stars and crescent moons. Before them, two stone-faced men with sharp halberds stood guard.

The footman backed away, but I did not move forward. How could I meet with the Council and pretend that nothing was wrong? How could I ignore what they had done to Nat—and to me?

“Lucy?”

Dr. Cornelius Penebrygg came toward me, his silver beard streaming over his loose coat, his velvet cap askew. “My dear girl,
how wonderful to see you again.” His eyes twinkled above his drooping spectacles as he folded my hands in his.

I smiled back at him. As a member of the Invisible College, Penebrygg had been a key ally in the fight against Scargrave. But more than that, he’d been my good friend. “I’m very glad to see you, too. How is your head?” The last time I’d seen him, he’d still been recovering from a blow Scargrave’s men had dealt him.

Penebrygg dismissed the injury with a wave of his hand. “Oh, that’s been healed for many months now. I’m fit as a fiddle.”

“That’s what Nat said in his letters.” The few letters, that is, that had reached me before they’d been cut off.

Penebrygg took my arm and ushered me toward a quiet corner, well away from the doors and the guards. “My dear, you seem upset. Is something wrong?”

“I—I just saw Nat.” I lowered my voice to a whisper. Penebrygg was as close as family to Nat, so surely it was all right to confide in him, but I didn’t want anyone else to overhear. “We didn’t have long to talk, but he said certain things . . .”

Penebrygg adjusted his velvet cap. “I see.”

“He warned me to be on my guard. He said the entire court had gone mad.”

“Did he?” Penebrygg shook his head.

“You don’t agree?”

“He’s a good lad,” Penebrygg said. “But no, I don’t.”

“But they wouldn’t let him visit me—”

“Yes, that was a bad business,” Penebrygg said. “A very bad business indeed. And you should know that I argued against it,
and so did several others on the Council. Do not fret, however: they cannot possibly hold to such a ridiculous policy, not in the long run.” He pushed his spectacles into place and regarded me owlishly through them. “But, my dear, that isn’t why he considers us mad.”