The Fyre Mirror (16 page)
Authors: Karen Harper
Tags: #Fiction - Historical, #Mystery, #16th Century, #England/Great Britain, #Royalty
“I have thought of all that, Robin,” Elizabeth said. “Let’s ride anyway to the spot where you think he disappeared, Clifford.”
They followed her yeoman guard out of the hunt park into a small meadow where grazed three of the fallow deer with which the park was stocked. The moment the animals heard the riders, they lifted their heads, froze for one moment, then bounded off.
“It makes me wish we had time for a hunt,” Robin muttered.
The queen turned back to Clifford. “But you said that the deer did not flee when the boy ran into this meadow.”
“God’s truth, Your Majesty, they didn’t startle or turn. It was as if he wasn’t even there, and then he just went poof.”
Despite the warm glow of the setting sun, Elizabeth shivered. She would not accept that the lad they sought could be a ghost. “Let’s ride to the very spot,” she said, noting well that the others had become nervous and quiet.
As they reined in about one-third of the way across the patch of meadow, Clifford whispered, “I think it was about here he disap—seemed to vanish.”
Elizabeth stood straight-legged in her stirrup and braced herself one-handed on her sidesaddle to look around. “There!” she cried. “I see flat stones over there.”
“Flat stones?” Robin said, craning his neck. “Oh yes, perhaps the remnants of some old building that was taken down when the village was razed.”
They rode over to survey two layers of stones, roughly mortared still, barely protruding among the grass and weeds. Behind the stones was a hole in the ground, perhaps four feet square, also lined with mortared stones. Grass grew through the spaces and cracks of mossy stones that had, indeed, been here a while. Elizabeth saw no remnant of cloth or any sign of human life left behind.
“Aha!” Robin cried. “There’s your answer. You should have ridden closer and you would have caught him, man. The boy knows the area well and hid in there, that’s all.”
As they dismounted and looked into the small hole, Elizabeth breathed a sigh of relief. Ghosts didn’t need holes to hide in.
“But what exactly is or was this?” she mused aloud.
“I wonder,” Jenks said, “how many deer have broken their legs in there. I’d best fill it in, lest we do have a hunt and someone’s horse comes through here.”
“Fill it in,” Elizabeth echoed, neither giving a command nor asking a question. She suddenly pictured where she’d seen a similar configuration of stones: on top of the hillock where she’d spoken to Kat and Floris the day of the tent fire. And, come to think of it, on the rise just inside the hunt park. But neither of those elevations cradled a cavity like this.
“Yes, fill it in tomorrow,” she said. “Men, we must find and question that child, perhaps more for what he could have observed than for what he himself did. Mayhap it was mere coincidence, not even the same boy that I saw flee at Mortlake. Jenks, ride back there, and if Simon Garver is yet able to speak, question him to see if he knows the purpose of the two hillocks on the west edge of the Nonsuch grounds—and this hole in the meadow. If he does not know, see if he can give you some names of others who might be able to tell us, however scattered he told me the former inhabitants of Cuddington are now. We are looking for any information we can find—any.”
“Yes, Your Grace. I can be there by nightfall and return at first light.”
The three men walked her to her horse. Clifford held the reins while Jenks linked his hands to give her a boost and Robin steadied her elbow until she was seated.
“But why bother to interview those who recall Cuddington?” Robin asked. “It ‘died’ nearly three decades ago.”
Elizabeth gazed out over the meadow to the hunt park with the parapets of Nonsuch barely visible above the trees. “Perhaps because I feel sad about the ruination—the murder—of the place, that’s all. But in this fire-mirror madness, nothing fits, nothing matches. The only connection I can fathom between why the Garvers and Will Kendale and the boy Niles could have been attacked is that Garver the Carver and Will the painter were once artisans who worked on the decor of Nonsuch.”
“I was thinking, when you mentioned a ghost,” Robin went on, “about a theory that the running boy Clifford chased is Niles’s spirit, yet trying to escape the site where he met his fiery death.”
Elizabeth gaped down at him. “Robin, ghosts do not cavort about in the open in broad sunlight, and why would Niles’s ghost be six miles away in Mortlake?”
In truth, she had not thought of Niles as the ghost any more than she had considered him the intended victim of the first fire. She would not accept that the running boy was some sort of specter at all. No, the only kind of ghosts she believed in right now were ones that ran through her head, the memories of the fire in her youth and deep regret for what her father had done to Cuddington.
As dusk fell, the queen considered questioning the still ailing Gil Sharpe through his tent flap in the crowded privy garden, but soon gave up on that idea. Firstly, it always helped her to observe as well as hear those she interrogated. Secondly, since her courtiers were now crowded in such a small space, everyone would overhear her suspicions about Gil. And thirdly, if the boy was really ill, and Meg said he was, she didn’t want to catch his condition herself.
“My lord Cecil,” she told her master secretary as they sat at her council-chamber table that evening while she read and signed writs and decrees he handed her, “I fear my desired respite in the countryside has too much put the business of the kingdom to the side. I do not wish to leave here until we can solve these arsons and murders, but I cannot in good conscience remain much longer.’S blood,” she cried as another thought hit her, “I should have had Jenks bring back Dr. Forrest with him from Mortlake for Gil!”
“You don’t think old Garver will live?”
“It’s not that. Both Forrest and Dee believe he will, though he will be dreadfully scarred. But I need his opinion—Dr. Forrest’s—on what ails Gil Sharpe.”
“Speaking of good conscience, we must hope it is not a bad one making Gilberto Sharpino ill,” Cecil muttered, handing her another decree to be signed and sanded.
“Do you believe, my lord, the boy is really to blame for any of this?”
“I only know, as you do, something he won’t confess is eating at him.”
“Granted, so—”
Clifford’s loud knock sounded at the door. “Enter!” she called.
Her yeoman guard stepped in and closed the door behind him. “Dr. Dee has ridden in, Your Majesty, with good news, he says.”
“I can use that. Send him in.”
John Dee looked windblown and exhausted as he trudged toward them across the tiled floor and bowed. “Old Simon is doing as well as can be expected with those burns,” he told them, out of breath, “yet I also have other fortunate news.” He swung from his shoulder a saddle pack, which he placed carefully on the floor and bent to open. Within it lay the black tooled-leather box that used to hold his stolen mirror.
“The lost mirror has been found, Your Grace. Whoever took it must have abandoned it quickly, perhaps when he saw it had a glass which magnified and distorted rather than simply reflected, and didn’t know the mirror’s worth.”
“I am delighted but surprised that the thief didn’t at least sell it for its fine metal frame,” she said, rising and walking over to take the mirror from his hands and examine it closely. Her reflection made her jump: she was all huge eyes and big nose. What would her preening cousin Mary of Scots think if she peered in this strange mirror? Elizabeth had half a notion to send her one like it.
“Or perhaps,” Dr. Dee went on, “the thief feared being captured with it and so discarded it straightaway.”
“And yet risked climbing a garden wall for it with people living in the house who could have seen him?” she challenged.
At that, the usually talkative Dr. Dee said nothing.
“Precisely where was it found and by whom, Dr. Dee?”
He cleared his throat. “By my wife, out for a brief walk—the strain of caring for Simon in such pain, you see. Precisely, she said, in a bed of violets not far from our house.”
“I see. Quite a fortuitous turn of events.”
“Ah, yes. Katherine herself said that.”
“Not to change the subject, Dr. Dee,” she said, “but perhaps you can help me with some local information about Mortlake. Someone told me of a strange boy running away from the fire at the Garvers’ cottage. Dressed in brown broadcloth, perhaps even hopsacking. Rather broad-chested, I hear, squat in form, with short legs but ones that moved all too fast. He supposedly ran toward the river path and disappeared. Does he sound at all familiar to you?”
He looked at her wide-eyed, then shifted his gaze to the parchment he held in his hands. She could see his writing on it—not in code this time—and some sort of drawing with mirrors and dotted lines to signify angles. His tone wary as she glanced back to his face, he said, “Do you mean one of the village children?”
“I do not know but am curious to find out. Have you ever seen his like?”
“Not I, God’s truth, but rumors say a few others have over the years. A man of logic and rationality, I don’t give it much credence, but best you warn whoever saw that boy. I should have asked Simon if his wife had seen the apparition, for supposedly it appears only to those soon doomed to die.”
STILL HOLDING DR. DEE’S MIRROR, ELIZABETH MOVED TO the closest chair and sank into it. Cecil came to stand behind her; though he did not touch her, she felt his support as if he had clasped her shoulder. She stared down into the mirror again. This time it caught her mouth with her lips pressed tightly together but looking huge and trembling.
“Tell me more about this ghost, Dr. Dee,” she said.
“May I inquire who saw the apparition, Your Majesty?”
“Just tell me more.”
“They say, you see, the boy was one of many country folk who died in an early plague—not the Black Death but the sweat. Victims were buried in a mass grave on the edge of a farm, which is no longer there. As the site was not designated by tombstones, the name of the place became its only marker.”
“The name of the place?”
“Why, Mortlake.”
“Ah,
mors, mortis
—Latin for ‘death,’” she whispered. “Lake of death.”
mors, mortis
—Latin for ‘death,’” she whispered. “Lake of death.”
“It was never really a lake, I take it, but a pond which the Thames evidently overflowed. I’ve read that the sweat carried off hundreds in the last century,” he went on, his hesitant voice now taking on that tutor’s tone he often fell into. “The addition to the cellar dug for the Riverside Inn about thirty years ago disturbed the old burial pit, according to my mother. Rumors of hauntings have been sporadic at best ever since, or I would have warned you not to stay there.”
“I’m glad,” Cecil muttered, “we didn’t know we were sleeping above a plague pit.”
“Dr. Dee,” Elizabeth said, “since the hauntings began only after people learned a plague pit was there, could we not just as well theorize that the ghost is a figment of men’s imaginations and not a specter whose bones have been disturbed?”
“I’ve always thought so, but someone once warned old Simon he’d be cursed for disturbing those bones.” Dee gestured with his rolled parchment as if it were a magician’s wand. “I asked him several years ago if he’d ever seen the running boy, but he said no.”
“Dr. Dee,” Elizabeth said, looking up steadily at him, “
I
have seen that boy, or one who could be so construed. He was running away from the fire at the Garvers’ as if he had been burned.”
I
have seen that boy, or one who could be so construed. He was running away from the fire at the Garvers’ as if he had been burned.”
Dee’s eyes widened; he squeezed his parchment so hard it crinkled. “I thought at first you might mean you’d seen him, Your Grace, but I dared not ask. Running away as if—I suppose the plague pit could have extended over to the Garvers’ cottage area.”
She jumped to her feet. “’S blood, that may be the first completely irrational thing I’ve ever heard you say!” she cried. “I heed not that sort of superstitious curse. Besides, my guard Clifford, the yeoman on the door just now, also saw such a boy running, and not at Mortlake. Here, at the edge of the hunt park, just after a fire mirror was evidently used to mar one of my portraits and incinerate another.”
“But not after the tent fire?”
“Not that anyone reported, though we did not search the hunt park then.”
“It may well be all superstition and happenstance,” Dee said. “Can you tell me about the boy who was glimpsed here at Nonsuch?”
“He was no ghost—we’ve discovered that,” the queen exclaimed, her voice gaining strength again. “His disappearance was made quite simple by a small stone cavity in the meadow, exactly where he supposedly vanished.”
“A stone cavity?” he asked, frowning. “How small?”
“About four feet square,” Cecil answered for the queen as she held her arms out to approximate the size. “And Her Majesty says there is similar stone work, though without holes in the ground, on two man-made hillocks at the edge of the palace lawns.”
“Did you not pass my man Jenks on the road, Dr. Dee?” she asked, suddenly remembering him. She put both hands to her forehead. “I sent him to your house to question Simon Garver about those hillocks. After all, the old man worked at Nonsuch while it was being built and memories of Cuddington were still fresh.”
“Ah, Jenks—yes. Those actors hailed him as they were coming back into town, and I saw him stop to speak with them, though I just rode on.”
“He’d best ride on too. Tell me more then of how the old man is doing.”
“Your physician’s—and my Katherine’s—care and the herbals your strewing-herb mistress sent have availed him some comfort. Though he should recover, I fear he does not want to.”
“I thank you for coming directly here with the mirror, Dr. Dee. Now if you would excuse us …”
“Your Majesty, you mentioned the old village on this site just now. Surely you aren’t thinking there is some Cuddington curse after all this time?”
“Was there ever?” She asked the question of herself more than of these two brilliant men.
“John Mooring, the lord of the manor house there, according to my mother, cursed the king.”
“My father. God’s truth, I can understand why Mooring was angry enough to risk treason and death for such a curse.”
“Before I go, Your Majesty,” Dee put in, “this may not be the time, but I brought a plan to you for using mirrors on ships to signal, day or night, of dangers.” He extended the parchment to her, now quite curled.
“You may leave it here, and I shall consider it as soon as I can,” she told him. “Ship signals aside, this already is the time, day or night, of dangers. I need to see my dear friend, Kat Ashley, and get some sleep and try to think. My lord Cecil, will you see that Dr. Dee is well cared for this evening?”
Another of Clifford’s distinctive knocks resounded. “Perhaps Jenks came back in the dark, though he said it would be tomorrow,” the queen told them. “Enter!”
She, Cecil, and Dee gaped as Clifford opened the door, for not only Jenks but Katherine Dee stood there.
“Your physician did all he could, and I, too,” the woman cried, even before she crossed the threshold and managed an unsteady curtsy. Her face was glazed with tears, her hair wild as if she’d torn at it. “He’s gone.”
“My old friend is dead?” Dee asked.
“Yes—gone,” she said, her voice rising to a squeak as she ran to her husband’s arms.
“I deeply regret Master Garver’s loss,” Elizabeth pronounced, fighting to keep her voice steady. “My kingdom can ill afford to lose the former generation of artisans, whose skills and knowledge grace our lives yet today. Jenks, did you have time to speak with Master Garver before he died?”
“So close but so far, Your Grace,” he said, shaking his head. He looked as grief-stricken as she felt. “Mistress Dee said she’d go in first to decide if he could answer a few questions for me, but she gave a cry and said he was gone and I rushed in.”
“An immediate cry,” Elizabeth asked, “or did it take her a moment in the room, evidently to realize he was gone?”
“Well—quite soon she cried out, I guess.”
Elizabeth’s gaze snagged Dee’s. Again she glimpsed an expression of stunned knowledge that his wife, at least, could come under suspicion. He looked away before the queen did as all eyes returned to the crying Katherine.
Apparently missing the tension in the room, Jenks went on. “Dr. Forrest came rushing downstairs. Surprised he was, but he said the old man lost his will to live and so gave up the ghost.”
At the way he’d put that, Elizabeth again sank into her chair, for her trembling legs would not hold her.
The queen questioned Katherine alone at some length that night, thinking her emotional state might make her admit something. Though it seemed entirely possible that a badly burned man who was supposed to live could suddenly die—while only Katherine Dee was with him and Jenks was about to question him—Elizabeth and Cecil were newly suspicious of the young woman’s motives and deeds. But in the end, they decided not to detain her, so she returned to Mortlake with her husband the next morning to help make funeral plans for Simon Garver, too.
Exhausted and frustrated, Elizabeth took a stroll upon the rooftop the next morning rather than walking either outside or inside the palace. Even the beautifully painted and carved walls of Nonsuch were starting to make her feel as trapped as Whitehall had the winter before.
“The breeze is lovely up here, and you can see for miles,” Meg Milligrew, who had accompanied the queen with Floris and Kat, said, and sucked in a deep breath.
“Yes,” Elizabeth said, leaning both elbows in a cutout portion of the crenellated walls, “you can almost see the small meadow behind the hunt park from here, and over there, the spire of Mortlake Church, where both the Garvers will now be buried.”
“It’s the most beautiful view in the kingdom!” Floris gushed, thoroughly annoying the queen. She was glad Kat’s companion had a sunny disposition, so she did not deign to correct her. But as lovely as it was here, her kingdom held many stunning views, and surely the woman who was nursemaid to elderly folk had hardly been all over to judge anyway. Such chatter was almost as presumptuous as Heatherley insisting she must choose his portrait because it was finished. But the queen scolded herself silently, for she was too much on edge with everyone. Each time she thought things could not get worse, they did, though she was not certain how any news could be blacker than Dee’s blurting out last night that anyone who saw the running boy was doomed to die.
Elizabeth braced herself when she saw Lavina Teerlinc appear at the top of the staircase to the roof, which Clifford guarded. Ned Topside was with her, and, gesturing to Lavina to wait a moment, he hurried to the queen.
“Your Grace,” he said, evidently out of breath from the climb, “Mistress Teerlinc says she must speak with you on most urgent business.”
Elizabeth looked past Ned. Lavina was actually wringing her hands, and her expression was that of someone who has just sucked a lemon. Surely no one had managed to set fire to the portrait she was repainting, not here in the shelter of the palace.
“I will speak with her privily,” she told her little coterie. “Floris, keep a close watch on Kat up here.”
The queen walked to Lavina, and they stood about six feet from Clifford at the edge of the roof overlooking the hunt park. Lavina curtsied stiffly as the brisk breeze shifted her hair and skirts.
“You have something important to tell me?”
“Something dat’s been eating at me for over a veek now, since the day of Vill’s death, Your Majesty.”
The queen caught her breath. “And what makes you tell me now?”
“Because I see him trying to trick you again, that’s all.”
“Him?”
“I know you favor him, Your Majesty, but your boy artist, Gil, he isn’t telling you all he knows either. I thought he vould, since you seemed so—close. It vould be none of my affair if these dreadful things veren’t happening—Vill’s death, his portrait slashed, mine burned, even Henry’s portrait of you marred.”
“Lavina, what about Gil? He’s holding back what? And, as you say, you have done the same.”
“Dere, you see. Already you defend him.”
“Calm yourself and start at the beginning. I assure you I am grateful for any help you can give me in solving Will Kendale’s death—any.”
Biting her lower lip, Lavina nodded. She glanced out at the hunt park and went on. “I saw Gil Sharpe sneak out of his tent and go into the voods—vit a mirror.”
“With a mirror? Just before the tent fire?”
Lavina shook her head. “The next day—ven you vent to Mortlake to visit Dr. Dee for the day.”
Elizabeth breathed again.
“I vas painting outside, a view of the palace. He came out of his tent and rushed into the voods. I’d seen Dr. Dee looking around there, drawing too, so I thought maybe you told the boy to make another sketch. I vas upset you didn’t ask me to do it.”
“I value your honesty. Say on.”
“Vell, truth was, I didn’t see the mirror at first because Gil had it hidden in his shirt. But ven he got into the trees in a bit of sun, he took it out and played it up and all around, catching the sunlight. He hoisted himself up in a tree and fixed the beam on my tent—dis vas before the tents vere moved.”
Elizabeth had begun to tremble, whether with terror or rage, she was not sure. Gil had a mirror about which he had not told her. Gil had climbed a tree when he had said his leg now hurt him and he never climbed anymore. She had trusted and supported and cared for Gil, and like other men before him, he had betrayed her. She had let Gil’s talent and her longing for her lost brother lead her astray to trust him.
“I only held dis back,” Lavina was saying, “since I thought you vould hold it against me if I tried to put the blame on him. But I’m afraid now, afraid since my portrait was burned, that I’ll be next, attacked like Vill.”
“Lavina, you did well to tell me these things. I can’t believe it of Gil—there must be some explanation. But I am grateful. You may go now.”
As the woman curtsied and left her, the queen put both hands on the wall to brace herself. She must go to face down Gil now. He might even be lying about his illness; there were ways to make oneself vomit.
“Your Grace, are you quite well?” Clifford’s voice came close behind her.
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