The Queene's Cure (14 page)

“Bett, could I talk to you downstairs before you head home?” Meg asked, stacking their pewter plates to take with her. As long as she was going down, she'd clean them out proper in the shop wash water instead of just wiping them with a crust of bread up here.

While Nick leaned back in Ben's chair, putting his feet up on the bench the women had shared, Bett lit a fat tallow candle and lighted Meg's way downstairs.

“You can talk in front of Nick,” Bett said, sounding a bit annoyed. “I mean about Dr. Clerewell's mention he'd consider a cure for Gil's muteness.”

“I know,” Meg assured her. “Though Nick is not truly Gil's sire, he loves him like he was.”

Meg sighed silently. She did not want a baby with Ben Wilton, yet she sometimes longed for one to love. Though Gil was hardly a child anymore, Meg had come to care greatly for him. Too bad, she thought for the hundredth time, that apothecaries were legally banned from prescribing cures. But now she had hopes for Gil, thanks to Dr. Clerewell's suggesting he could help.

“What is it you want to say then?” Bett asked, interrupting Meg's agonizing. “Or has Ben been at you bad again?”

Meg shook her head as she dropped the plates in the wash water and lit a second candle. “I have something special for you here, just so you can tell me how you think it does.”

Handing Bett her candle too, Meg motioned her over to the cabinet of deep drawers that lined the wall behind the counter. In the one where she usually kept dried spring flowers, she had hidden the precious box of Venus Moon Emollient.

“How something smells, you mean?” Bett asked. “If it's medicine for me, I'm healthy as a horse.”

But when Meg produced the alabaster box, Bett was all eyes and ears. “Even looks pretty,” she said solemnly. “What is it then?”

“A skin cream that covers and treats scars at the same time. And you're not to tell anyone where you got it, because it is both rare and—well, being investigated for its effect right now, so you mustn't try it if you're afraid. But I've seen someone who used it with fine results.”

Peering as suspiciously into the box as if it were Pandora's, Bett frowned, then shrugged. “If you say so,” she said with a sniff at the substance.

“And you won't tell a living soul about this, not even Gil, because he chatters so,” Meg insisted.

“Chatters, that's a good one. My mute boy chatters,” Bett said, and they exchanged smiles.

While Bett held both candles, Meg put a bit of the thick cream on her index finger and smoothed it over the
jagged mark on Bett's chin, caused by a gunpowder explosion years ago, the same accident that had thrown Gil into a wall and made him mute. The substance felt both smooth yet slightly grainy to her touch, but it went on well. It was even closer to Bett's pale skin hue than it had been to Marcus Clerewell's complexion.

“There!” Meg pronounced as if she'd done an entire portrait fine as those Gil produced. “Don't wash your face till I get a good look at you in the morning, and if anyone but your family asks, don't trust them. Just say it's evidently starting to fade after all these years, praise God.”

“Praise God for a friend like you,” Bett said with tears in her eyes as she stared into the small square of polished bronze mirror that Meg held before her face. “Laws, I just knew I'd be scarred forever, but I didn't figure on this.”

K
EEPING HER DISTANCE FROM THE BODY, ELIZABETH
paced back and forth in the large anteroom down the hall from her state apartments, where she had ordered the corpse laid out on a table. It was all too eerily reminiscent of what she'd been through with the effigy, and she was certainly not taking this into her privy chambers. No matter that the best medical knowledge declared that pox was spread either by the wrath of God or by foul air from a living, infected person. She was
taking no chances touching or getting overly close to this victim, so she needed others to observe it.

It—she—lay covered to her armpits with the soaked sheet in this well-lighted room. She almost looked asleep as water dripped on the parquet floor, which the queen had ordered covered with a second sheet.

“I just don't want my court doctors privy to our investigation,” Her Majesty rambled on to Ned and Jenks, while Gil sketched the dead woman's face from his perch on a windowsill. “They might let something slip to their illustrious colleagues over on Knightrider Street. So I'm forced to have you, Ned, fetch that irascible German Dr. Burcote who tended Kat. Well, hie yourself after him now!” she shouted, smacking her hands on her skirts. “And where is Cecil? He should have reported to me an hour ago for our scheduled secret meeting. And Kat? Lord Hunsdon?”

Ned seemed only too glad to escape. The queen kept pacing, not touching anything. If this woman had died from drowning and not the pox, her disease could recently have been in its virulent stage. The small, round sores had not yet turned to pockmarks, and the winding sheet looked speckled with tiny drops of blood, so the onset of pox—and death itself—must be recent.

Besides, she knew bodies went stiff after several hours and this one was still pliant, unless floating in the water had done that to it.

“I also need to find out how whoever left her got in my
privy garden!” Elizabeth went on to the nervous Jenks. “If he or she can breech that, what else is safe?”

“He or she?” Jenks asked. “You mean mayhap this girl wandered in when she was sick with delirium fever, took her clothes off, died, and just toppled in?”

“Don't be simple! Of course that's not what I mean!”

“You want me to check the grounds now?” he said, all too eagerly edging toward the door.

“By dawn's first light. Oh, Kat,” she cried when the hall guard opened the door to admit her, “where have you been?”

“Fell asleep and lost track of time and all else I hear went on.” Elizabeth could see the truth of that, for Kat's coif had gone flat on one side and the underpinnings of her farthingale had slid awry to make her skirts look lopsided. Elizabeth suddenly cursed herself for letting Harry Carey go home to Blackfriars, but he said he'd felt nauseous. 'S bones, so did she! She hurt all over and had a good notion to send for him to come right back, ill or not.

As Jenks slipped out, Kat shuffled a bit closer to the body. “Lord have mercy, no!” she cried, pressing her fists to her mouth. Gil's charcoal stick stopped whispering on the paper.

“You know her then?” Elizabeth asked. “It isn't that lace girl Lucinda, is it? But poxed?

“Never saw this slip of a thing before, but ugh, I see what someone's done to her.”

“Drowned or dumped the poor poxed thing in my fountain!”

“No, that's not what's all over her,” Kat explained, walking boldly closer to the corpse. “Someone's overbled her, that's what happened here.”

“You see lancet scars somewhere?” Elizabeth demanded, holding her ground ten feet away. “You mean she's been stabbed too?”

Shaking her head, Kat came over to Elizabeth and put her arm around her slender shoulders to draw her slightly closer to the corpse. The queen could feel Kat trembling too.

“This woman may look poxed, lovey,” Kat said, “but I think some mountebank or quacksalver passing for a physician has bled her near dry with a legion of leeches all over her skin. Don't you recall that time my leech bites wouldn't heal for days? Next to the pox itself, not much you and I hate more than leeches.”

J
A
, LADY ASHLEY IS RIGHT,” DR. BURCOTE PRONOUNCED AFTER
viewing the corpse two hours later. “Not the pox but far too many leeches.” He shook his head and stroked his chin. “Any
dumkopf
should have known it vould kill a female of this size.”

Elizabeth stared at the little man through the haze of her exhaustion and horror. “But if it was leeches, they were placed so regularly on her—all over,” she stammered,
“instead of at some specific site to drain bad blood for a particular malady. Was it intentional—to overbleed her, and she was too ill or weak, or perhaps given some sleeping potion so she didn't resist?”

“I'd say she did resist, or at least her leecher feared she vould,” he muttered, “even vit that broken arm.”

“Broken arm?”

He pointed to her right arm, swollen and at a slightly strange angle, then at both wrists. Elizabeth could see what he meant. “I don't hold vit tying patients down,” he went on, “especially ones vit a bone that should have been set,
ja.
”

“Tied down, with a broken arm,” Elizabeth marveled at his deductions. Shuddering, she squinted at the slightly rough, red marks around each wrist and at the crooked elbow-to-wrist bone. She saw now that the skin was discolored each place he pointed. Also the body bore a walnut-sized strawberry birthmark at the base of the throat.

“As to the wrists, mayhap she had bracelets or sleeves that were too tight,” Elizabeth suggested. “It is simply that I cannot bear to think the worst, but I must learn to. Can you tell if she was gagged to keep her from crying out during all this?” she asked as an afterthought.

He shrugged, frowned, but looked closer at the mouth and cheeks, even her earlobes. “Not vit a gag that vas tied around her head with her mouth open or closed. But she
could have had something stuffed in her mouth, then pulled out—after.”

Elizabeth was trying to discern if this girl must have been tortured and killed in a place where there was privacy from witnesses overhearing, but that seemed a dead end. All her ideas were too much of that lately, but she wasn't giving up.

“Doctor, do you think she was deceased before being brought to the palace, or could she have somehow been brought or escorted in, then drowned? It was dark a good half hour before my retinue went outside.”

“Her face seems calm as if there was no final, fitful death throes—at least ven the leeches began to do their slow, steady vork. Yet she is newly dead, for rigor mortis is only setting in now. Bled to death first vit leeches applied in the pattern of the small pox,
ja.
”

Elizabeth seized a tall chair back to steady herself. Some desperate or demented mind was behind all this. And to exactly what horrid purpose had this corpse been delivered, almost ceremoniously, to the Queen of England?

“Besides,” he said, lifting the sheet from the body and peering under it, “the girl was unclothed ven the leeches vere applied, and I don't think garbed after that.”

“But certainly not carted through my palace or over the garden walls stark naked!”

“Ask the one who wrapped her up ver he found this sheet,” he said. “The blood specks on it seem to match
her vounds, so I vould say it came vit her. After her being dead and in the vater, the leech sores vould not dot the sheet like this.”

“Yes,” she whispered. “The guard I questioned before you came said he saw the sheet on the ground and did not fetch it from the palace as I had first thought. So—she was brought in wrapped in that sheet. That's how,” she said almost to herself, “I pictured the other being delivered too.”

“Vat other?” he asked, looking sharply up at her.

“No—nothing. If you would discover if there are any other telltale or identifying marks on her besides that birthmark, I will leave you to your task. We will hold her body for a few days to see if it is claimed, then see she is properly buried. My Lord Cecil is instructing my courtiers only to say that some half-witted girl wandered in and drowned herself here—not the rest of it.”

“As you vish, Majesty,” he said and turned away as if he were dismissing her. As she put her hand to the door latch, he said, “In the morning, have someone take a good look at the fountain vater to see how much she bled in it. Some leech vounds ooze for hours after.”

“I know,” she said. “Years ago, a country doctor leeched Kat for a migraine, and it was—terrible. I vowed then, only quick cuts from lancets, not this ugly, lingering …”

She thought she would be sick again and stayed her hand on the door, partly to hold herself up. “Tell no one
anything I've said or asked,” she ordered. “And if I have need, I shall send for you again.”