The Poyson Garden (24 page)

sorry for the rain, but they cannot be seen here with us."

She thrust him toward the door. "Tell Jenks to promise them horses to ride, food-- some coin. And Ned, I understand about betrayal and vengeance, even in one's family. And may God grant us no more surprises on this day."

But three more came close upon the heels of her words, and she hated things in threes. Death came in threes, Tom Seymour had told her once, referring to her father being thrice widowed--twice by his own decree and once through the death in childbirth of Tom's sister, Queen Jane. Elizabeth had seen it other times, and everyone believed it, high and low, astrologers and clergy too.

First Cecil's letter reporting information she had requested came much faster than she could ever have hoped. His man left the missive for Jenks in the crotch of the dead chestnut tree as they had arranged, and fortunately, Jenks met him in the damp forest as he was leaving the missive.

"Here it is, delivered safe into your hands, Your Grace," Jenks said, out of breath where he had found her sitting alone in the back of the gardens after the rain passed. "I'll needs double my speed now to get to Ned's people and bring them back. Oh, forgot to tell you, Cecil's man said he come straight from London, not from Stamford."

She looked up, alarmed. "London?

Cecil said nothing of going direct to London. But then," she added, "he did need to see his usual sources immediately, and they're all tied to the court. So then, he is near Queen Mary," she added under her breath, "for she bides at St. James's Palace." She closed her eyes to picture the brick palace, lying just outside London in the fields and marshes hard by a park so large it seemed in her mind to swallow the forest outside Ightham. Elizabeth had asked Mary to go riding with her in St. James's Park that day when Mary had ordered her away from London because, she said, Elizabeth was poisoned by her mother's Boleyn blood and by iniquity.

As Jenks bowed and hurried away, she sat staring after him. Surely, Cecil's getting near his sources to help her was the only reason he would hie himself to London without telling her. He had admitted he was ambitious, but only for his

success through hers.

Breaking the seal on his letter, she stood and walked farther away from the house, past the sundial, and sat wearily on the stone bench, though it was still damp from the rain. Glancing around to see that she was indeed alone, even scanning the windows at the back of the manor house, she stared at the first of two pages. No matter what words came before her eyes, she kept seeing, hearing, thinking, The real red-haired fox is next.

She forced herself to read slowly enough to take it all in should she be forced to destroy it soon. At least it was in Greek instead of Latin this time, so that would stop some prying eyes. First he conveyed something her cousin Harry--so he was suddenly in London, too, when she had told him to stay quiet in the country--had wanted her to know. Harry thought that Waldegrave's mention of St. Anthony's fire could refer to a sort of plague that had swept through France, feu de Saint-Antoine, the French called it.

"Smut rye!" she translated aloud as she read on.

"What's that, Your Grace?" Meg asked as she walked up to join her. Kat was somewhere out here too.

"Sit down and listen carefully. Cecil writes that St. Anthony's fire is not an herb but a poison fungus that can taint rye bread. If aught happens to me at Leeds, you must get word to Jenks's friends at the tavern in Edenbridge that Kentishmen loyal to me might be in deadly danger from eating rye bread."

Meg sat and leaned closer, her eyes wide on the letter. "Oh, no," she said, squinting at it. "Ned's been teaching me and I still can't read a word of that."

Another time Elizabeth might have laughed, but she said only, "It's in Greek." She began to translate the explanation Cecil had included: "St. Anthony's fire is a black fungus that infects grain, especially rye. It causes nausea, vomiting, severe head pain ..."

She paused, recalling her own headaches lately, but that was because of all the strain and because she was heir to them by nature. She had not eaten rye bread but only fine, stone-milled white manchet, at least since Wivenhoe, hadn't she?

"Head pain and ..." Meg prompted her.

"Also, violent changes of temperament," she read on, with a shudder. She had that, but hardly caused by poison fungus, surely not. "In small doses it has some medicinal use, as you well might ask your herbalist Meg--" she translated before she caught herself.

"Cecil means not to trust me, I know it," Meg cried. "I can read between his lines at least."

Elizabeth shook her head and went on. "I have been informed that this fungus is properly used after birth to make the womb contract to normal size but must be used in small measure, for the slightest overdose can be fatal."

She sucked in a breath at the next fact he had written, then read it in a quaking voice. "Your cousin says he heard that France had an epidemic in which poison rye bread killed thousands of people. Thousands," she repeated, whispering that last word.

She hit one palm against her forehead. "That's it! Not only does she want the Boleyns out of the way--especially me--but also my loyalists around Leeds, thousands of them, and she's going to murder them with food poisoning. Meg, go fetch Kat and come back to me instantly, but do not run."

Without another word the girl obeyed. It was then that the second surprise of the afternoon interrupted her continued reading of the letter. Ned walked up behind her so quietly, she nearly jumped out of her skin when he spoke.

"Lady Beatrice," he said, "has been summoned to her sister's in Maidstone."

She twisted around to see him. "Oh, Ned. When?"

"Just about the time you found the fox." "I swear Bea got it in my bed for that poisoner, then fled so she could not be questioned. Or they mean to strike at me here, and she has cleared out. Actually, now I ... feel more vulnerable here, just waiting ... for something."

"Maybe She sent the fox to force you to Leeds."

"Then I will outfox her. I've done everything by night before--dug up Will Benton, went to Bushey Cot, then Hever. Our approach in

broad daylight at Leeds must take them unawares. You'd best go pack what costumes and scenery you've assembled, in case Jenks does not find your Queen's Players. Nothing must stop us from riding to Leeds this night."

She hardly paid attention to his fading footsteps as she began to read Cecil's second page. He was trying to trace Sarah Scottwood again, but knew it would take time they might not have. And he had given her a bad bit of advice when he told her that James Butler's bastard daughter had gone back to Ireland when he died eleven years ago at a feast, along with sixteen of his retainers, evidently from food poisoning.

"God save us," she muttered and gripped the pages so hard against her knees that the stiff velum crinkled in her hand.

Though the Butlers had served the Tudors, she read on, your royal father never had James Butler's death investigated--a third insult to their family from your royal parents. Butler's daughter and her mother--once Butler's longtime mistress, whom he had cast off--went to Ireland for a time, but that was before Butler was poisoned. The mother died there and the daughter returned alone, even served at court, though in some minor capacity as the Princess Mary's beekeeper.

Again a shudder racked Elizabeth, but she read on: Where she is now, I cannot discover; like Sarah Scutea, she has vanished. I have heard, though, that Butler's daughter--I have not learned her Christian name yet either--suffered through an outbreak of the pox at court, and her face was scarred for life, so deeply that in the old days she would have become a nun and taken the veil. ...

Elizabeth stopped reading. Food poison. Beekeeper. The veil. St. Anthony's fire and a poisoned fox wearing a crucifix Queen Mary had once given her. And a buzzing, swarming danger to her very person. ...

She tried to hold shut the floodgates of memory, even tried to cling to that promise of God from her favorite psalm by whispering, "They compassed me about like bees; they are quenched as the fire of thorns: for in the name of the Lord I will destroy them."

But even that could not stop the terror of being destroyed herself. As if in a trance, she stood and

walked slowly toward the corner of the frost-blighted garden, closer and closer to Lady Cornish's beehives and to the greatest--and worst --surprise.

Elizabeth had been eleven years of age that day of memory and thrilled to be back at court after numerous, painful childhood exiles from her oft-married sire. His sixth wife, Katherine Parr, was a loving stepmother to all three royal children, playing ambassador of goodwill to their irascible and increasingly ill royal father. Queen Katherine encouraged their educations and treated them with love and warmth.

Mary and Elizabeth's younger brother, Edward, as heir, held sway. Yet Elizabeth's rooms were hard by those of the queen at Whitehall Palace in London, and Mary was allowed her own small household, including a beekeeper who was also an herbalist.

Mary was twenty-eight that summer, still sadly unwed. Her girl, who provided all the fine honey for the queen's table, was twenty and sometimes made up Mary's nosegays and tuzzy-muzzies too. The beekeeper seemed moody and quiet, but at times she spoke with a gay lilt and sang among her flowers and her hives.

In the warm afternoons Elizabeth often sat and read in the gardens with her new governess, Kat Champernowne--her name before she wed John Ashley. But today Elizabeth had closed her book of Ovid's Metamorphoses and now she strolled the gravel garden paths alone, past the old sundial--her father fancied sundials--and the splashing fountain painted Tudor white and green. Beyond the barge landing, the bustling River Thames lay broad and blinking in the summer sun.

In that hot afternoon, shadows slanted sharply as the Princess Mary's beekeeper appeared around the turn of privet hedge with something in her long-gloved hand. A good number of bees buzzed about her.

"Oh," Elizabeth said, "you gave me a start in that veil and draped and gloved, but I know you now." She wondered why the girl did not dip her at least a hint of curtsy. Had Mary given her such largesse? But she was not too shy to speak.

"My father," she replied, with no apology in

her voice, "was always teasing to say my face is my fortune, just like my mother's, so I'm always careful of stings, that I am."

"Of course. Is not the Princess Mary about today?"

"Of course," she said, her voice lilting and almost mocking as she echoed her words. She came closer. Elizabeth smiled to see the bees stay with her, like tiny, trained, flying dogs bouncing off her veil and shrouded shoulders.

"The Princess Mary studies the queen," the girl said when Elizabeth had almost lost her train of thought, "because she will be a queen."

"The Princess Mary?" It was most disconcerting to have to talk to someone when she could not see her countenance. "Only, I warrant, if she weds a foreign king. Our brother will rule after our father, and his heirs after him," Elizabeth explained.

She shook her head; her veil swayed. "She must be queen, as her own mother was. My family served hers well--serves the Tudors too. We are the Irish Butlers, Dukes of Ormonde. You have heard of us, of all my father does for the Tudors no matter what affronts are given by upstart elements like your mother's family, have you not?"

Even in her tender years it annoyed the princess to be rudely lectured. This girl dared speak to King Henry's daughter like this--that her Irish family was important and had done great things? Elizabeth had heard that this girl had been born on the wrong side of the blanket, so who was she to boast so? And yet Elizabeth's own painful heritage, where she, too, had once been declared illegitimate, made her hold her tongue on that.

"Your mother was the Boleyn," the girl went on, "who took the place of the Princess Mary's mother in the king's affections, even after the king took your dam from betrothal with my father."

Elizabeth backed away now, wary of the girl's approach with outstretched hand. People at court knew speaking of Elizabeth's Boleyn heritage was forbidden. And though young Bess had been cuffed once or twice years ago, her father's power--and now Queen Katherine's favor-- had of late surrounded her with a hedge of protection. But something unfathomable yet fearsome blew from this girl like an ill wind.

Elizabeth darted a look back in the direction of the others. Where was Kat? Why had not someone come to fetch her?

"I've been wanting to show you something, if you think you will ever be queen in the Princess Mary's stead," the girl said, extending her gloved hand farther and unflexing her fingers.

Elizabeth saw nothing there at first, then noted a single, large bee staying in one spot, going dizzily in circles. Rather than running as she should--though princesses never ran--she stood mesmerized while the young, veiled beekeeper placed the large bee on Elizabeth's shoulder and lifted her other hand in the air as if to give someone a sign.

"She's the queen," she said. "See what happens if you dare."

The bees that had been bumping lazily into the girl's clothes seemed to multiply and swoop straight for Elizabeth's shoulder. They covered her sleeve, her bodice and hood. Her neck, her face, more of them, swarming with a deafening buzz around her ears while she stood frozen in stark fear.

She waited for stings, for help, for something. Eternity came and went. Their fuzzy bodies and shifting legs covered her tightly closed eyes, her mouth. She would die here. She wanted to scream, to run, but she was trapped. She held her breath, terrified they would crawl up her nostrils or in her ears. She felt dizzy, nauseous. Her head pounded. Helpless. Caught. Cursed. She shook all over but mostly deep inside.