The Poyson Garden (12 page)

"It's her!" she whispered. "The hag is the poisoner."

Shuddering as she touched it, even gloved, she took one arrowhead and dropped it in her sack, then, from this vantage point, noted another coffer behind the first one under the table. She knelt to open it. Perhaps this contained the hag's letters, poison recipes, victims, the names of others in this conspiracy ...

"Ugh!" she cried as the stench stuffed her nostrils. She lifted her lantern to stare down at a jumbled mass of grotesque-shaped roots, mushrooms, toadstools, and fungus in all stages and sticky hues of decay.

Shuddering, she put some in her bag. If Meg could not identify them, Cecil must have contacts who could. It was then, as the embers shifted lower, she heard muted humming in the corner farthest from the hearth. Slow, drowsy, not a human sound.

She shuffled closer and tilted her head to listen. A buzzing. Dear Lord, not bees? She hated bees.

She recalled the man who had been her royal father's beekeeper for years--a kindly old man who had worked with honeycombs all his life--had been stung to death by them, though their venom had never affected him before that day. It was just after Mary became queen, when Elizabeth was walking in the gardens at Whitehall, that he fell and died in agony. Someone had said it was only because one sting was so close behind his ear that the poison leapt right to his brain. Elizabeth had knelt to hold his hand, until she realized other bees still buzzed about and someone had pulled her away. Mary had said she'd find a new beekeeper; and then there was something else about bees, but Elizabeth could not bear to think of that. ...

She shook her head to clear it and stepped slowly away from the muted murmuring. Surely bees were not stored in here and kept deliberately dazed by the smoke. They must be on the other side of the wall. All that sat in this corner was a slumped bag with grain in it. The old woman must mill her own for bread.

She began to breathe again. With a swift look back at the room, Elizabeth snuffed out the wick in her lantern, hefted her heavy sack, and hurried out the door.

"Let's ride," Ned called to her the moment she appeared. "This place makes my knees knock as loud as the pounding in my head."

She nodded, hardly heeding what he'd said.

"She's been here," she intoned, "but she hit you and slipped out. She's here, close by, hidden in the dark of the woods, watching and waiting. I--I can feel her."

"But who is she?"

"I still don't know. But I will."

"Could she be armed?"

She heaved her sack up to fasten it on her pommel. "Probably not with more than what she struck you with. We'll make a dash for it. But there's just one more thing. Do you know aught of bees?"

"Only that there's a thatched hive of them set in the nook of the chimney," he said with a nod in that direction, before he put both hands to his head again, evidently pained by the slightest movement.

"Then," she whispered, almost to herself, "they gather their sweet from all this sour. So their stings could be more deadly than most."

"I only know I never heard a hive make such a buzz at night, like we've disturbed them. We'd best fly, Your Grace."

"Yes," she said and mounted before he could help her up. She glanced around the walled yard, studded with plants she knew must be poison. "I know what she's been doing but not why," she whispered, more to herself than him. "And I will have her head, before she can get mine."

"I call to order this meeting," Elizabeth declared as she took her place at the head of the small table in her withdrawing room at Hatfield. "And I dub you my privy and covert council."

Shoulder to shoulder sat Ned on her left, Kat on her right, then Meg and Jenks. It was dark outside, and all but Kat had singly sneaked up the servants' stairs.

"We are not," she went on, keeping her voice low in case someone hovered at the keyhole, "to solve problems of government but of this poison plot I have explained to you. We shall be like those who sat at King Arthur's old round table in the days of yore, where all may speak out equally when we have such meetings. If there ever needs be privy communication among us, I shall be known as just plain Bess."

Kat's eyes widened in obvious surprise, then narrowed to disbelief. She shook her head slightly. Jenks frowned and shifted in his chair. Meg nodded, but Ned crossed his arms over his

chest to look watchful and doubtful. It was not, Elizabeth thought, an auspicious beginning.

"Of course, I shall have the final say if there is disagreement," she added hastily. "Secrecy must be our byword in all we do. But in the trust we share, I must tell you I have an aide who has confederates in London, a man privy to my problems, whom I shall not name at this time. And that man is housing my cousin Henry Carey, so he shall be a support to us also, especially since he is of Boleyn blood and was intended as a victim."

"What good, Your Grace," Ned put in, "will it do for us to have an unnamed aide to rely on if some of us know not his name? Besides, I warrant Kat Ashley knows, and that puts some of us at a disadvantage."

"Whatever Her Grace says," Jenks put in with a fist thumped on the table, "that's the way it shall be."

"Thank you, Jenks. And you are right, Ned," Elizabeth admitted, "that no one must have a disadvantage and we must always trust each other. But until I have this aide's specific permission, I cannot divulge his identity. Now for a report of current discoveries. Meg, tell us what you know about the dreadful hodgepodge of goods we brought back from Bushey Cot."

"Don't know a thing about the mushrooms and fungus, 'cept they stink so they could nearly kill a body that way. Some of the poison plants I did know were the roots of black hellebore with its white flowers. It's got to be dried out of the sun, so maybe that's why "she" had them strung up inside the cot."

"Are we going to just call her that?" Kat asked. "She? And can't we get a reckoning of women who might hold a deadly grudge against the Boleyns and search them out, Your Grace?"

"Yes, Kat, on both questions," Elizabeth said. "I am working on attaining such a list, and when we find someone suspect we shall, as you say, search them out. And as for She--that will do for a title of that hellish murderess for now."

"'Course, mayhap," Jenks put in,

"She is working for someone else. It's usually men behind plots, isn't it?"

"Not necessarily," Elizabeth said. "We don't know yet who is behind Nettie's work or those who attacked my cousin, Lord Carey, or

even if someone is behind this She. Meg, tell us more about the Bushey Cot herbs."

"Wouldn't know a thing about them 'cept a few like hellebore--same thing I'm thinking might have been on that arrow--but the gardener at Wivenhoe used to poison foxes what kept getting in the henhouse with that. After it was dried and pounded up, he used to add honey." Her gaze met Elizabeth's, and Ned cleared his throat before the girl went on. "And add some fat in equal parts to make a paste. He rolled balls of it and hid them in food you leave out to kill the fox-- or whatever."

"Say on," Elizabeth said when Meg hesitated. She saw that Ned kept glaring at the girl as if she'd done something wrong. "Go ahead, Meg," she prompted again.

"Other herbs from the cot I knew was nightshade, with its black and purple berries, and hemlock, what's called poison parsley. 'Course, Your Grace, yourself recognized the English yew and meadow saffron--the rest, don't know, 'cause I only work with garden plants and simples."

"Sounds like you know more than you think, Meg," Jenks put in, while Ned nodded as if he'd put him up to that.

"So," Elizabeth said, "I will have you, Jenks, carry samples of the rest of these poison plants to my aide--"

"Jenks knows of this aide too?" Ned asked, swinging back toward Elizabeth. "Only Meg and I don't?"

"But will soon," she said, pointing at him to make him sit back. "Now, everyone, it is my belief that our enemy--our prey--is a master poisoner, whether or not She has a superior pulling her strings," she explained, looking from one to the other. "At Bushey Cot--and God knows where else--She keeps her poison garden. Ned, I have a task for you, if you will accept."

"Of course and gladly."

"I would have you assume some hail-fellow-well-met identity, just in case the She of Bushey Cot is still in the area and would recognize you from our nocturnal visit there. You must ask about and endeavor to find some further description or information about her. And we must have this before we set out for Ightham Mote in a few days."

"And what shall we do, Your Grace,"

Meg asked, "Kat and me?"

"Without tipping your hand you must keep a close eye on Lady Beatrice Pope--because of this." She reached behind her on the bench to retrieve the first two pieces of poison embroidery. Placing them on the table, she added between them a linen towel Bea had done for her this year for May Day--a circlet of mixed flowers with the words, Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow.

"I'm certainly not saying Bea is our She," Elizabeth admitted, "for I have proof she has defended me to her husband. But she could be an informant here in the house, and for whom, I'm not sure."

"In other words, anyone up to the queen herself," Ned said.

Elizabeth nodded jerkily. She could not bear to think that, face that. Surely her own sister would not be behind this attack on the Boleyns--and herself. Though Mary hated her, she must surely draw the line at poisoning her heir, however reluctant she had been to name her so.

"And wouldn't," Ned interrupted her agonized thought, "the poisoner She have had such an informant in the manor at Wivenhoe, and Lady Beatrice Pope was hardly there." The question was directed at Elizabeth, but he dared to dart a glance at Meg, who kept staring down at the samplers.

Elizabeth glared at him and deliberately stepped on his foot under the table. He started and drew back. "All things are possible," she said, "and we shall consider them. And we shall meet again soon to lay our plans for tracing Nettie and her employer in Kent. There we must search two places that have ties to my past--to the Boleyns-- where someone might have held some kind of long-tended grudge. But till that time I insist we act as a team, pulling toward the same goal. We must learn to trust each other and rely upon each other," she said, staring again at Ned, who finally looked guiltily away. "May I have your word, your hands, on that?"

She grasped Kat's proffered one on one side and Ned's on her other and pressed them together. Jenks and Meg leaned in to put theirs atop.

"And," Elizabeth added, "there is work to be done here that bears on this investigation in a more

indirect way. Ned is to teach Meg to mime my carriage and voice--at least my enunciation--lest I need her to stand in for me. And he is to teach Jenks and Meg to read on the sly. Jenks must teach Meg to ride a proper sidesaddle, as well as being my messenger and guard. Kat will stick close to me but also serve as go-between for us all. Are we agreed?"

Each nodded in turn.

"We'll help you find her 'fore She kills someone else, don't you fret, Your Grace," Meg whispered.

"'Tis damned dangerous business," Kat murmured, frowning.

"But from this moment," Elizabeth vowed, "the hunt is on."

Chapter The Ninth

Garbed in a cowherd's loose clothes, with a floppy hat pulled down and the ragged collar turned up, she stood behind a thick tree trunk. She glared at the red-bricked house beyond the broad meadow of brown grass, dying wildflowers, headless clover, and too many rabbits. She watched her informant, cloak rippling in the chill wind, walk toward the manor house, keeping close to the meadow's fringe in the thin shadow of skeletal trees.

When she clasped her hands to warm them, she noticed her fingers were still sticky with honey and hellebore paste. She bent to wipe its remnants on the grass and clover leaves so she would not get it on her horse's reins. She'd wash thoroughly in the first stream she saw along the road to Kent.

As she smeared the tacky stuff over more of the thick clover, she laughed deep in her throat. She plucked a piece of it, a shamrock sure enough, then stood staring at the second-story windows she had just been told were Elizabeth's. She crushed the clover in her raised fist.

"Here I'm standing on your land, and you'll not be the only lass going about as a lad. I was even closer that night in the Wivenhoe graveyard but did not fathom you'd be digging up a corpse. And then you nearly snared me in the cot. But I'll be standing closer yet on your own grave soon enough to pour poisons on the sod so naught grows there, that I will for sure."

The wind ripped her words away and whined through the tree limbs. As she strode toward where she'd tied her mount in the hawthorne thicket, the memory of Queen Mary's bitter voice came back to her from last year when she saw her privily at court: I was tempted to have her beheaded in the Tower, but my beloved husband would not hear of it. Yet I swear on my mother's soul she is not of royal blood. However red her hair, that one was not sired by my royal father, as my half brother Edward and I were. Her whore of a mother could have caught her from tupping her russet-haired lutenist, Mark Smeaton.

Ailing though she was, the queen's voice had gotten louder, sharper. Her pretty Smeaton used to lie about her chamber at all hours. Dios sabe, that woman bedded him and others in her lust. It all came out at the adultery and treason trial of that witch woman. ...

"Witch woman," the cowherd echoed Mary Tudor's words as she untied her mare's reins and pulled her to a stump so she could mount astride more easily. "Witch woman," she repeated. "Bewitching, more like."

But "hag, witch" was what those rustic fools of Bushey had called her. She wished she had the time to put a poison curse on them. She'd wipe them off the face of the earth just as she would Kentish folk, every man jack of them who ever served or swore loyalty to a Boleyn.

She yanked the reins to halt her horse and swing it back to face Hatfield, though she could barely see the red brick through this more distant scrim of trees.