The Poyson Garden (23 page)

He silently cursed not only them for coming, but himself for having to blink back tears that prickled behind his eyeballs but did not fall.

"Uncle, Randall, lads," he greeted them formally with a mere inclination of his head. The breeze blew the plume before his face to tickle his nose and make him want to sneeze. Tossing his head to clear the plume, he stopped a good ten feet from them. "Will you tell me you just happened to be in the neighborhood?" he challenged.

"We only wanted to tell you in person, nephew," Wat said, stepping slightly closer, "that we are very proud indeed of your well-deserved success, are we not?"

The others chimed in. Ned kept his narrowed eyes on his uncle's countenance. They were down on their luck, for certain. And they had not replaced him yet.

"We had just hoped," Wat went on, "for old time's sake, in passing through, we would offer to feature you for the princess, your patron, in a piece. However bright you shine in her royal eyes, my boy, we could make you glitter like a gem set in golden filigree."

"That is kind. But I did the king's speeches in Triumph at Bosworth for Her Grace and the entire household the other night. I may be called her fool at times, but I play the best parts now. And I'm writing a play for her at her special, fond bequest."

"Ah, and most excellent it will be too, I warrant," Grand Rand dared to put in. Ned still

did not look his way. Their betrayal pierced him again. True, he had sworn to his father on his deathbed he'd give The Queen's Country Players his loyalty, but Uncle Wat had gone back on his word to be a second father to him. He owed them nothing now but his disdain.

"I regret I cannot ask you to stay and play for the household here," he informed them loftily. "The princess is under some constraints by her guardian not to entertain overmuch, not with her sister mayhap on her deathbed."

His voice caught again. His father's wan, wasted face came to him so very real, and his uncle's face so resembled his father's.

"I see," Wat said quietly.

"You have heard of that?" Ned plunged on. "That I soon may serve not an exiled princess but the queen?"

Wat and Rand exchanged lightning-quick glances that said it all. They were willing to lick his boots to curry her favor, and, as usual, they would use and abuse him to get what they wanted.

"Of course," Ned added, "I will ask the Cornishes to send out beer and food to stay you for your continued journey, especially since Ightham is so distant from the other places you might play. And may I suggest a venue," he said as the errant thought hit him. Aye, this would even the match between them, and if they ever ran into each other again someday, he would be kinder to them after they paid their penance.

"Is another noble household nearby?" Wat asked.

"Not quite, but not far. I'll tell you the very way to go. You must inquire at the Queen's Head in the village of Edenbridge, where I've visited myself, the place closest to Hever where the Princess Elizabeth's own royal mother was reared. Be sure to announce that you call yourselves The Queen's Country Players, Queen Mary's. And, Uncle Wat, remember the way you always used to say you were fresh from London? Emphasize that, too, but leave the lads just out of town till you've set it all up, and then you can enter in fine fettle."

Ned felt only the slightest prick of guilt.

"Why can I not find anyone I want, when I want?" Elizabeth groused as she left

Jenks, Sir Thomas, and their other male companions in the inner courtyard after her short, aborted ride an hour later.

A flustered Lord Cornish met her at the door and sent his man to fetch down either Kat or Meg with a fresh pair of boots. Between rumblings of thunder, something unseen in the forest had spooked Griffin, and he had bolted to skim a hawthorn thicket. Though she was not really hurt, Sir Thomas had insisted they return to the manor house.

Jenks went immediately off to tend Griffin's scratches, but Elizabeth wanted an herbal wash for her own scrapes as well as a replacement for this left boot on which she'd broken a heel shoving away from a tree trunk.

"Can't find your girl Meg," Cornish's man reported, out of breath, as he came down the central staircase. "And hear your Mrs. Ashley's been overseeing the laundresses getting things off the bushes out back afore it rains."

"Then fetch her from out back, man," Elizabeth ordered, trying to keep her temper leashed. "Or else the Lady Blanche will do or Lady Bea--"

"I'll summon my wife forthwith," Sir Thomas put in as he came clomping over to stare at Elizabeth's snagged skirts. She ignored the offer of his arm to limp on one heelless boot toward the stairs.

"Never mind, I'll tend to things myself," she called back over her shoulder. "I believe it is just not my day."

She knew Penelope Cornish always took a nap in the late afternoons, so she didn't ask for her. Bea had not even appeared at breakfast, but not being able to summon her household women vexed her no end. She hobbled up the steps and past the window at the turn of the staircase. From that vantage she saw Kat and Meg. She had a good nerve to open the casement and screech at them like a Billingsgate fishwife.

Kat was not only overseeing Lady Cornish's laundresses harvesting the linens spread on bushes and hedges but was lugging a big wicker basket herself, so she'd be complaining about sore muscles tonight, when it was her own fault. And Meg stood beyond the moat at the forest edge, though, thank God, she appeared to have neither Ned

nor Sam with her. Mayhap she was after mushrooms again, but didn't the dolt realize thunder portended rain?

"'So blood," Elizabeth hit her fist on the window frame and muttered, "we should be laying plans for Leeds, and we're all at sixes and sevens till Ned gets that damned play done."

Though she knew her staff had never thought she would be back posthaste after setting out, she banged the door to her chamber open and into the wall. Where was that bootjack, and would it even work since the heel was missing? If she tried to just pull the boot off bare-handed, she'd scrape herself with the protruding nails, which kept tripping her on the floorboards. Could English craftsmen make nothing sound in these modern times? When she got to London next, she'd buy a hundred pairs of boots, all imported ones, Spanish leather or not.

As she plopped down on the hearth bench, she saw the maids had not even straightened her bed today, when it should have had its linens changed. No, rather, it seemed, she realized, someone slept in it.

She stood, bootjack in hand, and limped closer to the bed as thunder rattled like cannonballs outside. Her left heel snagged the carpet; she almost fell. Some sunlight or a lantern would help in this dimming room, but she discerned a mussed coverlet, a nightcap, and the slightest bit--tip--of reddish hair. But Meg was outside, so ...

In the half shadow of the hanging tester of the bed, she put her hand out and gripped the corner of the counterpane and top sheet. And pulled them back.

Not a drop nor blotch of blood stained the pristine white sheet around the corpse. But wearing her favorite beribboned nightcap, its dark eyes staring wide open, its tongue lolled out, its black-tipped tail curled nicely around its sleek red rump, a dead fox sprawled in her bed. A delicate crucifix dangled from its neck, the very one she had put on poor Will Benton weeks ago in his grave at

Wivenhoe.

Chapter The Sixteenth

The real red-haired fox is next. Elizabeth had reread the beautifully embroidered words until they echoed in her ears and

rang in her brain: The real red-haired fox is next.

It was the boast--the threat--of the poisoner on a small, unframed sampler found under the fox's body, pinned to the crucifix chain when Ned removed the corpse secretly from her bed. He had carried the dead animal downstairs in a laundry basket, and he and Jenks buried it in the forest, but Elizabeth had kept the crucifix and the menacing message. It was encircled by three-leafed clovers, their long stems knotted nooselike to match the style of the other hand-sewn warnings.

As exhausted as she felt, Elizabeth knew she could not get back in her bed that night, though Kat had scrubbed and aired the ticking and changed the linens yet again. She would not rest there or elsewhere, she had vowed, until she had discovered the identity of the poisoner and rid this world of her.

She had cross-questioned all her people--except Jenks, who had been out riding with her. Kat, who would ordinarily have been in the room but was out back with the laundresses, claimed she had not seen or heard a thing amiss. Prior to going outside, Meg had been in the kitchen sorting herbs with the cooks. Lady Cornish's pastry baker had upheld her word on that.

"Oh, you still nettled your girl warn't there when you come back in with your boot broke," the portly woman named Moll had dared to respond to Elizabeth's question about Meg's whereabouts. Elizabeth was amazed that petty gossip was the real meat and drink of the downstairs staff and the servants of the bedchamber, in small manors as well as at court.

"I am not nettled if she was helping you," Elizabeth assured Moll through the potent cloud of garlic that enveloped her. "By the way, your saffron crusts are excellent."

"Thankee, ma'am--Princess," Moll blurted while her florid face bloomed brighter. "Aye, Meg was in and out of the kitchens."

"In and out?"

The woman shrugged her rounded shoulders so hard her pigeon breasts bounced. "Tell true, Princess, I figured she was sneakin' out to see Sam in the stables, 'cause he gone sweet on her of a sudden like she slipped him a love potion or somethin'."

"Say nothing of my questions," Elizabeth had

warned her. "I do not want Lady

Cornish to think I am displeased with any of the efforts all of you make here in the kitchen."

Moll's thin eyebrows had scooted halfway up her high forehead. "Oh, course not, Princess. Wouldn't think nothin' like that."

Elizabeth had also been circumspect in questioning the Cornishes' chief laundress. She did not want the Popes to know any of this--if they didn't already. She worried incessantly that Bea could at least have expedited the fox's arrival in her bed. As for Ned's whereabouts when it was delivered, he claimed he had taken a brief walk outside the moat but spent the rest of the time in Lord Cornish's deserted library, penning the short play In Praise of Our True Queen.

"Our true queen--Mary?" Elizabeth had asked him testily, leaning over his shoulder to skim the lines. She had to read by twin rush lights he had lit, for the storm still raging outside had darkened the day.

"Of necessity, as you commanded," he told her defensively, rising and looking rather guilty, she thought. "You said, Your Grace, it was for the ears of Irish Catholics. See, I've copied out the parts for you and Jenks and kept him to a minimum with mostly mimed actions, even a bit of swordplay. We'll rehearse a few days--"

"We haven't the time anymore, not since She has clearly demonstrated she has the most-intimate access to my person and my life. 'So blood, I am safer going after her than waiting here--supposedly guarded--as Cecil would no doubt have me do. We are greatly undermanned with just you, Jenks, and me as players, but we must ride to Leeds tomorrow night. If we but knew these parts, we'd go tonight."

"Tomorrow? But--"

"You and I are apt pupils, and I need something else to do but brood. Give me my part," she insisted and seized the sheet he'd indicated. "And Meg tells me you can do an Irish brogue or Spanish tongue, so you'd best polish them too. Work on your speeches and then, after I go up from supper, come privily to my room and we will go over them. Damn, but I'd give a fortune if we had a few more men along to take our part. Something else is eating at you, I can tell. Out with it."

"I--nothing. I just mayhap need to make a few revisions, write in a few more parts," he said, snatching at her paper.

She pulled it out of his reach. "More parts for whom? It's far too late for that. The three of us will have to do, whatever ill befalls. I will not wait here to be poisoned in my bed by someone who obviously has been watching me for who knows how long. At least, I warrant, since Jenks, my cousin, and I dug up that body at Wivenhoe, for surely neither of them would have told the poisoner that I put a crucifix--one my sister once gave me--around poor, murdered Will Benton's neck."

"Your Grace," he said frowning, as if he were hardly listening, "if I could fetch us a few more players--two men, two boys--ones I know well, ones who--"

"What? But we need them now. Are they hereabouts?"

"If they haven't had their skulls smashed in, as I--I arranged--and hoped for," he said, sighing heavily. At least she was relieved to discover that what made him look so guilty had naught to do with her or Bea Pope. "If you send Jenks on the road to Edenbridge," he rushed on, "he might stop them in time and bring them back privily. They'd need horses, but--"

"Your old friends were here? Your uncle? And you sent them on? I heard some players were turned away but assumed the Pope was the villain. Ned, how could you?"

He flushed; his fine features clenched to make him look the chided boy caught with his hand in the sweetmeats. "They betrayed me," he blurted, "especially my uncle. I didn't tell you aught of what really happened. But vengeance felt so good--so good. I still think they need watching, my uncle and Randall Greene, but I warrant we're desperate, eh?"

She seized his shoulders and stared close into his eyes. "Deadly so. Can we get them back to leave tonight?"

"Tonight? But you just said tomor--" "But now all of you can do a set play, which will give me time to look around. I'll go in as just another boy, and they won't think a thing of it if I'm not on stage while the rest of you keep their interest. Send Jenks for your players, but keep them in the forest here till we go out tonight. I am