Palace of Spies (29 page)

That was when I heard the crash and the high-pitched, terrified howl.

I don’t remember running the rest of the way down the corridor or bursting into my room. I only remember seeing Olivia, stretched out on the floor, her eyes staring, her mouth open, and her arms flailing weakly. She gasped, a hoarse and painful sound. Around her, the dogs yipped and wailed in frantic confusion. There were the remains of a meal with its plates and tray scattered all over the floor, including a shattered glass and a pool of sherry spreading beneath Olivia’s hand.

I don’t know if I screamed. I don’t know if I didn’t. The world seemed to be proceeding in fits and starts. One moment I was in the doorway. The next, I was on my knees beside my cousin. The next, I held her arms and called her name.

“Olivia! Olivia! What’s happened? My God! What’s wrong!” But my cousin only groaned. Her eyes rolled madly in her head. She was cold to the touch, and her mouth and hands had taken on a terrifying blue-gray tinge.

Matthew was on his knees with us. He snatched up the glass and sniffed at it. Then he dipped his finger in the spilled sherry and tasted.

“She’s been poisoned,” he said. “Belladonna.”

“No,” I said uselessly. “My God, no!” I did not doubt him for a minute. His father was an apothecary; he would know.

“We’ve got to get it out of her. We need an emetic. Christ!” he shouted as he jumped to his feet. “I don’t know where anything is in this place!”

“Get Mrs. Abbott!” I said without thinking. “Three doors down on the left.
Hurry!
” Olivia convulsed in my arms again.

Matthew ran. I was weeping now. Olivia choked. I prayed and babbled and rolled her on her side so that she would not swallow her tongue. I scrabbled at her dress to loosen her laces. She choked again, and I wrapped my arms around her stomach, pressing hard, crying more and willing her to vomit.

She was going to die. Olivia, my cousin, my friend, was going to die because someone had meant to poison me. Out in the corridor, someone laughed. Someone else remarked at all the terrible noise and how if one was going to have dogs, one should keep them under control.

It was a thousand years before Matthew reappeared with Mrs. Abbott beside him. “Get her on the bed,” she ordered as she strode straight past us and vanished into the dressing room.

Matthew and I struggled to obey. Olivia had gone terribly, terribly still. Her skin was clammy and stone cold. Her eyelids flickered wildly, and her eyes were nothing but twin black holes in her white, white face. The dogs sniffed and whined about us, and I kicked them ruthlessly out of the way. We laid her on my bed, and I climbed up beside her, to hold and warm her, for all the good it would do.

Mrs. Abbott emerged from the dressing room with an array of bottles and a fresh basin. Matthew grabbed up a clean glass from the table beside the sherry decanter so Mrs. Abbott could pour some concoction into it. She attempted to pass it directly to Olivia, but Matthew snatched it out of her fingers, sniffed it, tasted it, and nodded.

I would later marvel that Mrs. Abbott permitted this, but all she said was “Lift her head.”

I tried to obey. I had been a nurse to friends, and my uncle’s aged mother. I knew how to lift a patient’s head and cradle it so broth or medicine might be spooned into a mouth. But this was different. This was Olivia, and she was dying of poison, and my hands were shaking so terribly I could barely do anything at all.

“Open, Olivia. You must. Please, please, please.” I gently prised her jaw apart. She tried to struggle. She choked and wheezed. Her breath smelt sweet and foul. Mrs. Abbott, grim and silent, poured the entire glass of greasy-looking brown liquid down Olivia’s throat, clamping her mouth and nose ruthlessly shut so she must swallow.

I waited one heartbeat. Two. Three. A dozen. Olivia convulsed again. She gagged and shook. I rolled her onto her side, and Matthew took her shoulders to help hold her steady. Mrs. Abbott held the basin. Olivia vomited.

When at last she finished, she went limp in my arms. “Olivia?” I whispered. She was cold. She was still. Her mouth was blue, and it should not have been. No living flesh ever wore that color. I squeezed her hand as tightly as I could. “Olivia!”

Matthew had gone white. Mrs. Abbott left us, and I barely noticed. When she returned a moment later, she had a hand mirror with her. I was weeping continuously now as I lifted my cousin’s head so Mrs. Abbott could hold the glass in front of Olivia’s mouth.

A heartbeat. Another. An eternity and an instant. Matthew’s strong, warm hand on my shoulder.

A faint silver mist formed on the glass.

She’s alive
. The words thundered through me, but I could not speak. I slumped backwards and would have fallen against the headboard if Matthew had not been there to catch me.

Mrs. Abbott drew the mirror away and then gently lifted one of Olivia’s lids to peer into her eye. She laid her hand against Olivia’s chest and then pressed her ear there.

“Alive, yes, but weak. Her heart is not steady. You are sure it was belladonna that did this?” she demanded of Matthew.

Matthew indicated the fallen glass, which, I now belatedly realized, the dogs were sniffing around. My God, what if one of them had drunk . . . ? Olivia might live, but if one of her dogs was harmed, she would certainly kill me.

Mrs. Abbott retrieved the glass and, as Matthew had, she sniffed and she tasted. Her face went white as sheets and paper, and she strode to the table where the sherry decanter sat. For a moment I thought she was going to smash the crystal bottle, but she only unstoppered it and sniffed again.

We saw by her expression that this was where the poison waited. Not that she turned toward us. She stayed there, facing the poisoned wine, her head bowed.

“This is how it was done,” she whispered. “It was poison for my Francesca as well. And I did not see. I did not think. I was so sure it was fever. I . . .” She choked on the grief that swelled beneath her words.

But then Olivia stirred. Her eyes flickered and opened. “P . . . Peg?” she breathed.

It was a long time before I could stop crying.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

I pray sincerely that I never know a night worse than that one. Olivia vomited three more times. Twice more she fell into a stupor, breath and pulse both faltering. Each time, I was certain she had died. I sat on the bed beside her and held her in my arms and babbled at her, begging that she live. I don’t know if I was begging Olivia or God, and I don’t suppose it mattered much.

Matthew kept the fire blazing, even as night gave way to a clear dawn. He drew the window curtains shut against any possibility of draft.

As dawn brightened into a hot morning, Mrs. Abbott worked. She all but forced me into the dressing room to get me out of my court clothes and into day things. She brought hot bricks wrapped in flannel to place at Olivia’s feet and sides, and clean water to moisten her mouth and wipe her face. She mopped up all trace of the spilled sherry and put down more clean water for the dogs.

At eight o’clock, however, Mrs. Abbott left us. She had to return to Sophy Howe to avoid rousing her new mistress’s suspicions. She promised she would tell Sophy that Lady Francesca had indeed fallen ill again, and she would send one of the reliable palace maids up with brandy, bread, and broth.

She stood by the door as she said all this. Her eyes were red with unspent tears, and her voice harsh as any crow’s from weariness and a fury I could finally begin to understand.

“Thank you,” I said to her. It was all I had to offer. “You saved her life. Thank you.”

Mrs. Abbott’s eyes glittered, and for all my new understanding, I could read nothing in her hard face. She turned and softly closed the door behind her as she left.

I tried to send Matthew away as well, but he would not go. “You’ll lose your position,” I warned him.

He shrugged. “It’s lost. I’ve been seen with you under dubious circumstances, and I’ve stayed out all night. Mr. Thornhill will not tolerate such behavior.”

“I’m sorry,” I whispered miserably.

But Matthew took my hand. “I’m not.”

The morning wore itself away into afternoon. Mrs. Abbott did send up the victuals she promised. I fed Olivia broth and brandy. Matthew and I and the dogs shared out the bread and some biscuits. Sometimes Olivia lapsed into sleep. Other times she woke, her eyes dull, but focused.

At those times I talked, telling Olivia and Matthew the whole of my story, from my first meeting with the firm of Tinderflint, Peele, and Abbott, to my training to impersonate Lady Francesca, to finding the drawings that my predecessor had hidden. I told them how Mrs. Abbott deserted me to take service with Sophy Howe and why she’d done it. I talked about Mr. Peele stealing two of the three sketches and ordering me to turn thief and to get myself out of the palace without delay. Finally, I told them both about Robert, and the Jacobites, and the papers he had left in my keeping.

“Are they still here? Those papers?” asked Matthew.

I felt my blood drain from my cheeks. Matthew went to my writing table and, after a moment’s search, found the packet with its blue ribbons. It seemed a very small thing just then, but it was a sign of hope. Perhaps.

“What about this sketch? May I see it?”

I squeezed my eyes shut. I could not do this now. Not with Olivia still hovering so close to the abyss. But something was touching my hand. I opened my eyes to see Olivia looking at me from under her heavy lids. Her one finger tapped at my hand restlessly. No, impatiently. When she saw she had my attention, she croaked a few syllables and jerked that finger toward Matthew. And then fell back against the pillows, her breath ragged from the effort.

It was so like her, I thought with awe and exasperation. She might be near dead, but Olivia still had not lost her sense of drama. She wanted to hear the end of the story.

I left her side and unearthed the last sketch from my workbasket, where I’d stowed it. Matthew cleared the round table beside the bed and brought over a candle for extra light. We needed it. The sketch had become well smeared from all the folding and unfolding and being carried about in my sleeve. Matthew bent close and squinted at the lines. Then he lifted it, holding the paper in one hand and a candle in the other, examining the drawing in silence, his ruddy cheeks slowly growing pale.

“Do you know what this is?” he asked.

“It’s a parody of the ceiling in the princess’s new apartment,” I said. “But I can’t understand why the couple there on the rocks is dead.”

“Look at them again.” He passed me the paper and then went and pulled back the curtains so the bright daylight flooded the chamber. “Look closely.”

I did look. Perhaps I could have seen, had not so much of my attention kept darting back to Olivia to reassure itself she was still breathing.

“That’s His Majesty King George there, dead on the ground,” said Matthew quietly. He was right. I’d passed the king’s portrait a thousand times in the dim gallery, but had only seen him in person the day he left, and then only his shoes. “This one, mounting the chariot instead of Apollo? That’s James the Pretender. I’ve seen his portrait elsewhere,” he added quickly, but I heard afresh the north country burr in his voice and wondered at that. “He’s here again, in the medallion where His Royal Highness’s portrait is on the original. I can’t tell who the woman standing in for the princess in the other medallion is . . .”

I peered closely. I’d stared at this sketch more times than I could count, but I’d been in the twilight of my room, either in the mornings before anyone was about, or late at night when I couldn’t sleep. Flickering firelight and classical dress in the sketch, and paint and powdered wigs on the originals had obscured the details that broad daylight and Matthew’s artist’s eye revealed. “God in Heaven. That’s her. That’s Francesca.” Francesca had filled in her own face in the place where the Princess of Wales belonged.

“No.” Matthew leaned in until his nose almost touched the sketch. “Yes. You’re right. And Leucothoe here? That’s Sophy Howe.”

I stared at the figure who was trying to bar the Apollo figure from his conveyance. “And the charioteer . . .” recognition came over me slowly. “That’s Robert Ballantyne, and Sophy Howe is holding James the Pretender back from climbing into the chariot. Robert Ballantyne is the Pretender’s charioteer, and all of it, over His Majesty’s dead body.” Everyone said Francesca was so sweet, but no sweet girl put herself in the place of a princess, beside a man who meant to retake the throne his father had lost. I thought on another sketch, the portrait Matthew had drawn, and of the greed he’d captured in Francesca’s face. “What was she playing at?”

“What about the other two drawings?” asked Matthew. “The ones that this Peele took. Describe them to me.”

I did. I told him about the death of Queen Anne with its addition of the monkey, and the man with the paper beside the secret panel in the fireplace. I could not help but remember that Robert had pulled the papers he had left with me from another such panel. I also told Matthew about the floor plan for the great house.

“Queen Anne died in Kensington Palace,” said Matthew slowly. “Could this floor plan have been for Kensington?”

“It could have.” In fact, it was a wonder I had not considered this before. I told myself I had other demands on my attention, but this did not make me feel any less a fool. I took up Olivia’s hand again. Did it feel warmer, or was that just hopeful imagination? Olivia’s eyes flickered again and opened a hair’s breadth. She was watching me, us. She listened closely, although she could not speak. My heart swelled.

“So, when Queen Anne died, a monkey and a man hid something in her bedchamber,” said Matthew slowly. “But what? And why would it be worth murder?”

Matthew shook his head and frowned at the picture of the ceiling, tracing its lines with one finger. I gripped Olivia’s hand and listened to her breathe. I tried to think. If this were a game, if this were the two of us in the breakfast parlor laughing over an advertisement or cartoon, Olivia would already have the whole storyline laid out. She’d have it all making perfect sense from beginning to end.