The King's Damsel (20 page)

My feelings were in a jumble. Confusing desires tugged at me. My face grew warm, in spite of the frosty air.

I gave myself a mental shake. Why was I thinking about
courtship and marriage? No matter how old or how skilled in working silk Rafe became, he could have no permanent place in my life. He would never be a gentleman and therefore Sir Lionel would never allow a match between us.

Abruptly, I stood, intending to leave the arbor before I embarrassed myself further. Rafe grabbed my arm and hauled me back. My breath caught. My heart rate quickened. We were standing very close together, nearly touching from shoulder to toes.

“You have forgotten your gift,” he whispered.

“There is no need for you to give me anything.”

“There is every need. I want you to have something to remember me by.”

And with that, he pulled me tight against him, planted his mouth firmly over mine, and kissed me. Of a sudden, I could neither breathe nor think. My blood pounded in my head. I felt near to fainting by the time he released me.

I inhaled sharply. My entire body tingled, especially my lips. Strange and powerful urges had me reaching for him when he stepped away from me, but I dropped my hand when I caught a glimpse of his face. Rafe looked as shaken as I was. His skin had gone pale. His pupils were enormous.

He started to speak and had to clear his throat before any words came out. “Remember me,” he said, and then he turned and walked away.

I was still shaking when I came in from the frigid garden. Maria, catching sight of me, drew me close to the nearest charcoal brazier and bade me warm my hands. “What did he say to you?” she whispered.

So rattled were my thoughts about Rafe Pinckney that at first I did not understand what she was asking me.

“You are in the habit of returning from your meetings with the
silkwoman’s son bearing news of the concubine’s doings,” Maria reminded me.

“There was nothing this year.” I shook my head, hoping to clear it. “He had no rumors to repeat.”

Maria looked pleased. “Perhaps that means that the king has tired of Lady Anne at last.”

We should have known better than to let ourselves hope.

Lady Anne Rochford was back at court in time for New Year’s Day. Right after Yuletide, she and the king rode away together, leaving the queen behind.

In March, Princess Mary paid an extended visit to her mother. The king was elsewhere. Their Graces spent long hours talking together in private. The princess was quiet and withdrawn after these sessions, but she did not share what had been said with me, or with Maria.

Maria’s mother and the other Spaniards who served Queen Catherine could add little to our knowledge. Mistress Vittorio told her daughter that the pope continued to resist granting King Henry his annulment.

“In time, they are certain the concubine’s influence over the king will wane,” Maria informed me when she returned to the maidens’ chamber after spending the afternoon with her parents.

“But that does not appear to be happening,” I pointed out, “and the king has been infatuated with Lady Anne for a very long time already.”

“She has bewitched His Grace,” Maria said. “That is what I think.”

That was not the first time she had made this suggestion. “Would that the answer were that simple,” I retorted. “If the concubine could be caught using spells, she’d be arrested and imprisoned.”

Maria brightened. “No. She would be executed. Burnt for heresy. What an excellent notion!”

I thought about the times I’d seen Lady Anne, recalling the way people responded to her. Was that sorcery? Or merely the result of a compelling personality? Coupled with the power of physical attraction, something I understood considerably better after Rafe’s kisses, I rather thought that Lady Anne had no need of spells to ensure the king’s continued devotion.

W
e had been back at Her Grace’s principal residence of Beaulieu only a few days when the princess was stricken with terrible pain in her head and belly. Her physician did not know what to make of her condition. He tried various nostrums. Her Grace could not keep them down. He bled her. That just made her weaker.

The next day, she refused to eat, rejecting nourishing broths and sweet confections alike. By the third day of her sickness, her eyes looked sunken and her cheeks were hollow. She kept her lips pressed tightly together to keep herself from crying out as each new pain racked her thin body.

I hurt for Her Grace when she pressed both hands to her belly, trying in vain to ease another spasm. She was panting by the time it passed.

“What can be causing this?” I whispered to Maria, terrified by this mysterious affliction. Maria swore in Spanish. Then she signaled me to follow her from the sickroom. She did not explain herself, only led the way to the kitchens. I watched in growing
consternation as she inspected every clump of cooking herbs that hung suspended from the rafters. Apparently satisfied, she left again, still without saying a word.

“What were you looking for?” I demanded.

She was already outside. I had to run to catch her before she reached the still house, maintained to provide the household with cordials, sweet waters, and cosmetics. I stepped inside right behind her. The scents of a half-dozen perfumes greeted me, everything from lavender and rose water to the more exotic jasmine essence that the Countess of Salisbury preferred. Equipment for distilling stood ready for use on a table, but no one was present to oversee the process.

I seized Maria’s arm, forcing her to look at me. “Why are we here?”

“I am looking for poison.”

I gasped and released her, freeing her to rummage through the herbs. Her hands trembled as she took down bundle after bundle to look at and sniff and even taste.

In a faint, disbelieving voice, I said, “You think Princess Mary has been poisoned?”

“It stands to reason after what happened to the Bishop of Rochester. My father told me about it in one of his letters.” She shoved aside an alembic and displaced a mortar and pestle.

“Tell me.”

She did so as she continued her search. “It was late February when it happened. The bishop, John Fisher, was at Rochester House in London. His cook prepared a broth for him, but he did not eat it. He is a very holy man and fasts a great deal. In this case, that habit probably saved his life.”

“What was in the broth?”

“No one knows. A powder of some sort. That is what the bishop’s
cook admitted later.” She lowered her voice to add, “Under torture.”

An involuntary shudder passed through me.

“The cook claimed he thought it was only a jest, that the powder was a laxative and would make the others in the household most uncomfortable for a time but not truly harm anyone. Instead, many were violently ill and two people died, one of the bishop’s servants and a poor old widow who was among the beggars at the gate. She received some of what was left over when the household had finished their meal.”

“But why would anyone want to poison a bishop?” I asked.

“Can you not guess? He angered Lady Anne Rochford. Bishop Fisher supports Queen Catherine in the king’s great matter. And if Lady Anne would try to kill him, why not the princess, too? If one of the concubine’s party is a worker in the kitchen, it would take but a moment to add something foul to a dish. Not all poisons have an evil taste or a bad smell.”

“Is Her Grace going to die?” I whispered. “Has that woman killed her?”

“I may be wrong. I pray I am. But I know something of herbs from my father. I have to look. If I can discover what Her Grace was given, I may be able to compound an antidote.”

“But you found nothing in the kitchen.”

“No, nor here,” Maria admitted, replacing a glass beaker on a shelf.

“And no one else is ill.”

But Maria was already outside again. “The herb garden,” she called over her shoulder.

Once again, I followed her.

“How can there be poisonous herbs here?” I asked as we stood in the chilly April sunshine looking down at the neatly planted rows of basil and borage, fennel and rosemary, sorrel and the like. My
training in both cookery and distilling had been cut short when I’d come to court, although I did know how to make a poultice with self-heal, wine, and water to draw the infection out of a cut.

“Some herbs can harm as well as heal.” Maria bent to inspect the neat rows of plants, reciting their names as she came to each one: “Betony. Parsley. Orache. Coriander. Clary. Dittany. Hyssop. Mint. Pellitory. Rue. Sage. Tansy.” She hesitated.

“Surely tansy is not a poison,” I objected. “We always have tansy cakes to eat at the end of Lent.”

“Tansy cakes are made with tansy juice mixed with eggs. They
are
harmless. And oil of tansy, well steeped, can be used to calm the nerves and help female complaints. But in too great a dose, it is poisonous. It can cause convulsions and spasms.”

“The princess has spasms of pain.”

“But no convulsions.”

Maria continued her inspection. “Violets. Fennel,” she murmured, then passed by a few more plants without naming them, her forehead creased in concentration and her eyes fixed on the ground.

“Surely the princess’s cook would know if he had a poisonous plant in his kitchen garden or among his dried herbs,” I said.

“Not necessarily. Some poisonous herbs are easily mistaken for their more benign cousins. My father says that monkshood tops resemble parsley, and so do the leaves of cowbane. Young thimble flower plants look much like comfrey, but if you eat the leaves, you will die within a day. Even hemlock, which everyone knows is a poison, can be confused with caraway.”

“I did not know hemlock was poisonous,” I murmured.

“Well, it is. But in the normal way of things, no one would ever eat of it. The entire plant has a disagreeable, mousy odor.”

Maria stooped to look more closely at a tall, hairy-stalked plant,
but after a moment she stepped away, shaking her head. “There is nothing here.”

“What did you expect to find?”

“Banewort, perhaps. It is often cultivated in herb gardens because it can be used as a sleep aid and to prevent miscarriages. And it can make one’s pupils grow large and luminous. Some women squeeze the juice of the berries right into their eyes.”

“If the plant is poisonous, why doesn’t that kill them?”

“It is
eating
the fruit that is dangerous, although all parts of the plant contain the same deadly poison.” Maria’s attention had already shifted to the wooded area two bow shots distant from the manor house. “Some poisons grow wild. Henbane lines many of the roads hereabout and cowbane can grow in stagnant ditches.”

For another hour, we searched among the trees. I learned a great deal more than I wanted to know about poisonous plants but we found nothing suspicious. It was beginning to grow dark when we made our way back to the princess’s privy chamber.

“Her Grace is still suffering severe cramps, but she is no worse,” Mary Fitzherbert told us. “She has been given borage. Master Pereston, the princess’s apothecary, suggested it.”

Maria nodded approvingly. When she’d stepped aside, out of Mary’s hearing, she whispered, “Borage cleanses poisons from the blood. And it is easier to come by than a stag’s heart.”

I was not certain I wanted to know, but I asked anyway. “What would you do with a stag’s heart?”

“If the princess were to wear part of a stag’s heart in a silk bag around her neck, it would draw poison out of her body.”

“I suppose we could ask for one in the kitchens.”

Maria gave a derisive snort. “Some cures are simply old wives’ tales and of doubtful use. Learned men like my father disdain them.
Another such is that wearing a bag of arsenic next to the skin can prevent someone from falling ill of the plague. Far more likely, the arsenic would seep through the bag and cause harm, for arsenic is a deadly poison.”

“Arsenic?” I repeated, unfamiliar with the name. “Is that another herb?”

“It is a mineral, useful as a base for salves but very dangerous.” She frowned. “That is all I know of it.”

“Then perhaps we had better learn more.”

I went in search of Thomas Pereston and found him not far away. Denied access to the princess’s bedchamber, he lurked at the foot of the great stair that led to the royal lodgings.

“Tell me all you know about arsenic,” I demanded.

The apothecary looked at me askance. “Why would you want to know such a thing?”

I hesitated, then glanced pointedly up the stairs.

“Ah, I see,” said Master Pereston, “but you are quite wrong if you think arsenic is to blame.”

“Tell me anyway. I would decide for myself.”

He took off the tiny pair of spectacles he wore. Breathing on each lens to fog it, he used his handkerchief to wipe away the moisture. Only when both small circles of glass were clean and the whole was once again perched upon the bridge of his nose did he oblige me. “I suppose it will do no harm for you to know,” he said. “And it may do you some good one day, although I pray you never have need of the knowledge.”

“I see we understand each other.” Even if the princess had not been poisoned this time, the threat of such a thing was very real.

“I fear we do.” He cleared his throat. “Arsenic can kill if taken internally. It is tasteless and odorless in solution, and therefore dangerous. That is why only those trained to handle medicines
that contain the substance—apothecaries and physicians—should meddle with it.”

“What does it look like in its natural state?” I asked.

“It is a powder. Gray, with a crystalline appearance. But arsenic sulfide is yellow in color. It is even called yellow arsenic. There is also red arsenic—realgar—an orange-red powder that is used as a pigment by painters and in pyrotechnics. If you heat realgar, you produce white arsenic. The crystals then look something like sugar.”

“And all of these forms are poisons?”

He nodded. “Oh, yes. Decidedly so.”

“And their effects?”

“Severe abdominal pain.” At my reaction, he hastened to reassure me. “The other symptoms of arsenic poisoning are not present in . . . in any patient I have seen of late.”