The Thorne Maze (30 page)

“And Clifford somehow tied himself up and knocked himself unconscious? It won’t work, Jamie. Best give it all up.”

“I’m grateful for the reminder to haul him out into the forest and bury him somewhere. No, Your High and Mighty Majesty, it will work and I will win, for I take opportunity where I find it. There will be such chaos at the loss of England’s young, popular queen that no one will notice I have left the court, grief-stricken, of course.”

He lifted a tennis ball—sized piece of ballast from a barrel and cocked his arm as if he’d stone her as she stood, trapped. Her thoughts darted as he went on, “Now about Cecil, who no doubt never thought you should have brought me to court with Chris in the first pl—”

“That’s not true. Cecil, like I, values brains, and you have those in spades.” She had to get to Cecil soon. She feared this demon had already used ballast stones instead of bricks for attempting a murder on this night.

“Too late for compliments,” Jamie insisted with a snicker. “You know, your brilliant principal secretary actually fell just now for my news that your Lady Ashley had attacked my beloved Lady Rosie and called her Anne Boleyn. I came directly to him, I claimed, to avoid vexing you with your vile headache.”

She just gaped at him, fearing she was indeed bested in this life and death duel. He’d been wily enough to play on Cecil with Kat’s dementia. Then she might indeed be doomed.

“You have heard of Anne Boleyn, High-and-Mighty?” he goaded. “Cecil and you, like the Suttons, underestimated me.”

“You are in error about that. You cleverly poisoned Bettina, didn’t you?” she countered, trying to stroke his sick pride. “You did not take your yew tonic, even though you were truly ill and Meg Milligrew doled it out to you. You saved it and poisoned Bettina. And endeavored to do the same to Chris.”

“How clever of you, in turn, but, once again, you are dealing in half truths, and even wily lawyers always get caught for that,” he said with another chuckle, as if they yet played some sort of game. “You’ve guessed right about Bettina but wrong about Chris.”

He began tossing and catching the rock in one hand over and over. “You see, Bettina drank a goblet of my medicine I’d been saving, mixed with wine, to make all her troubles go away, I promised. But I had only a dram left for Chris, so I soaked his favorite breath cloves in it, just enough to make him suffer before I hoped to increase the dosage. We poor lackeys who are sent on errands to fetch cloves for our betters chew the cheaper gillyflowers, Your High-and-Mighty, but our breath is just as sweet. Since you’ve never taken to dancing with me or hanging on me as you do Chris or Robert Dudley, you would not know that.”

She forced herself to ignore that barb. “So Chris was saved by Mistress Milligrew’s purgatives only to be attacked in this maze by the man he most trusted and relied on?” she asked.

“He recovered so quickly that he was in fine fettle tonight, wanted to row the maze with me, so I let him come along. But, as for you and me, our battle of wits is no longer amusing. I regret to inform you the game is ended, and I have won.”

“Jamie, I admire your attention to detail and could use an informant such as you in my employ.”

“You’re dismissing me for a dolthead again!” he cried and heaved the stone at her. She tried to dodge it, but, only slightly slowed by the water, it hit her left wrist. He immediately picked up another, bigger stone from a barrel.

“Then you don’t love Rosie?” Elizabeth challenged, her voice sounding panicked now. “I told her earlier today I would raise you high to wed her—”

“It wouldn’t change a thing since I was never noble or even gentry to begin with, no matter if you would bestow a title or some court sinecure. But do I love her? I was regretful I would have to disappoint her until she told me flat a few minutes ago that if it was a choice between serving you and wedding me, her loyalty lay with you. No one—
no one
recognizes the worth and genius of the rural servant’s boy!” he roared. “And so, I’m taking a letter north with me to Mary, Queen of Scots, informing her that, when she’s asked to come and take your throne, she’ll owe it all to me.”

When he named her nemesis, Elizabeth was so stunned at the magnitude of his betrayal she stood momentarily speechless.

“I’ve played up to Lord Darnley, too,” Jamie went on, “at a dear price—a
dear
price to that sodomite, I tell you, but if he prospers with Queen Mary, I’ll need him. As for now, I must tidy up here and be going.”

He was going to stone her, to drown her. She found her voice again. “It was you who tried to strangle me in the maze at Hampton Court,” she accused. “Why didn’t you finish the deed then, Master Barstow?”

“Ah,
Master
Barstow now, is it? You look down on anyone not—ah, at least to the manor born.”

“No, I look down on a tormentor and murderer and betrayer, whom God will judge and punish, whether or not someone else does first.”

“A bold speech, but then, you are good at that. I didn’t finish strangling you because that would not have made the game so pleasant. I wanted the challenge of proving I could demand your utmost attention, then still beat you, Templar, and Cecil in a convoluted lawyer’s chess match, and I have done so—royally.”

He gathered yet more stones and laid them on his knees.

“Tell me about you and Bettina,” Elizabeth demanded. “I see you draped her skirts across the opening of the maze this night.”

“Are you the one who ripped them down? The wielder of those garden clippers was the one who used to help his father shear both sheep and trim hedges on the Hattons’ estate—and to long for so much more. A clue to my identity left right between the whore’s spread legs, and you didn’t credit me for even that.”

“Nor was it to your credit that you must have had—not an
affaire de coeur,
for you have no heart—but an affair of lust with Bettina at Gray’s.” She was gambling she could get him angry enough to make a mistake, even to miss her when he threw that growing pile of stones.

“She was, shall we say, more than willing,” he said smugly. “We were very careful in those years, but I was annoyed she might divulge our liaison when she came to court.”

“She did not betray your confidence.”

“She betrayed me!” he shouted. “Like you, like everyone, she favored Chris over me. But I’m the one who enjoyed her charms, and I’m going to enjoy this. Like the others, you are about to become just another piece of the puzzle that is my maze masterpiece. And I shall live to outfox another queen and her minions when Mary of Scots comes here to take your throne.”

Jamie cocked his arm, then set his lantern down in the prow to pick up yet another stone from the barrel of ballast. Elizabeth saw but one way out, the path she dreaded and had vowed never to take again. Sucking in a breath, even as he hurled a stone, she ducked beneath the surface of the water.

This was better than before, she thought, shoving herself between two barrels, grateful no skirts weighed her down. She felt her way through the cold current, forcing herself to hold her breath. When her lungs were nearly bursting, she exploded upward one path over from Jamie in his boat.

He evidently heard her; the oarlocks creaked as he beat the water and shoved at hedges to come out of the dead end and after her.

Cat and mouse in the maze, she thought, trying to picture Cecil’s sketch of it. As Jamie’s boat blocked the end of the path she’d emerged in, she took another breath and went another row over, then another. Temporary salvation, for this third passage could not be accessed from the main one on which he found himself. Let him try to outwit her in this maze. She could eventually work her way out of the entire labyrinth, but that would put her in a stretch of open water where he could catch her, so the game was not done yet.

Concentrating despite the stinging in her eyes and nose, the queen retraced her steps backwards. She could hear her pursuer breathing hard, coming closer each time her ears emptied of water, or could that be her own ragged breath?

She pictured the watery paths he would have to take to come after her again, and lay in wait. Rowing desperately now, he bounced the corners of hedges, splashing. Elizabeth had finally gone deadly calm inside, desperate but determined.

She could tell he came closer, only one thorny wall away. Taking a breath, she went under and popped up next to his boat as he passed, just missing the thrust of his oar.

Her lungs bursting, Elizabeth surfaced and gasped for air. “I win!” she screamed.

Startled, Jamie slammed his oars in the water to halt and half stood, lifting an oar to strike her. She rocked his boat toward, then away from her hard enough to throw him out, headlong into the hedge on the other side.

His face raked through the thorns, and he splashed into the water. A dull thud resounded as his head hit a barrel. She braced herself, then turned his boat and rammed the prow into him, once, twice when he came up, flailing, choking. If she could but pin him against a barrel …

Elizabeth held her breath again and went under two rows away to wait. She heard and felt nothing but roiling water which slowly stilled. No sound from him unless he too would carry on the game to lay yet another trap, or he walked through the water to come stealthily after her. Still, nothing.

But then she heard a boat, this one, thank the Lord, from outside, coming toward, then into the maze. It shot quickly past her position in the first false turn, but she saw Rosie rowed with Kat in the stern.

“Rosie, help me! There’s a man after me in the water,” she shouted, deciding not to spring his identity on her yet.

“Your Grace? I thought you were in the manorhouse!”

“Be careful near that drifting boat. Row back toward the maze. Lord Cecil is back there and needs help and Chris is—”

“But here comes Lord Cecil. Oh no, with a bloody head and someone—Chris Hatton, hurt too—in his boat.”

Cecil and Chris alive, the queen rejoiced, even as Rosie’s voice rang out again, “But where’s Jamie? I thought he came out here, and I need to talk to him.”

Despite the shock poor Rosie had coming, Elizabeth felt warmed by salvation’s victory. Behind Rosie’s boat came Cecil’s craft, floating in the current while he dazedly held his bleeding head with both hands. But he’d somehow brought Chris with him, for his big body sprawled over the side of the boat as he coughed up water.

“I told you not to fall in again, lovey!” Kat cried as if nothing were amiss with Cecil or Chris. “If you get hurt, you’ll never live long enough to become queen.”

“Don’t fuss over this single bruise of mine, but tend to the others,” Elizabeth ordered as Meg and Mildred bustled from one sick bed to the other. “If you can get them through the night, we’ll fetch the doctor from St. Alban’s in the morning.”

Jenks was out in the garden shed fast asleep, but Cecil had lost a lot of blood and had a blinding headache. Yet each time Mildred bathed his bruised forehead, he smiled.

Clifford had been knocked out and tied up on solid ground, without seeing who or what had hit him, so perhaps Jamie had felt some affinity for a fellow servant. Chris Hatton had a concussion and water in the lungs, but his grief that his best friend had so deluded everyone seemed to pain him as much.

Regretful that a person of such promise in her kingdom could have been so embittered and gone so bad, the queen had ordered Jamie Barstow guarded in death as she had not in life. His body lay on the lawn, covered by a sheet to await burial after his unfortunate “accident” in the maze, which had set the guests all agog. The potentially brilliant lawyer Jamie Barstow would have no day of trial or punishment in court but before God’s judgment throne, she thought sadly. But however slighted he had felt, however overlooked, it gave him no excuse for making murder a rule in his demented games.

Despite the fact that daylight was yet hours away, the queen’s courtiers had been told that he had confessed to Lord Cecil in the water maze that he had murdered Templar and Bettina Sutton. Then, the public story went, the guilt-ridden killer had drowned himself, though Cecil and Chris had tried to save him.

Clifford had agreed to swallow his pride to say he had merely backed into a tree limb in the dark. Elizabeth would reward both him and Rosie well, not only with preferments but with seats on her Privy Plot Council, should there ever—God forbid—be the need for it to be assembled again.

“I can’t believe it of him—his doing all of that,” Rosie sobbed into the queen’s handkerchief since she had already soaked her own. They sat in a small chamber down the narrow, first-floor hall from the one in which the injured men were being tended.

“I thought it best to tell you the truth,” Elizabeth explained to her friend. “It’s painful but, in the end, will make us wiser and stronger, too.”

The queen had donned a robe Kat had fetched, but her hair was still wet and she’d taken off Ned’s water-logged boots to go barefooted.

“Yes, I’m grateful to have this clear sign,” Rosie managed, blowing her nose again. “I shall remain as I was—a virgin serving you, Your Grace.”

“Do not think we will live unhappily,” Elizabeth promised, rising and patting her shoulder. “I warrant there won’t be one dull moment, though I wish for such at times.”

Rosie nodded, but began to cry again. Kat, ever more adept at consoling others, sat beside the young woman and pulled her into her arms.

Elizabeth stood watching, cherishing the memories of Kat comforting her in her youth. Let her tend to Rosie now, for Elizabeth must continue to find strength elsewhere for the days ahead.

Aching and exhausted, the queen heaved a sigh and leaned against the door one moment more, then headed down the hall to see how the injured men were faring. The maze murderer had been wrong that she did not admire men of common or yeoman stock like Clifford or her dear Jenks, even Templar. Though educated, titled men like Cecil, Chris, and Robin were the bones on which she’d build her kingdom, commoners would be the very flesh and blood of it.

Tomorrow, she thought, she would send Darnley to Scotland with greetings to her dangerous cousin Mary, yet hold Margaret Stewart here. It was good to keep one’s friends close, but to reign and rule, one must keep enemies even closer. Soon she would make grand plans with Cecil to visit the university town of Cambridge, and she would return to her beloved, beleaguered London as soon as it was safe. She no longer felt like the ghost of herself, for the queen that she could be had much to do.