Free The Poyson Garden by Karen Harper

their nameless enemies might expect. He was simply to tell the Wivenhoe household he was going abroad again.
    She walked from the forest cover toward the back of the house. A carp pond littered with yellow leaves and a few rose beds gone to autumn legginess were all that lay between her and the familiar house. Hatfield boasted no fine herb garden either. But from here she hoped to get Kat's attention with a few pebbles against the windowpanes. She would have her toss down a petticoat or two so she didn't look like something the cat dragged in. In case someone spotted her, she merely carried her cloak with its lining out so no one could see how mud-speckled it looked.
    Please, dear Lord, she prayed as she had much of the endless, sad ride back, protect me and show me what to do next.
    Though no answer to that prayer, Beatrice Pope popped round the corner of the house with her ever-present needlework in her hands. Her pert face registered shock: Her full lower lip dropped, her tilted blue eyes widened, and she tossed her head.
    "Oh, Lady Elizabeth, Mistress
    Ashley said you were still abed and not eating, and my lord said he's going up to demand that you do." Even when Bea gave a mere yea or nay answer, words
    seemed to spill from her as if they conveyed the most momentous message to all mankind. "Else we shall have to send to Her Majesty the report that you are ailing and we needs must have her best physician, like the time she sent her own before."
    Elizabeth stopped in her tracks. Why had she not thought of that? Her sister had sent the royal physician just after she was released from the Tower following the aborted Protestant Wyatt Rebellion, for which Mary had blamed her. Elizabeth had slowly sickened--with some of the signs her aunt showed--and had publicly protested her fears to all around her that perhaps she was being poisoned. Indeed, when first Mary was queen she had banished Elizabeth after shouting she deserved to be poisoned and claiming that Anne Boleyn had poisoned Catherine of Aragon.
    Under the care of Mary's physician and the newly arrived Cora Crenshaw, a cook who still served here, Elizabeth had recovered. There was no real proof of poison. But what if--what if, though Queen Mary dare not have her done away with thusly in the Tower, she had decided to have her somehow gotten rid of here? And what if, when Elizabeth publicly complained, she had bided her time, but as she herself became ill and mayhap would die soon and leave the realm to a Protestant queen ... Oh, dear Lord, what if Queen Mary Tudor, who burned martyrs at the stake, were the "she" the poisoner had feared when she drank that vial of venom rather than facing her wrath? What if, before she died, Mary Tudor planned to wreak vengeance on all of the Boleyns?
    "I said," Bea was repeating, suddenly staring so close into her face that Elizabeth jumped, "are you certain you are well, my lady? You looked as bleached as my linen for this sampler."
    Elizabeth glanced at what she held up.
    The intricate chain stitching outlined rose vines with thrusting thorns and tight buds curled around each other in a mazelike pattern, twisting tighter toward the central space left for the epigram. For a moment she thought she would faint. She took a slow, deep breath.
    "I am quite on my way to recovery," she claimed with a forced smile. "My head suddenly cleared this morning, and I could not abide being closed in by the bed-curtains and that stale chamber
    any longer. I craved fresh air, so
    I donned a gown while Kat yet slept and took a walk."
    "It is laced in rather slipshod fashion," Bea observed, with a suspicious glance at her back. "But you really should have put on some petticoats. It's not like you to look so tawdry. And you might merely have stuck your head out the casement for fresh air."
    Bea tilted her head and slanted her gaze toward the suite of windows where Kat Ashley looked out, surprise stamped all too plain on her broad face. Kat could keep a lock on