Free The Fyre Mirror by Karen Harper Page B

mine. God’s truth, Your Majesty, this is something upon which you and I agree. I know young Darnley’s your second cousin, but he’s a preening milksop and he galls me sore. She’s beyond listening to either me or the Earl of Murray on it.”
    The shadows of the arched entryway leaped over them as they entered the building, and for a moment, the three of them blinked like owls to see better. A lad appeared with three goblets of wine on a silver tray, and Maitland took his readily.
    “I wish we could drink to better news,” the queen told the men solemnly, though she could hardly contain her excitement. Mary had not only bit on the bait, but was going to be quite caught in the net. Darnley would surely drag her down. Maitland might call the pompous lad a milksop, but indeed he was a sodomist, who must be playing Mary for all she was worth. The man’s passion must surely be only for her power, not for her person, so there might not even be an heir from their marriage that Cecil so feared.
    They emptied their goblets silently. Let the pretty Queen of Scotland gaze in mirrors and jest about taking England from its rightful queen, Elizabeth thought grimly. Just let her try.
    While Maitland and his men refreshed themselves and rested, and two tents were pitched for them, Elizabeth, pretending she was merely going for a stroll, went out with Cecil and Dr. Dee to look through Lavina Teerlinc’s and Henry Heatherley’s tents. The servants who lived here were being kept busy in the palace, so although others walked or rode the grounds, no one was nearby now.
    “Even if we disturb the order of their things,” Elizabeth assured her companions, “they’ll think it just happened when their domiciles were moved.”
    Dee and Cecil took Heatherley’s tent while Elizabeth looked through Lavina’s more carefully than she had before. She peered into and sniffed at pots of paints, bottles of what smelled like linseed oil, and something more acrid in which a single, short brush sat, so perhaps it was some sort of cleansing liquid. Lavina had bouquets of brushes, from squat and short to lean and long, all made with various animal hairs, soft sable to stiff boar. There were, of course, lanterns in the tent, three of them with fat, halfburned candles. Could a candle have begun the blaze by being thrown up on the roof?
    “Dr. Dee,” she said, going to stand in the opening of Heatherley’s tent as the two men searched his things, “could a candle heaved on one of the slanted tent roofs catch and start a fire?”
    “Canvas doesn’t catch easily, Your Grace,” John Dee told her, straightening from his own perusal of paint supplies. “Granted, tallow could have melted and the wick burned in the blaze, so we’d find no evidence. But I’d say a candle is as likely to gut itself out as catch an entire tent afire. Now a torch might be a different thing.”
    The queen suddenly broke out into a sweat. It had been flames larger than a candle which had caught afire that gay, brightly hued pavilion when she was thirteen. That had not been sturdy canvas, but mere material in pretty colors with fluttering flags and pennants … .
    To get away from the warmth of the late-afternoon sun, she went to stand in the shade on the eastern side of Lavina’s tent. As she gazed up at it from this angle, her eyes widened. What appeared to be a scorch mark, walnut brown, perfectly round, was on the sloped roof just below where the tent pole emerged.
    Elizabeth circled the tent. She saw only that one strange spot. As she circled Heatherley’s, peering up at his roof but seeing nothing amiss, Cecil and Dee came out to inquire what she was doing.
    “Look!” she told them, motioning them to her earlier vantage point. “That mark up there. What is it? Could a candle or flame have been thrown on this tent roof, too, but failed to ignite? Strange that it seems so perfectly round.”
    “But for your keen eye, it would have been a perfect crime, Your