Frustrated rage welled within her at the sight. Elaborate gowns, brilliant jewels, and a mask of cosmetics could create the illusion of unchanging beauty, but it was an illusion, nothing more, and one that failed worse with every passing year. The creature that stood before her was truly ageless. Invidiana’s face and figure were as perfect now as they had been in the Tower, untouched by the scarring hand of time.
Elizabeth had many reasons to hate her, but this one was never far from her mind.
“Do not,” she said in frigid reply, “presume to instruct me on what I must do.”
Invidiana glittered, as always, in silver and black gems. “Would you rather be seen as weak? Her guilt cannot be denied—”
“She was lured into it!”
The faerie woman met her rage without flinching. “By your own secretary.”
“With aid.” Elizabeth spat the words. No one ever seemed to hear them, on the infrequent occasions that the two queens came face-to-face; she could shout all she wanted. “How much assistance did you provide? How much rope, that my cousin might hang herself? Or perhaps that was too inconvenient; perhaps ’twas simpler to falsify the letters directly. You have done it before, implicating her in her husband’s murder. Had matters gone your way, she would have been dead ere she ever left Scotland.”
The black eyes glimmered with cold amusement. “Or dead in the leaving, save that the nucklavee showed unexpected loyalty. I would the monster had drowned her; ’twould have saved much tedious effort on my part. And then your precious hands would be clean.”
Words hovered behind Elizabeth’s lips, all her customary oaths, swearing by God’s death and his body and countless other religious terms. How fitting it would be, to hurl them now: proof that although Protestant rites might lack the power of Catholic tradition, words of faith yet held some force.
But again, what purpose would it serve? Nothing she said now would save Mary. The Queen of Scots had been proven complicit in a scheme against Elizabeth and England; there was no concealing it. Invidiana had seen to that. Elizabeth’s councillors, her parliament, her people — all wished to see Mary gone. Even James of Scotland had bowed to circumstances. His last letter, sitting open on a table nearby, offered no more trouble than the weak protest that his subjects would think less of him if he made no reprisal for his mother’s execution.
“And what if I will not do it?” Elizabeth said. “’Tis plain you wish her gone for your own purposes. What if I refuse you? What if, this once, I refused to play a puppet’s part?”
Invidiana’s lips thinned in icy displeasure. “Would it please you more if I removed my hand from your affairs? Your end would surely then be swift.”
Elizabeth almost told her to do it and be damned. The threats to English sovereignty were manifold — they were at war with Spain, and Leicester had bungled the campaign in the Low Countries — but she refused to believe herself dependent upon the faerie queen for her survival. She was Queen of England, by God, and needed no shadowy puppeteer to pull her strings.
Yet she could not deny the strings existed. Some of the demands Invidiana made of her seemed innocuous; some were not. The faerie woman had required no devilish rites, no documents signed in blood, but she had imposed a real cost — if a subtle one. A certain ruthless cast to particular affairs, colder and harder than it would otherwise have been. The persistent reminder of her own mortality, more unbearable because of its contrast with the faerie’s eternal youth. And, in a blending of the personal and political, solitude.
Once, there had been many suitors for her hand. Leicester, Alençon, even the King of Sweden. None without complications of religion or faction, none without the threat of losing her independence as a ruling queen… but there might have been happiness with one of them. There might have been hope of marriage.
None of it had come to anything. And that, Elizabeth was certain, she could lay at the feet of her dark twin, the loveless, heartless, solitary faerie Queen.
She did not ordinarily resent the price she had been forced to pay, for security on her throne. What Elizabeth resented was the creature to whom she had been forced to pay it.
“You must execute her,” Invidiana said again. “However you have come to this pass, no other road lies before you.”
True, and inescapable. Elizabeth hated the elfin woman for it.
“Leave me be,” she snarled. Invidiana smiled — beautiful, and ever so faintly mocking — and faded back into the shadows, returning whence she had come.
Alone in her bedchamber, Elizabeth closed her eyes and prayed. On the morrow, she would sign the order, and execute her cousin and fellow Queen.
BEER HOUSE, SOUTHWARK: May 5, 1590
“The thing to remember,” Rosamund said, “is that she’s not all-knowing or all-powerful.”
The words hardly reassured Lune. All around them the alehouse was bustling, with voices clamoring in half a dozen languages; the river thronged with travelers, merchants, and sailors from all over Europe, and the Beer House on the south bank attracted its fair share. The noise served as cover, but also made her nervous. Who might come upon them, without her ever knowing?
Rosamund clicked her tongue in exasperation. “She cannot have eyes and ears everywhere, my lady. Even if she has somehow trapped his ghost….” The prospect shadowed her face. “I know we haven’t the rose here to protect us, but this will serve just as well. Her attention is bent where ’twill matter, and that is elsewhere.”
The brownie was probably right. The greatest threat they faced here was from uncouth men who targeted them with bawdy jests. Lune and the Goodemeades had made certain they were not followed, and with glamours covering their true appearances, there was nothing to draw Invidiana’s attention here.
They might as well meet; if Francis were in her clutches, Lune’s only hope lay in following this matter through.
Her nerves wound a notch tighter when she saw a familiar head weaving through the noontime crowd. Deven wore a plain woolen cap and clothing more befitting a respectable clerk than a gentleman; Gertrude, who came into view before him, might have been any goodwife of the city. The brownie squeezed herself in next to her sister, leaving Deven no choice but to take the remaining place beside Lune. Rosamund passed them both jacks of ale.
Deven cast a glance around, then said in a voice barely audible through the racket, “Have a care what you say. Walsingham often picked up information from the docks.”
Lune gave Rosamund a meaningful look.
He saw it, and an ironic smile touched his lips. For a moment the two of them were in accord; Gertrude, curse her, looked smug. “Escaping both sides at once takes more doing than this, I see. A moment.” He vanished into the crowd, leaving behind his untouched ale and a fading warmth along Lune’s side, where he’d pressed up against her.
He returned quickly, and gestured for them to follow. Soon they were upstairs, in a private room hardly big enough for the bed and table it held, but at least the noise faded. “Someone may try to listen at the door or through the wall,” Deven said, “but ’tis better.”
“I can help with that,” Gertrude said, straightening up from where she crouched in the corner. A glossy rat sat on its hindquarters in her hands, and listened with a bright, inquisitive manner as she explained what she wanted. Deven watched this entire conference with a bemused air, but said nothing.
When the rat was dispatched to protect them from eavesdroppers, Deven gestured for the women to take the available seats. Lune perched on the edge of the bed — trying not to think about the uses to which it was put, nor what the Beer House’s owner thought of the four of them — while the Goodemeades took the two stools.