P. Chisholm - An Air of Treason

“You’re right, Mr. Tovey,” said the lady-in-waiting. “His pupils are fixed wide open, it must be belladonna.”

“The Queen?” He had to know. What if his aunt had had her usual nightcap of spiced wine?

“She’s well, Sir Robert, she hasn’t had any of this at all. She knows what’s happened and we are searching Rycote now for the poisoner. Please sir, lie down.”

“I’ve brought my pallet for you, sir, please lie on it until we can move you.” Tovey’s voice.

Really he preferred the stones which were cooler, but his stomach cramped and twisted humiliatingly again and Tovey’s blurred angular face was wobbling and stretching, drawn upon the finely woven veils around him.

Looking down from his straw-smelling cloud was fun. He laughed at the sight of men on horseback, riding hell-for-leather across country along the line of the old Giant’s Wall. He recognised the man at their head-good God, was that what he looked like in a jack and morion? Not bad, quite frightening in fact, and from the look of his face, he was in a rage about something.

Carey peered with interest over the other edge of the cloud to see more riders, a remarkable number, in fact. It looked like a full-fledged Warden raid, though for some reason all the riders were heading eastward rather than north or south, riding bunched in their surnames. From the quilting on the jacks there were Dodds, Storeys, Bells, a lot of Armstrongs, Grahams…good God, Grahams ? Following him? What the hell was going on?

And somehow he saw in a flash what it was that had enraged him, which was Elizabeth Widdrington in nothing but a bloodstained shift, locked in a storeroom, with a black eye and a swollen face and dried blood on it.

The bolt of fury that drove through him at that sight knocked him right off his cloud and into the uproar of his body which seemed to be fighting the people trying to strap him to a litter. He could ride, he needed his sword, where the hell was Dodd…? More light blurred into his useless eyes making his enormous head hurt. Had he been struck blind? Dear God, please not?

Heavy weights coloured red and gold twisted his legs from under him and landed on his shoulders and hips, pinning him down. There was murmuring in the background. Someone with a foreign voice was advising caution, the delirium from belladonna or henbane could make a man four times as strong as normal.…

The war drums were beating around him but he could still hear Tovey dropping to his knees and stammering something. What was he saying?

“Y…your M…Majesty?”

The fear in the boy’s voice was what suddenly cut through his rage. Despite his agonising headache, his heat, the suddenly more distant rage, the drought, and the unsettling discovery that the world was really made of the finest, most delicate silk, Carey smiled.

“Robin, Robin, can you hear me, my dear?”

Yes, it was the Queen. He knew his aunt’s voice, though when he squinted to see her she was a blotchy pink and white moon, framed by sable fur and topped with a thatch of grey-red. Red and gold lumps were next to her, behind her was a dark column with a doctor’s cap.

He managed a grunt through a throat too dry to make any other sound and he couldn’t think of words. Some of the rage was draining out of him, despite the pounding of his heart. Garbled foreign noises surrounded him. She was talking to Tovey in Latin and the boy responded, he couldn’t understand a word of it, now the doctor was talking it too. Bloody hell, he hated learned people talking about him in Latin.

He felt the Queen’s hand on his shoulder which was going numb because of the large Gentleman Pensioner kneeling on it.

“Robin, I have brought my own Doctor Lopez who is an expert in poisons, one of my lord Essex’s physicians as well,” said the Queen’s voice. He frowned. The last thing he wanted was a doctor-he didn’t want to die.

“He has purged, Your Majesty,” said Lopez’ nasal Portuguese voice. “He has drunk some water. I recommend the empiric treatment of this belladonna poisoning, as suspected by Senhor Tovey. I ’ave a decoction of beanpods which has been efficacious in the past…” A click of fingers, somebody trotted off into the night, he heard them, what the hell was a decoction of beanpods?

He tried to shift the weight of the two Gentlemen Pensioners with their knees bruising his shoulders and couldn’t. The Gentlemen were not scrawny young clerks to be knocked sideways like ninepins. There was another argument going on above him, this time in English.

“No, he certainly can’t stay here. So long as this is no illness, not plague…”

Nobody thought it was plague, especially not Dr. Lopez. That was good to hear. The argument went on while he drifted in and out, sometimes on his cloud, sometimes wishing they’d stop holding him down so he could go and kill the bastard who had hurt Elizabeth Widdrington.

Cool bony fingers touched his forehead.

“Robin, listen. I’m having you moved into the manor house,” said the Queen in a voice that brooked no argument. “We’ll kick out one of Essex’s pack of hangers-on and make room.”

She patted his cheek and he heard the rustling of dressing gowns as she left with her two ladies. It wasn’t the first time he’d seen his aunt in her dressing gown, after all. Not that he’d seen her this time, since his eyes weren’t working at all.

The weights came off his shoulders and hips, but something was tangling his wrists so he couldn’t lift his arms. He tried to sit up, was pushed down firmly and a strap came across his chest. Goddamn it to hell, he had to get up, he didn’t have time for this nonsense, he needed his broadsword, he had to save Elizabeth. He tried to shout, but couldn’t, he wanted to piss but couldn’t. He wanted to see but couldn’t. He was hot as hell again and the world was turning back to silk veils as he somehow jerked high in the air, blinking at the shadowed stone forest of the church, the branches in their orderly stone patterns and the gargoyles laughing at him. Christ, where was his sword, where was Dodd? He was somehow bobbing along on his back, a stone lintel went past above him and now he was flying through the sky where the stars were and now he was on the other side of the fake painted silk walls of the world.

But this time he was looking at himself climbing a ladder to a wooden platform.

Two men were waiting for him in the cold sunlight, and a priest in a plain surplice, speaking the words “Oh Lord, wash me of my iniquity, cleanse me of my sin.…”

His own face was white, lips set in a line, but his eyes were sad. He heard himself speaking in the dawn to the small crowd waiting to see him die, apologising for his wicked rebellion against his most loving cousin, the Queen, thanking her for her gentle mercy to him of the axe, who was unworthy of it. Quite a good speech, really.

He saw himself turn, shuck off a worn green velvet doublet and kneel down to the block in his shirt and hose. He heard himself saying the Our Father in a creditably firm voice, words torn away by the wind, then bending to put his neck on the block and the headsman’s axe swinging up, glittering in the sunlight.

The blow knocked him out of his dream again and back into his body where someone was making him drink something filthy-tasting. Meekly he drank it and let his miraculously still-attached head down to the pillow again, heart drumming wildly inside him.

Rebellion? Against the Queen? Good God. And it must have been a foul bill that he confessed to because the vision of himself had had no injuries, no signs of torture at all. How could that have happened?

It’s a fever dream, he told himself somewhere deep inside himself where the drought didn’t matter so much-both of them were fever dreams. And why had he been so badly dressed for his execution? His doublet had looked ten years old and hard-worn. That could never happen. Rebellion was as ridiculous as the idea that he could become so…well, so shabby.