The Fyre Mirror Read Free

queen’s closest courtiers and staff.
    “What is that sweet-smelling stuff?” Elizabeth asked Meg Milligrew, her strewing-herb mistress of the privy chamber. On her knees, the girl had her red head bent over a chest of the queen’s clothing she was scenting. Elizabeth halted as she entered the chamber from the inner sanctum of her bedroom.
    “Fresh potpourri from the first apothecary roses, Your Grace. I was wearying of the dry dust of the wintry sachets. Gracious, this journey to Nonsuch will be like a breath of fresh air.”
    Meg Milligrew had always been that for the queen. They’d gone through some difficult times these last seven years Meg had served her. Because the young woman somewhat resembled Elizabeth Tudor and was one of her most trusted servants of the privy household, Meg sometimes became more than a mere herbalist, especially when some mystery or crime needed to be secretly solved.
    “You’ll soon be fetching in all sorts of green and growing things again,” Elizabeth told her jauntily, though the queen’s heart was heavy as she went out into the corridor. She headed two doors down to a small chamber where her dear old friend Lady Katherine Ashley was living out the winter of her life in a state the royal physicians deemed “second childhood.”
    As the queen had been only three when she lost her mother, Queen Anne Boleyn, Kat had been her nursemaid, her early governess, and later first lady of the bedchamber and mistress of the royal wardrobe. Above all, Kat had been the nearest thing she’d had to a mother these thirty-two years.
    Elizabeth halted in the doorway. Kat, in a carved armchair by the window, was slumped in sleep with the sun on her robed knees. Floris Minton, the nursemaid who had been hired with highest commendations in January, looked up from her embroidery frame and jumped to her feet to curtsy.
    The queen gestured for Floris to join her in the hall, and the sprightly woman obeyed instantly. Floris was a real find, a gem, as Lady Rosie and Meg, who had previously helped tend the failing Kat, always said. Floris’s face might be plain and pale, her nut-brown hair and eyes unremarkable, but she was clever and always radiated care and concern for Kat.
    “How do you think Lady Ashley will abide the trip?” the queen whispered to Floris with a nod in Kat’s direction.
    “In the padded litter you propose, well, I think, Your Majesty. The sweet country breezes of Surrey will do her good.”
    “Tend her well on the journey and send word to me if aught is amiss. Of course, both of you will be lodged near the royal chambers. Mistess Minton, I trust your opinion in all this.”
    The short woman gave a pert nod. “I note well the love you bear her. You suffer to see her so much as buffeted or discomfitted.”
    “Has she addressed you as her daughter of late?” Elizabeth asked, for Kat sometimes had hallucinations that Floris was her own progeny she must tend to.
    “Off and on, Your Majesty. She—”
    “Who is that come calling?” Kat’s tremulous voice cried out.
    “It’s me, Elizabeth,” the queen said, stepping into the chamber and slowly going closer. “Remember me?”
    “Of course I do. And I see you’ve borne your child, flat as a board you are again.”
    “I—Kat,” Elizabeth said as her hands fluttered to her stiff satin stomacher, “I told you I am not wed nor have had a child.”
    “Pity,” Kat clipped out, frowning. “My Floris needs friends.”
    As queen she could not tend Kat for hours, as she’d like, but it cut Elizabeth to the quick that it was Floris whom Kat held to now. “We all need friends,” Elizabeth whispered, and merely touched Kat’s shoulder, though she wanted to hurl herself against the old woman’s breast and weep for her losses, as she had so many times in her childhood. But the queen blinked back tears and fled before she made a fool of herself, crying before Floris and further upsetting Kat. Each time Kat was with Elizabeth lately,