My Lady Jane(65)

“Here.” She brought a cup to his lips. He drank and then hissed at the taste. It wasn’t water, but a concoction so foul it made his eyes tear.

“It will snake the poison from your blood,” Bess told him. “Gran made it.”

“Gran’s here?”

“Of course I’m here,” came a gruff old voice from the doorway. “Where else do you suppose I would be?”

“Hello, Gran.”

“You’ve got yourself in quite the pickle, haven’t you, my boy?” Gran said. She went to the window and drew back the heavy velvet curtains. Warm midday sunshine poured in.

“Gran,” Bess admonished warmly. “You shouldn’t address him as boy. He’s still the king.”

“He’s a birdbrained boy, as far as I can tell,” the old lady cackled. “I mean, getting himself poisoned. My word, child. People tried to poison me ten times a day, when I was queen. None of them ever succeeded.”

“Yes, Gran,” he said. “It was in poor form to get myself poisoned.”

“Now get up,” she ordered. “You need to get the blood moving through you, to give the antidote a chance to work.”

He still felt light-headed and wobbly, but he didn’t argue. He let Bess support him as he sat up and swung his legs out of bed. That’s when he discovered he was wearing only the white linen shirt Gracie had stole for him, which hit him mid-thigh.

“Um, where are my pants?”

Gran scoffed. “Oh, please, it’s nothing I haven’t seen before.” She got on the other side of him and poked him in the ribs. “Up with you.”

He stood. It did not escape his notice that Gran was as unpleasantly fragrant as ever, but the skunk smell was actually working to clear his head. He felt weak and hollowed out and half-naked, of course, but decidedly better.

Maybe he wasn’t going to die.

Gracie appeared in the doorway. Her gaze went straight to his white, white legs.

“Your Majesty,” she said with a grin, and curtsied impertinently, which looked all wrong because she was still wearing trousers.

Or maybe he wanted to die, after all.

Still, as Gran had said, it was nothing she hadn’t seen before.

Gran and Bess were both looking from Gracie to Edward and back again with amused expressions. Then Bess snapped out of it and fetched his pants. He tried to ignore his burning face as she helped him put them on, one leg and then the other. Once they were fastened, he stood up straight and said, “I can manage,” shook Bess off as she tried to help him, and walked slowly but steadily across the room to the window. It looked like a summer day outside: birds singing, green grasses swaying in a half-tended garden below, sky so blue you would doubt that it had ever rained.

“How long have we been here?” he asked.

“You arrived early this morning,” Bess provided.

Less than a day, then. Gracie had run them here in less than a day. He glanced back at her. “You can run pretty fast, for a girl.”

“Well, I may have held up a nobleman on the road and borrowed his horse,” she confessed.

A crime punishable by death, he remembered. “I owe my life to you,” he said.

Her dimples appeared. “A girl does what she can, Sire.”

“Oh, I like her,” Gran announced. “Can you play cards, my dear?”

“A bit. And I hear you’re the queen of hearts,” Gracie answered, which clearly pleased the old lady even more.

“There’s no time for cards, Gran.” Bess’s expression was so solemn that she vaguely resembled Mary for a moment. Which made Edward remember Mary. And her soldiers, marching toward his castle.

Gran sighed. “True enough for you, but not so for me. Come along, you,” she said to Gracie, grabbing the girl’s arm and towing her toward the door. “I’ll show you how to play trump.”

“Keep an eye on her sleeves,” Edward called after them. “You never know what she might be hiding up there.”

Gracie made a face that said, Do I look like an amateur to you? and he was tempted to warn Gran, too, that the Scot was more than what she seemed. But then they were gone.

“We need to talk,” Bess said in a low voice.

He crossed back to the window and leaned against the sill. Bess closed the door, then pulled a chair up beside him. “All right, Bess,” he murmured, suddenly tired again. “Tell me what’s happened.”

“Jane became queen, as you intended.”

“As Dudley intended,” he corrected darkly.

“The duke also attempted to capture Mary and me and throw us in the Tower, so we would pose no threat to Jane’s rule,” Bess continued. “But I slipped out when I heard them coming, and Mary caught wind of it through one of her craftier spies, and escaped to her estate at Kenninghall, and from there she went to Flanders to enlist help from the Holy Roman Emperor. She raised an army, of course, and from what I understand, she took back the throne this morning.”

“We need to go,” Edward said. “I need to be there, now.”

Bess shook her head. “Mary wanted this—for you to be dead and the crown upon her own head—to rid the kingdom of E?ians and return to the purity of the old days. She will stop at nothing.”

He remembered the bite of poisoned pudding that his sister had pressed firmly to his lips. To ensure that very thing.