The Poyson Garden by Karen Harper Read Free Book Online Page A

nodded jerkily and disappeared. Within a quarter hour she, Harry, and a shaken Jenks had taken a lantern and two spades from the garden shed, unlocked the graveyard gate, and begun to delve.
     
    Chapter The Fourth
     
    She loved the night because she didn't have to wear the veil. It suited her, the blackness, the very void of it, like the deepest reaches of her soul.
    She stood in the shadows of the church, watching the trio digging across the small graveyard. At first she thought it must mean Mary Boleyn had died, for her lass said it was almost time. Her burial would be
    in secret, since she had been officially dead nearly twenty years, but they would surely inter her beneath the church floor with her lord. So they must be digging up the man her little band had killed when the simpletons should have executed Henry Carey.
    She shifted slightly closer and peered around a big tree. They were so intent, they would not see her. She realized they had come through the gate she had planned to slip through to meet her girl, using the copy of the key she'd had made. They were too close to it for her to risk entering the grounds of the manor now. A curse be on them, for she would be delayed. If this was to be the night Mary Boleyn died, she wanted to be under her window, staring up, knowing one more Boleyn had been dispatched to the fiery bowels of hell.
    The tree limb creaked overhead, and the breeze danced dry leaves through the frosted grass. Autumn had come early this year, as unnatural as the summer disasters that had plagued the kingdom because these wretched Boleyns still were drawing breath, waiting for one of their ilk to take the throne.
    She strained to hear what the two cloaked men and the lad digging for them said. The lad's face, too, was hidden, for he had some sort of handkerchief tied over his nose and mouth. Then the wind shifted, and she caught their words.
    "The poor wretch been in the ground near on four days, milady," the digger said. "Best pinch your nose, 'cause I know how a dead horse is after that time, 'less it's in the deep of winter."
    A servant, but not one Essex-bred, the eavesdropper thought. Off and on she'd been in these parts enough to hear the way the local rustics slurred their words. But who was that lady the lad addressed, and one garbed like a man? Mary Boleyn was too weak, so perhaps this was the Lady Cornish her lass had mentioned. But if they were digging the man up to rebury him somewhere, why at night? Or were they exposing his corpse for another reason?
    "Just dig, Jenks," the lady said, "then I'll slit the winding sheet."
    The watching woman spun to press her back against the tree trunk; she covered her mouth with both hands. They suspected something about the corpse. But let them be puzzling over it, she thought, let them find her hellebore and aconite
    on those tips and shafts, if congealed blood and earth and worms had not annihilated the deadly concoction. Before they could try to trace her, she would have Mary Boleyn dead and then be on to her real passion, her royal victim, that she would--
    "Oh, 'So blood!" the cloaked lady cried and turned away, retching loudly on the grass near the grave in scraping, gasping sounds. The watching woman peered back around the tree. The lady still held the lantern but jerked it so quickly it threw sharp, tilting shadows of the trio on the brick manor wall. She wiped her face on her cloak and her hands on the grass. But she came right back to the grave, even bent over it, one hand now covering her mouth and nose. Whoever she was, the watcher had to admire her mettle. In form she resembled Meg the herbalist, but her voice was a far hue and cry from hers. She wished she'd shine the lantern at her face inside that hood. And why was she garbed like a man?
    "Wait!" the lady said in a voice both men obviously heeded. "I said I'd cut the winding sheet myself, and so I shall." The watching woman saw her put her lantern down and kneel, leaning into the