don’t … stop, but she was too weak.
“Men, haste to the queen and say we’ve found my daughter!” the man cried. “One of you, ride to tell my wife that Marie has been found. Dearest girl,” he said, bending back over her, “your mother is beside herself—I, too … whatever happened?” He tried to free her hand from Sally’s, tried to lift her to break their grasp.
“No, don’t!” she cried, with great effort. Had he said her name was Marie? “She is—with me!”
She saw the man who was her father turn to Sally. He saw the girl’s face and shuddered slightly.
“Yes, yes, of course,” he muttered. “She will come with us. You’re tired, sweetling, hurt, too, or hit your head.”
Had she hit her head? Was that why she could not swim up through the slippery, suffocating press of stairs and windowpanes? Was that why she kept hiding, so afraid to scream or flee?
Still holding tightly to Sally’s hand as her father held to hers, the girl he had called Marie surrendered in his arms to sudden, drowning sleep.
Chapter the Fourth
“YOUR MAJESTY, THEY HAVE FOUND GRESHAM’S daughter, just outside the palace!” Ned Topside called to her. With the others, he had just left her to prepare for their foray this night, but he’d darted back in even before the door was closed behind Cecil.
“Here? Had someone taken her?”
“I know naught else, but she’s being carried in, quite dazed.”
“Fetch Doctor Forrest—but first tell them I said to put her in Mary Sidney’s rooms, as they are empty now. And that I want someone to bring Lady Gresham to the palace. Where is Sir Thomas?”
“I heard he’s the one found her, so I assume—”
She waved him away and hurried out into the hall herself. Ned was already running toward the stairs. With two guards falling in behind, Elizabeth went down the central staircase. Leaning over the bannister, she could hear the hubbub coming from the entry by the Kings Street courtyard.
Ned must have done as commanded, for she saw Sir Thomas coming up the staircase, laboriously limping, though he would hand over the child to no one else. Flanked by three of the queen’s men and two of his own, his awkward progress rocked his daughter to and fro as if they had set sail upon a windy sea.
Marie Gresham, the queen saw now, was hardly a child, but a young lady. Ned said she looked dazed; her eyes were open and fixed on nothing. Pale and pretty, she did not cling to her adoptive father but rather to another child whose hand she held, pulling the smaller girl along. Marie’s blue cloak would have dragged on the stairs and tripped her father had not her companion, in a mud-splattered brown cape and large hood, lifted Marie’s hems with her free hand as if she carried her train. Perhaps Marie Gresham had run off with a servant girl. The queen paid the smaller child no more heed as she waited for the men to reach her around the turn of the stairs.
“Your Majesty!” Thomas cried, perspiring and panting. “The lost sheep is found, but frightened or stunned. Your man said we could tend her here, so—”
“Yes, follow me. I’ve sent for one of my physicians.”
The queen led Gresham down the corridor away from the royal apartments toward the wing overlooking the kitchens. With the court in residence here, it provided the only empty rooms she could think of, though the area made her uneasy. Not only was this hallway supposedly haunted by the ghost of one of her stepmothers, but memories of her dear friend Mary Sidney, who had been so ill here, seemed to cling to the place. Now another patient, Marie instead of Mary, would be cared for in the same chamber and bed.
Elizabeth hesitated at the door, then opened it herself to usher them in. She motioned Thomas through the first chamber, where his entourage waited, into the bedchamber within.
“Put her on the bed,” she said, her voice wavering. Before she banished the image, she could yet imagine her friend lying ill
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