The Siren Queen: An Ursula Blanchard Mystery at Queen Elizabeth I's by Fiona Buckley Page A

between fits of retching, and I had a sniff at it. That chicken was past its best. I could smell it. Curses, indeed!”
    “And I know what to do for them all, or at least what might help. Pity there’s not much chance they’ll ask me!” Gladys growled.
    She would have turned back into the bedchamber, except that I caught hold of her. “Gladys, what would help? Quick, tell me!”
    “Clear it out of them, what else? Warm salt water. That’ll bring it up. Empty their stomachs right out. Then clean well water to wash ’em through. I’m going back to bed.”
    “Come on,” I said. “Dale, Meg, Sybil. Let’s see what we can do! Upstairs first!”
    “I’ll go to the kitchens and help the fellows there,” Brockley said.
    The scene in the servants’ dormitories upstairs was highly unpleasant. There was one for the menservants and another forthe women, with a dozen or more occupants in each. In both rooms, someone had managed to light candles, so we could at least see what we were about. Everyone hadn’t been stricken and those who were not were trying to help the less fortunate, most of whom were either crouching on chamber pots or leaning over basins. There was a hideous smell of vomit and excreta.
    Hugh and I rapped out questions and counted heads and then, with Meg, Sybil, and Dale behind us, we rushed down to the kitchens. As we reached the foot of the steps, we heard more sounds of distress coming from a passageway to the left and we veered along it to investigate. Discovering two doors, opposite to each other, we plunged through one and found ourselves in what looked like the butler Conley’s suite. It was empty, however, and we now realized that the noises came from beyond the other doorway. This proved to be the housekeeper’s domain. Conley, looking slightly green but not violently ill, was there, holding Mistress Dalton’s head as she threw up into an earthenware bowl.
    “It was the stew,” he said shortly as we came in, and his usual dignified tones had slipped, revealing a down-to-earth London accent and a down-to-earth mind to go with it. “It’s happened before, with chickens. The cooks plunge the carcasses into boiling water before they pluck ’em, to make plucking easier . . . ”
    I nodded. During a secret assignment that had obliged me to work in a pie shop, I had learned a good deal about the art of plucking poultry. After immersion in boiling water, the feathers came out easily if pulled against the grain. But the exposure to heat also meant that the meat didn’t keep for long. Chickens treated in such a way had to be cooked promptly.
    “. . . all the plucking for the day is done in the morning and birds not used for dinner go on one of what I call the supper shelves in the larder. There’s dinner shelves, too. Anything that’s being kept for tomorrow’s dinner is put there, but it shouldn’t ever include chicken. We never hang plucked poultry, either. But mistakes can happen, like I said. Some careless lad or lass puts a plucked chicken on the shelf for tomorrow’s dinner instead of today’s supper, and no one notices because they’re always busy andour chief cook always wants everything done yesterday if not last week, and the chicken’ll still be there next day, by which time it’s started going off, and some not very bright novice cook . . . ”
    Here, Conley went off at a tangent. “They’re never bright when they’re novices. Our head cook scares them senseless sometimes; wallops the shit out of them if they do things wrong. Well, the young have got to be trained but you can go too far with these things.”
    He shook his head and came back to the point. “So some young kitchen hand in a fluster and a hurry, probably being shouted at, takes things off the dinner shelf and puts them on a kitchen table and doesn’t think to ask if that chicken ought to be there. Or maybe hasn’t yet learned enough to know. And the morning’s supply of poultry is being plucked