The Thorne Maze by Karen Harper Page A

ale storage. The great kitchen block, which produced the prodigious meals for up to one thousand courtiers twice a day, was staffed by eighty servants with a system of rank all their own, from chief cook to scullery maids and slop boys.
    But now, as the queen entered unannounced, multiple hubbubs slowly ceased as heads turned and workers elbowed others to silence.
    “I came to tell you how much your hard work is appreciated,” Elizabeth declared in ringing tones. She noted well the mingled aromas that assailed her, but none seemed the scent she was seeking. Still talking, greeting folk who beamed or looked as if they’d cry in pride at this arm’s-length glimpse of her, she led her small party through the garnish room, where a roast peacock was having its feathers arranged and a crown-shaped marzipan was being colored and decorated. Soon, Roger Stout, the garrulous chief cook, appeared and trailed along, overanswering each question as fast as she asked it.
    The intensity of mingled smells amazingly increased as they stepped out into a court which boasted not one but two herb gardens stuffed with the green and flowering savories Meg helped to oversee. The queen sniffed. Yes, the scent was here, but faint. Trailing gawkers and her original entourage, Elizabeth perused the beds of herbs, recognizing most, but, as Meg had said, she saw no pale rose-hued gillyflowers with pinked edges here. She turned to Roger Stout again.
    “I would have sworn I smelled gillyflowers strongly in the upstairs gallery where I was walking yesterday,” she told him, pointing. “There, just to the east.”
    His face, like a plump apple, permanently bronzed from peering into pots and at spitted, rotating joints, broke into a relieved smile. “Yesterday? Aye, Your Majesty, we were crushing cloves, pounding them to powder, right here. As for gillyflower petals, we had none, though they ever lend a faint clove spice smell, aye, and taste to everything. Not that you were mistaken, Your Majesty, but perhaps you just thought it was gillyflowers and here it was our precious cloves, though they’re much stronger—more expensive, too. Aye, we take a care not to drop a one, we do, and not to give too many out when servants come abegging or bartering for cloves for their lords and ladies.”
    “Cloves, was it? My courtiers want cloves to spice their own foods when they eat gratis at my table?”
    “Not so much that, but chewed whole, for sweetening the breath, Your Majesty, like lovers wont to do, eh?” the man finally managed a short answer.
    She favored Master Stout with a nod, then turned to her guard Stackpole and said low, “Is this clove smell what was on the note, do you think?”
    “Not sure, Your Grace,” he boomed out. “All I know is that note smelt good.”
    So far, the queen thought, her wretched attempts to tie proofs to her strangler had made her path wider, not narrower. Many of her court could write notes and hire some apprentice from town or even an itinerant ruffian to deliver them. Many flaunted those silver garters, and could have cloves, chewed or stored, about their persons, let alone gillyflowers. Elizabeth made her way out of one of the numerous exits from Cooks Court, but she considered her foray into it a dead end.
    As she walked around to the riverside lawns, hoping to calm herself, she glared at the roped-off maze, then decided to walk its outer circumference. She was perspiring and knew Rosie and Anne were shooting each other arrow-tipped looks, evidently wondering if their queen had taken leave of her senses. Stackpole, toting his ceremonial pike and sword, huffed along as if he was exhausted or chagrined. Only the other guard, Geoffrey Clifford, kept up well.
    Indeed, she was angry with herself as she still had no notion what she was looking for. A break in the outer hedges perhaps, which was not discernible from within but which someone inside the maze could have broken out to escape?
    “That pin you lost in the