title: Face Down upon an Herbal (Elizabethan Mysteries)
author:  Kathy Lynn Emerson 
description: Treason, conspiracy and political scheming in Elizabethan England form a complex and sinister background for Lady Susanna Appleton's latest foray into sleuthing. The self-assured and feisty herbalist and author of A Cautionary Herbal, who was last seen in Face Down in the Marrow-bone Pie (1997), is bid by the queen to visit Madderly Castle, ostensibly to help Lady Madderly complete her own book on herbs. But a series of murders at the castle puts that project on hold. Lord Glenelg, an arrogant and irritating houseguest, is stabbed with his own knife. Lady Madderly is bludgeoned with a silver candlestick, and her sister-in-law is strangled. Susanna summons her husband, Sir Robert, back from Scotland, where he was happily combining a serious errand for the queen with his own wenching and quaffing. Their joint detection efforts, though acrimonious, are productive. Is treason in the works? The story is wonderfully enhanced by herbal lore (decoctions, potions and balms) and a heated and forbidden romance: Susanna's impressionable young sister-in-law is smitten with someone entirely unsuitable. There is always someone lurking behind an arras or scuttling along a secret passage, and codes and ciphers play a key role. At times, the conspiracies seem unreasonably complex, but Lady Appleton's keen logic and insight prove bracing. <br />Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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  FACE DOWN UPON AN HERBAL
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Kathy Lynn Emerson
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Chapter 1
  
  Madderly Castle, Gloucestershire
  
  October 1561
  
  Startled by a small sound, Magdalen Harleigh looked up from the herbal she was
  studying. Lord Madderly’s two towheaded sons moved with studied stealth among
  the trunks and aumbrys that furnished their father’s private library. Bent on
  no good, she’d warrant.
  
  “Good day to you, Edward. Philip.” Magdalen hopped off her four-legged, joined
  stool, abandoning the treatise on poisonous plants propped open on the
  armariola’s inclined lid.
  
  Edward, who was ten, stopped short. Philip was so close behind that he
  barreled into his brother, bumping his nose hard against the stiffened back of
  Edward’s doublet. The seven-year-old managed not to cry, but Magdalen could
  tell from the tortured workings of his mouth and eyes that it was a near
  thing.
  
  “Good day to you, Mistress Harleigh,” Edward replied. “We needs must fetch a
  book to the schoolroom.”
  
  He was lying. Ma