In late summer of 1562, within a bedchamber at Whitehall Palace, Elizabeth Tudor prays for the recovery of the delirious, fever-racked friend who has served her for twenty-six of her twenty-nine years. Ten days later, with loyal, handsome Lord Robert Dudley by her side, the queen leads her retinue to London's Royal College of Physicians to enlist two learned doctors in the raging battle against disease and pestilence. She knows she has no trusted allies in Peter Pascal and John Caius, ardent Papist sympathizers with long-standing grievances against the Tudors. Yet even the stalwart queen is shaken when a frighteningly lifelike effigy of herself ravaged by pox turns up in her royal coach. Elizabeth's fear that the counterfeit corpse is a harbinger of impending tragedy comes to fruition when ever more terrifying transgressions penetrate the very heart of her royal precincts. With the help of her Privy Plot Council and an intriguing healer whose curative arts are at odds with the dangerous Royal College, Elizabeth resolves to unmask a murderer who wears a false face and is beset by the vilest humours of the soul. But when she herself falls ill, an entire realm is caught in the grip of a treasonous conspiracy to take a queen's life and throne.