Blood Between Queens (19 page)

“What news?” she said the moment she reached him.

All he could think of was Justine. “Where’s my daughter?”

“Upstairs. I’ve just sent her to bed.”

Disappointment crashed over him. Ridiculous, he realized. What had he expected? Mary would hardly bring the girl to this fraught rendezvous. Yet he could not keep from asking, “How is she?”

“She is well,” she said crossly. “I wish I could say the same for myself.”

That shook him back to reality. “Are you sick?”

“Sick to death of being Elizabeth’s captive.” She shivered and hugged herself, though the night was balmy. “As for your daughter, I wish I could send her away. This is not working.”

“Why not? Have you not befriended her as I said?”

“I have done my best, but . . .”

“But what? What’s gone wrong?”

“I’m not sure. I fear she is clever. She keeps asking questions. Today, about Northumberland. Is he one of my friends? she asked. Dear God, if she discovers his plan to help me and tells Elizabeth, I am doomed.”

Caution prickled him. It was true, they could not afford to have Elizabeth find out about Northumberland. Yet he doubted they were in danger from his daughter. “How could Justine know anything about that? She has been with you night and day. She sees no one. No, you are imagining things. What have you gotten from
her?
Anything of Elizabeth’s intentions?”

“Nothing. I tell you, the girl is clever. She guards herself carefully. If we want to make use of her you must step in. You must make yourself known to her. Beat down her defenses. Bring her to our cause.”

Should he? Part of him longed to see his daughter, to embrace her and reclaim her from Thornleigh’s indoctrination. But was it safe to do so? Reluctantly, he said, “Not yet. Not until—”

The kitchen door swung open and the kitchen maid stepped out. Christopher yanked Mary back with him into the shadows. She gasped and stiffened. To keep her quiet he whipped his arm around her waist, her back to him, and pulled her close. He held her tightly, willing her to be guided by him. She gave a slight sigh and leaned back against him and he felt her muscles soften. He knew that she had always taken comfort in having a strong man act for her. Christopher was more than ready to be that man now. He would not let on how anxious he was about his chances of killing Elizabeth before the inquiry could ruin Mary and blast his future. He still had no idea how to get close enough to Elizabeth to do it. Even if he could, would Northumberland be ready with enough force to back up Mary’s push for the crown?

They stood together, their body heat merging, and watched as the maid took the kitchen scraps to the dogs. The barking ceased as the animals fell on the meat. Humming a tune, the maid padded back into the kitchen. The door closed. There was no sound but the faint rustling of leaves in the night breeze.

The interruption spurred Christopher to shake off his problems. Somehow he would find a way to reach Elizabeth, and as for Northumberland, Christopher now had reason to hope they would get the foreign backing they needed. It was why he was here. He turned Mary around. “I’ve come to give you some good cheer. We are a step closer to bringing the ally we need to our cause, to bolster Northumberland. Spain.”

Her face lit up. “Spain? How so?”

“I’ve been with Ambassador de Spes in London. He is in a rage about English piracy.”

She frowned, disappointed. “What do common cutthroats on the seas have to do with me?”

“Not common—Sir Adam Thornleigh. And not on the seas, but at the Earl of Pembroke’s home in the presence of the Queen. It seems that, unprovoked, Sir Adam attacked de Spes’s cousin and beat him senseless. Thornleigh was like a mad dog, de Spes told me. The next day, still coughing blood, his cousin died.”

Christopher had felt sheer glee when the Spaniard had given him the account. The brawl was the kind of flashpoint that could push two countries, already snarling at each other, into raging armed hostility. The fact that Richard Thornleigh’s son had been the berserk fool who had fomented the standoff made it all the sweeter. As was Elizabeth’s quandary because of it. Christopher had heard that she had been outraged at the Spanish attack on Hawkins’s ships in the Indies, but she could make no complaint because Hawkins had had no right to be in Spanish waters. Now, after Thornleigh’s violence, she had been forced to publicly apologize to de Spes, and to Spain. She was seething. De Spes was seething. All of it was fertile ground, Christopher hoped, to sow seeds of upheaval. Indeed, if he could assassinate Elizabeth, Spain would smile.

Mary still looked doubtful. “But is it really enough to push Philip to join us? He is no hothead.”

“No, it’s not enough. But a step in the right direction. I’m on my way to Alnwick to ask Northumberland to come and meet with de Spes. My lady, it is time to bring together our allies, English and Spanish. Time to show Philip our home-grown strength.”

She seemed to take heart. “Do it. Elizabeth has no right to hold me captive. Do it, and quickly. Set me free.”

“A visitor?” Justine asked the next morning. She stopped pouring water into a basin. It was for Mary to wash her hands before breakfast, though Mary had not yet left her bedchamber. She set down the ewer and looked at Jane de Vere, who had come in with the news. “For me?”

“For you,” Jane confirmed. “A dirty-looking young fellow. He came in by the kitchen and frighted the cook. I’ve left him there.”

Justine hurried down the stairs and along a corridor, then down another flight to the castle kitchens. A kitchen maid was talking to a young man whose back was turned to Justine. Seeing her, the maid curtsied. The man turned, and Justine took in a breath of surprise. It was the young carpenter from Yeavering Hall. Jeremy.

He tugged off his cap in deference to her. “Pardon me, mistress.” His face was dusty from the road and his clothes were chalky with dried mud. An icy excitement shot up in Justine. He could only have come with news about Alice.

“Lady Isabel sent me,” he said as though fearing she might suspect him of running off without leave. “I went to her with a thing I’d heard and asked would she send word to you. She said it was important to you, so she gave me leave to come and tell you myself.”

Justine sensed an eagerness in him, and she was itching for him to go on, but first she guided him out into the passageway where they could speak in private. A footman trudged past them carrying a coal scuttle. The moment they were alone she asked, “What have you heard?”

“I did what you said. Asked around in Kirknewton about what people might have seen the day Alice was killed. I asked the folk that get passed over by the high and mighty . . . begging your pardon, mistress, I know they’re me betters.”

“Never mind that, I’m glad you did. And?”

“Well, across from the east end of the churchyard is the stable that’s back of the butcher shop. The ostler told me a farrier had been shoeing an old mare that day. So I goes to the farrier in his cottage, edge of the village. And what the farrier told me was, as he was shoeing that mare he glanced out the open stable door and what he did see but a man running through the churchyard.”

She felt a tingle at the back of her neck. “Running?” Jeremy’s eyes narrowed. “And that’s not all the farrier said. He
knew
that man. Not knew him like he was from the village or even the county, but he’d seen him in the village before. Selling wine, he was. And he said that wine man was running like a felon from the law.”

Justine found she was holding her breath. Was the running man Alice’s killer?

“W
e’ll step her foremast more forward, do you see?”

Adam tapped the spot on the charcoal drawing of the ship, showing his eight-year-old daughter Katherine his new design, a small, three-hundred-ton galleon. They were in the parlor of his Chelsea home, Kilburn Manor, five miles west of London. The riverside hamlet of Chelsea was a quiet backwater, but the house itself was far from quiet. Across the courtyard Frances had a clanging crew of masons and carpenters and plasterers and glaziers at work building a new three-story wing onto the house. When Adam had arrived home last night he’d been appalled to see the scope of the construction. Appalled at the expense. He didn’t begrudge his wife her diversions, but this grandiose project would sink him. He would have to break the news to her. The building had to stop.

At the moment, though, he was taking pleasure in explaining the exciting new ship design to Katherine. How the length-to-beam ratio of three to one made the hull form below the waterline more like a galleass, but with a deeper draft. How he’d kept the superstructure low, sweeping upward from waist to stern. Most important, how she would carry a powerful armament for her size, twenty-eight guns. Altogether, she was leaner, faster, deadlier. Good for killing Spaniards. He didn’t tell her that last thought.

“And the rakish stem, here, will give the helmsman better handling in rough seas.” He swept his hand across the paper with such gusto he knocked the apple he’d placed as a paperweight and it rolled toward the table edge. Katherine lurched from his side and grabbed it before it fell.

He smiled and squeezed her shoulder. “Good catch, Kate.”

She beamed up at him. Adam looked across the parlor at his six-year-old son Robert who stood just inside the doorway, his hands behind his back pressed against the door jamb. The boy was pale and quiet. And small. Adam had expected him to have grown more in the year and a half he’d been away. He took the apple from Kate and held it up to Robert, coaxing. “Want a bite?”

Robert shook his head. Not a word. He’d barely spoken a sentence since Adam had arrived home yesterday. He had watched, though, staring at his father with intense gray eyes, more like a worldly-wise man than a child. Adam found it unnerving. But he thought he understood: It was shyness. Robert had been four when his father had sailed away, and Adam knew that despite his few days of rest at the palace he still looked gaunt and haggard—perhaps, to a child, even frightening.
The lad hardly knows who I am.

He felt like a stranger himself here at home after so long at sea. It did his heart good to see his children—Kate so tall, and so clever—but it unsettled him that there was so little for him to do. He was no gentleman farmer, had no interest in hunting and hawking and no patience for dinners with bores. He wanted to get to work on repairs to the
Elizabeth
and longed to start building this new galleon he had on paper, but all of that would have to wait. God only knew how long. He was home on orders from Elizabeth—temporarily dry-docked. It galled him. How was he to know the Spaniard he’d struck had a weak heart and would die? He got word that Elizabeth had done her best to defend him to the livid ambassador, de Spes, telling him that Adam was deranged by his ordeal in the Indies, which only infuriated Adam when he heard it. Afterward, she’d made a great show of appeasing the Spanish delegation, ordering Adam to pay them an enormous fine of five hundred pounds. Five hundred pounds that he didn’t have! He’d had to go cap in hand to his investor, Anthony Porteous. Elizabeth was so angry at the whole affair she had ordered him to go home to Chelsea and stay there until de Spes’s blood cooled. Adam had itched to suggest that his sword would cool the man’s blood, in fact turn it stone cold. But he had held his tongue.

“What will you call her?” Kate asked.

Her voice snapped him out of his dark mood. It was a treat to see how the new ship design enthralled her. “What name would you like?”

“Not bad.”

“So she’ll always take you into fair winds, and never a hurricane.” She spread her smooth small hands on the map that lay beside the design. Adam had been showing the children the waters he had sailed—well, showing Kate, who was full of questions. He had hoped to draw Robert’s interest, too, but so far had failed. He’d never seen a child so shy. An unwelcome thought stole over him, that Frances kept the boy too close to her.

“Was this where the storm caught you, Father?” Kate was pointing to the Florida Strait.

Clever girl,
he thought with a swell of pride. Even as a baby she had liked to sit on his knee, imitating his pensive face as he’d pored over nautical charts. She had perused the markings of landfalls and soundings, none of which she could read, with the solemnity of a scholar. “That’s right. And caught we were. Top-heavy, you see, not like”—he smiled at her—“like
Zephyr
.”

Hammers clanged. Adam shot an anxious glance out the window at the gang of workmen busy at Frances’s grandiose project. He didn’t know how he would pay even half the debts she had incurred. The battle off San Juan de Ulúa rushed back at him, and he saw again the coffers that held his expedition profits sinking beneath the waves. The brutal truth was, he didn’t have enough money even to repair the
Elizabeth,
let alone build
Zephyr
. His throat tightened at the prospect before him. Bankruptcy. A kind of panic jumped him. He felt caught, a vessel snagged on a reef.

“Did it hurt?” Kate asked.

“Did what hurt?”

“The hurricane.”

He looked at her serious face. He hadn’t told his children about the Spaniards’ murderous attack. They thought the worst he’d been through was rough seas. It was better that way. How do you tell a child about a cannonball splattering a friend’s brains on your boots?

“Look here,” he said, pointing to Florida to change the subject. “That’s where
Zephyr
wants to go.”

“Doesn’t Florida belong to Spain?”

“Not all of it. It’s a huge land, nobody even knows
how
huge. That’s where England needs to be. Other nations got a head start. We have to catch up.” He tapped Brazil on the map. “Who owns this?”

“Portugal.”

“Right. And over here how much is Spain’s?”

Eagerly, she leaned close and with her finger traced the enormous scythe-shaped bite of world that was the Spanish Main running from Florida through Mexico and Central America to the north coast of South America, gateway to the vast riches of Peru. Adam thought how his daughter’s small finger made Spain’s immense New World empire look even bigger. For over fifty years Spain had held dominion over half the globe, and from Mexico and Peru a constant river of gold and silver flowed across the Atlantic and into the Spanish King’s treasury. For even longer, on the other side of the world, Portugal had held a monopoly on the trade routes that connected Africa, India, and the Spice Islands, becoming rich from the traffic in spices, ivory, silks, and precious gems. It had left the English nowhere to go but north. Frobisher had sailed to Newfoundland, and Chancellor and Willoughby to Moscow, but those expeditions were commercial failures, no gold, no spices, nothing but hunger, disease, and death in the icy, heaving wastes. Ten years ago Adam had sailed as a common seaman on one of the Moscow voyages and seen dozens of his shipmates perish.

Now, at San Juan de Ulúa, he’d seen more good men die.
His
men.

He didn’t shrug off the dark memories; he hoarded them, as fuel. Somehow, he would make the Spaniards pay. But that was not for his daughter to see. “England lags behind,” he told her. “It’s like a race. What do you do in a race, to win?”

“Go fast,” said Kate.

He nodded. “And that’s what
Zephyr
will do. Go very fast.”

Robert’s voice piped up, “Why?”

Adam looked at him in surprise. He was pleased. Finally, the boy was taking an interest. “Because of her shape.”

“No. Why
do
it?”

Adam didn’t know how to answer. Seafaring was his life. The boy had never seen blue water, of course. No water at all but the River Thames outside his door. “Robin, come over here.”

The boy didn’t move.

“Come.” Adam stretched out his arms, fists balled. “There’s something in one of my hands that will
show
you why.” He put both hands behind his back. “It’s yours if you guess which hand.”

Curiosity sparked in the boy’s grave eyes. He crossed the room slowly, still on guard. He stood before Adam, looking up at him, his eyes darting from one of his father’s bent arms to the other. He pointed to the right arm. Adam brought his right hand around and opened it. Nothing in his palm.

Disappointment flicked over Robert’s face. He pointed to the other arm, determined to know.

Adam brought around his left hand and opened it. Nothing. Both children looked confused and let down. Adam reached for the side of his son’s head, and with the flourish of a magician displayed the prize he had apparently snatched from behind Robert’s ear. A bright silver coin, a Spanish piece of eight. The boy’s eyes widened in astonishment. Kate laughed at the trick and clapped her hands. “You’re rich, Robin!”

Adam grinned. “Why a fast ship, you ask?
That’s
why.”

Robert regarded the coin, his interest waning. “Just money.”

Just?
Adam blinked at him. Where was the boy’s delight?

His son looked up, wariness in his eyes. “Did you steal it?”

Adam was shaken. And angry. He said sternly, “You’ll speak with respect to your father.”

The boy flinched. He piped in a small voice, “Yes, sir.”

It made Adam feel a tyrant. Did his son think he was going to have him lashed? Regret surged through him. He hated being put so off balance. “Well,” he said, briskly rolling up the drawing to get his bearings, “we’ll talk later. Off with you two, now. Master Rowan has set lessons for you, I warrant.”

They went upstairs to their tutor and Adam set out across the courtyard, maneuvering past workmen’s carts and apprentices hoisting shovels and picks, barrels and ladders. Kilburn Manor was a hive, the activity centered on the new wing, which stood parallel to the old manor house, the two connected by a new roofed passageway so that together with the waterfront gates, the buildings formed a square around the courtyard. Beyond them lay drowsing orchards and gardens. Beyond that, farmer’s fields.

Adam strode through the shadows of Frances’s topiary works that were a feature of the courtyard, two lines of tall yew shrubbery clipped into shapes of columns, pyramids, vases, and globes that her gardeners maintained as stiff as statues. The light west wind barely ruffled their leaves. It did, though, carry a scent of watery plant life from the River Westbourne as it made its way down from Hampstead to the Thames, which fronted the old manor. Adam had never warmed to being in Chelsea; it made his trip upriver from the Thames estuary longer than when they’d lived in London. But seven years ago Frances had set her mind on moving to this sleepy spot. Said she wanted to bring up the children far from the noisome city. Adam knew what she’d really meant: far from court.

Into the new wing he went and up the stairs and into the long gallery, dodging workmen and tramping over sawdust that floured the floor. The air was dry with plaster dust. The hammering never stopped. The place was cavernous. Canvas sheets were tacked up to cover the long, empty expanse of wall where, at one end, glaziers were fitting new windows that soared two stories high. The canvas hung limp in the still afternoon, like sails becalmed. Adam shook his head at the folly of the project. Above this gallery were two more ostentatious floors. Frances was building a palace.

She stood at the far end, gesturing to a burly stonecutter in a scarred leather apron who listened intently to her instructions. The fellow knows who’s captain, Adam thought wryly. He had never discounted his wife’s skills as a manager. She took pleasure in running a large household, and was good at it.

She noticed him coming her way and hurried to greet him. “My lord and master,” she said gaily, making a mock curtsy. “Come.” She beckoned him with happy urgency. “I must have your word on a matter of vital importance.”

She hooked her arm around his and led him down the length of the gallery, chattering about the marbled pattern underfoot beneath the sawdust, the columns the masons were installing by the stairs, the gilt plasterwork for the ceiling, the cherrywood linen-fold paneling she had ordered. The gleam in her eyes told him how much she was enjoying the project. He was sorry to have to frustrate her.

“There.” She stopped him and pointed at the far wall. “Should the portrait go above the door, or nearer the windows? Above the door would catch the viewer’s eye best, but that spot won’t get the splendid light from the windows, so I can’t decide. What do you think?”

Adam looked at her. “Portrait?”

“Of us. I’ve commissioned Hans Eworth. Lady Fanshaw says he did an excellent job on her.” She added with hushed reverence, “He painted the late Queen Mary, you know.”

And charges a princely sum,
Adam thought. “Frances, that’s impossible.”

“No, don’t worry, he has worked us into his schedule,” she said reassuringly. “It’s all arranged. He starts next week. It takes a month or so, and he’ll stay with us.” She added happily, patting his arm, “It will let you rest and get back your strength. You’ll have nothing to do but sit for Master Eworth.”

Sit for a month? What a god-awful thought.
“Cancel the arrangement. There will be no portrait.”

“Cancel it? But why?”

“I can’t afford it.” He had raised his voice in exasperation, but thankfully the workmen hadn’t heard him above the din they were making. Saws kept sawing, hammers kept banging. Adam suddenly saw them as leeches on his life. “And cancel all of this.” He swept his arm to take in the whole huge wing.