Blood Between Queens (22 page)

Justine took a shocked step back, up against her mare. The cold metal stirrup dug into the small of her back. “No.” The word jumped out of her mouth before she could think. “I don’t believe it.”

“It’s astounding to get this break, I know, but I assure you it’s true.”

“You’ve read these letters?”

“Ad nauseam. I was up most the night making copies of them for Sir William and my uncle.” He rattled off key phrases, quoting Mary. “I cannot sleep according to my desire, which is between your arms.... Whatever happens to me I will obey you. . . . I am so far made yours that my thoughts are willingly subdued unto yours.... I end, after kissing your hands, your humble and faithful lover, who hopes shortly to be another thing unto you for the reward of my pains.... Burn this letter, for it is too dangerous.”

She stared at him, struggling to find words, a sense of dread stealing over her. These lurid lines apparently written by Mary contradicted everything Mary had told her. But it was Mary she believed. Mary she pitied. Mary, who had been wronged by powerful men using her to further their ends. “You say the commissioners were presented with the letters. Who presented them?”

“The Earl of Moray himself.”

“How did her spokesmen respond? Lord Herries and Lord Livingston and the Bishop of Ross. What did they say on her behalf?”

“They weren’t there. Moray brought the letters to the commissioners in private.”

“What? Mary’s representatives had no chance to defend her?” Outrage welled up in Justine. “How did this happen? Were you there?”

He said that he was, and his uncle, too, and told her that they were supping with the Duke of Norfolk when Moray and the other Scottish lords came in, Maitland bearing a silver casket. He described how dirty dishes were moved aside for Maitland to deposit the letters on the table and how the commissioners had snatched them and read them aloud. Justine was appalled, imagining it, the letters dumped out helter-skelter like a catch of mackerel, and Norfolk and Sussex and Sadler pawing over them, passing them around, commenting and opining like tittle-tattle fishwives. It was grotesque. And Lord Thornleigh! How could he have taken part in such a travesty? “Did Lord Thornleigh do nothing?” she asked.

“Of course he did. The moment I finished copying the letters, he sent them under guard to Her Majesty.”

They were talking at maddening cross purposes. “Will, I’m saying this is not
right
. I don’t know the law as you do, but I know there are rules of procedure. Rules of evidence. No court in England would allow such a trampling of proper process.”

“This is not a trial, Justine. The purpose of the inquiry is to supply Her Majesty with information. She alone will decide on the evidence.”

“It has all the marks of a trial,” she snapped, “except justice.” He looked taken aback at her outburst. She reined in her indignation. “The commissioners may have barred Mary’s spokesmen, but Mary herself will have plenty to say.”

“No, she won’t. The matter is confidential. She will not see the letters.”

Justine gaped at him. “Not be shown this evidence used against her? You mean the commissioners will carry on without even
hearing
from her?”

“For that she has no one to blame but herself. She refused to attend.”

Justine winced, knowing this was true. Mary had locked the door on her own confinement. But that was no reason to unjustly condemn her.

Will was looking at her with worried eyes. “Why this tender feeling for Mary? Justine, has she bewitched you, too?”

The idea was preposterous. And insulting. “Duty to Her Majesty does not mean willfully ignoring the truth.” Something in Will’s account was nagging at her. “How did the Earl of Moray come by these letters?”

He told her how Moray’s men, victorious over Bothwell, who fled to Denmark, had captured of one of Bothwell’s servants, who led them to a casket in his master’s house. “They found it under a bed.”

“How convenient.”

Will’s eyes went wide. “Do you doubt that the letters are genuine?”

She remembered Mary’s harrowing tale of rape at the rough hands of Lord Bothwell. She lifted her chin, ready to stand by her defiance. “I do.”

He shook his head. “No. Moray would never have brought the letters to light if he were not positive about them. The risk to himself would be too great in the event that Mary is restored to her throne. He knows she would have his head. In any case, the point is moot. Her Majesty knows her cousin’s handwriting. Elizabeth will decide this.” He took Justine gently by the shoulders. “You have a kind heart, Justine, but do not let that blind you.” He added soberly, “Or sway you from your task. We are loyal to Elizabeth, you and I. And to my uncle. Remember, we owe him much.”

“I owe him everything,” she said with feeling. “But, Will, I have come to know Mary. She is a victim of violent men. Scheming men. And with these letters they are out to ruin her.”

His face clouded over. “She has done plenty of scheming herself. She encourages disaffected Catholics who hate Elizabeth for suppressing their religion. You
know
that’s why they visit her and pay court to her. The ones you saw may seem tame, but there are fiercer lords who would love to see Mary on Elizabeth’s throne. And never doubt that if she sat there she would bring back all the horrors of Catholic tyranny. Inquisitions. Burnings. Terror.”

His bitter tone made Justine shudder. She had been raised a Catholic. “Those horrors are long past,” she said. “Her Majesty began her reign by proclaiming tolerance in religion. She does not despise Catholics.”

“And I honor her, a wise and dedicated ruler. But I cannot extend my own tolerance to vicious Catholics. They killed my father.”

She froze at the words. It was a new Will she was seeing. Harsh. Unforgiving.

“Grenvilles,” he said. “They were the bloodiest papists in our county.” His face was hard with hate. “They murdered him.”

She pretended amazed ignorance, wielding it as a shield. “Grenvilles?” She forced out the name like a stone from her throat. “You mean Frances’s family?”

“The same. God only knows what witchcraft she used to snare my cousin Adam into marriage. To this day I cannot look at her without choking.”

“But surely she was not responsible for—”

“She is a
Grenville
. Justine, I saw them slaughter my father. I was twelve. We were at my uncle’s Essex manor, Speedwell House. John Grenville, may he burn in hell, came thundering in with his henchmen. My father rushed out of the house. Their arrows felled him. I saw through the window. Three arrows in his chest and neck. I watched him drown in his own blood.”

She was shivering. The wind had thrust into their hiding place and whipped icy fingers around her throat. The truth she had been ready to confess for love of Will was strangled mute in the face of his hate.

 

At the Bolton Castle stables Justine left her horse with the groom and hurried across the courtyard. The gusting wind rattled a loose door and whistled over the steel helmets of soldiers coming out of the mess. It snapped Lord Scrope’s flag atop the southwest tower, sounding like cracks of a whip, and it plastered Justine’s skirt against her thighs as she made for the southern range. She was late for the noonday meal in Mary’s suite. She couldn’t eat a bite, but she wanted out of this wind. Wanted refuge from her wretchedness. She had left Will like a nervous thief, with no kiss of good-bye, no smile, only a few abrupt few words about how she had to get back.

Margaret Currier caught up to her. “Dear me, I nodded off in the solar,” she said. Wearing no cloak, she was hugging herself as she fell in beside Justine. “We’d better run. Cook will be in a fume if we miss her roast partridge. Where were you?”

“Master Tudholm’s. Delivering my lady’s note.”

“Ah, that man can talk your head off. No wonder you’re late. Come!” She hooked her arm around Justine’s to urge her on, and together they hurried to the arched door that led into the southern range. Inside, blessedly out of the wind, they hastened along the corridor, tidying their hair, making for the staircase that led up to Mary’s rooms. A door opened ahead, and a young man came out, tugging his cap into place. Justine knew him, a gentlemen usher from Aberdeen, one of the handful of Scottish servants Mary had been allowed to admit to her small court here. He gave her and Margaret a casual nod and carried on past them. Justine halted. He had left the door open and she looked in at the candlelit room. The chapel. A wisp of incense reached her. It tugged a thread of memory, a thread of promised comfort.

“Come
on,
” Margaret urged.

“You go ahead, Margaret. I see Master Forbes in there, and I need a word with him about repairing my lady’s desk.”

Margaret frowned with disapproval. The chapel, with its ornate Catholic trappings, was an indulgence that Elizabeth accorded to Mary out of respect to her foreignness and her rank. English men and women were officially Protestant, and none more so than Margaret. “I’ll tell my lady you’re on your way, shall I?”

“Thank you. I won’t be a moment.”

Margaret hurried on up the stairs. Justine stepped into the chapel. Forbes was not there—she had said so only to give credence to her detour—but a few of Mary’s small entourage were. A master clerk from Fife kneeled at the rood screen before the altar. The pretty Paris-born lady’s maid who dressed Mary’s hair stood at an alcove lighting a votive candle. A jowly Edinburgh chaplain sat with the white-haired priest at the end of the last row of padded benches, chatting in hushed tones, two old friends. Justine hung back, wary of the impulse that had drawn her here, not sure why she had come, but savoring a deeper breath of the fragrant incense. Savoring the comforting opulence. Protestant churches were stark, devoid of so-called idolatry: no paintings, no carvings, no statues, no incense. The mass, with all its grand mystery, was banned; Protestants merely took communion, and their altar was a plain wooden table.

This sumptuous space was an enchantment for all the senses, and it left Justine at once awed and soothed. Light filtering through the stained glass window crimsoned the floor’s ivory-colored tiles. Silken banners and tapestries glimmered. With the doors closed against the household noises, the only sound was the whisper of the worshippers’ feet. A rood screen of carved cherrywood segregated the nave from the altar, the screen crowned with a shining cross of gold. On the marble altar, candlelight glinted off child-high silver candlesticks. The chapel was dedicated to St. Anne, mother of the Virgin Mary, and a life-sized statue of the matriarch holding the Christ child, painted in bright hues of azure and gold, stood watch over all who came to her for succor.

Justine raised her eyes above St. Anne. A wide arch formed a gallery on the second story. The light up there was dim, but she could make out the wooden railing that fronted it, the wood carved with crosses and with crowns of thorns. Justine remembered the same kind of gallery in the chapel at Yeavering Hall, an elevated place where her family could observe the mass privately. Here, above St. Anne, generations of the Scrope family would have done the same. The arch’s gold brocade curtain was closed. The Scropes were Protestant now.

The murmuring of the two churchmen drew her gaze back down to them. Sitting in genial conversation with his friend, the priest wore gorgeously embroidered vestments.
He’s just concluded a mass,
Justine realized. A memory rushed over her, indistinct but as powerful as an ocean wave—phrases of the ceremony, fragments of the ritual. She saw in her mind’s eye the solemn faces of adults around her, their eyes closed in prayer. Saw the sheen of candlelight on her father’s smooth blond hair, his eyes opening before the prayer ended and glinting at her like a cat’s eyes. She smelled the spicy incense. Heard the tinkle of the sacring bell. Felt a warm hand, her mother’s, gently enfold her small one. She strained to recall her mother’s face, heart-shaped, and to feel again the skin of her cheek, petal soft against Justine’s, but the image was already lost, like a blossom borne out by the tide.

She tried to call back the dissolving memory, but instead Will’s bitter words rushed back, swamping her:
“The Grenvilles . . . the bloodiest papists.”
His raw hatred for her family chilled her. Sick at heart, she sank down on the rearmost bench, longing for sanctuary from the tumult of her thoughts. The churchmen at the opposite end ignored her, engrossed in their talk. Justine fidgeted with the folds of her skirt, her hands feeling bereft having no rosary to slip through her fingers with soothing soft clicks. She felt so alone, cut off from Will. Their meeting should have bound them more lovingly together, but instead they had parted in strained silence. Her sympathy for Mary had baffled him, and her abrupt good-bye had startled him. But
she
had the greater pain to bear, and the unjustness of it made her seethe.
I had no part in our families’ quarrel!
She had been prepared to tell him the truth about herself, to bravely trust in his love, but now? After what he had said? Tell him that she had been born into the family who had murdered his father? No, she could never tell him now.

She lowered her head and closed her eyes, willing her misery to vanish, but her problems swarmed in her head. What was she to do about Mary now that letters had been brought forward to blacken her name? Letters brought forward in secret. Was she to say nothing and go on spying on Mary? But how could she possibly report to Will again? It wasn’t just his hatred of her family that dismayed her—it was also his callous disregard for this injustice to Mary. She suddenly realized that she had hoped Elizabeth would restore Mary to some position of rank in Scotland—not as monarch, because Moray’s government would not accept that, but perhaps as the respected mother of the infant King James, a retired but honored dowager queen. Now she saw that men on both sides of the border intended to ruin Mary and leave her with nothing. Will was
abetting
her ruin. So was Lord Thornleigh. Justine felt hot anger flare in her, and it struck her again how much she and Mary had in common. Both had been uprooted. Both had been born in the Catholic faith and found themselves in a Protestant society. Both had been made powerless by the crimes of men around them, Mary by her ambitious brother and his fellow ruthless lords, Justine by her traitor father and his murderous kin. A voice inside her wailed,
It is not fair
.