The Highwayman (21 page)

“The father will be so proud,” Mary said.

The father will never see it, Alex thought, turning her face away so Mary would not notice her expression.

Mary laughed. “And who would have thought this of old Selby? There’s no cure for the ills of age like making merry with a young girl. As my childhood nurse was wont to say, you shouldn’t put an old horse out to pasture before his true time, there still might be some seed left in him.”

Alex said nothing. She had been careful to let everyone think that Selby had sired her child, but it still bothered her whenever people talked about it.

The baby’s real father lived in her mind as vividly as if she had left him yesterday, and it was difficult for her to pretend otherwise. She felt like a traitor going along with the fiction, a traitor to herself and to her memory of Burke, but for the future of the child she carried she had no choice.

“Her Majesty may want to play the virginals when she returns,” said Mary. “She asked for some new Italian sheet music, madrigals I think, this morning. Perhaps we should alert the singers, as she’ll want them to take their parts.”

Alex sighed. She did not share her monarch’s passion for the harpsichord, and after several hours of listening to the queen pound the instrument, especially when accompanied by her chorale, Alex usually wound up with an aching head.

“I’m so happy we got her dressed without incident.” Mary stood and checked the next room, empty now, and then opened the door to the hall and looked into the corridor. She returned and whispered to Alex, “She gets worse every day. On Tuesday she kicked me when I told her that my lord chamberlain had said there was no more of that small beer she likes for her dinner.”

Poor Mary seemed to come in for the worst of it. Once, when she wore a fancy dress that the queen thought too grand for her station as lady-in-waiting,

Elizabeth took it away and kept it, even though it did not fit her.

“We’ve ordered vats of that light ale,” Mary went on, “but she goes through it like it’s water.”

“It almost is. She insists on diluting it so much I don’t know how she can tell the difference,” Alex replied.

Capricious, the queen certainly was, and exasperating, but those who served her endured her tantrums not only because they had to, but because her essential nature inspired devotion. She was in love with the romance of her own reputation as a great lady, and she always eventually lived up to it, even if others did not agree with her estimation of what that required. She never forgot an act of kindness or fealty, and she repaid loyalty with loyalty, like with like.

“I’d best get rid of this perfume before Her Majesty returns,” Alex said, rising and clearing away the debris. She rinsed her hands at a wall laver, but the heavy smell still clung to them, making her head light and her stomach unsteady.

“You’d think that Frenchman would learn that giving her strong scent is a poor idea,” said Mary.

“It’s a premier product of his country.”

“But not highly regarded in these hallowed precincts.” They both giggled.

Lady Warwick returned, carrying a folded stack of the queen’s silk chemises. “Help me sort through these before the queen returns,” she said. “She’s been complaining that the seams are too thick on some of them and are thus chafing her skin.”

The women exchanged glances, but then set to the work in silence, ruled once more by a magisterial whim.

* * * *

Burke had been at sea two days when a fierce storm swamped his small boat and tossed him into the churning waves. He saw a ship in the distance and swam for it, going under several times before he reached its side and was pulled aboard, half-drowned and coughing water. He passed out on deck.

When he woke up he found himself confronted by a sunburned blond man in a surprisingly neat uniform.

“What’s your name?” the captain of the vessel demanded in English as Burke blinked salt rime from his eyes.

Burke was silent.

“What were you doing at sea?”

“Trying to get to England,” Burke grudgingly replied.

“From Ireland, I assume.”

Burke said nothing.

“Oh, you’ll get to England all right,” the captain said. He turned to one of the men at his elbow and said, “Let him sleep ‘til morning and then feed him a good breakfast. He looks fit enough, he should be ready to work by then. Set him to repairing the mainsail.” The captain surveyed him. “Congratulations, paddy, you are now a sailor in the British Imperial Navy. You’ll take your orders on this ship and obey them smartly. If you disobey, you will be shot. If you desert, you will be shot. You are entitled to wages of two pounds a month at Her Majesty’s grace, though I wouldn’t count on it if I were you. We haven’t been paid in a year.”

He turned away abruptly, and both Englishmen disappeared.

Burke fell back on the deck, not as unhappy as he might have been. Impressment of seamen was common, and he could certainly do his share of the work long enough to get to England. He was alive and intact, and he knew that sooner or later the vessel would have to put in to port.

When it did, he would jump ship and find Alexandra.

* * * *

The cold winds of autumn gave way to the freezing sleet of winter. In late November, Alex and Mary were gathered with a small group of courtiers surrounding the queen as she sat next to the fire, playing chess with Sir Walter Raleigh.

Elizabeth was dressed in one of the fantastic outfits of her old age, a black velvet dress with pink slashes, her wig drawn up into a gold net spangled with sequins and pearls. In these later years she favored black and white, both colors admirably suited to a pale-skinned woman with red hair. Raleigh was himself arrayed in the fine apparel he typically cultivated—he’d once paid six hundred Spanish maravedis, part of his seafaring booty, for a pair of Italian shoes. Today his long, lean frame was graced by a burgundy velvet doublet embroidered with silver and gold thread, and his elegant legs were encased in costly silken hose. He studied the chess board intently, stroking his full beard, the firelight gleaming on his thick black hair, as Elizabeth fingered one piece dreamily and then seized another.

“An error, Water,” she said gleefully, using her nickname for him. “If you had used such tactics in Cadiz, methinks you would have emerged from that fray no hero.”

“You outwit me at every turn, madam,” Raleigh said in his broad Devonshire accent, inclining his head.

Alex looked on, admiring the adept way he handled the queen. In his youth he had been as hotheaded and impetuous as the banished Essex, but now he was a favorite, an older man who had learned to temper his behavior. Poet, businessman, warrior and courtier, as versatile as he was mercurial, Raleigh had years earlier fallen out of favor for violating a lady-in-waiting and getting her with child. He had lost his position as captain of the guard, and everyone at court had written him off as a fallen power, never to rise again.

But Raleigh knew how to play a waiting game. As time passed he had worked his way back into the queen’s good graces, unlike the boyish Essex. He had been known to turn his back on the queen in contempt and had even drawn his sword when she’d refused his advice on the touchy subject of Ireland.

“Your Majesty is a strategist. You should have field command of the army,” an onlooker said from the sidelines.

“Think you that I could do better than some who have lately been in Ireland?” Elizabeth asked.

“You have not lost there, Your Majesty, only stayed the fight for another, better day,” said Sir John Harington, her godson and Essex’s friend, knighted by him in Ireland.

“That may well be true, ma’am,” Raleigh said. As Essex’s constant rival in glorious naval exploits as well as in the queen’s affections, he could afford to be gracious now that Essex was in prison and in disgrace.

“That fight should have been concluded ere this,” said another onlooker, Francis Bacon, a former friend of the defrocked favorite.

“We shall see, we shall see,” said Elizabeth. She looked up to notice Alex and Mary Howard standing in the background.

“Lady Selby,” she called, “some wine to quench our thirst. And a plate of those almond sweetmeats my Walter favors.”

It was the queen who favored the candy, but no one contradicted her. Alex walked over to a sideboard and poured Alicante wine and water into a goblet, mixing the liquids three-quarters water and one-quarter wine as the queen liked. She filled another goblet with the undiluted wine for Raleigh and added a pile of sugared almonds to a gold plate, placed all of it on a heavy inlaid tray, and carried it to the chess table.

The queen gestured impatiently for her to put it down. “There will do, Alex.”

“Alex, what manner of name is that for an English child?” Raleigh asked. “What can your father have been thinking of, Lady Selby?”

“Lady Selby was named for Alexander of old, so she tells me, for the respect her father bore that ancient ruler,” the queen said. “And so he should have done, and so should we all, for the many lessons his noble story has to teach us,” she added with finality, settling the matter.

“Lady Selby or Alex, you’re looking well,” said Raleigh, surveying her figure with the practiced eye of an expert, “Impending motherhood becomes you.”

Alex glanced at the queen nervously. The monarch was known to be jealous of male attention and notoriously disapproving of compliments paid to other women in her presence.

“When is your confinement?” the queen asked abruptly.

“January, ma’am.”

“And will your husband return?”

“No, Your Majesty. He is now in Antwerp, securing loans for the Crown, and that business should keep him well into the spring of the new year.”

“Oh, yes,” Elizabeth said, remembering. “So, should you like to go home to Hampden Manor for the birth?”

“Yes, very much,” Alex said, relieved that she did not have to bring it up herself. She had been waiting for an opportune moment to broach the subject.

“Very well, then, you are dismissed. And take your kinswoman with you,” she added, gesturing to Mary Howard. “Her husband is also away, and you can keep each other company for Christmastide and to await the coming of the child.”

Both Alex and Mary sank to the floor in deep curtsies, hardly able to believe their good fortune. They rose gracefully and walked unhurriedly to the door, waiting until they were outside in the hall to fall into each other’s arms.

“Praise be Jesu’s, He owed me a favor,” Mary said. “I thought my ears were playing tricks. What do you suppose possessed Her Majesty?”

“I’m not going to stop to find out,” Alex said. “Let’s pack and go before she changes her mind.”

They were on the road to Hampden Manor in Surrey early the next morning, Alex in a litter because of her advanced stage of pregnancy and Mary following on a horse, their belongings strapped to pack animals in the rear. The way was bumpy and slick with ice, and the babe in Alex’s belly protested every time they hit a rut. By the time they reached Hampden it seemed every muscle in her body was aching. When Mrs. Curry met the two women in the entry hall with flagons of mulled wine, Alex felt she was never so glad to see anyone in her life.

“Oh, my lady,” the housekeeper clucked, “just look at yourself, almost asleep on your feet. And Lady Mary, you look half-frozen. What was the queen thinking of to send you off in the middle of winter this way? When I got word that you were coming from the rider Her Majesty sent ahead, I thought that all of you must have taken leave of your senses.”

“I’m fine, Mrs. Curry, we’re both fine,” Alex said. “I’d much prefer to be here, and there was really no risk. We proceeded slowly and took two gentlemen pensioners with us for our protection. By the by, would you see that they are fed in the kitchens? And the horses need attention, too, they’re as tired as we are.”

Mrs. Curry gave the orders to two underlings as she took the ladies’ outer garments and led them to the fire roaring in the great room. The women sank onto cushioned chairs and ate from the trays the housekeeper gave them as they caught up on the local news.

“Has there been any word from Lord Selby?” Alex asked.

“A letter came for you yesterday. I was going to send it on to Richmond with tomorrow’s post. Would you like to see it?”

Alex nodded.

Mrs. Curry left to get it, and Alex looked around the room at the fine furnishings and appointments. Although she was legally married to Selby, she did not think of any of it as hers but felt rather like an honored guest in a hostelry who was given the best treatment and the full attention of the staff.

“This mutton is tasty,” Mary said with her mouth full.

“Shoe leather would taste good to me tonight,” Alex answered. “I’m starving.”

“The babe makes you eat. The appetite will go once it is born.”

“It is to be hoped so.” She felt like Jonah’s whale; she could never pass for a boy now, as she had not so very long ago. At least her hair had grown in; it was now long enough to brush to her shoulders and pin up in back.

Mrs. Curry returned with the letter and a file. Alex burst the sealing wax with the opener.

“There’s also another letter from your uncle in Ireland,” Mrs. Curry said cautiously. Alex had refused all previous correspondence from him.