The King's Daughter (35 page)

Besides, he had a son to build a future for, and a daughter to protect.

What’s more, he had property. If the Grenvilles worked their poison into the Queen’s ear, which he did not doubt they would, the Queen would denounce him as a heretic and then all his property would be forfeit to the Crown. His manors with their rents, his house, his clothworks, his warehouses—all would be bought up by grasping royalists. Nothing left for Honor and Isabel and Adam ever to come home to.

And for him there’d be no quick hanging. Heretics they burned at the stake.

He remembered his pledge to Honor that evening, before Grenville came. In exasperation at her reluctance to flee England he had promised that if she would go, he would help the rebels—help this Sir Thomas Wyatt keep at bay the Spanish Inquisition. He’d been thinking then only of giving money, but now the stakes had escalated. He needed to do much more. He wanted to join them. To fight. To hold on to his property for his family. Or die trying.

If only he could get out of this dungeon. He watched the corpse cart party drag a woman’s body, stripped half naked by the child scavengers, and heave her on top of the heaped cart. If only …

And then it came to him. A way out.

“Idiot!” Edward cried. He raised his hand to strike his steward. Palmer cringed. Edward regained control and lowered his arm. Still livid, he glared into the fire that whispered in his sumptuous parlor’s hearth. The steward bowed his head and anxiously turned his hat in his hands.

Edward watched the flames and tried to digest the galling failure Palmer had reported. He had entered Newgate prison yesterday and had stayed inside all night in search of a felon willing to dispatch Thornleigh, but even the exorbitant fee Edward had authorized him to offer held little inducement for condemned men waiting to be hanged. Finally, this morning, Palmer had found a man eager for drinking money, and they had struck a bargain. But the prisoner demanded to be paid for the job in advance. Knowing his master’s need for haste, Palmer had paid. The felon had immediately decamped to the prison taproom where he had spent the money on a spree of drink and whores, had insulted another prisoner, and had been killed in the ensuing brawl.

“Idiot,” Edward repeated under his breath in disgust. What could be salvaged of this catastrophe?

He began to pace before the fire, thinking it through. Tomorrow morning, by the Queen’s order, Thornleigh was to be moved to the Tower by the Sergeant of the Guard, to await his treason trial. Once Thornleigh was under lock and key in that impregnable fortress, Edward would have no further chance to reach him. So, he had until morning.

“There’s something more, sir,” the steward put in hesitantly. “We’ve found the girl, like you asked.”

“What girl?” Edward asked testily.

“Thornleigh’s daughter. She’s here in London, at the Anchor Inn on Thames Street. Seems she doesn’t know her father’s been put in Newgate and she’s searching the prisons for him. And she’s got that Spaniard working for her.”

“What? The one you hired in Colchester? The murderer?”

The steward nodded.

Edward frowned. This was an odd wrinkle. How had such an unlikely alliance come about, the daughter and the mercenary? And why? But he could not bother with such questions now. He must deal with the main point, that he had only the few hours until morning to deal with Thornleigh.

At the hearth he stared at the sharp, darting flame tips. And there he found his answer.

“Palmer,” he said, abruptly turning, “the Grenville Archers are close at hand, are they not?”

“Master John’s troop? Aye, sir. They’re billeted at the Queen’s revels pavilion hard by the palace.”

“Good. Who’s the best among them?”

“Sturridge, sir. He’s their captain.”

“And I,” Edward said with a small smile, aware of the irony, “have been named one of the Queen’s lieutenants. Bring Captain Sturridge to me.”

An hour later the young captain of the Grenville Archers stood on the Turkish carpet before the fire, nodding as Edward outlined his orders.

“You understand?” Edward asked.

“Aye, sir. But how will I know this Richard Thornleigh?”

Edward realized the difficulty. He had no answer since he’d never laid eyes on Thornleigh himself—the very reason it had been necessary to give the Spaniard the old password to make the identification in Colchester jail. But the problem was not insurmountable. “You know the Sergeant of the Guard, don’t you?”

“Aye, sir. Master Willingham.”

“Good. The sergeant will be escorting a gentleman prisoner out of Newgate first thing in the morning. That prisoner is your target.”

Shivering, Thornleigh was replacing Honor’s letter inside his shirt when he noticed the black spots on the back of his hand. Only a few. In the light of the corpse-cart party’s torch they looked like gnats. Irrationally, he brushed at them with his other hand as if to flick them away.

That was when he saw the first child arrive. A girl, perhaps eight years old. She squatted about ten feet from him in front of the alcove, her elbows on her knees, her hands cupped under her chin. She was very thin and dirty. She did not move, but simply stared at him. She had just squatted down when another child, a boy much younger, crept up beside her and squatted, too, watching Thornleigh. Then the rest came, singly or in pairs, until there were nine of them, all hunkered in a ragged semicircle, watching him.

Thornleigh tried to hide his shivering. He knew that the children were waiting for him to fall asleep or die, whichever should come first. He glanced around the crowded ward. There was nowhere to go to escape them. He must stay where he was and weather this. He picked the girl, the eldest—the leader—and he stared back at her. Her eyes, dark and lifeless, were two huge smudges overpowering her thin white face.

The corpse-cart work party left, taking away the dead and taking away the light. The children in front of Thornleigh became shadowy mounds. The other prisoners settled down into the hushed and feeble motions of night. And Thornleighsat shivering and staring into the girl’s eyes—eyes so deep, empty, and merciless.

Carlos shouldered his way through the pedestrians and carts clogging the market on Newgate Street. His eyes were fixed ahead on Newgate prison. He walked quickly, alarmed to realize that the afternoon light was fading fast. He’d spent the whole day searching for Thornleigh. Working alone, unencumbered by the girl, he had moved methodically through the Marshalsea prison and King’s Bench jail in Southwark, all with no luck. Newgate was the only prison left. Thornleigh
had
to be there. But Carlos knew he must hurry if he was to get inside before they locked visitors out for the evening.

He skirted the stalls of the Shambles, the flesh market in the middle of Newgate Street. Housewives and servants hastened to finish their purchases, even as the butchers and tripe-sellers were packing away for the day. Paupers picked at the refuse on the ground. Beyond the sheds, the bleating of sheep and the bellowing of steers rose from the slaughterhouses and cattle pens.

A flock of children swarmed into the street, boys and girls alike wearing identical yellow kerseys and red hats. Carlos judged they were from the foundlings hospital next door. He had to halt as the orphans dashed around him, screeching with laughter in some private game. He hated stopping like this in the open; the guards from Colchester must still be out looking for him, guards from the Fleet prison too. But the children pinned him inside the swirl of their bodies and he had to wait. He looked up at the prison that lay dead ahead.

It rose up from London Wall, built over the arch of the gate, its flat roof notched with battlements. Carlos made out four upper stories, and the grates at street level indicated at least one lower ward. The stench from the grates reached him even with the competing smells from the Shambles. The open gate itself was wide enough to admit four horsemen riding abreast under the arch, and the traffic of farmers, housewives, gentlemen, and priests flowed both ways, on foot, donkey, wagon, and horseback. Several people had congregated around a whipping post just inside the gate where a boy of about twelve, stripped to the waist, was being flogged. As the orphan children zigzagged around Carlos he looked for the prison porter’s door. A small gang of shackled prisoners was being herded back inside by a turnkey: probably the jailer had farmed them out for their labor for the day. That door would be the porter’s lodge.

He glanced southward. Less than a quarter mile that way lay Ludgate jail, also built over a gateway arch in London Wall, but Carlos knew Thornleigh would not be in there. He’d learned from talkative prisoners that Ludgate was reserved for wealthy London citizens accused of larceny, fraud, and the like—gentlemen’s crimes—while the Marshalsea’s inmate population were mostly debtors. Newgate was for the harder cases: the murderers, rapists, and violent thieves from all of Middlesex County.

Newgate, with its grim barred windows and battlemented roof, looked impossible to escape from. Carlos thought of Isabel, of her naïve dream to get her father out. And then he wished he hadn’t thought of her. The guards were hunting here in London, and there were search parties after him to the north, and he had no means of getting away. No money, no time, and no choice. He had to do this thing, get paid, and get out. He clenched his jaw and shoved aside the last of the children.

He strode toward the porter’s door and was reaching for the latch when the door opened. A stack of corpses was moving toward him. He suddenly realized what it was: a cart loaded with the prison dead.

“Mind where you tread!” a sweating man pushing the cart growled.

Carlos lurched back. The cart joggled out, its cargo with dangling arms and legs jerking as if in some death throe. Two more carts followed. Carlos took several steps away to distance himself. The black-speckled corpses were diseased. Nausea wormed inside his gut.

The carts crunched out into the street and were swallowed by the crowd.

The porter’s door was still open. Carlos took a deep breath and strode back toward it. The white-haired porter inside was sorting through a huge ring of keys, about to lock up. Carlos knew this was his last chance. He would not be locked out. His foot stomped down on the threshold. The porter looked up—old and rheumy-eyed. Weak. The two of them were alone in the room.

Carlos only had to get inside.

21
Nightmares

“L
ord, it’s the Spaniard’s night, to be sure!” the Anchor’s chambermaid crowed to the card players. The card game had been going on all evening since Carlos’s return from Newgate. “Pay up, you lot!” She cocked a greedy eye at the losers as though she herself had won the victory.

The common room was packed with royalist soldiers eating and drinking around the blazing hearth, and the landlord’s children scurried about serving beef and bread fetched from their mother in the kitchen and ale fetched from their father in the cellar. On the communal tables the soldiers who’d already eaten had left a litter of half-empty tankards and wooden trenchers scraped clean but for streaks of gravy.

The disgruntled losers at the card table reluctantly shoved coins across to Carlos, to the loud delight of the maid. She stood at Carlos’s back, and after every round he’d won herhands had squeezed his shoulders a little more tightly, and her breasts had nudged the back of his head a trifle more insistently. He found the pillow pleasant enough, though her squeals of delight were beginning to grate.

Still, nothing could dull his vast feeling of well-being. He grabbed his tankard and downed his ale, then crossed his arms and watched with satisfaction as the coins piled up before him. Everything was coming to him now. And more would come soon. Money, freedom, land—everything he needed. Yet it had happened so suddenly, and so unaccountably. He still could hardly believe how, in one stroke, his crisis had been … not solved, exactly, but … transformed.

Yet, for a moment, back at Newgate, he had thought he was lost.

He had been on the threshold of the porter’s lodge. “Lock-up time,” the old man had grunted. “Out with you.” Carlos had stood still, feeling strangely impotent. The old man suddenly whisked him out like a housewife shooing a child from her clean floor. Carlos backed out, stumbling, and the porter shut the door in his face and bolted it.

He had been trudging down Thames Street besieged by thoughts of his failure to get to Thornleigh, when, approaching the Anchor, he saw a flurry of activity in front of the inn’s gate. Horses, soldiers, baggage mules, a fletcher’s cart stacked with bundles of arrows—all jostling to enter the inn’s small courtyard.

Taking no chances, Carlos tugged up the hood of his sheepskin coat to partially hide his face, and pushed through the crowd.

“Valverde!”

Carlos whipped around to the voice.

“Good lord, it really
is
you!” The speaker was a lean-faced man, about forty, with bright, amused eyes. “Don’t you remember me? Norwich, back in forty-nine? That rabble the Duke sent us to settle down?”

Carlos remembered him. A lieutenant in those days when they had both been working for the Duke of Northumberland. Not particularly capable, but well liked by his men. Gentry-bred but not a first son, so he’d been forced to seek his fortune as a soldier. “Andrews?”

“That’s right.” Andrews grinned. “Good Lord, Valverde, what the devil are you still doing in England?”

They sat down over tankards of ale as the soldiers continued to tromp through the Anchor and up and down the stairs, settling in. Andrews explained. They were a troop of the Earl of Arundel’s men—his retainers and yeoman tenants—just mustered for the Queen, and billeted at the Anchor for the time being. Equipped at the Earl’s expense, most of them were archers, but many had brought swords and pikes besides their longbows.

“So the Queen is fighting,” Carlos said quietly, watching the activity. He knew of Wyatt’s revolt, of course, but in the maelstrom of his effort to stay alive the insurrection had held little interest for him. Now, its significance dawned. And a bold idea took hold of him.