The Lost Duchess (48 page)

Kit inclined his head.

‘Majesty; in your wisdom we trust.’

The Queen spread her hands.

‘Now go with my blessing and say nothing of this to anyone. Go back to Plymouth. I release you from your service at court, Mistress Fifield, but you must keep the identity you assumed when you left. Wed this man, but do so discreetly. And I charge you, Master Doonan, to present yourself to Sir Francis Drake and offer to assist him in any way he thinks fit. Take your son with you. If the time comes for action then I expect you both to fight to your last breath.’

Kit looked at Rob then back at the Queen and his expression was grave.

‘We will.’

Rob grinned.

‘I’ll fight with my father gladly.’

He would, Emme knew, and Kit would fight too, and perhaps war would tear them apart just as good fortune and the Queen’s clemency had brought them together. She bit back tears as the reverences were made before leaving.

The Queen moved to the door.

‘See the Lord Chamberlain before you leave. He will provide you with something in recognition of your loyalty.’

At a nod, the meeting was over. The Queen walked ahead of them and flung the doors wide, surprising the guards who sprang to attention, and startling Lady Howard, who stepped aside in a fluster, while an elderly courtier began hurrying away. Emme had no doubt that both of them had been listening, though the Queen had been careful to speak at a distance. Indeed the Queen seemed unconcerned and not a little amused by their embarrassment. She slammed one of the doors closed and watched the retreating gentleman jump and look back over his shoulder. At that instant Emme’s blood ran cold. She knew who he was: Lady Howard’s clandestine
husband; the man who had shamed her and tried to claim her as his duchess.

‘Lord Hertford!’ the Queen called after him. ‘Did I see you turn your back on me?’

Lord Hertford froze mid-step and gingerly retraced it. He turned his head.

‘Ah, Your Majesty! I would never knowingly do such a thing. My delight is always to feast my eyes on your sight.’

He minced back towards her and proffered a perfunctory bow. The Queen moved on, reaching him almost halfway across the covered bridge that led to the Privy Lodgings. She beckoned for Emme, Kit and Rob to follow then swept her hand towards them.

‘I give you Master Christopher Doonan and his son, Robert. I believe you already know the lady.’

Lord Hertford grimaced and shuffled back a step as if to avoid any proximity.

The Queen advanced until she was next to him, and waved the three of them closer.

‘These good subjects have shown the greatest loyalty, courage and devotion to duty that any sovereign could wish for. I should not speak of their achievements publicly else I would favour them with titles. As it is, all I can give them is my gratitude. They deserve your respect, good sir.’

‘Really?’ Lord Hertford’s face creased like a bladder ball deflated of air. ‘Well, if you are sure and insist on it.’ He tipped his head a little towards them and avoided Emme’s glare.

The Queen narrowed her eyes.

‘A bow would be appropriate.’

The Earl looked pained and placed a hand to the small of his
back as if the action might cause grave discomfort; even so, he managed to bend a little.

‘Lower!’ the Queen ordered.

Lord Hertford bowed and Emme smiled back at the Queen. She could see Her Majesty’s eyes were twinkling. The Queen turned and walked on, while Kit took hold of Emme’s hand and the Queen’s ladies gathered round behind them.

Emme could see the future opening before her, threading through the palace and out by the watergate, by wherry to London Bridge, and thence to the quays before the Tower, to reach the pinnace, freshly crewed, that would take them back to a new start in Plymouth. She saw a silver line over the sea stretching to a wide empty horizon, connecting the grandeur of Richmond with the bustle and dirt of London’s streets and those of Plymouth, no less crowded, but folded together over cliffs and coombs, and there the thread ended because she could see no further. While England prepared for war would she and Kit keep course together?

Yes, yes – let the thread continue strong, her path and Kit’s entwined as one. She took his hand again as they settled in the wherry, while Rob at the bow watched the ice at the water’s edge.

In Kit’s other hand was the packet that the Lord Chamberlain had given them.

‘What is in it?’ she asked.

He gave it a shake.

‘Not gold, alas.’

He smiled, and she snuggled closer to him.

‘That’s no surprise, but you still haven’t told me.’

He broke the seal and unfolded the paper then raised a brow as he held it out of her reach.

She tugged at his arm, and he hugged her with the other.

‘It’s a licence for us to wed without banns.’

‘So no one will know,’ she said, and smiled to herself. ‘The Queen gives nothing away without reason.’ She wrapped her arms around his waist and relished the feel of his warmth. ‘There could be no better gift for us.’

‘She was gracious, and with Rob too.’

Emme squeezed him again and kissed his chest.

‘I still keep thinking of Lord Hertford’s face when he was made to bow, and I cannot help laughing every time I picture it.’

He held her tight.

‘That’s good. Laugh at the fool; he deserved the requital. The wonder for me is that the Queen was content for him to see us.’

‘He knew we were at Richmond anyway, and the Queen will have ways of ensuring he keeps quiet. He has enough secrets of his own to protect without stirring up trouble by revealing any more.’

Kit pulled a blanket over their shoulders and placed his arm around her again.

‘I have something else for you.’ He dug into his pocket and produced a large iron key. ‘It’s for a house in Plymouth. I haven’t seen it yet but I know the place will have a garden and a view of the sea.’

He placed the key in her hand.

‘I asked Will to make the purchase before I left for Virginia. When we got back to Plymouth, I went to his warehouse by Sutton Poole. The key was waiting for me with a letter.’

He kissed her cheek.

‘Will has enlisted for Drake’s
Revenge
. I shall have to do the same as soon as I can, and I will take Rob with me.’

So the time for parting would come soon; but it had to be, she
could only accept it. She would at least have a house in which to wait for him. She folded the key into the palm of her hand and kissed him back.

‘Let us wed first and share one night in this house before you go. I have something for you too.’

She took his hand and placed it on her stomach. This was the news she had for him, news she had only recently become sure about and had, for a month, hardly dared admit to herself. Through this, the thread might continue, while the strands she and Kit had begun faded and disappeared like a wake over waves.

‘I am carrying your child.’

‘O, dear Emme.’

He kissed her passionately, his mouth hard against hers, his smell and taste, his heat and strength, all around and so close that their senses flowed together, and she knew that, already, the person she had been was lost. With him she was born anew, as surely as the life within her would be new to the world.

‘What happened to the colony left at Roanoke?’ This question has remained unanswered ever since John White returned to England in November 1587. He immediately began a series of ill-fated attempts to send assistance to the settlers but none was successful. A relief fleet assembled at Bideford under the command of Sir Richard Grenville was commandeered to assist Sir Francis Drake when the threat of invasion by the Spanish Armada became imminent the following year. White was left with two small pinnaces which embarked in May 1588, but they did not get very far before one was attacked by French pirates who decimated the crew and made off with most of the provisions meant for the colony. The Armada was famously defeated in August that year, and not until the spring of 1590 was White able to raise the resources to make another attempt to go to the aid of his ‘Planters’ with the backing of Sir Walter Raleigh and a consortium of London merchants. This time White managed to reach Roanoke, but he did so in the midst of a storm which overturned one of the landing boats and claimed
the lives of seven men, including that of Edward Spicer who had sailed with the 1587 expedition. The disaster undermined the will to continue of many of the mariners, and led to a hurried search constrained by the need to leave quickly before their ship was blown out to sea.

When White finally arrived at Roanoke, he discovered the island deserted and parts of the forest burnt, with some trees smouldering as if from recent lightning strikes. The houses were in ruins, though a wall of tree trunks still enclosed them. Inside these defences, supplies of iron bars and heavy equipment had been left in disarray and were overgrown with weeds. Chests, plainly once buried, had been dug up and their contents scattered. White found many of his own books, maps and paintings torn and spoiled. Only one thing gave him heart. He had previously agreed a code for a message which would be left by the colonists if they departed – the name of their destination would be carved on a high tree, accompanied by a cross if their leaving was forced. So he was thankful to find the letters ‘CRO’ carved on a conspicuous tree on the way to the settlement, and then the letters ‘CROATOAN’ cut into a trunk at the entrance to the fort, without a cross or anything else to suggest that the colonists had been in distress. The fate of the colony has remained a mystery ever since.

White had no chance to search on Croatoan, the island belonging to Manteo’s people; bad weather forced the expedition to leave. He returned to England, settled on one of Raleigh’s plantations in Ireland, and died deeply disappointed, never knowing what had become of his daughter and granddaughter. ‘My last voyage to Virginia … was no less unfortunately ended than forwardly begun,’ he wrote to Richard Hakluyt in February 1593. ‘I leave off
from prosecuting that whereunto I would to God my wealth were answerable to my will.’

White’s surviving watercolours provide some of the most sensitive, beautiful and faithful records of the southern Algonkian Indians and their culture before the influence of European colonisation. The originals are held in the British Museum. Two catalogues compiled by Kim Sloan produced as companions to exhibitions of these works have provided a wealth of material for the writing of this novel. They are:
A New World – England’s first view of America
and
European Visions: American Voices
.

Raleigh continued to search for his lost colony up until the Queen’s death in 1603 after which his fall from grace was catastrophic. He was charged with treason and imprisoned, briefly released after nearly thirteen years, and imprisoned again following a disastrous campaign to find gold in Guiana which brought him into conflict with the Spanish. He was executed as a traitor in 1618.

Subsequent expeditions to Virginia brought back stories of settlers who had moved to the Chesapeake Bay area and had then been massacred by the Powhatans, of pale-skinned people living with tribes far inland, of white captives who worked at copper-smelting in villages along the Chowan River, and of grey-eyed, brown-haired people living on the island of Croatoan. None was ever proved.

Efforts are continuing, using DNA testing, to try and find out whether Raleigh’s colonists were indeed wiped out, or whether, through their descendants, they still live on. Many believe that they do.

The mystery was revived in the national media on both sides of the Atlantic in 2012 when a patch on John White’s ‘
Virgenea Pars
’ map, over a position corresponding to the confluence of the
Chowan and Roanoke Rivers (known as the ‘Moratico’ or ‘Moratuc’ in Elizabethan times), was found to mask a fort-like symbol. Speculation then ran rife that this could mark the spot where the colony meant to relocate, but its significance remains the subject of conjecture. The fact is that no one knows for certain what happened to Raleigh’s colony. Some of the settlers could well have travelled north, nearer to Chesapeake and the site of what would become the first enduring English colony at Jamestown; some could have become assimilated into the Croatan tribe; some could even have tried to return to England in the pinnace which was almost certainly left at Roanoke when White departed in 1587.

In
The Lost Duchess
I have suggested one possible answer to the mystery as the foundation for a story, but that’s all it is: just a possibility, not a probability, and certainly not what actually did happen because now we can never know.

From my visits to Roanoke and the wider area my abiding impression is of a fragile region in the process of constant geological change. The sand banks around the Pamlico Sound are always shifting under the assault of hurricanes, tide and current. Some channels that led to the sea in Elizabethan times no longer exist; new islands have formed while others have disappeared. In over four hundred years, the pattern of what are now called the Outer Banks of North Carolina has altered considerably, and the north shores of Roanoke Island have become much eroded. It is quite possible that the site of the City of Raleigh, which has never been reliably pinpointed, now lies under the waters of the Pamlico Sound, having taken the secrets of the Lost Colony with it.

The Lost Duchess
is a story that lies in the lacunae of historical knowledge, but its backbone is true insofar as the records provide
evidence of the establishment and abandonment of an English colony at Roanoke. All the main characters are identifiable from the accounts, with the exception of Kit Doonan, who is purely a product of my imagination, and Alsoomse, Manteo’s mother. We know that Manteo’s mother was a leader of the Croatans, but her name was never recorded; I have made one up for her. There is even an ‘Emme Merrymoth’ listed amongst the 1587 colonists, about whom nothing is known apart from her name, along with a man or youth described as ‘Robert Little’. There is a parish of Fifield-Merrymouth in Oxfordshire deriving, via ‘Merymowthe’, from the thirteenth century name of ‘Murimuth’, and I enjoyed building the character of Emme Fifield, who becomes Emme Murimuth, listed as ‘Merrymoth’, from these raw details. There is no evidence that a lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth sailed with the Lost Colonists; I gave Emme the position of a Maid of Honour to the Queen to bring the Queen’s involvement closer to the heart of the story. But there really was an Earl of Hertford, son of the usurped Duke of Somerset and first in line to that dukedom (though the title was then in abeyance), who was notorious for ‘seducing a virgin of the blood royal’ after secretly marrying the sister of Lady Jane Grey and getting her pregnant. He went on to marry twice more in secret, his second wife being Frances Howard, one of the senior ladies of the Privy Chamber.