The Queen's Captive (2 page)

One of them dropped to his knee and tugged off his helmet as she passed. “God save Your Grace!” he said.

Her heart leapt at this. A few other soldiers pulled off their helmets, too. But the show of loyalty changed nothing for her grim escort, who marched her on. She looked up at the stone walls glinting black with rain. Men were being tortured beyond those walls, she knew, tortured to scream out what they knew of her complicity in Wyatt’s rebellion. Wyatt himself was a prisoner here. So was the mighty Duke of Suffolk. Mighty no more.

She passed under the inner tower they called the Bloody Tower and glimpsed, across the courtyard, the scaffold on Tower Green. Terror stabbed her. Just weeks ago her cousin Lady Jane Gray—queen for nine chaotic days—had stumbled up the steps of that scaffold. Trembling, she had groped in confusion for the block on which to lay her head, and the Queen’s executioner had brought his axe thundering down. Pitiful, bewildered Jane, just seventeen years old. Yet the rebels had not fought in her name, but Elizabeth’s. How much more cause, then, did Mary have to hate Elizabeth?

Her bravado suddenly deserted her, and with it all the strength in her legs. She sank down on a wet stone step, shivering, faint with fear, lost. Her fingers groped the grainy stone, her fingernails grating. The icy wetness seeped through to the skin of her thighs, to her very bones. Mary’s hate for her was a well so deep, Wyatt’s treason had merely topped it up. Its wellspring had been Elizabeth’s mother, Anne Boleyn, despised by Mary for supplanting her own mother, Catherine, as Henry’s queen. Mary’s years of suffering before coming to the throne all stemmed from Anne. Now, as Queen, she was going to make Anne’s daughter pay.

“Madam, you cannot tarry here,” Sussex urged.

“Better here than in a worse place!” Elizabeth cried. “For I know not where you are taking me.”

The place they took her, through Coldharbour Gate, was both better and worse. Better, for it was no dungeon or filthy cell but a fine room in the ancient royal palace in the inner ward, a room warmed by a brazier of coals and resplendent with a bed plump with satin cushions and fresh, embroidered linens. Worse, though, because this was the very place where her mother, condemned by the King, her husband, had been lodged before he had executed her. This was Mary’s cruelest blow! Walking in, Elizabeth smelled coal dust and iron filings, and imagined her mother’s terror when she had been brought here, knowing that she would walk out only to her death. Elizabeth had been three years old. Later, she had heard the tales of her mother’s reckless courage in those days. Knowing that the axe of an English executioner sometimes hacked two or three times to finish its grisly job, Anne had demanded that an expert French swordsman be imported to make one clean cut.

The guards shot the great iron bolts of the door behind Elizabeth. No one had come to rescue her. Later that very day she heard drums and commotion as they led out the Duke of Suffolk, and then the executioner’s axe thundered down again. She tried to muster her mother’s courage. She knew she would be the next to die.

2

The Bargain

November 1554

T
he tavern’s low ceiling and rough lumber walls had trapped generations of Antwerp’s harbor-front smells—fish, stale beer, wet rope and salt-crusted clothes. Boiled turnips, too, Honor Thornleigh thought as she walked quickly through the room. Winter fodder. Staple of the poor. She ate turnips too often these days.

She passed seamen sitting over pots of ale, their desultory talk a stew of many languages—Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian. One man, dressed in the fine doublet of a ship’s master, looked up from his foamy tankard as Honor passed. She lowered her face to hide it behind the edges of her furred hood. She had chosen this sailors’ haunt far from her house, but Antwerp’s mercantile community was as tight as a gossiping village and she couldn’t risk being seen by one of her husband’s business associates. Richard had no idea what she was doing behind his back.

She went straight through and out the tavern’s back door, and across a cobbled courtyard that stank of gutted fish, where the gusting November wind chased dead, dry leaves. She was relieved to enter the stable with its friendlier smells of hay and horses.

George Mitford was already waiting. He stood at a stall door, scratching the nose of a shaggy bay mare who bowed her head in contentment.

“She seems to love that,” Honor said, throwing off her hood.

He smiled when he saw her. “We all love a good scratch.”

“Scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours?”

“And so the world goes round, my dear.”

She gave in to impulse and embraced him. “Thanks to old friends, yes.” She paid for her action with a sharp spasm at her rib, cracked by a bullet ten months ago.

“Now, now, don’t tease,” he said as he pulled back from her embrace. It was his jest, but said with a blush that Honor found endearing, the cheerful fluster of a man who had not forgotten the passionate impulse of youth. She was forty-four and he was ten years older, but he was still fit, still possessed of a thick head of hair, though it was sheened with silver. In the old days, back in England, his hair had been as dark as Honor’s was still. Was that really more than two decades ago? He had caught her by the waist under the stairs on Richard’s ship as they had sailed into this very harbor, delivering George to safety from the heretic-hunting persecution of the bishop of London, and in that moment he had fervently declared his love to her. She had laughed. George was not the first man she had rescued whose giddy gratitude had flashed into ardor. “And all I had to do,” she’d teased, “was save your life.”

Now here he was, saving hers.

She noticed the sturdy case at his feet, a strongbox covered with amber leather, secured with studded copper bands and an iron lock. He was never without it. She glanced over her shoulder to make sure she had not been followed. There was no one. Just the soft chomping of horses munching hay, and the keening of wind across the roof’s patched holes. She was satisfied that she and George were alone.

She opened her cloak to display the top of her bosom to him, and touched her necklace, an almond-sized emerald pendant on a chain of filigreed gold. The gem was warm against her fingertips, her body’s warmth infusing Richard’s gift from the summer they were married twenty-one years ago. To her, it held the essence still of that sweet, English summer. She bent her head to undo the clasp, then handed over the necklace. “I couldn’t give it to anyone but you, George.”

She saw a moment of deep feeling in his eyes before he lowered his gaze to study the goods. His demeanor was suddenly all business. “Milky inclusion in the left quadrant. Old-fashioned cabochon setting. A nick in the clasp.”

Honor winced at the criticism. She loved this necklace, a golden filament with its drop of green fire that connected her to happier days. But she stilled her tongue. George knew how much she needed the cash. He had been buying her jewelry, piece by piece, for months. She glanced down at his leather case, aching with curiosity. Were any of her gems still nestled in the black velvet lining, or did they already adorn his pampered clients? Her ruby earrings that Isabel, as a baby at her breast, had reached out to grab. Her rope of pearls bought on a trip with Richard to Venice. The diamond and sapphire ring he had given her seven years ago after a spectacular wool season. Her brooch of opals and topaz, an heirloom from the mother she had never known—Honor had planned to give it to her stepson Adam’s intended at their official betrothal. Her bracelets and necklaces of garnets, carnelian, amber, and coral, of lesser value yet cherished all the same. She lifted her eyes from the case, fending off the tug of regret. Her family could not eat rubies and pearls.

As always, George gave her an excellent price. Far better, she knew, than the emerald was worth.

The wind tugged at her skirt as she made her way home along the river Schelde’s crowded quay. Tall ships’ masts loomed over her, their furled sails stacked in massive tiers that blocked the watery sun. Their taut ropes creaked, straining against the wharf’s bollard posts in an age-old sea song. Winter was bearing in from the frosty North Sea and seemed to make the sailors and tradesmen hustle more earnestly in and out of the chandleries and harbor offices and boat sheds. She passed men hefting sacks from the hold of a Portuguese carrack pungent with a cargo of pepper and cinnamon.

She looked to the broad river’s western horizon. Was Adam’s ship sailing into the estuary right now, she wondered, battered from its battles with Russian ice? Would he make it back for tonight’s feast for Isabel? He had written from the port of The Hague to say he intended to be there, and Honor hoped that the wind and tides would indeed bring him. It would be a sadder party without her seafaring stepson.

There were shouts from crewmen on board a magnificent galleon coming alongside the wharf, its bright banners fluttering, and she stopped to make way for a gang of wharf hands jogging forward to secure the ship’s hawsers. Venetian, by its flag, and alive with men on the decks readying lines, and boys in the rigging, furling canvas. This controlled chaos of river traffic always impressed Honor. Antwerp was the trading and financial center of Europe, thanks to its fine seaport and crucial wool market, and hundreds of ships passed through here every day, making it an international city, with sailors and merchants and financiers hailing from Spain, Portugal, Venice, France, England, Poland, Sweden, and beyond. Antwerp embraced them all with a tolerance that Honor admired. The sights and sounds of the hectic river commerce reminded her of the busy Thames, and London, and a wave of homesickness rushed over her. How she missed England! But she and Richard were exiles. He was wanted as a traitor. They could never go home.

But what future lay here? The view of the ships dragged her thoughts far out to sea, south to Cadiz, to the storm four months ago that had cost them so much. She saw Richard’s two caravels pitch in the storm’s black fury. She heard their hulls smash on the rocks, the wood shatter, heard the screams of men hurled overboard. She felt their terror as they drowned, thrashing in the black depths.

She turned abruptly away from the water. Pointless to torture herself with visions of the catastrophe. She left the harbor and headed for home, her purse heavy with George’s coins, her heart heavy with regret. And something sharper. For the first time she felt fear. All her jewels were now gone.

John Cheke, a Cambridge don, announced the toast. “To Isabel and Carlos!”

The twenty-three men and women crowding round the Thornleighs’ dinner table raised their glasses high. Bright candles warmed the snug town house near the heart of Antwerp’s Grote Market. Richard had bought it, a fashionable address, in the heyday of his wool-trading business, to be a second home for his frequent trips from England. Now, Honor hoped their neighbors didn’t suspect that they could barely maintain the upkeep. “To the young couple,” Cheke cried. “The enemies of New Spain will quake at Carlos’s sword!”

“And if that fails,” a bookbinder quipped, “he’ll unleash a
real
terror—his wife!”

Everyone laughed, the toasted couple loudest of all. Isabel flashed her imitation of a fierce warrior’s face at her Spanish soldier husband. It made him throw back his head and roar with laughter.

Even Honor had to laugh—though her daughter’s exploits still astonished her. She glanced at Richard down the table and saw him, too, gazing at Isabel in wonderment. Their daughter, just twenty, had proved herself to be not the innocent they thought they had raised, but an audacious rebel who, a year ago, had helped Wyatt’s uprising almost bring down England’s Queen Mary. It had happened as Honor lay here, barely conscious, sunk in a fever from a gunshot wound, and when she had recovered enough for Richard to tell her the tale, she had found it incredible. Isabel’s choice of husband had surprised her almost as much—Carlos Valverde, a mercenary soldier, unschooled, accustomed to very rough ways. But when she heard how he had saved Richard and Isabel, she had embraced him like a son. The wedding three months ago had been a happy interlude in the family’s financial troubles.

Adam’s wedding would be next. That would be a grand affair, and the rich connection very promising for the family, Honor hoped. It saddened her that the tides had not brought her stepson tonight, after all, but she did not indulge fears of a mishap. If any man knew his way around a ship, it was Adam.

Her eyes met Richard’s. He was head and shoulders taller than many of the men here, and with his leather eye patch and sea-weathered face and storm gray hair, he put her in mind of a rugged rock rising above the shallows of other folk. Tonight, though, he looked careworn and all of his age, a craggy fifty-six. As her glance met his, their smiles at the toast gave way to a mutual sadness. This was a farewell party. Isabel and Carlos were leaving for the New World.

All day, organizing the modest feast, Honor had tried not to give in to her sense of bereavement. When would she ever see her daughter again? She watched Richard quickly drain his goblet of wine and then pour himself another. It worried her to see him drinking so much, drowning his own hard regrets. He had wanted to give Isabel and Carlos some of the land he owned in England, determined to keep his family together, but instead, to make a living, Isabel and Carlos were sailing half a world away. Honor knew how it was gnawing at Richard. Queen Mary’s officers, in confiscating the moveable goods of all known rebels, had snatched everything at their home in Colchester, from flocks to looms. His fulling ponds and mills sat idle, his tenting yards fell daily into further decay, his warehouses lay stripped bare. And the manor house he and Honor had built—her beloved Speedwell House, named after the wildflower so dear to her heart—was reduced to a hulk. She knew how Richard longed to go home and revive his international wool cloth business, but that could never be. If he set foot in England, he would hang.