The Queen's Exiles (20 page)

Adam saw that the chest was crammed with costly objects, including some used in the Catholic mass. Silver goblets, gold plates engraved with religious symbols, a gold sacring bell, lace vestments, a priest’s embroidered silk stole. Plunder. “From a galleon?” he asked. Wealthy Spanish churchmen often traveled with such things.

“No,” his host said with a wink. “This pigsty was on land. Lauwersmeer. The canting little priest and his bum boys won’t be doing their Sunday shows for a while.”

Adam knew of the place. A small coastal town.

“And this,” La Marck said, pulling out a rolled canvas, “is from Hellevoetsluis. From the house of the mayor himself.” He unfurled it. A fine painting of a Madonna. “It’ll fetch a fair price in a Portuguese port.”

Adam swallowed wine to keep from showing his unease. La Marck had been raiding Dutch towns. What was the point of that? And no doubt blood had been spilled, the blood of innocent townsfolk. But he held his tongue. He hadn’t come to argue.

The men’s laughter up on deck had subsided and the muffled voices sounded angry and heated now, some kind of argument. Adam had been around seamen most of his life. When they weren’t arguing over dice they were fighting about women. “Where are you bound?” he asked La Marck. Adam was hungry for action. Hungry to take on the Spaniards. “Have you some fat galleon in your sights? Maybe one carrying troops to Alba?”

The Dutchman didn’t answer. He regarded Adam quizzically. “What’s that caravel you’re sailing? Has your queen declared war on Johan of Sweden? Did you take the caravel as a prize?”

“Not at all. Her Majesty enjoys cordial relations with His Majesty King Johan.”

“Spoken like a prating courtier. Face it, Thornleigh, you’re a rover, an adventurer, same as me. Come on, where’s the
Elizabeth
?”

Adam gritted his teeth. It was hard to talk about his ship. “Burned,” he managed. The very word seared his throat. “To the waterline.”

La Marck looked shocked. “Hellfire. Where?”

“In harbor. Sark.”

“By Alba?”

“By his order, I’m sure.”

“So he
did
come for you.” La Marck looked at his captains and crowed, “What did I tell you? This man has nine lives. Ha! Only four or five left now, Thornleigh!”

Jansz said, “I knew that caravel looked familiar. I saw her on Sark.” He added to La Marck, “Her owner bartered her for repairs to his galleon.”

“Aha,” said La Marck, “so the Swede made a deal with the fair Mistress Doorn.”

Adam didn’t like his tone. Or the leer in his eye. “The
Gotland,
yes. I’ve borrowed her.”

“
Borrowed
her, have you?” La Marck looked intrigued, amused. “And yet Mistress Doorn is known to drive a hard bargain. She’s a comely wench, Thornleigh. Did you slip her something
hard
to satisfy her demands?”

Adam was on his feet before he knew it, glaring down at the Dutchman’s face. “When you speak of that lady you’ll keep a civil tongue.”

Curry said, “Come, my lord,” a quiet warning. “We’re all friends here.”

“That we are,” the Admiral said. “All friends.” But his amused look had vanished.

Adam sat down. He knocked back the last of his wine. There were muffled shouts up on deck, then the sound of men scuffling. A brawl?
Not my business,
he thought. “I asked you, La Marck, where are you bound?”

“What do you care? Are you not bound for England?”

“I’ll send some Spaniards to the bottom first.”

“Is that why you’ve come to me?” He looked surprised. “You always fought alone.”

“When I had the
Elizabeth
. With gun power.”

La Marck brightened. “Ah, so it’s
guns
you want.”

“The
Gotland
is a merchantman. I need eight cannon. Six at the least.”

La Marck held Adam’s gaze like a bargainer weighing his prospects. “We might make a deal. Come along with us. We’re bound for Oostduinkerke. Good weather for it, townsfolk indoors in the rain. Then we’re off to Dover to sell the swag.”

Adam didn’t want any of that. Not the raid on innocent Dutchmen or Dover, either. He had advised and approved Elizabeth giving the Sea Beggars safe harbor in her Channel ports—she found them useful for the havoc they caused to Spain—but what he itched for now was action. “How can you be satisfied with mere booty, man?” he said, unable to hide his scorn. “It’s Spaniards you need to fight, not Dutchmen.”

The Admiral spat on the floor. “Dutchmen who let themselves be slaves to Spaniards.” He eyed Adam with a hard look tinged with contempt. “We need victualing, Thornleigh. We’ve been at sea for three months. You’re a rich man. You don’t know what it is to go hungry.”

“I’ll pay you for the guns. We can put in at Calais, transfer the guns there. It’s not two hours away.”

“I don’t want your money.”

“What
do
you want?”

“You. My fleet’s a damned pack of wolves.” He glanced up, indicating the rowdy din on deck. “I could use a tough leader. What do you say? Equals, you and me.”

Adam’s hope shot up. “That’s fine. That’s what I came for. Let’s give the Spanish devils some pain.” A new thought stirred him. “If we can come together as a fighting force there are rebel bands ashore we could unite with, become a force for Prince William to break Spain’s grip.”

“Hmm. Later, maybe. First we’ll lighten the dago-loving burghers of some of their goods.”

“Raiding towns? No.”

“Why not? A few ports of call and in a month we’ll be rich enough to stay in Dover for a year.”

“You’ve gone soft, La Marck.”

“And you have no guns.” He got to his feet. “Go back to your borrowed merchantman, Thornleigh. And think about my offer.”

O
n horseback, Fenella kept well behind the man she was following on his fine, gray military mount. She could not let Carlos Valverde see her.

She found it hard to maintain his pace, for he kept his well-trained horse at a fast trot even in the crowded main street leading away from the Grote Markt. At ease in the saddle, he didn’t slow as he edged around people and carts, while Fenella clumsily dodged these obstacles and then kicked her mare to keep up with him. People gave Fenella odd looks. No wonder—a woman alone, riding with purpose like a soldier, dressed like a shabby courtesan. The gaudy clothes she wore were a necessary part of her plan for Valverde. But she hated attracting attention in public. She could not afford to have anyone in authority stop her to ask her business, ask where she was from. That was risky enough, yet she was courting even more danger with her plan.

Plan?
she thought anxiously. More like a desperate hope. Nothing was certain. She was so nervous, the clammy sweat of her palms made it hard to keep a grip on her reins.

Valverde turned down one street after another, passing shops, a church, crossing a bridge, passing a long wall that enclosed a monastery, then turning again, and again, until Fenella, with her eyes locked on him, was no longer sure in which direction they were going. A glance at the sun hanging low between a rooftop and a church belfry told her they were heading north. The bell clanged and birds burst from the belfry. Evening service was about to begin. It turned her stomach to think of the priests and sheep-like people praying for the health of Alba, their governor, while he tortured and murdered at will. Fenella prayed only that she could finish what she’d set out to do before it was too late . . . before they executed Claes. On Sark she had killed a Spaniard. Now she would kill another.

She had waited for Valverde outside the barracks behind the King’s House across from City Hall, the center of Spain’s authority here. She had stood by the barracks wall all afternoon, scanning the soldiers who came and went through the gates. She wasn’t the only woman—whores idled, chatting and sharing drink from a wineskin, eyeing Fenella, who kept her distance—but she was the only one with a horse. The mare munched grass in the ditch as Fenella waited. A shiver of excitement rippled through her when, not long after suppertime, Valverde trotted out, hard to miss in his steel breastplate and helmet with its white plume that identified him as one of Alba’s commanders. She ran to her mare and followed him, growing more nervous and uncertain as he made his way through the city. She’d got a good look at his face when he’d left the barracks, a weathered, unsmiling face that had seen butchery on and off battlefields. Valverde had done hard things to men. He was no fool. Her task would not be easy.

Now he slowed, approaching a walled house fronted by a line of spring-green bay trees. She stopped, watching him pass through the open gate into the courtyard. She glimpsed a fat maidservant waddling by with a brace of bloodied pheasants and halting to let him pass on his horse. A stable groom hurried to meet him. Fenella thought,
This has to be his home
. Just as she’d hoped.

She slid off her horse. She stood still in the street, unable to move, her heart thudding painfully, her hand still gripping the saddle pommel. If she failed, Valverde would have her arrested. She would hang. Claes would die.

Claes
.

“At Terneuzen,” Jacques had said. “That’s where Alba’s men captured them. In a rye field north of the abbey.”

“And took all the guns?” another of the Brethren asked, a big man with a bristling sandy moustache, named DeWitt. This late-night meeting was in the Beaumonts’ printing press room behind their shop. Jacques and Marguerite, red eyed from lack of sleep, were sweating at their work, hastily printing pamphlets that denounced Alba’s tyranny. Fenella was helping, doing whatever they asked of her. Anything to keep from curling into a ball in the corner and weeping.

“All,” said Jacques, hoarse from the tension they were all living with. “They didn’t get a single gun across to Vlissingen.”

“Guns,” Marguerite said, wiping her brow with her sleeve as she set fresh type on the press. “How can we talk of guns when fifteen of our Brethren are scarcely cold in their graves? And Brother Domenic will be next.”

At the mention of him they all looked at Fenella. Her fingers were cold as she adjusted the type the way Marguerite had instructed her. Claes—Brother Domenic—was a leader in their movement, and her statement that she was his wife had likely spread to the Brethren throughout the city. Under the eyes of eight of them now, she said nothing. Johan’s agony on the gibbet never left her thoughts, nor the more terrible agony that Claes was condemned to suffer soon. But as for words, she had none.

“Cold they are, our Brethren,” DeWitt said gruffly, “and so, beyond our care. It’s not the dead we need to think of but the living. And that means guns. Nothing will change until we get enough men and munitions to Prince William to
force
a change.”

“Not in time to save Brother Domenic,” Jacques muttered grimly.

“Is there not some way to rescue him?” a young man asked, stacking pamphlets as they came off the press.

“How?” an old man scoffed from his chair. “That prison could withstand a hundred cannon. Which is a hundred more than we have.”

“The prison’s just a building and Brother Domenic is just one man,” DeWitt insisted, pacing. Fenella gathered that he was the leader of the Brussels group. “Neither its fall, if that were even possible, nor his rescue would change anything. Not while Alba continues to rule.”

“Brother Clarence is right,” another man said. “The way to destroy a monster is to cut off its head. Our countrymen are cowed by their terror of Alba, but his corpse might rouse the people to action. Send them to rally round the prince.”

“Corpse?” the young man said, incredulous. “Impossible. No one could get close enough.”

“Brother Jerome did last year. With poison.”

The young man said grimly, “And look what they did to him.”

Fenella looked to Marguerite beside her, a question in her eyes:
What did they do?

“Alba had him strung up by his thumbs,” Marguerite answered quietly, “and his wife and children brought before him. They told his wife to drink the poison or see her children killed. She drank it, and as she was dying in front of Brother Jerome’s eyes they slit the children’s throats. Then disemboweled him and left him to die.”

An icy shudder shot through Fenella.

Jacques lowered a lever and the press thumped down. He raised it again and the young man whisked out the newly inked sheet. The Brethren talked on, not of guns now but of moving the press to a new location. That was their priority. They were a brave group, but Fenella heard the fear in their voices. The capture of Claes and fourteen of his rebels might have put these people in grave danger if the captives under torture had revealed information about them. It was not safe to keep the press here, behind the shop. They had come tonight to dismantle it after this final printing and move it to a house outside the city. Fenella’s gold had bought the house. Jacques was in charge of the operation. It had been decided that he and Marguerite would split up. She would tell their neighbors that he had gone to Lille to buy the fancy French materials needed for the shop. Lace, silver thread, ribbons.

Fenella watched Marguerite’s ink-stained fingers set the type. She didn’t want to look into the Frenchwoman’s eyes, for she knew what Marguerite was suffering at the thought of being separated from Jacques, a separation that would begin this very night. Ink, metal type, paper—these were the concrete objects they dealt in, creating pamphlets that had inspired their fellow rebels and that they now hoped would rouse the people to stand up to Alba. Their life as a couple had to come second to this consuming, essential endeavor.

Fenella was afraid to see Marguerite’s pain because the same pain clawed her own heart.
Adam
. He would have got her message. By now, he would be gone. Had he sailed with his children, as he’d hoped and planned? She knew how much his son and daughter meant to him and it gave her a small quiver of joy to imagine the three of them reaching Sark to get his ship, repaired and ready for him, and then sailing to England. They might even be back in their English home by now. A family. Her misery flooded back. She would never see Adam again. Sending him that awful message had been the hardest decision she had ever made. Tears had clouded her eyes when she’d written it. What must he think of her? How he must hate her!

Well, let that pass,
she told herself as steadily as she could. She had to deal with reality. The dream she had concocted of a life in England with Adam—Lord Thornleigh—was sheer fantasy, as insubstantial as the frothy gauze in Marguerite’s shop. Fenella had built a golden castle in the air, had floated within its glow when Adam had held her in his arms, but now she had returned to earth. Adam was gone. She had sent him out of her life forever. Sent him home.

Home
. Her home was here. Because of Claes. She had taken him as her husband eight years ago, gladly joining her life to his to build a business together, build a future. That life had shattered when the Spanish soldiers thundered into Polder, butchering and burning, and she’d watched them heave Claes into the river, watched him sink, and she had wept for him and grieved for him and hated Alba for his savagery, hated all of Alba’s henchmen. Since then she’d lived as a widow. But ten days ago, in shock and confusion, she had found Claes alive, her husband, now a leader of men.

He was her husband still. Her brief, bright time with Adam Thornleigh had not changed that reality. For a few days she had been blind to it, like a child at the fairground bedazzled into a dream of running off with the magic man. But her eyes had been opened by Johan’s death, by the mass hangings, and by the terrible death sentence passed on Claes. But by something else, too—the example of Marguerite and Jacques. The simple, unshakable bond of their marriage, no matter what hardships life hurled at them. Fenella recognized the bond, felt it in her bones. By every law of Christendom and every probing of her conscience, Claes was her husband. They were man and wife. Bound together. Whatever the hardships. When she had awoken in bed at the Beaumonts’ shop after the hangings and heard Jacques report the fate that awaited Claes, she had known. As long as there was breath in her body, she had to try to save her husband.

The gate to Valverde’s home remained open. Fenella tethered her horse to one of the bay trees and walked through the gate. No one stopped her as she crossed the small courtyard. At the open kitchen door a scullery maid tossed out a panful of bread crumbs, her eyes on the hens that came pecking for the morsels. A rich smell of roasted meat wafted from the kitchen, boar perhaps. Music sounded from an upper window, the flute-like notes of a recorder, the tune thin and wavering as if played by a child.

Fenella made for the low brick building where the wide wooden door stood open—the stable, unmistakable from the glimpse she caught of a groom inside leading a black horse. She heard voices as she approached. She slipped inside, keeping to the shadows. Beyond her, the pale gold light was thick with motes of straw. Smells of hay and horses and dung. The lazy shuffling sound of hooves in stalls.

Valverde stood talking to a couple of grooms while lifting off his helmet. His breastplate was already off, held by the younger groom who then took the helmet, too, and walked away with the master’s gear. Valverde led the other groom to the black horse, a muscular stallion with a bandage wrapped around his foreleg. A warhorse, Fenella thought, bred for speed and agility on a battlefield. And for chasing rebels? She imagined it, Valverde and his troop galloping after Claes and his men as they ran through the rye field. Ran for their lives, terrified, exhausted, stumbling, falling. No match for horsemen.

The groom unwrapped the linen bandage, revealing a red cut. Valverde gave instructions about a poultice. Fenella could not hear the exact words. Her mind was in turmoil, her skin clammy with sweat.
Step out now,
she told herself.
Confront him
. She balled her fists, closed her eyes, summoning the resolve to carry out her plan.

“Call me in if there’s any change,” he said, his voice faint.

Fenella’s eyes sprang open. Valverde was already out the door.

Fool! Get him back!

The house smelled of roast boar. Striding through the hall, Carlos was disappointed he hadn’t got home in time to have supper with his family. But the business that had detained him had been worth it, a talk with Alba’s secretary, who’d come with a commendation from Alba and an invitation. Carlos had made haste to get home, eager to tell Isabel that a pension from the king of Spain would soon be his. He had earned it, bringing in fifteen rebels, including their leader, Claes Doorn. He hadn’t felt so hopeful in months. The pension would save him from bankruptcy. Finally, he could take Isabel and the children back to England.

The laughter of his little girl, Nell, guided him to the parlor. There he found her and Isabel kneeling over a basket where five puppies born two weeks ago squirmed to suckle their mother, Isabel’s spaniel bitch. Nell squealed when she saw Carlos and grabbed a puppy and ran to him.

“Papa, look! Their eyes are open!” She hugged the animal against her face. “He’s my favorite.”

“You picked the runt.” Carlos tousled his daughter’s hair. “Like you.”

“Mama says I can keep this one. I named him Jasper. Because his face is wrinkly like Jasper at home.” Carlos had to smile. Jasper Winch, the old footman Isabel kept employed though the fellow was lame.

“She wanted to keep them all,” Isabel said, getting to her feet, not easy since she was so heavily pregnant. Carlos went to help her up. She took his arm with a grateful smile.

Nell murmured to her puppy, “Do you like your name, Jasper?”