The Queen's Gamble (16 page)

12

The Road to Edinburgh

T
om Yates pointed at a cloud. “That one’s a mermaid, my lady. Do you mark her fishy tail?”

Isabel studied the cloud in question sailing high above the snowy East Lothian moors. The game had helped to pass the long, cold hours on horseback. That morning she and Tom had crossed the border into Scotland, alone but for her packhorse laden with the satchels of the Queen’s gold. Isabel had wanted no armed escort to draw the interest of French spies, so she was travelling in the plain homespun garb of a farmer’s wife. “I see a haunch of roast venison,” she said, “and if you see a mermaid, Tom, you’re daft.”

“You’re just hungry, my lady, that’s what’s making you cross-eyed. She’s a mermaid, I warrant. See her seaweedy hair, all wavy like? And those two fair, round paps? They’d lure any seaman to his doom, and right willing to go.”

She almost laughed. Who but Tom would see a woman’s breasts in a cloud? “You’re right about one thing. I’m so hungry I’d pay a prince’s ransom for a hot meal at the next inn. I don’t mind if it’s oat gruel, I’ll gobble it down.”

“Lucky thing, since oaten gruel is all these Scots heathen eat, so I hear.” He cocked his head with a mock, mad glint in his eyes. “When they’re not devouring their babes, that is.”

She smiled at his foolery. His cheeky jests had lightened her spirits a little as their horses trudged this lonely landscape. She had needed it, for every mile northward they went, the wider the chasm she felt between herself and Nicolas. And the more she hated Queen Elizabeth. She did not doubt that her son was being well treated, perhaps even cosseted by the Queen’s young ladies, but she could not forget the fear on his face, nor his confusion and dismay at her acceptance of the Queen’s edict. How his tearful look had pained her heart! And now, was he utterly dejected, wondering where his parents had gone? Was he frightened at night with no father to sweep his sword under the bed to clear away ogres and no mother to sing him a lullaby? Had the wretched Queen shunted him away into some corner of the palace to be minded by a stern official of the chamberlain’s staff? It was horrible to think of him bravely trying to obey a taskmaster’s regime all day and crying into his pillow at night. Before she had left that awful royal interview, her mother, trying to hide her own dismay, had asked the Queen to allow him to stay at her house, but she had snapped a refusal. Nicolas was the Queen’s hostage, a surety against Isabel’s betrayal, and the palace was his prison. Pampered he might be, but a prisoner nonetheless. Isabel would never forgive Elizabeth.

But helping her was the only way she could free her son, so she had pushed herself and Tom at a hard pace along the Great North Road. At Alnwick they had parted company with Frances, who had gone on to her brother’s, Isabel maintaining the lie that she was going to Edinburgh to see Carlos. The sooner she could deliver the gold to Knox’s rebels, the sooner she could return to London and reclaim Nicolas. Over the long, cold miles it had become a silent chant inside her head:
Give them the gold, go back for Nico. . . . Give them the gold, go back for Nico.
She could only hope the money would let the rebels buy enough arms and pay enough soldiers to bring them a speedy victory, for only when this war ended could Carlos, too, come home. Her silent chant for her son alternated with one for Carlos.
Let them win, send Carlos home.... Let them win, send Carlos home.

Tom was whistling a ditty. Isabel took a deep breath of the frosty air to clear her head of her worries. Her toes felt nearly frozen, and she had balled her fingers into fists inside her gloves for the tinge more warmth that offered, and she took comfort in knowing they were just a day from their destination. Strangely, the wide-open landscape helped soothe her. They had crossed the border in moor country, barren and windswept, but unexpectedly beautiful. She had not seen a winter in five years. Peru’s sunshine and greenery and flowers had so completely satisfied her senses, she had never thought to miss the cold, dead season of this island. But here, in the wild country between the Scottish Lammermuir Hills and the North Sea, she was reacquainted with the bold beauty of winter as though with a childhood friend. Not the grimy winter of London, where rooftops and chimneys cut off the light, and mud and dung befouled the streets’ snow. Here, the sky was a vastness of clean blue, and sunshine sparkled on the snow-smoothed hills that rolled westward like ocean swells held in a northern fairy’s spell.

It was not, however, a countryside kindly to people. The population was sparse and hungry looking, for they struggled with flinty soil and a cruelly short growing season. The dwellings Isabel had seen were little more than sheds, flimsy huts of piled rocks, mud and thatch that could be thrown together or taken down in a few hours. “Dog kennels,” Tom had called them. “Woof, woof.” Even the cattle were small, stunted. The largest town they had passed, Haddington, was just one main street with cramped alleys leading off it. Pigs ran freely. Any Englishman would call it a village. Spaniards would call it a pigsty.

“There, my lady,” Tom said now, “see that stub of a chimney?”

“Tom, that cloud is no more like a chimney than I am like a pea sprout.”

“No, I mean the smoke, yonder.”

She looked ahead. Wispy brown smoke curled up from behind the next hill. “An inn?” she asked hopefully. “Or perhaps just a cottage.”

“Even a cottage would have vittles.” He lowered his voice. “If its folk are alive.”

His tone gave her a chill. “Why wouldn’t they be?”

“Mayhap raiders have burned the place.”

She had heard gruesome tales about these lawless borderlands. The murders, the maimings, the burning of houses and crops, the stealing of cattle. It sprang from the deadly feuds between clans, so fierce they sounded more like savage tribes. Their life was thieving and reiving and raiding, and they often swept down into England, where the long frontier was poorly controlled by the Queen’s deputies in the garrison towns of Berwick, Alnwick, and Carlisle, fortifications on a line that swept like a sickle around the dangerous border areas. That morning Isabel and Tom had stopped in a churchyard to eat cold bread and sausage from their saddlebags, and in the church porch she had seen a red-smeared glove—the “red hand”—stuck on a spear point, some clan’s silent challenge to an enemy clan.

“Just how hungry are you, my lady?” Tom asked with a wry look.

Isabel gauged the sun low in the western sky. The winter days here were short. Nights came on fast. Ahead, an icy stream gurgled over its stony path, and a heron rose up from the water. She watched the bird wing its way across the barren wastes. She longed to press on, too, and get to Edinburgh, but a peddler they had passed around noon had told them they would not make it there before darkness.

“Very hungry,” she said, “and soon in need of a bed. Let’s go see.”

Fear is at its worst as an expectation. That was Isabel’s thought two hours later as she and Tom sat down at the inn’s rough supper table among people who were blatantly not murderous raiders—the landlord’s impoverished family and two other road-weary travelers slurping their supper pottage. The landlord was pale and quiet and thin as a sapling, and his careworn young wife was burdened with two babies, one balanced on her hip, the other asleep in an empty crate doing service as a cradle. The only color in the whole drab place was on Tom’s fanciful jerkin, the mangy sheepskin that he had tricked out with a red satin collar and gold tassels on each cuff. “Inn” was too grand a name for such a humble place—a low-ceilinged common room dominated by the hearth with its smoky peat fire, a kitchen behind it, and four cramped rooms above. But Isabel was grateful as she dug her spoon into her wooden bowl brimming with cabbage and morsels of rye bread in barley broth. It was surprisingly tasty, and blessedly hot.

Tom, as usual, had attracted the children around him, the landlord’s brood, two boys and a girl, all under ten, who had served the travelers their supper and small beer. The children wore shabby clothes and no shoes, but had bright faces as they stood entranced by Tom’s magic tricks. He had pivoted on the bench to face them, and now drew a penny from behind the ear of the little girl. Her breath caught in wonder at the magic. Her brothers, too, were wide-eyed.

“By gum,” one of the travelers said in amazement around his mouthful of pottage. “How’d he do that?”

“He’s a master, sir,” Isabel said proudly. Tom had dazzled her with the same marvels when she was little.

After supper Tom entertained everyone with a guessing game that involved three walnut shells under which he had hidden a pea. Then the other traveler, a coal merchant’s agent, pulled a tin pipe from his pocket and tweedled a jig. Tom got up and danced a parody of a sailor’s hornpipe, and that got everyone laughing, even the work-wearied hosts. Isabel pressed three shillings into the hand of the oldest boy and whispered to him to give it to his father. The lad walked away, eyeing the windfall in amazement. Isabel hoped it might buy this family some shoes, at least. Would the war brewing in Edinburgh touch their lives? she wondered. Scratching out a living from season to season was their whole world, and she doubted that it mattered a whit to them whether the far-off lords were Scottish, English, French, or even Spanish. War was a thing for great nobles and armies, not for quiet folk such as this.

“You overpaid the lad, my lady,” Tom told her later as they sat alone by the fire. He was whittling a stick with his knife, the two satchels of the Queen’s gold lying at his feet. He would spend the night sleeping beside them. Isabel was keeping him company before going up to bed, for she did not want to leave the gold until she was sure the others had retired. The children already lay asleep on straw pallets in the corners.

“You’re not one to talk,” she said. “That little girl is a penny richer, and you’re a penny poorer.”

“Is she now?” he said with a sly look. “Were you, at her age?”

Isabel dug into her memory. Good heavens, she thought. “Tom Yates, did you tell the child to give it back so you could show her a more wonderful trick?”

“Which she did, like you did, my lady. Then got lost in the walnut shells, like you did.”

Isabel laughed. “And forgot all about the penny.”

He smiled as he skinned the stick. “Folks are the same, young and old. Easily led onto a new path, so long as they think it’s got roses.”

She gazed into the glowing peat fire, remembering how, as a child, she had loved to help her mother tend the roses in her garden at their home near Colchester. Damask roses, red and white. “How are they, Tom, all the folk at Speedwell House?”

He gave her a puzzled look. “My lady?”

“It’s been five years, so I’ve lost touch.” She knew he had recently returned from there, and she was interested in news of the place where she had spent her girlhood. “Does Fat Mary still rule the roost in the kitchen? And old Peter Brewer, is he still making the best ale in the county at our brewhouse?” Tom was looking at her so oddly, she wondered if she had misunderstood. “You were just there, were you not?” she asked.

“No, my lady, not there. At your father’s new manor in Kent.” His brow furrowed in concern. “You don’t know about Speedwell House?”

The news, she sensed, could not be good. Had one of the longtime servants died? “Know what?”

“It’s gone, my lady.”

“Gone?” Had her father sold the place?

“Burned to the ground. Last year.”

Her hand flew to her mouth in dismay. “I had no idea.” Why had her mother not told her? The thought was awful—her old home, vanished. “How did it happen? A kitchen fire? A lightning strike?”

He let out a grunt that sounded like he was in pain. “If only it had been. Leastways that would have meant God’s hand was in it. No, my lady, this was the work of the devil. And the devil’s name is Grenville.”

A shiver touched her scalp. “Lord John Grenville . . . burned our house?”

“Attacked us, he did. Thundered in with a band of brutes. I was there. Midsummer Day, it was. All calm and quiet, and sweet with the blooms of summer on the air, and all of us house folk lazy from our dinner in the noonday sun. I were jesting with Fat Mary about her sweetheart, a swaggering captain that made her smile, and she and me was chuckling over the pudding, when out of the clear blue rides Baron Grenville, crashing through the gates with his mounted brutes alongside him and murder in his eyes.” Tom shook his head in sorrow. “And murder he did that day, the devil. Someone sounded our alarm, and Peter Brewer—you say aright, my lady, he brewed the finest grog—he dashed into the courtyard, and that band of murderers cut him down. He lay bleeding on the cobbles, and nothing anyone could do, for we were all in a uproar, men searching for weapons, women crying out, and your father and uncle running to meet the marauders with sword and bow. They felled your uncle, an arrow to his heart.”

Isabel gasped. “Uncle Geoffrey!”

“And Grenville himself,” Tom went on, “he struck down your father so he lay senseless. They killed more of our menfolk. Fired the house. Slaughtered the livestock. And carried your father away.”

She asked, still shocked, “Carried him . . . where?”

“To Grenville Hall.” He lowered his voice, as though what he had to say was too vile for anyone to overhear. “And kept him chained to the wall in his lockup, not able to lie or sit. Kept him suffering like that for three long days.”

“So, my mother . . .” She could not find the words.

“Aye. She rode to Grenville Hall alone. And there, in front of all the baron’s folk, to save your father, she stabbed that devil over and over and over. Killed him dead.”

Isabel listened, stunned.
Murder . . . in cold blood.

Could I do what she did?
Isabel asked herself later as she lay sleepless on her straw mattress in the dark. She felt ashamed that when she had first arrived home she had been so irritated with her mother, angry at her for keeping secrets. Now she understood why her mother had not wanted to speak about this. And also why her father acted so coldly to Frances. It left her more mystified than ever about Adam’s marriage. How had he come to wed Grenville’s sister? Isabel liked Frances, and felt sorry for her in her loveless marriage, but she was glad she had not accepted the invitation to break her journey with a visit to Frances’s other brother, Christopher. She had never met this new head of the house of Grenville, but she doubted she could be civil to a man whose family had brought her own family so much grief.