1634: The Baltic War (19 page)

Well. At least not until he lost the election. After that—this day and age being what it was—who could say?

Big deal. The election Mike had to worry about was at least a year away. Eddie could lose his election any time that damn drunken Danish king who kept him up half the nights till the wee hours drinking along with him chose to punch his ticket.

Did I mention I have absolute power? No? Well, not to worry—here's the proof of it. Lads, take this fellow downstairs and pluck off another part of his body.

Eddie heard the door opening. All thought of the Three Lesser Idiocies were swept from his mind. The Great One had arrived.

"Still in bed! Eddie, you should be ashamed of yourself! And don't pretend you have a hangover because my father let you go long before the carousing was over last night. I know, Ulrik told me. Oh, he's here, too."

Eddie sat up to look. Sure enough, the youngest of the king's three sons in the royal line was coming in right behind.

Perfect. The outrigger, so to speak, to the Greatest of All Idiocies.

On the other hand—they had bestsellers in this day and age, too, he'd discovered—maybe if Eddie survived it all he could write a book and become rich and famous. Okay, rich and the laughingstock of an entire continent, but what the hell.

The Life of a Secret Agent.
No, that'd be fudging.
The Secrets of a Secret Agent; or, How to Turn 007 Into a Seven Percent Solution.

Chapter One. Get captured in a naval battle. Make sure you lose a foot while you're at it.

Chapter Two. Get some moron of a president to make you his secret agent while in captivity.

Chapter Three. Ingratiate yourself to an alcoholic enemy king by drinking as much as you possibly can in his company, when you don't like liquor to begin with and the stuff scares you to death because your dad was a souse.

Chapter Four. Feed him a pack of silly lies and just hope that he's not sober enough to catch you at it.

Chapter Five. Make friends with his son the prince.

Chapter Six. Fall in love with his daughter the princess. Fine. The "king's daughter"—as if that's going to make any difference when they figure it out, seeing as how James Bondaged .07 was clever enough to pick a girl who's jail-bait back up-time and dungeon-bait in this one, so it wouldn't matter if she was a butcher's daughter.

Chapter Seven . . .

But Eddie flinched from that still-unwritten one. He couldn't only hope the red-hot tongs would cauterize the wound at the same time they rendered him unconscious from agony, when they removed the offending body part in question. Sometimes he found himself wondering if, in this day and age, they made wooden peg-dicks to match wooden peg legs.

The scariest thing was, they probably did.

"Why are you staring at me like that?" Anne Cathrine demanded. "You'd think I was a ghost or something."

Ulrik pulled up a chair next to the bed, blithely ignoring the cost of the chair or whatever damage it might do to the floor. Eddie was afraid to sit in most of the furniture, himself, and whenever he couldn't walk barefoot on the floor he practically tiptoed.

Of course, Ulrik could confidently expect to
inherit
the dungeons and the tongs and the what-not. He had a chance of it, at least. Danes still had the custom that the nobility got to elect the king, choosing from whoever was eligible in the royal family. They'd already elected the oldest prince Christian as the successor, but if he died before his father did, Ulrik might still wind up on the throne even though he was the youngest of the three princes. Even if he didn't, he'd surely come out of it with a dungeon or two, along with a reasonable share of the torturers and tongs and pincers and what-not.

"It can't be you, Sister," said Ulrik cheerfully. "Look! He's giving me the same stare."

Anne Cathrine planted her hands on her hips. Very shapely hips. She was fully past puberty now, but still had a completely teenage female figure. Fifteen going on
Eddie-if-you-ever-lay-a-finger-on-her-your-ass-is-grass.

Fortunately, he'd managed—so far—to avoid that one and only idiocy. But unless Admiral Simpson steamed into the Øresund with an icebreaker before the winter was over, Eddie wasn't sure how long he could hold out.

The problem was that Anne Cathrine wasn't exuding any of the well-known signals from Eddie's past that informed him in no uncertain terms that
this girl ain't interested, buddy, so forget it.
If she had, his course would have been easy. Miserable, sure, and pining away with unrequited love—but he was used to
that.
His high school experience had been four almost solid years of pining away after girls whose titles might as well have been
You-Gotta-Be-Kidding
or
In-Your-Dreams, Buster.

What he wasn't used to was a princess—fine, "king's daughter"—who planted those same very shapely hips on the bed right next to him, leaned over, spilling her gorgeous red-gold hair, took his cheeks in her hands and gave them a little shake. "Stop looking at me like that, I tell you."

Ulrik laughed. "Sister, you're being forward. If I tell Father, he'll scold you."

"No, he won't," she said serenely.

"Yes, Princess," Eddie said, not serenely at all.

That got him another cheek-shaking. "How many times must I tell you! 'King's daughter.' Not 'princess.' My mother's marriage to my father was morganatic." She twitched her head toward her half-brother. "Ulrik is a prince because he is in the royal line. I am not. Just a 'king's daughter.' "

Eddie nodded, simply thankful that he'd escaped disaster. He'd almost said "Yes, dear."

He wondered what might have resulted from that. Would they just satisfy themselves by removing his cheeks with hot tongs, or would they add all his teeth into the bargain?

Ulrik laughed again. "Eddie, you always cheer me up. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because you can do melancholy better than any Dane."

"Well, sure. I read the book. I don't know if it's been translated into Danish yet."

"What book?" the king's daughter asked.

"It's the one I told you about," her half-brother explained. "I read it in English. The play that Englishman wrote about a Danish prince in Helsingor—he called it 'Elsinore'—who finds out his father was murdered and can't decide what to do."

"Oh, that one." She released Eddie's cheeks and waved a dismissive hand. "I don't want to read it, even when my English gets better. What a silly fantasy. Any Danish prince—princess, too, even a king's daughter—who found out that someone had committed such a crime would have his head by the morning."

Chapter Eight. Did I mention the jailbait will inherit the jail? Well, at least one or two cells in it. With a share of the tongs and the pincers and the what-not.

Whitehall Palace
London, England
February 1634

"Three more!" shouted King Charles, holding up the middle three fingers of his left hand. With his right, he pointed accusingly in the direction of the palace's servants' quarters. "A cook and two cleaning women. That's quite enough! The city has become a pesthole. The queen and I depart for Oxford on the morrow."

Sitting in his chair, the king lowered his head, gazing up at the earl of Strafford in the way that a stubborn child will make clear to his parent that he is most displeased. The royal expression combined sullenness, petulance, anger and resentment—and was about as unregal as anything Thomas Wentworth could imagine.

He took a breath, but before he could speak Charles snapped: "That is all, I say! There will be no further discussion on this matter. Simply see to the arrangements. I want a full escort out of the city, mind. London has become as infested with unruly apprentices as it has with vermin and disease."

Thomas bowed his head, bowing to the inevitable at the same time, and left the royal chamber. Outside, in the corridor, he took several deep breaths. Partly to control his anger; partly to give himself time to decide what steps he might still be able to take to alleviate some of the political damage that would be caused by the king leaving the capital for Oxford.

He considered, for a moment, simply biding his time and approaching the king with a proposal to reconsider later that day, or in the evening. That had worked twice before, after all.

Almost instantly, he discarded the notion. On the two previous occasions, the king hadn't been as set in his course. And, what was more important, his wife hadn't been involved. But Thomas has already learned from one of his assistants that Queen Henrietta Maria had been in hysterics this morning, after she heard about the latest outbreak of disease in the palace. With the queen in that state of mind, there was simply no chance any longer of persuading Charles to remain in the capital. The king doted on his wife. It was a personal characteristic that Thomas might have respected and even found attractive, had the king's doting not been so excessive and the wife herself such a blithering fool.

The fact that disease continued to crop up in a huge palace in the middle of winter, especially in the cramped servants' quarters, was a given. Thomas' assistant had told him that none of the cases involved plague. They were simply the sort of illnesses that were inevitable under the circumstances, and posed no real danger to the king and queen, living where they did elsewhere in the palace—in conditions that were anything but cramped.

For that matter, they weren't even inevitable—if the king has been willing to either move to the Tower or allow Thomas to bring the American nurse Rita Simpson into Whitehall to oversee the reorganization of the sanitary and medical practices in the royal residence. But the king had refused, to the second proposal even more vehemently than the first. As the months had passed, Charles had developed a detestation and fear of the captive Americans that was simply not rational. Even for him, it was not rational.

Thomas wasn't certain yet, but he was coming to the conclusion that a cabal against him had formed among the queen's courtiers. More precisely, a
competent
cabal. Even more than disease in winter, it was a certainty that a cabal would be formed against the most powerful minister in the government, by one or another of the cliques that made up the not-so-small horde of courtiers who infested the palace even worse than vermin did. The queen, with her love of flattery and lack of common sense, provided them with a natural center. And the long nights and slow months of winter provided them with the time and idleness to engage in their schemes and plots.

A given, in short, and not something Thomas was normally given to fretting about overmuch. Every powerful chief minister in English history had faced the same, after all.

But, lately, some new faces had been showing up at the queen's masques. Men of real substance, like Sir Francis Windebank and Sir Paul Pindar, Endymion Porter, or noblemen such as the earl of Rutland, Francis Manners. The most dangerous of them was probably Richard Boyle, the earl of Cork. He was one of kingdom's richest men, very astute, given to malevolence, and as ambitious as anyone Wentworth had ever met.

Thomas began pacing slowly down the hall, his hands clasped behind his back. He'd been incautious, he realized. The severe and unprecedented measures he'd taken to secure the king's rule and forestall any possibility of the English revolution that the up-timers' books depicted had enraged much of the populace. Especially those inclined toward Puritanism, of course.

So much, he'd expected and planned for. What he hadn't considered was that the same measures would stir up the ambitions of men who were inclined to support them. In a sense, by breaking the rules under which England had managed its affairs for so long, Thomas himself had inspired others to do the same. If he could do it, why couldn't they? The fact that his own motives, allowing for a reasonable amount of personal ambition, had been primarily political, was neither here nor there. Men like the earl of Cork wouldn't care. Such men were simply too self-centered to see any distinction at all between what they wanted and what the nation needed.

So be it. Thomas was confident enough that he could outmaneuver his rivals. Their great advantage was equally their disadvantage. Seeing—correctly—in the queen, the softest target in the court, they set their aim there. It was not hard to gain her confidence and support, after all, if you were prepared to ladle flattery and fawning with neither shame nor restraint. But once it was gained, the confidence always proved to be as soft as the target itself. Henrietta Maria was a superb complainer, whiner, critic and naysayer. But Thomas had never once seen her throw her influence with the king behind a project or person for any motive beyond petty and usually personal ones. She was simply not cut from the same cloth as Marie de Medici, the French king's mother who had been an incorrigible meddler in political affairs for years, and was still continuing her intrigues from her exile in Brussels.

Whitehall was possibly the largest palace in the world—certainly in Europe—and it was more in the nature of a small town with buildings all jammed together than a palace as such. All told, it had more than a thousand rooms and a multitude of corridors. So, long before Thomas reached the quarters he'd set aside for himself, he'd settled his nerves over the king's foolish decision. There was nothing for it except to make sure the foolishness went smoothly.

Encountering two guards at a corridor intersection, both of them in the colors of the mercenary company he'd decided to use for the purpose, he instructed one of them to find Captain Leebrick and have him report to the earl's quarters. Anthony Leebrick was one of the steadiest of the mercenary captains, with a well-trained company and good lieutenants. He also had a phlegmatic personality, which he'd need dealing with Charles and Henrietta Maria in the course of a long journey to Oxford in midwinter. Their complaints would be incessant, especially the queen's.

Leebrick arrived not long after Thomas reached his quarters. Once Wentworth had explained the situation, and what was needed, the captain quickly left to make the arrangements. Even with as well-trained and disciplined a company as his, Leebrick was still dealing with mercenary soldiers—who were not prone to do anything "on the morrow" except sleep off a bout of drunkenness, unless they were actively on campaign in the field.

That done, and remembering that his friend William Laud was still in London, Thomas decided to pay him a visit. The archbishop had decided to postpone his visit to Canterbury for a few more days, in order to deal with a few problems that had come up lately. Having only recently been elevated from bishop of London, he was a bit overwhelmed by the demands of his new station.

That probably meant Thomas would have to put up with at least half an hour's worth of listening to William's querulous complaints, until he settled down his nerves. But it was a small price to pay. One of the drawbacks to becoming England's most powerful minister was that Wentworth had found he had very few friends left. More precisely, friends whose motives he didn't have to scrutinize carefully at every turn. He had plenty of the other sort, most of them men who'd never indicated the slightest fondness for him in times past—and a fair number who'd been actively hostile.

For all his many faults, William Laud was one of the few left whom the earl of Strafford could accept at face value. Perhaps the only one, really, except . . .

And there was an odd thought. Except a prisoner sitting in a dungeon in the Tower named Oliver Cromwell. Who, to be sure, had played a major role in separating Thomas Wentworth's head from his body a few years from now in another universe. But who also, Thomas was quite sure—in that world as much as this one—had never lied to him or told him anything except what he thought.

There was an irony there, of course. It seemed the more powerful a man became, the more limited became his pleasures. To the point where, reaching the pinnacle, it sometimes seemed that the only pleasure left to him was simply knowing that a statement made was the truth and not a lie or a ploy. Even if the statement was "let me out of here, and I'll try to slit your throat."

He even laughed then, in a very dry sort of way.

"And now this!" the archbishop exclaimed, throwing both his hands in the air. When they landed back on the armrests of his chair, Laud had them clenched into fists. Then, after taking a couple of deep breaths, he gave Wentworth something of an apologetic grimace.

"Yes, yes, I realize it must seem like a small matter to you, this business of the Americans asking me to appoint a bishop for them. Certainly compared to the problem you're having to deal with." He sniffed, disdainfully. "Our beloved monarch decamping from his own capital in the middle of a crisis."

"I wouldn't call it a 'crisis,' " Thomas said evenly. "More in the way of a tense time. But you're actually wrong about the rest. I don't think the matter you're wrestling with is a small one, at all. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if—"

He broke off abruptly, realizing the precipice he was nearing.

Unfortunately, he'd forgotten just how perspicacious his friend could be, at times. The Archbishop of Canterbury's faults were so pronounced that it was easy to underestimate the man. William Laud hadn't fought his way up from very humble beginnings to become the primate of the Anglican church without there being a keen brain there, beneath the mulishness and the peeves and the personal quirks and foibles.

"You're thinking about it, aren't you?" said Laud, peering at him intently.

Frowning in as innocent a manner as he could manage, and being careful not to clench his own fists, Wentworth said: "Thinking about what?"

"Don't play the innocent with me, Thomas—and for sure and certain, don't try to play me for a fool. You know perfectly well what I'm talking about. It's not as if we haven't danced about the subject for weeks, now. You're thinking about the Glorious Revolution, that's what."

Wentworth sighed, and turned his gaze from the archbishop to the window looking out over London. Slowly, his hands curled on the armrests of his own chair. Not quite into fists; more like a man might try to seize something intangible in midair.

"Oh, yes, it's been quite obvious to me for some time," continued Laud. "Even if you do manage to stymie the revolution of 1640, then what? You can't continue this way, you know it as well as I do. This is
England,
not—not—the Ottoman empire."

Wentworth said nothing. He just continued to gaze out over the city. There really wasn't much to see, beyond a gray sunset lowering over a city that was grayer still. Gray everywhere he looked, nowadays, it seemed to him.

"Come, come, Thomas, speak up. I shall not betray you. You must know that, if nothing else."

There was that, after all. One of the few certainties in a world that grew less certain by the day.

"Very well, William. Yes, I am thinking about it—and, yes, of course you're right. Everything I've done since the king brought me to London has been a stopgap. Just a temporary measure—often enough, a ramshackle one—to keep a situation from spiraling out of control. But that's all it is. The king may be under the delusion that he can rule this way for a lifetime, and his successor after him, but that's all it is. A delusion. A ruler needs legitimacy before all else, and legitimacy in the end must have its base in the consent of the governed. Their acquiescence and acceptance, at the very least. When all is said and done, that's as true for the Turk as it is for the Englishman."

Laud made a face. Wentworth chuckled. "Granted, the Turk is more acquiescent to begin with. But read the histories, William. Even the Ottomans fell. Even the tsars fell. All of them fell—or they accommodated to survive. How is England to be the sole exception? Even allowing for God's special favor."

He planted his hand on the armrests and pushed himself erect, feeling far wearier than any forty-year-old man should be, who hadn't done anything more physically strenuous that day than walk corridors and sign documents. He went to the window, hoping, perhaps, that the city might look less gray if he could peer at it directly.

No, it didn't. He wasn't surprised.

"He was an excellent ruler, you know," he said softly. "I've pored over the records that we've been able to obtain. All of them, twice over and more. And the more I read, the more I found myself wishing that I'd been his chief minister. All that Charles isn't—nor his father before him, nor any of the Stuarts—Oliver Cromwell was. Firm, steady, decisive. Yet not given to harshness for no purpose. He'd be labeled a tyrant after his death—they even dug up his corpse to decapitate it—but it wasn't true. Compared to Henry VIII? Or Elizabeth? Any of the Tudors? To say nothing of the Plantagenets. Ridiculous."