Blood Ties (62 page)

The sound of the flute accompanied Thomas in his dawn search. With a strong wind bellying the
Sea Feather
’s sails, there was time now for music; and Do-ne, under the tutelage of the old fisherman, Gaspard, had progressed rapidly from the ear-piercing shrillness of his first lessons. Four weeks at sea and he could carry, and carry well, half a dozen tunes.

He found her at the prow of the ship. It wasn’t hard, the ship was small, even for a caravel. But for the first month of the voyage he would always go straight aft if he wanted her, because each day she would be there, looking back, weeks after the last giant pine had disappeared. Then, yesterday, he’d found her at the bow for the first time, her eyes as fixed on the horizon before them as they had been on the one behind. When he asked her what she scanned for, when they were yet some weeks from any harbour, she had simply said, ‘My future.’

She smiled when he sat beside her, then returned her look ahead. He was content to stare with her until he felt her gaze once more upon him.

‘This suits you.’ She leant toward him to pull at the blue material of his shirt.

‘I hope so,’ he said, ‘because it’s undoubtedly the most expensive shirt I’ve ever had – if you figure that the robe I gave Gaspard for it cost me twenty scudi in Milan.’

She laughed. ‘Then I think you were cheated. But my father always said the Bretons were the masters of that art. Then again, he was from the Loire.’

‘It was worth it just to hear you laugh,’ he said.

He was sorry he said it, because the words chased the fragile smile away and she returned her look to the horizon. But when he placed his hand on hers, as he had for the first time the day before, she did not withdraw it. Her fingers even tightened on his and he sat there, immeasurably content.

Will she come with me to Shropshire?
he thought.
Is that what her hand in mine means? Or is mine in hers and she will lead me?

He thought then of another hand, another Anne he’d once held and he shuddered as his memory compared bone to flesh. His mind moved back again to that night in the Tower, a mere …
six months before?
When he’d gone to violate a grave and found …

What? It didn’t matter. A path. God’s paths, always mysterious, no map could ever mark them. Leading here. And the miles and the pain in between, what were they after all? A route to this contentment, to holding the hand of the only woman he had ever loved.

Leaning back against the gunwale, he sighed and closed his eyes.

She heard his sigh, turned to study his face, its lines, its fringe of grey-black hair. He was a kind man, this Thomas Lawley and that, she had discovered, was a rare quality in this world. But she’d observed that such kindness often came to men who had experienced much sadness, as he had, as her father had. Tagay had not been allowed the time to grow kind but she knew he would have, if only they had been granted those years together. But his fierceness had been what he needed to fulfil his destiny. So she hoped that his son, whose first stirrings she had felt within her, would have the best of all the men from which his life sprang. The gentleness of this man dozing beside her, to whom she was now linked. Tagay’s fire. And through her, perhaps some of her own father’s courage. For though he had faltered along the way, Jean Rombaud had triumphed in the end.

Yes
, she thought,
let me teach my son the true meaning of courage, as both his father and grandfather had learned it: to be afraid, yet still leap into the darkness
.

The notes of a flute rose from the ship as Anne Rombaud, named for a queen, turned her face again toward a new, old world.

Queen Mary died, childless, after a protracted illness and careworn life, on 17 November 1558.

Elizabeth, having survived all the plots against her, was crowned on 12 January 1559. She married no one.

Simon Renard, ‘the Fox’, lost his power with Mary’s death. He died in 1571.

Philip of Spain, having failed in his wooing, sent his Armada to invade England in 1588. It was famously defeated by daring seamanship and dreadful storms.

The Tahontaenrat were the last to join the Huron Confederacy, the Wendat, in 1610. For several decades the Wendat, allied with the French, thrived and dominated the fur trade. Yet they were not strong enough to defeat the Iroquois, mainly Mohawk and Seneca, who conquered them in 1648–9.

The Hodenosaunee, or Iroquois Confederacy, eventually became six nations and grew powerful, usually siding with the British against the French in the wars of the next centuries. Their power only started to decline when the united front cracked, four tribes staying with the British, two joining the American Revolutionaries in 1776 – one of the subjects to be dealt with in C.C. Humphreys’ next novel,
Jack Absolute
, available in Orion hardback from January 2004.

C.C. Humphreys was born in Toronto and grew up in Los Angeles and London. A third generation actor and writer on both sides of his family, he is married and lives on Salt Spring Island, Canada.

www.cchumphreys.com

AN ORION EBOOK

First published in Great Britain in 2003 by Orion Books.
First published in ebook in 2011 by Orion Books.

Copyright © 2003 C. C. Humphreys

The moral right of C. C. Humphreys to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978 1 4091 3855 6

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