The Queen's Captive (15 page)

The entrance to Woodstock Palace swarmed with men on horseback. Thirty or forty altogether, Adam judged as he cautiously trotted up to the gatehouse. Some wore a livery of blue and tawny, likely retainers of Sir Henry Bedingfield, the Queen’s man here, custodian of the Princess. Some were soldiers of the guard, in breastplates and helmets. All were armed with swords and rapiers. Horses’ hooves clattered and harnesses jangled, and above it all an officer shouted orders to his men. Some people from the village had come out to watch and stood gawking, keeping their distance.

Adam looked up at the gatehouse. That was where his stepmother said she stayed with the Princess. For a moment he took heart, thinking they surely would not make all this commotion about her, a mere merchant’s wife. But then he realized that if she had fallen afoul of the Queen, her treason would implicate the Princess in treason, too, a matter of enormous consequences.
Treason.
The very word churned his gut. He had to get inside, find out what was happening. As he approached the gate a soldier halted him. “Name?”

“Adam Thornleigh.”

“Your business here?”

“I’ve come to see my stepmother. She’s the Princess Elizabeth’s lady.”

The guard scowled at him. “Today of all days?”

Dread rose in Adam’s throat.
Why not today? What’s happened?

“Dismount.”

Adam kicked his feet from the stirrups and jumped to the ground. The guard searched him for weapons, Adam standing with arms outstretched. The guard relieved him of his dagger, searched his horse’s saddlebags, then let him pass. “Say good-bye to her, then be on your way.”

Good-bye?

Adam led his horse into the courtyard where dozens more men were milling. There were liveried retainers, and more soldiers, and servants running to and fro hefting baggage and leading horses and packing trunks in carts. The blond-bearded captain of the Queen’s guard, on horseback, was talking to a stout gentleman on foot who gestured with an air of impatient authority. Bedingfield, Adam guessed.

He spotted a stairway that led up inside the gatehouse. He tethered his horse to a rail, and no one stopped him as he took the stairs two at a time up to the second story. He dodged a couple more servants hustling down the stairs with bundles. At the top he entered a large room with a painted ceiling. He was alone. The room looked barren, as though recently stripped of furniture. The door to an adjoining room was closed. Through it he could hear his stepmother’s voice.

“Listen to me, I beg you!” she cried.

Good Lord, was she begging for her life? He lunged for the door and yanked it open. His stepmother turned. She looked pale, anxious. And clearly surprised at seeing him. “Adam!”

“What’s happened?”

“Shhh! Come in. Quickly. Close the door!”

“I’ve no
time
to listen,” a woman’s voice called from the next room where the door stood open. A bedchamber, Adam saw. “They’ve only given us twenty minutes,” the voice went on breathlessly. “Where’s my silver comb? Where’s my Cicero?” He glimpsed a figure dash past the bed, then disappear. It had to be Princess Elizabeth.

“Close the door!” his stepmother said again, rushing toward him to close it herself.

“What’s going on?” he asked “The Queen’s soldiers—”

“The Queen has summoned her. To London.”

“To court! At last!” the Princess sang out from the bedchamber. She sounded happy. Adam saw her flit past the doorway again. It looked almost like she was dancing.

“Why?” he asked.

“For the Queen’s lying-in,” his stepmother said. “That’s the official story.” Her anxious look told him how little she believed it. “My lady,
think,
” she called as she hurried to the bedchamber. She disappeared inside, but Adam could still hear her saying, “Why should she ask for
you?
”

“The baby,” the Princess said. “It has mellowed her. They say that does happen when women come near their time.” Adam couldn’t see either of them now, but he heard drawers being pulled open, cupboards slammed shut. “It’s the coming baby, that’s all.”

“Or a trap. To lure you there.”

The Princess laughed lightly. “No, no, no, you don’t understand. It’s tradition. An ancient custom. All the noble ladies of the realm are summoned to court to attend a queen’s delivery. They’ll all be there, you’ll see. The duchesses and countesses…and me! Oh Lord, to be at court after this mausoleum. I can hardly wait. Music. Dancing. People!” She rushed out through the doorway, then stopped abruptly, seeing Adam. She looked about to laugh as she said, “Here’s one now.”

The window was behind her and the sun was so bright it seemed to make her glow. But it wasn’t just the sun. She was dressed in a dazzle of gold and green. But it wasn’t just her clothes, either. He’d never seen anything like her hair, a coppery cascade that shimmered like the sea under a ruddy gold sunset. And her smile had a dazzle all its own. It felt like she was giving off light.

“Stop this,” his stepmother said harshly, coming out and stepping between them. “Think what she’s doing by getting you back to London.”

“Who’s this?”

“My stepson. Adam.”

He went down on one knee. He was glad that etiquette in the presence of royalty demanded it. His legs didn’t feel quite solid.

“Master Thornleigh,” the Princess said in an impassioned, conspiratorial voice that sent a shiver of thrill through him, “have you ever felt frightened, but also so excited that you simply had to carry on, no matter what?”

Yes, he wanted to say. Every time a ship under him trembled at the crest of a mountainous wave, about to plunge into its trough. Or right now, as he imagined leaping up and pulling this woman into his arms.

“My lady, please,” his stepmother went on urgently. “This summons could just be her ploy.”

“To what end?” the Princess said, her eyes still on Adam. He knew he should properly bow his head, but he couldn’t make his eyes leave hers. “To dare me to show my face amongst the duchesses? I’ll take that dare.”

“No. To lure you into the Tower.”

Her gaze snapped to his stepmother, and Adam saw a shudder run through the Princess. The mention of the Tower seemed to terrify her, like a dog once viciously beaten who sees its master’s stick.

Yet something in her look told him she was facing the fear head-on and carefully calculating the odds. She suddenly shook her head, confident again. “You’re wrong. Quite wrong. Master Thornleigh, your mother is my good friend. You know that, don’t you? I mean, you know my situation, being persecuted by my sister?”

His head felt like he’d had too much wine. It took him a moment to swallow. “I do, Your Grace.”

“Good. Then let me explain, and you be the judge. My sister has persecuted me for one reason only, because until now I was the legal heir to the throne, the last surviving person with our father’s royal blood, and she hates that I stood to inherit. But her coming baby changes everything. Don’t you agree?”

He blinked. He had no idea what to say.

“Do get up,” she said.

He stood. The Princess turned to his stepmother. “Don’t you see? The baby will now be her heir, so she can stop plaguing
me.
”

“The baby puts you in even
more
danger,” his stepmother said. “Until now she did not dare to openly kill the last child of King Henry, for fear of rousing the many lords who support your rights as heir. The baby does indeed change everything, but you have not thought it through. The moment the Queen has an heir of her body, you become expendable.”

The Princess went completely still. Adam was horrified by his stepmother’s words. For months he had heard her talk of the danger the Princess stood in, but those had been words about a stranger, a distant royal personage. Not this golden, glittering girl. To imagine her death seemed like dying a little himself.

“Forgive my speaking so harshly, my lady, but we have not a moment to lose.” She hurried to the window and looked out at the massing soldiers. “Tell them you are ill. Feign some sickness. Stay here, in your bed, and say you are too seriously unwell to be moved. That can give us a few days. Enough time for me to contact Sir William Cecil. He is friends with the lords on the royal council who support you. Once he alerts them, the Queen cannot then act against you without rousing them up. It may be just enough to stop her from—”

“Let me do it,” Adam said.

They both looked at him.

“I’ll go to Sir William. I can be in London by nightfall.”

His stepmother offered a quick, grateful smile. Adam waited. A smile from the Princess, that’s what he was waiting for.

All her gaiety had drained away, but also, it seemed, all her fear. Her gaze drifted to the window. The look on her face was open, no art in it, a look of pure yearning. As though her mind had traveled past the window, skipped across the courtyard, and sailed over its walls—as though she were seeing the whole wide world that lay beyond. Trees and rivers and fields. People. London.
Life.
Adam didn’t think he had ever seen anyone so hungry for life. He knew then that she had made up her mind and heart. She had been a captive here for a year, and now the Queen’s summons had opened her prison door a crack and she ached to bolt through it. She was getting out, and nothing his stepmother could say would stop her. He felt a pang of loss, almost as if something had been stolen from him. She didn’t want his help. She wanted freedom.

He would help her anyway. He rode past the dozens of men on horseback outside the palace gate, forcing himself to keep his horse at a trot, not dig in his spurs to gallop as he itched to do. The horsemen had formed themselves into an organized cohort, with the Queen’s soldiers in the vanguard, the forward rider carrying the staff with the Queen’s banner rippling in the wind. They were followed by Bedingfield’s guardsmen and retainers, their ranks stretching back along the road that ran straight to the palace. Outriders from the soldiers’ ranks trotted back and forth along the length of the entourage, checking that the whole troop was in order. Scores of villagers had left their cottages and shops and fields and stood crowding both edges of the road.

A cheer went up. Adam halted his mount and looked back. He trotted to one side to watch as the gate opened. The sun was cresting the gatehouse as the Princess emerged on a white horse. She sat tall, as though the world was such a thrilling place she wanted to stretch as high as possible to see it all, hear it all, smell it all. Her horse seemed infused with her excitement, stepping high as it pranced out of the gateway.

“God save Your Grace!” a man shouted from the village throng.

She laughed. Even at this distance, Adam heard her laugh. It seemed to pour into him like cool water on a hot day. She beamed as she trotted forward, taking her place at the center of the entourage, for there were as many horsemen now coming through the gate after her as there were already ranged in front. Adam saw his stepmother, on her stolid brown mare, riding directly behind the Princess.

The whole entourage started moving along the road to London. The villagers moved forward with it, knots of excited men and women and children walking alongside, pointing and chattering. A couple of women tried to get close to the Princess, one calling out, “God bless the Lady Elizabeth!” before the outriders nudged them back. The bearded captain trotted close to the Princess, his royal charge, with his right hand resting on his sword hilt and a stern gleam in his eye. Children skipped after the train like gulls in the wake of a ship.

A skinny little girl carrying a ragged bouquet of wildflowers scampered between the horses, quick as a fish, and darted up to the Princess. “Here, my lady!” She held up the flowers, offering them, as she kept pace beside the white horse.

The Princess looked entranced. Smiling, she reached down for the spindly wildflowers as though they were rare orchids presented by a sultan’s daughter.

The captain lunged his horse forward, drawing his sword. He slashed the bouquet, decapitating the blooms from the stems. The little girl screamed and ran. The Princess’s face went white. She sat rigid, stunned.

It was all Adam could do to hold back from charging the man and wrestling him to the ground.

Instead, he kicked his spurs into his horse’s flanks and bolted down the road ahead of the train. He didn’t look back, but he felt her presence—the laugh, the light—as he bent over his horse’s neck and galloped toward London to alert Sir William Cecil.

“Perhaps we should begin?” Father Percy ventured.

“Not yet,” Frances snapped. She would not start without Adam. The priest folded his hands over his paunch, meekly accepting her command.

They stood outside St. Botolph’s church at the edge of the grassy quadrangle, the old monastery cloister rimmed with ruins. Four men—Colchester’s master stonemason and his three apprentices—stood at the far corner of the quadrangle, as though they were a team of wrestlers squared off against Frances and the priest. The master mason had rolled up his plans and stood tapping the roll impatiently against his thigh. The bored apprentices murmured amongst themselves. One of them idly kicked at an anthill. The whole party had been waiting for almost an hour.

The sun glared down, unseasonably sweltering for late April. Frances was hot, and she was angry. Where was Adam? It was over a week ago that they had agreed on this Friday meeting, the feast day of blessed Saint Anselm. Adam had promised to be here. He had made her so happy, saying he looked forward to commissioning the masons and approving the first dig, finally launching the project.

Frances squinted in the bright sun, skeptically eyeing her maid, who sat on a large rock amid the ruins, fanning herself with her hand, her eyelids lazily drifting closed. The apprentice kicking the anthill had been stealing regular glances at the girl. It hadn’t escaped Frances’s notice. Nor had the girl’s blowsy appearance, the chemise above her bodice unlaced like a harlot’s, showing her plump bosom pink and dewy in the heat. Frances wrestled with the impulse to sack her here and now. She would not tolerate lewdness in her servants. But she hesitated. The maid was quite artful at dressing Frances’s hair.

Irritably, she batted away a fly. More flies buzzed thickly over a dead creature by the ruin wall, some large bird. She could smell the thing. An appalling thought struck her. Adam had been hurt. He had fallen off the scaffold at that ship of his and broken his leg. He had been thrown from his horse and snapped his neck. He had been run through the heart by some villainous highwayman, robbed and left to die by the side of the road. He lay gasping in a ditch at this very moment, crawling, trying to get to her. Otherwise, what could possibly keep him from being here?

“Dyer!” she called, turning to the church.

Her steward came hurrying out the door of Father Percy’s study. He held the list of tasks that Frances and Adam had written up together, an agenda for this meeting. “My lady?”

“Forget that,” she said, waving away the list. “Send people out to search. I fear Master Thornleigh has met some dreadful mishap.”

“Have you heard word of this?”

“No.”

“Then perhaps—”

“I want him found! Is that understood?”

Dyer shut his mouth. He nodded.

Frances turned to Percy. “Father, dismiss these workmen.” She started along the path that led out of the churchyard. Dyer kept by her side. As they reached the maid the girl stood up, ready to fall in behind her mistress. Frances slapped her face. The girl gasped, her eyes big with fear.

“Make yourself decent,” Frances ordered. She turned to Dyer. “And I want that shiftless apprentice sacked.”

9

The Queen’s Child

April–May 1555

O
n a warm Tuesday morning, the last day of April, the news swept London at daybreak. Courtiers told servants, neighbors told neighbors, and soon the whole city was buzzing that just after midnight Queen Mary had given birth to a prince. The boy was fair and without blemish. By midmorning there were bonfires in the streets and bells rang throughout the city. In every church
Te Deums
were sung, the priests jubilantly orchestrating the people’s thanks to God for the safe delivery of their queen and the birth of their prince.

By nightfall everyone had learned that the rumor was false. The Queen, in fact, had not yet begun her labor.

Three weeks later, as Honor was climbing the staircase to the Queen’s apartments to make another meaningless report to her about Elizabeth, she still didn’t know how the birth rumor had started. What mattered was that Elizabeth was safe—for now, at least. Sir William Cecil, alerted by Adam, had spread the word to his influential friends about the Queen removing Elizabeth from Woodstock, and since her arrival in London she had been confined to her rooms in Hampton Court Palace, under guard, but at least she was not in the Tower. Honor did not know if the alarm had stayed the Queen’s hand from taking some dire action against her sister, or if Elizabeth’s reprieve was somehow connected to the confusion swirling around the imminent delivery of the Queen’s baby, including the birth rumor. She reached the top of the staircase and made her way to the Queen’s rooms, thinking how everyone was on tenterhooks awaiting the event. Here at Hampton Court, where the Queen had come for her lying-in and the whole court had followed, it was all people talked about. When would the baby come? The Queen was five weeks overdue.

Mary had secluded herself in her private chambers, and the life of the government had practically come to a standstill, while courtiers and the staffs of ambassadors and diplomats met anxiously in chambers, in the corners of galleries, in the courtyards, and on the busy palace wharf, exchanging scraps of information gleaned from the Queen’s apartments. Honor was privy to little of their talk, since everyone at court, noting the Queen’s shunning of her sister, avoided Elizabeth. They hurried past the cramped set of rooms in the rear of the palace where she had been lodged under guard. Nobody wanted to be seen near Elizabeth. She and her lady were pariahs.

Every day Honor felt the pall of suspense and suspicion grow heavier. It seemed that all of England felt it, for the one program the Queen had pushed ahead with was the burning of heretics, and the bishops had filled the country’s prisons with Protestants. A clerk of the French ambassador had told Honor one day, furtively, under a staircase, that he thought the Queen had made up her mind that her child could not be born until every Protestant in prison had been burned alive. The burnings fueled the fury of radical Protestants who met in secret congregations at night in cellars and barns and cemeteries. Their seditious pamphlets were read in taverns, in the streets, in the gambling houses. Honor had seen one of the more distasteful pamphlets with a picture of Queen Mary as a filthy sow, suckling a litter of grubby priests lined up at her teats. As the burnings continued there were riots in Warwickshire and Devon. The Queen’s council raised more troops. The soldiers were quartered in the immediate neighborhood of the palace, and they brought artillery with them. Meanwhile it was common knowledge that the Queen’s husband was anxious to get to Flanders to see to his father’s imperial business and was waiting only until the baby came. His retinue of Spaniards prowled the palace corridors, impatient to get home.

As Honor entered the Queen’s apartments she sensed that here, especially, nerves were at a snapping point. The noblewomen of the realm had been brought to court in April to witness the royal birth, and somehow room had been found in the palace for all of them with their maids and lapdogs and trunks of finery, but now it was late May, and Honor heard bickering among the duchesses, countesses, and marchionesses as she walked through the antechamber. Eight or nine of them, looking sour and restless, sat idly playing cards, picking at candied apricots at a sideboard, and gossiping by the windows. They had put in weeks of embroidering baby clothes. The sewing was done, the midwives stood ready, the wet nurses had been brought in, the rockers hired. The royal cradle sat in a corner, sumptuously decorated and blatantly empty. Everyone was just waiting.

The gentlewomen kept their distance from Honor, Elizabeth’s lady, as she passed among them and knocked gently on the Queen’s bedchamber door.

The door opened a crack. Frances Grenville stood like a sentry.

“Her Majesty is expecting me,” Honor said.

“She is resting. Come back later.” Frances gave off a chill that Honor sensed was jealousy for her, the Queen’s new, special confidante.

A groan sounded from deep inside the room. Then the Queen’s voice, thin and pinched with pain. “Frances, who’s there?”

Honor smelled a cloying odor, like bad meat. The chamber lay in darkness, though it was two in the afternoon. What was going on? Frances started to close the door. Honor slapped her palm against it to stop her. “It’s Honor Thornleigh, Your Grace. May I come in?”

She pushed the door open, forcing Frances to step back. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the gloom. The windows were shuttered and the heavy velvet curtains were closed—winter curtains, incongruous against the gentleness of May outside. Candlelight flickered at the far end of the room, coming from the alcove with its
prie-dieu,
though Honor could not see it from the doorway. On a table, a plate sat abandoned with some kind of cooked meat, rabbit perhaps, its gravy congealed. The bed, with its thick carved posts and heavy embroidered hangings, lay shrouded in darkness.

Frances sat down in her chair beside the bed, picking up a baby’s silk cap and her embroidery yarn and needle. Honor approached the bed, ready to go down on her knees before the Queen. But the bed, she now saw, was empty. Frances, intently sewing, seemed bent on ignoring Honor.

The Queen was likely at the
prie-dieu,
her private altar, Honor thought. She left the bed and turned the corner to the alcove. The
prie-dieu
stood in lone splendor, its silver crucifix and polished ebony backdrop with inlaid gemstones gleaming in the light of the candles that flared on either side. A red satin cushion lay on the floor in front of it. Honor knew that the Queen knelt here in prayer several times a day. But not now.