The Queen's Captive (36 page)

“My lady, you must not—”

“In the emperor’s court they are whispering about me, I know it. In the absence of my husband, they say, all my authority is melting away. Yet what would they have me do? Disobey my lord and husband?”

She was looking at John, apparently expecting an answer. Frances saw his struggle to come up with one. To save him she replied with some warmth, “It is quite the contrary, my lady. The fact that my brother and your other loyal servants caught the traitors before they could move against Your Majesty shows good governance. My brother acts in your name, and for your sovereign glory.”

Mary beamed at her through teary eyes. “God’s glory, my dear. Thanks be to Him.”

John cleared his throat. Frances could tell that inside he was squirming to bring some decorum back to the interview. “Your Majesty,” he said, “you sent for me. Is there some commission you would entrust to me? Some service I may render you?”

Mary closed her eyes as though in pain. She looked so pale, Frances was afraid she might faint, and she stepped closer to offer her hand if need be. But Mary rallied and looked at John.

“A service for the King,” she said, a new edge in her voice. “You shall leave here, sir, with a grave commission indeed. I have received word from my husband. It regards my sister, now guarded in her house by Sir Henry Jerningham and his troop. My lord’s command is to dismiss that guard and escort my traitorous sister to a different place.”

Frances shot John the briefest smile.
To the block.
Here was his chance.

“My lord’s command,” Mary repeated bleakly as though to herself. “My lord and master. Frances, I know that you understand my duty. I am a sovereign queen, but a wife first.”

“As God bids, Your Majesty.” She knew how seriously Mary took the Church’s teaching that a wife be subservient to her husband, Christ’s representative. And Philip had become a great and powerful king since his father had abdicated and handed over most of his vast domains. Philip was now monarch of half the world. He had all but deserted Mary, but she wrote to him constantly, and always signed her letters
Your loving and obedient wife.

“I am yours to command, Your Majesty,” John said.

“No, my husband’s,” Mary said bitterly. “You are to terminate the investigation into my sister’s crimes. Escort her to her house at Hatfield. She is to be set free.”

22

Adam’s Bargain

June 1556

T
he road was awash with mud from the night’s rain. Adam was spattered with it to the thigh as his horse galloped to meet the group plodding toward him—two horsemen and a horse-drawn cart homeward bound from London. He had ridden nonstop from Colchester, had been overseeing his storm-battered ship made fast to the wharf at dawn when he’d heard the news and set off. Now, with the muddy road steaming in the noonday sun, his shirt was plastered to him with sweat, and his lathered horse heaved bellows breaths as he galloped to close the distance to the small group. They were his kinsmen. Plodding on with downcast eyes, they were carrying his stepmother home.

“Uncle!” he cried out to hail them.

His Uncle Geoffrey looked up in surprise. Adam thundered up to them and reined in with such ferocity his mount almost staggered under him. Geoffrey held up a solemn hand to signal the others to stop—his son-in-law Randolph riding beside him, his teenage son, James, driving the cart. Something twisted in Adam’s chest as he saw the still figure lying stretched out in the cart, her eyes closed, her face pale as a corpse. “Oh God,” he groaned. “He killed her.”

“No,” said Geoffrey, his voice raw. “But not far from it.”

Adam sank back in his saddle, overcome with relief. But as he took in the grim faces of his uncle and cousins he realized what a hellish task they’d had, fetching his stepmother from the Tower.

“What are you doing back in England?” Geoffrey asked with dismay. “It’s not safe for you.”

“My family is here, Uncle, not in France.” He walked his horse to the cart for a closer look.

“But he’s right, Adam,” Randolph said. “So many have been arrested.”

“For plotting rebellion, not for the robbery,” James said, sounding proud. He had always looked up to Adam. “The dolts investigating the theft haven’t put the two together. You covered your tracks, didn’t you, Adam?”

He didn’t answer. Someone had betrayed Dudley, and many men had been captured, some already executed, and Geoffrey might be right, the Queen’s council might have a warrant out for Adam’s arrest, too. But right now that seemed the least of his worries. He was shocked at the sight of his stepmother. Clothes matted with filth. Wrists black with bruises. One of her arms, lying at her side, was bent an unnatural way. Fury boiled up in him. Grenville had tortured her.

“How bad?” he asked. “Can she walk?”

“Don’t know,” Geoffrey said, raking a hand wearily through his hair. “We had to carry her out. She moaned, but no words that made sense.”

“That cursed place,” said James. “Adam, you can’t conceive how foul. Just look at her!”

“Joan will bathe her and see to her,” Geoffrey said.

“Adam,” said Randolph gently, “she has weathered the worst. Don’t despair.”

Adam choked back his rage at Grenville, and his pity for his stepmother, knowing his kinsmen felt no less. They all loved her. But it was hard to pretend composure, imagining what she had suffered. “Grenville would have tried everything to get her to talk,” he said, “to incriminate Princess Elizabeth.”

“Well, she must have told him nothing,” Geoffrey said. “If she had, the Queen would have grounds for arresting her sister and she would be in the Tower now, too.”

“So it’s true what I’ve heard? Elizabeth is unharmed?”

“Aye. Unharmed and at liberty.”

Adam had never felt so grateful. And never admired his stepmother more.

“Word is that the Queen just suddenly dropped her investigation of the lady Elizabeth,” Geoffrey went on. “Some say at the command of her husband. Seems that’s the reason Honor’s free.”

“And thanks be for it. But my father is not.” His father still lay in chains in the Tower. Was it his fate to die there?

Geoffrey’s face showed how much he feared it. “Richard’s case is another matter.”

Randolph muttered, “He dared to fight her in Parliament and now she’s making him pay.”

Adam shook his head. “No, she only meant to punish him for that as a warning. She’s done the same to others who displeased her—kept them in prison for a few weeks, then sent them home. This persecution is something else. It’s Grenville’s doing.” He remembered his father’s warnings, and bitterly regretted how little he had believed them. His stepmother’s bruises were the sickening evidence of how far Grenville had gone to hurt her.

“But maybe now the Queen will order him sent home, just like Honor,” Geoffrey said. “Grenville has to obey the Queen.”

A hand gripped Adam’s boot in the stirrup. He froze. His stepmother’s hand. Her eyes were open. Staring at him.

“Madam,” he said, hardly knowing what to ask first, “is it the pain?”

Geoffrey and Randolph kicked their horses to her other side and James twisted around on the cart seat to see her. “Honor,” Geoffrey asked, “how can we help you?”

She kept looking straight at Adam. Squeezing his boot toe. She moaned, “Stop…him…”

The men shot anxious looks at each other. Her voice was so faint, Adam had to lean down to hear her. “What do you—”

“I saw…your father…cannot survive—” She winced, stopped by the pain. But her eyes never left Adam’s face. “Grenville will…kill him.” She groped for him. “Save him!” Her eyelids fluttered. Her hand dropped. Her voice was scarcely more than a breath. “Please, Adam…save…him…” Her eyes closed. Her head lolled. She went still.

“Madam!” Had she died? No, she was breathing, thank God. She had fainted. He turned to his uncle and his cousins. They all looked shaken.

“Can we believe this?” asked Geoffrey.

“Believe it,” Adam said.

“We should fight!” James said. “Rally our friends and ride back to London. Storm the place, swords drawn. Get to my uncle and break him out!”

“Don’t talk nonsense, boy,” Geoffrey snapped. “It’s a bloody fortress. They’d cut us to ribbons before we got past the drawbridge.”

“Hire more lawyers?” Randolph asked, sounding desperate. “The fellow we have is a snail.”

“What good would more do?” said Geoffrey. “Lawyers’ work takes months, even years. Richard would be a corpse before the court grinds out a ruling.”

“We will save him,” Adam said. It was why he had come home. He hadn’t come with any plan, but he had one now. He tugged the reins of his horse, but the animal was so winded it would be cruel to ask more of it. “Randolph, lend me your horse.”

“Adam?” Geoffrey asked with a frown. “What are you thinking?”

“Can’t explain now. Trust me, Uncle.”

Geoffrey seemed to accept that. He gave a brisk nod to his son-in-law. Randolph dismounted. Adam did, too, then swung up into Randolph’s saddle. With a last look at his stepmother, he turned the horse to go. “Take good care of her, Uncle.” He kicked the horse’s flanks and it bolted forward.

“Where are you going?” James called.

But Adam was already cantering away.

Grenville Hall lay upstream from Speedwell House and Adam had to row against the current all the way. It was late afternoon when he came alongside the Grenvilles’ jetty. The long day’s heat provoked distant rumbles of thunder as he shipped the oars, climbed out onto the jetty, and tied up the skiff. A few chattering maidservants were sorting fish from the weir’s nets, and Adam kept his head down, aware of the dangerous course he was charting. He had taken the precaution of buying clothes from the smith at Speedwell House. The maids, used to seeing boats land, and workmen load and unload goods, barely gave him a glance in his dingy shirt and scarred leather jerkin and patched breeches, all ripe with the smell of charcoal. But in this enemy territory it wasn’t maids he needed to beware of, it was fighters. No smith would carry a sword. So all he had brought was his dagger.

He made his way along the beaten-grass path that curved up from the river to the Hall’s outbuildings. He passed a noisy team of carpenters hammering nails to repair the dairy house roof, and women carrying sacks of flour into the bake house, and a groom leading a gelding across the stable courtyard to the farrier’s forge. None of them paid him any mind. No one here knew him. No one except the woman he had come to see. And her brother, the enemy he had to avoid.

“You there, boy,” he said, stopping an urchin carrying slop pails from the kitchen scullery. “Care to earn a shilling?”

The boy’s eyes went as big as the coin Adam held up. “Aye, sir.”

“Do you know the lord’s sister, Mistress Frances Grenville?”

“Aye, sir.”

“Can you get inside the great house to take her a message?”

The boy eagerly set down his pails. “Aye, sir, I just saw her in the pantry with the cook.”

Adam tossed him the coin and the boy snatched it in midair. “Tell her that her priory partner waits for her in the stable. Let no one else hear you.”

The boy scampered off. Above the carpenters’ hammering, Adam heard laughter. He turned to see three men swaggering across the courtyard, laughing over some private joke. Armed with swords and carrying crossbows, they wore the lord’s livery of green and yellow. Grenville Archers. Adam couldn’t afford to draw their notice. Head down, he walked briskly toward the stone stable. One of its double oak doors stood open. With a glance over his shoulder to make sure the archers hadn’t spotted him, he slipped inside.

The shadows were cool, and welcome after the glare outside. He didn’t see any grooms. Just as he had hoped, given the time of day. Most of the household would be at supper or on their way to it, and he had seen no sign that the Hall was entertaining guests, so grooms wouldn’t be needed to tend visitors’ horses. A central corridor divided the stalls that lined both sides of the stable and he strode straight on down it, passing horses behind their half walls, some munching hay. He noticed straw drifting down from a loft that ran across the breadth of the place, and saw a couple of stable boys up there with pitchforks. Busy at their work, they merely glanced at him as they each tossed another forkful down to the stone floor. Adam sidestepped the falling straw and strode on as if he was on business. They would take him for a visiting smith or farrier. He spotted a stall to his right, its door open, the space empty. He slipped into it, glad to be out of sight. The stall was hung with harnesses that deepened the shadows, and the wooden slats on either side like prison bars gave him a vague sense of being trapped. Tired as he was after the rough crossing from France and the hectic ride, then rowing here, he felt jumpy at the enforced stillness. To keep moving he began to pace. Now, all he could do was wait.

Would she come? If she did, could he still expect her goodwill after all that had happened? Enough to…his stepmother’s plea echoed:
Save him.
Frances can do it, he thought. Father was right about her brother, but I’ve been right about Frances. Right to make a friend of her.
She
is not the Grenville obsessed with hatred. Adam knew she had feelings for him. She had even told others. Elizabeth had heard some court gossip that he meant to marry Frances, and had been angry. So silly, that she would believe it. So thrilling that she cared. Bewitching Elizabeth—the thought of her was an arousing distraction, and he could not afford any distraction, not if he was going to save his father.