The Queen's Captive (41 page)

“My lady,” he said, laying his hand on the pouch to stop her. “Have you really thought this through? It’s clear that Master Parry thinks—”

“Parry is a fretful old woman. He cares nothing for my dire need to be gone. He thwarts me.”

“He is your true friend and cares only for your safety, and you know it.”

She pulled the pouch away from him. “And you, sir? What are you? Are you with me, or will you thwart me, too?”

There was a desperation about her that made him uneasy. She was not making sound decisions. Someone had to make them for her.

“Dismiss these people,” he said quietly.

“What?”

“Tell them you’ve changed your mind. That Parry is right, it’s too dangerous to attempt to flee.”

Elizabeth fixed hurt eyes on him. “I thought I could trust you.”

He shook his head. “The baggage train of a princess, complete with your ladies and men-at-arms? How could you hope to evade the Queen’s spies, whether in the village or on the road?”

She looked defiant. “All manner of noblewomen travel thus. Even wealthy merchants’ wives do. If I disguise my appearance, I could pass as anyone.”

“But you are not anyone. You are the woman the Queen wants dead.”

She went as pale as if he’d slapped her.

“I will not take you as a princess,” he said. “I will take you as common folk like me. And alone.”

They met with Thomas Parry in his chamber.

“Master Thornleigh says it must be so, Thomas. You must give out to the household that I am not well and am keeping to my bed.”

Parry paced beside his desk, clearly still reluctant, but listening.

Adam said, “And the routines around the Princess must carry on as usual. That’s essential, Parry. The servants must bring her daily trays of meals, take out the nightly chamber pot, deliver letters.”

“You do not trust her people?” Parry challenged.

“Wholeheartedly, in the main. But it takes just one to succumb to an agent of the Queen, or of the imperial ambassador. Those men can be generous paymasters.”

Parry nodded grimly and conceded, “Always my fear.” He cast a worried glance at Elizabeth. “But, to journey with no protection for my lady, no guard at all. I cannot see—”

“What soldiers does a merchant’s daughter need?” Adam said.

“Merchant’s daughter?” Elizabeth asked, looking daunted.

“Makes sense, since you’re traveling with me. You’re about the same age as my sister.”

She looked intrigued. “Really? What’s her name?”

“Isabel.”

He caught the hint of a smile as she considered it. “Perhaps a half sister. Isabel Fitzroy.”

He smiled at that. Fitzroy meant son of the king. Daughter, in this case. “Here’s our story. We stopped here so I could pay my respects to Princess Elizabeth, and now we’re continuing on our way to the wedding of our cousin at Braydon.”

“Do you have a cousin at Braydon?”

“No. But it’s a good cover in case anyone asks you.”

“Asks me my business?” she said with royal hauteur. “Who would dare?”

“Almost anyone who’s curious. People on the road like to chat.”

She looked dismayed. Whether by the prospect of such forward behavior, or uncertain how to join in the habits of common folk, Adam couldn’t tell, but he needed to know before they both risked their lives. “My lady, it’s a two-day ride, three if the weather’s foul, with only humble inns for shelter, and you’ll have no attendants to fetch for you, dress you, make you comfortable. We’ll have to shift for ourselves. If you feel unsure—”

“Never mind that,” Parry said to her. “It’s the
danger
you must consider. If a spy should suspect you, you’ll have no protection from an assassin getting close enough to do the deed.”

Her eyes flicked between them with growing concern. She fixed her gaze on Adam. “No protection? Not so, Master Parry. This man has proved his mettle. No, the one I fear is me. What if I betray myself?”

It was all Adam needed to hear. “Take courage,” he told her. “I know how you love to watch the players. Comedy or tragedy, I’ve seen you marvel at their nimbleness in shedding their given selves and taking on the heart and soul of another. Now you must be as nimble. Act the part. Can you do it?”

She lifted her chin and said bravely, “I must.”

The next day dawned bright and brittle cold. The Hatfield courtyard was quiet. The whole household was at morning prayers, called by Parry to ask God to return good health to the Princess, who’d been struck in the night with a fever and was keeping to her bed.

Adam helped Elizabeth mount her horse, then swung up onto his horse beside her. She wore simple clothes—a homespun brown cloak, a wool dress of a dark reddish brown like a hickory nut, and beneath it a plain white chemise—but her consternation was that of a princess as they watched the gatekeeper’s men push open the gate, the iron fittings clattering as they walked the double doors apart. Adam had never seen Elizabeth so nervous. Never before had she passed through these gates as anything but a royal personage, the daughter of a king, the center of a grand entourage. Now there were no men-at-arms and liveried retainers surrounding her, no ladies keeping her company, no train of household officers, gentlemen ushers, secretaries, servants, and lackeys, no bustle of baggage carts and packhorses. Just Adam, with a couple of well-worn leather bags of belongings strapped near the rumps of their mounts.

The gates stood open. They started forward at a walk. Elizabeth suddenly jerked her reins, halting her horse. She stared out at the yawning gulf beyond the gates—the slushy road with its straggle of villagers—as wary as if it were a foreign land, treacherous and threatening.

Adam waited, hoping she could gather her nerve. She seemed to shrink back under the bright sunshine, as though afraid that it exposed her to the world as an imposter and revealed her to the court’s spies.

“You’ll be fine,” he said. He gave her an encouraging smile. “Ready?”

She turned to him, and for a moment she seemed lost. He reached out, offering his hand. “Here. We’ll do it together.”

She took his hand. Then took a deep, steadying breath. “Ready.”

They passed through the gates hand in hand, their horses at a walk. Adam tossed a shilling to the gatekeeper’s man, thanking him for his pains and wishing him a good day. Elizabeth’s horse sensed the journey ahead and quickened its step, pulling her hand free from Adam’s.

25

The Royal Commoner

January 1557

R
iding side by side, Adam and Elizabeth kept their horses at an unhurried walk as the gates of Hatfield closed behind them. Elizabeth tensed as they approached the scatter of villagers on the road going about their business. Though she wore commonplace clothes, Adam thought her beauty shone more brightly, no longer hidden under lavish ruffs, gold embroidery, lace trimmings, and jewels. He almost feared
too
brightly—couldn’t these people see how glorious she was? Despite everything they were risking, and the suffering that her capture could bring them both, he couldn’t help feeling a rush of happiness just to have her beside him, alone.

They carried on through the village, where plenty of people were out, trudging to and from the winter-dirty shops and market stalls. They passed housewives haggling with a meat vendor whose cuts of beef and pork roasted on spits over a charcoal fire, and market stalls where men and women loudly hawked winter apples, honey, turnips, dried herbs, and live rabbits. No one made way for them, as Elizabeth was used to having done for her. She had pulled her cloak’s hood up over her hair, and with each person they passed she lowered her head, eyes cast down as though she feared that every farmer plodding behind his ox might be a spy for the Queen, every housewife on a donkey an agent of the imperial ambassador.

“Don’t hide,” Adam said quietly. “Just look them in the eye.”

She tried it. Timidly at first, but then, as the next person trudged past without a second look, she gathered courage. “It works.” She gave him a cautious smile of surprise. “They don’t seem to notice me.”

“Too busy with their own concerns. The price of bread. The baby’s cough.” They passed a middle-aged couple on foot, the woman nattering angrily at the bleary-eyed man, and Adam said with a wry smile, “The drunken husband who didn’t chop this morning’s wood.”

Elizabeth laughed, then covered her mouth to bottle up the sound, but delight shone in her eyes. As they overtook a limping priest, she ventured quietly, “The mule who threw him yesterday.”

Adam grinned. “And the doctor’s bill.” He jerked his chin to indicate a young farmer on a shaggy workhorse trotting toward them with a dreamy look. “The pretty girl he saw in church, and what’s the best way to meet her.”

Elizabeth smiled at him. It warmed him to his boots.

They struck out onto the main road that led out of the village and he felt Elizabeth tense up again, as though preparing herself to cross this threshold into the wider world.

“All right?” he asked.

She looked at him, pale faced but clear-eyed, and nodded.

They left the village behind and rode on past fields sleeping under quilts of snow. The road sloped down to a narrow river frozen in its bed, and their horses clomped over the wooden bridge. The earthy smell of wood smoke reached them as the road rose up on the other side. Elizabeth began to relax. Adam could see it in the way she let her hood slide back off her hair, the way she let the reins slacken a little, the way she let her body sway with the horse’s gait. Most of all, the way she let herself look around, her anxiety yielding to curiosity. Her worried concentration on herself seemed to melt under the strengthening sunshine, and her gaze stretched out to roam the white expanse of the countryside. They rode on in companionable silence, Adam loving this easy camaraderie with her. They trotted through a hamlet of five or six thatched cottages that hugged the riverbank, where a work party of mud-spattered men were mucking out a ditch. A child sat in a doorway skinning a rabbit. A bell pealed from the squat church that thrust its steeple into the bright blue sky. Dogs barked. Leaving the hamlet, they rode again past snow-quieted fields that rolled out on either side like drowsy ocean waves. Sun sparkled on the sea of snow.

Elizabeth heaved a sigh, almost like a moan.

“Tired?” Adam asked. They’d been riding for several hours, and it was cold. Had he pushed her too far?

She shook her head. “It looks different,” she said almost in wonder. “So different from when I’m out hunting or hawking. There’s always such a noisy company of people and servants and horses and dogs. All my friends chattering and gossiping.”

He remembered it. “Gentlemen wagering on the hunt.”

“Ladies bickering.”

“Everyone jockeying for place.”

Her smile was sly. “Toadying.”

He laughed.

She looked over the land and let out another sigh that sounded like contentment. “Inside that moving court I never see this. Never
hear
this.”

He knew what she meant. The silence.

She suddenly looked very serious. “How fares Mistress Thornleigh?”

“Better. The months spent quietly at home have done her good.”

“I am glad to hear it. But, dear Lord, to be stretched on the rack. And never, under such terrible duress, to speak of me. It humbles me.” A sly smile flitted across her face. “Though I’m sure she thinks such an emotion quite foreign to me.”

Adam hid his own smile.

“And what of your good father?”

“Better, too.” He said nothing about how his father now kept a guard around the house. How he never left home without armed retainers. How his private war with Baron Grenville simmered, threatening to overturn all their lives. There was a temporary ceasefire, ever since Frances had written in one of her letters to Adam that the Queen had dispatched her brother to Ireland to oversee a commission for keeping the peace. But in a few months he would be back, and then, Adam thought, what lay in store for his father? But he said none of that to Elizabeth. To speak of John Grenville would be to face the fact of his betrothal to Frances, and that Adam refused to do. He had banished Frances to the backwaters of his mind.

“I owe your family much,” Elizabeth said.

“You owe us nothing. Except to stay exactly as you are.”

“Willful and obstinate?”

He grinned. “That, of course. Who would want to follow a timorous princess?”

They stopped beside an old churchyard where a stone bench slumbered under a stand of ancient oak trees, their bare boughs plumped with snow. Adam brushed the snow off the bench, and they sat and ate bread and cheese and hard-cooked eggs from the saddlebags, washing it down with ale that came ice-cold from the wineskins. As they bent their heads over the shared meal that lay between them, he loved the way her breath, steaming in the cold, blended with his. The horses nudged the snow-covered ground around the crooked tombstones and munched the few tufts of grass.

“Strange,” she said, looking at the snowy expanse that stretched beyond them for miles. “It’s as though I’ve disappeared.”

“Into thin air?”

“Into England.” He caught the sadness in her eyes. “And yet, it may be the last time I’ll ever see all this.”