The Queen's Captive (52 page)

“Again! My heir! Your lust is showing. Can you prate of nothing else?”

“I speak it because it is what the people tell
me.
They will not tolerate a foreign ruler. They would rather fight and die than see Mary of the Scots call herself their queen. She is a creature of the French court that has always been her home, and now, married to the heir to the French throne, she would sell England to the King of France. And—forgive me, Your Majesty, but I must speak the hard truth—the people fear even more that if King Philip is your heir, he would gobble us into his mighty empire and make our England a feeble, vassal state.”

“Never!” a councilor blurted. He immediately looked regretful at his outburst, and jerked a deferential bow to the Queen, but there were no looks of reproach from his colleagues. He had merely spoken what they were thinking. The Queen was trembling. Her eyes looked haggard. Control of this interview was slipping away from her and she was too unnerved, too ill, and too bereft of friends to win it back.

Elizabeth kept on without mercy. “Wherever I go, Your Majesty, the people flock to me and press their petitions on me and tell me their fears. Without a named heir you leave the realm unprotected, vulnerable to any invader or to tragic civil war. Your people are loyal, but they would rather risk everything now to bring about a change than wait to see their green fields soaked with the blood of brave Englishmen who want only to protect their families, their homes, their beloved native land. Without a named heir, Your Majesty, you consign your own memory to infamy.”

“Enough! You…you…” The Queen did not finish. She was swaying, fainting.

A lady cried, “Your Grace!” She and two others rushed to hold the Queen upright. The courtiers and councilors buzzed in alarm. “Make way, my lords!” one of the Queen’s ladies cried. The gathering broke apart to create a ragged path to the royal bedchamber. The Queen, hanging on to her ladies, disappeared into her private chamber. The door closed behind her.

Honor heard Parry murmur to Elizabeth, “Your tale has made her deadly ill.”

Elizabeth looked at the closed door and said tightly, “I hope to God it kills her.”

32

From the Ashes

June 1558

S
peedwell House was a smoking ruin. The roof had collapsed, and two of the outer walls and most of the second-story floor, leaving waist-high rubble, half-eaten interior walls, and a staircase that went nowhere. Wisps of dirty smoke drifted up into the blue sky as tired women and children, their faces half soot, poked with sticks through the charred debris, looking for anything of value that might be salvaged.

Honor moved slowly in the outer shadows of the house’s remains. Her shoes and her skirt’s hem were white with ash. White as a corpse’s winding sheet, she thought. White as bone. Her mind was on death. Elizabeth had betrayed her. Betrayed them all.

The bells of Chelmsford had been ringing when she rode alone through the town on her way back from London. The town council had convened in the market square where the clerk had read out the proclamation to the people. Decreed by Queen Mary, and signed by all the lords of her royal council, it declared that in the absence of an heir of her body the Queen named Princess Elizabeth as her heir. The people cheered. Fast work, Honor thought bitterly as she kept riding. Elizabeth had so frightened the councilors with the spectre of imminent country-wide rebellion, and offered so reasonable a path to peace—herself as successor—she had backed the Queen into a corner from which Mary’s only exit, no doubt clamored for by the council, was to immediately name her sister her heir.

Betrayed,
Honor thought in misery. Elizabeth had gotten exactly what she wanted. While Richard and Adam still faced death.

She stopped walking when she reached the garden. Gray ash lay like a shroud over her rose bushes, the blooms as colorless as if drained of blood. Ash made ghosts of the fruit trees. She noticed a pile of cut roses lying on the parched, blackened grass. Dead now—just a heap of blanched flowers and shrivelled leaves, all dusted with ash. Dusted with death is how it felt to her. Who had cut this doomed bouquet? She saw a dagger on the stone bench. A shape only, for the dagger, too, was dusted with ash, but she recognized it instantly. Richard’s. Had he cut these roses for her? A terrible pain squeezed her heart. He must have done it just before Grenville attacked. He’d had no chance even to snatch the dagger before Grenville’s men snatched him and dragged him away. Two days ago. Was he alive or dead? And if alive, was he suffering such agony that he prayed God for death?

She sat down with a thud on the bench, on its shroud of ash, and struggled to hold back the scalding tears. If she let them loose, lost all control, she was afraid she would go mad.

She looked up at the blue sky. The wispy smoke of her dead house drifted up toward wispy clouds, a few long, feathery trails in the otherwise cloudless expanse. Mare’s tails, Adam called such clouds. They portended rain, not soon but within twenty-four hours. A seaman’s knowledge. She stared at one elongated plume that stretched itself high and lonely against the blue. Adam was about to meet his own death, she was sure of that. When she had ridden in, the anxious women told her that he had gathered together all the men of the household and almost half the tenants, and all night they had trooped the area, getting horses and arms from this neighbor and that, and now they were scouring the vicinity for more men, and Adam was offering pay to any that came armed and ready to ride with them. Untrained farmers and farriers and carpenters, about to hurl themselves with pitchforks against the Grenville Archers and the band of murderers Grenville had hired to man his fortress home.

Adam would die. Honor knew it in her bones.

Would Elizabeth weep?

“I trusted you,” Honor had accused her in bleak fury as they had left the Queen. “Trusted you to save my family. But you never intended to. You will not fight. Not for anyone.”

“No, I will not fight, not when fighting will lead to thousands of deaths. I will not loose barbarous civil war to get a crown. And barbarous it would be, for the Queen has many supporters, adherents of the Catholic faith, and she can call on the armies of Spain and the pope. No, Mistress Thornleigh, I will not send Englishmen to die for your family. I will not sacrifice thousands to save a few.”

Honor turned from her in mute misery. She started to walk away, not knowing where to go or what to do. They were under a massive archway in the courtyard of Whitehall Palace, and beyond the arch Elizabeth’s retinue were saddling up to leave.

“Stop,” Elizabeth called, running after Honor. She grabbed her arm to stop her. “Please,” she said in a strangled voice, “please understand. I wish to God I
could
help your family. I esteem your husband, who did such brave service in Parliament. And as for your son…I love him. Yes, I will say it. I love Adam Thornleigh with all my heart. Love him body and soul.” Her voice wavered. “I know how deeply you love your husband. Believe me, I feel no less for Adam.”

“Then how can you let—”

“Because I cannot think only of those I love! Not anymore. You once told me I need to think of all England as my family. I did not want to hear it then. I wanted no such burden. Perhaps I should have listened to you back then. If I had thrown my support behind Dudley’s plan, I might at this moment be queen. I could have curbed Baron Grenville and kept your family safe. I could have stopped Adam’s marriage. Well, it is too late for that.” She lifted her head high. “But not too late for me to do what I must. You have tried to protect your family. I am doing the same for mine—and mine is all of England.”

“You have gambled, that’s all. Gambled that the Queen will name you her heir. But she may not. Then what will you do?”

Elizabeth answered in a heartbeat. “Then, I will fight. To the death.”

Honor got up from the garden bench. The dead house seemed to pull her, like a ghost that haunts the living, urging them not to forget. She wandered inside, her skirt’s hem sweeping ashes. She stepped over a fallen pillar of the great hall, and skirted the staircase that stood decapitated between the two floors. She looked up toward the bedroom she had shared with Richard. Half the floor had collapsed, but on the floorboards that remained stood their bed, a grotesque heap of smoking ash. Richard had always kept his strongbox of gold in the corner. Gone, now—stolen by Grenville’s men. And the table where Honor kept her jewelry and combs and pins, and her cherrywood box of Isabel’s precious letters from Peru—all dwindled to ash.
Isabel,
she thought with a pang. Her daughter would come home to find her father and brother slain, her mother a widow, Adam’s new wife a widow.

It was too painful. She turned away.

She walked on to the roofless parlor, where the sun shone down on the rubble. Last week she had brought her jewelry box down here to show Geoffrey a bracelet she meant to give his daughter for her birthday. Poor, dear Geoffrey. His body and the bodies of Captain Boone and the six other men had been laid out by the women under the chestnut tree in the stable yard. Joan would have heard by now. Richard’s kindly, sensible sister, always Honor’s friend—already a lonely widow.

She turned away again. But there was nowhere to go.

Something glinted in the rubble. Green fire. Her breath caught. Her emerald necklace! She crouched and pawed at the hot ashes. The beechwood jewelry box was cinders, and the gold chain of the necklace was a distorted thing, half melted and cooled into an ugly contortion, but the gemstone shone pure. She snapped it free of the chain. It was too hot to handle, and she fumbled it into a well she made in her skirt. It was so beautiful. And so dear to her, a gift from Richard on their wedding day. Shining in the sunlight, it reflected twenty-five years of memories of him. Lovemaking. Talks about Isabel’s first tooth, Adam’s school, ships, business, gossip, Christmas, books. Lovemaking.

She would never see him again. Never hear his voice. Never lie in his arms. Clutching the hot gem, she ran out through the rubble and reached the parched grass and dropped to her knees, and the tears sprang. She could not stop them. She sank back on her heels, sobs tearing her chest, leaving her throat in a wail of despair.

“Aye, mistress, cry it out. We’ve all lost good men, and it ain’t over yet.”

Gulping breaths, Honor looked up. Mary Carter stood gazing down at her with sad sympathy. Fat Mary—Captain Boone’s sweetheart. A sack slung over her shoulder bulged with salvaged, useful things. Tin cups, pewter plates, spoons, wire. She was wiping a soot-grimed cloth over a long knife to clean it. Boone’s knife. “Can you stand, mistress? Come, I’ll help you over to the tent. There’s water there. And some cold vittles. And a stool to rest on.”

Honor let herself be helped to her feet. She wiped the tears from her face with her sleeve, struggling to gain control, though sobs still shuddered through her. “Not over?” she managed to ask Mary, afraid to hear the answer.

“Master Adam and the men are set to ride hell-bent for Grenville Hall. Peter galloped all the way from Colchester to say they’re on their way. I pray the good Lord they’ll kill that bastard baron and ride back to us, every one of them. But I’ve found that the good Lord don’t much listen to me.” She looked sadly at the knife. “No more than my man ever did.”

Two hours, Honor thought. Maybe three. That would bring Adam to the enemy’s gates. She looked at Mary, so busy with useful work, not tears, scavenging for items to coax life back to normal. She took a deep breath to steady herself. “I’m all right, Mary. Thank you. And I am so sorry for your loss. Go on, now, see what else you can find.”

Mary trudged on, and Honor watched her kick through a pile of debris. Mary was doing what had to be done. Admirable. And necessary.

She looked up at the blue sky and thought of Elizabeth, that proud and selfish girl she had come to know so well. The hoarded anger at her fell away, and in its place swelled a fierce respect. Elizabeth was a girl no longer. Selfish no longer. She might not yet have a crown, but she had transformed herself into a queen, a leader of her people, making hard choices, sacrificing her own desires. Elizabeth was doing what had to be done.

Honor lowered her gaze to the faraway horizon of forest that bordered Grenville’s lands. Adam, too. He was doing what he was convinced had to be done.

And so must I.
Maybe she had known it all along, known since Grenville took Richard. The answer lay with her. There was something that only she could do. It was necessary. Because Richard was necessary. Adam was necessary. Without them, there was no family. Without them, Isabel would come home to a house of widows.

Grenville Hall had been built in the dark days of unstable reigns, overmighty nobles, and the constant threat of civil war. The mossy stone walls of its main block rose five stories, topped by parapets with crenellations as shields for archers. The walls of the lower blocks were hatched with arrow slits in the form of crosses. The stone curtain wall that fronted the buildings was a parapet with more embrasures for archers. The wooden drawbridge crossed a moat of murky water where foes would wallow to their deaths. The gatehouse hulked over a massive arch manned by guards.

Honor crossed the drawbridge, her horse at a plodding walk, its hoofbeats echoing down to the dark water beneath. She looked up. Archers spiked the parapets. A flag rippled lazily, high atop the main block, lifting just enough to display the Grenville coat of arms as though to claim mastery over the feeble breeze. Guards, standing thick along the inner walls of the gatehouse arch, watched her come. They were alert but at ease, only idly interested in a lone woman on a tired mare. She obediently stopped before they stopped her. The lead guard sauntered out and asked her to state her business. She told him she had come to see Baron Grenville. “He is holding my husband.”