The Queen's Gamble (17 page)

Round and round these thoughts went in her head, and always she came back to the desperate action her mother had taken, and the question:
Could I do murder, knowing I would hang?
Only the new Queen’s pardon had saved her mother. Isabel hated Elizabeth for keeping Nicolas a hostage, but she had to admit the immense debt her family owed her.

The next morning Isabel finished her breakfast of porridge while Tom saddled their horses in the cow byre. The other two travelers had already left, riding north together. Isabel was paying the landlord, ready to go, too, when the door burst open and the two travelers rushed back in. They were out of breath and looked shaken.

“Raiders,” one said. “They’re swarming the road ahead.”

“Must be twenty or thirty of ’em,” the other said, taking a chair to steady himself. “They were hooting and hollering at us like banshees. We turned and raced back.”

“Jesu,” the landlord said, crossing himself, “that’ll be the Douglas clan. Word was they were riding hell-bent for a skirmish with the Murrays in the vale yonder.”

Isabel saw the men’s fear and felt it creep into her too. “What will they do?” she asked the landlord.

“Mayhem, that’s for sure. The Douglases will go for the cattle, but the Murrays will be awaiting them. It’ll be a battle.”

“Are we in danger?”

“Not if we stay put. It’s each other they’re out to maim. But there’ll be no traveling north now. No one’s getting through that lot.”

Isabel was dismayed. She was so near her journey’s end, she hated to delay. Clearly, though, it would be foolhardy to try to pass these murderous raiders. “I’ll tell my man,” she said, angry but resigned as she started for the door. “We’ll have to stay another night.”

“Mistress, those brutes will be swarming for
days,
what with their kin riding in to join them, and all of them fixing to do battle. You hunker down with us and wait it out, that’s all there is for it.”

“Days?” she cried.

“Once, they were bashing each other for nigh on two weeks.”

“No, that’s not possible. I must get to Edinburgh.”

“You won’t be getting anywhere with your throat slit.”

It was terrifying—and infuriating. But what choice did she have? She went out and told Tom. “Buggers,” he growled, but he agreed that the only thing to do was wait. All day they sat, she and Tom, the other two travelers, and the landlord’s family, everyone silent with fear as they listened to the faint whoops of the raiders in the distance. The common room was barely warmed by the low peat fire where the landlord’s wife had gathered her children around her at the hearth. Late in the afternoon the weather turned foul, with rising winds and an onslaught of snow.

“Maybe this bad weather will send them away, send them home,” Isabel said, standing at the window to look out at the driving snow.

“Those devils care nothing for snow,” said the landlord’s wife as she suckled her baby. “They were whelped in snow and ice. They’ll stay.”

Night fell. The wind howled around the inn. Isabel sat on the edge of her narrow bed, thinking. She could not spare two weeks, nor even two or three days. She had to deliver this gold, and then get back for Nicolas. She got up and went downstairs for Tom. He sat by the hearth whittling a stick. The others had gone to bed, exhausted from fear. She told him what she had decided.

“What? Out in that storm?” he said in dismay.

“Yes. Tonight. Now.”

“We wouldn’t be able to see beyond our noses!”

“And those raiders won’t see
us
.”

He looked far from convinced.

“Tom, I cannot stay. Those men might come here—to steal the horses, or for food. If they do, they’ll find the gold. And if they don’t kill us in taking it, once it’s gone I might as well be dead.”

He heaved a hard sigh. Then looked out the window, steeling himself. “Bundle up, my lady.”

They left without a word to anyone. As they made for the byre, the wind whipped Isabel’s cloak and tugged at her tightly drawn hood and scarf. When she was mounted, Tom tied a rope between her horse and the packhorse so it would blindly follow her, and another rope between her horse and his. He took the lead of this blind train and they set out northward, and blind they were indeed in the darkness and the wind-driven snow. It blasted Isabel, scouring her face whenever her scarf wrapping slipped. She could barely see Tom ahead—he was a mere ghostly shadow—and she knew he could see no better, letting his horse pick its way by instinct along the road, the animal veering back whenever it felt the spongy ground off the road. The animals plodded with heads lowered against the wind. Isabel had never been so cold. And never so frightened. The creeping pace was excruciating when she knew that all around her men were camped with daggers, axes, and claymores.

She did not know how long they had been plodding on when the first feeble hint of dawn crept over the distant hills. Her fingers were sticks of ice. Her cheeks were frozen slabs. A headache pounded from the battering of the wind and the stress of her fear. Her toes were numb. Her
mind
felt numb, for she realized that the wind had dropped—realized that she
could
see the hills ahead. Never had she been so glad to see a sunrise. She looked all around for signs of encamped raiders. There was no one, only snow-swept barren fields. They had made it.

Tom turned in his saddle to look back at her. He had tied a scarf around his head, and it was a clump of icy snow. “Had enough exercise, my lady?”

She smiled, though it hurt her cheeks. “Quite enough.”

“Then let’s get us to that cottage ahead and beg for some grog to thaw us out.”

Low, barren hills overlooked Edinburgh under a gunmetal sky. Refreshed from a hot meal at the cottage, and dry clothes, Isabel waited on horseback on the most southerly mound, her horse dancing nervously on the spot as it sensed her tension. She had felt it too risky to ride into the city with her packhorse laden with a small fortune in gold, so she had sent Tom down into the narrow streets to quietly seek out the rebel leaders—John Knox, or James Hamilton, the Earl of Arran—and tell them she was here. But he had been gone for hours. Where in God’s name was he?

This southerly rise gave her a full view of the capital and the fields beyond. Edinburgh Castle sat atop its high crag at the city’s western end, while at the other end lay the royal residence of Holyroodhouse. In the middle rose the crown-shaped spire of St. Giles Church. She knew that Knox’s rebel force was in command of the capital, and she could see indisputable evidence. Their encampment stretched beyond the city walls, out toward the coastal village of Leith that lay two miles distant on the Firth of Forth, an estuary of the North Sea. The open fields between the city and the coast were thick with tents, and dotted with men moving at ease among tethered horses and carts. She could make out the threads of smoke from their cooking fires curling lazily upward in the faint breeze. The sense of such a huge host of Scottish rebels gave Isabel a rush of hope. Not only were they in possession of the capital, they had pushed the French troops into their garrison at Leith—she knew that from Cecil, who had also told her that the Queen Regent had fled Holyroodhouse and sought protection with her garrison. Of course, that was before the French had landed seven thousand more troops to swell their strongholds of Leith and Inchkeith.

Isabel gazed across at Leith, straining to make it out at this distance. Leith, she knew, was no mere village. Over a decade ago, in their war here against England, the French had enclosed it within strong walls. She could make out the encircling earthen ramparts, and three high stone bastions. It gave her a thump of dread. Carlos was inside that fortress, living among the French officers. It looked like a formidable stronghold, standing guard against the dark water, its gates closed. Behind its high ramparts, the enemy seemed not to stir. It put Isabel in mind of a giant, asleep. Or waiting.

But a brazen Scottish leader, a commoner, had cornered the giant behind those gates. “A firebrand named John Knox,” she remembered Cecil saying as he had briefed her. “He leads the Congregation. That’s what his Protestant army of followers call themselves, and the nobles who’ve joined them call themselves the Lords of the Congregation. And none of them call themselves rebels, but reformers. They swear it is not royal authority they mean to destroy but papist idolatry and wickedness. Interesting, for Knox himself was once a Catholic priest. But there is nothing more bloody-minded than a convert, and now he’s the most militant of Protestants. A hardened soldier, too, captured thirteen years ago by the French. They made him a galley slave for two years, then traded him and others in a prisoner exchange with our King Edward. He’s also a scathing author. And a blistering preacher. His Scottish soldiers love him. Her Majesty cannot abide him.”

“Why?”

“For a book he wrote condemning women rulers
. Blast of the Trumpet,
he titled it, and in it he blasts indeed at female rulers, calling them unnatural and monstrous.”

But the Queen needed this cantankerous Scot, Isabel realized, and she wondered now: Is Knox the fearsome warrior who will slay the French? She prayed that he would. Only then could Carlos leave here and come home.

A noise made her tear her eyes from Leith and look down to the base of the hill. Three horsemen were cantering up the slope toward her, their spurs and swords and harnesses a-jangle. She tugged the reins to keep her horse still, but could do nothing to calm her quickened heartbeat. The men’s boots and capes were dirty from service in the field, their faces lean, their chins dark with beard. She spotted a fourth man at the rear and saw that it was Tom. Thank God. These Scottish strangers must be Knox’s men.

Then a sudden fear gripped her. What if they were not Scots at all? Had three French outriders captured Tom and forced him to lead them to her?

13

The Rebel Camp

T
om did not look like a cowed prisoner, and when the three strangers got closer Isabel saw that the blanket one man had slung over his shoulder like a cape was a Scottish plaid.
Friends,
she told herself with a rush of relief.
Calm down
.

They reached her in a thunder of hooves and jangling harness and surrounded her, hauling back on the reins as their horses capered to a halt.

“Isabel Valverde?” one of the men gruffly asked. He appeared to be the oldest of the three, perhaps forty, with a barrel chest and stout legs, and the lower half of his face bulked by a thick black beard. He was glaring at her in suspicion. Isabel guessed why. Her Spanish surname. She saw the eyes of all three men flick to the nearby farmer’s shed as though wary of an ambush. All had laid their fighting hands on the hilts of their swords.

“I am, sir,” she replied. Her own need to establish identities was as strong as his. She had taken the precaution of keeping the Queen’s gold out of sight, tethering her packhorse behind the farmer’s shed. “And you are . . . ?”

“Excuse my manners,” he said, still wary. “Alexander Cunningham of Glencairn.” The Earl of Glencairn, she realized. She had been briefed by Cecil. Glencairn introduced the other two. Archibald Campbell, the Earl of Argyll, a wiry young man. And Patrick, Lord Ruthven, keen-eyed and fair-haired. Both looked not yet thirty. Glencairn said cautiously, “Your man said you bear a message from the English Queen.”

Isabel looked to Tom. He caught the question in her eyes and gave her an easy nod. That satisfied her. Besides, she had heard the Scots burr in Glencairn’s English. “A bright message, my lord,” she replied. “One that will cheer you.” He still looked skeptical, as though unable to get past her foreign name. To clear away his misgivings, she said, “My father is Baron Richard Thornleigh, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth’s loyal servant.”

His stern look vanished. He asked with a sudden, piercing curiosity, “Are you kin to Sir Adam Thornleigh?”

She was astonished. “He is my brother. Are you acquainted?”

The three men exchanged a look and a happy laugh. “I’ll drink his health when I
do
meet him,” said Glencairn.

“Have you not heard the news, madam?” Ruthven asked. “About Admiral Winter?”

“I have heard nothing, sir. My man and I have been on the road from London for three weeks.”

“Ah, then you have some rejoicing in store. The Lord knows we have done our share. The French fleet was on its way here with thousands more troops, but Winter’s ships intercepted them and scattered them, sending the poxy French back out into the gales. Only a few of their ships reached Leith, and they landed less than nine hundred soldiers. Sir Adam Thornleigh captured the two French supply ships that lay off Leith with their stores of ammunition and provisions. Your brother was the hero of the day.”

Joyful news, indeed! “Have he and the other captains returned home?”

“I know not, madam. But I can tell you they have the thanks of all the Lords of the Congregation. Their brave action has gladdened the hearts of our fighting men.”

Argyll said soberly, “It was the blessed hand of God, for He is watching over us.”

“Aye, with a little help from the English Queen, I warrant,” said Glencairn. He added to Isabel, as though to probe her, “Though we heard of no such naval order from Her Majesty. Have you, madam?”

“I, sir? How would I?” But she thought it would be like the anxious Queen to send her navy on a covert mission. Fearful of Spain, Elizabeth clearly intended to keep secret
all
her intervention here in Scotland. Isabel only hoped that Adam had sailed home, safe. “Now, my lords, to our business,” she said, tugging her reins to turn her horse. “Please follow me, and I will deliver my message.”

Glencairn asked, puzzled, “You did not bring it with you?”

She smiled. “It is somewhat heavy.”

He took it the wrong way. “Bad news?”

“Far from it!”

They followed her, and when they reached her packhorse at the shed she dismounted with Tom’s help. She lifted the flap on one of the packhorse’s satchels to reveal the gold to them. “Three thousand pounds,” she said.

The faces of all three Scots lit up. “Thanks be to God,” Glencairn said with feeling. He added quickly, “And, madam, to your noble Queen.”

He moved his horse closer and reached for the packhorse’s bridle, but Isabel tugged it, turning the horse’s head beyond his reach. “Pardon, my lord, but I have a commission to deliver this gift only to the Earl of Arran or to his father, the duke.” Again, Cecil had briefed her. James Hamilton, the Earl of Arran, was the nobleman who had recently come to London in secret to negotiate for marriage with Queen Elizabeth, for he claimed the right to the Scottish throne after his father and Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots. The elder Hamilton had been governor of Scotland and regent to the infant Queen of Scots, who was now the wife of the French king, and to keep him on their side the French had made him the Duke of Châtelherault, with rich estates in the heart of France. But then John Knox had come along, inflaming the Scottish people against their French overlords in a grassroots revolt that had swept the country, at which the Hamiltons, father and son, had turned Protestant. The Duke of Châtelherault was now the rebel movement’s leading noble, and his son, the Earl of Arran, a leading fighter. “Is the earl in the city?” she asked.

“No. At his father’s house at Kirk o’ Field, a few miles hence. Allow me to escort you.”

“No, I wish no more delay.” She wanted only to hand over the gold as the Queen had instructed and then return to London. The sooner she left, the sooner she would see Nicolas. “Is the duke also at Kirk o’ Field?”

“No, here, in the city.”

“Then please take me to him directly.”

Glencairn’s scowl returned. “Madam, our camp is no place for a lady. My friends will escort you into town, where you will be shown to a comfortable lodging. I will see that this gift from your queen is safely delivered.”

“Pardon me, sir, but that will not do. I will stay with the Queen’s gold until I give it into the hands of his grace the duke.”

The ancient church of St. Giles, Edinburgh’s patron saint, lay in the heart of the city. Isabel and Tom followed Glencairn through its crowded nave, and she marveled at the host of men camped throughout the church.

There were hundreds. They lolled on blankets, strolled the aisles, lounged on the floor playing at dice and cards. The arched stone ceiling reverberated with their voices—bored chatter, bursts of laughter, occasional shouts of complaint over a dice game. They were soldiers, but were dressed in such an array of dirty, unkempt clothing they looked like no cohort Isabel had ever seen. There were women among them, too. A skinny young woman in a ragged dress crouched beside a cooking fire, turning a spit where a haunch of pork sizzled. Isabel could smell the sweet fat. She saw a man sharpening his dagger on a whetstone wheel. Saw dogs foraging in the litter of bones and scraps that were crammed into corners. Saw a goat tied to one of the central stone pillars.

The military encampment did not unnerve her, but the desecration of the church did. It was all around. Every article of Catholic ritual had been ruined or removed. She had heard about the sacrilegious spree of these rebels. They had sacked churches in Perth and St. Andrews and all through Fife on their march to Edinburgh, and had driven the monks out of their monasteries. Still, the extent of the defilement here shocked her. The church must have had many altars at the various chapels and family monuments, but every one of them had been smashed and the marble still lay in dusty chunks, littering the stone floor. The walls, which would have been resplendent with paintings, were bare, and some of the canvases still lay in shreds. The niches that would have held statues of saints had been stripped, and on the few statues too high to reach, the saints’ noses had been chipped off by pistol shots. Beside a cooking fire Isabel saw a jagged panel of gorgeously wrought woodwork, a former rood screen. They had smashed this work of art for firewood. She could not express her alarm to Glencairn, but she glanced behind her at Tom, and even he, a dutiful Protestant, shook his head in dismay.

They passed a chapel nook where a half dozen people sat in a tight circle—three rough-looking soldiers, a prim-looking young woman, a man in the homespun garb of a servant, and another older man in much finer clothes including a russet satin cape, clearly some lord. They all held books on their laps—Bibles, Isabel saw—and were listening to one of the soldiers speak. It was startling to see people of such differing classes sitting and chatting together like equals.

“This way,” Glencairn told her.

They followed him to an open door off the chancel. A soldier leaned against the doorjamb, picking his teeth with a wood splinter. Glencairn told Tom to wait here with the soldier, then ushered Isabel inside. It was a snug, paneled room, formerly the priest’s office, she guessed. Five men were playing a game of darts. Gentlemen, judging by the better quality of their clothes, though their jerkins and breeches and boots were almost as dirty as those of the common soldiers. It was their superior weapons that spoke of their status—costly swords and engraved steel cuirasses that lay around the room. Isabel was taken aback to see that the target they were using for their darts was a painting of Saint Cecilia. The bull’s-eye was her mouth.

Glencairn told them to leave, and the officers gathered their things and filed out with curious glances at Isabel. “Make yourself comfortable, madam,” Glencairn said. “I will tell his grace you’re here.”

Left alone, she looked around the room. On a table there were other games—a backgammon board, Primero cards, a red ball made of rubber. She picked up the ball and bounced it on the floor, thinking of Nicolas, of how he loved to play with a ball. It stung her with a longing to see him. As she caught the ball she noticed a silver goblet half full of wine. Not just any goblet, but a chalice formerly used in mass. A priest had once blessed the wine it held, transforming it into Christ’s blood, but now it was just a cup to satisfy an officer’s thirst. Isabel surprised herself by how quickly she was becoming inured to this sacrilege. Of course, these people didn’t see it as sacrilege. They felt they were ridding the country of “idolatry.”

She thought of that ill-assorted group out in the chapel reading the Bible together. Cecil had told her that these rebels were unique. For centuries, he’d said, the uprisings that had sporadically occurred throughout Europe had been nothing more than mobs of peasants. None had attracted nobles to their cause, because no noblemen—even enemies of the monarch—would tolerate a peasants’ attack on authority. They always joined ranks with the crown and put down the rabble uprisings. But here in Scotland the Protestant rebels under John Knox had won over aristocrats who supported them not only in word but in deed. There were earls—Arran, Glencairn, Argyll. There was Hamilton, the Duke of Châtelherault. There was even a nobleman with royal blood, Lord James Stuart, the illegitimate son of the late King James. These Lords of the Congregation, as they called themselves, rode with the common men. It was extraordinary.

She heard a soft sound behind her. She turned and was startled to see a man just inside the door. He had come in so quietly.

“Is there anything you need?” he asked.

It was the servant who’d been sitting in the circle in the chapel. “No, I’m fine,” she said.

“Are you sure? A cup of water, perhaps?”

He was looking at her with an intensity that irritated her. Perhaps curious at seeing a lady in this soldiers’ camp, she thought, though she was dressed as a common farm wife. The way he stared was almost insolent. She realized that she still held the rubber ball, and she set it back on the table, saying, “I told you, I need nothing.”

He made no move to go. “Your journey must have been tiring.”

His Scottish burr sounded harsh to her ears. “I am waiting for his grace the duke. His presence is all I require to restore me.”

He smiled. “That’s what Jeremy Calder was just saying about Our Lord.”

She didn’t follow. “Lord who?”

“Our Lord Jesus Christ.”

She felt a pinch of annoyance. These lowly Protestant Scots were so forward, it was hard to get used to. Yet she felt she should make an attempt. “This Jeremy Calder, was he one of your group? I saw you in the chapel.”

“Aye, Bible study. Every day at three. Join us tomorrow, if you’re still here. You’d be welcome.”

This was more than she could allow. “That will be all, thank you. I will wait alone for the duke.”

“Why do you want to see him?”

She was so taken aback, it was her turn to stare. “Goodness, man, that is none of your—”

“Forgive me for keeping you waiting, madam,” a man said, striding in. Glencairn was behind him, and two soldiers. “James Hamilton, at your service.” The duke, she realized. He was tall and lean, with an air of easy arrogance born of his noble rank, yet Isabel was astonished to realize that he was the lord she had seen sitting in the Bible study group. These people were so bewildering! She dropped into a deep curtsy, for a duke was almost a prince. “Your Grace.”

“I see that you have met Master Knox. Good.”

She almost stumbled as she rose. The servant . . . was Knox? Nothing in his manner had changed. No bow to the duke. No lowering of his eyes from hers as she stared at him. She had barely noted his appearance, but now she took it in all at once. He was short, but broad-shouldered. Had coarse black hair, but limpid blue eyes. A swarthy complexion, but cheeks that were as round and ruddy as a baby’s. A narrow forehead, but bold bushy eyebrows. A man of contrasts who seemed to fit no type at all.

“Three thousand pounds,” said the duke, rubbing his hands. “Madam, you have brought salvation to men thirsting in the wilderness.” He turned to Glencairn. “Muster the men, Alex. Tell them they’re getting paid.” Glencairn left, and the duke went on to Isabel, “I cannot express thanks enough for this generous gift from your queen.”