The Queen's Gamble (21 page)

He’ll send me back to entreat the Queen for more aid, she thought. She could do it, easily. Then take her son home and be finished with this dangerous business. But was it enough? That unnerving voice inside her still murmured that what she had come to do was not yet done. She could not stop thinking of Tom.

“Forget their far-off dukes and ambassadors,” Glencairn said. He got up, bandy-legged but strong looking with his barrel chest. “It’s the Queen Regent’s men thirty miles away who can cut our throats.
That’s
the news we need—news of what’s afoot at Leith. We must know, is King François sending another fleet with more soldiers?”

“Of course he is,” said Sir William Maitland, as lean as a scarecrow. He was the scholar and wit among them, but he had seen battle, and his cheek and neck bore livid red welts. “D’Elbeuf will have already sailed from Dieppe with thousands more.”

“Not if the reports about the Huguenot uprisings are true,” said Ruthven with hope in his voice. “The King and the Duc de Guise need all their troops to keep our Protestant brethren from overwhelming their throne.”

“Wishful thinking,” scoffed Maitland. “The duc will send his sister reinforcements, count on it. Marie de Guise will be expecting them. It’s just a matter of when.”

“Aye,” Glencairn agreed. “Our plans must be under way before those troops arrive.”

“Attack first!” said the hothead Arran. “That’s our only course.”

“No,” Knox said firmly, ending the discussion. “Our course is the one we’ve already agreed on. We concentrate on holding Fife and the southwest.”

Isabel listened as they discussed some successes they’d had in the skirmishing with the French throughout Fife. A couple of Admiral Winter’s ships had supplied them with arms. “Thanks to Sir Adam Thornleigh,” Glencairn said with a respectful nod at Isabel, and again they all looked at her. She felt a rush of pride for her brother. He was so bold. Too bold? she suddenly wondered. He was alone with just his crew in a hostile territory. She remembered Knox’s chilling talk of being captured by the French, and the years he had spent in forced service on their galley ships. Chained to the oar bench. No shoes. Bread and water.

“Friday we march out. We will divide our force,” Knox said. “Two days here to see to our wounded and bury our dead. Then we march south.” He detailed how the duke and Glencairn would go to Glasgow with their men, while Arran and Lord James and their men, and Knox himself, would go to St. Andrews. The other lords were given their orders, too. A discussion about tactics, monies, levies of men, and friends to contact went on for another half hour. Then Knox dismissed them. He asked Isabel to stay.

When they were alone he called for a servant to build a fire. Then called for some food. “Are you hungry?” he asked her.

“Very.” She was famished. The last she had eaten was a hunk of stale oatmeal bread from the saddlebag of a kind sergeant hours ago and a cup of icy water on a riverside rest during the long ride to Stirling.

“And weary, I can see,” he said, pulling up two chairs to the fire. He beckoned her to sit.

Weary, indeed. She sank into the cushioned seat. An old woman brought the food, two wooden bowls of rabbit stew that smelled deliciously of onions, which she set down on the dining table, then left.

“No, no, do nor bestir yourself,” Knox told Isabel, and he brought the bowls over to their fireside chairs. Isabel gratefully took the bowl, warm in her hands from the brown, steaming stew. Knox dug a spoon into his. But the moment Isabel saw the sheen of fat on the surface her stomach recoiled. She feared she might be sick, and set the bowl down on the floor. It was her grief for Tom, she thought. It made her feel almost faint.

“Not to your taste?” Knox asked, spooning stew into his mouth. He called back the woman, and she soon returned with wedges of wheat bread fresh baked with currants, and a small winter apple. This plain fare suited Isabel well. She was relieved to munch on both.

She glanced at Knox mopping up the last of his stew with a crust of bread. Through the window the moon spied on them between the roofs of two houses. “I warrant you are weary yourself, sir, though you show your men unflagging energy.”

He nodded. “Weary of the separation from my family. I miss my wee bairns.”

He had children? She could not hide her surprise. She had never imagined him with a home and family. He was so consumed by his cause. So driven.

He seemed to catch her look. “Aye, Nathaniel’s three. And baby Eleazer not yet one.” He set his empty bowl on the floor. “And you? Have you young ones?”

“A son. Nicolas. He’s four.” Her throat felt tight. “The heart of my heart.”

“I hear your longing. You miss the lad. Does he bide in London with your people?”

She nodded. She had no wish to confess that the Queen’s trust in her was so thin she was holding Nicolas as a hostage. To change the subject she asked where his wife was.

“St. Andrews. And snug abed tonight, I hope. I pray God I’ll see her soon, and my bairns.” He looked at her. “Marjory is about your age. English, too, like you. Daughter of the captain of Norham Castle. Ach, I’ve gifted her with a hard life. Whisked off to Scotland. Exile in Geneva. Back to Scotland and this camp life, marching from town to town.” There was unmistakable affection in his voice as he added, “She is dear to me, like my own flesh.”

It moved Isabel. She thought of Carlos.
Like my own flesh
.

Yet could she truly believe Knox’s tenderness for the woman in his life? Cecil had told her about the notorious book the man had written castigating female rulers. “You astonish me, sir, for the world says you detest women.”

“I?” he said, surprised. “Never.” Then he understood. “Ach, the blasted book.”

“A blast, indeed.” His book was titled
The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women.
In it he had called female rulers unnatural, unfit to govern, and ungodly.

“I had Mary Tudor in my sights when I wrote that, she who wrenched England down into the muck of idolatry and evil, and burned so many hundreds of our brethren at the stake. I was also looking over my shoulder at the coming of young Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, another worshipper of idols. Never forget that the French want England, and that she, their queen, is their tool.
Those
women were my quarry.” He shook his head in disgusted regret. “Ill timing that the book was printed just as Mary Tudor died and Elizabeth became queen.”

“And so felt herself the object of your ire.” Bad timing, indeed. Cecil had said that Elizabeth had refused to speak to Knox when he’d returned from exile in Geneva, or even to let him pass through her realm on his way back to Scotland. He’d had to sail.

“Do not believe everything the world says, mistress. I have many female friends. I correspond regularly with several in London and Geneva, wise and brave women who support our cause. They have my greatest respect. As do you.”

A compliment, though given with his usual dour intensity. “Thank you,” she managed.

He sat back, folding his arms and studying her. “If I believed what the world said of
you,
I would think you a mere idle lady of leisure. Pampered, waited on, and good for nothing but to fatten the purses of the trinket merchants. But I know better. I wonder, mistress, do you?”

She was astonished. “Pardon?” The liberties he took!

“I say that you do not know yourself. I have learned something about you since first we met. Your role in the Wyatt rebellion. I hear you undertook great dangers to assist Sir Thomas Wyatt in his noble intent to bring down Queen Mary. A go-between, were you not, for Wyatt with his scattered accomplices?”

She said nothing, unnerved, though she knew her silence was consent.

He nodded. “
That
is how you are meant to be. In action. God wishes it. It is your destiny.”

She felt it like ice water dashed on her face. Abruptly awake. She tried to quiet the pounding of her heart. The voices that had been murmuring inside her—now she knew who they were. Wyatt’s men, cut down when she had opened Ludgate and Queen Mary’s men had set on them.
“We would have lived, but for you.”
And the voice of Tom, murdered because she had made him ride out with her.
“I would have lived, but for you.”

Knox went to the door and closed it, then sat down again beside her. “I have had a letter from Sir William Cecil. The Queen’s council are unanimous in urging her to help us, thanks be to God. And to Cecil, who has been our champion. But the Queen will not commit. She is fearful of Spain. I need you to go to her. Clearly she trusts you. You must tell her what you have seen with your own eyes, felt with your heart—our desperate need. It is no longer a question of aid. That is not enough, neither her money nor even some hundreds more men. We need an army. An English army. An army of thousands. Without that, we perish.”

Isabel looked at him, her heart racing. To go back to London meant freeing Nicolas. She imagined swinging him up into her arms in a hug, taking him hand in hand to the customs wharf, boarding a ship bound for Spain, and sailing home to Peru. It’s what Carlos wanted.

But she thought of Knox’s men tonight standing in the church, their dirt-streaked faces resolute. What are they fighting for? she had asked herself, and then had realized the truth. For brothers, fathers, cousins, sons. For the women who waited at home. For kin.

She felt her troubled heartbeat settle as she made her choice. Nicolas was living in a palace. Lonely he might be, and sad, but he would be living in comfort and ease. True, the Queen could exact her displeasure on him if she thought Isabel grossly disloyal. Former kings, enraged by unfaithful nobles, had sometimes thrown the transgressor’s young sons into the Tower with the father, there to languish for years. But Elizabeth, though formidable, would never be that cruel. More to the point, Isabel would never give her cause to think her disloyal. Nicolas was safe.

She had watched Tom bleed to death in her arms. It had brought home to her the menace of the French as nothing before had, and now she knew she would do her all to prevent them swooping down to conquer England. Her family would not survive an occupation. She had seen Wyatt’s men die. Seen Tom die. She would see that her kin lived.

“You are right,” she told Knox. “Her Majesty must hear this news, and your plea. But I shall not deliver it.”

He flashed her a look, startled, angry. “But you are—”

“Send a man she can relate to. Send Sir William Maitland. He will state your case with accuracy and eloquence. As for me, I can do you better service.”

He blinked in surprise. “What?”

“You need information about the French at Leith. Their preparedness. Their expectation of reinforcements. I will go there. Into the garrison. I will get the facts you need.”

He looked at her as if she were mad. “How?”

“My husband is with them. Sent as a military liaison for Spain. I will visit him.”

It so took him aback, his mouth dropped open. “You are married to an ally of the Queen Regent?”

“My husband is completely neutral, sir. He is merely an observer. He takes no sides.”

A new distrust seemed to dawn in his eyes. “Unlike you?”

She bristled at the implication. And forced herself to say the words she had used so often since returning to England. “Trust me.”

Alone in her lodging Isabel undressed, shivering in the chill night air, and at the thought of the task she had taken on so boldly. Recklessly, it felt like now. But Knox had jumped at her offer, and she would see it through. She would.

At the moment, though, her thoughts were snagged on what she was looking at in her satchel. Balled up between her wool shawl and her last clean shift were the laundered rags she had brought from London for her monthly flow. When she had left London at Christmas her time was already almost two weeks late, yet she had not needed the rags in the days that followed. It was because of the tension, she had thought then, and the rigors of the journey. But now January was giving way to February, with no blood yet. Two months.

She sank down on the edge of the bed. How could she have been so blind? Her queasy stomach so many mornings. Her ravenous appetite, yet aversion to fatty food. She laid her hand on her belly and felt excitement flutter. It made her smile, for in a few months that flutter would be an impish kick. Flesh and blood. Hers. Carlos’s.

She looked out the window at the moon, and its cold, sad light stole her smile away. In war, uncertainty was all that was certain. What country would her baby be born into? Scotland? England? Peru? And what kind of world? A sliver of fear slid into her heart. Her offer to Knox was going to take her into danger. She made a silent prayer.
Let me not endanger my child. My new wee bairn.

17

Through the Enemy’s Gates

I
sabel tightened her grip on her horse’s reins. She knew she should have expected what she was seeing, yet it took her aback. Edinburgh was swarming with French soldiers.

They swaggered down the snow-packed High Street. They strolled out of taverns. They regarded her with blatant interest as she trotted past them. Their wolfish looks gave her a shiver, for she was riding all alone. Two of Knox’s men had ridden with her from Stirling, but the French patrolled the countryside and the closer she and her escort had got to Edinburgh, the more she had worried they would be stopped and questioned. She had a legitimate reason for coming—to visit her husband—but Knox’s men had none. So, at the outskirts of the city she had sent them back to Stirling. She would not have the deaths of two more good men on her conscience.

Snow had been falling for the last few hours, shrouding the road and trees and the hovels of the poor in a ghostly silence. Dampness had soaked through Isabel’s cloak at the shoulders and seeped through her leather gloves, leaving her wet and cold to the bone, and trying to tamp down her alarm as she trotted past a crowd of soldiers lounging beside Edinburgh’s tollhouse. One of them eying her said something to his comrades and they laughed. She pretended not to notice, but her skin prickled. There were several guards posted at the doors, and she realized that the tollhouse jail must be crammed with Knox’s men captured in the horrible attack three days ago. Poor souls. They would almost certainly be hanged.

A church bell pealed. All the churches, of course, would have reverted to Catholic services. She caught glimpses of the townspeople going about their trade in shops and cookhouses, while on the street they clattered past her in carts and wagons. Knox had warned that Edinburgh was Catholic to its backbone, and the people that Isabel saw had a brisk attitude of business as usual, as though they felt well rid of the rebels. How quickly the French had made themselves at home! And how arrogant they were in their prowess. It galled her. Frightened her, too, for if she ran into trouble none of these citizens would rush to her rescue.

She was only minutes past the tollhouse when a stench reached her, so putrid it turned her stomach. She looked up at the church tower ahead and her breath snagged in her throat. Corpses were slung over the tower parapets. Half a dozen, hung by their heels like meat to rot. A lesson to any rebel-friendly townsfolk. That big fellow, she was sure he was the one who had given her some bread from his saddlebag that day of the retreat. Upside down, gaping in death, he was barely recognizable. She quickly looked away. Didn’t trust herself to hide her horror.

But what she saw at the other end of the street only compounded her fears. Edinburgh Castle brooded on its high stone crag, and from its turrets the flags that lifted in the cold breeze bore the colors of the Queen Regent. Until now Lord Erskine, who commanded the castle, had observed a strict neutrality, fending off both sides in the conflict and declaring he would continue to do so until a Parliament could convene and give him his orders. But if the Queen Regent had taken up residence there, it had to mean that Erskine had gone over to the French. The impregnable castle had its cannons trained on the High Street to mow down any attackers. It gave Isabel a pang of dread. Knox and his men faced such terrible odds. Without help from England they were doomed.

“Pas si vite!”
Not so fast!

Isabel gasped. A soldier had grabbed her horse’s bridle and brought her lurching to a halt. There were two of them, both red-cheeked from drink and barely steady on their feet. She understood their French, slurred though it was. The one who had stopped her stroked her horse’s nose while leering at Isabel. “Very pretty,” he crooned.

“Nice woman, too.”

The first one laughed. “And a better ride.”

“Unhand my horse, sir!”

He glared at her. Isabel cursed herself.
Speak French, like a lady. “Laissez-passer!”
she commanded.

She wrenched the reins, yanking the bridle free of the man’s hand, then kicked her horse. It burst into a trot. She heard the men calling lewd names at her back. A sweat of fear chilled her. Was she brainsick to have come here? She hadn’t even reached Leith yet, two miles away, and already this felt like a lethal mistake.

Find Carlos,
she thought. He was her goal, her haven. Once she was with him she would be safe. It pained her that she would have to keep from him her real reason for coming. She longed to confide in him how crucial it was for England that Knox’s rebels win back their country, and how desperately Knox needed the information she could supply. But she was sworn to secrecy and must honor that oath. Still, she was sure Carlos would understand what she was doing if he knew. Right now, all she wanted was to be with him, safe, and no longer alone.

But how to find him? Leaving Stirling, she had assumed he would be at the Leith garrison, but now she wondered if he might have been given rooms here in Edinburgh. Having taken back the capital, the French didn’t need to stay bottled up in their seaside fortress, and it was obvious that hundreds were now billeted throughout the city.
Don’t think of them as the enemy,
she told herself, trying to steady her nerves.
They’ve got to believe I’m on their side
. Should she stop one and ask if he knew where to find her husband? But rank-and-file soldiers would likely not know Carlos. He was above them, a kind of ambassador for Spain. Perhaps go into a tavern or cookhouse and inquire there? But if she wandered the streets on foot she could be taken for a whore. She had to stay mounted; the horse was a sign of her station. She tapped her heels against its flanks, eager to keep moving at a brisk trot. She had to get into the Leith fortress in any case to get the details Knox needed.

She rode out through the city gates and started across the open fields toward Leith. She was not alone on the road. A few farmers rattled by in carts, and some men and women trudged along on foot, but Isabel felt very alone. Memories flooded her of the last time she was here. Riding on one horse behind Tom. Hearing faint sounds of battle in the distance. “Seen enough, my lady?” he had coaxed. But she had insisted on going farther. If only she had been sensible, he would still be alive.

She was approaching the bridge. There, the deserter had stabbed Tom. There, she had killed the wretch. Too late, though, Tom already dying when she had gotten him back onto the horse. She steeled herself to see his body lying on the side of the road. But she reached the spot, then passed it. Where was he? She looked around on either side, almost frantic now. Had corpse robbers hauled his body away? But why? Did they sell cadavers? She refused to follow that vile thought. No, he must still lie here somewhere, hidden under the fresh, deep snow that blanketed everything. She tried to take comfort in the peacefulness of his resting place, but it was cold comfort. Her horse’s hooves thudded hollowly over the wooden planks of the bridge, echoing the hollowness in her heart.

The high walls of Leith rose before her. Ghosts of snow floated off the ramparts and drifted in spasms, hostages to the wind. The central gates stood wide open, evidence of how invincible the French felt, and a straggle of country people plodded in and out, farmers’ carts delivering firewood and coal, women carrying in baskets of root vegetables and cheese, peddlers pushing in carts of knives and crockery, and leaving with bones and rags. Isabel joined them, riding her horse at a walk in through the enemy’s gates. Atop the walls the corpses of more of Knox’s men had been strung up to rot as memorials of the conquest. Isabel almost gagged.

She was in, the gates behind her. The French had erected Leith’s walls according to the most modern military science, she assumed, but the place they enclosed was a poor Scottish town. The narrow streets were paths of muck where skinny dogs prowled and dirty children, big-eyed with hunger, sat idle in doorways. Inside a rickety house on a corner, a baby screamed. Soldiers tramped past Isabel in twos and threes, a few of them eyeing her. She saw two rolling a cannon carriage toward a blacksmith’s forge. One sat on a bench outside a tavern, oiling a musket.

She stopped at a stable where the hostler was leading a stallion to a water trough, and was about to ask him where the garrison was when she looked across the stable roof and saw her answer. A half dozen flags emblazoned with the blue fleur-de-lis fluttered from buildings that seemed near enough to walk to. Though faded by sun and wind, the flags were still a proud symbol of French power. She took a deep breath. The garrison was her destination. She could hardly wait to take refuge with Carlos.

“Stable your mare, mistress?” the hostler asked.

“I’m not sure.” She told him she had come to visit her husband, a guest of the French commander.

“Ah, then you’re but ’round the corner from him, and this is the place for your mare.” She asked if he knew Carlos, and he brightened. “I do. A fine judge of horseflesh. He’s out on the training course, yonder.” He pointed up the narrow street. Between the houses Isabel could make out an open field where she glimpsed some horsemen cantering past. “For his sake,” the hostler added, “I’ll groom her myself.”

Isabel started out for the training course on foot, and immediately felt more vulnerable down from her mount as soldiers passing her turned to look, and those lounging in doorways watched her go. She felt her exhaustion acutely, too, for her legs and back, cold and sore from the ride, ached with every step over the street’s frozen wheel ruts, iron hard.

She smelled smoke, and turned to look down a narrow lane. Three men stood around a campfire. Beside them was a cart heaped with what looked like rags. She slowed to look only because the fire was so odd in that cramped space. The stone wall of a churchyard rose on one side, the brick wall of a house on the other, a wooden shed closing the alley. She saw that their cart was crammed with a jumble of breeches, boots, jerkins, caps, blankets. Booty, she realized in disgust, plundered from Knox’s dead on the fields. They were burning the trash from the haul. The rest they would likely sell. Were they soldiers or villagers? Soldiers, it seemed, for they wore the uniform buff jerkin of the French infantryman. Except for the one nearest the fire. He was talking to the others, making sweeping gestures as though telling a grand tale, and the firelight lit up the jerkin he was wearing. Isabel froze. It was of sheepskin, its collar of red satin, and every move of his arms set the tattered gold tassels on the sleeves to dancing. Tom’s!

Fury flooded her. Swamped her mind with raw rage. She was running. Tearing down the alley toward the villain, screaming, “Take it off!”

They turned to her in surprise. She reached the one in the sheepskin and grabbed hold of it at his chest. “You stole it from Tom! Take it off!”

“Christ on a stick,” he said in dismay, his French a guttural patois. His arms shot up between them, easily breaking her hold. Isabel staggered back.

His mate grabbed her arm and spun her around. “Who’s this little she-devil?”

The third one chuckled. “André, did you duck out of the whorehouse again without paying?”

Fury coursed through her. “What have you done with his body?” She lunged for the sheepskin again and clawed at its collar to unfasten it. “Tell me!”

“She’s a lunatic,” the man said, fending off her hands. “Get her off me.”

The other one yanked her back again. He was a big lout and she was no match against his strength. But she shrugged off his hand and stood her ground, catching her breath, fired with rage.

“It’s a lady, you idiots,” the third one said, the runt among them. His words whistled through a gap where a front tooth was gone. “Look at her gew-gawed clothes.”

“That’s right,” she spat, “I’ve come to see the commander.” She pointed to the cart. “And when he hears of your thieving he’ll have you all whipped!”

The three of them shared a look. Then a laugh. “I just sold him a plaid blanket nicely speckled with gore,” said the one in Tom’s jerkin. “Trophy for his wife, he said.”

They were all grinning. Isabel swallowed. Rationality returned, and with it the cold realization that she had made a terrible mistake.

The men’s grins hardened. Isabel’s every muscle tensed for flight. But they surrounded her. The fire crackled behind her. She felt its heat. Two of the men moved in closer to her, the big one and the one in Tom’s jerkin. She backed up, and stumbled in stepping around the fire. They moved forward, parting for the fire. They backed her up against the churchyard wall. Its rough stone surface snagged her cloak like a clutch of burrs.

The one in Tom’s jerkin grabbed the edge of her cloak, his knuckles poking her breast. His clothes stank of pork fat, his breath of ale. She pressed up against the wall, the stone icy against her back. He fingered the fine wool. “This’d fetch more than half the bloody truckle.”

“Here,” she said, fumbling to untie her cloak. “Take it.”

“I will.” He wrenched it off her shoulders. He stepped aside with his booty, but before Isabel could move, the big one took his place. He jammed his knee between her legs. “Got something for me, too?” She stiffened in fear. Rape was in his eyes.

“Hold on, you blockheads,” the runt said. “She’s no doxy. What if the commander really is expecting her? One word from her and we’ll be grubbing with the rats in the Hole.”

The other two shared a worried look. Isabel rejoiced. It was
they
who had made a mistake, and they would pay for it!

“What do we do?” the big one asked, stepping back.

The runt said quietly, “She hasn’t been there yet. Better she never does.”

Terror gripped her so fiercely she could hardly breathe. Their way out was to murder her.

“I
was
there,” she managed to blurt. “I’m on my way back. The commander knows that. He’ll send men to look for me.”

The runt moved in on her and studied her face, frowning. Then he looked at the big one. “She’s lying. Snuff her out.”