The Queen's Gamble (4 page)

Her mother ran her hand tenderly along Nico’s foot, which lay under the cover. “He’s a sweet boy.” She had to reach across herself with her left hand, Isabel noticed. The right arm hung limp.

“What happened to your arm?”

She didn’t answer right away. When she did, the words were terse. “Queen Mary’s agents. They got wind of a rebellion plot and detained me. Questioned me. Their techniques are not gentle.”

Isabel gasped. “You mean . . . the rack?”

She nodded. Then gave Isabel a searching look. “You’re wondering, was I involved in the plot?”

“I’m wondering how you could bear the pain.”

She shrugged. “Not much choice.”

“Will it heal? In time?”

Her mother shook her head. She seemed to have accepted the affliction.

Isabel had to know. “
Were
you involved?”

“I don’t deny that I wanted Queen Mary deposed.” Her eyes locked on Isabel’s. “Your sympathies once lay there, too. Wyatt’s uprising.”

It sounded like an invitation. Or a challenge. “That all seems a long time ago.”

“Not so long. Five years.”

“Long enough for everything here to have changed. You are fast friends with the
new
Queen.”

“I’m proud to say that I am.”

“She was grateful to you, Frances says. Was it because of what you suffered for her sake?”

A sharp look from her mother.

It seemed obvious to Isabel. “The goal of any rebellion must have been to put Princess Elizabeth on the throne. Was it for information about her that they tortured you? Frances said—”

“Frances does not always know what she’s talking about.”

Isabel heard the reprimand. She let the subject drop. Other issues felt more pressing.

“Mother, is there something wrong? Something to do with the Queen? I heard you and Father talking.”

“Did you?” was the steady reply. It sounded as though she wanted to say more but was unsure if she should.

“You can tell me. I haven’t crossed an ocean to see you just to chat about lemon trees and donkeys.”

Her mother’s smile was warm. “No. You are made of sterner stuff.”

“So tell me. What’s amiss?” She sensed a deep anxiety in her mother’s eyes that belied her outward calm.

Her mother reached across Nico’s sleeping form and took Isabel’s hand. It was a gesture of trust, and it moved Isabel. “This must be between us alone, Bel. Matters of state. Promise me that you will keep—”

Nicolas jostled, murmuring incomprehensible words in his sleep. His movement tugged the open collar of his nightshirt away from his throat, revealing the gold crucifix on the chain around his neck. The cross glinted in the candlelight, and Isabel saw her mother’s eyes drawn to its glimmer. Something in her face changed, hardened, like a door closing. She withdrew her hand from Isabel’s.

“Well,” she said, “perhaps we should let the child sleep.”

Isabel knew that tone:
I don’t wish to discuss this.
It made her feel cold. Why did her mother suddenly not want to confide in her? “He’s fine,” she said. “He won’t wake up until dawn. What were you going to say?”

Her mother looked at her as though gauging how to reply. Her eyes went back to Nicolas’s crucifix. “I see you’ve become Catholic,” she said.

“Impossible not to, in Spanish Peru.” Isabel had tried to say this lightly, but the heavy significance of her next words was impossible to hide. “Does it matter?”

Her mother was still. Then her face softened. A smile twitched her mouth. “When I was a girl of, oh, seventeen, I think, an academic vicar came to visit my guardian. Sir Thomas was well known for his writings, and often received such guests.” Isabel nodded. She knew her mother had been a ward of Sir Thomas More, a scholar and adviser to King Henry VIII. “Sir Thomas had written a book in Latin that was popular, called
Utopia,
” her mother went on. “It was about a fictitious island commonwealth in the New World, where the people, though heathen, were morally upright. The vicar had come in all earnestness to ask Sir Thomas for the island’s exact location. He intended, he said, to make a missionary expedition to bring to the ignorant Utopians the blessed civilization of the Church.” She laughed lightly. “A most delicious fool, for the place is purely imaginary.
Utopia
means ‘no place’ in Greek.”

Isabel smiled. A charming tale. Yet she wondered what the point was.

Her mother’s smile faded. “Protestant. Catholic,” she said, shaking her head. “I shall never get used to people killing one another over the best way to reach another imaginary destination, called heaven.”

Confusion prickled Isabel. The blasphemy was not to her taste, although she admitted she felt the same disdain her mother did for the violence that men committed in the name of God. But what bothered her more was her mother’s shift of topic.
Does it matter?
Isabel had asked. She had not received an answer.

Her mother got to her feet. “You haven’t said how long you can stay, Bel,” she said pleasantly. “I hope we can keep you all here until well after Christmas.”

“I hope so, too. Carlos does need to get back eventually, but . . . well, Christmas was always my favorite time.”

“Good.” Her mother blew her a kiss across Nicolas. “Sweet dreams.” She started for the door.

“Mother, why don’t you like Frances? You and Father?”

She turned. “I don’t
dis
like her. We have accepted her.”

“Not the same thing, is it.”

“No,” she conceded. She looked loath to go on, but then said, “You should know, Bel. Queen Mary’s agent, the man who put me on the rack—it was Frances’s brother.”

Isabel was so shocked, she could not speak. Questions exploded in her mind. Who was this vile man? How could Adam have married a woman whose brother had tortured their mother? But one thing was clear: the reason behind the chilly current that ran between her parents and Frances.

“That’s not all. You should know everything. Frances is a Grenville. Her brother was Lord John Grenville.”

The name stunned Isabel. And lit fury inside her. The long feud between the house of Grenville and the Thornleighs had brought her family so much misery. “Will those terrible people never leave us in peace?”

“They have now. I killed Lord John.”

3

Adam’s Appeal

S
ecrets. Evasions. Whisperings. Isabel felt so frustrated she wanted to kick something. Wanted to snatch a snowball from the boys squealing over a pitched battle between the Cheapside shops she was passing and hurl it. But at what? At whom? The boys with their snowballs in the lane were skirmishing with adversaries plainly in front of them, but her adversary was not made of flesh and bone. It was a tension, an atmosphere, a
mood
. Nothing she could stand up to, or even touch. Just whisperings. Evasions. Secrets.

She had been stunned by her mother’s calm admission that she had killed Lord John Grenville—though she felt that no man deserved it more for torturing her mother. But when she had asked for an explanation of how it happened she had got an outright refusal. “No, Isabel. It’s behind us. I never want to hear that name again.” She had asked her father about it the next day, but he was even more terse. “May he rest in the hottest flames of hell. Forget Grenville. And don’t trouble your mother about it.”

But how could she forget it? She was part of the hostility between the two families, like it or not. She had been there, in her parents’ Colchester parlor six years ago when Grenville’s father had shot her mother. Isabel had seen her father strike the man down before he could shoot again. Her mother had survived, thank God, but now here was this thunderbolt—John Grenville had tortured her and then she had killed him. Where would the brutal feud end?

Or had it, with Adam’s marriage? Had Frances Grenville been the peacemaker? Frances herself might have shed some light on the matter, but Isabel felt so bewildered by the union of her brother with a daughter of the house of Grenville that she had shirked her promise to visit her sister-in-law.

The mystery was not the worst of it. She might have accepted being shut out of the closet of family skeletons, since it was clear that passions still simmered. Wounds were still raw. Perhaps her parents simply found it too hard to talk about. After all, she had been back amongst them for only three days. In time, her mother might speak her heart. But Isabel knew they were shutting her out of more, and that hurt her deeply. They were involved in some precarious business with the Queen, she could feel it. Though heaven knew she saw little enough of them. They spent all day at Whitehall Palace, and when they came home separately, her mother looking weary, her father looking worried, they immediately put on a front of high spirits for her and Carlos and deflected every question she put to them about the Queen. “Let’s have some supper first,” her mother would say brightly, and then steer the conversation to inquire what Isabel and the others had done that day. Had Nicolas enjoyed the bear garden? Did Carlos find the Smithfield winter fair amusing? Isabel felt it like an insult. She had crossed an ocean to come to her parents’ aid, and they treated her as though she were not even part of the family. Just a visiting guest, someone worth only a false face. Someone to hide secrets from.

Her hurt feelings smoldered—and her curiosity burned. She had visited the servants’ quarters in the mews to ask Tom Yates what he knew about it, but was told that Tom had been sent on an errand to her father’s country estate. She had then stooped so low as to question a shy young footman, and even Ellen, the businesslike cook. But they had blinked at her in silence, members of the conspiracy. That was when Isabel knew her frustration was making her unreasonable. Conspiracy? How could she think the servants would know about royal doings at the palace? So that morning, after Pedro had taken Nicolas back to the bear garden and Carlos went to see a visiting merchant from Seville, she had gone to the kitchen and apologized to Ellen, bewildering the poor woman even more, then told her she was going out to Cheapside to buy Christmas gifts. She had taken refuge in the brisk walk across the city in the cold air. But then, at Chastelain’s shop on Goldsmith’s Row, the proprietor’s behavior had been the last straw.

“Please send it to my father’s house on Bishopsgate,” she had told him as he tied a tag to the gold salt cellar she had bought for Frances. She started to tell him the location, but he shook his head.

“No need, my lady, I know your parents’ house well. Lady Thornleigh is a valued customer. We missed her during her troubles.”

“Troubles?”

He glanced up, and looked as if he had said more than he should. “There now.” He quickly tightened the string’s knot, evading her eyes. “Will there be anything else?”

Conspiracy was what it
felt
like. Isabel bit back her humiliation and told him that no, that would be all. She asked him, barely civil, if booksellers could still be found at St. Paul’s. She slammed the door behind her as she left.

The biting cold air helped. The bustle of shoppers on Cheapside, too, for she was not the only one buying Christmas gifts on Goldsmith’s Row. Yesterday, when she had crossed the busy thoroughfare with Nicolas, she had tried to explain that “cheap” had once meant “marketplace,” but he’d asked where the pineapples and bananas were, and she realized that Cheapside’s array of sumptuous goldsmiths’ houses, where the wares gleamed in the windows, did not fit her son’s notion of a market.

Pineapples and bananas, she thought. Sunshine and bougainvillea blossoms. The beauty of Peru was so at odds with frigid London, its streets of muddy snow, its pewter-colored sky. A few snowflakes were falling, pristine and pretty as they drifted past rooftops where smoke curled from chimneys, but even the snow became dirty the moment it touched the ground. She had girlhood memories of wonder at London’s grand buildings—St. Paul’s, Guildhall, the famous livery companies’ halls, Westminster Hall—but the city now seemed to her a crowded jumble of smokegrimed shops, crumbling facades, trash-littered alleys, and smelly ditches. London wore its age like a seedy old man. In Peru, no Spanish building, not even Lima’s lovely cathedral, was much older than Isabel herself.

And the London beggars—they seemed to be everywhere. Men, women, children, huddled in rags, scabbed with sores, blank-eyed with hunger. Were they desperate country folk, drawn to the city for sustenance? Had recent harvests been such a disaster? Or was this the legacy of Queen Mary’s harsh, mismanaged reign, dying with her a year ago? “Bloody Mary”—that’s what she had heard her parents’ servants call the late Queen. Whatever the cause, Isabel felt pity for the unfortunate souls in this city of chilly, pinched-faced want. It sent her thoughts back to her sun-kissed house in Trujillo that overlooked the sparkling sea. She and Carlos had dropped everything to come to England, but he could not stay away indefinitely. The viceroy did not permit absentee
encomenderos
. A brief visit to Europe was allowed, but nothing prolonged. The viceroy could retract Carlos’s
encomienda
grant and award it to the next deserving man. Very soon, Isabel would have to start planning their return voyage.

What a jumble of emotions she felt. It would be hard to leave her parents after seeing them so briefly. And she longed to know what was troubling them. But if they would not talk to her, what could she do? Their life was here, and she was no longer a part of it. It hurt. And sparked her resentment afresh, a feeling that smoldered as she carried on to find the gift she wanted for her mother, a newly published
Herbal
. Gardening was her mother’s passion. She loved getting her hands dirty with daffodil bulbs, rose cuttings, and pear tree grafts. The quest brought Isabel to the end of Paternoster Row, which led into the churchyard of St. Paul’s.

The precincts of the massive Norman cathedral were crowded, as usual, and she squeezed past people thronging the ice-slick cobbles. She knew there would be a bazaar atmosphere inside, for Londoners used the cathedral’s interior to transact every kind of business. Merchants hailed colleagues to discuss trade news. Gentlemen came to hire servingmen who lounged by the pillars. Ladies strolled arm in arm to gossip. Illiterate folk paid scriveners to write letters to their relations in the countryside. Whores trolled for customers, and pickpockets and confidence men eyed their marks. As a child Isabel had often stood with her father while he and his associates discussed developments in the wool cloth trade, and she had liked watching the lively dramas going on around them. Once, she stood next to a portly gentleman craning his neck to look up at the painted ceiling—clearly not a native of London—and a young man kindly pointed out to him that the place was full of pickpockets so he would do well to remove the impressive gold chain around his neck and conceal it in his sleeve. The visitor did so, with fulsome thanks for such helpful advice. A few minutes later there was a fracas near the doors—some scuffling and raised voices that drew the attention of everyone—and when it died down Isabel saw the look of panic on the visitor’s face. The chain had vanished, and so had the friendly young man.

Today she was interested in none of the hubbub inside the cathedral. She made her way to the outdoor booksellers’ stalls snugged between the mighty stone buttresses. She navigated between an old woman leading a donkey laden with firewood and a bony dog snuffling at the muddy snow, and she reached the tables where books were laid out under a rough canvas awning that sagged between poles. She stood elbow to elbow with customers who were haggling with the booksellers and let her gaze range over the tomes on mathematics and animal husbandry and astrology. There were beautifully illustrated almanacs, and calendars of celestial events called ephemerides, and manuals for surveyors and carpenters. And there were dozens of pamphlets with sermons. It seemed that Londoners, newly and passionately Protestant thanks to their new Queen, could not get enough of sermons. But amid all these she finally found the
Herbal
she wanted, a freshly printed edition with extensive diagrams, bound in handsome green leather.

Isabel was paying for the book when a shout almost made her fumble her shilling change. It came from around the corner. People from the far end of the bookstalls were scurrying to investigate, disappearing around the cathedral. More shouts, louder, angrier. Isabel felt a prickle of alarm. Best to leave.

She tucked the book into the pocket of her cloak and hurried away from the stalls. Her route led her in the direction of the shouting, but she was careful to skirt the commotion and stay well clear of the crowd. It was growing, though, with people running in from all directions. Like to an execution, she thought uncomfortably. The center of the commotion was Paul’s Cross, the raised outdoor pulpit where leading churchmen regularly preached sermons to throngs of Londoners. It held no preacher today, but Isabel saw a wild-eyed man scrambling up its steps, shouting curses. Two men were close on his heels, groping at him to stop him. He was quicker and made it to the top.

“A bastard heretic calls herself our queen!” he cried out to the crowd. There were gasps from the people. “She is a foul sacrilege!” he ranted. “God will smite her! Smite the fornicating heretics who follow her, all of you!”

Isabel was trying to get out of the churchyard, but it was slow going with so many people jammed in, everyone moving closer to the commotion while she was trying to go the other way.

The two men going after the wild-eyed man in the pulpit reached him and one punched him in the face. The other grabbed him by the collar and heaved him down the stairs. He tumbled down and fell in the muck. He struggled to his feet, crying out, “God will smite you all! Every fornicating whoreson dog among you!”

Someone in the crowd yelled back, “Shut your face, you Godrotting papist!” and hurled a rock. It struck the side of the man’s head and he lurched, then fell, bleeding. One of the men who had pushed him out of the pulpit came tearing down the steps, his face a livid red. He kicked the fallen “papist” in the belly.

“Hold off!” said a gentleman in a jeweled cap, stepping between them to shield the kicked man. A Catholic sympathizer, apparently. Another “papist.”

The red-faced man lifted a dagger and plunged it into the gentleman’s shoulder. There were gasps from the crowd, then shouting. The gentleman swayed, clutching his shoulder. Three servants with him reached for him in horror, supporting him, one desperately pressing his bare hand to stanch the blood from his master’s wound. The red-faced assailant bolted, running straight into the crowd. People made way for him to escape, calling gleeful encouragement. Then several men among them surged forward and began kicking the fallen, wild-eyed man who had screamed curses from the pulpit. Suddenly, everyone seemed to be running, swarming both him and the gentleman’s frightened servants.

Isabel felt the press of bodies pushing her that way, too, and their hot, angry breath as they yelled, “Down with papists!” It was like an ocean tide, impossible to fight. A man’s elbow jabbed her ribs. He didn’t notice her as he yelled at the mob’s victims, but the sharp pain made Isabel stumble. She fought to stay upright, panicked at the thought of being trampled. The panic gave her a jolt of strength and she finally pushed free—at least a little more free, into a pocket of space where the crowd was surging around a lantern post. Her cape had gotten wrenched tight at the throat, and she loosened its strings, catching her breath, glad to be out of the crush of bodies. She was looking for a way out to the street when she saw a black-bearded man pointing an angry finger at her from the edge of the crowd.

“Crucifix!” he shouted.

Her hand went instinctively for the gold cross at her throat.

Several men beside the bearded man turned to look at her in fury. “Papist!” one yelled.

They came at her so fast she froze. Then she twisted around to run. But two more men lunged at her from that direction, including a huge laborer who pushed her shoulders with both hands, the force of it like a board that walloped her backward. She staggered, groping for support from the man behind her. But he stepped aside to let her fall. She hit the ground on her back so hard it knocked the breath from her and pain shuddered up her spine. The faces looking down on her blocked the sky, a blur of hatefilled eyes and shaking fists.