The Queen's Captive Read online

  He would help her anyway. He rode past the dozens of men on horseback outside the palace gate, forcing himself to keep his horse at a trot, not dig in his spurs to gallop as he itched to do. The horsemen had formed themselves into an organized cohort, with the Queen’s soldiers in the vanguard, the forward rider carrying the staff with the Queen’s banner rippling in the wind. They were followed by Bedingfield’s guardsmen and retainers, their ranks stretching back along the road that ran straight to the palace. Outriders from the soldiers’ ranks trotted back and forth along the length of the entourage, checking that the whole troop was in order. Scores of villagers had left their cottages and shops and fields and stood crowding both edges of the road.

  A cheer went up. Adam halted his mount and looked back. He trotted to one side to watch as the gate opened. The sun was cresting the gatehouse as the Princess emerged on a white horse. She sat tall, as though the world was such a thrilling place she wanted to stretch as high as possible to see it all, hear it all, smell it all. Her horse seemed infused with her excitement, stepping high as it pranced out of the gateway.

  “God save Your Grace!” a man shouted from the village throng.

  She laughed. Even at this distance, Adam heard her laugh. It seemed to pour into him like cool water on a hot day. She beamed as she trotted forward, taking her place at the center of the entourage, for there were as many horsemen now coming through the gate after her as there were already ranged in front. Adam saw his stepmother, on her stolid brown mare, riding directly behind the Princess.

  The whole entourage started moving along the road to London. The villagers moved forward with it, knots of excited men and women and children walking alongside, pointing and chattering. A couple of women tried to get close to the Princess, one calling out, “God bless the Lady Elizabeth!” before the outriders nudged them back. The bearded captain trotted close to the Princess, his royal charge, with his right hand resting on his sword hilt and a stern gleam in his eye. Children skipped after the train like gulls in the wake of a ship.

  A skinny little girl carrying a ragged bouquet of wildflowers scampered between the horses, quick as a fish, and darted up to the Princess. “Here, my lady!” She held up the flowers, offering them, as she kept pace beside the white horse.

  The Princess looked entranced. Smiling, she reached down for the spindly wildflowers as though they were rare orchids presented by a sultan’s daughter.

  The captain lunged his horse forward, drawing his sword. He slashed the bouquet, decapitating the blooms from the stems. The little girl screamed and ran. The Princess’s face went white. She sat rigid, stunned.

  It was all Adam could do to hold back from charging the man and wrestling him to the ground.

  Instead, he kicked his spurs into his horse’s flanks and bolted down the road ahead of the train. He didn’t look back, but he felt her presence—the laugh, the light—as he bent over his horse’s neck and galloped toward London to alert Sir William Cecil.

  “Perhaps we should begin?” Father Percy ventured.

  “Not yet,” Frances snapped. She would not start without Adam. The priest folded his hands over his paunch, meekly accepting her command.

  They stood outside St. Botolph’s church at the edge of the grassy quadrangle, the old monastery cloister rimmed with ruins. Four men—Colchester’s master stonemason and his three apprentices—stood at the far corner of the quadrangle, as though they were a team of wrestlers squared off against Frances and the priest. The master mason had rolled up his plans and stood tapping the roll impatiently against his thigh. The bored apprentices murmured amongst themselves. One of them idly kicked at an anthill. The whole party had been waiting for almost an hour.

  The sun glared down, unseasonably sweltering for late April. Frances was hot, and she was angry. Where was Adam? It was over a week ago that they had agreed on this Friday meeting, the feast day of blessed Saint Anselm. Adam had promised to be here. He had made her so happy, saying he looked forward to commissioning the masons and approving the first dig, finally launching the project.

  Frances squinted in the bright sun, skeptically eyeing her maid, who sat on a large rock amid the ruins, fanning herself with her hand, her eyelids lazily drifting closed. The apprentice kicking the anthill had been stealing regular glances at the girl. It hadn’t escaped Frances’s notice. Nor had the girl’s blowsy appearance, the chemise above her bodice unlaced like a harlot’s, showing her plump bosom pink and dewy in the heat. Frances wrestled with the impulse to sack her here and now. She would not tolerate lewdness in her servants. But she hesitated. The maid was quite artful at dressing Frances’s hair.

  Irritably, she batted away a fly. More flies buzzed thickly over a dead creature by the ruin wall, some large bird. She could smell the thing. An appalling thought struck her. Adam had been hurt. He had fallen off the scaffold at that ship of his and broken his leg. He had been thrown from his horse and snapped his neck. He had been run through the heart by some villainous highwayman, robbed and left to die by the side of the road. He lay gasping in a ditch at this very moment, crawling, trying to get to her. Otherwise, what could possibly keep him from being here?

  “Dyer!” she called, turning to the church.

  Her steward came hurrying out the door of Father Percy’s study. He held the list of tasks that Frances and Adam had written up together, an agenda for this meeting. “My lady?”

  “Forget that,” she said, waving away the list. “Send people out to search. I fear Master Thornleigh has met some dreadful mishap.”

  “Have you heard word of this?”

  “No.”

  “Then perhaps—”

  “I want him found! Is that understood?”

  Dyer shut his mouth. He nodded.

  Frances turned to Percy. “Father, dismiss these workmen.” She started along the path that led out of the churchyard. Dyer kept by her side. As they reached the maid the girl stood up, ready to fall in behind her mistress. Frances slapped her face. The girl gasped, her eyes big with fear.

  “Make yourself decent,” Frances ordered. She turned to Dyer. “And I want that shiftless apprentice sacked.”

  9

  The Queen’s Child

  April–May 1555

  On a warm Tuesday morning, the last day of April, the news swept London at daybreak. Courtiers told servants, neighbors told neighbors, and soon the whole city was buzzing that just after midnight Queen Mary had given birth to a prince. The boy was fair and without blemish. By midmorning there were bonfires in the streets and bells rang throughout the city. In every church Te Deums were sung, the priests jubilantly orchestrating the people’s thanks to God for the safe delivery of their queen and the birth of their prince.

  By nightfall everyone had learned that the rumor was false. The Queen, in fact, had not yet begun her labor.

  Three weeks later, as Honor was climbing the staircase to the Queen’s apartments to make another meaningless report to her about Elizabeth, she still didn’t know how the birth rumor had started. What mattered was that Elizabeth was safe—for now, at least. Sir William Cecil, alerted by Adam, had spread the word to his influential friends about the Queen removing Elizabeth from Woodstock, and since her arrival in London she had been confined to her rooms in Hampton Court Palace, under guard, but at least she was not in the Tower. Honor did not know if the alarm had stayed the Queen’s hand from taking some dire action against her sister, or if Elizabeth’s reprieve was somehow connected to the confusion swirling around the imminent delivery of the Queen’s baby, including the birth rumor. She reached the top of the staircase and made her way to the Queen’s rooms, thinking how everyone was on tenterhooks awaiting the event. Here at Hampton Court, where the Queen had come for her lying-in and the whole court had followed, it was all people talked about. When would the baby come? The Queen was five weeks overdue.

  Mary had secluded herself in her private chambers, and the life of the government had practically come to a standstill, while
courtiers and the staffs of ambassadors and diplomats met anxiously in chambers, in the corners of galleries, in the courtyards, and on the busy palace wharf, exchanging scraps of information gleaned from the Queen’s apartments. Honor was privy to little of their talk, since everyone at court, noting the Queen’s shunning of her sister, avoided Elizabeth. They hurried past the cramped set of rooms in the rear of the palace where she had been lodged under guard. Nobody wanted to be seen near Elizabeth. She and her lady were pariahs.

  Every day Honor felt the pall of suspense and suspicion grow heavier. It seemed that all of England felt it, for the one program the Queen had pushed ahead with was the burning of heretics, and the bishops had filled the country’s prisons with Protestants. A clerk of the French ambassador had told Honor one day, furtively, under a staircase, that he thought the Queen had made up her mind that her child could not be born until every Protestant in prison had been burned alive. The burnings fueled the fury of radical Protestants who met in secret congregations at night in cellars and barns and cemeteries. Their seditious pamphlets were read in taverns, in the streets, in the gambling houses. Honor had seen one of the more distasteful pamphlets with a picture of Queen Mary as a filthy sow, suckling a litter of grubby priests lined up at her teats. As the burnings continued there were riots in Warwickshire and Devon. The Queen’s council raised more troops. The soldiers were quartered in the immediate neighborhood of the palace, and they brought artillery with them. Meanwhile it was common knowledge that the Queen’s husband was anxious to get to Flanders to see to his father’s imperial business and was waiting only until the baby came. His retinue of Spaniards prowled the palace corridors, impatient to get home.

  As Honor entered the Queen’s apartments she sensed that here, especially, nerves were at a snapping point. The noblewomen of the realm had been brought to court in April to witness the royal birth, and somehow room had been found in the palace for all of them with their maids and lapdogs and trunks of finery, but now it was late May, and Honor heard bickering among the duchesses, countesses, and marchionesses as she walked through the antechamber. Eight or nine of them, looking sour and restless, sat idly playing cards, picking at candied apricots at a sideboard, and gossiping by the windows. They had put in weeks of embroidering baby clothes. The sewing was done, the midwives stood ready, the wet nurses had been brought in, the rockers hired. The royal cradle sat in a corner, sumptuously decorated and blatantly empty. Everyone was just waiting.

  The gentlewomen kept their distance from Honor, Elizabeth’s lady, as she passed among them and knocked gently on the Queen’s bedchamber door.

  The door opened a crack. Frances Grenville stood like a sentry.

  “Her Majesty is expecting me,” Honor said.

  “She is resting. Come back later.” Frances gave off a chill that Honor sensed was jealousy for her, the Queen’s new, special confidante.

  A groan sounded from deep inside the room. Then the Queen’s voice, thin and pinched with pain. “Frances, who’s there?”

  Honor smelled a cloying odor, like bad meat. The chamber lay in darkness, though it was two in the afternoon. What was going on? Frances started to close the door. Honor slapped her palm against it to stop her. “It’s Honor Thornleigh, Your Grace. May I come in?”

  She pushed the door open, forcing Frances to step back. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the gloom. The windows were shuttered and the heavy velvet curtains were closed—winter curtains, incongruous against the gentleness of May outside. Candlelight flickered at the far end of the room, coming from the alcove with its prie-dieu, though Honor could not see it from the doorway. On a table, a plate sat abandoned with some kind of cooked meat, rabbit perhaps, its gravy congealed. The bed, with its thick carved posts and heavy embroidered hangings, lay shrouded in darkness.

  Frances sat down in her chair beside the bed, picking up a baby’s silk cap and her embroidery yarn and needle. Honor approached the bed, ready to go down on her knees before the Queen. But the bed, she now saw, was empty. Frances, intently sewing, seemed bent on ignoring Honor.

  The Queen was likely at the prie-dieu, her private altar, Honor thought. She left the bed and turned the corner to the alcove. The prie-dieu stood in lone splendor, its silver crucifix and polished ebony backdrop with inlaid gemstones gleaming in the light of the candles that flared on either side. A red satin cushion lay on the floor in front of it. Honor knew that the Queen knelt here in prayer several times a day. But not now.

  She was about to go and ask Frances where the Queen was, when she caught the unmistakable smell of an unwashed body. Sweat.

  She heard a groan. She looked past the candles’ glare, and her breath snagged in her throat. Queen Mary sat on the floor in a linen shift, barefoot, her hair loose and tangled, her face as white and damp as raw pastry. She looked up at Honor, pain thrashing in her eyes. She’s in labor, Honor thought.

  “Your Grace, is the baby coming? I’ll call for your doctor. Try to—”

  Mary heaved another groan and her head dropped to her knees. Honor felt a stab of shock—her knees? The Queen had pulled her knees up tightly against her chest and wrapped her arms tightly around them. No woman nine months pregnant could possibly sit in such a posture. “Your Majesty…” She stopped, not knowing what to say, what to ask.

  A horrifying thought struck. The baby had been born, just now. Only…where was it? There was no crying. No blood. Had the infant died? Was the Queen in shock?

  “Mistress Grenville,” she called, hurrying back to her. “What has happened?”

  Frances looked up from her sewing, her face as hard as a closed door. “Happened?”

  “The baby…haven’t you seen?” She stopped. Frances seemed to have no inkling of how impossible the Queen’s posture was. Or was she, too, in shock?

  “I’ll fetch the doctor,” Honor said, starting for the door.

  “Don’t. He was just here, not fifteen minutes ago.”

  “What? What did he say?”

  “That we must be patient. Babies take their time.”

  Honor could only gape at her. There is no baby!

  “Her Majesty gets these spells,” Frances said, a smug look on her face. “They always pass. God works in wondrous ways.” Her tone hardened. “Now, go back to your mistress.”

  This was madness. Honor pulled open the door and the daylight hit her, making her squint. Some of the ladies looked at her, but most kept on playing cards, strolling, gossiping. She opened her mouth to speak but could find no words. What was she to say? Who would believe her? She scarcely believed what she had witnessed with her own eyes and ears.

  She hurried from the Queen’s apartments. No baby—that was the only clear fact. Should she tell Elizabeth? Honor had left her studying Cicero. But the girl, high-strung at the best of times, had been through so much with her recent feverish hopes of freedom dashed, the last thing she needed was more alarm and uncertainty. And this could not be more bizarre. The Queen, the doctor, the whole palace seemed to be in the throes of a delusion. First, Honor had to sort out what it portended for Elizabeth. She needed to talk to someone with a calm and rational head. Someone in the real world.

  Sir William Cecil lived in Wimbledon, a few miles southwest of London. Honor rode, and with the clear, warm weather and dry roads she was there by six, the supper hour. Cecil’s house, the Old Rectory, stood on the northern slope of a hill, the view dominated by the spire of mighty St. Paul’s across the Thames on the northeast horizon. The house was not luxurious, but Cecil’s family lived comfortably: he and his wife and son, along with his sister, his wife’s sister, and his ward, plus the two dozen or so servants who saw to the bake house, brew house, kitchen, and stable.

  Sir William’s wife, the able administrator of this lively household, welcomed Honor and led her to the parlor. “Do stay to supper, Honor,” she said. “It’s been ages since we’ve seen you, and Thomas Randall has just come back from Antwerp. He’s got plenty of news of our mutual friends there
. Do stay.”

  “I wish I could, Mildred, but it’s impossible today.”

  Sir William rose from a chair beside his desk. “Honor,” he said, “what news?”

  She took a breath. “I hardly know where to begin.”

  He looked mildly startled. He glanced at his wife, and she, taking the cue, said, “Yes, yes, I’m going. Honor, do take some of our honey back with you when you leave.”

  “Thank you, Mildred, I shall.”

  She left them, closing the door. Honor now saw another man in the room. He was far more elegantly dressed than Sir William, with much jewelry—rings and a chain of gold—and a look of sharp intelligence.

  Cecil gestured to him. “May I introduce—”

  “Monsieur de Noailles,” she said. “Je vous ai vu au palais.” I have seen you at court.

  The French ambassador bowed, and when Sir William told him Honor’s name his face lit up. “The mother of Isabel Thornleigh?”

  “The same, sir,” she said with a swell of pride. Isabel, the rebel. Honor knew that Noailles had been complicit in the Wyatt uprising.

  He made another bow, this time as deep and respectful as if she were a duchess. “A young woman of courage. How I relied on her.”

  “Come, Honor, what’s happened?” Sir William said. “Something. I can see it in your face.”

  She was wondering if she could speak freely in front of Noailles. But Sir William clearly considered him a friend, and Noailles already knew how deeply her family had been involved in Wyatt’s failed rebellion. As he had been himself, secretly. His employer, the king of France, was a notorious enemy of Prince Philip’s father, Emperor Charles. The two countries had been warring for decades over pieces of the Italian peninsula. The emperor was lord of half of Europe, and France was his only real adversary, so each was always angling for England’s allegiance. Queen Mary’s marriage to Philip had incensed the French. Noailles would naturally be a supporter of Elizabeth.