The Queen's Captive Page 14

  Honor sighed, dabbing at the last of her mirthful tears. Adam continued to gaze down at Elizabeth as she chatted with people left and right, making them smile.

  “They love her,” he said.

  Honor heard the warmth in his voice. Amazing, she thought, the effect Elizabeth had on people. The more lowly their station, the more passionate their admiration, from fishwife to butcher to carpenter’s apprentice. Honor believed it was because they sensed her genuine interest in them. “Ah, you should have seen it when we left London,” she told Adam. “The people went mad for her. Cheering, and rushing to give her cakes and flowers. She would stop and banter with them, which just brought more people running. It happened at every village. Took us days to get here.”

  Honor was quite sure no European monarch or prince showed such affection for their common people. In fact, they would be shocked by Elizabeth’s easy familiarity. A fine quality in her, in Honor’s estimation, and one Elizabeth had earned the hard way—the terrors she had endured had given her an understanding of the insecurities most people lived with. Though a princess, she knew what it was to be friendless, fearful of the future, and at the mercy of rulers. People saw that in her, and it touched their hearts. Just as she has touched mine, Honor thought. The girl now felt as dear to her as her own daughter.

  Well, almost. What joy she had felt when she’d read Isabel’s letter back in July, with the news that she had been delivered of a fine, healthy son. Nicolas, they had named him, in honor of Richard’s late father, Nicholas, but with the Spanish spelling. He would be four months old now. It had taken Isabel’s letter over two months to reach England from Peru. Nicolas had been born on May Day.

  “Who’s that?” Adam asked.

  “Who?”

  “That oaf with his hand on her shoulder.”

  Honor followed his gaze down to Elizabeth. “Oh, that’s Doctor Dee. Mathematician and philosopher. Her friend.”

  “And that fellow? The one speaking in her ear?”

  “Roger Ascham. Her former tutor. Another good friend.”

  “What about the one at her back? Black beard.”

  “A new friend, Senor Castiglione. He’s teaching her Italian.”

  “An awful lot of them.”

  “What?”

  “Friends.”

  “Well, naturally.” Honor was settling herself down on the bench, tucking her handkerchief back in her sleeve. “She’s been alone for so long.”

  He looked over his shoulder at her. “She’s had you.”

  “Hardly the same. It’s young people she needs.” She patted the spot beside her on the bench. “Come, Adam, I want all the news.” He had arrived just as the play was starting and she had whisked him up to the empty gallery to watch, but also to get him alone for a few minutes. She was hungry for news of home. “How is your father? How is everyone? Tell me all.”

  “I can do better than that.” He was pulling letters out of his pocket. “One from Isabel. One from Father.” He handed them to her.

  She tore open Isabel’s and read it quickly, gobbling the words. Carlos had been promoted in the viceroy’s horse guard. Baby Nicolas could now hold a rattle. Isabel had made friends with a captain’s wife and had become so fluent in Spanish she was writing poetry in it. Honor sat back, sated by wolfing down what she needed to know—that they were alive and thriving. She would read the letter again later, slowly and indulgently, to savor all its tastes.

  She opened Richard’s letter.

  My dear Honor,

  You will be glad to know that the Flemish weavers we hired are settling in well and are fine craftsmen all. I believe that paying for their passage and settlement will prove to be a good investment. I may hire more if Walton can get to Antwerp before Michaelmas to arrange it.

  He went on to tell about a delay in delivery of the wall paneling she had ordered, and the death of his niece Cecily’s grandfather, and a sick hunting dog, and the wedding of one of their maids to a Colchester tanner, leaving the housekeeper on the lookout for a replacement.

  Here’s the real news, my love. Lord Powys and Sir Nicholas Graves stopped in yesterday and stayed to sup and they told me Henry Jernigan is dead. Seems he caught a flux in Ireland and was gone the next day. That leaves his seat in Parliament vacant just as an urgent bill is coming up that touches all our rights, as Powys and Graves put it. The upshot of their talk was that Powys has asked me to stand in Jernigan’s place. Powys thinks it a fine idea, and Graves seconded it, and they asked for my answer, yay or nay, and when they told me the dangers of the Queen’s bill I was ready then and there to tell them yay. That made three men saying the same thing, which is a foolish way to weigh an issue. I wish you had been here to argue the point. I told Lord Powys I would think on it and send him my answer. If I do say yay, the Grenvilles are sure to howl, but they have no claim to the seat now that John Grenville has moved up to sit with the Lords. His brother lives too far away, in Northumberland.

  The Queen’s bill is called the Exiles Bill, so you will have some idea of where her interest lies. If passed, it would allow the Crown to confiscate the property of any Englishman who has fled abroad. Protestants, of course, are her intended quarry, particularly the hundreds of families in the Low Countries. Powys left me reams of paper on the issue, which I will study before I decide. In the meantime keep this knowledge unto yourself alone. I have not told Adam. But write to let me know your mind and send your letter home with him.

  Trusting that you are in good health and steadfast in your service to Her Grace the Princess, I commend me unto her.

  Your loving husband,

  Richard

  “Good heavens,” she murmured, excited.

  “Hmmm?”

  She looked up from the letter. Adam stood with his back to her, arms resting on the railing, still gazing down at Elizabeth.

  “Nothing. A delay in getting my wall paneling.” It was not like Richard to keep such important news from Adam, but she thought she understood why. Ever since Frances Grenville had roped him into her project of rebuilding the priory in Colchester, she often called him to the site to discuss it whenever she was home from court. It would not do if Adam inadvertently let this news slip to Frances before Richard was ready. The Grenvilles are sure to howl.

  Let them, Honor thought. The Commons seat was virtually Lord Powys’s to bestow. He was the largest landholder in the county—much of that land being former monastic holdings he had bought from King Henry—and the mayor of Colchester and all the leading citizens followed his lead. Except, of course, the Grenvilles.

  Richard must accept, she thought, her excitement building as she folded the letters and put them in her pocket. In the House of Commons he would be a part of the very sinews of government. More important, and definitely more urgent, this Exiles Bill sounded threatening. A blatant money grab by the Queen. One that would immediately impoverish all their Protestant friends abroad. And it might be just a first step. If she was targeting the wealth of Protestant exiles now, how long until she targeted suspected Protestant sympathizers right here in England? Honor shuddered, thinking how with a pen stroke of Parliament she and Richard could lose everything they were working so hard to rebuild. The Queen had to be stopped. Parliament had been called for October. It would convene in five weeks.

  She looked up at Adam, who was still at the railing watching the milling household. He had come for a quick visit after meeting with a merchant in nearby Hereford about investing in Adam’s shipbuilding venture. An unsuccessful meeting, he had told her when he’d arrived—seems the man had recently suffered some financial loss and was no longer interested. Tomorrow Adam planned to ride home. But Honor was thinking it might be wise to keep him away from Frances Grenville for a while.

  “There are some people here you should meet,” she said, joining him at the railing to watch the hubbub below. Servants had brought out platters of fruit and cheese and more wine, and Thomas Parry had started playing his lute, and the hall rang with chatter
and laughter and music. “Powerful people.”

  “Oh?” Adam said. She could see he was barely listening to her. He had eyes only for Elizabeth.

  “You might consider staying for a few days. Get to know some of these men. There’s always a group out hunting or hawking. You could sound out a few of them about investing.”

  He looked at her as if she had said something remarkable. As if he wished he’d thought of it himself. “I could, couldn’t I?”

  “The more the merrier with the Princess. She’s making up for lost time.”

  He was all attention. “She rides with them?”

  “Almost every day the sun shines.”

  “I’ll stay.”

  “Good. I’ll introduce you to a few people before I leave.”

  “Leave? Where are you going?”

  She smiled and kissed his cheek. “Home.”

  Frances was torn between anxiety about Adam and anxiety for the Queen. “Urgent business in London”—that was what had kept Adam from their meeting at the priory in the spring, so his note back in May had said, and in the months since then he had cancelled two more meetings, one just two days ago. It grieved her so much, she had sent her steward to investigate. What “urgent business” could now be keeping him from her?

  But the Queen. Poor, dear Mary. Her claim on Frances was greater at the moment. She was weeping over the letter from her husband. Frances did not know how to comfort her.

  “The abdication arrangements could take months,” Mary said, lowering the letter and lowering her head in misery. “Oh, when will he return to me?”

  Frances reached across the table and took her friend’s hand in solidarity. Emperor Charles, the most powerful monarch on earth, ruler of Spain and the Netherlands and the limitless New World, was stepping down and passing on his lands to his heirs, giving Philip the choicest of these, the Kingdom of the Netherlands. But divesting himself of half the world was taking time. The official ceremonies were dragging on and on.

  “The King will surely be back soon after Michaelmas,” Frances said to bolster Mary’s hope. It still felt strange to call him king, but Mary insisted on it since it was Philip’s wish. He was her lord and husband. “He will want to join you for the opening of Parliament.”

  Mary looked across the room at the life-sized portrait of him. Her face darkened and an angry growl came from her throat. She jumped up from her chair and ran at the portrait, arms raised, and pounded her fist against the canvas. Philip’s image continued to gaze out over her head, oblivious. “Dorothy!” she shouted.

  The young lady-in-waiting appeared at the door, looking nervous at the Queen’s harsh tone. “Yes, Your Majesty?”

  “Take this picture away! I will look at it no longer!”

  Dorothy glanced at Frances, bewildered. In answer, Frances shook her head to the girl: Wait. “Your Grace,” Frances suggested, “it will take some time to bring in the workmen at this late hour. Perhaps we should leave the portrait for now.”

  Mary lowered her arm and her head drooped again. “Yes. Yes, leave it. I would not have it moved.” Frances shooed Dorothy away. Mary came back to her chair and sank into it. “I would have him near me.” Her face crumpled as she tried to hold back tears.

  Frances again reached out and took her hand. “Courage, my dear,” she said, and Mary nodded bleakly, suffering in silence.

  The Queen had shown courage, Frances thought. All through the hellish summer. Back in April, still happily awaiting the baby’s birth, she’d had her secretaries write letters announcing her safe delivery, ready to send to the pope, the emperor, the kings of France and Hungary and Bohemia. The date of the birth had been left blank, as was the sex of the child. Mary had signed the letters herself. Then came May, and the awful anxiety of waiting, and Frances suspected Mary’s horrible mistake. By June people were sniggering that the Queen was apparently eleven months pregnant. Their insolence appalled Frances, but she knew by then that her friend was tragically deluded. All through July they had waited for a miracle. But no miracle came.

  Finally, at the end of July, the household received orders that the Queen was moving so that Hampton Court could be cleaned. It was an unstated acknowledgment that her confinement was over. The bored, impatient inhabitants of the palace heaved a sigh of relief. Philip’s attendants had already been leaving for weeks. The noblewomen who had been shut up with Mary and Frances for three months swiftly ordered their servants to pack their trunks and left for their own summer houses. On the third day of August the Queen and King quietly moved to Oatlands, a modest manor house outside London. The ordeal was over.

  But Mary’s agony was not. After that soul-wrenching humiliation, she then had to watch her husband leave England. Frances saw her trying to be cheerful and dignified, saying good-bye to him in front of scores of courtiers as he and his retinue boarded ship at Gravesend. But as soon as she was alone with Frances, her tears flowed. The King had promised that his stay in Flanders would be brief, and indeed he had left behind most of his vast personal household, including his Spanish soldiers, his Burgundian cavalry, his physicians and chapel clergy, most of his horses and grooms, and even the pages of his chamber. But as the weeks passed, all these members of his entourage left, one after another. Ships carrying Philip’s personal effects sailed out of English ports every day.

  Mary took some comfort in the presence and support of Cardinal Pole, who moved his lodgings into the palace. He was her cousin, and Mary loved him. He was the symbol of her proudest accomplishment, England’s reunion with Rome. This alone had kept her strong—her duty to God, her avowed battle against heresy and wickedness. Frances was in awe of her dear friend’s determination. But she feared that the King had little intention of returning to England this year, or even the next, if at all. The King had abandoned his wife.

  There was a soft knock on the door. Dorothy poked her head in. “Mistress Grenville? Your steward is come to see you.”

  She practically ran down the corridor away from the Queen’s apartments. Dyer was waiting for her in her private chamber. Hurrying in, she shut the door behind her. He turned from the fire that crackled in the grate, still rubbing his hands to warm them. His face was pale.

  Dread clutched Frances’s heart. “Dead?”

  “No, madam, he is alive.”

  Relief overwhelmed her. Thank God.

  But the next moment anger pinched. “Then where is he?” Yet again, Adam had not come after saying he would—a court banquet two days ago in honor of the visiting king of Poland. He had seemed keen when she’d extended the invitation, offering to introduce him to many gentlemen of high rank at the affair. He had promised to come. But she had ended up sitting alone. “Where?” she demanded again.

  Dyer heaved a tight sigh. “You will not be pleased, madam.”

  Not a good beginning. “Go on.”

  “He is in Hertfordshire.”

  “What’s in Hertfordshire?”

  “Hatfield. Princess Elizabeth.”

  “Ah,” she said, relaxing. “He is visiting his stepmother.” The Thornleigh woman had persuaded the Queen to let her attend Elizabeth—or, as Frances always thought of her, the whore’s daughter—though she did not think Honor Thornleigh’s reports had been much use to the Queen. It was merely her low way of worming into Mary’s good graces.

  “Yes and no,” Dyer said carefully.

  Frances was tiring of this cat and mouse game. She went to the sideboard where her maid had left mulled wine. “Get to the point, man,” she said, pouring herself a goblet full.

  “My informant in the house told me that Mistress Thornleigh left Hatfield six days ago. Master Adam stayed.”

  Frances drank some wine, eyeing him with growing alarm. His tone told her there was much to be alarmed about. “And what’s he been doing all this time?”

  “Hunting. Hawking.”

  “There’s more. I can tell.”

  “Madam, I am your faithful servant. Please remember that. What I have to tel
l you, I do so out of the greatest sense of duty to—”

  “Yes, yes, man. Out with it.”

  “He rides out hunting with the company of ladies and gentlemen who follow the Princess, but it is not the deer he has his eye on. It is the Princess.”

  “Hoping for her notice? For some preferment?”

  He shook his head solemnly. “For love, madam. For sheer love.”

  Frances shivered in London’s morning fog the next day as she rode with Dyer under the arch of Moorgate, heading for Finsbury Fields. She barely glanced up at the heads of rebels impaled on pikes atop the arch. Twenty months after Wyatt’s rebellion the shriveled heads remained as a warning to any would-be traitor. Frances had not slept, had thrashed in anguish all night, and now she felt almost dizzy from fatigue and the unrelenting heartache.

  Adam and the heretic Princess. The whore’s daughter. Lewd, blasphemous, and almost certainly a traitor. Frances had wanted to tear her hair. The only thing that kept her from it was Dyer’s assurance that Adam had not become intimate with the object of his desire. “My informant in the house tells me that Master Adam loves, but loves from afar,” he had said. Of course, Frances thought. The whore’s daughter kept so many men around her that every new one had to join the queue. That was something. Adam had not touched the trollop. Not yet.

  Not ever, she vowed as she left the Moorgate arch behind her. The fields outside the city walls were busy. In Moorfields, to the right, laundresses spread shirts and smocks and household linens on the grass, waiting for the autumn sun to burn off the last of the fog. Past them, closer to Bishopsgate, were tenting grounds where apprentices stretched wool cloth, tapping hammers at the tenterhooks. Ahead, past grazing cattle, rose the windmills of Finsbury Fields, where the shouts of men drifted from the archery butts. Through the trees and the last shreds of fog Frances could see them, a troop of twenty or so. Their shouting was exuberant and good-natured, young men taking pleasure in their prowess.