The Queen's Captive Read online

  Now here he was, saving hers.

  She noticed the sturdy case at his feet, a strongbox covered with amber leather, secured with studded copper bands and an iron lock. He was never without it. She glanced over her shoulder to make sure she had not been followed. There was no one. Just the soft chomping of horses munching hay, and the keening of wind across the roof’s patched holes. She was satisfied that she and George were alone.

  She opened her cloak to display the top of her bosom to him, and touched her necklace, an almond-sized emerald pendant on a chain of filigreed gold. The gem was warm against her fingertips, her body’s warmth infusing Richard’s gift from the summer they were married twenty-one years ago. To her, it held the essence still of that sweet, English summer. She bent her head to undo the clasp, then handed over the necklace. “I couldn’t give it to anyone but you, George.”

  She saw a moment of deep feeling in his eyes before he lowered his gaze to study the goods. His demeanor was suddenly all business. “Milky inclusion in the left quadrant. Old-fashioned cabochon setting. A nick in the clasp.”

  Honor winced at the criticism. She loved this necklace, a golden filament with its drop of green fire that connected her to happier days. But she stilled her tongue. George knew how much she needed the cash. He had been buying her jewelry, piece by piece, for months. She glanced down at his leather case, aching with curiosity. Were any of her gems still nestled in the black velvet lining, or did they already adorn his pampered clients? Her ruby earrings that Isabel, as a baby at her breast, had reached out to grab. Her rope of pearls bought on a trip with Richard to Venice. The diamond and sapphire ring he had given her seven years ago after a spectacular wool season. Her brooch of opals and topaz, an heirloom from the mother she had never known—Honor had planned to give it to her stepson Adam’s intended at their official betrothal. Her bracelets and necklaces of garnets, carnelian, amber, and coral, of lesser value yet cherished all the same. She lifted her eyes from the case, fending off the tug of regret. Her family could not eat rubies and pearls.

  As always, George gave her an excellent price. Far better, she knew, than the emerald was worth.

  The wind tugged at her skirt as she made her way home along the river Schelde’s crowded quay. Tall ships’ masts loomed over her, their furled sails stacked in massive tiers that blocked the watery sun. Their taut ropes creaked, straining against the wharf’s bollard posts in an age-old sea song. Winter was bearing in from the frosty North Sea and seemed to make the sailors and tradesmen hustle more earnestly in and out of the chandleries and harbor offices and boat sheds. She passed men hefting sacks from the hold of a Portuguese carrack pungent with a cargo of pepper and cinnamon.

  She looked to the broad river’s western horizon. Was Adam’s ship sailing into the estuary right now, she wondered, battered from its battles with Russian ice? Would he make it back for tonight’s feast for Isabel? He had written from the port of The Hague to say he intended to be there, and Honor hoped that the wind and tides would indeed bring him. It would be a sadder party without her seafaring stepson.

  There were shouts from crewmen on board a magnificent galleon coming alongside the wharf, its bright banners fluttering, and she stopped to make way for a gang of wharf hands jogging forward to secure the ship’s hawsers. Venetian, by its flag, and alive with men on the decks readying lines, and boys in the rigging, furling canvas. This controlled chaos of river traffic always impressed Honor. Antwerp was the trading and financial center of Europe, thanks to its fine seaport and crucial wool market, and hundreds of ships passed through here every day, making it an international city, with sailors and merchants and financiers hailing from Spain, Portugal, Venice, France, England, Poland, Sweden, and beyond. Antwerp embraced them all with a tolerance that Honor admired. The sights and sounds of the hectic river commerce reminded her of the busy Thames, and London, and a wave of homesickness rushed over her. How she missed England! But she and Richard were exiles. He was wanted as a traitor. They could never go home.

  But what future lay here? The view of the ships dragged her thoughts far out to sea, south to Cadiz, to the storm four months ago that had cost them so much. She saw Richard’s two caravels pitch in the storm’s black fury. She heard their hulls smash on the rocks, the wood shatter, heard the screams of men hurled overboard. She felt their terror as they drowned, thrashing in the black depths.

  She turned abruptly away from the water. Pointless to torture herself with visions of the catastrophe. She left the harbor and headed for home, her purse heavy with George’s coins, her heart heavy with regret. And something sharper. For the first time she felt fear. All her jewels were now gone.

  John Cheke, a Cambridge don, announced the toast. “To Isabel and Carlos!”

  The twenty-three men and women crowding round the Thornleighs’ dinner table raised their glasses high. Bright candles warmed the snug town house near the heart of Antwerp’s Grote Market. Richard had bought it, a fashionable address, in the heyday of his wool-trading business, to be a second home for his frequent trips from England. Now, Honor hoped their neighbors didn’t suspect that they could barely maintain the upkeep. “To the young couple,” Cheke cried. “The enemies of New Spain will quake at Carlos’s sword!”

  “And if that fails,” a bookbinder quipped, “he’ll unleash a real terror—his wife!”

  Everyone laughed, the toasted couple loudest of all. Isabel flashed her imitation of a fierce warrior’s face at her Spanish soldier husband. It made him throw back his head and roar with laughter.

  Even Honor had to laugh—though her daughter’s exploits still astonished her. She glanced at Richard down the table and saw him, too, gazing at Isabel in wonderment. Their daughter, just twenty, had proved herself to be not the innocent they thought they had raised, but an audacious rebel who, a year ago, had helped Wyatt’s uprising almost bring down England’s Queen Mary. It had happened as Honor lay here, barely conscious, sunk in a fever from a gunshot wound, and when she had recovered enough for Richard to tell her the tale, she had found it incredible. Isabel’s choice of husband had surprised her almost as much—Carlos Valverde, a mercenary soldier, unschooled, accustomed to very rough ways. But when she heard how he had saved Richard and Isabel, she had embraced him like a son. The wedding three months ago had been a happy interlude in the family’s financial troubles.

  Adam’s wedding would be next. That would be a grand affair, and the rich connection very promising for the family, Honor hoped. It saddened her that the tides had not brought her stepson tonight, after all, but she did not indulge fears of a mishap. If any man knew his way around a ship, it was Adam.

  Her eyes met Richard’s. He was head and shoulders taller than many of the men here, and with his leather eye patch and sea-weathered face and storm gray hair, he put her in mind of a rugged rock rising above the shallows of other folk. Tonight, though, he looked careworn and all of his age, a craggy fifty-six. As her glance met his, their smiles at the toast gave way to a mutual sadness. This was a farewell party. Isabel and Carlos were leaving for the New World.

  All day, organizing the modest feast, Honor had tried not to give in to her sense of bereavement. When would she ever see her daughter again? She watched Richard quickly drain his goblet of wine and then pour himself another. It worried her to see him drinking so much, drowning his own hard regrets. He had wanted to give Isabel and Carlos some of the land he owned in England, determined to keep his family together, but instead, to make a living, Isabel and Carlos were sailing half a world away. Honor knew how it was gnawing at Richard. Queen Mary’s officers, in confiscating the moveable goods of all known rebels, had snatched everything at their home in Colchester, from flocks to looms. His fulling ponds and mills sat idle, his tenting yards fell daily into further decay, his warehouses lay stripped bare. And the manor house he and Honor had built—her beloved Speedwell House, named after the wildflower so dear to her heart—was reduced to a hulk. She knew how Richard longed to go home and rev
ive his international wool cloth business, but that could never be. If he set foot in England, he would hang.

  “Honor, your tankard is empty. That will never do.”

  She turned to the affable face of John Cheke, who filled her mug with ale, the twinkle in his eye belying his reputation as a distinguished Cambridge scholar. She shook off her melancholy and quaffed some ale, truly pleased to see these good friends who had come to bid Isabel and Carlos good-bye. All were exiles, many worse off than she and Richard were. With George’s coins she had sent her scullery boy to pay off her debts to the butcher, the fishmonger, the grocer, and the vintner, and with her credit good again—for a while, at least—she had set a hearty table of English fare for these fellow refugees from Queen Mary’s oppression. The roast beef and beer, eel pie and cider, baked apples and custard, were comforts to a homesick community. A queer little enclave they had created, she thought as she watched John Abel pass the hat. As usual, he was collecting for the Sustainers of the Refugees Fund. There were hundreds of exiles throughout the Low Countries, and for those here in Antwerp her house had become a meeting place, a home away from home for hard-up Protestant gentry and scholars. Erasmus, her late mentor, would have loved the constant chatter about books and the New Learning.

  They liked to dance, too. Honor called on the trio of musicians to play, and Isabel and Carlos had just got up to start the first dance when the maid hurried in, wiping her hands on her apron, her eyes shining. “It’s Master Adam!”

  Honor turned with a happy smile. Her stepson had made it, after all. Adam strode in with a burlap sack slung over his shoulder like Father Christmas, and looking as jovial, if not as old, his beard not long and white but trim and black. Isabel cried out with joy and rushed over to her brother and threw her arms around his neck, crying, “You came!” Carlos clapped a congratulatory hand on Adam’s shoulder, saying, “And in one piece.” Honor hugged him in delight and welcomed him home. Richard shook his son’s hand in heartfelt silence.

  The guests hadn’t seen Adam since his return from Russia, and as everyone crowded round, welcoming him, Honor looked on with a swell of pride. She knew from his letter the story of the Merchant Adventurers’ voyage. They had endured terrible privation, he had written, losing ships and men, and were returning with little profit to show for it. Reading between the lines, though, Honor gathered that Adam had acquitted himself bravely, helping to lead the remnant of the expedition overland to Moscow. At the guests’ urging he was telling tales of the extraordinary court of Czar Ivan—of caviar and saunas, and harbors teeming with whales. She watched him gesture as he talked, thinking how, at twenty-nine, he looked so like his father at that age. Tall and sturdy, with the easy movements of a man comfortable in his own skin, and that watchful gleam in his eye, observing others with alertness but never with fear.

  “Where to next, my boy?” old Anthony Cooke asked.

  “Back to Moscow, sir, if the company can raise the funds. They’re refitting Spendthrift. I’ll be captain.”

  Honor caught Richard’s dark look as he quietly left the room. Their son’s advancement was bittersweet. An expert navigator since he was twelve, Adam had been not just captain but master, too, aboard Richard’s ships for years, an equal alongside his father. But the storm off Cadiz four months ago that had sunk their two caravels with all their cargo—a massive, horrifying loss—had left them stranded on the brink of bankruptcy. Richard’s third, much older ship, Speedwell, lay moored in the estuary, derelict, for they could not afford to repair her. To bring in money, Adam had signed on with the Company of Merchant Adventurers. It pained Richard to see his son a mere hired seaman. It pained Honor to see their family breaking apart.

  She slipped out of the room and found Richard starting up the stairs. To rifle through his account books again, she wondered, searching for phantom profits? Several nights she had gotten up and found him poring over the ledgers in candlelight. The futility of it—his obsession to ferret out some cash—tore at her heart.

  “He’ll want to talk to you,” she said. “Richard, come back.”

  He turned on the step. “He doesn’t need my advice. And words are all I can give him.”

  “He’ll want to tell you everything. Let him give you that.”

  He frowned. “Why don’t you wear the things I gave you?”

  Instinctively, her hand went to her neck, betraying her.

  “That’s right, your jewels. You never wear them anymore. Have you suddenly turned Calvinist? No more frippery?”

  “There was so much to organize, the food, the wine, I…I just forgot.”

  He looked at her for a long, sad moment. “I hope you got a good price,” he said, and went on up the stairs.

  She stood still a moment, shaken. Not just at being found out. It was the change in him that unnerved her. She had never before seen Richard despondent. During everything they had lived through, he had always faced the challenges head on, alchemizing dangers and turning them to his advantage, whether outsmarting the bishop of Norwich’s henchmen or bedeviling the Church’s murderous inquisitors. It almost seemed that he’d thrived on it. But this—being unable to provide for his family—had unmanned him. Honor did not know how to help him.

  When she rejoined her guests, Adam was rummaging in his burlap sack and pulled out a sleek, black pelt. The women gasped at its opulence, and Dorothy Hales exclaimed, “A sable!”

  Adam draped it around Isabel’s throat. “From the forests of Russia, Bel.” She beamed as she stroked the silken fur. “And what do you think of this?” he said. He lifted out a carved wooden figure the size of his hand, a Russian peasant woman so plump she was pear shaped, with clothes and a kerchief painted in bright red and yellow and green. He set it in Isabel’s hand, then winked at her. “Watch.”

  He pulled off the top half of the figure. Nested inside was a surprise: another figure, identical but smaller, a baby replica of the original. The guests cried “Ahhh” in delight.

  “They call it a matroshka,” Adam said.

  “From the Latin root, mater, I should think—mother,” John Cheke said helpfully. “What a quaint fertility symbol.”

  Isabel turned scarlet, tears springing to her eyes even as she kept smiling. She pressed her face against Carlos’s broad chest as though to hide her embarrassment. He wrapped a protective arm around her, his face beaming pride. “She was going to tell you later. Isabel is—”

  “With child,” Honor blurted. She’d guessed it the moment she saw Isabel’s happy tears.

  Isabel turned back, sniffling and smiling, and nodded to her.

  “When?” someone asked.

  “Wedding night,” Carlos said, grinning.

  Isabel playfully swatted his shoulder. “April,” she said.

  “A little April fool, just like its mother,” Adam said, and before she could snap a retort he kissed her cheek.

  Honor nudged past the guests and enfolded her daughter in her arms. “Oh, my darling.” She held Isabel so tightly it sent a stab of pain through her tender rib.

  Isabel saw her flinch and quickly let her go, whispering, “I’m sorry, Mother.” She knew how near death that bullet had left Honor. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, yes, fine. And so very happy for you.”

  The news of the baby sparked new life into the party and the guests threw themselves into eating and drinking with fresh gusto. Some bombarded Adam with questions about how the Russians lived, while others heatedly debated the Spaniards’ harsh rule in Peru, where Carlos was headed to captain the governor’s cavalry. And the dancing began. Honor wanted to hurry upstairs and give Richard the sweet news about the baby, but Henry Killigrew tugged her out to join the dance and was bowing to her to the strain of “Greensleeves” when Adam came to her side.

  “Can I speak to you?”

  His sober look was so at odds with his cheerful mood moments ago. What is wrong? Honor wondered. She excused herself to Henry and followed Adam to a deserted alcove behind the bowl
of spiced wine.

  “I’ve been round to the Kortewegs,” he said to her quietly. “It’s off. No betrothal. No wedding.”

  Honor was shocked. “But, I thought you and Margriet had an understanding.”

  “We did.”

  “What changed her mind?”

  “Not her. Her father.”

  “Why? He found you suitable enough at Michaelmas.”

  “That was before Cadiz.”

  Honor felt it as a blow. Margriet Korteweg, daughter of a wealthy Antwerp burgher; Adam Thornleigh, son of a near-bankrupt. “He’s refused his consent?”

  Adam nodded. He watched the dancing as though he was considering joining in, not for fun but for a diversion. He looked angry, Honor thought. And sounded angry. Not in an ominous way as though he meant to strike back, more like he had absorbed the deep insult and meant to move on, though the anger simmered. Did he love the girl? She was a catch, both pretty and rich, but Honor did not have the feeling that Adam’s heart was broken. His pride, yes. And his lively plans.

  “Don’t tell your father. Not tonight.” She knew it would wound Richard almost as much as Adam, and for the same reason. The Thornleighs were suddenly not good enough for the Kortewegs.

  “I hoped you might do that task. Better than me.” There was a hint of a smile in his eyes, self-deprecating, as though to acknowledge that he lacked her finesse. But she sensed it was to mask the stinging humiliation he felt at his loss. “Money,” he said with quiet fierceness. “It’s all that really matters, isn’t it?” He gave her a determined smile. “Well, from now on, money shall be my guiding star.”

  There was a flurry of sound through the room, voices abuzz with surprise. Honor realized the dancers had stopped. The music dwindled and died. She followed the gaze of her guests to the door. A lanky man stood there, bundled in a russet cloak against the cold autumn night. A draft of frosty air had rushed in with him, but it was not the cold that held the whole company frozen, including Honor. It was the extraordinary fact of his presence.