The Queen's Captive Read online

  Thornleigh said cautiously, “Your family has suffered, my lord, and for the loss of your father I am truly sorry. My family has suffered, too—my wife so grievously injured she was brought to the brink of death. And all for what? A pointless feud.”

  He stopped as though waiting for some response, his expression anxious with anticipation. But John said nothing.

  “But those hurts, hard as they were, are behind us now,” Thornleigh went on, “and that is where our feud belongs as well. My wife and I have come home, and we long to live in harmony with our neighbors. At this sacred time of year, it is my hope that we can forgive each other, as Our Savior taught us. Come, sir, shake my hand.”

  He stretched out his arm. John’s men stiffened.

  John did not move. Frances knew that his hatred ran as deep as hers. Deeper, if possible, for he had been the one to claim their father’s broken body from Thornleigh’s parlor, bludgeoned by this smiling devil.

  Thornleigh turned to Frances. “Mistress Grenville,” he said, and bowed. “Will you accept my heartfelt entreaty for peace between our houses? At least, do accept these meager offerings for your Christmas table? It is a start.”

  If she had been the man of the house she would have spit in Thornleigh’s face.

  Instead, John astonished her. “Master Thornleigh, you are wise to speak of Our Lord,” he said with icy civility. “It is no good thing for a country when neighbors live in discord. Nor for our souls.”

  “Bravely said, my lord,” Thornleigh replied, again extending his arm in friendship.

  John stepped forward and clasped Thornleigh’s hand.

  The armed men relaxed. Thornleigh smiled and guided John over to examine the gifts. They murmured together, looking like old friends, Frances thought. She felt her stomach roil and she thought she might be sick. Her brother had not asked her opinion.

  “Frances,” John said. “Have the maids take these things to the kitchen, would you?”

  She turned on her heel for the kitchen, glad to be going. She heard the far door open.

  “And now,” Thornleigh said eagerly, “the final gift.”

  Frances turned. A man walked in from the passage, rubbing his hands from the cold. It was the young, dark-haired man who had stood over her, tended her cut, taken her breath away.

  “My lord, I don’t believe you’ve met my son, Adam. He has just delivered a fine, white, Arab stallion from our stable to yours, which I hope you will accept as the seal of our accord.”

  Frances found herself walking toward the young man.

  “Adam,” Thornleigh said, “may I present Mistress Frances Grenville.”

  Adam bowed to her. “I trust that wound does not pain you, madam,” he said with a knowing smile. He took her hand and examined her forearm with the mock soberness of a doctor. “Did the horn of unicorn help?”

  For the second time he took her breath away. But he was wrong about the pain. The jolt of joy she felt at his touch brought an ache more acute than she had ever known.

  Riding home at a trot with his father and his uncle Geoffrey, their horses snorting steam, Adam took a bracing breath of the cold, crisp air. He’d never spent much time in England, had lived most of his adult life either aboard ships or managing his father’s shipping interests in Antwerp. But something in these silent, snowy hills and dales touched a heartstring he’d never felt vibrate until they had moved back home for good. For this was truly home. England. Colchester. Their manor house, their fields worked by diligent tenant farmers, their cloth works centered in the old abbey whose lead roofs were just visible now beyond the wooded horizon, all of it managed in their absence by his uncle Geoffrey. The storm of near bankruptcy was behind them, and Adam felt the happy relief that every seaman feels when he sails out of the blow and into the protected waters of his home port. He had a sense that he could make a life here. A life all his own.

  He had lost Margriet. He’d been surprised and disappointed by her submissive acceptance of her father’s command, and the sting of it was still fresh. But he wasn’t bitter. Just sobered. He felt he’d learned a hard lesson about the facts of life.

  The most brutal fact, and the most urgent, was that his family needed money. Sir William Cecil’s financial aid had got them home—had refurbished Speedwell and discharged their most threatening debts—but that had calmed only the surface of their troubled waters. Their debts went deeper. It would take a year, at the very least from spring sheepshearing to the late autumn cloth fairs of Antwerp, before his father’s cloth works showed some profit again. And Adam had launched a project with his father’s blessing that would, at first, sink them into even greater insolvency: He was building a new ship. So there was heavy weather to face still, and many trading runs to the Low Countries to pay it all off before they could relax.

  Still, Adam felt a ripple of exhilaration. He was keen to get on with it. He’d persuaded his father to let him manage the whole enterprise of the ship—from financing her construction, to overseeing her eventual trade operations—in return for a fifty percent share in the profits. Such profits, at this point, seemed a mirage that floated in some hazy future, but he felt confident that he could captain the mission to a successful landfall. Life seemed full of promise again.

  “God’s teeth,” Geoffrey exclaimed, looking at their four servants who were riding ahead, one upending a wineskin at his mouth. “Herbert’s at it again. Does the man think we’re blind?”

  “Let him drink,” Adam’s father said. “It’s cold.”

  “I intend to. Just as soon as he’s given me a swig.” He rode ahead, leaving Adam and his father exchanging indulgent smiles.

  “That went well, mending fences with Lord Grenville,” Adam said. “A good day’s work, I’d say.”

  His father grunted. “Don’t you believe that charade.” He shot a look at Adam, dark with warning. “John Grenville will never forgive.”

  Adam was startled. “You don’t take him at his word?”

  “Would you give your word to the man who killed your father?”

  “You acted in self defense, sir. And the defense of your wife.”

  “Know thy enemy—that’s what the military men say. Think like he thinks. No, Grenville will never forgive. I never expected him to.”

  “Then why go to his home? Why the”—what was the word he’d used?—“the charade?”

  “I found out exactly what I wanted to know. Anthony Grenville’s children don’t know about Honor’s conviction for heresy years ago. If they did, they wouldn’t have shown me even the pretense of civility.”

  Adam looked at him, admiring his shrewdness. Not for the first time. At sea, when he was young, he’d seen his father craftily navigate through many an unanticipated shoal that would have capsized lesser men. Yet, wasn’t his wariness now a little extreme? Grenville wasn’t a fool—he must realize that the Queen’s pardon was an edict, not open to challenge, and therefore the two families had to find some way to live as neighbors. “Well, that’s a bonus for us, sir,” he said. “He seems willing to let hostilities lapse, at least. That’s something.”

  His father halted his horse abruptly. Adam had to tug the reins of his own horse to stop, too, and turned back to face him.

  “It’s nothing,” his father said, his tone so urgent he sounded angry. “Nothing, you hear? Their hatred feeds on deeper grievances. They hate that we bought the abbey. Hate that we’re not acolytes of their religion. Hate that we stood in rebellion against the Queen. They hoard their hatred and let it fester, like rot. Never forget that. Never trust them.” He looked over his shoulder, back toward Grenville Hall. “He’d called out his famous archers, did you see? That was his warning shot across our bow.” He turned back and added grimly, “Be careful, Adam. Watch your back.”

  When the frenzy of Christmas and Twelfth Night was over, business on the Hythe, the wharf of Colchester Harbor on the River Colne, resumed its normal bustle. The river traffic was a shifting maze of ships, barges, wherries, and li
ghters, and on the quay the cranes squeaked and clanged as they hoisted sacks of cargo to and from the waiting wagons and carts. This winter traffic, though, was nowhere near as thick as it was at the end of summer for oyster season. The town of Colchester owned all the local oyster beds by virtue of a grant by King Richard I, and for over three hundred years, each autumn, a small fleet of fishing boats dredged the beds. In October the town staged a great oyster feast in the Moot Hall and hundreds of people from near and far came to eat Colchester oysters.

  But on this gray January day, activity on the Hythe was much more calm. Frances Grenville, on her big-boned bay gelding, followed by her steward, Dyer, on his mare, clopped past a knot of draymen gambling over dice during their dinner break. The men tugged off their caps and bowed to the baron’s sister, but she barely noticed their obeisance. She was looking for Adam Thornleigh. He was here, the harbor master had told Dyer. He was working with his shipwright.

  Palpitations of the heart beset Frances whenever she thought of Adam. It was a new sensation, one that slightly alarmed her, but greatly excited her, too. She had been near marriage once, last year. It had been a long time coming. As a girl she had made a vow to remain single as long as her dear friend, Princess Mary, was single. But last year Mary had become queen and had wed Prince Philip of Spain, and so Frances had agreed to marry a man her father approved, Edward Sydenham. But God had not approved. Sydenham had betrayed Mary in the dreadful Wyatt rebellion, and was hanged.

  Adam Thornleigh was very much alive, and the flutter Frances felt in her breast seemed to set the town’s church bells ringing. The fanciful thought pleased her, though of course the bells were only tolling the hour. She was so glad of the return to the old Catholic ways since Mary had brought the country back to the one true Church. Frances knew the sound of all the bells in all the town’s churches, most of them very old, built in Norman times. St. Peter’s, St. James the Great, St. Runwald’s, St. Martin’s, All Saints. St. Nicholas, with its spire rising above all the others. Holy Trinity, the oldest, dating back to Saxon times. And the venerable St. Mary at the Walls, so called because it was built against the ancient Roman walls, for Colchester was proudly the oldest town in England. The town’s coat of arms depicted its patron saint, St. Helena, the Roman emperor’s mother, who had found the true cross of Christ. Frances recalled how her father used to jumble bits of the town’s history, telling guests that Helena had been the mother of Old King Cole of nursery rhyme fame. In fact, Frances knew, the rhyme derived from King Cunobelin, Colchester’s heathen ruler when the Romans arrived. She felt content with all these ancient ties, for Colchester’s past had been intertwined with the life of her family for centuries. Tradition was a venerable thing. The past was a comfortable place.

  Then she saw Adam Thornleigh and the present lifted her like a swelling spring tide. He stood on a scaffold of green wood, gesturing orders to his shipbuilders. She had heard the local talk about his family’s brash return to business. How they had instantly reopened the former abbey where their cloth works were centered, with their looms and fulling mills and tenting yards. How they had hired scores of men. How Adam had forged ahead building this new ship—so new it was not yet born, a mere backbone with ribs. The smell of its fresh raw lumber cut through the ancient port smells of seaweed and fish. And he himself was new, was young, a man not yet thirty. While she was of an age with her childhood playmate, the Queen, a woman of thirty-nine. Yet he was a ship’s master, and something in that image thrilled her. She remembered him standing over her in the courtyard, taking charge of her wound. Imagine such a man taking mastery of her. She had to struggle to compose herself as Dyer called up to him to get his attention.

  Adam looked down from his scaffold and across the heads of the working men, and when he saw her, puzzlement flitted across his face. But only for a moment. He jumped down to the lower scaffold in one bound, springy as a young lion, then came down the ladder, and in a moment was standing before her, greeting her. He looked up at her on her mount and waited, his fists on his hips as he uttered a quick, formal greeting.

  She was so agitated she didn’t take in his words, she heard only his tone, a strained politeness, as though he was impatient to get back to work. And worse, as though he was wary of her. She needed to change that.

  “What is her name?” Frances asked.

  He frowned—a moment more of puzzlement—then quickly understood. “Oh no. No name until she’s launched. Bad luck.”

  “I hope, whatever you do name her, she will not take you too far from home. What is it the fishermen say? There be dragons.”

  He smiled. “But there be riches, too, in trade. I’ll tackle a dragon or two if the return on investment warrants.”

  He could tackle a dragon, she thought. So vigorous, so confident. And even this was new, this self-assurance of the burgeoning new class of gentry with their driving itch for profits. His father was certainly one of them. Not a knight who had done service to his monarch, nor the head of a long-landed family. Just an upstart merchant using every modern tool, procedure, and scheme to rake in cash. An upstart and a murderer.

  But she would not let her mind stray into that dark path. She would move beyond that grievance.

  “Well, Master Thornleigh, I wish you joy of her in whatever enterprise she may carry you to.”

  He made a gracious sweep of a bow, lowering his head. She saw a whorl of dark hair at the nape of his neck, just visible above the back of his collar. She imagined stroking it. It brought again the flutter to her breast.

  “I, too, have a new enterprise,” she said. “Or rather, an old enterprise that wants a fresh start. I wonder if I might interest you in a partnership.”

  He looked more puzzled than ever. “Me?”

  “You are surprised, I see. And no wonder. You and your father”—the word gave her pause, for mentioning the murderer still came hard—“you came to Grenville Hall to offer friendship, and I fear my brother’s coldness sent you away dissatisfied. I hope that we might remedy that, you and I. Be friends. Our two families are the most prominent in these parts after the earl, and should be on good terms, for the good of the whole community. Don’t you agree?”

  “I do, madam. I am of your mind. But what is this joint venture you speak of?”

  “A work of charity, sir. To aid the town.”

  “Ah,” he said, his body relaxing, a smile warming his face. “A fine idea.” He folded his arms across his chest as though settling in to discuss it. “What is your plan? A fund for the poor? There’s many a man hereabouts can’t scratch out enough work to feed his family. I can’t offer much cash at the moment, but I’ll be glad to join you with a helping hand as far as I’m able.”

  “No, not that.” The poor were Father Percy’s responsibility. “I want to help the new Grey Friars. Or, I should say, the old Grey Friars.” When she was a child these Franciscan monks in their gray habits, as well as monks and nuns of other orders—the Dominicans, Carthusians, Benedictines, Augustinians, Carmelites, Cluniacs—had seemed to be everywhere, in church and market, field and town, as ubiquitous as the birds. Then King Henry snatched all the monasteries and threw these holy men and women out into the world to fend for themselves. An attack on God himself, it had seemed to Frances. Many had gone abroad, while the King sold their vast monastic lands to anyone with the money, whether noble, gentleman, or upstart. But Queen Mary had now encouraged some of the holy men to return, to put on their habits again and live in the church properties that remained in her hands. “It is my intention,” Frances said with pride, “to endow a new priory here in Colchester.”

  “Priory?” He seemed not to understand. She remembered that he had lived mostly in the wicked German lands, molded by his wicked parents. He could not be blamed for their sins.

  “Yes, sir. A small monastery. To do the work of God.”

  His distaste was clear. “I see. Not the work of a carpenter or miller.” His meaning was equally clear, that the latter was honest work.
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  It was closer to blasphemy than Frances could allow. “Your family are still new to our good old ways here,” she said. “You would do well to show Father Percy and the mayor the faith of your hearts, for the salvation of your souls.”

  She had not meant it to sound as it did—like a threat—and he seemed to bristle. No, this was not at all what she wanted!

  “But more important,” she said quickly, “it would be a proof of our families’ newfound accord, a thing I am eager to see flourish. I am tired of rancor. It does no one good. I want to open the door of friendship. You came to my home in good faith. Do accept my good faith now.”

  Again, he seemed to relax. “You say well, madam.”

  “Then you will join me in this charity?”

  He took a moment, his eyes on her as though weighing profit and loss. “I will,” he said finally. “For friendship’s sake. I ask only one condition.”

  “And what is that, sir?”

  “No hair shirts.” He gave her a smile that made his teeth gleam and her breath stop short. “Let us have some merry monks.”

  Frances allowed herself a smile, too. This young lion could be sweetly tamed.

  Grenville Hall was finally quiet after the revelry of Twelfth Night, the Christmas guests gone home. The chattering children of cousins and friends sounded no more throughout the rooms of the venerable old house. It was late in the evening, and Frances and John sat a little distance away from the fire in the parlor, while his wife, Arabella, sat gossiping at the hearth with the last cousin as they plied their embroidery needles, her three spaniels slumbering at her feet. The room was a modern improvement that Arabella had insisted on adding—a parlor was au courant—though Frances knew that John preferred, as she did, the old fashion of relaxing in the dignified great hall in the evenings. This room, though lavishly appointed, felt as cramped as a laborer’s hut.

  “I wonder what his father will think of your partnership,” John mused aloud to Frances as he closed the account book of tenants’ rents that he had been perusing. She had told him about Adam Thornleigh agreeing to help her build the priory. It would not do for her brother to hear of it through the mean-spirited channels of gossip. By breaking the news herself, she could control his perception.