The Queen's Captive Page 8

  “Seems she cannot do without him.”

  Honor had heard as much. The government was dependent on the Antwerp money markets for loans to bridge the gap between its revenues and expenditures, and Sir Thomas Gresham, the Crown’s agent in Antwerp, had managed this cleverly and resourcefully until Mary came to the throne and sacked him. She had appointed a man whose religion was impeccable but whose inept dealings had forced England to pay ever higher interest rates, up to fourteen percent, leading to a crippling exchange rate. Now, she had been forced to rehire Gresham. One more example, Honor thought, of this Queen’s incompetence as a ruler. All that mattered to Mary was religion. Of that issue she was totally in control.

  Honor had shuddered at the recent reports. The burnings had begun. One of the first was John Hooper, bishop of Worcester, a tenacious Protestant. He had been in prison for months for preaching that the Catholic tenet of Christ being physically present in the eucharist wafer was absurd. Last week, they had burned him at the stake. With green twigs laid at his feet, and no merciful wind to quicken the flames, he had been roasted alive for three-quarters of an hour.

  Parry broke in on Honor’s thoughts. “The Queen’s physicians say she will be delivered of her child in April,” he said. “Cardinal Pole ordered a Te Deum sung at St. Paul’s in thanks to God.”

  Old news, Honor thought. She felt disappointed, frustrated. Parry was an able administrator, and fiercely loyal to the Princess, but he was not at court. He could not tell Honor what she needed to know for Elizabeth’s sake. The state of the Queen’s mind. The state of the Queen’s heart.

  Elizabeth went on, her tone icy with disdain, “Mayhap, when this blessed royal child arrives, its mother will pull in her claws and molest me no longer.”

  Honor said sternly, “Do not believe it, my lady. You are in danger as long as the Queen fears you.”

  “What is there to fear?” she wailed. “I am her prisoner. I can do nothing!”

  “You can draw men to you, and she knows it.” As I know it, Honor thought, and as Parry knows it, and Sir William. And how many others? How many men of wealth and influence would rally to this girl’s side if needed? But that must wait. Before she could consider such things, she first had to keep Elizabeth alive.

  “My lady,” she said, “you must ask Bedingfield to write another letter.”

  Elizabeth rolled her eyes. “Another plea to the council? That dump of deaf old men? It took me weeks just to get the toad to take my dictation, and all for what? They refused my every request.”

  Honor knew how this had stung Elizabeth. The council had ignored her as though she were a common felon, granting nothing she had asked for. No move closer to London. No more ladies to attend her. No writing materials. No hope.

  “I don’t mean a letter to the council,” Honor clarified. “I mean a letter to the Queen herself.”

  “Why? She hates me.”

  “You have the power to tame that hate. Quiet her fears. Calm her jealousy.”

  “Jealousy?” Elizabeth said, incredulous. “I am a captive and she is queen!”

  “She is a woman.” A plain woman hopelessly in love with her husband, by all accounts, Honor thought. A woman of thirty-nine, nervously facing her first childbirth. “She is human. She once suffered as you do now. She was an outcast, stripped of her titles and rank in the days when her mother was cast aside. You and she have more in common than you think. Write to her, as woman to woman. Be kind. Be gentle. Wish her and her baby well. It may do you a world of good.”

  Elizabeth was studying her with a quizzical look. “I know not how to judge you, Mistress Thornleigh.”

  “I think I have proved myself,” Honor said with a nod at Parry that said I brought you him.

  “That you have. Yet you are full of contrary advice. ‘Stir the people’s anger’ one moment. ‘Love the Queen’ the next. I know not what to make of you.”

  “Make me right. Follow my advice. Read the book by Machiavelli I brought you, and follow his advice.” She quoted the Italian: “Only those means of security are good, are certain, are lasting, that depend on yourself and your own vigor.”

  Elizabeth put on her most haughty face, unwilling to be pushed. “I shall consider it.”

  6

  The Rosary

  March 1555

  Honor wiped a trickle of sweat from her brow, her spade idle in her hands as she took in what Adam had just said. “A project?” she asked warily. “What kind of project?”

  She was preparing the soil for transplanting some rose bushes to the borders of her herb garden. Dirty knobs of snow clung stubbornly to hollows in the earth, like vagrants claiming squatting rights, and despite the body warmth the work generated, the March wind chilled her nose and fingertips. She had allowed herself a few days at home before returning to Elizabeth at Woodstock, and in this brief time she longed to start things growing. The Princess was proving a frustratingly obstinate pupil, but of this endeavor—tending her flowers and her herb garden—Honor was master.

  But Adam’s news was serious. To steady her spade, Honor jammed it into the garden loam. That shot a pain to her rib that made her wince.

  “Here, let me,” he said. He took the spade from her, set his boot on the blade’s top edge, and sank it effortlessly into the earth. “Why not let the servants do this for you?”

  “I like doing it. What kind of project?”

  “A monastery.”

  She stared at him. He couldn’t be serious.

  “Just a small one,” he said. “A priory, she calls it.”

  “I don’t care if it’s big or small or covered with honey and feathers. Why involve yourself in such a thing? Especially with Frances Grenville.”

  “It’s hardly involvement.” He flung a spadeful of stony dirt toward the raspberry canes trained on a wooden lattice, and frowned as pebbles clattered against the latticework. “What did you plant last year, stones?”

  “Roses like stony soil. How much are you donating?”

  He rested his hand on the top of the spade handle and gave her an indulgent smile. “Don’t worry, it’s just a token. It’ll be mostly her money.”

  “Then why involve you at all?”

  With a shove of his boot, he dug the spade in again. “She wants someone to help her make decisions.”

  “There’s her brother.”

  “You’re right. The fact is, she has another motive. Her idea is to mend the rift between us, the two families.”

  Honor took back the spade and hacked the soil with a vigor that took the place of the retort on the tip of her tongue: a little late for that. “She could have just invited me to supper,” she muttered as she dug.

  Adam shrugged. “I think she’s a rather lonely old lady.”

  Honor had to laugh. “She wouldn’t appreciate you calling her old. She’s of an age with her friend the Queen. Forty, perhaps.”

  He seemed mystified at the correction. “Exactly.”

  She laughed again, but more soberly, her suspicion all but confirmed. Adam might be unaware of what a handsome young dog he was, but she doubted that Frances Grenville was unmoved. When would he take a wife? she wondered. They had heard that the Korteweg girl had hastily been married to someone else, a man whose fortune satisfied her father, and it seemed to Honor that Adam had put that misadventure behind him, his heart relatively unscathed. She was glad. She hoped he would settle down with an English girl here at home. But would he want to, given the anxious atmosphere of Queen Mary’s regime?

  She looked to the house where a pair of swifts darted past the eaves, trading undulations in flight as though they flew as one. The late afternoon sun lit up the windows of her second-story study with a rosy gold light that warmed her in the deepest part of herself. Speedwell House. Home. She heard giggling, and looked down to the water meadow where two maids were strolling up to the house with baskets full of fresh cut rushes. A pair of swans glided on the stream. Behind the house, a horse in the stable whinnied. There was a fai
nt smell of wood smoke. How she loved this place.

  But, she thought with a sigh, there was still much to do to get it back to normal. The rooms still felt hollow, echoing. After the rebellion the Queen’s agents had confiscated all their moveable goods, and so far Richard had replaced only the most essential furniture—beds, kitchen blocks, dining table for the great hall, desks, not much else. Too much debt. And he was too busy working day and night to reestablish his cloth works, since the Queen’s men had taken away everything there, too, looms and all. But they were making progress, step-by-step, and she felt sure Richard would have the business prospering again within a year or so. Speedwell House would soon feel like home again. She cast her gaze across her herb garden. She loved how the hyssop and thyme and winter savory stayed green all through the winter. And soon the speedwells around the sundial would blossom in a carpet of blue. She couldn’t wait for warmer days so she could sow parsley seeds and lavender and lemon balm. She took in a deep breath of the chilly spring air, fresh and full of promise.

  Then felt a shiver. The Grenvilles had always cast hungry eyes on Richard’s property. “Monasteries,” she said with a grunt as she dug up a new spadeful of stony earth. “Men forsaking the world and giving themselves to God. What’s he supposed to do with them? Such nonsense.”

  “It’s an insurance measure,” Adam said.

  “What is?”

  “My help with the thing. Shows we’re conforming. These days, that’s important.”

  She stopped digging. He was looking at her with a serious expression. “And it wouldn’t kill us to befriend the Grenvilles,” he said. “There’s plenty of preferment at court, and access to wealthy investors, and no one’s closer to the Queen than Frances Grenville. Good to have her on our side.”

  “Frances or Queen Mary?”

  “Both.”

  “We don’t befriend tyranny, Adam. Seventeen men the Queen has burned this month. Three right here in Colchester. And she’s just getting started.”

  “They were raving radicals. Hot-Gospelers. We’re not.”

  “No,” she said tartly, not liking his dismissive tone, as though those innocent victims’ suffering had nothing to do with him. “No, we conform.”

  He nodded, relaxing. “Exactly.” He gave her a gentle smile. “It’s just a small priory. Ten or twelve monks going about their foolish, monkish business. What’s the harm?”

  Richard saw it differently. “I don’t like it,” he said at supper in the great hall, swishing the last of his wine in his goblet. “I told you, Adam, you can’t trust a Grenville.”

  “Can’t trust her brother, you said. This involves only the lady.”

  “Same thing. Same blood. Why’s she meddling with us?”

  Adam looked about to speak, but then slung one arm over the back of his chair and merely shook his head at his father as though to keep himself from arguing.

  Honor spooned up the last of her apple custard, thinking. The three of them were alone. Richard’s sister, Joan, and her husband, Geoffrey, visiting from Blackheath, had gone upstairs to the gallery to play cards. The other members of the household who supped with them—Fletcher, the new steward; Dorothy, the housekeeper, and her husband Stephen, the chamberlain; Alford, the clerk—had all gone to finish evening chores. Outside, some children, likely Dorothy’s boys, were squealing over a game of football. Honor could hear the thump of the pig’s bladder against the courtyard wall.

  “Sir,” Adam said quietly, “you take this grudge too far.”

  Richard banged down his goblet. “You didn’t see Anthony Grenville fire a lead ball into your stepmother!”

  She felt the tremor reach her at the other end of the table. Not just the bang of the goblet but the tremor of memory. Sparks from Grenville’s pistol. The searing bullet.

  Adam bristled. “I saw what it did to her.” He looked at Honor for vindication. “When Isabel sent you across the Channel to my care, I saw.”

  “And no care could have been more attentive,” she assured him. “No one doubts that, Adam.” She wanted their argument over. Arriving in Antwerp she’d been delirious, and she recalled nothing of the trauma of her recovery. It was history, and she had other things on her mind. Elizabeth.

  “Then how could you so blatantly do something that could bring Honor to the Queen’s notice?” Richard challenged his son. “To associate with the Grenvilles is to join the Queen’s circle. That’s dangerous for Honor and you should know it.”

  “I believe I know as well as anyone how to protect this family,” Adam said with some warmth. “And I believe that the best way to do that is to befriend the people who wield the power in this benighted realm.”

  His black-and-tan setter had ambled over to his chair and laid her nose on his knee. He stroked the dog’s head and scratched behind her ear, gaining control of himself. “Sir,” he said more calmly, “I don’t dispute the evil or the madness that drove Anthony Grenville to attempt murder. But can we blame his children for that? He is dead and you’ve been pardoned and they want peace. I say peace is the only way to live sensibly as neighbors.”

  “They say they want peace. What they want is retribution, starting with the abbey,” Richard said, jerking a thumb toward his cloth works factory across the stream from the house. “Do you think for one moment they’ll forget how their old aunt suffered under King Henry?” Honor noted his word suffered. The king had sent soldiers to enforce his seizure of all the monasteries and nunneries throughout England, and the story was that the late Eleanor Grenville, the abbess here, had been raped.

  “They can’t blame you for that. You weren’t the only one who bought monastic lands,” Adam pointed out reasonably. “The king sold them on the open market. The Grenvilles know that.”

  “All they care about is that I’m the one who bought the abbey and set up my looms, and they will always see that as blasphemy. I tell you, they will never rest until this property is in their hands and they’ve sent us packing.”

  Adam heaved a sigh, not conceding but not willing to fight. “You live too much in the past, sir.”

  Richard said darkly, “It’s them. They won’t let the past go.”

  They sat in silence. From the kitchens came the sound of sloshing water, the scullery maids washing the pots. Someone across the courtyard was hammering.

  Honor set down her spoon. It was time to speak her mind. “I think we can make something out of this,” she said. “Friends with the Grenvilles, but on our terms. Adam, do you have plans to see Frances anytime soon?”

  Both men turned to her. Adam looked intrigued, Richard wary.

  “Yes, tomorrow, in Colchester,” Adam said. “At the site she’s picked for her priory.”

  “Good. I’ll come with you. I want to meet her.”

  “Really? You seemed so cool to the idea before.”

  “I’m getting warmer.”

  Richard’s eye narrowed in suspicion. “Honor? What are you scheming?”

  She looked at him. “I want Frances Grenville to introduce me to the Queen.”

  The next morning Honor and Richard’s sister, Joan, helped him at the abbey. He was supervising workmen as they hefted in a new loom, setting it in the nave beside five others newly bought on credit, all smelling of fresh wood. Honor and Joan oversaw a team of maids sweeping out the floors of the workrooms and washing windows. Once, these had been the monks’ offices and dormitories. Now, they would store bales of wool, as they had before the family fled last year. They would also serve as Richard’s headquarters for tenting and fulling the finished broadcloth both here and at the manor at Blackheath managed by Joan’s husband, Geoffrey.

  Spring wind gusted through the open doors, carrying the scent of wet earth and sending last year’s wool fluff dancing through the nave. Birds chittered outside, busily building nests in the belfry and on the sills of the tall clerestory windows. Honor liked how the younger servants, babies when King Henry had dissolved the monasteries, found nothing odd that the clack and whoo
sh of looms, and the paddle thumps of fullers, should echo in the airy space that had once quivered to the chanting of monks. She liked that the clinging odor of incense was being pushed out by the fecund smells of spring.

  Yet, as she opened windows and watched the girls sweep, she felt a pinprick of dread. How far did Queen Mary, in her zealous rush to Catholicize the realm, intend to go? “Joan,” she said, as her sister-in-law passed by with a pail of water, “have you heard anything in Blackheath about the Queen wanting some of the old monasteries back?”

  “Who says that?”

  “Oh, there was just some talk in the market square. A couple of lawyers visiting from Cambridge. They thought she might demand it, monastic lands returned to the Church.”

  “Nonsense,” Joan scoffed. “It’s been over fifteen years. She wouldn’t dare try.”

  Honor felt the same. It would be political madness, antagonizing hundreds of families who had bought up the old monastic lands. But she had seen religion-inspired madness before. This queen had already provoked a rebellion that had nearly cost her her throne, all because she’d insisted on marrying Philip of Spain. And the burnings continued, many of the victims illiterate villagers confused by twenty years of seesawing official orthodoxy, in which their parish priests had changed doctrines at each new reign. Young people who had grown up being told the pope was the devil were now thrown in prison for disparaging him, and many were going to the stake barely understanding what they had done wrong. It was barbarous. All at the command of this zealot queen.

  At noon, she and Richard strolled back to the house arm in arm, Joan beside them, satisfied with their morning’s labor, and hungry for the cold roast pork and borage salad the cook had promised.

  “Geoffrey’s forgotten about dinner,” Joan said with a sigh, nodding to the top of the slope where her husband was regaling a group of men outside the brew house and getting their laughter. “I’ll go fetch him.” She went ahead.

  Honor and Richard carried on alone. They didn’t talk about her “wild gambit,” as Richard had called her plan to see the Queen. They’d been through it all last night and again at breakfast, Richard protesting the danger, Honor determined to go ahead. If she was going to keep Elizabeth alive, she needed to know what the Queen was thinking. She needed to be inside the court. Richard had finally thrown up his hands, unable to budge her. Now, as they crossed the footbridge over the stream and carried on up the sloping lawn to the house, they stuck to safe subjects: the quickest feasible schedule of debt repayment, and how many weavers and fullers they could hire.