by Barbara Kyle
He blinked at her like someone confused or lost. “I heard everything you said. You—” There was a shout. He flinched and looked over his shoulder. The shout had come from the city gate, behind him at the foot of the street.
Isabel tried to think. The rain stung her face. She held up her hand as a shield from it. “Martin, if you’re bent on leaving Wyatt’s army, I accept that … if your conscience does. But if so, come back with me to London. Help me. Father is in hiding somewhere, sick and weak. Help me find him and get him to safety.”
“Isabel, I can never go back to London! Don’t you see that? I’d be arrested and hanged. I can never see my family again … my parents, my sisters.” His voice cracked. “You’re all I …”
There were more shouts, frantic, again from the city gate.
“What about Robert’s family?” Isabel stammered. “How can you leave them? Meg … his children.”
Martin let out a shuddering breath of exhaustion. Isabel saw that he had no more strength, no reserves to deal with anything but the moment. All that was keeping him going was his conviction that she was coming with him to France. Now.
“Martin, I will marry you. Gladly. Right now if you want. But I cannot leave.”
They stared at each another. Rain dripped from Martin’s curls. He was shivering. “Isabel, I’m begging you. Do not desert me. Please.”
She saw the raw loneliness in his eyes, saw a glimmer of the horror he had endured with Robert in the night woods.
He took her hand and pressed it to his chest. He whispered, as though it was the only word he had left. “Please.”
Her heart twisted. She thought of the day four months ago when they’d made their betrothal vow. How many times since then had she glowed inside, feeling the strength of that vow. It had meant everything. It was her world. But a week ago her family had been shattered and the world had changed. She looked into his red-rimmed eyes. “Martin, do not ask me to abandon my father.”
There was a trumpet blast. Martin twisted around. The alarm bell in the armory clanged. He blanched as understanding struck. “My God, it’s an attack!” he cried. “It’s the Duke of Norfolk!”
People were running into the street.
“Archers!” a captain galloping on horseback yelled toward the armory. “To your posts!”
A citizen splashed through the mud toward his house and shouted up to his wife at a window, “Bolt the doors!”
A woman in a doorway cried, “They’re going to close the gates!”
Martin swiped rain from his face, trying to collect himself. He grabbed Isabel’s shoulders. “We can get out through the postern gate at the east wall … then get a boat, be married in France. Come! Isabel, I beg you!”
She looked around wildly. Soldiers were pounding out of the armory. A horseman galloped up from the gate, head bent, cape flying. The woman with the firewood staggered to reach her hovel. Shouts of fear ricocheted through the street.
A cannon boomed from the city wall. Martin flinched. “They’re coming!”
Isabel’s horse thundered over the road. Her breaths tore at her throat. The driving rain blurred her vision. Seeing the line of bare, black trees tossing in the wind near the top of Spitell Hill, she kicked the horse’s sides again, and the horse, heaving breaths itself, struggled up the slope. Just before they reached the line of trees, Isabel pulled back on the reins. The horse halted, panting steam, tossing its head in the rain. Isabel sat catching her breath.
She had made it. As the city gates were closing she had bolted through and galloped across the Strood Bridge. She had seen the terrifying sight of the Duke of Norfolk’s cannon ahead of her, his soldiers hurriedly placing the guns. She had galloped toward a track that wound around the back of the hill, and was amazed when no one followed her, the Duke’s men too busy with the guns to notice her, or care. She had made it up the hill, and now she sat her horse, looking back the way she had come, and aching with regret over Martin. Where he was going, she would not follow.
She heard a horse cough. She twisted around in the saddle. The sound had come from beyond the line of trees. She eased her mount forward. Stopping under the dripping boughs, she stared at the scene ahead. The mass of Norfolk’s troop was ranged on the far side of the hill, looking down onthe Strood Bridge. There were hundreds of them, horse and infantry, all wearing the white coats with red crosses of the London bands. Their soggy pennons flapped in the wet wind. Their horses whinnied and pawed the earth.
There was a boom from Norfolk’s cannon below. A captain on the hill yelled, “Charge!”
But, incredibly, the soldiers on the hill ignored him. No one moved.
A lieutenant drew out his sword. He cantered to the front of the host and waved his sword and cried, “To Wyatt! We are all Englishmen!”
Isabel gaped. The lieutenant was committing treason.
There was silence. Then, harness jangled as ten or twelve horsemen tentatively rode forward to join the lieutenant. The jangling grew louder as more horsemen trotted forward. Then foot soldiers moved too, first at a walk, then at a run, and suddenly the whole host was swarming down the hill in a thunder of feet and hooves, and rising above this din the voiced roar crested, as if from one throat: “All Englishmen! To Wyatt! To Wyatt!”
They reached the bottom of the hill and surged past the Duke and his guns. They threw down their pikes and longbows and sheathed their swords and poured across the bridge. Wyatt’s soldiers on the walls cheered. The gate clattered open. The London troops rushed inside the town.
The Duke of Norfolk watched, dumbfounded. He rode in a frantic circle around his handful of stunned officers. Then he stopped, spurred his horse, and bolted off in the direction of London. A few loyal men galloped off behind him. The few who had been left manning the Duke’s guns ran across the bridge into Rochester.
Isabel could hardly believe what she’d just witnessed. The London Whitecoats had come over to the patriots’ side en masse. Whatever setback Wyatt’s cause had suffered on Wrotham Hill, this was a heady vindication. London, now, would surely be his.
As she watched the last of the Whitecoats run across the bridge and into the embrace of Wyatt’s army, her borrowed cape billowed around her and its soggy flaps lashed her, and in her mind she heard Martin whisper, pleading, “I’m begging you! Come!”
But Martin was gone. By nightfall he would be on a ship bound for France. The fastness of their vow had been tested, and it had snapped. Martin had been the one to test it, but she had been the one to break it. But why, oh why had he demanded that her loyalty be forged upon betraying her father and Wyatt?
Beneath the dripping boughs she leaned over and clutched the horse’s mane in misery, and wept.
28
Appeal
Bishop Gardiner shouted, red faced, “The Queen must come out, Sydenham! She must acknowledge our decision!”
In the open doorway Edward Sydenham held up his hands to the bishop in a gesture that begged for calm. Inwardly, though, he was as shaken as the bishop and the other royal councilors seated at the long oak table. They had arrived at this early morning emergency meeting at Whitehall still staggering from the report of the defection of the Duke of Norfolk’s London Whitecoat troops at the Strood Bridge, only to hear from the Earl of Pembroke the even more alarming news: Wyatt’s army had just left Rochester and was marching toward London.
The Queen was still sequestered in her private chamber. She had not yet been told that Wyatt was on the march. Her councilors, apprehensive of feeding palace panic, were waiting until she joined them privately. Nevertheless, rumor had crept through the hushed corridors. Courtiers and ladies-in-waiting whispered in chilly gallery corners. Servants fretted to one another under shadowed stairways while the cold morning ashes of the palace hearths remained unswept. Soldiers of the Queen’s Guard murmured in the armory, nervously eyeing the stores of spears and pikes. But outside, where the rain drummed on the cobbles of the empty courtyards, no men-at-arms were massing. It was as t
hough the palace inmates felt besieged—by fear, by rumor, and by the pounding rain. Everyone was waiting for some direction from the Queen.
Edward closed the door to keep the conversation from being heard beyond the council chamber. “Her Majesty is preparing to join us, Your Grace,” he replied, keeping his voice controlled. “She asks your pardon for the delay, and asks your patience.”
Edward’s deference to these lords was ingrained, and his acceptance of their authority unshakable, yet he could not help enjoying a shiver of pleasure that the Queen now trusted him more than any of her councilors. The aura of being her intimate gave him immense status. But his thrill of pleasure was short-lived, for it was not consolation enough. There were still great dangers. First, there was the Queen’s precarious position. His future depended on her supremacy, but despite the successful, if belated, efforts of council members to raise a good number of troops to defend the city, the Queen still had no field army.
And then there was Richard Thornleigh. Edward’s agents had not yet tracked him down. None of the business associates whose names Thornleigh’s daughter had supplied had been found harboring him. And, hard on the heels of the news of the defection of Norfolk’s troops, the girl herself had come back to Edward’s house late last night reporting her failure, too, to find her father with whatever family friends she had apparently gone to see. She’d come back wet, exhausted, and disconsolate.
Edward watched the gray rain slide down the windows beyond the council table and tried to quell his rising panic. If the Queen’s officers found Thornleigh first and brought him to trial, then Edward’s victory here, his acceptance into the most powerful chamber in the land—his whole, carefully crafted world—would crumble.
Lord Paulet’s whine cut into Edward’s thoughts. “But we are agreed, are we not?” Paulet asked, wincing from his chronic headache. He looked at the other men around the table. “We are all firm? About Pembroke replacing the Duke?”
“Yes, yes,” Bishop Gardiner insisted. He thumped the table. “And the Queen must accept it.”
Edward glanced at Lord Pembroke who stood at a window with his back to the room. As the new commander of the Queen’s forces Pembroke was keeping very quiet, Edward thought.
“The real question, my lords,” Sir Richard Riche snapped, “is whether our troops will accept it. Or, indeed, accept any authority at all.”
“How do you mean, sir!” Lord Howard huffed, taking the remark as a personal attack, for he was in charge of the city’s defenses. His bloodshot eyes fixed Riche belligerently.
“I mean the shameful goings-on at St. Katherine’s wharf last night,” Riche said.
“What goings-on?” the Bishop asked irritably.
“Did you not hear, Your Grace?” Riche answered, barely controlling his scorn. “The Imperial envoys departed and—”
“And good riddance,” the Bishop shot back. “Their presence was an intolerable aggravation.”
“Whatever their presence was, Your Grace, it has now been removed.” Riche’s lip almost curled as he spoke. “God only knows what they will report to the Emperor, what tales of English barbarity. It was bad enough they felt obliged toslip away in the night, afraid of attack from the populace. They stole aboard an Antwerp merchant sloop that lay in the river about to sail, and left their horses to follow. But, Your Grace, obviously you have not heard the worst. Once the envoys were embarked from the water stairs, their escort of the Queen’s Guard shouted insults after them.”
“What?” Gardiner asked, shocked despite himself.
“Yes. Hurled insults over the water. Fired their arquebuses into the air in a show of contempt.” Riche looked at Lord Howard with a sneer he made no effort to mask. “I ask you, can such men be relied upon?”
“I warn you, Riche,” Howard sputtered, “I’ll not have my authority questioned like this!”
“That’s the point!” Riche shouted. “There is no authority!”
Howard shoved back his chair with a screech of its legs. Riche jumped up and jutted his furious face into Howard’s. The Bishop had to pull the two men apart.
Lord Paulet was rubbing his brow, ignoring the fracas. He spoke quietly, as if to himself. “Even Ambassador Renard asked me what would happen if the Londoners rise up against the Queen. ‘What will become of me?’ he asked …”
Edward longed to say something. He felt that Paulet had touched on the nub of the crisis: where did the loyalty of the Londoners lie? With a prickle of apprehension at addressing these ruling nobles, he opened his mouth to speak, but Lord Clinton spoke before he could. “We must send out a fresh army,” Clinton insisted with sudden energy. “Immediately. Cut off Wyatt before he gets to London.”
Bishop Gardiner blanched. “And have them rush over to him like the last bunch?”
“That was a direct result of Norfolk’s idiotic, premature attack,” Clinton said. “He was supposed to wait for Abergavenny’s arrival at Gravesend. If he had, and they had advanced together to Rochester as ordered, this disaster would never have happened. But now look!” He threw up his hands and got up and began to pace. “Almost eight hundred men gone over to Wyatt, and Abergavenny sitting alone outside Gravesend—unable to trust his own men now, I might add. Yes, his cavalry achieved a stirring victory at Wrotham Hill, but even that is turning against us, because the excesses the cavalry committed there have soured many of his foot soldiers. He’s had more desertions. The country people around his camp mistrust him. He’s even having difficulty getting food from them.” Clinton placed his knuckles on the table and leaned over with straight arms to emphasize his point. “No, we must raise a fresh force in London. Demand that the Guilds provide additional contingents. And none but householders this time, no unreliable substitutes. We must equip them and send them out to stop Wyatt!”
There were groans. The others shook their heads, or looked away, or grimly closed their eyes. Paulet droned on, almost to himself “… and now Renard fears the King of Denmark means to join the French …”
This brought a chorus of clashing voices:
“The Emperor must send an Imperial fleet to patrol the Channel against the French!”
“The Emperor is in Brussels. It would take a week to get a message to him.”
“We haven’t got a week!”
Edward’s impulse to speak shriveled. The councilors were so embroiled in quarreling and conjuring up enemies they would not deal with the overwhelming problem of London. But what could he do? He was no soldier. He loathed the feeling that events were beyond his control.
“Sydenham!” The Bishop’s voice blasted Edward’s thoughts. “The Queen must come out!”
“Enter.”
“Pardon, Your Majesty,” Edward said, opening the Queen’s door, “but your councilors anxiously await your presence and …” His final words dwindled. He had expected to find the Queen bustling about, preparing to attendthe conference. Instead, she sat in her darkened chamber with a blanket on her lap and a prayer missal in her hands as if she had no intention of stirring. Frances, lighting the votive candles on the Queen’s prie-dieu, turned to Edward. He felt a ripple of revulsion as the two women looked at him from the gloom of their pious niche like two spiders spinning in a corner.
“It’s Candlemas, Edward,” Frances gently reminded him.
“But, Your Majesty, the rebels are—”
“We deal with the things most needful, sir,” the Queen said, a quiet reprimand. “Our souls’ salvation lies therein. Today we mark the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary, in reverence, before we turn to the vile misdeeds of men.”
About to protest, Edward caught himself and bowed his head contritely. “Of course.”
Frances beamed at him.
“However, Your Majesty,” Edward ventured, “matters of some urgency require your attention.”
“Which matters?”
He shrank from blurting out the worst, that Wyatt’s army was on its way to London’s gates and that the Queen’s defenses were i
n a shambles. He would let the lords break such unwelcome news. “Your councilors have thought fit to appoint Lord Pembroke to command Your Majesty’s forces,” he said. “Your consent is needed, Your Grace.”
The Queen’s face hardened. “Pembroke is a desperate choice.”
Because he’s a Protestant, Edward thought uncomfortably. But even the Queen must know that Pembroke was all the council had. Already, a quarter of the members of the greater council had slunk away to their country seats to await an outcome. They would emerge when it was all over, to support the victor, whether rebel or monarch. “He is an able soldier, Your Majesty,” Edward suggested. “With much experience.”
“Aye,” the Queen muttered bitterly, “but will he use it to oppose the traitors, or to join them?”
Edward said nothing. His suspicions were not far off the Queen’s.
In the silence, the arrogant eyes of Philip of Spain stared down on the three of them from the Titian portrait. The votive candle flames twitched. Rain dripped from the corner of the casement.
“My lady,” Frances said gently, “you asked me to remind you to thank Sir Edward.” Edward smiled. He had sent letters with the departing envoys, directed to his contacts in the banking house of Fugger and other powerful men in the money markets of Antwerp, completing his transactions over the Queen’s loan. His efforts would bring her the funds she desperately needed.
The Queen brightened. “So I did, Frances. My heartfelt thanks go to you, sir. The loan arrangement was well done. I shall not forget you.”
Edward felt emboldened. “Your Majesty, may I speak?”
The Queen nodded.
“It is too long since your London subjects were graced with your presence. And, sadly, many of them have been cowed by the traitors’ actions. They crave your guidance. Let the Londoners see you, Your Majesty. A few words from their sovereign would do more to inspirit them than all the gold of Antwerp.”