by Barbara Kyle
A drone of apprehension eddied through the hall. Isabel saw Legge scowling and nodding his head. He was not alone. Everywhere, men of property were nodding in nervous agreement at the Queen’s warning of pillage.
Queen Mary seemed buoyed by the response. Her voice rang out, “And this I further tell you, as your Queen. I cannot say how a mother loves her children, for I was never mother of any. But certainly a prince and governor may as naturally and as earnestly love subjects as the mother does her child. Then assure yourselves that I, being your sovereign lady and Queen, do as earnestly and as tenderly love and favor you. And I, thus loving you, cannot but think that you as heartily and faithfully love me.”
This brought a low murmur of praise from the listeners. Many began to smile.
“And concerning my intended marriage,” the Queen went on fervently, “against which the rebels pretend their quarrel, understand that I entered not into that treaty without advice of all our Privy Council, who considered the great advantages that might ensue from it, both for the wealth of our realm and also of our loving subjects. Touching myself, I assure you I am not so desirous of wedding that for my own pleasure I will choose where I lust. I thank God, to whom bethe praise thereof, that I have hitherto lived a virgin, and I doubt not but with God’s grace I could live so still. But if it might please God that I might leave some fruit of my body behind me to be your governor, I trust you would not only rejoice thereat, but also I know it would be to your great comfort.”
These personal admissions—so intimate, so generous—brought more warm smiles from the crowd. The Queen seemed to take courage from them. “And in the word of a Queen,” she went on, head high, “I promise you that if it shall not reasonably appear to the nobility and commons of Parliament that this marriage shall be for the benefit and advantage of all the whole country, then I will abstain, not only from this marriage, but also from any other whereof any peril may ensue to this most noble realm of England.”
“God bless Your Majesty!” a hoarse voice cried.
The Queen smiled. “Wherefore now, as good and faithful subjects pluck up your hearts! And like true men stand fast with your lawful prince against these rebels, both our enemies and yours. If you do, I am minded to live and die with you, and strain every nerve in your cause, for this time your fortunes, goods, honor, safety, wives and children are in the balance. Fear not the rebels!” she resolutely concluded. “I assure you I fear them nothing at all!”
There was silence. Then a cheer. Then a chorus of cheers. Caps flew in the air. An old man began to weep.
Beaming, the Lord Mayor led the Queen from the dais, beckoning her out of the hall toward the private Council Chamber. Aldermen surged after them. Citizens in the hall, buzzing with excitement, began to push back out toward the street, eager to spread the report of the rousing speech. The crowd flowed in several directions at once, and Isabel was knocked and shoved, then caught up in one of the moving streams and borne outside to the courtyard. Trying to withstand the current she pushed her way to the edge of the crowd. She was tugging her disheveled clothes back into order when she looked up and froze. A man’s body hung from a gibbet right before her, his eyes staring in death.
“He was caught approaching the Duke of Suffolk’s house,” a voice behind her said. “Bringing a message from Wyatt.”
She twisted around. It was Sir Edward Sydenham. “A message?” she asked shakily.
“But the writing was in code. The man died before divulging its meaning.”
She looked back at the dead man, executed right here at Guildhall as a warning. His forehead was one livid bruise with a band of small puncture wounds clotted with dried blood. His thumbs were black. He’d been tortured. Isabel felt suddenly weak … her vision darkened … she felt dizzy.
Sydenham’s arm slid around her waist. “Come,” he said gently, supporting her, “let me take you home.”
Carlos halted on the frozen stream that snaked toward the village of Dartford. The bank rose to the height of his shoulders, and beyond it he could make out a soldier trudging across the path from the village. Carlos ducked. The bank hid him from the soldier’s view, and he was satisfied that his horse, left hobbled behind a church a quarter mile back, was well out of sight, too. The stream had seemed the ideal route to penetrate the enemy’s camp, but now he could hear the soldier coming toward him, and out here on the barren surface of the ice he was exposed. Wanting to look like a villager, he’d brought no weapon except the dagger under his sheepskin coat. His right hand itched for a sword.
He looked over his shoulder. A willow tree grew aslant the stream, its branches draping down the bank. On his knees he slid across the ice to the tree, grappled the trailing branches, and pulled himself behind their curtain. He noticed that the ice here was bluer, thinner. But noticed it too late. The soldier’s boots were already rustling the dry cattailson the bank, right beside the willow. On his knees, Carlos did not move.
Through the willow curtain he saw the soldier’s pike tip smash a hole in the ice. It cracked and crazed right up to Carlos’s knees. He lowered his upper body onto his forearms to spread his weight, but ice water seeped from the hole and spread under the willow branches, soaking his gloves and his sleeves up to the elbows and his breeches below the knees. His hands and shins were freezing, but he dared not move on the fragile ice.
He heard another slosh of water and glimpsed, through the willow curtain, a bucket on a rope skimming the water in the hole. The soldier heaved the bucket out. His feet rustled the cattails again as he turned to go. His footfalls became fainter and finally died away. Still on elbows and knees, Carlos carefully moved out from the branches and along to where the ice was thick.
He stood and peered over the lip of the bank. The soldier was turning the corner at the first huddle of cottages. Carlos looked both ways along the village’s perimeter to locate Wyatt’s sentries. It was barely dusk, but small watch fires already blazed in three sentry positions. He’d picked this time, the supper hour, when the villagers would be heading home to eat and Wyatt’s company, tired and hungry after their day’s march, would be concentrating on their food as well. Besides, he needed enough light to see what he’d come to see.
As he walked further along the frozen stream he peeled off his freezing gloves and stuffed them away. The soggy extremities of his clothes stayed plastered to his skin. There was nothing he could do about that. At the village edge he came to a fulling mill, deserted. The ice had been chopped away to give access to the water. There was no way he could continue walking along the stream. He checked over both banks. A sentry was posted on either side, though neither was close to the stream. The one to the right, a long bowshot away, stood over a small fire at the corner of a farmer’s field. He faced away from the stream, warming his backside by the fire. The sentry to the left, even further off, sat huddled up in the crook of an apple tree, whittling a stick. Carlos climbed up the bank to the mill. Outside its doors he found several buckets and a water carrier’s yoke. He set the yolk over his shoulders, slung a bucket on either end, lowered his head in a menial posture, and started for the village. The sentry by the fire glanced at him idly, then turned to warm his hands. The one whittling in the tree didn’t even look up.
None of the town’s inhabitants bothered him as he passed, though a dog tethered outside a cooper’s shed barked furiously at him. A farmer and his son were pitching hay from a cart into an open barn, going about their work as though unconcerned that an army of rebels had camped in their town. Carlos turned onto the muddy main street, where an old woman mumbling her own private pains shuffled past. The low din of many men’s voices reached him, probably from the market square at the village center, he guessed. The voices and the incessant, dull clatter told him that the company was converging there to eat. Soldiers passed him in twos and threes, hurrying toward the aroma of stewing capon and onions wafting from the cauldrons set up in the square, but no one stopped him.
Getting inside had been easy.<
br />
For almost an hour Carlos prowled the village, hands slung over his yoke, taking stock of everything he saw. The munitions wagons and the condition of the mules that would draw them. The hundreds of bundles of arrows stacked in the fletchers’ carts. The cache of matchlocks, carefully stored in a tanner’s shed to keep dry their match wicks, presoaked in saltpeter. The forest of newly sharpened pikes ranged in a smithy where the air still held a faintly burned odor from the overworked whetstone. The two small cannon tucked into a byre, which Carlos decided must be the guns the Duke of Norfolk had abandoned at Rochester bridge after his men rushed over to Wyatt. He counted horses, and noted how many were fit mounts for cavalry. Above all, as he edged the market square, he counted soldiers. Despite his concentration, though, he couldn’t help wondering about two young officers he saw talking: either of them could be the man Isabel meant to marry. He forced the thought away.
He reached the town’s northern edge where it dwindled down toward the broad River Thames. Here, a wooden footbridge straddled the frozen stream that fed into the river. He stopped on the bridge and looked out. A straggle of huts and a strip of dun-colored field, its furrows patched with snow, gave way to thick clumps of trees growing along the Thames. Through a break in the treeline Carlos saw a solitary watch fire flickering at the river’s edge. There seemed to be no one beside the fire. He suspected the sentry had come into town for his food instead of waiting to have it brought. No breach of discipline would surprise him among these English farmer-soldiers.
A fitful evening breeze made his skin feel clammy, for the walk through the cold air had done little to dry his clothes. It would be full darkness soon, and he still had to get out of town again and reach his horse. But he had not yet checked the river. He needed to see whether there was any amassment of boats. If so, it could mean that Wyatt intended to ferry his army to the northern shore, to Essex, for his advance on London. Knowledge of that would tip the royalists to concentrate their defenses at the city’s eastern gates and the Tower.
His eyes were drawn to a tithe barn at the far edge of the field, near the path to the river. One of its broad doors stood open, and in the shadows under its slate roof Carlos thought he made out the dull gleam of gunmetal. Maybe just a trick of the failing light, he thought. The sun had dipped below the treetops, but the sky above the river still held a pewter iridescence. He couldn’t see anyone guarding the barn. He decided to investigate on the way to the river.
The path to the tithe barn was lined knee-high with dead grasses that rustled as he passed, like an old man’s death rattle. A gull screeched overhead, swooping in from the Thames. Carlos saw no sign of any soldiers.
At the barn he found he’d been right. Inside, five big cannons rested on five sturdy carriages. And in the straw were bushels of shot and lasts of gunpowder, sound and dry. He wondered where Wyatt could have got hold of such impressive ordnance. He set down his buckets and slipped off the yoke, and reached out to feel the gunmetal, cold against his hands. He recalled Abergavenny saying a naval captain had deserted the Queen’s ships. Had the captain delivered the ships’ guns to Wyatt? As he walked around the carriages he noted the fresh joinery. Wyatt must have had the carpenters of Rochester sweating to build these carriages, but it had been worth the effort. The guns were formidable.
He had to move on. He went down to the riverbank. He saw just one lone skiff, beached in the grass on its side with a jagged hole in its bow. No flotilla. Wyatt would be remaining on the south shore. That was all Carlos needed to know. The only sign of life was that solitary watch fire glowing faintly through the trees.
Then he saw a sentry at the fire after all. Wrapped in a cloak, he sat on a log before the fire, his back to Carlos. His head drooped, but his body seemed alert as if he were studying something he held in his hands.
Apart from the evening breeze sighing through the trees, there was silence. Carlos stood still. Any sudden movement on the twig-strewn path could draw the sentry around. He had to leave quietly.
He was about to go when the sentry abruptly lifted his head and looked sideways. It was obvious he hadn’t seen Carlos in the shadows behind him. He just gazed at the river without moving, intent, like a dog sniffing the air. Carlos froze at what he saw. The man’s profile was clearly lit by the fire. A leather patch covered his left eye. It was Richard Thornleigh.
Carlos’s mind flooded with one thought: a hundred pounds for Thornleigh dead, to be paid at the Blue Boar in London on Candlemas night.
That was tonight. And the Blue Boar was only a two-hour ride away. And a hundred pounds meant freedom.
But he suddenly felt her warm breath against his throat, just as if she were here, just like that night when she’d cried out from her nightmare and come into his arms …
A fantasy. Forget her. She remembers you only to curse your name. Don’t weaken. Not this time.
He could not attack: a fight might bring soldiers. Then he would never get out.
Think of what is possible. Get his trust first. You did it once before.
He had no sword, but his dagger lay in his belt under his sheepskin. It could slit a throat. It could sever a finger. He stepped forward into the glow of Thornleigh’s fire.
Sitting on the log and rereading Honor’s letter, Thornleigh heard a crunch of twigs and glanced over his shoulder.
“Richard Thornleigh,” a voice said quietly from the shadows.
Thornleigh dropped the letter, grabbed his pike and stood, whirling around. A man approached from the path between the trees. Thornleigh could not clearly see his face but he wasn’t dressed like Wyatt’s soldiers. “Stop,” he said, pointing the pike. Its steel blade glinted in the firelight. “Who’s there?”
The man stopped at the rim of the fire’s glow and raised his hands in a gesture of surrender. “A friend,” he said. “You do not remember me?”
Thornleigh peered at the shadowed face. Holding the pike outstretched, he had to take a wide stance, for the fever had left him somewhat unsteady on his feet.
“Colchester jail,” the man said. “Remember?”
Now Thornleigh recognized him. The hard face. The strong, fighter’s body. And the accent. “The Spaniard?” he asked warily. He wasn’t sure. He’d seen so many strange and desperate men in the last days, the faces had become a jumble in his mind. And this one, made lurid by the firelight, was still indistinct.
“Let me come closer, into the light,” the man said. He stepped forward, slowly lowering his hands, and approached the log that lay between them. He stopped a few feet beyond the tip of Thornleigh’s pike. “See? You know me. Valverde.” He smiled. “Call me Carlos.”
Thornleigh was amazed. It was him—the Spaniard who had tried to arrange his rescue in Colchester jail, the one who’d made contact using the old password. “Christ,” he said, marveling, “I thought they’d hanged you for sure.”
Carlos laughed lightly. “I am not so easy to kill.”
Thornleigh did not laugh, nor did he lower the pike. Why had the fellow been skulking around in the shadows? “What the devil are you doing here?”
“Came to join up. I am a soldier.”
Thornleigh recalled the few words they’d exchanged after being chained together in the Hole. “A mercenary?”
Carlos nodded.
“Have you talked to an officer?” Thornleigh asked, jerking his chin toward the town, its rooftops aglow from the market-square fires.
“Not yet. Saw you first. Good thing, yes?”
“I’ll take you up myself then, soon as my relief arrives. You’ll have to come under guard, though,” he said, still holding the pike rigid. “Orders.”
“Of course. Gracias.”
Thornleigh noticed the bruised scar puckering Carlos’s eyebrow and remembered that he’d got that gash in the fight in Colchester jail. He couldn’t help wondering again who had been behind the rescue attempt. It hadn’t been Leonard Legge, after all. In his brief talk with Legge at the Crane his old friend hadn’t known
anything about the plan. Yet who else knew the old password? “You never did know who hired you to approach me, did you? Back in Colchester.”
Carlos shook his head. “A servant. A stranger. Sorry.”
Thornleigh let the matter drop.
Carlos took a step forward. Thornleigh jerked the pike. “That’s close enough.”
“But I have news. Let me come and tell you. It is about your daughter. I saw her in London.”
Thornleigh’s mouth fell open. “What are you talking about? Isabel’s in Antwerp.”
“No. In London. She got her mother safely on that ship and then—”
“She’s all right then? My wife?”
“That I do not know. But I do know your daughter has been searching London prisons for you.”
“Bel? Searching prisons? Impossible. She wouldn’t know the first thing about—”
“She has done it. She is very brave. She unlocked my chains in jail. She hired me to find you, to get you free. We have been looking for you. We are … friends.”
Thornleigh tried to take in the incredible tale. “Bel … unlocked you? But … what about the jailer?”
Carlos grinned. “I killed him.”
“Good God,” Thornleigh whispered. He was savagely glad. He could hardly bear to remember the rape of his daughter. No man had deserved to die more than that bastard Mosse. But worry instantly rushed back. “Why have you left her? Where’s she gone? How will she—”
Carlos held up a hand to stop the questions. “She did not want my help anymore. So I came here. I need the work.” He stepped closer, just a hand’s breadth away from the pike tip.
Thornleigh was still appalled by the news. Isabel … in London. What would become of her? “Why did she dismiss you?” he asked anxiously. “She’ll be all alone.”
“She knows she must join your wife and son in Antwerp. That was your order, yes?”
Thornleigh relaxed a little. Of course Isabel would go now. What else could she do? A chill breeze fingered inside his collar, making him shiver. Carlos was slowly moving around the end of the log. Their eyes locked. Carlos stopped. From the town the faint laughter of soldiers drifted down to the riverbank. Carlos bent to tug at the knee of his breeches. Thornleigh saw that the breeches were wet and plastered to his shins, and his sleeves were wet too. Carlos nodded toward the fire. “Let me come and dry out? I thought the ice on the river would be solid.” He gave a sheepish smile. “I was wrong.”