by Barbara Kyle
“Of course, sir,” she said. Waiting alone up here was agony. And he looked so desperate. She picked up her mother’s book. She had kept it near her in the last days as a kind of talisman. When she reached the door Sydenham looked at her intently and did not move to let her pass. She started forward again, thinking he would turn and leave first, but he took hold of her wrist, stopping her halfway through the doorway so that they were standing almost breast to breast. “So steadfast,” he murmured. His scrutiny made Isabel uncomfortable, and again she had to chastise herself for such an ungrateful response to him, her benefactor. She managed a smile, then moved past him.
Downstairs, there were no servants in evidence except the steward, Palmer. He stood at the entrance to the great hall, fidgeting with his dagger as Isabel and Sydenham passed him on their way to the parlor. Once inside the parlor with Isabel, Sydenham closed the door behind them. A fire blazed in the hearth, and candles had been set about the beautiful room as though in expectation of a quiet evening of cards and conversation.
There were shouts outside. Sydenham flinched. Isabel looked out the window beside his desk. Men were running down the street in twos and threes. She noticed a carriage—a rare sight—standing across the street in the darkness, the coachman on top huddled in capes against the cold. A wealthy nobleman planning to flee with his family, Isabel thought. Drums sounded faintly further down the street.
Sydenham hurried to the window and drew the velvet curtains to block out the commotion outside. “That’s better,” he said, clearly unnerved. He looked around, as if hoping for some diversion. His eyes fell on the chess board on the desk. It was a beautiful checkerwork of jetwood and inlaid mother-of-pearl. The pieces were exquisite carved creations of ivory and ebony. “A game perhaps?” Sydenham suggested, gesturing to the board.
Isabel accepted, and sat. As Sydenham stood beside her to arrange the pieces, Isabel laid the book beside her on the desk.
“Ah, yes, your mother’s book,” he said, setting the knights in their places, then the pawns. Isabel sensed that he was talking to steady his nerves.
She fingered the volume. “It gives me courage, for it reminds me of her.” She opened the cover to the title page where the painted blue flower glinted. “This drawing,” she said with a small smile, “was very special. When I was little my mother used to tell me that my eyes were like my father’s, speedwell blue.”
“Speedwell blue,” Sydenham murmured. He held a white Queen in his hand. “And your lovely eyes match your steadfast character—speedwell true.”
He set down the queen and began to arrange the black pieces. His hand moved under Isabel’s eyes, setting up the pieces as he talked on about the chess set. But Isabel saw nothing. She heard nothing. Nothing but the peculiar phrases he had just spoken. They careened around inside her head, colliding with words Carlos had spoken in Colchester jail just before she had unlocked his chains.
“You said the assassin used special words,” she had said to Carlos. “What were they?”
“Speedwell blue.”
“Did my father make an answer?”
“He said speedwell true. Your father is in much danger. Someone wants him dead. I do not know who.”
But Isabel knew. Now, at last, she knew. Knew why Sydenham had taken her under his wing and urged her to tell him every place her father might have gone to hide. Knew why his touch sent currents of mistrust coursing through her. Knew that she had betrayed her father. Knew it all … because Sydenham knew the password.
The truth came slamming in at her. It was Sydenham who had hired Carlos to assassinate her father. That had failed, so Sydenham had made a friend of Isabel to track his quarry. Then, yesterday, when they both had learned from Carlos that her father was with Wyatt, Sydenham had devised the scheme with the Grenville archers. Isabel had no idea why he was so bent on her father’s death, but she understood one thing with blinding clarity. He had not ordered the archers to spare her father, but to slaughter him. And she had given a description to enable them to do so!
The archers. They would be on their way to the gates at this moment….
“Isabel?” Sydenham’s voice broke in. “Are you unwell?”
She stared up at him.
“I too am anxious,” Sydenham said. “I confess that your loyalty, your determination through all of this, quite humbles me.” He leaned down and touched her cheek as if to draw some of that determination. Isabel’s stomach lurched at his touch. “However,” he said quietly, “there is nothing we can do until the storm breaks, is there?” He sat down across the desk from her. “Come, let us play,” he said.
Isabel looked down at the board. The white pieces faced the row of black. The game was ready for them to begin.
Edward watched Isabel’s hand tremble as she moved the first pawn. He noted her carefully lowered eyes, the tension in her shoulders, the heightened pulse thrumming at her throat. He cursed himself. He had let the password slip out. She knows.
Yet did it really matter? He had no further use for her. He had only to keep her here until he received his summons. Then, she could be dispatched by Palmer with little fuss.
The clock ticked. The fire hissed.
Isabel glanced up at him. Edward smiled and moved out his knight.
33
Ash Wednesda
The rain had stopped. Carlos halted his horse at the royal hunting preserve of Hyde Park and gestured to Lieutenant Wentworth to carry on with the Earl of Devon at the vanguard of the cavalry troop. Carlos looked around, shifting his foot in the stirrup to ease his sore knee. Out here, two miles west of the stinking streets of London, the fields smelled fresh after all the rain. The clouds had moved off and the day promised sunshine. It was seven o’clock on the morning of Ash Wednesday.
Carlos looked up at the clear sky. As blue as her eyes, he thought. Where was she now? Safe out of Sydenham’s house, he hoped. Since he’d let her know her father had gone to Wyatt she had no need to stay with Sydenham. But Carlos wasn’t sure she’d go. She was so full of hatred for him she might not have believed him. Madre de Dios, what a botchedjob he’d made of warning her. He clenched his teeth in bitterness, remembering Sydenham’s arm around her. A trumpet sounded in the distance, and he kicked his foot back into the stirrup. He had to concentrate on the battle ahead. He took a deep breath of the bracing, cold air. At least it was a good day to fight.
He cantered forward and caught up with Devon’s cavalry moving along the causeway. Devon had been ordered to take up a position at Charing Cross, about a mile west of Ludgate. On the way, they passed the other royalist forces, almost all of them in position now, Carlos noted. Lord Pembroke’s ordnance was set at the highest spot on the causeway, the big guns directly facing Wyatt’s imminent advance from the southwest. The main body of the Queen’s foot soldiers, with arquebuses and pikes and longbows, flanked the causeway. Besides Devon’s horsemen, there were two other troops of horse under Lord Clinton, the heavier in a field to the northwest, and the light-horse at the eastern edge of Hyde Park. Also, as Carlos approached the village of Charing Cross with Devon’s troop, he could just make out, at nearby Whitehall Palace, Sir John Gage’s soldiers standing ready at the palace gateway, their pikes glinting in the strengthening sun. Carlos could not understand why Wyatt had not attacked before daylight. It had been twenty-four hours since he’d left Southwark. Why the delay? Whatever had held him up was going to cost him dearly, because Pembroke’s forces were all in place now, and inside London Wall Lord Howard had organized the citizen-soldiers at the gates. Though Carlos doubted Wyatt would get as far as the gates. If he did, he thought grimly, he deserved to.
“My lord!” At the shout Carlos turned in his saddle. A scout galloped past him and came alongside the Earl of Devon, calling, “Wyatt has reached Knightsbridge!”
Carlos turned to Wentworth. “Where’s Knightsbridge?”
The young lieutenant pointed across the fields. “Just below Hyde Park, sir.”
About a mile
south of here, Carlos thought, trotting on. He glanced around at the horsemen behind him, Devon’s cavalry. He had found them well trained, though surely not by Devon himself. The fop was riding on ahead like some boy drunk on dreams of glory, his silk-tasseled sword already brandished high. And Carlos had discovered that in other ways these men were just as ill-prepared as the rest of the royalist soldiers. Some were frightened, a few seemed recklessly bloodthirsty, many did not believe they should be fighting Wyatt at all. More than once Carlos had overheard grumbled remarks that Englishmen should be helping, not hindering, the man who was out to stop the Spaniards from coming into England. But they did not say such things aloud in Carlos’s presence. Him they regarded with a kind of respectful fear. His reputation from Wrotham Hill assured that. That was fine with Carlos.
As the troop approached Charing Cross, he studied a slight, bare rise on the northern edge of the village. Wentworth, following Carlos’s gaze, said, “St. Martin’s Field.” A good place to deploy into line, Carlos thought. But Devon seemed not to have noticed the rise. Instead, he was leading the troop right toward the narrow village street. Carlos realized he’d have to point out the high spot to Devon. He shook his head. If this was to be his day to make a name for himself, he had his work cut out for him. He cantered forward to Devon.
“Your move,” Edward Sydenham said.
Isabel stared at the chess board. For an hour she had sat with him in the predawn darkness witlessly playing chess, insensibly listening to his increasingly erratic conversation, praying that he would leave. Dawn had come and they’d played on, with the curtains beside them still closed and the candles burning. Game after game Sydenham had played with a driven concentration, getting up only to throw logs on the fire. Game after game Isabel had lost. Her mind was numb from trying to think of a way out—for she had to getto Ludgate—and from dissembling, for she could not risk letting him suspect what she’d discovered about him. If he did, she did not doubt that he would never let her leave alive. It had been the longest two hours she’d ever spent.
Horse’s hooves clattered in the street and a voice shouted up, “Sir Edward!” Sydenham tore back the curtain and threw open the shutter. Isabel squinted in the bright morning light. The breathless voice in the street yelled, “Master Grenville bids you come, sir! Every man is needed in the fight! Wyatt is coming to Ludgate!” The horse’s hooves pounded off.
Dread flitted across Sydenham’s face at the mention of fighting. He stepped back from the window so abruptly his elbow knocked the white queen from her black square of sanctuary and she clattered to the floor. Sydenham seemed not to notice. He licked his lips and swallowed hard, as if fear was drying him up from the inside. “I must go …”
Isabel slumped in relief. The agonizing wait was over. Once Sydenham left, she could go too.
“I must arm myself.” Sydenham was rummaging in his desk drawer. Fear flashed in his eyes and wavered his voice. Isabel wished his fear would choke him.
He drew out an ebony case and opened it. Inside were two red velvet upholstered wells, one empty, the other holding an elegant wheel-lock pistol. With fumbling hands Sydenham lifted out the pistol. Its barrel was scrolled with leafy engraving and its handle curved into an exquisitely carved ball of ivory. Isabel’s own mouth went dry. The pistol was identical to the one Lord Grenville had used to shoot her mother.
Is he going to shoot me now too?
She pushed back her chair so fast, its legs screeched under her.
With his eyes locked on her, Sydenham called, “Palmer!”
Isabel ran for the door.
“Stop her!” Sydenham called. The door swung open and the steward stepped in, blocking Isabel’s exit. “Hold her,” Sydenham said.
Palmer grabbed Isabel and pushed her into the room. She stumbled toward the hearth. Sydenham and Palmer moved between her and the door, backing her toward the fire. Sydenham still held the pistol, and Isabel saw again that horrifying moment of sparks and smoke and her mother’s blood. “The pistol was yours,” she said. “You sent Grenville to kill my mother.”
He stared at her, his mouth working strangely. “No … no, it wasn’t like that. Grenville grabbed the pistol. I … couldn’t stop him.”
“And now you’ve sent the archers to kill my father. In God’s name, why do you hate us so!”
A bittersweet smile wobbled over Sydenham’s mouth as he gazed at her. He took a step closer to her. He was unbuttoning his doublet. “You are quite wrong,” he said. “None of this was my desire. I wish I did not have to harm any of your family. Especially you.” He shoved the pistol inside his doublet then grabbed her face between his hands. He kissed her full and hard on the mouth. Isabel shuddered and wrenched her head out of his grasp, wiping her mouth in disgust. As she did, she caught sight of a tall, pale woman standing in the doorway, watching. Isabel’s eyes flicked between Sydenham and Palmer, but neither of them was aware of the woman. When Isabel looked back at the doorway, the woman was gone.
A cannon boomed. Sydenham flinched. Distractedly, he fumbled in the desk drawer for packets of shot and stuffed them into his doublet. “Palmer, this woman is a traitor. If she attempts escape, use your weapon.”
Palmer drew his dagger. “Aye, sir.”
Sydenham refastened his doublet over the pistol. He looked back at Isabel. “I’m sorry, my dear.” He walked out, closing the door behind him. Isabel was alone with the steward and his dagger.
* * *
Edward walked the half mile barely seeing what was around him. He went west along deserted Cheapside, then along Paternoster Row with St. Paul’s a blur beside him, then down Ave Maria Lane. He turned the corner of Ave Maria and saw Ludgate dead ahead … and stopped in amazement. The big, double wooden doors of the gate stood wide open. Why had Lord Howard not shut the gate?
Outside it, Fleet Street looked deserted. Inside stood perhaps forty men, but not Howard’s soldiers, Edward realized. These looked like the citizens’ watch. Some were portly, older men, and some tugged uncomfortably at their unfamiliar brigandines, and awkwardly adjusted their swords. But they all looked zealous. A lanky man stood on the steps of the gatehouse door beside the gate, and the others had crowded in to hear him above the noise of cannon booming in the distance. Edward recognized the speaker, Henry Peck-ham, a prominent citizen. He recognized several aldermen, too. Edward was appalled, realizing what had happened. The citizens’ watch had betrayed the Queen. Led to treason by Peckham, they had opened Ludgate and were waiting to welcome Wyatt.
With a pang of dread he saw that there was no sign, either, of the Grenville archers. He looked around frantically for them. The three stories of Ludgate Jail rose over the gate above the eight-foot thickness of London Wall, and pale faces peered out from the jail’s barred windows, but there were no archers. None stood on the roof of the gatehouse to the left, either, though a ladder was set there.
Edward looked to the right of the gate, to the Belle Sauvage Tavern with its painted sign of a wild man standing beside a bell. Yesterday, up on the tavern roof, Edward had been part of the deliberations for erecting a crude scaffolding as a platform for the archers, but now the scaffold stood bare. Where were they? Still at Newgate? With Howard’s men? Were none of them aware yet that Wyatt was coming here to Ludgate?
The group of rebel citizens with Peckham dispersed to take up positions around the gate. Edward ducked into the doorway of the Belle Sauvage, but the attention of Peck-ham’s men was firmly on the gate and no one seemed to notice Edward. Crammed into the doorway, he tried to think, but his mind was clogged with fear. Thornleigh was going to come marching through that open gate. Thornleigh was going to hunt him down and kill him.
Where in God’s name were the archers?
Rebels’ cannon shots whizzed above the Earl of Devon’s cavalry on St. Martin’s Field. Carlos turned in his saddle and watched a ball plow into the brown grass beyond the rear of the cavalry line. Two more shots whirred over their heads. Wentworth, beside Carlos, cringe
d slightly. The horses lined up on either side of them whinnied and shied. Carlos saw anxiety in the faces of the men as they tried to calm their mounts.
“Shouldn’t we fall back, sir?” Wentworth nervously called to Carlos above the blasts.
Carlos shook his head. He’d been carefully watching the cannon shots. Every one had flown high. Either Wyatt’s guns were damaged by all the rain and their accuracy fouled, or his artillery officer was not experienced enough to make the instant, necessary adjustments. Or maybe Wyatt was only firing warning shots, unwilling to kill Englishmen. The latter was the most likely, Carlos decided. It fit the pattern of the rebel leader’s fainthearted, delayed campaign all the way from Rochester. Nevertheless, the noise alone was frightening Devon’s men. And Devon himself sat his horse like a statue, white-faced and rigid. “No,” Carlos answered. “The enemy must pass in front of us. Devon will attack.” He nodded to the road. “Look.”
From their slight rise of land they both looked down at the road, no wider than a cart track, leading from Knightsbridge through Charing Cross. Wyatt had turned onto it from thecauseway to avoid Pembroke’s cannon, and had halted his column just west of Charing Cross. His whole army—almost all foot soldiers—were stopped near their own smoking cannon. “Army” was too grand a word, Carlos thought, for it looked like Wyatt had even fewer than the three thousand Carlos had estimated in their camp at Dartford. Desertions, no doubt. He could see no sign that Wyatt’s losses had come from any skirmishing with Pembroke’s troops.
“Attack?” Wentworth repeated, glancing uncertainly over at the white-faced commander. Devon had placed himself behind the cavalry line, but every shot of the cannon had made him creep in closer, and his stallion’s shoulders were now crowding between the rumps of two other horses. Wentworth looked back at Carlos. “The commander doesn’t seem about to do that, sir.”