The Fugitive Queen

by FIONA BUCKLEY

  “The queen wants secrecy,” said Cecil, “but that’s a relative matter. Those in one’s service have to be briefed to some extent. Ryder and Dodd are aware that you have a private errand to Mary Stuart, though they have no idea of its nature, nor will they seek to discover it. They are both trustworthy. I expect that you’ll also tell Dale and Brockley a certain amount, though they should not know any details either. But avoid mentioning the errands to any of the others if you can.”

  Our company therefore consisted of five men and five ladies, the ladies being myself, Fran Dale, my good friend Mistress Sybil Jester, Pen, and Meg. We were all well mounted. Hugh and Cecil always made sure that their men had good horses. I had my own mare, a good-looking dapple gray called Roundel, a gift from Hugh. I had decided to breed from my former favorite, my pretty Bay Star. Her first foal, a charming filly, the image of her dam, was now a long-legged yearling and I hoped one day to present her to Meg, who was already a competent rider.

  Meanwhile, Meg had her own pony, a new and bigger one, since she had just turned thirteen, and was growing. Pen, who also rode well, was on the black mare she had brought from Lockhill. Dale, however, disliked riding and these days was very wearied by it and was therefore traveling on Brockley’s pillion.

  Brockley’s old cob, Speckle, was aging and was now keeping Bay Star company at grass. Speckle’s replacement, Brown Berry, was heavily built and inconveniently hairy about the fetlocks (always a trouble to the grooms who have to keep their charges’ feet clean), but more than equal to carrying double. Dick Dodd had a cob that was similarly strong, and since Sybil too was a poor rider, we put her up behind Dodd.

  We also had Meg’s merlin, Joy, full saddlebags, and two pack mules to carry everyone’s belongings. I needed suitable wear for an audience with a queen, and since Pen might accompany me, I had provided the same for her. Also, in a fit of optimism, I had stowed Pen’s very best blue velvet gown and a new lace-edged ruff in a separate hamper for use on her wedding day, if wedding day there should be. We were quite an impressive cavalcade, though hardly a speedy one, as Brockley remarked, just as we were starting.

  “The village dominie who taught me my letters had traveled a bit when he was young, madam,” he said to me in his calm voice with its slight country accent, and with no expression at all on his immobile face. His high brow with its dusting of gold freckles was unwrinkled, though he was over fifty. “He talked about it sometimes. He called them the three Perfidious P’s—pillions, pack animals, and pets.” There was just a trace of a smile in his blue-gray eyes. “Then he’d say that he learned to take two useful P’s as a guide. Porta parvum, he’d say.”

  “Carry little? Did he teach you Latin, Brockley? I never knew that!”

  “I don’t know much, madam. Just a smattering. He did teach his class some dog Latin but I only had a year of it.”

  “You’re full of surprises,” I said, smiling. “Isn’t he, Dale?” There had been a time when Brockley and I had had such a habit of exchanging expressionless pleasantries, that we had made Dale feel shut out and hurt her feelings. Nowadays, I tried to share the jokes with her. “I just wish,” I said, “that we hadn’t got to find our way.”

  Dudley had never visited his Yorkshire legacy and the agent he had sent to inspect it and make an inventory of its contents, six years ago when it first came into his hands, was now dead. Dudley still had the report and the inventory, however, and these he gave to me, along with a letter of introduction to the steward.

  The name of the place was Tyesdale, in a parish called Fritton. It was the largest property in the parish. The adjoining estate, Fernthorpe, had once been bigger but the family had foolishly got into trouble back in the days of King Henry VIII and been involved in the Catholic rising known as the Pilgrimage of Grace. None of them had been hanged, but they had been heavily fined—or had negotiated a deal—and had paid by surrendering some of their land to the crown. Tyesdale was now the larger by a considerable margin.

  “And has the better house,” Dudley told me. “At some point, after the rising, the original house caught fire and the family couldn’t afford to rebuild it properly. The replacement’s not much better than a large hovel. Tyesdale, on the other hand, is said to have a good manor house. The steward there is called Magnus Whitely. By the way, the agent I sent didn’t take to him. And so . . .” Dudley’s smile was malicious “ . . . I shan’t send a courier ahead to announce your impending arrival. You can take him by surprise, Mistress Stannard.”

  To get to Tyesdale, our recommended route was north through the cities of Bedford, Northampton, Leicester, Nottingham, and Sheffield; then north-westward for about twenty miles to a place I had never heard of, called Glossop, and after that, to another place I hadn’t heard of, a hamlet named Mossley. After Mossley, we must ask directions, for the way led across lonely moorland. We should try asking both for Fritton and for Tyesdale. In his report, the agent admitted to having got lost several times after Glossop, until at last he had hired a guide.

  “On which I was reluctant to spend my master’s money but it was better than wandering in the wilderness,” he had written piously. Our journey was clearly going to involve a marked element of exploration.

  Still, we did have good traveling conditions and plenty of daylight. The fact that I detested the whole business only made me more determined to get on with it, so I urged an early start each morning. I allowed a rest at midday and then I made us ride on through the later afternoon and early evening. We made the best speed we could and reached Sheffield after six days. The next day was Sunday and we rested, horses and humans alike.

  The humans attended church and I instructed Brockley to see if he could find us a guide to see us to Glossop. On Monday, with a local hired man to show us the way, we set off again. The road was a well-frequented track with quite a good surface. It was then, though, that we noticed how the land was changing.

  Pen commented on it first, which was a relief because it was almost the first spontaneous remark she had made since we started out. Although she had had kind and encouraging letters from both her mother and her brother George, expressing pleasure at her new dowry and thanking Hugh and myself earnestly for our supposed generosity, my ward had started the journey in a fit of sulks.

  Pen, of course, knew nothing of the ulterior motives behind the long ride north. As far as she was concerned, she was being dragged to Yorkshire because she was in disgrace. Until we left Sheffield, Pen spoke only when she was spoken to, and then replied in the fewest possible words. Meg chattered all the time, agog with excitement, but even Meg could make no headway against Pen’s obstinate silence.

  What finally broke through to her, unexpectedly, was the way the land around us had risen into high moors and steep hillsides, growing wilder and lonelier, it seemed, with every mile we traveled.

  “Are those mountains?” she asked suddenly, taking her left hand off her reins to point at a spectacular skyline. “And how can sheep graze on a slope like that? Do they have sticky pads on their feet?”

  Everyone laughed. “Not they,” said Dick Dodd. “Just sure-footed, they are. My dad kept sheep, so I know.”

  “But don’t they stray and get lost? The shepherds can’t be up there with them all the time!”

  Harry Hobson was a quiet fellow, but he had a jolly laugh on occasion and we heard it now. Our guide chuckled, too. He was one of those very tough elderly men who look as though they have been pickled in brine and then hardened by time like the ships’ timbers so often used in house construction. His wiry pony looked similarly tough.

  “True enough, lass,” he said to her, “but t’sheep don’t need all that much shepherding. They know their own ranges and t’owd yowes teach their lambs. They won’t stray off t’land they know or get mixed up wi’ other flocks. Shepherds mostly knows where t’look when they want to find t’flock.”

  He had a strong northern accent but Pen, inclining her head and paying close attention, managed to follow him and sa
id: “But how clever! I didn’t think sheep were as clever as that!”

  A moment later, when the guide had gone ahead to lead us through a place where several tracks met, Meg said to her: “I couldn’t understand him very well. What did he say, Pen?”

  Pen told her, and then repeated her question about whether the hills could be called mountains. “Almost,” I said. “But proper mountains are even higher. I’ve seen them in Wales.”

  After that, because having once emerged from her sulks, she couldn’t very well sink back into them, Pen was easier company, though still at times inclined to be prickly.

  “She’ll get over it,” said Sybil to me when we had found an inn at Glossop and she and I chanced to be alone together in the parlor. “New things to see and do will probably work wonders. I hope that we do find a good man for her in the north. It’s what she needs.”

  “I hope she doesn’t go and fall in love with Harry Hobson or Tom Smith,” I said worriedly, but Sybil shook her head.

  “So far it’s always been older men, the kind she can look up to. Hobson and Smith are far too boyish for her—and well beneath her socially as well. She does have a sense of her position, you know. She’s far from being a fool. She’s just young, and at the mercy of longings she doesn’t understand yet.”

  I looked at Sybil with affection. She was in her forties and by no means a beautiful woman, for the proportions of her face were wrong for that. They looked as though her features had been compressed between crown and chin. Her eyebrows swept out and upward too far beyond the corners of her eyes, and her nostrils were too splayed. Yet it was a face full of character, and the dark eyes under the remarkable eyebrows were always kind. “You understand young girls,” I said.

  “I have a grown-up daughter,” said Sybil simply. “You’ll be the same, when Meg is a little older.”

  The approaching voices of Pen and Meg, talking to each other, obliged us to change the subject. I said: “If we make good time tomorrow, I should think we would reach Tyesdale the day after.”

  • • •

  Finding the way beyond Glossop presented a difficulty. Our guide had reached the limit of his range and could be of no more use to us, while the innkeeper was only mildly helpful. He was a stumpy fellow with a red face, probably due to too much of his own ale. Nay, he had no one he could spare to send with us in the morning; happen there was all to do for a fair in the town, wi’ folk coming in from all about to sell their beasts and produce and he needed all his hands at home. Nay, he’d not heard of either Tyesdale or Fritton but he could direct us to Mossley. After that we’d need to ask again. Road were rough but not hard to follow.

  “Happen you miss your way, ask at a farm somewhere. They’ll know at t’farms. Stop there overnight if you need to—no one’ll refuse a drink of milk and a mouthful of bread and porridge. We’re hospitable folk in these parts,” he told us, giving us a grin from a mouthful of blackened teeth and leering at Pen. I saw young Hobson bristle. He seemed rather to like Pen, I thought, and sighed inwardly. It was bad enough worrying in case Pen fell for one of the men but I didn’t want new complications in the form of them mooning after her instead.

  We set off hopefully the next day, and at first all went well. Before midday we found ourselves in a village that wasn’t Mossley but did at least have a modest inn where we could eat and rest the horses, and the landlord, more helpful than his counterpart in Glossop, assured us that we were going in the right direction. Mossley wasn’t that much farther, we learned, and yes, he had heard of both Tyesdale Manor and Fritton Parish.

  “Not that we see much of t’folk from those parts, but they come through now and again when there’s a fair at Glossop.” He gave us directions, though they were a trifle confusing. To make sure we were on the right road for Mossley, we were to watch out for a bewildering list of landmarks including a lightning-blasted oak and a ruined cottage. Once we were past Mossley, we should look for the outlaw Dickson Morley a-swingin’ in his chains from an elm at a crossroad, and there the innkeeper thought that we should bear right—“half right, not full right; there’s tracks for both”—and after that, it would be a matter of asking the way from whatever farms we came across. “But they’ll knaw t’way, reet enough. Happen you’ll be in Tyesdale by nightfall, God willing.”

  “Ah, but which night?” inquired Tom Smith pessimistically. I told him not to be depressing.

  From then on, however, the road grew narrower and rougher, winding up and down the flanks of steep hills and moors. We found Mossley and rode through it, found the hanged outlaw and bore half right as instructed, but we were no longer making good time and Pen had fallen quiet again, and not, I thought, because her sulks had come back. This silence had a different quality.

  As we made our way across a lonely moorland, so high and near to the drifting puffs of cloud that it felt as though we were riding across a colossal roof, I grew seriously concerned about her, and bringing Roundel alongside her, I said: “Pen? Are you feeling all right?”

  “I’ve started my course,” said Pen dismally.

  “I thought so,” I said. “I’ve seen you like this before. I’m sorry.”

  I had found out soon after Pen joined us from Lockhill that she was one of that unlucky band of women who have a truly difficult time once a month, when she was liable to violent cramps. I sympathized, for although I did not suffer in that particular way, I was prone to migraine headaches and they were more likely at those times. I knew that Pen needed rest.

  I was anxious about the weather, too. The clouds were thickening and I had felt a few drops of rain. Ryder and Brockley now halted us, urging us all to get cloaks out of our baggage. Wet weather wouldn’t be good for any of us, but above all it would be bad for Pen and also for Fran Dale, who took cold easily and especially when she was tired.

  I spoke to Brockley and Ryder, telling them that Dale was exhausted and Pen not well, a polite euphemism that they immediately understood. Brockley pointed out a thin stream of hearth smoke in the distance, off to our left. “There’s a house of some sort over there, madam. Maybe we could stop there overnight and finish the journey tomorrow.”

  We found a narrow track leading toward the place, but it was farther than we expected and the rain was coming down hard before we got there. When we did, what we found was discouraging. It was a thick-walled stone farmhouse huddling under the lee of a hill. Moss grew in the crevices of the stone and on the battered slate roof. The doors were low and the windows had shutters, but not a single pane of glass. “It looks more like a cave than a home,” Tom Smith muttered.

  It was true that the north country had a tradition of being willing to take travelers in. The inhabitants of the farmhouse didn’t greet us effusively but they didn’t turn us away either. Tom Smith’s remark about a cave was fair comment, for inside, the farmhouse was so dark that we could scarcely see the faces of its occupants. One of them lit a frugal rush light, in fact, so as to take a look at us, and I sensed that this, to them, was a rare extravagance in the daytime.

  Our hosts were the farmer—a short, unsmiling boulder of a man—and his wife, who might have been buxom if better fed, two grown sons with a marked resemblance to their father, and an aged woman whom the wife addressed as Mother. On account of the weather, the men had been occupying themselves in the byre, which virtually meant that they were in the house, for of its two ground-level rooms, one was a kitchen and living room combined, with pots over the fireplace and three hams hanging from the rafters, while the other was a byre for horses and cows. The men helped to make our animals comfortable there, while the women found benches and stools in the living room for us all, and the wife put a rack in front of her cooking fire and hung our damp cloaks on it to dry.

  Presently, there was a meal, which we shared. The food consisted of a thick stew with beans and onions in it, and slices cut from one of the hams and fried. I noticed that between us all, we accounted for most of the ham in question, leaving the family only two. There
was rye bread, too, with some kind of dripping. We were offered ale or milk to drink. It was all done with apparent willingness, and yet there was a dour edge.

  “Happen thee’ve coom oop from t’south?” said the farmer, in a tone that implied faintly but unmistakably that he wished people from the south would stay there and not come knocking on his door and eating his provender.

  I understood. This was a poor household. I told him that we realized that the arrival of ten people and their animals was a strain on their resources. We wouldn’t have sought shelter there, except for the weather and the fact that Pen and Dale were too exhausted from traveling to go farther that day. I added that we would of course pay for our lodgings just as we would at any inn. The wife, who evidently had a friendly nature, demurred here but her mother dug an elbow into her ribs and her husband said: “Hush, lass,” quite roughly.

  Money, though, couldn’t solve their immediate problem, which was to provide for us all and still have enough food left for themselves, until they could buy more from a market or a neighbor. We’d be off first thing in the morning, I promised, and when Sybil saw the younger woman getting out flour and yeast and preparing to make more bread, she offered to help.

  The family, whose name turned out to be Grimsdale, were mildly curious when we asked about the way to Tyesdale. “Aye, I knows the place,” the farmer said. “In Fritton Parish, that’ll be—the next parish to this. There’s no master at Tyesdale now, though; nobbut a steward. Owner’s away down south.”

  I explained that Tyesdale had changed hands. Pen was now its owner, I said, and we had come to help her take possession of it. “And find her a Yorkshire husband!” piped up Meg, rather pertly.

  “What—round here?” The elder of the two sons laughed. “Most o’ t’folk in the big houses are Catholic hereabouts, even t’ones that pretend not to be. That won’t suit, will it?”