Philip
Elizabeth watched the dangerous letter burn, as surely Philip had meant her to do, and as the Spanish king’s words turned to ash, other words echoed in her ears. What did you see? she’d asked John Dee years ago.
You will command men and guide nations … This is the hand of a woman, Your Highness. But it is also the hand of a ruler.
She sat alone long into the night, wondering precisely what God meant her to do.
William burned with fever for two days after his final visit to Minuette. When he arose on the third day, he didn’t delay more than an hour before leaving Whitehall and London far behind. Jane was at Richmond Palace, being well-coddled for the duration of her royal pregnancy, but it was not west that he headed. It was north. He took six guards with him and no personal attendants. Only Lord Burghley had been told his destination: the manor house in Cumbria he had bestowed as a wedding gift upon the late Giles Howard.
Burghley assumed he was following Eleanor, who had returned north as soon as delivering her devastating testimony at Minuette’s trial. And so he was going to see her—for who better to wipe the taint of his failure with Minuette from his mind and body?
But even his Lord Chancellor did not know all his secrets.
It took seven solid days of riding to reach Lakehill House just south of the market town of Kendal. The manor was medieval in its lines and history, and thus well fortified. William had never been there before. For a moment he found himself comparing it to Wynfield Mote. Where Minuette’s home had radiated warmth and good cheer, Lakehill House lowered against the sullen grey of the skies. Its moat was not mainly decorative, the greasy black water itself seeming to shout “keep away” to any unwary travelers.
Perfect.
William sent an outrider ahead of him, so Eleanor had half a day’s warning of his arrival. As always, his mistress’s preparations were impeccable. The guards were directed into the care of her steward, an iron-faced northerner who scarcely could be bothered to bow to William. Fair enough—this job required taciturn and uninterested tongues.
“Would you care to take refreshment first?” Eleanor purred, slipping her hand through his arm as they walked alone into the hall. She looked like a rich and contented wife in her jewel-toned blue gown, hair neatly confined beneath a hood. But her eyes couldn’t be wifely if they tried; William felt her calculation as she led him inside. The interior of the manor, at least, was elegantly furnished and decorated, even ostentatious. “Or you could visit Nora. She chatters like a little bird, you’d be enchanted.”
“She is here?” William pulled up sharply, shaken at the news. “Why has she left your brother?”
“You said I might have her with me if you could trust me.”
“Send her away,” William ordered. “Back to Jonathan, at once. I don’t want her here this winter.” Not with the darkness he himself had imported. Far better his daughter be with the infuriatingly loyal Jonathan Percy.
Eleanor bit her bottom lip, a gesture William remembered well, and changed the subject. “Your bedchamber is ready for you.” And so am I she did not need to add. Everything about her shouted it.
He stopped abruptly and kissed her hard in the middle of the reception hall. Her response was immediate and reassuring. But Eleanor, though a pleasant distraction, was not his primary purpose in coming here.
When her caresses had sated the edges of his temper, William stepped away. “You know what I want. Business before pleasure.”
Although this business would also be pleasurable. Very much so.
Eleanor led him to the oldest part of the house, to a round tower that looked uninhabitable above the ground floor. But there was an oak door, six inches thick and with a sturdy iron lock and bolt, that led to a flight of steps descending into blackness. They each carried a lantern, Eleanor going first, her voice floating up to him as they went down.
“Fortunately, the servants here are not much interested in anything beyond themselves and what they’re paid. And I have a reputation as being somewhat … what’s the word? Erratic in my tastes and habits. I imagine they think I have a lover chained down here, what with my being the only one in attendance.”
William ignored her, for he had the fanciful notion that he could feel the man waiting below, could track the mind and emotions—tightly reined, no doubt, but perhaps the fiercer for it.
It would be a long time before William broke down that fierceness.
Eleanor reached the last step and William followed her down a short length of corridor with four iron-gated doors opening off it, two on each side. Only the last one on the right-hand side was barred shut. A dim light radiated from a single torch set in the wall outside the dungeon door.
William stepped up to the door and raised the lantern so his face could be clearly seen. “Hello, Dominic.”
Dominic blinked against the strong light, not surprised by the familiar voice. “Hello, William. Come for another round?”
He had been very surprised indeed when he had come back to consciousness all those days ago in a tightly closed, jolting carriage that had made him retch with the constant motion and aftereffects of his beating. Why wasn’t he dead? William had gotten his satisfaction—why not then hand him off for the public pain and humiliation of his execution?
He’d been in so much pain, slipping in and out of consciousness for days of rough travel, that he couldn’t concentrate on why. He’d begun to put fragments together, suspicions, but only when the coach stopped for the final time and he’d been hooded before being marched along and down stone floors and he was chained to the wall of his new prison did he finally grasp it.
William wasn’t finished with him yet. For the space of an hour Dominic wondered where he was, who William had enlisted in this secret. For secret he had surely kept it—he would not want Minuette having hope. William wanted her desperate and alone and sunk in grief.
When Eleanor Percy appeared, looking angelic with her light hair and exquisite cream-coloured gown, Dominic had been startled enough to exclaim, “Son of a bitch.”
“Close, but it’s a daughter I have. Though a son will surely follow, a son with a royal father. Pity your bitch wasn’t so smart.”
The chains brought him up well short of the iron door. It was the only time he lost control. After that he didn’t speak to Eleanor at all when she appeared twice a day to bring him food.
He’d wondered how long William would be able to keep away. By his count it was nine days now since his supposed death. And here was the king, looking at him as though he were a specimen in a menagerie.
“Can’t you deal with the waste?” William said sharply to Eleanor.
“By myself? Do I look like a maidservant?”
“Fine. There must be someone in your household without the wits to put together two words. Have them do it. And get him some water to wash himself. Now.”
Eleanor had learned submission, or at least how to approximate it. She took her lantern and walked away. Only when her light could not be seen did Dominic speak.
“Suddenly concerned about my condition?”
“There’s no need to make an animal out of you.”
“Because it’s more fun if I remain the gentleman?”
Was that a jolt of hurt in William’s eyes? Probably just disgust, Dominic decided. To keep William from broaching the subject first, he asked abruptly, “How was my execution? Sufficiently brutal, I suppose. How long did it take you to find a man who looked enough like me to pass at a distance?”
“Not long. You’re tall and black-haired—who ever looked at you enough to see beyond that?” William studied him. “Aren’t you going to ask me about Minuette?”
Not for anything in this world would Dominic speak of her to William. Because he couldn’t trust his mouth to keep his mind’s intention, he kept it firmly shut.
William shook his head at Dominic’s stubborn silence but didn’t try to break it. Was he going to beat him again? Dominic didn’t much care,
although his previous injuries were finally beginning to heal, slowed by darkness and cold and solitude.
Slow, shuffling footsteps followed Eleanor’s quicker ones. A young man came behind her, carrying a bucket of water and with the undoubted look of a child in an adult’s body. Eleanor unlocked the iron door herself, and gestured sharply for the man to put the water inside and shove it with his foot. Then he picked up the foul bucket of waste and retreated with it.
“Anything else, my lord?” Eleanor asked mockingly, and Dominic felt a great longing to wrap his hands around her neck and squeeze hard.
He kept his eyes on the king, wishing he could read the face he had once known better than his own. What was he thinking?
Curtly, William said, “I’ll be back. When Minuette’s child is born, I’ll return and report. Surely you’ll be interested in the outcome. Almost as interested as I am.”
Then he walked away, leaving Eleanor to scramble after him.
Dominic let out his breath and sank down with his back to the wall. He put his aching head in his hands and wondered how long a man could last in such a place without either dying or going mad.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
WHEN CARRIE WHISPERED in Minuette’s ear that there was a plan devised for escape, a way out of the Tower—that she needed to be ready to fake an early labor the moment she was told to—she was almost too numb with grief to care. Something essential in her nature had been broken, and if there was still a tiny flame of reason and hope left, it was buried so far that she’d lost sight of it. All she could manage was to keep breathing and that was labor enough.
“What does it matter?” she heard herself say, surprised she could manage even that much. Dominic had been dead for three days. All she wanted was to join him.
Carrie was not cowed. “This matters,” she’d hissed fiercely, laying her hand on Minuette’s heavily rounded stomach. As if in agreement, the child gave a series of urgent kicks just then, so that Carrie’s hand moved with it.
Minuette had worked very hard to distance herself from the fact of her pregnancy. What was the point of attachment, she’d thought, when she would never know her baby, when the moment she was delivered they would take the child from her, give it into someone else’s care, and then cut off her own head? When she said to Carrie, “What does it matter?” what she meant was: This child will never be mine. Why care about something I can’t have?
But something about these particular kicks penetrated Minuette’s numbness and she fancied there was a touch of familiar frustration to it, like Dominic when he was irritated with her stubbornness. It was enough to start the tears, though Minuette clamped down hard. She could not afford to get lost just now, because the sharp kicks had tumbled loose her grief and only now was she beginning to understand what Carrie was telling her. That there might be a way out, for both their child and herself.
She blinked and drew a hard, cleansing breath that was far shallower than usual. This child was determined to make itself felt in every way possible, apparently. “I understand,” she said, and found to her surprise that hope was not dead yet. “I’ll be ready.”
Six days after Dominic’s death Carrie received a message with their evening meal. “Tonight,” she barely breathed out to Minuette, as though the walls themselves were straining to overhear. “You should begin now.”
It was an amateur performance at best, for Minuette had never given birth, had never even attended a birth. But she could manage to moan and cry and whimper and Carrie was good at giving slight direction with only a nod or a shake of her head. It was also useful to have such a well of unshed emotion to call upon; Minuette directed her grief and fury into giving herself and her child a chance, and there came a time when she half believed in her own performance and wondered superstitiously if she were going to curse herself and bring the child too early.
Carrie flitted in and out with water and blankets and soft words, and kept badgering the guards to send for a midwife. Hours after Minuette began her performance, when the time was creeping near midnight, the door opened. Two women were admitted, wearing heavy woolen dresses and cloaks against the late autumn cold, one of them as large and broad as an obscenely well-fed man.
Swiftly, Minuette traded clothing with the larger woman, the garments padded out at the shoulders with extra linen so that she looked enormous all over and not just her belly. Her golden hair was plaited tightly to her head and bundled beneath a linen coif and cap. She had a moment’s memory of her escape from Dudley Castle two years ago, but tension made her jittery and unfocused.
“Now what?” she whispered to Carrie, who had remained in her own green gown, round face fiercely determined.
“We wait until we hear the sounds of a disturbance.”
“What disturbance?”
Carrie shrugged. “I wasn’t given the details.”
“How long do we wait?”
“No more than an hour. If there’s nothing, then Walsingham’s instructions were for us to leave as though I am going with one of the midwives to gather further supplies.”
Minuette looked doubtfully at the two women who would be left behind in such an event and wondered if they were prepared for the consequences. They met her gaze steadily and the larger one nodded in understanding. Minuette could only suppose Walsingham had explained the risks and made it worth their while. How much did it cost, she wondered, to get two strangers to risk their lives for hers?
It wasn’t nearly as long as an hour before there were shouts from elsewhere in the Tower. Carrie counted to five, then threw open the door and said imperiously to the guards, “She’s in a bad way. We need to get her somewhere safer to deliver than this cold Tower room!”
“She doesn’t leave.”
“That may be the king’s son she’s carrying—do you want to tell him his babe is dead because you hadn’t the wit to act responsibly?”
The guard blinked, but was stubborn. “No leaving.”
Carrie drew breath to begin the argument that she and one of the midwives be allowed out to gather more of what they needed, Minuette sweating beneath the heavy layers of clothing on top of her already bulky body, and the two midwives shut behind the inner chamber door. But suddenly there was the sound of running feet and the next moment a man burst up the stairs and, without hesitation, drove a sword through the nearest guard. The second guard pulled his sword but wasn’t nearly fast enough. He, too, was run through.
“Well, stepdaughter,” Stephen Howard said breathlessly, pulling his bloodied sword free of the second dead guard. “You do get yourself into the most interesting of troubles.”
“What are you doing?” She couldn’t decide if she was relieved or appalled.
“Offering one last service to your mother. Don’t make it in vain—get to the Water Gate. There’s a boat, but it won’t wait long.”
Minuette couldn’t decide whether to cry or laugh and knew that she was on the verge of hysteria. Carrie was quicker, and called to the midwives to escape with them as well. Then she had Minuette by the arm and was moving her along the corridor.
Shaking her off, Minuette turned back. “Aren’t you coming?” she asked her stepfather.
“You need time and distraction, and I can give you that.”
“They’ll kill you.”
“Don’t fret for me, Minuette. I’ve lived my life and made my choices. And this way I get to take a few men down with me. It’s all to the good.”
She surprised herself—and him—by throwing herself on him in a fierce hug. He patted her back awkwardly, then kissed her forehead. “I don’t want another Wyatt woman dying in childbirth. Get yourself out of here. Take care of Marie’s grandchild.”
They made it unmolested through the precincts of the Tower, past guards who gave them only a cursory glance as they rushed toward Stephen Howard and his sword, down the icy steps of the Water Gate and into the small fishing boat where Harrington himself waited for them. Only when they were far enough up the Thames th
at the Tower could no longer be seen did Minuette absorb the fact that she had one more man’s death on her conscience.
She laid her hand on her stomach and prayed silently for the soul of Stephen Howard.
As soon as Elizabeth heard that Minuette and Robert Dudley were safely on a ship to France—and Heaven bless they would have fair weather long enough to cross—she left Hatfield for Whitehall. Since William would summon her the moment he heard what had happened, she might as well anticipate him. Oddly enough, in those days of waiting she found herself thinking most often of Stephen Howard, who had killed three Tower guards and led them on a merry chase before himself being trapped and mercilessly hacked down by a number of swords. She didn’t suppose William would take Howard’s death as putting an end to the matter.
It was a jittery four days before William returned with the rush and clatter of an extraordinarily angry man. Burghley must have alerted him that Elizabeth was already in residence, for he did not even bother to change out of his travel-stained riding clothes but stormed straight to her privy chamber.
“Out,” he commanded her women, and they did not even wait for Elizabeth’s permission to scurry away.
Elizabeth rose and met him on her feet, braced for a fight. She couldn’t decide if he looked more angry or more ill. How long and fast had he been riding? Burghley had told her only that he’d been in the North. Word must have caught him on the road, because he looked as though he hadn’t slept for at least two days.
His blue eyes were opaque above smudged shadows of fatigue. But his voice was as sharp as ever. “I won’t ask why. I won’t ask what you were thinking. I won’t even ask who helped you, for I have already discovered Robert Dudley’s absence. You sent her to France, I imagine? I hope saving her was worth it.”
“I was rather hoping to save you as well,” Elizabeth replied steadily. “You are not yourself, William. Executing Dominic was one thing—friend or not, he was sworn to your service and he betrayed you and that is treason. But Minuette—”
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