Burghley, faithful Crown servant that he was, continued to update him daily despite William’s outward lack of interest. And so William knew that Norfolk’s ships had withdrawn, perhaps to make a play for a landing farther south at the Howard family’s East Anglia stronghold near Framlingham. “Don’t overlook the feint,” William told Burghley, and noted the slight hesitation of surprise from the Lord Chancellor that the king was indeed paying attention.
“No, Your Majesty.”
And feint it was, for in the end Norfolk managed to land his mercenary troops along the north side of the Humber near Ravenscar. Yorkshire was well chosen, for it had been the site of the Pilgrimage of Grace twenty years ago and the old Catholic ways held strong sway. Norfolk was calculating—but William was more calculating still. And the King of England had God on his side, at least in the matter of religion.
From the depths of his retreat at Richmond, William issued a rapid list of commands. Troops ready to march north and block Norfolk from sweeping to London. Burghley to take charge of the government from Whitehall. And, finally, the figurehead his people needed. “Bring me Elizabeth,” he told Lord Burghley, and received a relieved acquiescence. You prefer her to me? he thought cynically. That is only because she is not actually monarch. It is easy to be liked when one does not have to make the hard decisions.
Elizabeth came without demur. William met her in his presence chamber at Richmond, seated on a gilded throne beneath the canopy of estate. He was dressed as though to ride out, but he wore a circlet of gold and rubies and faced Elizabeth as her king and not her brother.
“Your Majesty.” Elizabeth curtsied a precisely calculated depth and waited for William to acknowledge her.
“Rise,” he said abruptly, and leaned back as Elizabeth stood straight and square, hands folded across her skirt. She had judged her attire as nicely as he had, her gown of black and white suiting her pale skin and bright hair.
She had always been more patient than the rest of them, and that patience had not deserted her in times of crisis. She waited, apparently unruffled, and William felt a twist of old and bitter amusement at the familiarity of their positions.
“I ride out tomorrow to intercept Norfolk and his hired mercenaries,” he told her. “Fewer have flocked to him in the North than surely he had hoped. This time I will not leave the field until the Duke of Norfolk is taken or dead. This cannot be allowed to continue.”
“I agree,” she replied. “England grows weary of strife. The people must have peace.”
“Lord Burghley will assume government power in London, but it would please me if you would act as regent from Hatfield as necessary. We have had our troubles, but I do not forget whose daughter you are. The people need to have Henry’s children before their eyes.”
“I will gladly serve.”
His eyes narrowed. He leaned forward, arms resting on his knees. “Can I trust you in this, Elizabeth?”
She did not answer immediately, or indignantly. Rather, she fixed her eyes on his as though seeing deeply into him as she used to do, and he remembered asking her once when she would teach him to read people as she did. When you learn to control your countenance, she had answered. He wondered if she found it harder to read him now than she once had.
Elizabeth curtsied once more, answering as she did so. “I can always be trusted to put England’s good before my personal interests.”
That phrase sat with him uneasily throughout the night. Once, she would have laughed at the notion that he could not trust her, or scoffed at his need for a spoken vow when he should be able to trust her without words … But in a world where everything else had tilted and altered, why not his sister?
The march was quick and easy, for the early June weather seemed to smile on military ventures with clear skies and dry roads. William was glad they did not have to stop and stay in any one place for long, for he did not miss the resentful mood along the way. Instead of cheers, his army was met with sullen silence and occasionally a catcall. Elizabeth had been right—his people wearied of the constant conflict. It made William all the more anxious to confront Norfolk and finish the job with the duke’s death, for what pleasure was there in ruling a country that was mocking and ungrateful?
And when he had finished with Norfolk, he would ride on to Cumbria. It was time to put an end to Dominic once and for all—perhaps, William thought, his refusal to deal with the past had caused God to destroy his present. When Norfolk was dead, and Dominic as well, then perhaps this burden of listlessness and illness would be taken from him and he could think clearly about the future of England and his own legacy.
The battle was joined at last south of the cathedral city of York. Clearly, Norfolk had not advanced as far as he’d hoped, nor had he gathered many local troops to support the small number of mercenaries. The fighting was sharp and began under clear skies, but within an hour the clouds that had been absent for so long erupted and rain began to pour fast and hard. William was aware of being wet, but fighting allowed him a chance to escape his own head and he refused to be sidetracked or retreat. They were winning the fight, Norfolk would be taken on the field, and William at leisure to return him to the Tower or execute him on the spot. It was the nearest he had been to feeling happy in almost two years.
The blow came at him from behind, catching the side of his helmet hard enough to stun him. The second blow (a mace? a stave?) struck his shoulder and sent him fumbling for his horse’s neck. But his horse had been struck as well and went down to its knees, sending William to the ground. He shook his head to clear it, but the ringing in his ears mingled with the sounds of battle as he hefted his sword and swung round to meet his foe.
Two mercenaries on horses had managed to slip through his guards and William braced himself for a brief fight and, at the worst, a briefer surrender. No doubt they saw Norfolk’s end as well as he did and wanted to use the king’s safety to negotiate their own retreat from the field. William didn’t care about the mercenaries—let them return where they’d come from.
He almost didn’t even mind, for at least the feeling of anger and disappointment was clean and sharp. After so long of muddled emotions and even more muddled motivations, it was nearly a pleasure to at least know what he was feeling.
But the mercenaries on horseback made no move to take him and suddenly William felt himself seized from behind. Before he could grasp what was happening, there was a sharp, almost liquid pain beneath his arm and then a second, similar, piercing pain beneath his other arm, and the rational part of William’s brain supplied the information that a dagger had been carefully thrust between the plates of his armor. The last blow came to his knees, a blunt thrust from the flat of a sword that spun him to the muddy ground, cursing and bleeding and wondering how the hell he could have been so stupid as to imagine Norfolk would fight with honour. Apparently he wasn’t the only one who’d intended to leave his enemy for dead today.
DISPATCH FROM WILLIAM CECIL, LORD BURGHLEY,
TO HER ROYAL HIGHNESS, ELIZABETH
Norfolk is defeated and his mercenary army dispersed back to Europe. The duke is being returned to the Tower of London. The king was seriously wounded on the field. He has been taken to Pontefract Castle.
William hated being at Pontefract, but he’d been unconscious when borne from the field and the royal castle was deemed the best refuge. He’d never stayed at Pontefract before, for it was tainted by betrayal and death: the royal guardian had handed it over to the rebels during the Pilgrimage of Grace; Edward II had executed his cousin for treason at Pontefract; and most awfully, Richard II had died in its dungeons, starved to death by Henry of Lancaster.
In the first two days, William had hopes of quickly moving on, for though the wounds pained him greatly they seemed to have missed anything vital. He followed reports of Norfolk’s surrender and dispatch to London and agreed with his commanders’ decision to let the mercenaries retreat across the sea. A man who is being paid to fight will not return when the pay
master is removed.
But the pain did not ease, despite the ministrations of several physicians. And soon pain became something worse—a poison of infection spreading from the dagger wounds through his whole body, bringing with it weakness and fever. William began to drown in dreams, and whenever he emerged to wakefulness he was seized by an awful fear at the familiarity of his position. It was the smallpox all over again: a lost, dark wandering through the blackness of his own soul.
I’m going to die. He’d had that thought more than once during the smallpox, but Dominic’s steady voice had found him in the darkness and brought him back. There was no Dominic to save him now.
Lord Burghley came, and several hours later (or was it days? William had lost time entirely) a dark-haired, dark-eyed man whom he associated with Elizabeth.
From somewhere deep, William dredged up a name. “Walsingham,” he croaked, for the fever and pain had stolen his voice along with his strength.
“Yes, Your Majesty.” Walsingham waited, as though he expected William to say something else. And William realized there was something he desperately needed to say. Needed the women to know.
“Box,” he croaked again, and was able to point so that Walsingham found the plain oak box on the table at the foot of the bed. William had carried that box with him everywhere since burning Wynfield Mote, and his attendants knew to keep it within his reach.
At a nod from William, which sent pain flaring bright and hot through his head, Walsingham opened the box and withdrew the simple linen bag that had been taken off Minuette’s maid in the camp outside Wynfield Mote.
Walsingham looked questioningly at William but did not open the bag. William knew he could feel the outline of a diary, the fluid shape of jewels, and he wanted to tell him … no, not him, it wasn’t Walsingham who needed to know … it was Minuette’s, it should return to her … but she was never coming back. And Dominic …
As William’s exhausted body slipped back into restless sleep, Dominic’s eyes followed him, dark green and hate-filled, watching him from the squalor of the dungeon at Lakehill House.
Dominic knew he was beginning to go slightly mad as the days and weeks and months passed and William did not return to see him. What was the king doing? Leaving him to die of grief and solitude? If that were William’s plan, he should never have mentioned that Minuette’s son—possibly Dominic’s own son—lived. The thought of some part of his wife left behind—and in the king’s hands—was just sufficient in the worst hours to keep Dominic moving in both body and mind.
But then there came a stretch of days when absolutely no one came, not even the mute servant who brought his food and emptied his fetid waste bucket. Dominic passed a bad few nights when he thought that William had sent orders to let him starve in the darkness, but before despair could quite sink into his bones, Eleanor appeared.
He had not seen her since William’s last visit, for she had apparently lost interest in taunting him at the same time the king had. But she had not changed. Dominic could still see in her the lovely, scheming, utterly amoral young woman she had been when she first appeared at court and in William’s bed. Of them all, it seemed Eleanor was the least affected by the years.
For all that, her voice had a new edge to it, like broken glass stroked across his skin. “I’ve had word. Your fate has been consigned into my hands. Now what,” she wondered softly, studying him as she might a dog, “shall I do with you?”
Seriously, Will? Dominic thought. You cannot even finish me off yourself, but must leave me to her?
Her eyes traveled his body, still chained but now wearing the rough homespun brought to him by the mute servant some time ago. His hair was a tangle to his shoulders and crawling with various unsavory life forms, and his beard itched awfully. Most of him itched.
“It would not do for you to meet your fate looking quite so revolting,” Eleanor continued. “I shall send a man to clean you. And then … the ax, I think. Is that not what you have been waiting for all these months? Do you even know how long?”
His voice was rough from disuse, though he’d made himself speak aloud in the emptiness of his cell as often as he could stand. “Just kill me, bitch, and be done with it.”
Her eyebrows shot up. “Well, well, well … who would have guessed the oh-so honourable Dominic Courtenay had it in him to say such things? But then, we all have our darker sides.”
She left then, but was as good as her word. The mute servant returned, this time with another man who looked marginally more intelligent if just as uninterested. They stripped Dominic—undoing the wrist chains one at a time—and scrubbed him harshly and methodically and sluiced away more dirt and filth than Dominic cared to think about. His hair they simply cut, ruthlessly cropping it, and though they didn’t shave the beard completely they at least made it manageable. Dominic was ashamed to admit what a difference it made, to feel clean.
And then he waited, dressed not in homespun but in soft hose and clean linen that had probably belonged to Giles Howard at some point, and waited for the promised deliverance of the ax.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
DISPATCH FROM WILLIAM CECIL, LORD BURGHLEY,
TO HER ROYAL HIGHNESS, ELIZABETH
The king’s wounds fester and grow foul. His previous bouts of ill health have weakened his constitution. The physicians are uneasy. Perhaps Your Highness should come to Pontefract.
Elizabeth sent Walsingham as her envoy to Pontefract, dispatching him with a curt written message rather than speaking to him.
And then she waited.
The previously glorious early summer weather had turned violent on the day of the battle, and Elizabeth felt the heavens mirroring her own internal struggle. She could not stay still, but she would not leave Hatfield. She would not go to Pontefract. She would not go to London. As long as she remained at Hatfield, time seemed suspended and all that had come before and all that might follow after were held in the balance of one man’s breath and one sister’s choice.
When the weather forced her indoors, Elizabeth paced through the confines of her favorite home and thought back to the deaths of those she’d loved. Her father, always larger than life, who might have been terrifying in his tempers if his affections had not been just as wide and deep; Elizabeth had been thirteen when Henry died, and she well remembered the keen sense of loss that filled the very air of England. Then her mother, four years ago, with whom Elizabeth had sat until her last hour, watching the vibrant Anne fade with every painful breath until her vital spirit slipped free of her injured body.
She thought of Dominic, whom she had perhaps not realized she loved until too late, for he was the very embodiment of self-effacement, and one tended not to notice him until he was gone. The last time she’d seen him had been the day he’d fled court with Minuette, to escape William’s reach for a time. But in the end the king had his revenge on the scaffold.
And Robert … her last memory of Robert Dudley was three days after Dominic’s execution, when she asked him to risk his life for Minuette, to escort her friend from the Tower to safety in France. He had taken Elizabeth’s hand in his and kissed it, not as a friend or a would-be lover, but as a subject. And he had said: I serve at your pleasure, Elizabeth, and I am your man until the last day of my life.
After two weeks of storms and flooding, the sun made a feeble return, like a new colt trying out its legs. Elizabeth had heard nothing from Burghley for two days when, on June 28, horsemen riding fast approached Hatfield.
Elizabeth met them outside, dressed in a gown that hinted at childhood in pale blue and white, her hair dressed high at the crown and left to hang to her waist. She noted Lord Burghley at once, but it was the nobles of the privy council who took center stage.
Not a duke—for Rochford and Dominic were dead, and Norfolk imprisoned—but the Earls of Pembroke and Oxford stepped forward of the others and were the first to kneel.
“Your Majesty.”
She could not have told who spoke those wo
rds first, but they were repeated as the remaining men—and her own few ladies—also knelt to offer homage to their new monarch.
My brother is dead, she thought. And John Dee was right.
Elizabeth the queen.
She had practiced her response and spoke without faltering. “This is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes.”
8 July 1558
Chateau de Blanclair
William is dead.
10 July 1558
Chateau de Blanclair
I did not mean to break off writing so abruptly before, but I found that I could not go on. Not for sorrow’s sake, or rage, or relief … I think it is more that I do not know how I feel.
The news came through Walsingham’s contacts. William had been wounded at the battle outside York and his general state of ill health led to a festering of the wounds and a weakness of spirit that could not be overcome. He died the day before our shared twenty-second birthday.
Now Elizabeth is queen. And yet I find that I remain far more interested in the fact that Lucette has light brown hair that curls slightly against her perfect scalp, that she is wonderfully chubby and good-natured, that she sits up perfectly well unassisted, and that she has cut her first two teeth. What are kingdoms and politics next to that?
27 July 1558
Chateau de Blanclair
Today I received a letter written in Elizabeth’s own hand. She begs me to return to England. “Not to court, unless you wish it,” she writes. “And I cannot imagine that you do. But I have carpenters hard at work restoring Wynfield Mote, not just the manor house but the cottages of your people that were burnt. Your home will be waiting for you, Minuette, whenever you desire to return.”
My home. I once thought my only home was Dominic. But now?
Her letter came with a gift: my old diary, my mother’s rosary, and the sapphire and pearl necklace Dominic gave me so long ago. I touched the filigree star hanging from the jewels and wondered if Dominic could see me from Heaven and knew how much my grief for him is mixed with love for Lucette.
The Boleyn Reckoning: A Novel (The Boleyn Trilogy) Page 34