Kate could see the truth of Lady Catherine’s desperate words written on her face. Lady Catherine was spoiled, true, and foolishly romantic, but not so stupid as to conceive such foul treason. She wanted her Ned above all else.
“I thought I could use them to teach my cousin a lesson,” Lady Catherine whispered. “That she would see how much power I could have, but that I do not really want it, and if she would just give me permission to marry Ned and leave court, all would be well. But I did not understand.”
Nay, Kate thought, she obviously did not. “We must get away,” she muttered. She had to push her own fear away now, not let it overwhelm her. She made herself study the inside of the torturous coach as if it was one of Rob’s stage props. There was little there but painted wood, and the rugs and cushions. The doors seemed fastened securely shut, even as they hurtled forward at a hurling pace.
She noticed the canvas seemed to have been hastily nailed over the windows, and a few of the iron nails protruded, one a bit farther than the others.
Lady Catherine’s hands were bound also, but in front of her rather than behind as Kate’s were. She had obviously already found a way to release the gags that were tied on them at the inn.
“Here, try to rub the rope on this nail, Lady Catherine,” Kate urged. “If we can loosen the bonds . . .”
Lady Catherine quickly nodded, and scrubbed her hands over the protruding nail. She scraped her fine white skin, but she was not deterred. She kept on until the rope frayed enough for her to snap it apart, and then she quickly worked Kate’s hands free.
Kate ignored the sting that rushed into her numb fingers, and pulled a corner of the canvas away from the window. She pulled herself up, pushing away the sparks of pain, and peered outside. They had left the spires of London behind. She could see only fields and thick groves of trees, hedges guarding the borders of fine estates, all blanketed in silvery frost.
Surely even the roads, perilous and bone-breakingly jarring already, would soon become impassable by coach. They were already going much too fast for the rutted, muddy conditions. What was Senor Gomez planning?
“What is happening?” Lady Catherine demanded, half-imperious, half-panicked.
“I can’t see anything,” Kate answered. She pushed herself to the other side of the swaying coach, bumping into the wooden seats until she could free a corner of the canvas over the window.
She caught a glimpse of Senor Gomez riding beside the coach, moving at a quick gallop, his face set grimly under the brim of his cap, his short cloak and boots splashed with mud. He shouted to someone, probably the coachman, but his words were snatched away by the wind.
Kate ducked down before he could see her peering out.
“I’m sure we can’t go on much longer,” she said. “The roads will become impassable. We must plan what to do when we stop.”
Lady Catherine shook her head, fresh tears pouring from her eyes. “I will never go with them! I will die before I leave Ned.”
Aye—it was rather like one of Rob’s plays. “That’s all very well, Lady Catherine, but Senor Gomez and his friends will surely do all they can to get you safely to Spain. Without you, their scheme can never work. Me, on the other hand . . .”
“Nay. I won’t allow that,” Lady Catherine cried, her face contorted as if with a horrible realization. Kate couldn’t help but feel a pang of grudging respect for her. Lady Catherine had been willing to die for herself, but when it came to others she was not so dramatically brave, so uncaring. “What shall we do, then? How can we escape?”
Before Kate could answer, a loud noise exploded over their heads. It cracked and echoed, almost like thunder, but Kate knew what it was—a firearm exploding. The coach, already unsteady, tipped to one side with a horrible, grating noise, a scream from a horse, shouts.
Kate and Lady Catherine were flung to one side, clutching at each other, but there was no time to cry out. The coach crashed into something amid a great cracking, and went horribly still.
Kate found herself sprawled awkwardly on the wooden floor, her head and shoulders braced painfully against the door, Lady Catherine collapsed over her legs. The canvas was ripped free from the door, and she saw the patch of gray sky beyond, fringed by the skeletal brown branches of trees.
“Lady Catherine?” she gasped.
“I am quite well,” Lady Catherine said, trying to push herself up. She gasped with pain, and Kate saw that her fine black satin sleeve was torn and stained with blood.
Kate reached out to help her, just as the broken door was torn open and she and Lady Catherine tumbled out to the frozen ground.
For an instant, she was dazed, her aching head spinning. She quickly scrambled to her feet, pulling Lady Catherine with her as she took in the scene in front of them. The horses were leaping and whining in fear, yet seemed unhurt, unlike the man who had driven them. He was slumped in his seat high on the box, perfectly still, blood seeping from a wound on his shoulder.
Senor Gomez was still in the saddle, his head turning frantically as if to glimpse their assailant. His guards seemed just as confused, and Kate thought she should take the chance to flee into the woods with Lady Catherine.
But their escape path was blocked by another man on horseback. He wore a hooded cloak, his face obscured, yet the gun in his outstretched hand was all too visible.
A lady’s face peeked over his shoulder from her pillion seat, and Kate saw to her shock it was the girl from the inn. Her dark red hair was tangled, a bruise on her pale cheek, and she looked terrified.
“What is the meaning of this?” Senor Gomez demanded in furious Spanish. He swung down from his horse, drawing his sword.
The other man nudged the girl down from her perch with a rough arm and then climbed down himself. His hood fell back.
Kate thought she screamed out, but she heard no sound come from her numb throat. For the face revealed was one she would never have expected—it was Gerald Finsley, her father’s old friend. The man she had known since she was a child.
Surely, she thought wildly, he had come to rescue them? Somehow he’d known how to follow them.
That hope shattered into a thousand brittle pieces when Senor Gomez smiled and said, “You. Why have you come today? Was our business not concluded to your satisfaction, Senor Finsley? Surely the gold was delivered to you.”
“That was not our agreement, and you know that very well,” Gerald answered, in a voice Kate had never heard from him before. A deep, bitter, humorless laugh. “You saw what happened when Senor Vasquez tried to cross me, did you not? Did he think I wouldn’t know when he tried to double-cross me with the Scots? We had an agreement, and he tried to use that fool Lord Macintosh instead of me.”
“You killed Jeronimo?” Senor Gomez demanded furiously.
“Of course I did. You do recall our plan—you were to set my wife, the rightful queen, on the throne, and now I see you were intent on the Grey-spawned harlot all along. I will not be used thus, even by King Philip. I have spent years trying to make things right!”
Lady Catherine cried out indignantly at being called a harlot, yet Kate couldn’t take her shocked gaze from the lady who cowered like a frightened little bird by the side of the road. She was so slight, shivering in her thin gown, her brilliant hair tangled around her. The rightful queen? Gerald Finsley’s wife?
Kate thought of Queen Catherine Parr, of her music, her longing for children. Kate’s mind brought her back to her bedroom table, when she compared her father’s music from Queen Catherine with the sheet of music she’d found in Vasquez’s room. Those dates in the code . . .
Melville Village, Scotland—February 1559—The Lady Mary—church of St. Saviour—in the church porch . . .
Could it be a wedding date? This Mary was barely old enough to wed, but it was possible. A million thoughts raced like lightning in her mind through the taut silence that fell
between the two men. The calm before the storm.
Senor Gomez gave a laugh that crackled in that silence like the ice in the river. “When you wrote to my uncle, you assured us your wife was the daughter of King Henry, hidden away by Queen Catherine for her own safety, and that you had proof. The only thing you had to give us was your own marriage lines, and that proves naught but your own greed. She is the child of the traitor Seymour—that is all. My king needs his own legitimate claimant to the throne. Surely even you, a foul murderer, can’t be so stupid as to not see that.”
The girl collapsed to her knees with a raw sob, her hands over her face, and Kate longed to go to her. She dared not move, though, while Gerald Finsley still held that gun. The heavy firearm trembled, as if he could barely keep its weight balanced, and she knew any sudden movement might set it off.
Kate’s own anger and pain at realizing how much she did not know, how blinded she could be by her affectionate memories of her father’s friends, would have to wait.
“That was why you brought me to London,” the girl said, her words muffled by her hands. “You cannot think—I’m not . . .”
“Hush, you stupid child,” Gerald snapped, not even looking at her. “I would make you a queen. No more of your foolishness.”
“I fear you are the one who has been foolish,” Senor Gomez said. “You agreed to help us, we paid you for that help most generously, and you repaid us with lies and murder. You used the money for your own wife’s cause. You should consider yourself fortunate you have escaped thus far.”
“Fortunate!” Gerald shouted. “I have spent my life working for this moment, and your treachery . . .”
“Enough!” Senor Gomez’s iron disdain snapped. He raised his sword in an elegant, smooth, terrible arc. “You killed Jeronimo, and yet we have been kind to you. That ends now.” He swept forward in one quick, agile movement, the dance of the practiced duelist. In only a few blurred steps, he slashed out at Gerald, almost causing the gun to drop.
Gerald’s face, so furious only an instant before, melted into panic. He raised the gun in a wild arc. “I am here to make you honor your agreement! I have worked too long for this!”
Senor Gomez shoved the older man to the ground. “You are the one who made an agreement you could not honor,” he said, cold and calm. “Trying to pass off a useless girl as a rightful queen. I have managed to set things right with my uncle and the king, no thanks to you. And now I have no use for you, nor does my master King Philip. Once Lady Grey is married to a proper Spanish lord, we will make our case for a new queen of England.” He took a deep, swift lunge toward Gerald, his sword raised high before it slashed down.
The girl screamed, and the gun in Gerald’s hand went off with a deafening explosion. The sharp, dark smell of burnt powder filled the air. For a moment, Kate could see nothing but a silvery haze, could hear only screams and shouts, a tangle of confusion and terror.
When the air cleared, she glimpsed Senor Gomez slumped on the ground, toppled to his side with a gaping, bleeding wound in his shoulder, the fine velvet and leather of his doublet ripped away. Gerald, too, was wounded, swaying on his knees, the gun fallen from his limp hand. Senor Gomez’s sword lay in the mud, its shining steel stained bright red. The guards looked on from the other side of the road, unsure what to do next. Lady Catherine looked completely white, as if she would faint.
So many things flashed through Kate’s horrified mind—Allison Finsley leading her by her hand through the garden as a child, the queen on her golden throne, Queen Catherine Parr with her head bent over her writing, Senor Vasquez lying dead in the garden.
Instinctively, Kate ran to Gerald’s side, and caught him as he fell. He was alive, barely, his chest heaving with the effort of breathing, of holding on to the light. Yet she could hear the low, humming rattle of it, a sound she had heard too much in the last year. At Hatfield, at Westminster Abbey, at Nonsuch—the death rattle.
He stared up at her with faded, half-seeing eyes. In that instant, he looked like the man she remembered from her childhood, the man who helped her with her music lessons, who laughed with her father and the Parks.
Yet he was a man who would concoct a treasonous scheme using an innocent girl as bait. What had driven him to such desperation?
“El—Eleanor?” he gasped.
“Nay, ’tis me, Kate. Eleanor’s daughter. Oh, Gerald—why did you do this? My father would have helped you if you were in some trouble, given you money. . . .”
“Nay, not for money!” he cried. He clutched at her arm, surprisingly strong. “I only wanted to help—her.”
“Mary?” Kate said. “You love her?”
“Not as a wife. I am not so—foolish as that. As a daughter, though I married her to protect her. She was alone in life after Allison and I took her from the Suffolk house, where she was sore neglected. I promised Queen Catherine I would protect her babe.”
“Then she truly is Queen Catherine’s child?”
“Aye, that she is, I promise on my dying vow. Allison and I raised her, we protected her, just as we promised the queen. Mary was meant to be a great lady, as her mother was.”
“Queen Catherine would never have wanted her daughter embroiled with the Spanish,” Kate whispered.
“She would have been a queen! Once Queen Catherine thought she might be pregnant with the king’s child, not long before he died. It was her most precious hope. And when I realized that I alone knew Queen Catherine’s code—the one she wrote in her music—I realized I could write another piece of music, one where the Queen bade me marry her daughter, at a certain time, a certain place, to keep her safe. A prophecy that could prove she was King Henry’s when I showed Vasquez Catherine’s letters from the days when she thought she carried King Henry’s child. I knew she was not truly the king’s, of course, but I knew I could find a way to pass her off thusly. But then I couldn’t find the papers, the music Queen Catherine had kept when that night she feared for her life so long ago.”
Kate thought of Queen Catherine’s music lying on her desk, the one Queen Catherine had given her father for safekeeping that same night.
“The Duchess of Suffolk had no love for the child. In her household, it was easy enough to switch the baby for a peasant’s dead child, and take her away to be raised by another family. Easy enough to bribe a priest to marry us. I wanted only to help her, however I could.”
“To help her with a lie?” Kate said.
“To help her with what should have been the truth!” Gerald shouted with one last burst of energy. “I worked so hard on this scheme. When I couldn’t find the papers, I realized I’d have to resort to other means of procuring the throne. I tried to scare the queen into thinking her past had come back to haunt her, that she was not the true queen after all. I saw her behavior in the house of the Dowager Queen! I managed to leave the note in her royal chamber; I paid a beggar child to leave the doll at Greenwich. All for naught.”
“The queen is too courageous for such cowardly schemes to frighten her—surely you must know that,” Kate cried. “Oh, Gerald, how crazed your thoughts must have become.”
“Not crazed! ’Tis the truth—what should have been the truth,” he declared.
* * *
He fell back onto the ground, his eyes turning blank. Mary let out a wail and ran to his side, catching the attention of Gomez’s stunned guards. They straightened to their feet, and Kate snatched up Gomez’s fallen sword and held it out. She had no experience with such heavy blades, but she held the steel hilt with both hands, forcing her fingers and her mind to hold steady. Surely it had to be more reliable than a firearm that could explode in her hands at any minute.
Lady Catherine had no such doubts. She scooped up the heavy gun and waved it toward the guards. They froze in their steps.
“Your master is dead, so surely his traitorous bargains are at an end,” Kate said in her own halt
ing Spanish. “You must let us go now.”
They still looked hesitant, but a thunder of noise in the distance seemed to make them decide. Horses’ hooves pounded down the rutted road, growing louder and louder until a party of riders swung around the twist in the road, their own swords held high. At their head was Lord Hertford, and Lady Catherine cried out to him. The look on his face, sheer relief and fury, made Kate hope his feelings for Lady Catherine were true after all.
And riding just behind Lord Hertford, his own face filled with a panic and fury that even an actor’s training couldn’t disguise, was Rob. Kate tried to run to him, but her legs shook too much to hobble more than a few steps.
“Halt in the name of the queen!” Lord Hertford shouted.
Their Spanish captors immediately stepped back, arms raised.
“It certainly took you long enough,” Kate said. She let the heavy sword drop, and swayed with the sudden wave of exhaustion and sorrow that washed over her. She turned away from the sight of so much blood, so much life wasted, and collapsed to the ground.
CHAPTER TWENTY
“The poor child,” Queen Elizabeth murmured as she leaned over the bed where Lady Mary Seymour slept. She gently smoothed a wave of dark red hair from the girl’s pale forehead. She had fallen into an exhausted sleep as soon as she arrived at the palace, her meager belongings fetched from the Rose and Crown. “How much she has been through.”
Kate nodded. She still felt weary herself, aching all over her bruised body from the jolting carriage ride, but surely Lady Mary felt even worse, tossed from one world to another. Considered dead since she was an infant, raised secretly in the country, married at twelve—though the girl, through her tears, had assured the queen that it was not a real marriage, that Master Finsley had been as a father to her. A father who had kept her in isolation, used her for his own treacherous ends, and now had left her alone in the world, without a soul to care for her.
Kate thought of her own father, the way he had held her close when she stumbled back into the palace, his tender kiss on her forehead, and felt doubly blessed.
Murder at Whitehall Page 21