The Highwayman (20 page)

“I saw you,” Maura finally said in a rush, “entering the castle as I was going home. I waited until you left and then ran after you. I never would have caught up if you hadn’t stopped here.”

“Well, you’re with me now.”

“Is it true that Tyrone got a peace pact from the English?” she asked him breathlessly.

“It’s true.”

Maura pressed his hands and smiled. “No small thanks to you, I’ll warrant.”

“Did you deliver the message in the flowers as I asked?” he said impatiently.

Maura nodded. “That same day, back in June.”
 

“And?”

“She was most happy to hear that you were safe away and out of English hands.”
 

“And?” he prodded further.
 

Maura hesitated. “She gave me a reply. She made me repeat it to get it by heart.”
 

Burke waited, his eyes fixed on her.
 

“She said, Tell him that I’ve gone back to England, to do my uncle’s bidding. Tell him to forget me.

Burke closed his eyes.

“She was sore afraid for you,” Maura added. “She thought you would be killed if you came back after her.”

“So she thought if she left I would be safe?” Burke demanded, throwing up his hands. “Damned headstrong, impossible woman! All she had to do was wait! Why the devil couldn’t she wait?”

Maura looked away from him.
 

“What?” Burke said to her. “What is it?”
 

“She was with child. She told me so herself.”
 

Burke didn’t move, but he looked much as if he might collapse. “My child,” he whispered.
 

“Your child,” said Maura.
 

Burke looked back in the direction of the castle and said between his teeth, “I should gut that bloody bastard like a flounder. He knew and never told me.”

“There’s nothing to be done for it now, Kevin,” Aidan said. “Leave it alone. We’ve won the peace on our terms and the girl is gone. Let it go.”

“There’s something to be done, right enough,” Burke said. “I’m going after her.”

“To England?” Aidan said in astonishment.

“To England. That’s where she is, I’m told.”

Aidan looked at Rory, who shook his head. It was no use talking to Kevin on this subject; Rory had already tried many times.

“You can’t leave now. We’ve just stopped fighting, and there’s much to be done,” Aidan protested.

“Nothing you can’t handle on your own,” Burke replied. “The difficult part is over, and you don’t need me for the rest.”

“How do you plan to get there?” Rory asked.

“I’ll get a curragh from the fishermen.”

“A fishing boat is not meant to cross the Channel,” Aidan pointed out.

“I’ll tar it well and outfit it fully for the voyage.”

“It’s foolhardy,” Rory said, stating his opinion for the first time. “But of course you must know that.”

Burke ignored him and raised Maura’s hand to his lips. “I owe you a debt I can never repay.”

“I’ve done nothing,” Maura said, embarrassed. “I pray that you might swiftly find your much-put-upon lady.” She withdrew her hand from Burke’s grasp and headed off through the thicket of trees, leaving the men alone.

* * * *

In the morning Aidan and Rory stood on the shore as Burke, his boat loaded with provisions, a compass and a borrowed sextant and several flasks of water, pushed the curragh into the sea.

“We’ll never see him again,” Aidan said.

“Would you have chained him to a stake in the ground?” Rory countered. “That would be the only way to keep him here.”

“I only hope she’s worth it.”

“He thinks she is, and that’s all that matters.”

“Even if he gets there, he’ll never find her. England is a vast place, many more people than here, spread about the countryside in hamlets big and small, as well as teeming towns with folk packed in like rabbits in a warren.”

“He’ll find her,” Rory said.

“And then what? She’ll welcome him when she’s married to another? A rich man, no doubt, whom she’ll reject in favor of my brother? He’s an idiot who thinks so.”

“She’s carrying your brother’s child,” Rory reminded him.

“All the more reason for her to stay with the man who could best provide for it,” Aidan said.

There was a pause while they watched the waves and the vanishing figure in the curragh.

“Well, good cess to him,” Rory said, clapping

Aidan on the back. “He’s doing what he wants, and so should we all. Let’s go back to the camp and have a drop on it.”

The prospect of a drink cheered Aidan, and the two men headed inland as the departing boat grew smaller in the distance, heading toward the horizon.

Chapter 9

The word
must
is not to be used to princes...

—Queen Elizabeth I

“Lady Selby!”

Alexandra whirled at the sound of her name to see Mary Howard running toward her, skirts flouncing.

“The queen!” Mary said, gesturing in the direction of the privy council chamber at Richmond Palace. As Alex looked past her, the elaborately carved doors burst open and the helmeted guards stationed on either side of them banged their axes on the floor.

“No more war, my lords!” the queen announced, concluding the council session an hour early. She strode purposefully out of the room and into the hall. Mary and Alex floated to the floor in curtsies as she swept past them, calling, “Attend me!” over her shoulder.

The two women stood up and hurried after her, exchanging glances as the old lady muttered her usual post council imprecations about “bankrupting my treasury with their military exploits” and “impotent old fools playing at toy soldiers.” The councilors streamed out of the room behind her, murmuring to each other as they packed up their papers. Among them was the principal secretary, hunchbacked Robert Cecil, son of gouty old Lord Burghley. The younger Cecil, nicknamed “Pygmy” by the queen for his stunted stature, had inherited leadership of the anti-Essex faction from his dead father. The men stopped to confer in small clusters, casting apprehensive glances at the queen as she marched away, still in a pother.

Guardsmen snapped to attention as she passed, and her path cleared before her as if by magic. Elizabeth walked briskly along the paved stone corridor, the courtiers she passed bowing from the waist and the ladies sinking gracefully to mark her progress.

“I will hear no more of Ireland!” she said to no one in particular as Alex and Mary hastened to keep up with her. “Three years ago I sent thirty-five hundred men to that benighted place, and within a year twenty-five hundred of them were dead, fled, or converted to the Irish. My soldiers disappear into those bogs as if melted by the fairy mist.”

She turned in at her privy chamber, and the door flew open before her. A startled Lady Warwick put aside one of the silk wigs she had been combing and curtsied abruptly. Two tirewomen making up the royal bed in the next room fell to their knees in fright.

“And Essex!” the old lady went on, taking no notice of the response of her servants. “I followed up his flagship last spring with sixteen thousand foot soldiers and thirteen hundred horsemen. And what have I to show for it? Not defeat for the rebels, as I was promised, but a
truce
, thank you very much. A truce, by Jesu’s wounds, with that wily, scheming, thieving rascal Tyrone!”

Alex was careful to shift her glance away from that of her mistress. The debacle in Ireland had been worse than she ever could have imagined.

“And now these varlets ask for
more
money for
another
campaign under Mountjoy! They will drive me to distraction with their demands. I will replace every one of them and have some blessed peace in my kingdom for my beleaguered and overtaxed people. Far better for my councilors to serve my interests by laboring on the charter for the East India Company and leave off Ireland altogether.”

The queen seemed to notice suddenly that everyone in the room had frozen. “Get up, get up,” she said, waving aside their obeisances. “Go about your business again. I merely wish to change my costume before receiving the French ambassador, but these two ladies can do for me well enough.”

Lady Warwick fled as Alex and Mary moved in on the queen, and Alex began to unlace her bodice when she gave the sign.

“Think you that Mr. Hurault de Maisse will like the silver cloth with the crimson kirtle and the slashed sleeves?” the queen asked.

“It’s a lovely dress, ma’am,” Mary said.

“The red taffeta lining becomes me not,” the queen said, fishing for a compliment.

“Your Majesty looks very well in red,” Mary said.

“But not so well as in some other colors,” Elizabeth said.

This was a trap, and both women knew it.

“Your Majesty can wear any color to excellent effect,” Alex said smoothly, “but perhaps the ambassador would prefer the red since it is new from France. It has always pleasured him to see you in his country’s latest fashions.”

“Well said,” Elizabeth remarked approvingly. She had spent her life fencing with diplomats, and she could recognize one anywhere. She stood still as the women dressed her in the new outfit and then said, “Bring the curled wig. This one is too heavy and it tires me.”

Mary lifted the auburn wig from the old woman’s head and repinned the sparse gray hair it had covered. When the new wig was brought, Mary set it on the royal head gently. She had been cuffed more than once when she was deemed too rough.

“Ah, better,” the great lady said, examining her image in her looking glass.

She gestured for her jewel box and added the touch of a circlet of rubies and pearls to match the pearl drops in her ears. Elizabeth lifted her long fingered hands, of which she was very proud, and studied the rings she wore, exchanging a heavy carnelian set with diamonds for a star sapphire embedded in gold.

“There,” she said when the sapphire was settled on her finger. “Now bring me the attar of roses scent the ambassador sent ahead of him. If I wear it, he may recognize it.”

Alex brought the crystalline bottle, and the old lady uncapped it and held the stopper to her nose.

“Bah!” she said, slamming the bottle down on her dressing table, where the contents slopped over onto the lace cover and stained it dark.

“This potion reeks. The man would have me stinking like a whore in the Southwark stews. Take it away.”

Alex, who knew the queen’s sensitive nose, removed both the bottle and the lace doily and put them in the other room.

“I will have the marjoram,” the queen said, indicating a pot of her favorite, lighter scent.

Mary fetched it for her, and Elizabeth sprinkled herself liberally with the perfume.

“Now I am ready,” the queen announced, handing the jar back to Mary. Her wrinkled face, heavily painted with alum and borax to enhance its natural whiteness, crinkled as she smiled at them, exposing the gap on the left side of her mouth where most of the teeth were missing. It was said that her physician kept fenugreek at hand to draw her teeth, since so many of them were yellowed and rotten— a consequence, Dr. Butts believed, of the queen’s fondness for sweets. Still, bejeweled and attired in rich clothes, she made an impressive figure for an ancient crone of sixty-six. And her intellect, as all who served her knew, was as sharp as the day she had ascended the throne forty-one years earlier.

“You are dismissed,” the queen said to Mary and Alex. “Remain here and await my return.”

She swept out to her audience with the ambassador, and the two younger women collapsed onto chairs as soon as she was gone.

“Aye me,” Mary said, adjusting her headdress. “What a tizzy she’s in! I would not change places with my lord of Essex for a chest full of silver guilders.”

Alex had seen him shortly after she had begun to serve the queen, the night he’d arrived back from Ireland, fresh off his horse, his face and clothes still splashed with mud from the wild ride. He had taken the queen by surprise at Nonsuch, bursting into her apartments when she was still in her night-clothes, surrounded by her women, her gray hair about her shoulders. The old lady had been speechless at his apparition; she had thought him still in Ireland and suddenly found him on his knees before her, covering her hands with kisses and begging her indulgence to let him explain his abrupt and unsanctioned return.

That had been the beginning of the end for him.

“How are the mighty fallen,” Alex said.

“Favorites change. When you’ve been at court longer, you’ll learn.” Mary brightened suddenly. “How is the babe?”

Alex winced. “Kicking.”

“When is it due to be born?”

“January, Dr. Butts says.”

“It will arrive with the new year and the new century,” Mary said. “It’s a good omen.”

Alex smiled and nodded. Mary, a distant cousin of hers with the dark eyes and hair of her mother’s people, was near her age. She had a homely philosophy of life and was given to such remarks.