The King's Daughter (22 page)

“He’s going to drownd,” a high voice beside Isabel said somberly.

She turned to a small face beside her, a buck-toothed little girl with wild, golden curls. The child was squatting beside the dog’s pudding bowl of water on the floor. A finger-sized piece of dough, crudely formed into the shape of a man, had sunk to the bottom. The child was looking up at Isabel with an expression of sad resignation.

“He needs a boat,” Isabel said. She reached across the table toward a bowl of walnuts and carefully cracked one open, splitting it into perfect halves. She picked the meat out of one half and held up the shell. “Fetch him out,” she told the child, nodding toward the water. The child obeyed with a wide-eyed look of anticipation and held up the soggy pastry man between her pudgy fingers.

Isabel took it, then bent and whispered another suggestion in the child’s ear. The child scampered across the room to the side of the hearth where a bough of leftover Christmas holly lay, and brought it back to Isabel. Isabel set to work. She tugged off a holly leaf and propped it inside the walnut shell to act as a sail. She shook water from the pastry man and, turning her back to hide the operation from the child, nipped off half his body and refashioned him much smaller, then turned back and placed him inside the shell. She bent over the bowl and set the tiny craft afloat.

The child beamed. She crouched and was immediately engrossed in prodding the little boat on an erratic voyage around the small ocean’s surface.

Isabel glanced up, smiling, and caught the mercenary looking intently at her. He quickly went back to wiping his sword. Always, he avoided her eyes. But his aloofness did not bother her now. She had accepted the delay in continuing the search, and she had made a stirring decision. She was going to go to Ambassador de Noailles for his instructions—now. De Noailles was lodged at the Charterhouse just outside Aldersgate; she could easily get there and back well before the nine o’clock curfew when the city gates closed. She felt energized, full of renewed purpose. She would leave as soon as she finished her ale … and as soon as she gathered the courage to say what she wanted to say to the mercenary. His words on London Bridge had sprouted a doubt in her mind.

The little girl, still beaming, lifted her boat from the water, clearly intent on showing it off. She cried to the mercenary, “Look!” and lurched straight toward his deadly blade. He jerked the sword away, up above her head, in a movementso swift the air hissed. The child’s mother at the table gasped. Isabel was astonished at how quickly he had reacted.

The woman crossed herself. “Lizzy, come away from there!” she called. “Come and help Mama!”

The child had frozen in fear—not of the blade but of the mercenary’s fierce scowl. Isabel reached out and gently drew the child back into her arms. “Go to your Mama,” she whispered. “She needs you.”

The child shot a smile up at Isabel and toddled off toward her mother, giving the mercenary a wide berth.

“Lord, I’ll skin that sweep alive!” This came from the chambermaid, emerging from the chimney. Backing out on hands and knees, she cursed the sweep with imaginative oaths for leaving the hearth in such a state. “Just wait till I get my hands on the wastrel. He’ll wish his mother had birthed him in China!”

Her litany of invective had brought her to her feet, slapping her hands of charcoal dust as she moved through the room. She stopped and gave the mercenary a frankly appraising look while wiping her hands on the top of her dirty apron, leaving thick black streaks down her bosom. It crossed Isabel’s mind that the young woman, apparently about her own age, was not unattractive under the smudges of soot on cheek and chin. “What won’t I do to that little bugger?” the maid finished with a suggestive grin to the mercenary. With her eyes still fixed on him she unwrapped her apron, displaying a low-cut bodice that barely concealed heavy breasts. The mercenary did not look away.

Isabel stood. “I’d like a word with you,” she said tersely to him. She moved to the door, out of earshot of the family. He sheathed his sword in its scabbard hanging on the chair and followed her.

“I’m concerned,” she said to him in low tones. “Do you really know what you’re doing?”

He frowned. “What?”

“You seem to know very little about London prisons. We had to be told that the Clink doesn’t take prisoners from outside London.” The cellarman had explained that fact following the abortive meeting with the other prisoner named Thornleigh. “Well?” Isabel waited for some response. The mercenary only looked away in that habit he had of avoiding her eyes. Exasperated, she asked, “Do you have any plan at
all
for freeing my father?”

He finally looked at her. “No use to talk tactics before you know the battlefield.”

She considered this. “I see,” she conceded.

There was a frantic flapping of wings. In the nook the fighting cock had made a leap for freedom into the air. The men laughed and one of them caught its leg and forced it to the ground.

Isabel felt awkward standing in silence next to the mercenary. “I am going out,” she said suddenly. “I have business to attend to alone. I will take the mare. I may be some time, so have supper yourself. The landlady says there’s a cookhouse round the corner where she is taking her pies to be baked. I’ll see you in the morning. Please be ready early.”

She turned to go back to the table for her cloak.

“Wait,” he said, catching her elbow. As soon as he touched her he let go of her as if he had been burned. “I do not—” He looked down, angry-faced, unsettled. He spoke through tight jaws. “For food, I … have no money.”

“Oh,” Isabel said. “I’m sorry.” She took out her purse and dug inside. As she dropped three shilling coins into his palm she noticed a tough, white rib of scar tissue running the length of his thumb.

She looked up and caught him staring at the ring on her forefinger. “It’s just like one my father wears,” she murmured. “He uses it to stamp the lead tags that mark his wool bales. See? It’s a thorn bush. Our family seal.” His attention was fixed on the ring with open-eyed interest, and Isabel could not resist a small smile, though a sad one. Perhaps, she thought, under this man’s armor of alienation he was capable of some feeling after all.

He looked at her with a sudden scowl and turned away abruptly, snatched up his sword, headed for the door, and left without a word.

Isabel blinked after him.
What an unaccountable man,
she thought. But she could not waste time fretting over his quixotic moods. She had work to do. And an ambassador to meet.

Carlos stomped up the snow-dusted south steps of St. Paul’s cathedral.
Damn the girl,
he thought.
Damn her soft eyes. Damn her sympathy.
He had not asked for any of it!

He stalked inside the cathedral and halted. The stone-vaulted nave was crowded—it was London’s only covered, public meeting place—and he was not sure where to find what he was looking for. The late afternoon light glowed duskily through the rose stained-glass window at the east end, making the movements of the people bustling around him look furtive. Porters and maids hurried by. Water carriers with tankards strapped to their backs trudged through, taking the short cut from Paul’s Wharf Hill through the nave and on out to Newgate Street. Moneylenders and their customers stood bargaining at the font. At a pillar servingmen loitered, hoping for work. At other pillars lawyers murmured with their clients. A dog sniffed Carlos’s boot. A plump whore sidled by.

There was a shout. A woman was chasing a young pickpocket up the north aisle. Carlos felt his shoulder banged. He whipped around, coming toe to toe with a foppish gentleman brushing his red satin sleeve and grimacing as if this contact with a peasant’s dirty sheepskin coat had soiled him. The man strode on. Carlos’s lip curled.
A week ago I owned a manor house,
he thought.
A week ago I was the lord of tenants and three hundred acres!
His fist clenched around the paltry coins the girl had given him. He grabbed a passing choirboy by the shoulder. “Clerks,” Carlos said. “To write a letter. Where are they?”

The boy pointed to the west end. Carlos saw them— scribes seated at tables writing letters and legal documents for customers. He moved the boy out of his way and started across.

He stood for a moment beside other customers at one of the tables and watched a spectacled clerk work the mysterious scrawl. Further along the bank of scribblers a young clerk sat sharpening his quill with a knife, obviously idle. Carlos moved to him. “You can write a message?” he asked.

The young scribe looked up. “Certainly, sir.” He took a fresh sheet of paper and dipped his quill. “To whom shall I direct it?”

Carlos hesitated. He did not know the man’s real name. But since leaving Colchester a worry had been gnawing at him. The employer who had sent the man to the jail to commission him would likely have heard of Thornleigh’s transfer, and the riot, and would assume the assassination had been thwarted. Carlos wanted to reassure him, but the only information the man had given him had been:
Bring proof to the Blue Boar Tavern on Cornhill on Candlemas Night. If you must contact me before then, ask for Master Colchester at the Blue Boar. They know me there.
Carlos had decided against showing his face in person at the tavern. Too risky. There had been search parties out for him in Essex. It was possible they’d be looking in London too.

“To Master Colchester,” he instructed the scribe. “Tell him this. ‘The work was delayed but I am in London and it will be done. Come to the meeting with payment.’ Write that.”

He watched the indecipherable pen strokes. When the clerk finished with a flourish, Carlos ordered, “Read it back.”

The clerk did so. Carlos was satisfied.

“Is that all, sir?” the clerk asked.

Carlos nodded. “How much?”

The clerk smiled and asked for a shilling.

Carlos looked down at the coins in his hand.
Her
coins.
“Madre de Dios,”
he cursed under his breath. He would beglad when this was over and he’d seen the last of her. The last of her dangerous passion to rescue her father. The last of her sympathetic eyes. He tossed a coin on the table.

The young man had looked up sharply at the foreign oath. “You’re Spanish?” he inquired.

Carlos only glared at him. “See the message is delivered to the Blue Boar Tavern,” he said, tossing down another coin. “Enough?”

“Ample, sir.”

Carlos turned on his heel and left.

14
Friends

“C
an you remember all that, mademoiselle?” Ambassador de Noailles whispered. His face was in shadow in this dim corner of his scullery at the Charterhouse. None of his English servants would have been able to understand his French conversation with Isabel, even if they could hear it, but the furtive location was necessary to keep his none-too-trustworthy French staff ignorant of the meeting.

Isabel managed a smile and assured him that she could remember, though her head felt jammed with the facts and figures of French fleets and infantry companies. De Noailles had declared the situation too dangerous for her to carry the information to Wyatt on paper.

“I wish I could offer you some refreshment before you go,” de Noailles said. “But …” He gave a fatalistic, Gallic shrug.

Isabel understood. The very fact that he had steered her to this deserted scullery beside his washhouse court was evidence enough that her visit was dangerous. She’d taken the precaution of entering the building through his back garden, her face hidden by her hood. “You are kind, monsieur,” she said. “But in any case I must return to the inn before curfew. I hear there’s little leniency from the citizens’ watches at the gates.” It was already dark.

His brow furrowed. “I do not like to send a young lady alone out into the evening. The streets are full of ruffians.”

“I’ll be all right,” she assured him. He accompanied her to the back door.

“Wait,” he said as if struck by an inspiration. “There is someone else visiting me who is also going back into town. He can escort you.” He smiled apologetically. “These days, I’m afraid I think too much of secrecy. But, in fact, you two should meet.”

De Noailles fetched the other visitor, a lanky man of about thirty with quick eyes and a trim beard that did not quite mask his receding chin. De Noailles made the introductions. The man was Henry Peckham. His French was halting, but Isabel could see that he and de Noailles were in accord. “Peckham is organizing the London citizens supporting Wyatt,” de Noailles explained to her, smiling. He added with obvious relish, “There are a great many of them. Aldermen, even. Ah, yes, the Queen is in for a great surprise!”

There was a burst of female laughter from somewhere at the front of the house, perhaps from the maids. Isabel and Peckham took a hurried, whispered leave of the Ambassador and stepped out into the washhouse court where a single hanging lantern on the court wall barely lit their way out into the dark garden. The evening wind made the boughs of the barren fruit trees creak and groan. They reached the postern gate in the garden wall and, in almost total darkness, made their way up a lane to Aldersgate Street where Peckham’s horse was tethered. Isabel had left her horse at a hostelry farther down the street; like Peckham, she had been sure that de Noailles’s lodging would be watched by the Queen’s officers.

Once in the street Isabel felt a rush of exhilaration at this small success with de Noailles. Amid the welter of her difficulties she had accomplished what she had set out to do here for Wyatt’s cause. It felt wonderfully satisfying.

On the way to the hostelry, with Peckham’s horse plodding behind them, Peckham told Isabel about his clandestine group’s activities. They were quietly organizing citizens and arms, he explained.

“Sir,” Isabel said cautiously, “may I ask if you are any relation to Sir Edmund Peckham?”

“My father,” he answered with a mischievous smile. “He dare not declare himself yet, but he is behind us.”

Isabel was impressed. Sir Edmund Peckham was Master of the Mint and a member of the Queen’s council. It was thrilling to think that support for Wyatt’s cause had reached so high.