The King's Daughter (7 page)

“I want her out of here,” Wyatt said.

Martin bristled. “Sir, I would trust this lady with my life.”

“Ours too, apparently,” Wyatt growled. “Out.”

Isabel swallowed. “Sir Thomas, I speak French. I can translate your discussion for the Ambassador.”

Wyatt looked startled.

“You can trust me, sir,” she urged. “I only want to help.”

Wyatt hesitated. He appeared to be considering.

“Sir Thomas,” Martin said, “Isabel already knows the worst about us. Give her a chance.”

Wyatt appraised Isabel. “Good French?”

“Le meilleur. Ma mère est une instructrice excellente.”

The best. My mother is an excellent teacher.

Wyatt thought for a moment. “All right.” He jerked his head toward a finely dressed older man at the fireplace—Ambassador de Noailles, Isabel gathered.

“Come on,” Martin whispered in her ear. She felt his hand squeeze her arm in encouragement as he guided her toward the Ambassador.

“Norton, we haven’t heard from you,” Wyatt called across the room. “Will your tenants come out on such short notice?” He shot a glance at Isabel. She immediately translated for Noailles. The Ambassador nodded, clearly pleased at this solution to his ignorance. Wyatt, looking satisfied, turned his attention back to the man he had addressed, Norton.

Norton was gnawing his lower lip. “Look, my house is practically next to Lord Abergavenny’s, and he’s one of the Queen’s most ferocious supporters. I wish you’d consider my position.”

“Your position is going to be prone on a French battlefield, dead,” a young man poking the fire said over his shoulder, “as fodder in the Emperor’s wars—and all the fighting men of your tenantry with you—if you don’t rally with us against the Spaniards.”

“Christ, Brooke,” Norton cried, “your own father won’t budge from his castle!”

Brooke threw down the poker. “He’s sent George and me.”

“But kept well clear himself!”

“How dare you—”

“All right, all right,” Wyatt said, restraining Norton. “Let’s fight the Queen’s men, not each other.” The two antagonists looked away, mollified.

A burly gentleman said, “I want to know what arms are available.” Several men answered about the stock of their armories. Isabel listened, then gave de Noailles the gist of the talk of swords, longbows, arquebuses, and breastplates.

“Norton’s right about Abergavenny.” This was the gruff-sounding man concerned about money, Sir Henry Isley. “He’s a problem. But he’s rich. I say we capture him. Hit him hard, first thing, and squeeze him for treasure. Then hand it out to our men-at-arms.”

“No.” Wyatt was emphatic. “Listen"—he addressed the whole group—"our declared aim is to keep out grasping foreigners. If we begin by robbing our own countrymen, they’ll surely turn against us. And who could blame them? No, I’ll not condone sack and plunder.”

There was murmured agreement throughout the room at this. Even Isley nodded grudgingly, and downed his wine.

For a while Wyatt fielded questions and Isabel kept up a constant murmur of translation into de Noailles’s ear: “Is there any word of support from Princess Elizabeth?” someone asked.

“I’ve sent a message to her country house. She hasn’t replied yet.”

“What of the Duke of Suffolk?” Martin asked.

“Lost contact. But he’ll be somewhere in Leicestershire mustering a force to join us.”

“Will our London friends stand firm?” Isley asked.

“Aye,” Wyatt said with a grin. “You saw the welcome Londoners gave the Spanish envoys yesterday.” There was a murmur of laughter. “And,” Wyatt added, clapping a friendly hand on Isley’s shoulder, “there’ll be plenty of gold once the Tower is in our army’s hands.”

“God will not suffer us to lack for anything,” another agreed jubilantly. “Our cause is holy!”

Isabel regarded the last speaker, a fiery young man. The look in his eyes reminded her of the Anabaptists in the Netherlands, the fanatical Protestants so hated by the Emperor—and massacred by him. As a child, Isabel had seen their heads on poles by the river, their eyes staring out with righteous wrath, even in death.

“Our cause at the moment, Master Vane, is to get ourselves down to Kent,” Wyatt said coolly.

“I stand ready, Thomas, and all the fighting men on my estates. Our sacred duty is to put down the papist idolaters.”

“Aye,” another man agreed, “let’s get the bloody Mass stamped out. I’ll bash the head of any man who tells me I’m eating a piece of Our Lord when I mouth a morsel of Communion bread.”

“Well said, Master Harper,” the fiery young man cried. “We’ll lead the whole kingdom against the whoreson papists among us!”

“That would be a mistake,” Isabel said.

The room quieted. Isabel felt all their eyes on her. Her heart pumped in her throat. She hardly knew where her voice—her thought—had come from. But once the declaration was out she felt its perfect rationality. And a surge of power at having said it. She knew she must go on. “Spaniards are the enemy, not Catholic Englishmen,” she said. “Tell the country that. Englishmen will fight to keep out Spaniards.”

A log in the fire crackled in a small explosion, cascading sparks onto the hearth. In the silence, de Noailles, looking confused, whispered to Isabel,
“Qu’avez-vous dites?”
She whispered back to him in French. No one else moved.

Wyatt was staring at her. “The lady is a strategist,” he said quietly. He turned to address the whole group. “She’s right. We must not make this a quarrel to divide Englishmen, but one to unite them against a common foe. Vane, Harper, all of you—leave your fulminations against the Mass at home. Bring only your sense of England’s rights against the foreigners. Bring that, and your courage, and we shall not fail.”

“Bring your weapons, too,” Isley added gruffly.

Wyatt laughed. “Aye, Sir Henry.” The others laughed as well, gladly shaking loose the tension of their hours of worry and indecision. “And bring every mother’s son you find idly toasting his toes at the fire. Let’s rouse ‘em up! Let’s go now, and be about it!”

The room was suddenly alive with the bustle of departure. Men gulped down the dregs of their wine, flung on cloaks, clapped on hats. They left the room in twos and threes, their voices echoing through the great hall, their boots clomping across its floor. When only a handful of men was left, Isabel stood looking at Martin. He had thrown on his cloak but stood still, looking at her, too, his desire to get on with the fight warring with his reluctance to leave her. But Isabel knew he must go now with the others. And she would be playing no more part in this great endeavor!

“Martin, wait a moment,” she said. She hurried over to Wyatt who stood near Isley, giving hurried last-minute instructions as he wrestled into his doublet.

“Sir Thomas,” Isabel interrupted, “you will be down in Kent, but Monsieur de Noailles must remain in London, where I presume he must maintain an appearance of neutrality. You will need a go-between. Let it be me.”

Wyatt barely looked at her as he fastened his doublet. “The Ambassador has plenty of spies on his French staff, mistress.”

“But they will be watched now that the royal council has been alerted.”

He turned from her to grab some papers on the table. “He has English informers, too.”

“Who will probably slip away,” she said, “now that the stakes are life and death. And of the ones who remain, can they be trusted not to mangle the Ambassador’s meaning?”

Wyatt was stuffing the papers into a leather saddlebag.

She grabbed his sleeve to stop him. “Sir Thomas, please let me help.”

He looked at her with cold appraisal. “Mistress, do you know what the French say about the women here?” He removed her hand from his elbow and shrugged his arm like a cock settling its ruffled feathers. “They say English women are comely, but appallingly forward.”

She didn’t flinch. “The really appalling thing, sir, would be to fail because you’d refused a helping hand.”

5
The Visit

“O
h bother, what now?” Honor Thornleigh dumped the armload of shirts and books into the trunk she was packing at the Crane and answered the knock at her door. A well dressed gentleman stood before her. He said nothing. He simply looked at her.

“Yes?” she asked, somewhat testily. She wanted to finish packing. Richard would be back any moment from the wool market and he’d want to start the trip home. She glanced past the gentleman’s shoulder to Isabel’s door across the hall. Poor Bel; returning from the apothecary’s yesterday she’d been distraught at hearing they were sending her to Antwerp next week, and had suffered a sleepless night. Honor had taken one look at her daughter’s bleary eyes this morning and told her to go back to bed for an hour or two. But she must wake her soon.

“Honor?” the man asked hesitantly.

She turned her attention back to him. There was something familiar about him. The smooth red hair, gray at the temples. Her heart missed a beat. “Edward?” she said. It didn’t seem possible. Her hands flew to her cheeks. She hadn’t seen his face in over twenty years.

Edward Sydenham nodded acknowledgment, then suddenly went still as if belatedly struck off-balance just as she had been.

For a long moment they only stared.

“I heard you were in London,” he said finally. “So I took the liberty …” His words trailed.

“Yes, of course,” she said, recovering. “It’s just that … it’s …”

She, too, fell silent, caught up in the wonder of looking.

“I know,” he said. “It’s … odd.”

The nonsense of the stilted exchange seemed to rush over them both at once and they laughed. But Honor thought his laugh sounded uneasy. She knew hers was.

“Well, come in, come in,” she said. He stepped into the room. “Good heavens, Edward,” she said, trying to keep blame from her voice, stifling the impulse to slap him—ridiculous, after all this time. “I really thought—”

“That I was dead, I daresay.”

“Well, I heard nothing from you. I mean … after.”

“No. I thought perhaps you wouldn’t want to. I did hear about
you,
though. Later. That you were all right. So I just stayed where I was.”

“Amsterdam?”

He nodded, then said wistfully, “Far from home. For too many years.” He gave her a tentative smile. “But I always wondered how you’d got on, how life had treated you. How have you been, Honor?” He glanced around the luxurious hotel room and smiled. “Though I hardly need ask. I’ve heard, and I can see, that you’ve done well. And also,” he added quietly to her, “that you are looking well. Lovely, in fact.”

A facile compliment, Honor thought. With her sleeves rolled up and strands of hair straying from her headband, she knew she must appear like a washerwoman next to Edward’s finery. “It seems you’ve managed quite well yourself,” she said. She was appraising the blue velvet doublet, exquisitely embroidered with gold, under the cloak he had thrown back over one shoulder. The doublet’s sleeves alone—blue satin fashionably slashed to reveal dollops of gold silk lining like rows of golden teardrops—would have cost a year’s salary for a journeyman tailor. Such an elegant transformation from the scruffy young man she had known. She was suddenly, burningly, curious. “Tell me everything, Edward. Where have you been all these years? What have you been doing?”

He laughed. “Everything?”

“Everything repeatable,” she said with a smile, gesturing for him to take a chair at a small round table. But he did not sit. “Shall I call for wine?” she asked. She felt awkward. Why was he here? Why now, after so long? “And … something to eat? The Crane makes a superb custard tart.”

“No, nothing. I only want … to talk to you.” The earnestness, the gentleness, in his voice and face placated Honor in spite of herself. The old urge to shake him had already faded. Edward Sydenham. She had to admit that she was pleased, after all, to see him—if only to satisfy curiosity.

But pleased, as well, that Richard was out. Her husband, she feared, would not be so forgiving.

“I was sorry to hear of your mother’s death,” she said.

He shrugged. “It was years ago,” he said coldly.

“But my affection for that formidable woman has never abated. She helped save my life, you know.”

“I heard.”

“They were both extraordinary people, your parents.”

“They were deluded.”

Honor knew when she was being told to drop a subject.

Edward gave a quick smile, as if willing its brightness to banish the cloud that had passed between them. “However, Honor, we both have made new lives since then. For me, it’s … ah, where shall I begin,” he said with a look of mild exasperation. Clearly ready now to talk, he graciously held the chair for her. Even in that gesture, Honor thought, there was a world of difference from the high-strung, selfish Edward of old. And once she was seated, and he was settling himself in the chair opposite, she marveled at his movements, so polished yet relaxed, like a courtier. What had happened to the frantic youth who had clawed at her to get out of the hold of Richard’s ship?

“You think I’ve changed,” he said, as if reading her thoughts.

She retreated into bland politeness. “We all have, I’m sure.”

“Not you. But then, you did not have to. There was nothing in your character to be ashamed of. The brave and lovely fawn,” he said with a smile, “can only become a brave and lovely doe.”

She laughed, nodding at his gorgeous apparel. “And you have turned into a butterfly.”

His mouth smiled, his eyes did not. “But before the metamorphosis, who can tell what the caterpillar, locked inside its dark chrysalis, must endure?”

Honor remembered how he hated the dark, and small spaces. She did not want to edge too close to that topic. “Well, tell me about the
light,
Edward. For clearly, it has been shining rather generously on you.”

Finally, he laughed. “Quite true. And I have no right in the world to complain. I am a lawyer, you know, and the law does not treat kindly those who complain without grounds.”

“A lawyer?” She was surprised. “Where did you study?”

“Louvain. I’ve remained in Europe, you see, ever since I saw you last. Germany, for the first few years. Then Brussels. Brussels has been my base. I’ve done rather well there.”