The Queen's Captive (33 page)

“Like a right witch,” he said.

They shared a nervous laugh.

Elizabeth looked on, and Honor saw the worry in her eyes, fear lurking there again. If Honor were caught, Elizabeth could see the inside of the Tower before nightfall. They could all pay with their lives.

Honor came to her. “Trust in me, my lady. I will not fail you.”

In a sudden, impulsive move, Elizabeth threw her arms around her. Honor hugged her in return, feeling too much to speak.

Elizabeth pulled back. She laid a gentle hand on Honor’s shoulder and said, “Godspeed.”

“Aspirat primo fortuna labori,”
Honor replied. Fortune smiles on our first effort. It was the quote from Virgil that Elizabeth had greeted her with the first time they had met.

Elizabeth matched Virgil with Virgil.
“Audaces fortuna iuvat.”
Fortune favors the bold.

Honor had never admired the girl more.

Crossing the courtyard alone, Honor tried to control the drumming of her heart. The heavy load on her back demanded a plodding gait, but she made use of that, trudging like a lowly working woman whose labors continued unchanged, whatever the change in her masters. She welcomed the itch of the homespun dress, coarse as bark against her skin. Welcomed the pinch of the shoes. Welcomed the reek of cooking grease in the shawl that covered her false hunchback. These clothes were her frail armor against the Queen’s soldiers.

She made for the closed main gate. Soldiers were posted, a pair on each side of it. Near the right-hand pair, Jerningham sat on his horse, consulting with a lieutenant on foot. Every fiber in Honor wanted to avoid Jerningham—he had seen her inside the house, next to Elizabeth. But the guards to the left of the gate could too easily discharge their responsibility with a flat denial. Jerningham, with his more subtle commission, was her only hope. And surely he would not recognize a hunchbacked servant as one of the ladies he had seen inside, would he? She could only hope not. Bargaining that his orders, whether to “protect” the Princess or keep her under house arrest—or both—did not include depriving her of the privileges of her status, she made her way toward the two guards near him.

The taller one stopped her. Told her to go back inside.

“And leave Her Grace with filthy underclothes?” she asked. “Nay, I’d rather fight the likes of you than face the wrath of the Princess.”

“Don’t talk rubbish, woman. No one leaves. Go back.”

“Nay, I will not. I cannot. I’m that afraid of a whipping from the master steward.”

“Fool.” He grabbed her arm to shove her.

She cried out, protesting.

“Here, what’s this ruckus?” Jerningham said, trotting his horse over to her.

“Woman was trying to leave, sir.”

Jerningham didn’t even look at her. “Well, send her back.”

“I will go out, good sir, if you please,” Honor insisted to him, “just as I go out every Wednesday morning.”

He frowned at her, then asked the guard, with a nod at Honor’s bundle, “What’s she got there?”

“Laundry, sir.”

“Her Grace’s laundry,” Honor clarified. “Which I must take away.”

“You’ll do as you’re told,” Jerningham said sharply, “or it’s the stocks for you.”

“I have my orders, sir, and that’s to take Her Grace’s smalls every Wednesday and wash and bring them back sweet smelling. I warrant you have your orders, too, a fine lord like yourself, and where would we be in this muddled world if we didn’t follow our orders?”

She waited, sweat prickling her back. His scowl did not bode well.

“Where were you heading?” he said, his voice dark with suspicion. “There’s water enough here for washing.”

“The Cheapside conduit is sweeter water, good sir,” she said, frantic for an answer. “And my sister lives nearby it and keeps special lavender that’s a favorite scent with Her Grace.”

Jerningham’s scowl deepened. “Have a look at what she’s got in there,” he told the guard, nodding at her bundle. Honor’s stomach clenched. “You too,” he told the other guard. “Look for any paper. A letter. A message.”

One guard opened the bundle and both of them poked through the linen shifts and bodice linings and stockings, examining every item. Honor swallowed. How far would they search?

“No papers, sir.”

“Search her clothes.”

The guard reached out to pull off her head shawl. Honor flinched as his fingers brushed her shoulder. An inch of padding under her dress was all that covered the gold on her back.

“Jerningham!”

The imperious shout from the house turned all heads in the courtyard. Elizabeth emerged from the door and swept across the courtyard with all her ladies and her gentlemen ushers in tow, demanding, “What insolence is this, man? Let my servant pass.”

Jerningham bowed stiffly in his saddle. “Pardon, madam, but I must search the woman.” He nodded to his guards to continue.

They turned back to resume their duty, but Honor sensed their reluctance as Elizabeth came near. These soldiers, like so many other common folk, admired the Princess. But they had their orders. They searched the sleeves of Honor’s dress. Searched the pockets of her apron. Even looked inside her shoes. The tall one reached again for her head shawl and this time he tugged it off.

“God’s wounds, my lord,” Elizabeth said indignantly to Jerningham, “are you so affrighted that you must molest this unfortunate hag? Can you raise your sights to no fitter enemy than a crippled washerwoman? Pray, when you finish do come in and search my lame scullery boy. Oh, and the blind donkey in the stable. Heaven knows what contraband we might have fed the creature.”

There were smirks from the guards. Jerningham glowered a reprimand at them and the smirks vanished. But the damage to his authority had been done.

“Bah,” he said to Honor in a burst of bad temper. Then, to the guards, “Open the gate.”

She was out—saved by Elizabeth. What a brazen gamble on both their parts! It gladdened Honor’s heart that they had triumphed together. Now she was on her way to Noailles.

Leaving Charing Cross in her wake, she walked east as fast as she could manage under the burden on her back. She ducked into a stand of beech trees at the side of a tavern and dumped the laundry bundle into the bushes, but she could not remove the gold, for there was no other way she could carry such a load. Hurrying again along the Strand, she could hardly wait to find out from Noailles what was happening. Was Dudley already marching to liberate London? Was Adam with him? Would the city welcome them, eager to be rid of a queen despised by so many, a city ready to champion the popular Princess?

As she made her way along the busy thoroughfare and headed up Ludgate Hill, she noticed troops of soldiers everywhere. She spotted some posted at Ludgate to watch the traffic of country women carrying baskets of produce to market and a farmer herding sheep. She passed more soldiers posted outside the Belle Sauvage Inn beside Ludgate in London Wall. She glimpsed some at the entrance to Goldsmiths’ Hall and Haberdashers’ Hall, the headquarters of two of the city’s great livery companies. She lowered her head as she walked by more of them under Newgate’s massive arch and, as she went north, more posted along the road to Pie Corner. This show of the Queen’s strength was unnerving, but also bracing, for it could only mean that they were preparing to fight Dudley. She yearned for victory. Elizabeth on the throne!

She hurried through Smithfield, skirting the milling throng who had come for the horse fair. Her stomach turned queasy at the very air—it seemed to hold the cinders of George Mitford and hundreds of others burned at the stake. She left the execution ground as fast as she could, passing Long Lane, and finally reached the Charterhouse where the French ambassador was lodged. It was a private estate now, but had once been the home of the Carthusian monks, and its sprawling grounds, too, held an odor of death. Over twenty years ago, in his edict to dissolve the monasteries, King Henry had met resistance from the Charterhouse monks and so had ordered their prior hanged, drawn, and quartered. Ten other monks had been held in Newgate Prison where nine starved to death. The last had been executed on Tower Hill. Now Queen Mary, having sent hundreds of men and women to die in the flames, had shown how truly she was her brutal father’s child.

Honor entered the Charterhouse by the garden gate, so as not to be seen on the street, and made her way past the well-kept beds of tall yellow iris and climbing pink eglantine, then around to the front entrance. She knocked. The lanky porter opened the door. She knew him from her clandestine visits, ferrying messages between Dudley and Noailles.

“Bartholomew, I must see the ambassador. It’s urgent.”

The porter stood squarely in the doorway, making no move. It’s this cumbersome disguise, she thought. “It’s me,” she said, slipping the shawl off her head. “Honor Thornleigh.” She tried to look past him for his master. “Let me in. I must see Monsieur de Noailles.”

“Madam, I regret that that is not possible.” He looked oddly pale.

“He’s not here? Good Lord, Bartholomew, then tell me where I may find him. Lives hang in the balance.”

“Indeed they do, Mistress Thornleigh,” a voice behind him said. The porter stepped aside, head down in shame.

Honor’s heart gave a painful thud, then seemed to stop. The man who had spoken was John Grenville.

“It seems,” he said, “that neither of us can speak to your French friend unless we travel to Paris. Monsieur de Noailles has fled.”

He nodded to the half dozen of the Queen’s guard who stood with him. Two soldiers stepped forward and seized Honor’s arms.

Grenville stepped close to her, his narrow face inches from hers. She could smell the metallic bite of his sweat. “An odd costume, mistress. Going to a beggar’s ball?”

With his eyes fixed on hers, he pulled a dagger from his belt. She stiffened in the soldiers’ grip. Grenville raised the dagger high above her head, aiming its tip for the base of her skull. The soldiers drew in a shocked breath.

He plunged the blade into her back. Her knees buckled at the impact. Fabric ripped. Metal screeched against metal. Gold coins spilled. As Honor righted herself, the soldiers gaped at the coins clattering around her feet.

Grenville smiled.

20

The Tower

May 1556

“W
hose gold is it?”

Honor forced her face to remain unchanged, though if John Grenville saw her terror it was no more than anyone brought to this place would show. Few prisoners who left the Tower went farther than the executioner’s block. From the stool where she was being interrogated she looked up at him standing over her. She had to lick her lips, dry as canvas, before she could reply.

“The lady Elizabeth’s.”

“Did you steal it?”

A trap. It would be easy to protect Elizabeth with that lie. But he would surely have found out from Jerningham how the Princess had insisted the gate be opened for her washerwoman. Grenville wanted to catch her in a lie.

He asked again, slowly and clearly, as though to encourage a dull child, “Did you steal it?”

She could hear his two servants adjusting long screws on the apparatus in the corner. The rack. She thought of Richard’s tenting yards, where cloth stretched over a frame was tightened by tenterhooks. “No, my lord,” she answered. “I am no thief.”

“Are you saying the lady Elizabeth
gave
it to you?”

“She did.”

A smile of satisfaction tugged his thin lips, turning white the hard rib of scar above his lip. “Good. We are making progress.”

How she hated him. Elizabeth was his real quarry. The prize captive to deliver in chains to the Queen.

“Now,” he went on, “why were you smuggling the Princess’s gold to the French ambassador?”

“For my husband.”

He frowned, caught off guard. “What nonsense is this? Your husband is the Queen’s prisoner.”

“And I hoped to set him free.”

“What? How?”

“Monsieur de Noailles has many contacts. I hoped he could extend an inducement to my husband’s guards.”

“A bribe?”

“A reward. The gold can be yours, my lord, if you will set him at liberty.”

He scoffed. “The gold is not yours to bestow. I have delivered it to Her Majesty.” He added pointedly, “Whose humble loyal servant I am. Now, do you expect me to believe that your husband matters so much to the Lady Elizabeth that she conspired with you to smuggle out five hundred pounds of her treasure?”

“She is a bountiful lady. As you know, I went to serve her at Her Majesty’s express wish, and I have come to admire the Princess’s generous spirit.”

He stared at her, pondering this. Then suddenly laughed. “You are ingenious, mistress. A most artful fantasy.” His eyes narrowed, his voice hardened. “But I am not the brain-sick fool you take me for. Now, let’s have the truth. Where was the gold destined? To which of the rebel leaders?”

“Rebels?” She swallowed. How much did he know? “I know of no such men, my lord.”

Grenville glanced at the rack. “Keep up these lies, mistress, and I shall trouble you with questions no more. Not until my men have stretched your memory.”

Her stomach threatened to heave.