Blood Between Queens (14 page)

Nevertheless, she felt grateful for this second chance. She was ready to do her very best for Elizabeth’s cause. And her own. Will’s betrothal ring, snug in her petticoat pocket, was her talisman spurring her to succeed.

Her one regret was that serving Mary was taking her away from Yeavering, from searching for the mysterious gentleman who had talked to Alice, his satchel full of ribbons. But Justine had found a willing helper in Jeremy. She had asked him to make inquiries in Wooler and Kirknewton and send word to her if he discovered anything.

There was a clang behind her and she looked over her shoulder. The gates, closing.

She was in.

T
he news hit England’s southwest seaport of Plymouth like a squall. A fast pinnace returning from Ireland reported passing a ship that was on a course for Plymouth but struggling in the foggy ocean swells. When the pinnace docked there, a messenger dashed to London with the news. Sir Adam Thornleigh’s ship
Elizabeth
was coming in. Alone.

The moment Frances Thornleigh got the message about her husband she left her London house and traveled as fast as she could. The windless conditions kept the
Elizabeth
wallowing offshore for another two days, and by the time Frances reached Plymouth the ship had just arrived. Now she was hurrying on foot down to the city’s seafront to meet it. The streets were gloomy with fog, the air cold, but Frances felt none of its chill, warmed by the joyful thought: Adam was home!

But her joy was shot through with nervousness. She had not seen her husband in over a year. It had been an October morning when she stood on the very quay she was hurrying toward now and waved him off on his voyage to the Indies, heartsick in knowing it would be many months until she laid eyes on him again. How handsome he had looked, how full of vitality. Just past forty, he seemed years younger than the expedition’s thirty-eight-year-old leader, John Hawkins. Adam’s youthfulness had always given Frances a double-edged pang. No man had ever stirred her as he did, but she was well aware how far past the bloom of youth she herself had wilted. It had long grieved her, for she believed that if she were not older than her husband, their marriage might have been a sunnier one. Certainly, it had had a rough start since she was a daughter of the house of Grenville; Adam’s parents had never warmed to her. And Frances herself suffered a silent hatred for Queen Elizabeth for the hold Elizabeth had on Adam. She sometimes thought their ten years as man and wife had seen as many storms as Adam had weathered at sea. One of the worst had come early: her brother Christopher’s treason eight years ago. But Frances had played no part in that debacle, and she was not sorry that it had claimed Christopher’s life. Since then she had given Adam a daughter and a son, both of whom he adored, while Elizabeth had found other “favorites” at court, and Frances now hoped the storms were all behind them. Almost two years spent apart from him had left her aching to have him back, and she prayed that the long separation had kindled some of the same feeling in him. To welcome him home she had dressed with as much care and art as possible. This reunion, she vowed, would mark a new beginning.

Her skin was unpleasantly damp from the mist as she reached the foggy harbor. Ships’ masts and rigging dripped moisture, and a seaweedy smell hung rankly in the air. Frances found that she was far from alone on the wharf—people seemed to have emerged from every street and alley: shopkeepers shutting the doors of their harborside businesses, apprentices sneaking time away from work, seafaring men coming from the chandleries. There were housewives in aprons, and street urchins with dirty faces, and a few finely dressed aldermen. All had been drawn by the arrival of the
Elizabeth
. On that October day over a year ago seven ships had proudly left Plymouth under Hawkins’s command, a small fleet but one with enormous prestige because the expedition was backed by a syndicate of wealthy London merchants as well as some of the Queen’s highest-ranking courtiers. The
Elizabeth,
it seemed, was the first vessel back. That did not surprise Frances. Adam had always been an intrepid and impatient adventurer.

Hurrying along the wet wharf in the fog she could not see farther than a few horse lengths, but the chattering crowd was moving toward the wharf’s southern end, so she knew the ship had to be there. She nudged past people, trying to get to the front. Excitement coursed through her as she anticipated her first glimpse of Adam standing high on the stern deck. But bodies blocked her view. As she got closer the chatter hushed, became a murmur. Something in the voices chilled her. A tone of horror. And there was a putrid smell. She pressed her sleeve to her nose to block the stench.

When she finally broke through to the wharf edge and looked up at the vessel looming in the mist, she gasped. The once-beautiful
Elizabeth
was a filthy hulk. Her hull planking was gouged by two head-sized holes that were stuffed from inside with sopping canvas sails. Her mainmast was gone, its stump a jagged timber. The bowsprit, once a proud lance that had pointed to the horizon and carried billowing canvas, had been half-eaten by fire; its charred remains looked like a burned amputee. Her rope rigging and the hawsers that townsmen were making fast to the wharf bollards were so shaggy they appeared chewed by rats. Her flags with the cross of St. George and the Queen’s colors hung faded and fouled, as bleached as bone. The
Elizabeth
was more carcass than ship.

Frances felt faint. The smell from belowdecks was the stench of death. Where was Adam?
As captain, he should be on deck.

She saw men moving, but so few! When the
Elizabeth
had sailed off to the New World over seventy men had crammed her decks: mariners, gunners, archers, carpenters, merchants’ agents. Now there were a mere handful. They moved like survivors on a battlefield, limping, dazed, some wounded, with dried bloodstains on their filthy shirts and breeches, and so thin they looked like clothed skeletons.
They’re starving,
she realized. One stood at the railing and stared down at the hushed crowd. Eyes hollow, he was as still as a cadaver.

Frances could scarcely breathe.
Where is Adam?

Men from the town began marching up the gangplank to assist, and the quiet crowd on shore suddenly came alive. Men of authority among them shouted orders. Other people ran to fetch water. Others pushed through with boards to carry off the casualties. Frances forced her way past jostling people to the gangplank. A couple of burly guards stood holding back mariners’ wives who were clamoring for word about their men. Frances gripped a guard’s arm.

“My husband is Sir Adam Thornleigh. Has he come ashore?”

“I know not, my lady.”

“Let me pass. I must go aboard and see.”

He barred her way. “No one goes on board but those to carry off the sick and the dead.”

Frances had to step aside as two men carrying a corpse between them lumbered down the gangplank. The smell was so foul, again she pressed her sleeve to her nose. “The sick. Where are they being taken?”

“Sign of the Trident.” He pointed to a harborfront tavern, then turned back to block a housewife who had clawed past the other anxious women. “Back now, you lot,” he told them. “Plenty of time. Dead men don’t scamper.”

Frances hastened across the harbor to the tavern. Its door stood open, awaiting more sick men to be brought from the ship, and inside the tables had been cleared as makeshift beds to receive them. The room was far from crowded. Only five men lay on the tables, and although a few looked barely conscious, their wounds had been dressed already by women who now stood grim-faced with towels and buckets of water, ready to nurse more of the ailing as soon as they should arrive. A scatter of other survivors, seven or eight, sat hunkered along the walls, a few on stools but most on the floor as though too weak to sit on a chair without falling. All were filthy. All, emaciated. None spoke. Cups of water and trenchers with bread and sausage lay beside them. One man was vomiting into a bucket after gorging on the food.

Frances scanned the faces, terrified of seeing Adam among these deathly ill wretches, yet more terrified of
not
finding him. If he wasn’t on the ship’s deck as captain, and wasn’t among the sick, was he among the dead?

Then she saw a face she knew. “John Bingham?” she cried.

She rushed to him. He sat on the bottom step of a staircase and looked up as she reached him. He had sat in her parlor discussing the expedition with Adam, and the man she remembered had been a ruddy-cheeked, clean-shaven, tidy fellow. Now a wiry black beard engulfed half his face, and matted hair hung in ropes from his head. His cheeks were concave, the skin sallow and pocked with sores. A grimy sling held his left wrist, and the linen sleeve was stiff with blackened blood. The shirt hung from his bony shoulders as from a board.

He blinked up at her. “Lady Frances?”

She winced at the sight of his mouth. Gray teeth, some missing. Scabbed lips. He was the son of a wealthy wool merchant and, like Adam, a member of the Company of Merchant Adventurers. He tried to struggle to his feet in courtesy.

“Sit, please sit. Oh, Master Bingham, where is my husband?”

He hung his head. “Adam . . .”

“Dear God, tell me he is not—”

“I saw him . . .” He looked up, desolation in his eyes. “Was it yesterday?”

“Where?”

“Bowsprit. Cutting a man from the nets.”

The anti-boarding netting. “Then he’s alive?”

“The poor wretch had lost a leg,” Bingham muttered. “Cannonball. Months ago. Don’t know how he lasted. Crawled to the nets to die.” His head lolled against the banister. “Shark food now.”

“But Adam? Where is
Adam?
”

He fought to focus on her. He licked his parched lips. She grabbed a wooden cup of watered ale from a nearby table and held it out to him. He took it in his good hand, the fingers grimy, and drank slowly, as though it hurt his throat. He looked at her. “God’s truth, Lady Frances, I do not know.”

She looked across the room and out the open door at the activity around the misty ship. She didn’t know what to do. They wouldn’t let her aboard to search, so all she could do was wait and hope to see him brought here, alive.

She sank down on the step beside Bingham. “What happened? Was it a storm?”

He grunted, a sound like a snarl. “A storm of Spaniards.”

“Pirates?”

He shook his head. “The viceroy himself. Mexico.”

She was shocked. “They attacked you?”

He drank more ale and seemed to take a little strength from it. Lowering the cup, he stared into its darkness. “We’d finished our trading south of their territory, all seven vessels. Took on victuals at Curaçao and were about to head home. When we entered the Florida Channel, one of the old salts told me he could smell the hurricane. It hit our fleet like the devil’s own hammer. The
Jesus of Lubeck
began to break up, her planks gaping. Fishes swam among her ballast as if in the sea. The
William and John
disappeared. The storm died, but it had blown the rest of us off course. We were lost. Then we realized we were in the Gulf of Mexico, drifting toward reefs off the Yucatán. Spanish territory. With leaking ships we had to make for harbor in Veracruz. San Juan de Ulúa—that’s what they call their God-cursed port. We were making our repairs there when we got word that the
flota
was expected any day.”

She knew about the
flota
. Everyone did. The fleet that Spain sent out twice yearly to carry back the immense riches of gold, silver, and precious gems from Mexico and Peru across the Atlantic to the coffers of King Philip.

“Thirteen ships, they were, bristling with cannon. And on board their flagship was Mexico’s new viceroy. We were anchored in their roadstead, and were well armed ourselves, but we wanted no fight. Nor did they, we thought, for they had to dock, load, and get back to Spain before the weather worsened. So Hawkins and their commander struck a bargain. They would let us finish our repairs and in return we’d let them into port. Then we’d be on our way.

“Liars. When we were lulled by the truce, they attacked. Three hundred Spaniards tried to board the
Jesus
. Many leapt across from the
Jesus
to the
Elizabeth
and grappled us in hand-to-hand fighting. Adam ordered our gunners to open fire and we struck the mainmast of their flagship. We cut our cables and turned to fight, trading cannon fire with cannon fire. But Spanish reinforcements swarmed from ashore. They sank the
Angel
. Overran the
Swallow
. The
Jesus,
with Hawkins aboard, was listing badly. Under heavy fire he ordered Adam and Drake, captain of the
Judith,
to take on men. Then Hawkins gave the order to abandon ship. He was the last to climb aboard the
Minion
.”

She listened, appalled. “Adam . . . was Adam wounded?”

He seemed not to hear her, trapped in recalling the horror. “We watched the
Jesus
sink with all our treasure. The Spanish sent fire ships among our midst, separating us. The
Judith
had vanished. We on the
Elizabeth
were alone.” He shuddered, as though speaking so much had drained the last of his strength. “We beat homeward . . . northern gales ripping at us. Low on food, water . . . ate every dog aboard . . . every parrot and monkey. When they were gone, we ate the rats.”

Frances glimpsed through the open door a man starting down the ship’s gangplank. She jumped to her feet. “It’s him!”

She dashed out of the tavern. Pushed through the crowd. By the time she reached the wharf edge her heart was pounding from her haste. Adam! Her breath caught at the sight of him. Unkempt beard, gashed cheek, soiled shirt, ripped doublet. He was carrying a boy of ten or eleven who lay in his arms as still as a rag doll. “Adam!” she called.

He looked up. Confusion clouded his face as he scanned the crowd. “Over here!” Frances called. He spotted her, and his confusion slowly cleared into a smile of wonder. The smile made Frances weak-kneed with joy.

The boy he was carrying struggled to look too, and Adam staggered on down to the end of the gangplank as Frances, rushing forward, met him amid dockworkers, barrels, and barking dogs.

“Oh, Adam,” she murmured, aghast at how thin he was, how pale. She imagined him giving the last rations of dog meat to his starving men, going hungry himself.