The Queen's Exiles (2 page)

The brazen interrogation seemed to amuse Thornleigh. “I can’t speak to what you’ve heard, but yes, I’m Baron Thornleigh.” He looked at Fenella, jerking his thumb at the old man. “Who’s this?”

She could hardly find her voice, appalled at Johan’s impertinence and in awe of Thornleigh’s exalted new status. New to her, at least. “He’s Johan Doorn . . . my lord,” she managed. “My master shipwright.”

“Good. I’ll need you, Doorn.” Thornleigh was suddenly all business. “Would you confer with my carpenter? You’ll find him in the fo’castle.” A nod of agreement from Fenella sent Johan shuffling toward the forecastle. Thornleigh turned to her. “I have wounded men. Is there a doctor ashore?”

“Tomorrow, from Guernsey.” She explained, “He comes the last Wednesday of every month.” She was glad to turn to business to quell her somersaulting emotions. “How many?”

“Fourteen.”

“There’s room in the church of St. Magloire. And crofters’ wives to nurse them.”

“Good.” He turned to his watching crew. “Rayner, tell Bates to ready the wounded and get them up on deck.” The scrawny crewman dashed to the companionway and clambered down it.

“By the sound of your pumps,” Fenella said, “you’ll be wanting to careen right soon, my lord. We’ll tow you round the headland to the boatyard bay. Good beach, and I can supply all you need there. Stout oak masts, cured planking, plenty of pine pitch. I have carpenters, too, if you lack them, and a sailmaker if you’re needing canvas.”

He nodded but was clearly distracted, his eyes fixed on the companionway that led below. The scowl she had seen when he first came on deck darkened his face again. Curry was leading up several men, and a crewman below bellowed at them to keep moving. Five emerged, stumbling one by one out onto the deck, squinting at the sudden bright sunshine. From the look of them—filthy, barefoot, in ragged homespun shirts and patched breeches—they were common seamen. Spanish prisoners. She smelled their sweat and fear. The gashed forehead of one oozed blood, and all were bruised and scraped. She imagined them plunging into the sea as their ship sank, flailing in the water in terror, since few seamen could swim, and then, when the
Elizabeth
picked them up, scrambling up the chain plates for dear life, the heaving sea bashing them against the hull, cutting heads, arms, shins.

Another prisoner followed, far better dressed, though his clothes were unkempt: a black satin doublet frothed with gold lace, and black satin breeches embroidered with silver and gold. He wore a jeweled hat of green velvet. A Spanish noble. A don. He stalked a few paces away from the seamen and arrogantly turned his back, proclaiming his status. Fenella felt a shiver. She hated Spaniards.

“Bring ropes,” Thornleigh told Curry. “We’ll hang them in pairs from the mizzen.”

The crew sprang to life with savage eagerness, swarming the prisoners. Fenella’s breath caught in her throat. Had she heard aright?
Hang them?

“Sawyer, lower the longboat,” Thornleigh ordered a crewman. “Prepare to ferry the wounded.”

The two crew parties set to their tasks. Curry and his men marched the prisoners to the mizzenmast while Sawyer’s party set to swinging out the longboat from its boom.

“Move to the mizzen,” Curry barked, “or you’ll taste Kate Cudgel again.” The seamen didn’t know the English words, but they understood Curry’s raised club. So did Fenella. Their bloody wounds had not come from scrambling aboard in a heaving sea. Thornleigh’s men had beaten them. She watched in horrified amazement as Curry’s gang hurled two ropes aloft along the mizzen spars. A hangman’s noose dangled from the end of each rope.

She spun around to Thornleigh. He was striding across to the port side crew party. She hurried after him. “Sir Adam . . . I mean, my lord—”

“Plain Adam to you, always,” he said with a gentle smile. “You saved my life.”

It sank the words she’d been about to say. Yes, she had saved him all those years ago, springing him from the garrison jail, but he had been so weak from captivity she thought he’d scarcely noticed her on their flight across to Amsterdam. Now, his look at her said he knew he was in her debt, and it thrilled her.

The terrified jabbering of the Spanish seamen brought her back to the here and now. They were huddled together, quaking in fear, surrounded by the leering crew. She could not see the don past the crowd of crew shouting their bloodlust, but she imagined that even the nobleman now was quaking. “Surely you won’t hang them?” she asked Thornleigh.

“Why not?” he snapped.

Her words stalled at his glare. She found her voice. “Send them to the galleys; that’s punishment enough. And you can ransom the don.”

“I don’t need silver.”

“But, hang them in cold blood? It’s . . . plain murder.”

“
They’re
the murderers. Attacked my men guarding them. Slit their throats, four good mariners. And a boy, Tim Waites, ten years old. He died in my arms five minutes ago.” He turned to Sawyer’s men and shouted, “Belay those lines!” They hastened to obey and the longboat splashed into the water, ready to take the wounded. They heaved over the rope ladder.

A wail came from one of the Spanish seamen. He was frantically crossing himself, praying, as a crewman tugged the noose close. Laughing, the crew mimicked the prisoner’s action like monkeys.

“Don’t, my lord,” Fenella said. “This is raw vengeance.”

“ ‘Which is mine, sayeth the Lord.’ ” The look in his eyes was cruel, bitter. This was not the Adam Thornleigh she remembered. What had happened to harden him so?

“My lord, they’re set to swing,” Curry called to him.

“Get on with it then,” Thornleigh growled.

“No!” Fenella said. “Stop right there, Master Curry!”

They all looked at her in surprise. Thornleigh scowled. “What the devil—”

“The devil’s behind what’s afoot here, sure enough. I will not have it. This is my bay. You are my guests. Hang those men, and I promise you there will be no respite for your wounded, no refitting of your ship, no victualing. You will not set foot on Sark.”

He glowered at her. “Who do you think you are, woman?”

His fury unnerved her. She hardly knew how the steel had come into her to cross him. But she had not escaped war in Scotland and slaughter in the Netherlands, all those mangled bodies that haunted her, to tolerate gross brutality now. Not here. She had come to Sark for peace.

“The Seigneur of Sark gives me authority over this bay,” she said, “and I have twenty-three armed men ashore who’ll do as I order them. Let these poor wretches loose, I say, or mayhap in the night you’ll find your anchor cable cut. You’ll drift out to sea and your men at the pumps will finally drop, and your ship will sink.”

They stared at each other. Fenella didn’t blink, but her mouth was dry as canvas. She said quietly, her heart in her throat, “Stay, my lord. Set them loose. Stay, and make your ship whole.”

A faint light came into his eyes. Shame? Amusement? Tedium? Whatever it was, he turned and gave a brusque new order: “Curry, pull down those ropes. No one hangs today.”

There was a groan of disappointment from the crew. They didn’t immediately obey, anger in their faces. The way they glowered at Fenella sent a spike of fear through her. She thought of the pistol that lay in her petticoat pocket. Idiotic, of course. Her against all of them.

She had to act quickly. She called to the Spanish seamen who were watching, stupefied, “Come on, you poor silly dagos, take the longboat!” She beckoned them over to the waiting boat that nudged the hull. “Come!”

They gaped at her. At Curry. At the English lord who was captain. Thornleigh’s eyes stayed fixed on Fenella. Then he bellowed to the prisoners, “You heard her! Move, you damned sea slugs! You’re free!”

One more stunned moment and then the prisoners rushed across the deck. Thornleigh stood stony faced, giving no order to halt them as they raced to the boat. Curry and his men watched in amazed silence.

The seamen were clambering over the rail when a man crashed against Fenella’s back. She staggered to keep her footing. It was the don, racing after the seamen for the boat. He grappled a prisoner in his way and threw him aside, sending him sprawling. The action knocked off the don’s velvet hat. Another prisoner was in his way, starting to climb down the rope ladder. The don spun around, looking for a weapon. Fenella saw his craggy face. Green eyes. Gray-blond hair like bristles. A shock went through her. Five years ago that hair had been bright blond.

The don snatched a belaying pin and turned to the prisoner climbing down and bashed his skull. Blood drops flew and the victim pitched overboard with a scream.

The coldness of a grave settled over Fenella. She was not aware of the time it took to raise her skirt and draw out the pistol, load the finger-sized powder charge, then the ball. She was swift from practice, and a calm corner of her brain knew it took less than a minute. The don had tossed his weapon, the belaying pin, clattering on the deck. He had thrown one leg over the rail.

Fenella cocked the trigger. “Don Alfonso!” she called.

He looked up astride the rail.

She aimed straight at the green eyes and fired.

A
dam Thornleigh stood knee-deep in the water, overseeing the effort to careen the
Elizabeth
onto her starboard beam. The beach rang with the shouts of his crew and the Sark shore crew as they hauled on five taut lines, like whalers struggling to pacify a leviathan. Even lightened of all her stores and water casks the ship resisted. The forward half of her keel was up on the sandy bottom, but her stern slewed stubbornly in deeper water. Adam felt a twinge for her; she seemed to know she’d be defenseless on her side.

He splashed through the shallows to the men with the bowlines, calling, “Haul her in, men! Now!
Haul!
”

With a mighty heave they dragged the ship forward. Her full keel finally plowed along the bottom. The starboard gang seized the moment and hauled her over, and as the larboard side rose Adam saw the two jagged holes from cannonballs that had crashed through the main deck and out the hull, imperiling his vessel and men. The oakum-stiff canvas he’d ordered packed in had only reduced the deadly leaks, not stopped them. High and dry now, the
Elizabeth
shivered for a moment, her timbers creaking. Then, giving up the fight, she surrendered and slumped down on her side like the weary veteran she was. The sweating men shouted victory and danced in the waves she made.

Adam let out a pent-up breath of relief. His ship was out of danger.

He walked out of the water onto the beach. Ahead, the cliff face rose around him in a semi-circle, and crowning it the sunset sky flamed red and orange. Razorbills wheeled in arcs, black and white against the glory of red. Murres swooped in to land on rock ledges on the cliff face. Adam felt a kinship with these birds who spent most of their lives at sea. As he tramped the sand in his sodden boots he suddenly felt sore in every joint. It had taken hours getting his wounded men ashore and getting the
Elizabeth
lightened, towed, and careened. He was hot and sticky and welcomed the cool shore breeze that whispered past his ears. He’d like a wash. His skin was still gritty with gunpowder grains from the morning’s action. An action he might regret. Sinking the
Esperanza
hadn’t been his intention. He’d only meant to cripple her, but she had blasted the
Elizabeth
with all her murderous firepower, so Adam had blasted back. England and Spain had been on the brink of war for four years.
Have I pushed us over the edge?
If so, he wasn’t sorry. He’d long been urging the Queen to take a stand against the tyrant.

Beside him someone coughed. The Sark shipwright, the one-armed old man, Doorn. He stood waiting. While the crew had got in position, he and Adam had been talking about Fenella Craig shooting the Spanish don. She had rowed ashore immediately after, white-faced, too shaken to answer Adam’s questions, leaving him with Doorn. Then the urgent careening operation had taken all Adam’s attention. Now, his concern flooded back. “Go on, Master Doorn. About the lady. You seem to know her well. Why did she do it?”

“She hates the dagos, my lord.”

“Don’t we all. But that individual drew her special ire.” Adam couldn’t help being grimly amused. She had been telling
him
to be merciful.

“Do you hate them indeed, my lord?” Doorn seemed fiercely eager about it.

Adam’s amusement drained away as he remembered the terrified Spanish seamen. Had he really been about to hang them? He’d been enraged by their attack on the men he’d posted to guard them. Four of his crew killed, and the boy, Waites. It felt terrible to Adam that the lad’s final resting place was this remote island, far from family. But his rage was spent. So much had happened since. Fenella. And the Spanish don.

“I
told
her it was your lordship sailing in,” Doorn went on eagerly. “Your men say it was the
Esperanza
you did battle with, a twenty-gun galleon. And you sank her! By Christ, I’d like to have seen it. Were any Sea Beggar ships with you in the fight?”

“No.” He was about to add,
Not this time,
but thought better of it. His work with the Dutch rebels was unofficial. For months he’d been harrying Spanish shipping, carrying out the secret wishes of his queen, the
Elizabeth
’s namesake. Sometimes he acted in conjunction with the Sea Beggars, sometimes alone, but always as if on his own initiative with no connection to Elizabeth. She was wary about pushing Spain too far.

“You did it yourself?” Doorn cackled with glee. “By Christ, my lord, you are the terror of the Narrow Sea.”

Adam said wryly, “Mistress Craig might better claim that title. Can you shed no light on why she shot the don?”

The old man looked away, quiet now. “You asked before about planking, my lord.” He pointed toward a long, low shed with a thatched roof, sheltered in the lee of the cliff, and beckoned Adam to walk with him. “We have stout oak planks from Normandy, well cured. Sturdy Baltic pine, too, for your masts. And plenty of pitch and cordage. We’ll soon have you back in fighting shape. Come, I’ll show you.”

Why deflect my question?
Adam thought.
Is he trying to protect Fenella?
But it was no use pretending it hadn’t happened. “No, not now,” Adam said. The light was fading, and so was he. He still had to visit the wounded to check that they were settled in the church. Tomorrow, too, billets must be found for his men; tonight they would camp on the beach, no hardship in this fine weather. A whiff of roasting meat reached him. His men not involved in the careening were eating around a campfire where they’d rigged a spit. Rabbits? Adam hadn’t had a bite since the morning’s action, and the smell of the roast meat set his belly to gurgling. He realized he was famished. Some of the men were sharing bottles of sack. A few lolled, drunk already; others were asleep, sprawled by the fire. Adam felt exhausted. The seigneur’s chamberlain had sent word offering him a bed in the manor house, the Seigneurie. But the issue of the dead Spaniard could not be ignored. “Fenella—that is, Mistress Craig—she may face rough consequences.”

Doorn’s eyes snapped to him. “From you, my lord?”

“Me? Never.” The Spaniard would rot at the bottom of the bay and good riddance. Adam had watched plenty of his own men plunge into the Channel. And he would never forget Spain’s vicious attack four years ago on him and the other ships of Hawkins’s expedition to the New World, when scores of English seamen had died, their throats slashed by Spanish swords, limbs ripped off by Spanish cannonballs. Corpses now, fish white in the sunless depths of the Gulf of Mexico. “But she’ll have to answer for what she did.”

Doorn shrugged. “Seigneur Helier is the Queen’s man here and he’s over in Jersey, at his manor of Saint-Ouen. Never fear about him, sir; he has lordship of all Sark and he is well pleased with the trade Fenella brings in. The only other authority is the church elders, and they’ll shed no tear for a God-cursed dago papist. As for the poxy sailors Nella sent on their way, they won’t reach their home soil for weeks, and even when they do, why would they blab against her when she saved their skins?” He added with a growl, “Me, I would’ve let them swing. But Nella, she’s different.”

Indeed she is,
Adam thought.
Extraordinary woman.
How bold she had been, demanding that he free the Spanish seamen. How paradoxical, killing Don Alfonso. And now, all around him, was the evidence of her small fiefdom. The long shed was the center of her boatyard, and the cottages hugging the low, irregular terraces no doubt housed her shore crew and their families. Out in the bay a smart-looking caravel, Swedish by the look of her rigging, rocked at a mooring, her shrouds pinging musically in the breeze, while four other vessels bobbed alongside the jetty: an expertly refitted Dutch cog, a Highland galley, a serviceable fishing smack that was perhaps French, and a wherry. All belonged to Fenella. Adam thought of that desperate voyage he had made with her from Edinburgh eleven years ago. He had been weak and fevered after months in the Leith garrison, jailed for running arms to the Scottish rebels. All he knew then of Fenella was that she was the mistress of the garrison commander, a brute she’d wanted to escape from, so she sprang Adam from his cell and supplied a fishing boat for them to flee in. Adam owed her his life—the commander would have hanged him. When she proved to be a capable sailor he’d been even more grateful, for he had helmed the boat in a fog of fever.

Not too fevered, though, to notice how fine looking she was. Even with that scar across her cheekbone. Like a white branch, broken. It tugged a string of sadness in him that something so lovely had been marred. A rose with one cankered petal. Oddly, the flaw heightened the beauty of the whole lush bloom. He remembered, when they were at sea, her gouged, bleeding cheek. What kind of brute would do that to a woman? Adam had killed men, but he could not imagine deliberately maiming a woman.

Then he thought of his wife, and knew he was lying to himself. If he had Frances in his grasp he would strike her senseless.
My wife, the traitor
. How close her plot had come to killing the Queen. And how enraged he had been to find Frances had escaped. In the three years since then his agents had scoured Europe for her. Now, one had found her. In Brussels. Reading his agent’s letter, Adam had felt the hot excitement of vengeance. When he caught up with Frances he would drag her home to hang.

Except what about Katherine and Robert? She would be twelve now, the boy nine. Every day Adam cursed his wife for taking them. Stealing them. His spry, clever Kate. Robert, his son and heir. Adam so missed their shining faces. They must have been so frightened, torn away from their home and everything they knew. Were they frightened still? And how were they living? What had Frances been
doing
all this time? He looked east across the water, toward the darkness where Europe lay. Weary though he was, he itched to track down the wretched woman. Not to exact vengeance, not anymore—that was a cankerous obsession, and he knew he had to let it go. All he wanted was to get his children back.

It came to him over the echo of a razorbill’s cry:
Now is the time to do it
. His ship would be out of commission for weeks, and he couldn’t bear to loaf on this island backwater. He’d been on his way home to report to Elizabeth on his mission, first to the Dutch Prince William of Orange in exile on his German estates, then to the French Huguenots in La Rochelle. All these dissidents wanted Elizabeth’s support, but first she had to know how strong they were, what real chance they had of disrupting her adversaries, the Catholic kings of France and Spain, so eager for her downfall. She was waiting for Adam’s report, but his return to England would now have to wait until his ship was refitted. That didn’t mean he had to wait here doing nothing. He could go quietly, privately, to Brussels. If he didn’t, Frances might slip through his fingers again. She could slip away to hell for all he cared, but if she left the capital she would take Kate and Robert with her and he’d lose them again, this time perhaps forever. Looking out at the dark horizon, he made his decision. He would go to Brussels, get his children, and take them home.

“Her name’s not Craig,” Doorn said suddenly.

The words cut into Adam’s thoughts. “What?”

“Fenella. After she left Scotland she married.”

He felt a prick of disappointment, almost as though he’d lost something. Absurd. He barely knew the woman. But he could not deny his intense curiosity about her. “So her name now is what?”

“Doorn.”

Adam blinked at him. She’d married this crippled old man? “She settled in my village. Polder. It’s in Brabant, north of Bergen op Zoom, on the River Scheldt. Her brother left her a little money when he died and she opened a chandlery. Nothing much, just a counter and a shed, but Nella knows boats, and word of her Swedish blocks and quality cordage got round. That’s where she met my son, Claes. He was a shipwright like me. I lived with them, my wife and I, and when she died I went on living with them.” Doorn was watching the seabirds wheeling around the cliff top. “Glad I am that she died when she did, quiet-like.”

The old man’s solemn tone gave Adam a twinge of unease. A foreboding.

“Three years Claes and Nella had been married,” Doorn went on, “three years to the day. That’s when the Spanish soldiers came riding in. Like a squall they hit us. Some folk in the village had been printing pamphlets against the Spanish occupation, tracts against the Duke of Alba, the new governor come to subdue the whole Dutch people.” He spat in the sand. “Curse him to hell.”

Adam knew all about the pitiless Duke of Alba. The Dutch had paid a bitter price for daring to oppose him.

“He hanged so many in Antwerp, they say the price of rope shot up,” Doorn said with grim humor. His look turned grave. “It was a quiet morning in Polder when the soldiers thundered in with sword and axe and pistol. And with fire. We heard screaming and shooting. It was slaughter. Soldiers threw a torch into our house. I took a stick to one of them and cracked his head, but another raised his sword and hacked off my arm.” He nodded to his empty sleeve. “I lay there in my blood. Fenella dragged me out. Our house went up in flames.” He plucked at the sleeve, picking off a speck of dirt. “They rounded up the village men on the quay. Fenella and I made our way there, me fainting, staggering. We did not dare cross the line of soldiers, but we saw past them, past the screeching women. They tied the men together, two by two, face-to-face. To save the time it would take to hang them. They pushed them into the river. They tied Claes to Vos the bookbinder. I saw them go under. . . .” His voice cracked.

Adam stood silent, picturing it.

“Polder was in flames.... Fenella and I, we spent weeks in the forest. She foraged . . . kept me alive.” Doorn rasped a cough. It became a spasm of coughing that made his narrow chest crumple and his shoulders shudder. When it passed, he spat, then swallowed, and got control of himself. “The commander that day was a fair-haired Spanish lord, name of Don Alfonso.”