Blood Between Queens (12 page)

She did not need to finish. They both knew the terrible consequences. If arrested for treason he would be hanged until almost dead, then disemboweled and quartered.
If I’m not arrested first about that Yeavering girl
. It shook him, remembering the figure running through the churchyard. What had the fellow seen? But he could not let such thoughts distract him now. Mary knew nothing of that misadventure, and he had no intention of telling her. He needed her absolute trust in his ability to succeed for her.

“I will be careful,” he assured her. “I’ll start for London tomorrow. Will you give me a letter for Ambassador de Spes, proof that I am your emissary?”

“Yes, yes, of course.” Her thoughts seemed to have strayed elsewhere. She got to her feet and began to pace, her agitation plain. “There is something else. You may not have heard.”

“What is it? What’s wrong?”

“Elizabeth. She has ordered an official inquiry. About me.”

She explained as she paced, and Christopher listened, appalled. Elizabeth’s councilors about to make a public spectacle of Mary. The Earl of Moray invited to England to make his case against her. It was horrifying. He jumped up and stopped her in her tracks. “Why in God’s name did you agree?”

“It was the condition for her help,” she said, as plaintive as a child. “Her emissary came to make the offer.”

“Help in what?”

“Restoring me to my throne. And I just received a letter from her that goes even further. She says that if the inquiry finds there is no truth to the charges she will restore me by
force
if necessary. But only if . . .”

“If what?” Dear God, what had Mary given away?

“If I will renounce my claim to the English throne.”

He could have slapped her. “Tell me that you have not done so.”

“No, never! But, oh, I am beset with enemies.” She hugged herself as if her plight had iced the air, and she tugged the gauzy shawl tightly to her. “Cecil, that devil who advises her. Moray, on his way to slander me before all the world. My fate is in Elizabeth’s hands. I
must
trust her.”

“It is her trap. She is lying. She will never restore you. It would shatter the alliance she and Cecil have created with Moray.” Cold sweat chilled Christopher’s back. He fought to keep his mind focused, find a way to deal with the crisis. “Oh, she is clever. This inquiry will light a fire under Moray. He will be desperate to prove you guilty, because if they find you innocent his position as Scotland’s legitimate authority will be untenable.”

“It
is
untenable! And criminal. He ruined me and tried to kill me. Once I am restored he will pay!”

“Don’t you see? That is the very reason he will do anything to prove you guilty. Because if you return as queen he knows he will face your vengeance.”

“And so he would! I would have his head!” She raised her hand like an axe and chopped.

He caught her wrist. “Stop it. You must keep your heart and mind set on the true goal. Not the throne of Scotland. The throne of
England
.”

She blinked at him like a sleepwalker jolted awake. “England. Yes. It is my right.”

“The whole world, even the Protestants, acknowledge you as Elizabeth’s heir. That is what she is trying to undermine.”

“Never. I will never renounce my claim.”

Dread slithered into Christopher’s heart like a snake. “Even if you don’t, she has set this inquiry in motion so that you cannot win.
She
is your true enemy.”

He saw in her face that the awful truth of his words was sinking in. She grabbed both his arms as though for support. “You mean . . . they could find me . . . guilty?”

His mind was thrashing through the possibilities. “There is no action she can legitimately take against you. She has no jurisdiction.”

“But the blot on my reputation. I would seem a monster. People would hate me!” Tears sprang to her eyes.

He groaned inside. Why could she never see farther than her own emotions! People’s smiles or frowns did not matter, only whether they would rally behind her or forsake her.
That
was the crisis here.

She was crying outright now, tears wetting her pale cheeks. Her helplessness stirred him despite himself. For one wild moment he imagined licking those salty tears. She laid her forehead on his shoulder and wept. It was her way to move men to action; always had been. He knew that. And knew he was not immune. But her very need for a strong man to guide her gave him a surging sense of power. His pulse gave a sudden thump as he realized the course that lay ahead. Simple. Bold. Terrifying.

Thrilling.

He slipped his arm around her waist. “They shall not find you guilty. I promise you.”

Her head came up. “How can you make such a promise? Elizabeth’s commissioners will do what she wants.”

“Not if she is dead.”

Her body went rigid. Eyes fixed on his, she repeated the word, her voice thrumming with excitement, “Dead?”

“Then you become queen of England. It is your due. No one disputes it.”

They stared at one another, and he saw she was as gripped as he was by the terrible splendor of the solution.

She whispered, “You would do this . . . for me?”

“It must be done before they reach a verdict.”

“But how? How can you get close enough to her?”

He had no idea. His elation crashed. The challenges were fierce. Even if he could get close enough to Elizabeth and did the deed, the Earl of Northumberland would still have to take London to forestall a rush by force of arms from other ambitious nobles eager to fill the void of power. But Northumberland would not make a move until he knew he had foreign backing as powerful as Spain’s, and that required collaborating with the Spanish ambassador, a man Christopher had not yet met. He would have to weave all these strands of the plan, and do so while skulking around with a price on his head. It seemed impossible.

Mary was looking at him, her eyes shining with wonder. “Do this,” she whispered, “and you shall reap a vast reward when I am queen.”

Suddenly, the impossibility vanished. He felt he could move mountains.

Smiling, she raised both her hands to caress his face. At the motion, her diaphanous shawl slipped off her shoulders, revealing her white neck. He kissed the smooth skin at her throat. She shivered with pleasure. He pushed the shawl aside, about to kiss the naked half-moon of her breast above her bodice, but halted, seeing a pendant that hung from a gold necklace, hidden before by the gauze. A thick golden crucifix. Christopher stared at it in disbelief. The rough cross. The smooth Christ. Rubies as the blood of His wounds.

It was a bolt to his heart. He lurched back a step. “Where did you get this?”

She shrugged. “A gift.”

He gripped the pendant, warm from her body’s heat. “Who gave it to you?”

She looked perplexed at his tone. “A girl.”

He grabbed her arm.
“Who?”

“She came with the emissary Elizabeth sent.”

“The emissary, who was he?”

“Baron Thornleigh.”

Christopher was so shocked, he could hardly find breath. “
Richard
Thornleigh?”

“Yes. Why?”

“The girl . . .” His heart pummeled his chest. “Her name?”

“I told you, Thorn—”

“Her
Christian
name.”

“Justine . . . I think. She is his ward. He brought her to attend me as lady-in-waiting.”

Christopher twisted around. Justine was
here?
In the castle? He snatched Mary’s hand and yanked her, heading for the door. “Take me to her.”

“No, stop.” She jerked her hand free. “I sent her away, sent her back with him. Anyone could see she was Elizabeth’s spy.”

Christopher gaped at her. Justine had been here . . . but now was gone! He felt his legs go spongy. He lurched for the bench and thudded down on it.

Mary came to him. “What’s wrong? What is this girl to you?”

He looked up at her. “She’s . . .” He felt helpless. Naked. Sick. “She is . . . my daughter.”

They stared at each other, she uncomprehending, he trying to hold his brain together. My child . . . with Thornleigh!

Mary said, “But she is part of Thornleigh’s family. How—?”

“He stole her. Like he stole everything else of mine.”
Sweet Justine,
he thought.
My child!
A sudden longing to see her flooded him. What was she like grown up? Gentle? Obstinate? Clever? Then fury came roaring back. Thornleigh had had eight years to mold the girl.
She’s not mine anymore. She’s one of them
.

He got to his feet. “When did they leave?”

“A few days ago.”

“Bring her back.”

She looked stunned. “What? Why? I tell you, Elizabeth sent her to watch me.”

He bit back a rebuke. Mary could be such a fool. “Then let her watch.”

She blinked, bewildered. He gripped her arm and squeezed it so hard she winced. He had to make her understand the golden chance that had fallen in their path. “My daughter is the very link to Elizabeth we need. Bring Justine back. Let her watch. We will show her what we want her to see.”

J
ustine had not gone back to London. Mary’s refusal to accept her as a lady-in-waiting had so shocked her that when Lord Thornleigh suggested they visit his daughter Isabel at Yeavering Hall before journeying home, she had numbly followed. On the way she could think of nothing but how her mission for Elizabeth had ended before she’d even begun. “Nothing to be done about it,” his lordship had said darkly, looking as though he would like to clap manacles on Mary. “A pity, though. Before she turned on us I thought you had charmed her.”

Justine had thought so, too. That intimate, risky moment she had shared with Mary in giving her the crucifix. Clearly, the risk had been pointless. Mary had her own agenda.

“She’s more minx than monarch,” his lordship said gruffly. “Still, she has agreed to send commissioners to the inquiry, and that’s what matters most.”

Not to Justine. She hated to think of the awful task that lay ahead when she got back to London. She would have to confess her true identity to Will, having accomplished nothing to make herself shine in his eyes. Confess her damnable Grenville blood. That prospect had sunk her so low she had scarcely been able to muster civility to Isabel and her husband Carlos when she had first arrived at Yeavering Hall.

Yeavering. How strange it was to be back in the house she had lived in as a child. Memories were everywhere. In the great hall, the stable courtyard, the kitchen, the garden. Ghostly memories: her mother’s scent, a wisp of sandalwood floating over a staircase. Painful ones: her father galloping away the night of the fire to leave her with the disgrace of being a traitor’s daughter. Heartbreaking ones: Alice teaching her cat’s cradle by the kitchen hearth with a string of raspberry-colored yarn; the two of them dashing in a game of hide-and-seek among the May apple trees; Alice stretching out a hand to entice her to climb out onto the roof.

It was these memories of Alice that finally shamed Justine out of her worries about Will. There
was
something she might accomplish, if not for herself, then for her friend. Justice. Now that she was at Yeavering, she would try to find out who had murdered Alice.

She set to it the day after she arrived. She was told that the day Alice was killed she had gone to the market in nearby Wooler. Justine started there.

The alehouse squatted on the edge of Wooler’s sleepy market square. Justine stepped into the low-ceilinged room, dark after the bright sunlight she had closed the door on. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust. The beaten-earth floor smelled dank from decades of spilled beer. Three workmen sat at a table over pots of ale—masons, by the look of the stone dust that whitened their jerkins and hair. The benches at the other tables were empty. In front of the bar a thickset man grunted as he hoisted a full keg to set it on its stand. Hugging the barrel, he looked like a wrestler.

All four men looked at Justine with idle curiosity. What was she doing here, a lady in fine clothes? It made her hesitate, unsure. She had ridden here alone and knew no one in the town; the Hall had enclosed her whole life as a child. What, indeed, was she hoping to find?

“Can I help you, my lady?” the barman asked, dusting off his hands, the keg now in place.

“I hope so.” She mentioned Alice and saw the three workmen listening intently. The murder, like all abnormal events in a small community, would have fueled evening chats around many a Wooler hearth.

The barman, however, seemed uninterested. “I told them from the Hall when they came quizzing us—I never laid eyes on the lass.” He lifted the lid off a tin pot on the bar and ladled milk from it into a wooden saucer. At the sound, a scrawny gray cat slunk out from the next room and began to weave loving circles around his ankles.

“Did you see any strangers that day she was killed?” Justine asked. The servants at the Hall had sworn that the killer could not be a local man. Most families, whether farmers or town folk, had been settled here for generations. Everyone knew their neighbors.

“Strangers?” His look said he thought her question almost too foolish to answer. “Plenty, my lady. It were market day.” He scooped up the cat and set it gently on the bar. It prowled to the saucer and sniffed cautiously as though suspecting the milk might be poisoned. The barman stroked its bony back, and the cat began lapping up the milk, purring. His tenderness to the animal touched Justine. And she felt it told her something: He would have noticed an obvious brute in his tavern.

She noticed a girl watching, leaning out from behind a post near the bar. She was about fourteen, slight of body, and was drying her hands on her dingy apron, her hands as red as if they’d been scalded. A scullery maid, apparently, forever washing up. She had a pinched face, but bright, keen eyes. So keen, in fact, that Justine wondered if her interest sprang from something more than a love of gossip. She beckoned her over. The girl came obediently, as she would to any of her betters, and stood in servile silence, but Justine sensed that she was bursting to speak and she asked her, “Did you see Alice Boyer that day?”

The girl’s startled expression gave her a prick of hope. Had no one from the Hall thought to question so lowly a servant? The girl looked to the barman, almost certainly her father. He seemed equally surprised that anyone would want to talk to her, but then shrugged, giving her permission to speak.

“Aye, my lady,” the girl answered with spirit, “she were at the stall with all the fancy ribbons.” She shot her father a nervous glance at this confession of having abandoned her duties on a market day, surely a busy time at the alehouse.

“Can you show me where?” Justine knew all about the ribbons. At Yeavering Hall Isabel had spoken with a shudder about how Alice’s body had been found in the Kirknewton church with a yellow silk ribbon binding her wrists together and the cord of gold braid that the killer had used to strangle her still around her throat.

“Go on, show her,” said the barman. “Trade today’s as slow as a turtle going backward.”

Across the market square they went, Justine following the girl, who almost skipped with pleasure. Her eagerness lifted Justine’s hope. Could this chit of a girl have some information that everyone had missed, something that would lead her to Alice’s killer?

Market day was Thursday; today was Friday, so the square was quiet. The shop-front stalls displayed a sparse leftover selection of wares: baskets of cabbages, ropes of onions, brooms, pewter bowls, a butter churn. Blood from a vacant butcher’s stall had soaked a patch of earth, leaving sticky mud. The square’s center was its market cross, a stone crucifix taller than a man, rising from its anchor of three circular stone steps worn smooth by centuries of use. Wrens sat twitching atop the cross. A whiskery old man lounged on the steps peeling an apple with his knife in one long strip. A farmer on a donkey plodded by.

“There,” the scullery maid said, pointing. “The ribbon man was right there.”

Justine saw only a patch of beaten earth between a barren shop front and the road. “Do you know him?”

The girl looked down and shook her head, deflated, her moment of specialness spent. “A traveler.”

Justine chided herself. What had she expected? That this girl would march to the door of the killer and point and cry, “It was him”? No, the Yeavering Hall steward had already questioned the town’s shopkeepers and aldermen and they said the draper selling ribbons had been an itinerant, his stall nothing more than his cart. No one knew him. She looked down the road that bent as it left the town, the bend hemmed in by willows. The “ribbon man” had gone on his way down that road. He could be anywhere between York and Edinburgh by now. Had he killed Alice? But what would drive a roving peddler, a stranger to Alice, to commit such a monstrous crime?

She turned back. “Did you speak to Alice?”

“Aye.”

“Did she seem upset about anything?”

“Not at all, my lady.” The girl seemed again proud to have a bit of unique information. “She were gazing at the fancies, the scarves and ribbons all flapping in the breeze, and I said wouldn’t it be grand to own one of those. And she said she’d like a dress all of that green silk—green as a dragonfly wing, it was. She said if she had such a dress she’d never take it off. You’d sleep in it? says I. And she says, Aye, sleep in it and dream in it, and if that were so I’d be a fine lady, so who would dare to wake me? We laughed at that. Daft talk, i’ faith.”

Justine felt tears sting the back of her eyes. Daft talk—how Alice had liked it. Liked foolery of all kinds.

“Did you see anyone else talking to her? A stranger?”

The girl shook her head. “I had to get back to me washtub.” She gazed at the spot where the draper’s cart had stood with its fluttering silks. Fluttering fantasies. Her shoulders drooped, her eyes went dull. Time, again, to get back to her washtub.

Justine rode northward, leaving Wooler, and her next stop was even more disturbing—the church at Kirknewton on the road to Yeavering Hall. She climbed the stone stairs up to the tower, following the vicar.

“All bedecked with scarves and trimmings and gewgaws, it was,” he said as they reached the belfry. He was a fidgety young man, not much older than Justine herself, she guessed, and schooled in stark Protestantism. He shook his head in disgust. “Frippery hanging hither and yon, all round the bell casement. Looked like some York brothel.”

Anger flared in her at his heartlessness, and she almost shot back, You know brothels well? She held her tongue, but it galled her that he seemed to care more about the defilement of the space than the snuffing out of an innocent life. The belfry was now austere enough even for him, the colorful “gewgaws” removed. Downstairs in the nave he had pointed out to her the spot behind the altar where the killer had left Alice’s body. She shuddered, imagining her friend’s last moments. Had the murderer used the pretty scarves to entice her up here to the belfry first? Had she become afraid of him then and tried to flee? Or had he festooned the belfry but then, before he could lure her here, strangled her in the nave? It was agonizing, not knowing. Perhaps, she thought bleakly, it was unknowable.

“You found no other evidence?” she asked. “No hint left behind to suggest who might have killed her?”

“As I told you, I was away reporting to the bishop. My churchwarden found the body, then this vandalism. There was nothing else.”

She went to the unglazed window that overlooked the moors. A dragonfly clung to the edge of the stone casement, its trembling wings iridescent in the sunlight. The scullery maid’s words came back, how Alice had longed for a dress of green silk, green as a dragonfly wing. Justine lengthened her gaze across the valley of the River Glen nestled at the foot of the Cheviot Hills, and up a low hill to the cluster of buildings with the grand house at their center: Yeavering Hall. Alice had worked there. It gave Justine a shiver, and not just for her friend. Yeavering Hall now belonged to Lord Thornleigh’s daughter and son-in-law. In her heart the Thornleighs were her family, yet their ownership of the Hall felt odd. It was an unsettling jumble in her mind: the home she’d grown up in that wasn’t her home. The family she loved that wasn’t her flesh and blood.

The vicar cleared his throat. “I must get back to my desk. Sunday’s sermon.”

Justine turned. “Yes, of course.” There was nothing here to help her. This was only a site of sorrow.

 

Yeavering Hall was three stories of honey-hued stone rising into the blue Northumberland sky. It had seemed immense to Justine when she was a child, an entire world of its own, with its pleasure grounds spreading across acres of gardens, terraces, treed alleys, and orchards; its busy outbuildings of bakery, brewery, dairy house, dovecote, stables, and barns; its views that swept up to the twin-peaked hill of Yeavering Bell and down to the River Glen. Yeavering had always been a beautiful house, one that Justine’s mother, with her French taste, had made elegant, but Justine did not remember it as being a particularly cheerful place. Now, thanks to Isabel and Carlos and their three young children, it was.

True, the elegance had been somewhat frayed by the whirlwind of family life for the last eight years. Instead of the graceful tunes of lutes that had once lilted from the musicians’ gallery, the great hall rang with the sound of running feet, giggling voices, and the high spirits of boisterous children. The gorgeous stained glass windows, the refined work of master craftsmen, looked down on a blithe clutter: two fishing rods propped against the hearth, a shaggy water spaniel nursing her litter of pups on the hearthstone, a rocking horse that wore, incongruously, a baby’s bonnet, and on the floor a heap of plums spread on a tablecloth that the children had used to gather their cache from the orchard. It was certainly a change from the formality Justine had known as a child, but she liked it. Isabel and Carlos had made the stately house a home.

Isabel especially. Since coming into Lord Thornleigh’s family eight years ago, Justine had looked up to her like an older sister. She was also fascinated by the conjugal bond between lovely, cultured Isabel and her rugged base-born Spanish husband who had once made his living as a mercenary on the battlefields of Europe. Though it was an unlikely match, Carlos had proved a diligent lord of the manor; lately, he’d been working with the Earl of Northumberland to strengthen the border defenses against the marauding Scottish raiders. And anyone could see the deep affection between him and Isabel. When Justine had first met them they had been married for five years and she had seen looks pass between them hinting at a carnal intimacy that had made young Justine blush with curious fascination. Now their happy marriage made her yearn for Will.

The hall today was quieter than usual, for Carlos had gone hunting with his father-in-law and they had taken twelve-year-old Nicolas with them. Justine wondered if Lord Thornleigh really was well enough for such hard exercise, but she knew enough of men to know that he would never willingly show himself unable. Andrew, age eight, had been invited to hunt too, but declared that he did not like to kill creatures, and was now in the garden playing commander of a tree fort with his five-year-old sister, Nell. Her chirping voice sounded faintly through one of the open windows.