Blood Between Queens (42 page)

Reality crashed over her.
Elizabeth!
She twisted back to look for the men who had run past with swords—Elizabeth’s guards. She saw only servants, men and women in nightdress, dazed and wandering, bleeding. A man carried another man slung over his shoulder. Two women crouched over a bloodied body that jerked in spasms. Men ran with buckets of water. Where was Elizabeth? Had her guards got her out alive?

Where was Sir Adam? She started after the guards, burning to question them, and tripped over a hook of metal. She looked down. A sword hilt, the blade plowed diagonally into the earth. She dropped to her knees and felt the hilt. She recognized its swirls of silver and bronze. Sir Adam’s. Horror froze her. Was he among the dead? She got up, scanning the frenzy of people in their misery. Smoke from the house ribboned over her head, carried on the breeze across the courtyard toward the wing. Her gaze fell on the dark new building. Untouched, immaculate, it seemed to stand in mockery of the wounded house that gasped in its flames.

A tremor jerked her.
Father
.

She ran. Past the people, down the alley of night-black yews, up the entry stairs and into the building. Inside, darkness engulfed her. Tingles of sound from across the courtyard reached her ears, her hearing returning. Shards of screams and shouts. Here, though, there was silence. She thought with a rush of relief,
He did not get my note! He did not come!

A thump. Upstairs. Her eyes snapped to the broad staircase. A deeper darkness lay up there, shot through with flashes of moonlight when the breeze stirred the canvas at the windows. A muffled crash. Justine went up the stairs, ears straining to pinpoint the sound’s location. At the top of the staircase she stopped, one foot still on the lower stair, listening, her eyes straining to see down the gloom of the long gallery. Another thump. To the left. She hastened toward it. Faint light glowed under the closed door—the very room where she had sat by the hearth with her father and poured out her grief. The memory was painful, her eyes now wide open to his crimes. Yet a feeble ray remained of the intimacy with him, the afterglow of a dead fire. She pushed open the door.

In the rushlights’ glow she saw them, and froze. Her father on the floor on his back, squirming, his bloodied hand impaled by a sword. Lord Thornleigh standing over him gripping the sword hilt, his boot on her father’s other arm. Like some monster who had fed, Lord Thornleigh’s face and neck glistened with blood. The naked socket of his ruined eye dribbled blood. His clothes dripped blood.

Her father saw her. “Justine!” he cried out. “Thank God!” His face was contorted in agony. “Help me!”

She rushed forward. Lord Thornleigh wrenched his sword out of her father’s hand, a move so violent the hand jerked up and her father screamed at the pain. Lord Thornleigh gripped the sword with both hands. His wild look stunned Justine. Her father lay helpless. She was sure Lord Thornleigh meant to strike a death blow.

“Don’t!” she cried.

He turned to her, panting, swaying on his feet. “I want—”

“You cannot! It would be murder!” She ran for him, twisting as she reached him so that she was between the two of them, her back to her father, shielding him.

“Justine!” Her father staggered to his feet, clutching her skirts to right himself. “My child!”

Lord Thornleigh blinked at her in shock. “I only—”

“Enough!” she cried. She pushed him away. He stumbled back a step. He swayed. His sword arm drooped in surrender. The blade tip scraped the floor.

Justine heard her father grunt behind her but she had no time even to turn, so swiftly did he move. Instantly on his feet, he chopped Lord Thornleigh’s sword arm with his hand. The weapon fell and her father caught the hilt before it hit the floor. In a flash he brandished the sword.

Lord Thornleigh grabbed Justine’s arm. A glance at his anguished face told her he was trying to pull her clear of the dangerous blade, but there was no strength in his grip. It was the grope of a sleeper in a nightmare, purposeful but powerless. “Justine . . . go,” he breathed. He let go of her, shuffling to stay on his feet. But he could not. He dropped to his knees.

Her father took two slow, victorious steps toward him. His free hand bled from the wound in his palm, but his sword hand was strong.

Lord Thornleigh looked up at Justine, and she saw the ghastly truth. He was half-dead. His look of desolation cut into her.
I’ve killed him
. His struggle to stay on his knees, to not topple, was ferocious, as though he knew that the moment he fell would be the end. His voice was a croak. “Only . . . wanted . . . peace.”

“You won’t find it in hell.” Her father raised the sword, poised to plunge it into his enemy’s heart.

Justine opened her mouth to cry
No!
but knew as surely as she had killed Lord Thornleigh that no word would stop her father. She moved before she could think. Grabbed the blade, wrapped her hands around it as it plunged. It sliced her palms. Pain like fire! Gushing blood. It did not stop her father’s lunge, but was enough to deflect the blade. It slid past Lord Thornleigh’s shoulder into the air. Unbalanced, her father staggered. Justine snatched the sword hilt from him. She hurled the weapon, sending it skittering across the floor.

Lord Thornleigh gaped at her bleeding hands. So did her father. He had quickly righted himself, and he looked at her with horror at her betrayal. “Traitor,” he said, his voice choked with feeling. “My own daughter.”

“Not yours.” Stunned at the pain, her heart wailing for Lord Thornleigh, she cried, “His!”

Her father slapped her so hard she sprawled.

He strode around his enemy, Lord Thornleigh still on his knees. Standing at his back, he whipped his arm around Lord Thornleigh’s neck. His elbow like a vise, he crushed him against his thigh with a savage wrench. Choking, Lord Thornleigh clawed at the arm.

Justine struggled to her feet. She staggered over to the fallen sword. She gripped the handle in both bleeding, raw hands. She lurched back to the men and stood facing her father, Lord Thornleigh between them. “Stop . . .” She was breathless. “Let him go . . .” She raised the sword. “Stop . . . or I will stop you.”

Her father looked at her in surprise. His face, contorted with his labor, was a sneer. “Your own flesh and blood? No. You would not.”

He squeezed Lord Thornleigh’s neck with a vicious jerk.

“Stop!” she screamed. She rammed the blade up under Lord Thornleigh’s raised arm and deep into her father’s heart.

T
he children, too young to be heartbroken, were the only mourners at the funeral whose hands stayed calmly at their sides. The adults—and there were many, Sir William Cecil among the high-ranking—all sought some activity for their hands: pockets and sleeves to take refuge in, cloak edges to grip, tears to wipe. The vicar fingered his prayer book as he intoned the psalm. A gravedigger rested his hand on his upright shovel as though on the shoulder of a friend.

Justine noted all these hands. It engrossed her. She
made
it engross her, wanting anything that would keep her eyes off the coffin about to be lowered into the grave. If there had been a thick falling snow to huddle from, or rain to cringe from, or even wind to listen to as it rode through the trees, she would have seized the distraction. Anything to keep her from looking at the polished wood box that enclosed him, the pit waiting to swallow him. Keep her from hearing the voice in her head that keened night and day:
I killed him
.

Instead, the air was still and the sun shone bright and strong. She could hear melting snow dribble off the church roof onto the stone path below. A thread of chimney smoke rose from Rosethorn House, the Thornleighs’ grand residence that lay beyond the village woods.

Justine’s own hands, wrapped with linen bandages, were as still as the children’s, but her stillness was a façade as thin as the bandages. Inside, she longed to spring forward and paw the earth back into the pit. Longed to keep him here. To have him back, alive. Her palms, sliced by her father’s sword, throbbed dully, but her wounds were nothing compared to the savagery she had witnessed that night. She had not succumbed from loss of blood. Not like Will. His horrifying wound. His shoulder hacked . . . raw muscle and bone. So much blood . . .

She forced herself to concentrate on the Thornleighs’ daughter Isabel and her husband Carlos, who stood across the grave gripping each other’s hands, Isabel’s smaller, white at the knuckles from pressing his, which were roughened and brown from his life in the saddle. Their three children stood with them. Though their eldest, Nicolas, was not really a child anymore; at thirteen he was facing manhood. His dark eyes revealed a deeper understanding of life and loss than his little brother and sister could grasp, as though today he had closed the door on the innocence of childhood. Justine felt a bond with him; it was not so long ago that she had closed that door. Yet she and Nicolas were worlds apart. In the last weeks she had been cast into a dark netherworld that he could not even imagine. Nicolas had not lured Lord Thornleigh to his death. Nicolas had not murdered his own father.

Blood. So much blood that night . . .

Her own blood, streaming from her sliced palms. Her father’s blood, bubbling from his ribs around his own sword, which she had rammed into him. Lord Thornleigh’s blood, dripping from his ravaged ear, soaking his clothes from the gashes her father had inflicted. Her father stood, his eyes wide in shock, his arm still crooked around Lord Thornleigh’s neck. Lord Thornleigh, on his knees between them, stared at Justine in dazed wonder. She still gripped the sword hilt, stunned by her own act.

Her father dropped his arm from Lord Thornleigh’s neck. His look at Justine was utter, wild surprise. “How could you . . . ?” Blood spilled over his lips. “How . . . ?”

Shaking, she let go of the sword hilt. Her father’s eyes clouded over. She saw death in them. He slumped backward. His body thudded to the floor. The sword quivered, a foot of steel buried inside him.

“Justine . . .” Lord Thornleigh’s voice was a reed through his crushed throat. He struggled to get to his feet. He was so gored, his effort was a shambling, pitiful sight. A heroic effort. It tore Justine’s heart.

“Don’t,” she cried, her mouth so dry the word grated her throat. “Don’t try.”

He swayed halfway to standing, giving up the struggle. “You’re right.” He fell back down to his knees. He made a feeble motion with his hand as if to calm her. “You’re right.” He collapsed, sprawled on his back.

“My lord!” She dropped to her knees and lifted his head onto her lap as gently as she could with her ravaged hands. “I only meant you should rest,” she said, desperate. “Rest before you get up.”

The faintest shake of his head. “I’m finished.”

Justine’s heart felt torn from her chest. She could not hold back the sobs. He groped for her hand. She grabbed his and held tight, willing her strength into him.

“Don’t cry,” he said, wheezing through his crushed windpipe. “I was finished . . . before. Bad leg . . . arm. Not much time . . .” He strained to look back at the corpse. He rasped, “Your father . . .”

“You are wrong!” she said, sobbing. “So wrong.
You,
sir . . .” She pressed her cheek to his. “
You
are my father.”

A ghost of a smile. “Good.” He squeezed her hand. “You’re free now . . . to live.”

A wail threatened from deep inside her.

“Tell Honor . . .” He coughed. He could not get his breath.

“Yes?” Justine strained to hear his thin voice. “Tell her ladyship what?”

“Tell . . . she is . . . my love . . .” He stiffened in agony. “Take care of her!” Breath rattled from his throat. His head lolled. His eyes closed.

She rocked him, sobbing. “Father . . . Father . . . Father . . .”

The sun was a hand on her back gently urging to lift her head and bear witness to the funeral ceremony. She felt Lady Thornleigh beside her tremble. Justine pitied the lady’s struggle to stay strong, and hooked her arm around hers as a support. Lady Thornleigh pressed closer for comfort. Justine hardly knew why the lady did not despise her.
I killed him
. Instead, she had thrown herself into Justine’s arms at the horrible moment of hearing the news. And in the days that followed, even after Justine had confessed her father’s machinations and her own part in luring Lord Thornleigh to the rendezvous, Lady Thornleigh had not cursed her. “You were with him at the end,” she had said from the depths of her sorrow. “You tried to save him.”

No one blamed Justine. She was left to blame herself. She had told her story to officials of Elizabeth’s court and eventually to Sir William Cecil himself, and everyone accepted that her father had abominably used her. What everyone really wanted to know was whether Mary had been complicit in Christopher Grenville’s assassination plot. The only person who could tell them was dead.

I have done murder,
Justine thought. It was a hard thing to live with, to murder your own father. Yet she did not blame herself for his death, only for the death she had not been able to prevent, the father of her heart.

“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil . . .” The vicar finished the psalm, closed his prayer book, and made a slight bow to Baron Thornleigh to indicate that the service was concluded. Inheritor of his father’s title, Adam stood by himself at the head of the grave, the head of the family now. His hands at his sides were balled into fists. He bore no wounds. His house had blown up around him and eleven servants had lost their lives, but Adam had rushed Queen Elizabeth out before the gunpowder had exploded. Elizabeth was unharmed. Adam had suffered scarcely a scratch.

Still, Justine knew the wounds he suffered inside. Returning to his father’s house for his children, he had found they were not there. “Your lady wife has come and gone, sir,” the old nursemaid Meg had told him, unaware of Frances’s treason. “She took the children with her. I reckoned she was taking them home.” But there was no home. Kilburn Manor was rubble. And Adam’s wife, with his children, had disappeared.

The vicar stepped aside to make way for the pallbearers who were shuffling forward with Lord Thornleigh’s coffin. Still, Justine could not make herself look at it. She glanced at Lady Thornleigh, whose gaze was fixed on her husband’s coffin as it went down into the pit, fixed on it as though nothing could make her tear her eyes from it. Her arm hooked around Justine’s was shaking. Justine squeezed with her elbow to give what comfort she could. She silently vowed,
Yes, Father, I will take care of her
. It was an aching, bittersweet love that swelled her heart. Never had she felt so much like a Thornleigh.

She turned her head away from the pit. Bare winter trees skirted the churchyard, and through a break in their trunks she saw a swath of bulrushes. They were tall, obscuring what lay beyond them, but a glint now and then gave it away: the sparkle of sun on water. A pond. Water birds warbled in the rushes, busy with the work of their lives. An oak tree kept watch over the pond and Justine spotted a hawk perched on a high branch, motionless, alert. Something in the sky caught the bird’s attention and it lifted to life, wings slowly beating, taking it up into the blue. It soared above the church, then flew on across the winter-drab fields, over the low hills that rose to Rosethorn House. There it disappeared, a vanishing speck in the vastness of blue.

“Lord Thornleigh, with your leave . . .”

Startled by the voice, Justine turned back. It was Will, just arrived, speaking to Adam. She had been told Will was too weak to attend the funeral, and her heart lurched at the sight of him, his bandaged arm in a sling, his face pale. She had not seen him since leaving him wounded at the Savoy. Lady Thornleigh, in her grief, had left London for Rosethorn House, and Justine had accompanied her to help in any way she could, while Will’s friends had taken him to the Thornleighs’ London house. She had longed to see him but was told he could have no visitors, so severe was his wound. She had lived on scraps of news as he convalesced. Now, as he stepped forward from the rest of the family, his arm in the sling, he limped from his injured ankle, but there was a determined glint in his eyes. He bowed across the grave to Lady Thornleigh, then looked straight at Justine. A piercing look. A shiver touched her scalp. He had loved his uncle.
And I killed him
.

His eulogy for Lord Thornleigh was eloquent, respectful, heartfelt. But there was a ragged edge in his voice that clipped the comfort his listeners might have taken from his words. Justine was not imagining it; she saw tension in many faces.

“Baron Thornleigh died a victim of a feud,” Will declared, his final word a harsh indictment. “For years the house of Grenville has been the sworn enemy of the house of Thornleigh.” There were agitated murmurs from the mourners. Justine felt a cold needle of dread.

“A feud is a demon,” Will plowed on. “It lusts to feed on flesh. It lays waste to everyone and everything in its path. Blind in its hunger, deaf in its purpose, it is insensible to the sorrow it inflicts. We, though, we feel the sorrow deeply today. The demon took your husband, your ladyship. It took my father. That demon even took my mother.”

He fixed his eyes on Justine. She thought her heart would stop.

“Dear friends,” he went on, “today we will move past our sorrow, for the demon is dead. It is dead because of the extraordinary bravery of one person.” He stretched out his arm to indicate her. “Justine Grenville.”

Every face turned to her. She was so astonished she could not breathe.

“This brave lady saved the life of our Queen. It was she whose warning thwarted the traitor’s plot. All of England owes her an everlasting debt. But this family owes her even more, for with her courage Justine Grenville killed the demon.”

The people’s muttering grew louder. Justine was barely aware of it. All she knew was that Will’s eyes, locked on hers, were shining.

“I have long loved this lady,” he said, “and months ago I asked her to marry me. She accepted and we became betrothed. But we kept our betrothal a secret, for she is of the house of Grenville and I am of the house of Thornleigh. In her wisdom, she did not want to feed the demon. Now, thanks to her, its rancorous power is vanquished.” He looked around, taking in all the people. They were quiet, waiting.

“Lady Thornleigh, my lords, friends. Lord Thornleigh wanted peace, finally, between the two houses. Today, I want to honor his wish.” He looked at Justine with a tentative, hopeful smile. “But I want something far more selfish, too. The woman I love, the woman who has taught me what true loyalty is. I want Justine Grenville to be my wife.”

He started toward her, limping, along the edge of the grave. People stepped back to make way for him in a hush. When he reached Justine he bowed to Lady Thornleigh, who gave him a sad smile and a nod. He held out his hand to Justine.

“Mistress Grenville, you alone have the power to transform this melancholy day into one of joy. Will you stand with me before all these witnesses and have the good vicar, here and now, join us together as man and wife?”

Until that moment she would not have believed that sorrow could flash in an instant into joy. “Oh yes, Will,” she said, smiling, a smile born in the glowing heart of her. “Yes.”