The Lost Duchess (46 page)

‘We’ll give him a hero’s burial here at sea.’

He beckoned to Jack and Lacy, and they wrapped Tom in an old sail and tipped him overboard, weighed down with bricks, to a salute from the guns. Those guns could serve for ballast later, if they ever got out beyond the banks.

Rob kept lookout while they said a few prayers, and the gunfire probably helped keep the savages at a distance. Not long afterwards canoes were spotted astern, but the sand banks before the ocean were already close to larboard, and the wind was helping them sail southeast without too much tacking. Their load was light and they could navigate the shallows and get to Port Ferdinando by the fastest route possible. They fired the guns to keep the savages back, and perhaps one was hit, though the pinnace was so far ahead by then it was difficult to be certain. They passed the islets before the channel, and then the foaming waters came into view that lay at the gateway between the sound and the sea.

There was a chance open before them to sail on and not stop, clear the passage and enter the ocean, leave Croatoan and head for England. Wasn’t that where Emme should be – on her way to England, the ‘home’ she’d spoken of when she’d tried to give Tom hope? They’d never find the Planters now, not without a miracle. Chesapeake Bay was vast, and the Planters might settle inland without ever reaching the coast. If he led his company in pursuit they’d probably die in the attempt; they’d never survive alone. What would be gained?

He saw Lacy coming aft and held course for open water.

The Irishman gave him a wink. ‘You’ll get out to sea now, won’t you?’

Kit looked across to the sand banks and back to the channel. It seemed as if Lacy had read his mind.

‘Aye, Jim, we will.’

Lacy stripped off his armour, his jerkin and shoes, his breeches, shirt and hose until there was little left on him, and Kit knew what he meant to do when he stooped to offer an embrace.

‘You won’t mind if I stay with my Alawa?’

‘No, Jim. You go, and God keep you both.’

Lacy jumped into the water as the pinnace slid by the dunes. Kit watched him wade ashore to Hatarask with only his pale skin to show he’d come from across the ocean. The Croatans would take care of him. This was the way it should be. Lacy would remain with his woman, and the Planters would send a message to Croatoan once they’d found a site for the new city. White would return to find them somehow, even if the pinnace never reached England.

Kit held course to race out with the flow, and his little crew made good work of getting the pinnace beyond the rollers where no canoe
could follow. They headed northeast to cross the seas with the drift, and the sun was bright and the wind was light: a good day to begin a journey.

‘For England!’ he roared, and they all four took up the cry, none louder than Rob.

He’d wanted to find a new land for his boy, but perhaps he didn’t need to. Rob had proved his resilience and now with Emme they were a family; together they could help one another no matter where they were. God willing, they’d get back. Emme came to sit beside him, his dear wife with whom he could now look forward to a future and children and living out his years.

She smiled, though tears still ran down her cheeks.

‘Will we really get to England?’

‘Yes, I think we will.’

She cried quietly and he held her.

‘Poor Tom,’ was all she could say.

‘Yes. He was just a lad, a very brave one.’

‘Poor Georgie.’

‘Harvie will look after him.’

She pressed her cheek against his chest, with her arms around his waist, and drew a ragged breath.

‘You are alive, and so is Rob, and we are together, here with Jack, and that is enough, more than enough, yet …’

‘Yet,’ he repeated softly, understanding what she meant.

‘It seems we’ve left nothing behind, for the friends we have lost, for all we have done, all that hope, all those dreams. The Secotans will raze our city. They’ll destroy everything we built.’

He stroked her hair and spoke of the conviction that burned in his core.

‘The city will be built again.’

She raised her head, and there was certainty within her that he could hear swelling in her voice.

‘Yes, it will. Dyonis and Ananias will found a new city with the Planters. They’ll make it even better, and Jim will live with the Croatans so there’ll always be a link with our Indian friends, both for us and for them.’

‘And it may be that something will endure from the time we were at Roanoke.’

She wiped her eyes and slowly shook her head. ‘Perhaps, though I can’t think what.’

He squeezed her shoulders. ‘You remember that acorn you gave me, the one from Richmond Park?’

‘Yes.’

She looked at him in puzzlement, and her beautiful face made a question that he most yearned to answer with a kiss.

‘I planted it in the garden of the Dares’ house, the one I always thought of as yours. Maybe something will come of that.’

She smiled more broadly, caressing the thought in the way she spoke of it. ‘An English oak in America … Could it grow there?’

‘Yes,’ he said, telling her the way he wanted to. ‘I believe it will.’

November 1587

‘You may enter now.’

Lady Howard ushered Emme towards the upper gallery within the privy lodgings at Richmond Palace. The yeomen guards opened the creaking doors and Emme glimpsed the cold winter light streaming through a long succession of windows and a man stalking towards her dressed entirely in black: Sir Francis Walsingham, tall, sallow and stoop-shouldered with a skull cap over his balding head.

She looked away from his hooded eyes.

‘Master Secretary,’ she murmured and curtseyed low.

‘Mistress Fifield, I am pleased to see you well. You have had an eventful journey, I hear.’

He drew close to her and stopped, gesturing for her to rise with a claw-like hand under the crook of her arm. His voice dropped.

‘Perhaps you will tell me about it.’

The Queen’s voice rang out behind him.

‘I shall speak with her first, my Moor. Send her in alone and leave us.’

Walsingham inclined his head and beckoned for Emme to proceed through the open doors.

She took a few steps and looked over her shoulder before she passed beyond the threshold. Kit and Rob gazed back at her, standing to attention in the best clothes they’d been able to find during their brief sojourn at Plymouth, and she saw the concern in their faces. She carried their hope and faith; would she be able to repay it? Throughout the long voyage back from Virginia she had clung to the dream of starting a new life with them in England. But this was the reality: that she remained the handmaid of the Queen, and the Queen would determine her fate. Walsingham had heard of her journey, so had Master Ferdinando returned? Had Governor White already brought news of the colony’s plight, in which case would the Queen receive her favourably? A sudden stab of fear transfixed her. Her Majesty might be furious when she heard that the City of Raleigh at Roanoke had failed. She might insist that Emme resume her duties as a maid of honour at court, and punish her for getting involved with an enterprise that had proved ill-founded.

Emme met Kit’s eye, and her love was in her look. Too late for words, all she could do was hold his gaze for an instant; she hoped he understood.

She turned and advanced. The Queen stood some way along the long turning gallery: a glittering figure who walked away as the doors closed, a fleeting dash of rich burgundy and gold, high collar shimmering behind a pinned crescent of auburn curls; then she was gone around a bend in the corridor. Emme kept walking, quickening her steps. The Queen must have been taking her exercise when Lady Howard announced the arrival of the lady who had been known as Mistress Fifield, and the Queen liked nothing to interfere
with her morning activity. Emme felt the rhythm of the palace settling around her like a familiar cloak, heavy and constraining. She could smell age seeping from the half-timbered walls, the damp of the Thames on one side, and the frosted vegetation of the privy orchard on the other. The air crept in through cracks around the leaded windows, penetrating and cold. Her footsteps sounded loud over the groaning boards, giving rise to small echoing thuds that mingled with the Queen’s tread ahead of her. Emme forced herself to move faster. But her heart was still with Kit, and anxiety for her future with him dragged at every step. At a word from the Queen she could be confined for the rest of her life, and Kit could suffer for marrying her without consent. Should she even confess to it? Their union had not yet been blessed in church, or witnessed or proclaimed. Would the Queen want to know now?

The country was on the brink of war; that had been apparent as soon as they made landfall at Plymouth. The talk in the harbour had all been of the mighty fleet gathering at Lisbon in preparation for invasion. ‘The invincible armada’, as the wherryman had described it on the passage upriver from London Bridge; ‘
la felicisima armada
’, as it had been named by the Spaniards, ‘the most fortunate fleet’. He’d spat in the river at that. ‘May their fortune go to Hell.’

The fleet would be the greatest the world had ever seen, a force with which King Philip and the Pope would be avenged for the heresy of the Queen of England, and the execution of the scheming Mary of Scots.

England might soon be destroyed.

Emme walked on, feeling a deepening sense of foreboding with each step she took. The gallery angled round, and she had a sense of completing a great circle, returning to the point where she had
started over a year before. This Palace of Richmond was where she had first met Kit and longed to escape. If she traversed all the outer galleries and re-entered the cantered tower, and climbed the little spiral staircase to the room above the royal bedchamber, then she would be back in the place where Lord Hertford had defiled her. She would have reached the point at which she had been impelled to flee. She had left Virginia full of joy that she and Kit had survived, but now she was returning to fulfil her promise and waiting for her was the role that she had relinquished when she departed. Each step took her closer to it. For the sake of the colonists, she would plead for their relief: for Eleanor Dare and her baby daughter, for Ananias and little Georgie Howe, and all the others she had left in Virginia. But would the Queen help them now? Would she be interested in a tale of hardship in the New World when the world around England was on the point of breaking apart?

A flash of low sunshine from across the river fields made her turn her head and blink. She glimpsed the top of a bare tree in the orchard bathed in golden light, like a crown of tangled thorns above a band of deep blue shadow. The steps ahead became louder. Emme looked forward and saw that the Queen had turned and was walking back in her direction. She almost hurried away but resolve held her rooted. She fell to the ground, prostrating herself over the boards.

The Queen paced sedately towards her.

‘Arise, child. Let us walk together.’

Emme raised her eyes and saw that the Queen had extended her hand. She stood, curtseyed and kissed a jewelled ring on one of Her Majesty’s slender fingers, noticing the veins that stood out on the back of her age-worn hand. The Queen’s face was a mask, whitened
and gaunt, but her presence was vibrant, charged with an aura of power and restless energy. Emme remembered how so often in the past she had felt diminished merely by being near her. She would have to be strong.

‘Majesty, I return to you, as I undertook to do, to report to you before all others on your City of Raleigh in Virginia.’

The Queen made a small sound of acknowledgement and gestured for Emme to walk by her side.

‘I have missed your singing. It was not the finest I have heard, but it had heart.’

With rapid, gliding steps the Queen proceeded along the gallery and Emme kept pace, feeling a sense of relief awakening in her because she had been received in a kindly way. She sensed the Queen eyeing her and kept her gaze fixed ahead, head bowed demurely.

‘You have become a little thin,’ the Queen said. ‘But that is hardly surprising.’

What did she know? Emme chanced a glance at her and saw the Queen raise her hand.

‘I have been informed of the colony’s difficulties. Governor White arrived in London two days ago and has given a sorry account to Sir Walter at Durham Place. I have yet to receive the official report, but my Master Secretary is aware of the substance. Secretary Walsingham is also aware that the expedition’s Pilot arrived in England some weeks before the Governor but in no better state. It would appear that both crews were so weakened by misfortune, death and disease that they could not get ashore without assistance.’

The Queen cast Emme another quizzical stare. ‘You appear to have fared much better with fewer men and a less seaworthy craft.’

Emme looked down at the Queen’s hooped skirts and the toes
of her dainty slippers as they appeared briefly with each step. She supposed it must seem barely credible that a small pinnace could cross the ocean crewed by two men and a boy together with a lady-in-waiting to the Queen, but they had done it, over great seas swept by icy winds, past Newfoundland and Terceira.

‘I have been fortunate to return with one of Sir Francis Drake’s men who is a skilled seafarer and navigator.’

The Queen raised her brows.

‘The mariner who waits outside?’

‘The same.’ Emme nodded earnestly. ‘Christopher Doonan, Master Boatswain: a most valiant and excellent mariner.’

The Queen made another wordless sound of acknowledgement. ‘No one else knows of your return from Virginia?’

‘We have told no one where we have come from. The news that I bear of your colony in the New World is for you to hear before all others.’

‘Good. So tell me the nub of it as quickly as you will.’

Emme drew breath, aware of the pressure to distil everything she had been through into a few terse words. She must forget her own concerns, and concentrate on what mattered to the realm and the plight of those she had left behind.