The Queen's Captive (11 page)

Then felt a shiver. The Grenvilles had always cast hungry eyes on Richard’s property. “Monasteries,” she said with a grunt as she dug up a new spadeful of stony earth. “Men forsaking the world and giving themselves to God. What’s he supposed to do with them? Such nonsense.”

“It’s an insurance measure,” Adam said.

“What is?”

“My help with the thing. Shows we’re conforming. These days, that’s important.”

She stopped digging. He was looking at her with a serious expression. “And it wouldn’t kill us to befriend the Grenvilles,” he said. “There’s plenty of preferment at court, and access to wealthy investors, and no one’s closer to the Queen than Frances Grenville. Good to have her on our side.”

“Frances or Queen Mary?”

“Both.”

“We don’t befriend tyranny, Adam. Seventeen men the Queen has burned this month. Three right here in Colchester. And she’s just getting started.”

“They were raving radicals. Hot-Gospelers. We’re not.”

“No,” she said tartly, not liking his dismissive tone, as though those innocent victims’ suffering had nothing to do with him. “No, we conform.”

He nodded, relaxing. “Exactly.” He gave her a gentle smile. “It’s just a small priory. Ten or twelve monks going about their foolish, monkish business. What’s the harm?”

Richard saw it differently. “I don’t like it,” he said at supper in the great hall, swishing the last of his wine in his goblet. “I told you, Adam, you can’t trust a Grenville.”

“Can’t trust her brother, you said. This involves only the lady.”

“Same thing. Same blood. Why’s she meddling with us?”

Adam looked about to speak, but then slung one arm over the back of his chair and merely shook his head at his father as though to keep himself from arguing.

Honor spooned up the last of her apple custard, thinking. The three of them were alone. Richard’s sister, Joan, and her husband, Geoffrey, visiting from Blackheath, had gone upstairs to the gallery to play cards. The other members of the household who supped with them—Fletcher, the new steward; Dorothy, the housekeeper, and her husband Stephen, the chamberlain; Alford, the clerk—had all gone to finish evening chores. Outside, some children, likely Dorothy’s boys, were squealing over a game of football. Honor could hear the thump of the pig’s bladder against the courtyard wall.

“Sir,” Adam said quietly, “you take this grudge too far.”

Richard banged down his goblet. “You didn’t see Anthony Grenville fire a lead ball into your stepmother!”

She felt the tremor reach her at the other end of the table. Not just the bang of the goblet but the tremor of memory. Sparks from Grenville’s pistol. The searing bullet.

Adam bristled. “I saw what it did to her.” He looked at Honor for vindication. “When Isabel sent you across the Channel to my care, I saw.”

“And no care could have been more attentive,” she assured him. “No one doubts that, Adam.” She wanted their argument over. Arriving in Antwerp she’d been delirious, and she recalled nothing of the trauma of her recovery. It was history, and she had other things on her mind. Elizabeth.

“Then how could you so blatantly do something that could bring Honor to the Queen’s notice?” Richard challenged his son. “To associate with the Grenvilles is to join the Queen’s circle. That’s dangerous for Honor and you should know it.”

“I believe I know as well as anyone how to protect this family,” Adam said with some warmth. “And I believe that the best way to do that is to befriend the people who wield the power in this benighted realm.”

His black-and-tan setter had ambled over to his chair and laid her nose on his knee. He stroked the dog’s head and scratched behind her ear, gaining control of himself. “Sir,” he said more calmly, “I don’t dispute the evil or the madness that drove Anthony Grenville to attempt murder. But can we blame his children for that? He is dead and you’ve been pardoned and they want peace. I say peace is the only way to live sensibly as neighbors.”

“They
say
they want peace. What they
want
is retribution, starting with the abbey,” Richard said, jerking a thumb toward his cloth works factory across the stream from the house. “Do you think for one moment they’ll forget how their old aunt suffered under King Henry?” Honor noted his word
suffered.
The king had sent soldiers to enforce his seizure of all the monasteries and nunneries throughout England, and the story was that the late Eleanor Grenville, the abbess here, had been raped.

“They can’t blame you for that. You weren’t the only one who bought monastic lands,” Adam pointed out reasonably. “The king sold them on the open market. The Grenvilles know that.”

“All they care about is that I’m the one who bought the abbey and set up my looms, and they will always see that as blasphemy. I tell you, they will never rest until this property is in their hands and they’ve sent us packing.”

Adam heaved a sigh, not conceding but not willing to fight. “You live too much in the past, sir.”

Richard said darkly, “It’s them. They won’t let the past go.”

They sat in silence. From the kitchens came the sound of sloshing water, the scullery maids washing the pots. Someone across the courtyard was hammering.

Honor set down her spoon. It was time to speak her mind. “I think we can make something out of this,” she said. “Friends with the Grenvilles, but on our terms. Adam, do you have plans to see Frances anytime soon?”

Both men turned to her. Adam looked intrigued, Richard wary.

“Yes, tomorrow, in Colchester,” Adam said. “At the site she’s picked for her priory.”

“Good. I’ll come with you. I want to meet her.”

“Really? You seemed so cool to the idea before.”

“I’m getting warmer.”

Richard’s eye narrowed in suspicion. “Honor? What are you scheming?”

She looked at him. “I want Frances Grenville to introduce me to the Queen.”

The next morning Honor and Richard’s sister, Joan, helped him at the abbey. He was supervising workmen as they hefted in a new loom, setting it in the nave beside five others newly bought on credit, all smelling of fresh wood. Honor and Joan oversaw a team of maids sweeping out the floors of the workrooms and washing windows. Once, these had been the monks’ offices and dormitories. Now, they would store bales of wool, as they had before the family fled last year. They would also serve as Richard’s headquarters for tenting and fulling the finished broadcloth both here and at the manor at Blackheath managed by Joan’s husband, Geoffrey.

Spring wind gusted through the open doors, carrying the scent of wet earth and sending last year’s wool fluff dancing through the nave. Birds chittered outside, busily building nests in the belfry and on the sills of the tall clerestory windows. Honor liked how the younger servants, babies when King Henry had dissolved the monasteries, found nothing odd that the clack and
whoosh
of looms, and the paddle thumps of fullers, should echo in the airy space that had once quivered to the chanting of monks. She liked that the clinging odor of incense was being pushed out by the fecund smells of spring.

Yet, as she opened windows and watched the girls sweep, she felt a pinprick of dread. How far did Queen Mary, in her zealous rush to Catholicize the realm, intend to go? “Joan,” she said, as her sister-in-law passed by with a pail of water, “have you heard anything in Blackheath about the Queen wanting some of the old monasteries back?”

“Who says that?”

“Oh, there was just some talk in the market square. A couple of lawyers visiting from Cambridge. They thought she might demand it, monastic lands returned to the Church.”

“Nonsense,” Joan scoffed. “It’s been over fifteen years. She wouldn’t dare try.”

Honor felt the same. It would be political madness, antagonizing hundreds of families who had bought up the old monastic lands. But she had seen religion-inspired madness before. This queen had already provoked a rebellion that had nearly cost her her throne, all because she’d insisted on marrying Philip of Spain. And the burnings continued, many of the victims illiterate villagers confused by twenty years of seesawing official orthodoxy, in which their parish priests had changed doctrines at each new reign. Young people who had grown up being told the pope was the devil were now thrown in prison for disparaging him, and many were going to the stake barely understanding what they had done wrong. It was barbarous. All at the command of this zealot queen.

At noon, she and Richard strolled back to the house arm in arm, Joan beside them, satisfied with their morning’s labor, and hungry for the cold roast pork and borage salad the cook had promised.

“Geoffrey’s forgotten about dinner,” Joan said with a sigh, nodding to the top of the slope where her husband was regaling a group of men outside the brew house and getting their laughter. “I’ll go fetch him.” She went ahead.

Honor and Richard carried on alone. They didn’t talk about her “wild gambit,” as Richard had called her plan to see the Queen. They’d been through it all last night and again at breakfast, Richard protesting the danger, Honor determined to go ahead. If she was going to keep Elizabeth alive, she needed to know what the Queen was thinking. She needed to be inside the court. Richard had finally thrown up his hands, unable to budge her. Now, as they crossed the footbridge over the stream and carried on up the sloping lawn to the house, they stuck to safe subjects: the quickest feasible schedule of debt repayment, and how many weavers and fullers they could hire.

Richard went to the stable to check on a newborn foal, and Honor headed for the great hall. When she walked in she found a man standing at the windows, looking out at the distant rooftops of Colchester. He turned, and Honor was surprised to see the ruddy face of George Mitford.

“I know,” he said. “Look what the cat dragged in.”

“Dragged or not, you’re always welcome,” she said, going to him and embracing him. She pulled back to look at him. She hadn’t seen him since he’d bought the last of her jewels in Antwerp. “But what on earth are you doing back in England?”

“First, are you all right?” he asked with a frown of concern. She knew it had to do with the emptiness around them. The hall did look bleak, given Richard’s bachelor-like encampment with Adam since their return to the stripped house while Honor was at Woodstock. There were no sideboards laden with plate. No banquettes plumped with cushions. Not a tapestry or a wall hanging to soften the hall’s harsh sounds. She could hardly wait for May, when her flower garden would yield bouquets to waft the scent of roses.

“We’re getting back on our feet,” she assured him. “It’s slow but sure. We’ll be fine.”

He nodded, apparently satisfied.

“You didn’t come all this way to ask me that, did you?”

“No,” he said, smiling. “My son’s getting married.”

“Timothy?”

“Roger.”

“Roger! Has his voice even changed?”

“Good Lord, Honor, he’s twenty-two.”

“And taking a wife—heavens. When?”

“Two weeks from Saturday. Alice Lowry, a lovely girl. Margaret would have been proud.”

Honor gave him a sad smile. He had been devoted to his wife, dead for seven years. “Where will the ceremony take place?” she asked.

“London.”

“But is it safe? For you?” George was a declared Protestant, devout and outspoken. All very well in cosmopolitan Antwerp, but England these days was a dangerous place for such opinions. It was the very reason he had moved abroad, though his sons had stayed.

“An old codger like me, I won’t be bothering anyone. And I’m only staying for the wedding. You and Richard will come, won’t you?”

“I’d love to, George, but I can’t. I’m sorry. I’ll be…away.”

“Oh? Where?”

“I can’t tell you that. Though I’m sure you’d approve.”

He gave her a quizzical look. “Not back to your old tricks, are you?”

“I’m no magician. Tricks are for the young.”

But it wasn’t true—she was in the thick of intrigue, advising Elizabeth, and later today she was going to push things even further, with Frances Grenville. Seeing this face from the old days jangled her nerves a bit. George had been on her side and still was, of course, but might there still be someone out there from the other side? Someone who knew everything and could set the bishop’s dogs on her?

“Oh,” he said suddenly, remembering. “I’d like your opinion on something.” He bent to pick up his leather-covered strongbox with the copper bands. Honor noticed a slight tremor in his right hand. Her old friend was getting on, no mistake.
So are we all.
The thought helped settle her nerves. So many from the old days were dead, and those who remained were out of power, toothless, no threat. Besides, she was accepted now by her community, by the parish priest, and by all Richard’s business associates as the properly conforming wife of a proper Colchester clothier. Adam’s
modus vivendi:
Don’t rock the boat and we’ll all get along just fine.

George set the strongbox on the bare dining table, then pulled a brass key from his pocket and used it to open the lock. With the lid lifted, his precious wares winked from their black velvet wells: diamonds, rubies, sapphires. A green leather pouch the size of a melon was tucked in one corner. He took it out, tugged loose the drawstring, and then, giving Honor a sly smile, upended its contents on the table.