The Queen's Captive (31 page)

His heart banged painfully in his chest. He had just killed a man. Roger was losing blood. The six of them were covered with stolen silver. And there was no skiff.

“One word of support from you, that’s all they want,” Honor urged Elizabeth. “It would mean everything to them.” She was trying to keep up with the Princess on the sand-packed garden path that ran from Somerset House to the river. Elizabeth walked briskly and her long legs covered the ground faster.

“I don’t want to hear about it. You have put me in peril by just
telling
me.”

Honor held back her anger. She had expected some excitement from the girl on hearing of Dudley’s venture, an eagerness for details. Some nervousness, too, of course, which they all felt. But not this wall of denial. She stuck by Elizabeth’s side as they passed through the orchard where cherry and apple buds were swelling in the heat.

“You cannot let these men fight for you without giving them
some
encouragement.”

“I did not ask them to fight.”

“But you will accept the throne if they win it for you,” Honor snapped. “Can you deny that?”

Elizabeth glared at her. “It is treason to say so.” She stomped up the steps to the raised flowerbeds that offered a view across the garden’s riverfront walls. The Thames swarmed with Easter boat traffic, Londoners coming and going to church.

Honor followed her. “Don’t pretend you haven’t
thought
about being queen.”

Elizabeth turned on her. “I have thought long and hard about imprisonment and execution. About the axe that cut off the head of my sweet cousin Jane when
she
tried to be queen. My sister ordered that death, and she hates me more than she ever hated Jane.”

“My lady, this venture is worlds away from that sad time. Lady Jane had no goodwill of the people, only her madly ambitious father. He propped her up on a stolen throne. You have the people’s respect as the daughter of King Henry. You have their love. You embody their hope for ending your sister’s tyranny. And many powerful men are loyal to you. The whole realm would welcome you as queen.”

She saw something spark in Elizabeth’s eyes. Eagerness after all? A desire to hear more? To make this cause her own? Elizabeth had just returned from chapel where she had dutifully attended mass, and she still held a rough stick cross, twisting it now between her fingers in nervous contemplation of Dudley’s enterprise.

There was a burst of ribald laughter. They both looked over the westward garden wall. Beyond the neighboring nobleman’s estate smoke drifted up from a cooking fire in the derelict tenements of the Savoy. Built decades ago as a poorhouse cheek by jowl with the great mansions of the Strand, the Savoy had degenerated into a squatting ground for petty criminals and vagrants. Elizabeth watched the smoke rise, absently twisting the stick cross in her hand. “It’s easy for you to talk so recklessly. You don’t know what it’s like to be in prison, to wonder every day if it will be your last.”

“I think I do. My husband has been in the Tower for four long months. Every day I wonder if it will be his last.”

Elizabeth looked more annoyed than sympathetic. “That’s the real reason you’re planning rebellion. I know you. All you think of is your family.”

Honor was taken aback at the heartless insult. Elizabeth had spent time with Richard at Hatfield when they had sat by Adam’s bedside.

“No. No, that’s wrong,” Elizabeth said quickly, contrite and flustered. “Good Master Thornleigh. He has my pity.”

Honor decided she could build on that. “I have learned that family is everything, my lady,” she said. “You need to think the same way. If you’re going to rule, the people of all England will be your family. That’s why, when brave men stand up for you, you must stand up for them.”

Elizabeth threw down her cross like a petulant child. “I don’t want them to! I didn’t ask them to. I don’t
need
them to. I have the protection of my brother-in-law. You said it yourself, he needs me next in the line of succession in case my sister dies. To keep my cousin Mary of Scotland from becoming queen of England. I’m safe—as long as I don’t make trouble.”

“A queen cannot run from trouble. A queen must meet trouble and transform it.”

“I am not queen!”

Honor bit her tongue. “Think, please think, of the fine men who are wagering all for you. Sir Henry Dudley, a bulldog for your rights. Lord John Bray, your good neighbor at Hatfield. Faithful old Sir John St. Loe, whose son has served you so well as the captain of your guard. My son, who saved your life. Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, who—”

“Your son? What does he have to do with this?”

Honor was startled by the sudden keenness in the girl’s tone. She hesitated, unwilling to leak the information that Adam had just robbed the Queen’s treasury. “He is sailing for France at this very moment,” she said. “To help raise an army for you.”

Elizabeth looked horrified. “Why? Why
him?
”

What a question. “He believes in you,” Honor said tightly. She wished she could say she felt the same. She was beginning to wonder if this selfish young creature was fit to rule.

Elizabeth’s eyes narrowed in fury. “This is your doing. You
made
him.”

“I? How could I? He is his own man.”

“He could die! I shall never forgive you, woman. Leave me. Leave my side at once!”

Noon, and no sign of the skiff. They would miss the two o’clock tide.

Looking downriver from the palace wharf, Adam cast his mind to the
Elizabeth
moored off Billingsgate Wharf, waiting for them. Two tides daily. Five hours for the ebb to end and the next flood to begin, then seven more hours until high tide. So the next time he could weigh anchor was two o’clock in the morning. A neap tide, at least, and there would be some moonlight. Little comfort, he thought. What the devil was he to do for twelve hours, with Roger half fainting from his wound, and his crewmen anxious to be gone, and palace guards maybe already out looking for them? Should he hire a tilt boat to take them? But that would leave an oarsman who had seen their faces and seen them board the
Elizabeth.
He didn’t want to add another corpse to his sins today. He would wait. If Daniel hadn’t come by dusk, he would steal a boat and they would take their chances.

But they could not tarry on the wharf for hours, laden down so awkwardly and dangerously with silver. He had to get Roger out of sight. And the treasure.

“I could use a swallow of that,” Roger groaned with a feeble smile.

Adam followed his gaze to the servants hoisting the last hogsheads of beer out of the barge. They were hefting the barrels as though they were weightless. “Sorry, my friend, they’re empty,” Adam said. The palace had its own brew house. This was a shipment of fresh barrels. Then a thought struck him.
Bless you, Roger.

He explained the plan to his men.

They crossed the wharf to the alehouse. Adam settled Roger inside, in the cool of a heavy-beamed alcove, and left Jack to watch over him. A few shillings bought Adam five empty hogsheads from the barkeep’s store. A few more shillings to the fishermen outside bought their nets. He and his crew rolled the hogsheads behind the building to a small courtyard filthy with fish refuse and littered with broken casks. A few minutes later they rolled the hogsheads, no longer empty, out to the wharf edge and onto the spread nets. The fishermen watched, idly interested, as Adam and the men used the nets to lower the heavy hogsheads into the water. They’d all seen it done by fishermen on countless wharfs during the dog days of every summer. A fine way to cool ale.

Dusk was falling. In the purple shadows Adam prowled the wharf with Jack, looking for any craft left unattended. The wharf wasn’t busy, just a lord in blue satin instructing his servant, and a small knot of gentlemen who stood arguing about where to go for supper. But every watercraft was manned by at least one oarsman. Waiting for trade, the oarsmen sat lounging, one whittling a stick, one taking pulls from a bottle of wine. Adam passed them, feeling more desperate. He would steal anything, even a sculling boat. He had left his other three crew keeping watch over Roger, who lay delirious in the dirty courtyard behind the alehouse.

“Sir,” Jack said under his breath, nodding to a boat.

Adam saw it, a wherryman lying stretched out in the stern, snoring. The river rocked him like a baby in a cradle.

Adam and Jack exchanged a look, and Adam nodded. Going down the water stairs without a word, they climbed into the wherry quietly so as not to wake the man. Jack took the oars. The wherryman snuffled in his sleep. Adam went to the short single mast, not much taller than himself, and hoisted the sail, so small it took just two pulls on the halyard. He left the sheets slack as Jack, rowing, nosed the boat out past the other craft.

A snort from the wherryman, awaking. “Hoy!” He sat up. “What—”

Adam clamped his hand over the man’s mouth and pulled his dagger. “Quiet. Or you’ll swallow some river bottom.” The man tensed, no more struggle.

Adam kept his dagger at the man’s throat as Jack rowed them over to the alehouse, past the two drunken stragglers on the bench. Adam tied up the boat and whistled softly. His three crewmen came out from the back of the alehouse, helping Roger stagger over to the water’s edge. They settled Roger aboard. He moaned, his face as white as the washed-out sail, and Adam wondered if his friend could survive even the river journey, let alone the crossing to France. But he would not leave him. They hustled the wherryman to the back of the alehouse and gagged him and tied his wrists and ankles with ropes.

It took all five able-bodied men to haul up the fishing nets with their cargo of dripping hogsheads. No one at the other end of the wharf heard the silvery clinking inside the hogsheads as the men loaded them into the wherry.

With all his crew aboard, Adam hardened the sheets and took the tiller, and the evening breeze carried the small boat, with its six men packed knee to knee, out into the middle of the river.

It was almost midnight when London Bridge loomed dead ahead. Lanterns and torches blazed from its three-and four-storied houses and shops, lighting the water below like quicksilver. The river roared, compressed by the twenty huge stone arches, sounding like a waterfall. The arches were thirty feet apart. Adam picked the seventh from the south shore and tacked, preparing to shoot the bridge. It would be rough—the small boat was not made for such white water.

The crew braced themselves, two of them holding Roger between them to cushion the impact. The little boat jerked and pitched as it hit the rapids. The bridge lights above them were eclipsed as Adam steered through the roiling water of the sixty-foot-high stone cavern. Then, the angry water shot them out the other side. Adam hardened the sheets and within moments they were sailing smoothly again.

He steered for Billingsgate on the north shore, navigating between the scatter of lofty galleons and caravels moored near the wharf. Flags fluttered from their masts with the colors of France, Spain, Hungary, Poland.

When he spotted the
Elizabeth
it lifted his heart like a summer breeze lifting a becalmed sail. As welcome as Elizabeth’s kiss.

He steered over to her, and she rose above the little boat, as proud and shimmering as her namesake. Lanterns winked in her stern cabin window as she rocked gently in the river swells, and reflections of the painted designs on her hull—chevrons of bright green, gold, and red—danced on the lamp-lit water.

“Ahoy!” Adam called up to the stern rail.

Faces of Adam’s crew appeared over the rail. Then the face of Sir Henry Dudley himself.

“Thornleigh?” he called down. “Good Lord, man, you made it!”

Adam had his men board first, carrying Roger, and he ordered his friend’s wound seen to. Then he took over his ship. He set three of his crew to load the hogsheads of silver while he oversaw preparing the
Elizabeth
to sail. Dudley, marveling at the treasure, gave a low whistle of appreciation. “Well done, Thornleigh. It’s enough for a king’s ransom.”

My father’s ransom, Adam thought as he watched the sails unfurl. As he took the wheel he looked back at the Tower rising up just past the bridge, its turrets and battlements etched against the moonlit clouds. His father was there, his only company for four long months the rats of his stinking cell.
For him, and for me,
Adam thought,
this rebellion cannot come soon enough.

They were underway with the tide. They cleared Gravesend and soon broke free of the estuary with a fresh, following wind at their back. Once out in deep water Adam felt buoyed by the clean night wind rushing past him at the wheel. It felt like Elizabeth’s hand gently pushing him on, and her voice whispering in his ear,
Do this for me…do this for me…

19

The Queen’s Net

May 1556

“F
ive hundred pounds?” Elizabeth said in amazement. Honorhad stopped her on the broad staircase of Somerset House. “You must be mad.”

“You refused to send Sir Henry Dudley even a word of support,” Honor said sharply. “The least you can do is send—” She paused to let two maids carrying armloads of bed linen trudge past them, going down the stairs. When the maids were out of sight, Honor took Elizabeth’s hand and pulled her up the last steps and into an alcove where no one could hear them.