The Queen's Exiles (36 page)

He noted Elizabeth’s guards standing sentry at the base of the terrace, and he set his mind to business. Why had the Queen summoned him to this private meeting when supper was about to be served? Urgent news from the Low Countries? She’d already told him she wanted him to be an intermediary in her clandestine dealings with the prince of Orange. Or could it be word about Robert?
No,
he told himself soberly. That was his private cross to bear, not Elizabeth’s.

He reached the rose garden and passed under its brick entrance arch. Inside, the trellised walls reached as high as his shoulders, the dusky red blooms climbing the trellises. The voices and music in the house sounded ever fainter as his boots crunched the gravel path. Two ladies-in-waiting bobbed curtsies to him, Blanche Parry and a new one he didn’t know. Blanche gestured down a rose-sided alley. Elizabeth stood with her head bent to sniff a blossom. She wore her favorite colors, black and white, all silk, bejeweled all over with rubies and sapphires. She turned when she saw him coming.

“Lady Thornleigh will be glad her roses cheer you, Your Grace,” he said, bowing.

“They do. The variety she cultivates has a lovely perfume. I warrant it’s a kind that even
you
do not turn up your nose at.”

He smiled. She knew him well.

“You take after her,” she said.

“I, Your Grace? I’m afraid I am no gardener.”

“Yet you have brought a new kind of bloom into our court.”

Ah, Fenella.
“I take it you refer to Mistress Doorn. A brave and valiant lady.”

“Indeed. I like her spirit well. But take heed, my friend. With roses come thorns.” She flicked her fingers toward her ladies. Obeying, they turned and moved away, out of hearing. “I am hungry for supper, Adam, so I will get to the point. I have considered your request and have an answer for you. You will find it bittersweet. Which part will you hear first, the bitter or the sweet?”

“I’ll take the sweet, Your Grace. To gird myself for the bitter.”

“Very well. At your request I am granting you an annulment of your marriage.”

The relief was so powerful it jolted him. Frances had been an anchor grounding his ship on a lethal reef. Elizabeth had cut the cable. He was free!

“Annulment is a grave matter,” Elizabeth said, “for marriage is a sacrament. But this is an extreme case. Your wife is a vicious traitor who tried to murder me, and would have succeeded but for you.”

He bowed deeply. “I am your very grateful servant.”

“Good. Let service be your guide as I tell you the bitter part. You will now do something for me, something very difficult.”

“Anything, Your Grace.”

“You will disown your son.”

The words startled him. Had he misheard? “Disown . . . ?”

“Robert is the boy’s name, I believe?”

“Yes, but—”

“Renounce him. Disown him. Wash your hands of him.”

He gaped at her. She could not be serious. What possible cause could she have?

“I demand this, Adam, for your own safety. Your wife tried to have you killed. You told me so yourself. And we know why. Your son would inherit your title, your lands. Your wife controls the boy and she holds that dream ever in her mind, of being the mother of the new Baron Thornleigh. But if you cut him off, you kill her dream. She will have no reason to hazard another attempt on your life.”

He could find no words. He saw Elizabeth’s reasoning . . . but reason faltered in the face of a demand that cracked his heart.

“The boy is lost to you, Adam. You know that. She will never, ever let you near him. She has Alba on her side.”

“I might yet try . . .” His words trailed. He felt their hollowness.
Try what?

“No. You shall not. And I will tolerate no debate on this. You are too valuable to me. Though you would risk your life, I will not. Disown the boy. It is my command.”

Their eyes locked. Inside the house, the music ceased.

Elizabeth laid a gentle hand on his shoulder. Pity softened her voice. “However, I have a sweet to give you yet, my friend. Honey to salve your wound.” She beckoned Blanche Parry and told her, “Bring me Mistress Doorn.”

Fenella could not tame her tumbling thoughts as she followed the Queen’s lady-in-waiting across the terrace and down to the rose garden. Mistress Parry had said only,
Her Majesty wishes a word,
and Fenella could scarcely imagine what that word would be. Perhaps,
Who do you think you are, you foolish woman?
Or,
How dare you impose on this noble family’s goodwill?
Or,
Quit my kingdom this very night!

But nothing prepared her for the sight of Adam standing with Her Majesty. They watched her coming. The Queen looked grave, Adam bewildered. Fenella reached them and sank into a deep curtsy before the Queen.

“Rise, mistress. I have a question or two to put to you. Kindly make your answers brief, for I am hungry and eager to sit down to Lady Thornleigh’s roast pheasant.”

“Yes, Your Majesty.” Her voice was so thin she barely heard herself.

“How do you like England?”

Fenella blinked at her. “Your Majesty?”

“Do you find the country pleasing? Salubrious to your health? Overflowing with wise and gentle people?”

“England is . . . all that, Your Majesty,” she stammered.

“Ha, she is a born courtier, Lord Thornleigh.”

Adam gave Fenella a look that said he was as mystified as she was.

“I have just rid this gentleman of his troublemaking wife,” said the Queen. “He is in love with you. Do you love him?”

Fenella was astounded. Adam clearly was, too.

“It is not a difficult question, mistress. Do you love him, yea or nay?”

Stunned though she was, Fenella could not help admiring the bluntness. “With all my heart, Your Majesty.”

Her Majesty seemed slightly startled. “My, you do speak your mind. Good. Then, it’s settled. You like England, and England has given you a protector in Lord Thornleigh. I therefore proclaim you forthwith a denizen of my realm, with all the rights, privileges, and duties of an English subject. My people, my nobles, and all the world will henceforth consider you an Englishwoman.”

Fenella blinked again. What did all this mean? “I . . . thank you, Your Majesty.”

“No need for thanks. You’ve provided me a fine opportunity to somewhat pacify the bellicose king of Spain. I
must
pacify him, you know, for with one lash of his fury he could send an army to our shores. So I intend to have it known far and wide, here and abroad, that I make you my subject for one reason only.” She turned to Adam, a twinkle in her eye. “Can you guess it, sir?”

He seemed lost for words. “I cannot, Your Grace.”

She looked triumphant, turning back to Fenella. “It is because your husband has taken up arms against the lawful authority of Spain, something no subject anywhere must ever do. Your husband is therefore a rebel and a traitor, and any connection to such evil rabble I will not abide. Which is why, mistress, since you are now my subject, I hereby annul your marriage.”

Fenella gasped. Adam gasped.

“The rest, sir, I leave to you. And now,” said the Queen with impatience, “let us sup.” She beckoned her ladies, a signal that she was leaving.

Fenella could scarcely bend her knees to curtsy, too buffeted by joy, too caught up in grinning back at Adam’s grinning face.

The Queen bade her rise. Their eyes met. The Queen stepped close and whispered four words in her ear.

What did she say to you?
Adam had asked Fenella that evening when the Queen had left them alone among the roses and they’d embraced, laughing in joy. Fenella did not tell him then. She did not tell him in the sixteen days that followed, just enough time to publish the banns in church on three successive Sundays. She did not tell him during the whirlwind of wedding preparations with his sister and his daughter and the Dowager Lady Thornleigh. The gowns, the gifts, the jewels, the banquet, the throng of guests, the toasts. The love in Adam’s eyes when he and Fenella exchanged vows as man and wife, making her heart sing. The shy, sweet smile from Kate that made Fenella want to cry.

Now, as she came to him in bed for the first time at his house, she wanted to tell him, to give him this gift. “Do you want to know what Her Majesty said to me?”

He was kissing her neck, scarcely listening. “What?”

“That night in the rose garden, my love. She said four words.”

He looked at her, curious now.

She kissed him, more happy than she’d thought it was possible to be. Then she put her lips to his ear and whispered the words. “She said this:
Give him a son
.”

Readers of historical fiction are often keen to know how much of a book is fact and how much is fiction. Regarding
The Queen’s Exiles,
let me fill you in. First, the facts.

Spain’s ruthless occupation of the Netherlands, sixteenth-century Europe’s rich mercantile hub, is well documented, as is the brutal governorship over the Dutch by the Spanish Duke of Alba, the “Iron Duke.” In 1567, Alba set up a special court called the Council of Troubles to crush Dutch resistance, and under its authority he executed thousands. The people called it the Council of Blood. Here are Alba’s own words: “It is better that a kingdom be laid waste and ruined through war for God and for the king, than maintained intact for the devil and his heretical horde.”

The scene of cruelty in Chapter 3 of
The Queen’s Exiles
after a Dutch boy throws dung at the Duke of Alba’s statue is an invention, but Alba did in fact commission a life-sized statue of himself showing him trampling rebellion. It was made by sculptor Jacques Jonghelinck and in 1571 was erected in the market square of Antwerp. (For the dramatic purposes of my story I set the statue in Brussels, twenty-seven miles from Antwerp.) The people loathed the statue, and it did not long outlive Alba’s regime; his successor pulled it down. However, Jonghelinck also sculpted a bronze bust of the duke and it survives today in the Frick Collection in New York.

The story of the Sea Beggars, the Dutch rebel privateers, is fascinatingly true. Led by William de La Marck, they were a motley fleet of about thirty vessels who harassed Spanish shipping and raided coastal towns. The origin of their name is intriguing. Before the Duke of Alba’s arrival in 1567, the governor was the king of Spain’s sister, Margaret. In 1566, a delegation of more than two hundred Dutch nobles appeared before her with a petition stating their grievances. She was at first alarmed at the appearance of so large a body, but one of her councillors exclaimed, “What, madam, is Your Highness afraid of these beggars?” The Dutch heard the insult, and after Margaret ignored their petition, they declared that they were ready to become beggars in their country’s cause and adopted the name Beggars with defiant pride. When the Spanish persecution worsened, scores of these rebels took to the sea to harry Spanish shipping and proudly called themselves the Sea Beggars.

For several years England’s Queen Elizabeth gave safe conduct to the Sea Beggars, allowing La Marck and his rebel mariners to make Dover and the creeks and bays along England’s south coast their home as they continued their raids on Spanish shipping. England was far weaker than mighty Spain, so Elizabeth was playing “a game of cat and mouse” with King Philip, says historian Susan Ronald in her fascinating book
The Pirate Queen:
Helping the Sea Beggars was “the only course open to her to show her defiance of Spain.” But Philip’s fury grew dangerous, and in March 1572, Elizabeth ordered the expulsion of the Sea Beggars from her realm, an act that people assumed was to placate Philip. It turned out, however, that Elizabeth had struck a lethal blow at Spain: By expelling the Sea Beggars she had unleashed these fierce privateers’ latent power. For a month they wandered the sea, homeless and hungry, until, on the first of April, they made a desperate attack on the Dutch port city of Brielle, which had been left unattended by the Spanish garrison, and they astounded everyone, even themselves, by capturing the city, just as depicted in the novel. Their victory provided the Dutch opposition’s first foothold on land and launched a revolution: the Dutch War of Independence. The capture of Brielle gave heart to other Dutch cities suffering under Spain’s harsh rule, and when the Sea Beggars pushed on inland they rejoiced to see town after town open their gates to them. The exiled prince of Orange now sent troops to support them. But Spain ferociously struck back. Taking the rebel-held cities of Mechelen and Zutphen, the Duke of Alba’s troops massacred the inhabitants; in Mechelen the atrocities went on for four days. The town of Haarlem bravely resisted during a long siege, but finally surrendered. Alba’s troops methodically cut the throats of the entire garrison, some two thousand men, in cold blood.

By 1585, Elizabeth could no longer tolerate Spain’s tyranny in the Netherlands and she openly supported the Dutch revolution, sending an army under the Earl of Leicester to fight alongside the Dutch resistance. Nevertheless, it took almost six more decades until the people of the Netherlands won their freedom, in 1648. To this day, on the first of April every year the Dutch people still exuberantly celebrate the Sea Beggars’ capture of Brielle. (In writing about these ragtag but committed rebels I often thought of the French Resistance fighters in World War II who stood up to the Nazi occupation of France.)

Here are a few notes on the fate of four real people who appear in
The Queen’s Exiles:

The Duke of Alba was a military legend in his own time, a stupendously successful general in Spain’s many European wars, but after six years as governor of the Netherlands even his master, King Philip, felt Alba had been too hard on the Dutch and he was recalled to Spain in 1573 at the age of sixty-six. His glory days, however, were not over. In 1580 the seventy-two-year-old duke led a force of forty thousand across the Spanish-Portuguese border and defeated the Portuguese army. He triumphantly entered Lisbon, making his king, Philip II of Spain, also Philip I of Portugal. Alba died in Lisbon in 1582 at the age of seventy-four. For information about him I am indebted to Henry Kamen’s fine biography
The Duke of Alba
.

William, Prince of Orange, the popular Protestant leader of the Dutch resistance, does not make an appearance in
The Queen’s Exiles,
but the Sea Beggars fought in his name, and after their victory at Brielle he openly supported them. He led the resistance movement until 1584, when he was assassinated, shot in his house by a Catholic Frenchman, Balthasar Gérard.

Elizabeth I was in the fourteenth year of her reign in
The Queen’s Exiles:
1572. She went on to rule England for the next thirty-one years, an extraordinary age of peace and prosperity for her people, and of bold exploration and an unprecedented flowering of the arts. Elizabeth’s intervention in the Netherlands was a feature of her foreign policy of supporting Protestant rebellions to destabilize the Catholic regimes that were her adversaries: Spain and France. Working with her ever-loyal first minister, William Cecil, whom she elevated to the peerage in 1571 as Baron Burghley, Elizabeth forged this successful policy, eloquently described by historian Conyers Read, of “keeping England safe by making fires in her neighbors’ houses.” In 1603 Elizabeth died peacefully in her bed at the age of seventy.

Jane, the English-born Duchess of Feria, was a real person (though her friendship with the fictional Frances Thornleigh is my invention). Born Jane Dormer, the daughter of a prosperous Catholic Buckinghamshire landowner, she was at the age of sixteen a maid of honor to England’s Queen Mary, and when the Spanish Count of Feria came to Mary’s court as Spain’s envoy he fell in love with Jane and married her. They settled in Estremadura, Spain. In 1567 he was created Duke of Feria, which made Jane a duchess. After her husband died in 1571 she moved to the Netherlands, where she was a champion of the English Catholic exiles, many of whom, including the Countess of Northumberland, enjoyed pensions from the pope.

Novelists do wide research to mine the “telling details” of everyday life that ground our fiction in reality, and one such detail I unearthed is rather fun. In
The Queen’s Exiles
Fenella visits a Brussels shop owned by a French Huguenot couple who sell headdresses and perukes (wigs). I based this scene on information in historian Charles Nicholl’s delightful book
The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street.
Nicholl describes the “head tyre” shop on Silver Street in London owned by a French family from whom Shakespeare rented a room in 1612. That was forty years after the events of
The Queen’s Exiles,
but according to Nicholl the kind of fanciful headgear I describe in the novel was popular decades earlier as well. Clearly, the whimsy of women’s fashion is ageless.

A note regarding geography: In Elizabeth’s time, people used the terms “the Low Countries” and “Flanders” to refer to an area that included modern-day Belgium and the Netherlands. I have called this area the Netherlands throughout
The Queen’s Exiles
to avoid confusion for the reader.

Now, the fiction.

Fenella Doorn, the Scottish-born heroine of the novel, is my invention. She made her first appearance in a small but crucial role in
The Queen’s Gamble,
a previous book in my Thornleigh Saga, and her spirited character stayed with me when I began planning
The Queen’s Exiles,
set eleven years after
The Queen’s Gamble
. I was delighted to give Fenella the starring role as an entrepreneur, owner of a ship-refitting business on the island of Sark. The Channel Islands, including Sark, were in fact notorious havens for pirates and privateers throughout the Tudor/Elizabethan period. Sark was a possession of England, and in 1565 Elizabeth granted Helier de Carteret the fief, naming him the Seigneur of Sark.

The seafaring Adam Thornleigh and his embittered wife, Frances, are fictional, as are former mercenary soldier Carlos Valverde and his intrepid wife, Isabel. They all feature in my five previous Thornleigh Saga books. Each book is a stand-alone story. Many readers have written me to ask the order in which the novels were written, so I give it here:

The Thornleigh Saga begins with
The Queen’s Lady,
featuring Honor Larke, a fictional lady-in-waiting to Catherine of Aragon, Henry VIII’s first wife, and follows Honor’s stormy love affair with Richard Thornleigh as she works to rescue heretics from the Church’s fires.
The King’s Daughter
introduces their daughter, Isabel, who joins the Wyatt Rebellion against Queen Mary, a true event, and hires mercenary Carlos Valverde to help her rescue her father from prison.
The Queen’s Captive
brings Honor and Richard back from exile with their seafaring son, Adam, to help the young Princess Elizabeth, who has been imprisoned by her half sister, Queen Mary, another true event.
The Queen’s Gamble
is set during the fledgling reign of Elizabeth, who, fearing that the massive buildup of French troops on her Scottish border will lead to an invasion, entrusts Isabel to take money to aid the Scottish rebellion, led by firebrand preacher John Knox, to oust the French.
Blood Between Queens
begins with the arrival of Mary, Queen of Scots, in England in 1568, fleeing her enemies who have usurped her, and follows the Thornleighs’ ward, Justine, in her dangerous mission to spy on Mary for Elizabeth. I hope you’ll enjoy the adventures of all these characters, who live in that best of all possible worlds, the reader’s imagination.

Readers have sent me wonderfully astute comments and questions about the characters, real and invented, in my books and I always enjoy replying. This partnership with you, the reader, makes my work a joy. If you’d like to write to me, I’d love to hear from you. Contact me at [email protected] and follow me on Twitter @BKyleAuthor. And, if you’d like to receive my occasional newsletters, do sign up via my Web site at
www.barbarakyle.com
.