The Queen's Lady (40 page)

Honor took up the pitcher again. She moved around behind Thornleigh to serve ale to the other side of the table. As she passed him he caught her wrist. “All right,” he said quietly. “If it means that much to you.
Speedwell
she shall be.”

Her eyes met his in a silent thanks so eloquent, he wished it was in his power to give her such happiness again and again, just to be rewarded with that look. Then she moved away.

The others were delighted with the name. Toasts to the ship erupted. Everyone smiled and chattered. The christening—the sweet, English familiarity of the name itself—seemed to bind up their frayed nerves with a comforting ribbon of security.

The company began to stifle yawns. Everyone was tired, and the gathering soon broke up. Paycocke and his granddaughter, each carrying a sleeping child, drifted to the door, followed by the bookbinder and the wheelwright. They left for their quarters, everyone chuckling over choice parts of Honor’s tale of Thornleigh and the Bishop.

Honor trailed after them. Thornleigh’s voice stopped her at the door.

“Sleep here tonight,” he said.

She turned to face him. He saw her eyes dart to his lanternlit bed tucked in its berth. She had misunderstood him. And her look was not one of happy anticipation. He noted it wryly; yet it stung him. “Don’t fret, mistress,” he said. “I’ll be spending the night with the crew.”

He saw blood rush to her cheeks at her error.

He brushed past her. “Be up at first light,” he ordered, and went out.

Brooding, he walked across the main deck under the stars. He drank a ladle of water from the rain barrel near the main mast. He tugged at a rope’s knot to test it. Damn, but it was like his heart was on a seesaw, dealing with the woman. Up when he could see her smile, down whenever they wrangled. Which was often enough, God knew, with these rescues of hers. Constantly hurling herself into danger.

He turned to look in on the men in the fo’c’sle. At least he could feel pleased with the new crew. Of course, he’d hand picked them. And, to ensure loyalty, paid them double the usual fifteen shillings for a return trip to the Low Countries.

He didn’t notice the figure at the railing gazing ashore until he’d reached the fo’c’sle door. It was the breeze rippling her skirt that caught his attention. Then he heard her soft sobbing. Honor? Needing comfort? He hurried to her side. He’d take her in his arms this time. No more hesitating.

She turned, startled. It was the old man’s granddaughter, Alwyn.

“Oh, don’t be angry, Master Thornleigh,” she said, brushing tears from her cheeks. “I know your orders were not to come on deck. But since it’s so dark I thought I might be allowed, just for a moment. I simply had to have a last look.” Her voice wavered as though she was trying not to cry. “One last glimpse of England.”

He looked at the sky. With no moon, the night was as black as pitch, and the only lantern was far aft, up on the sterncastle deck. He hadn’t even seen her himself at first. “Alright,” he agreed. “For a moment.” He looked out at the black water to give her time to recover.

“Little ones a-bed?” he finally asked.

She nodded silently. Together, they stared out for several moments. From the fo’c’sle came the sweet-sad tune of a sailor’s tabor pipe. Suddenly, a sob escaped her. “I know nothing of Dutch or Flemish, Master Thornleigh,” she blurted. “Nothing of strange, foreign ways!”

He leaned on his elbows across the railing and watched the pin-prick light of a night watchman’s lantern creep along Yarmouth’s town wall. “Do you like cheese, mistress?”

She looked at him, surprised.

“They have an uncommon fine cheese in Amsterdam,” he said. “Delicious with a good ripe apple or a thick trencher of rye bread. ‘Gouda’ they call it.” He turned his head to her. “Can you say it?”

“Gouda?” she stammered.

“There. Now you know some Dutch.”

She almost smiled.

“It’s that simple, mistress. Your boy’ll be jabbering it soon enough, you’ll see. ‘Gouda’ may even be your little girl’s first word.”

Her face clouded again with worry. “They’ll grow up more foreign than English, won’t they?”

“They’ll have two tongues to speak, double the tools most people have for understanding the world. That can’t be an ill thing, now can it?” He smiled gently at her. “There’s good and bad folk abroad, same as everywhere. Same as in England. Same as in your own village, I warrant.”

She nodded, calmed, and this time she managed a small smile.

He watched the pale, anxious, young face. She looked about the same age as Honor, he thought, yet so different, so adrift. In fact, she reminded him a little of Ellen. “I’m sorry about your husband, mistress.”

“He’s with God,” she said simply. After a moment she looked up at him. “You’re very kind, sir. Not at all what Mistress Larke—” She stopped herself, her fingertips at her lips.

Thornleigh grunted, straightening. “Mistress Larke and I sometimes see things differently. Doesn’t mean she’s always right.”

The ship’s bell rang to mark the watch.

“You’d best get below now,” Thornleigh said. “Your children will need you rested, come morning.”

“True enough. Good night, sir,” she said, and turned to go. She was several steps from him when she looked back and whispered shyly. “And thank you.”

He leaned again on the railing and looked out. A game young woman despite her fears, he thought. Not so much like Ellen after all. Ellen. Last time he went home he’d found her curled up in a soiled shift, lost in a stupor of sadness that had lasted for four days, according to his sister, Joan. Four days in which Ellen had not dressed, nor bathed, nor even risen from the bed. When Honor’s message had come asking him to run a second escape voyage, he’d jumped at the chance to get clear of home.

He looked down at the black water, thinking of home. How many times over the past few years had he spurred his horse out of the courtyard of his manor, Great Ashwold, barely getting past the gate before he kicked into a gallop and raced away from the place, away from his wife? His clinging, incomprehensible wife.

And away from his responsibilities. Adam was running wild. Ellen couldn’t control the boy, a rambunctious eight-year-old, curious as a young wolf. The task of seeing that he stayed out of trouble and stuck to his lessons had fallen to Joan. But Joan deserved a house of her own, a family of her own. If Giles Tremont ever got up the courage to ask for her, Thornleigh knew Joan would be keen to accept. He had no right to hold her there, minding his household like a servant. He must let her marry.

But Ellen was utterly incompetent at running a large manor. Thornleigh’s jaw tightened in anger as he thought of her. Yet he knew his anger was better directed at himself. After all, who had rushed into marriage with a seventeen-year-old girl he barely knew? Even Ellen’s father, though eager for the match, had warned him. “She’s a good girl, but somewhat . . . queer,” the old knight had confided just before the wedding. But Thornleigh had found Ellen comely enough, a quiet little thing, soft of voice. He’d have settled for far less to get hold of the large dowry her grateful father offered.
That
was very attractive, indeed. The thriving manor of Great Ashwold. With its paying tenants and flocks of sheep, the manor was a bracing step up for a young clothier with his way to make.

But Thornleigh had had no idea then of the bottomless melancholy which, without warning, could drag his new wife into some private hell and chain her there in torment for days. Joan believed, as did the neighbors and the parish priest, that a devil had bored into Ellen’s skull and lived there, sometimes at work, sometimes asleep. After nine years with Ellen, Thornleigh had come to think of it more as a disease. Still, much good his theories did her. A way to help her—that he’d never found.

Except the babies. She loved babies. She had been good with Adam when he was small: tender and watchful. Mothering had made her happy. But then there had been a series of miscarriages, and that little fiasco at the bishop’s court. And the black moods had crept back. Then, little Mary had been born, and . . . His hands involuntarily balled into fists.

No. There would be no more babies.

He quickly turned from the railing with an urge to escape thoughts of home—the same urge that made him gallop back out through his gates after every brief visit there. He wasn’t proud of it. But, God help him, that’s the way it was.

He cast his eyes up over
Speedwell
’s furled sails. What
had
made him proud was that second voyage he’d run for Honor. And the ones that had followed. Real accomplishments. Even the trouble with the harbor officials in Bruges; it could have gone far worse. The fact was, he’d never felt so alive. The work was unpredictable, challenging, exhilarating. And there was Honor.

He looked up at his cabin on the forecastle deck. She was there, inside, behind his door. He felt like a dolt for leaving her in such a stupid way, like some pouting love-starved pup. She’d be gone in the morning. He wouldn’t see her again for at least a month.

A wand of light glowed under the door. He stared at it, and imagined her bare feet moving along the floor. Her hair loosened from its band. Her body loosened from its silken cocoon. He pushed off from the railing, strode to the door, and knocked.

She opened it. Still dressed. What excuse could he muster? “I forgot to lock away the charts,” he said, walking in.

He rolled up the parchments, stashed them into a trunk and locked it. It was done in a moment. Nothing else to keep him here. At the door again, he turned. “I’m sorry. All that shouting when you arrived, I mean.”

She nodded. He saw that weariness had crept back to her face. “I’m sorry too,” she said. “You were right. Sometimes I am . . . reckless.”

She had never admitted so much. It was a thread of intimacy, of connection, and he wanted to spin it out, wanted to wrap it around them both, wrap her close to him. He could not leave. Not yet. “The ship,” he said. “Why does naming her
Speedwell
mean so much to you?”

She sighed. She went to the corner of the window. It’s sill was at the height of her chin. He came and stood beside her. She looked out at the blackness, and told him her story. The book. Ralph. Sir Thomas’s perfidy.

By the time she had finished, Thornleigh was leaning his shoulder against the wall, his arms crossed, watching her. “So that’s why you can’t forgive More,” he said.

“Never.” Again, he thought, that chilling voice, hard as an undertaker’s spade. “Well then,” he said, “I’m glad you forgive
me.”

“You?” She looked unsettled, surfacing from her trance of spite.

“For my earlier bluster.”

Her mouth began to curve in a smile. Mentally, he ran his thumb over the soft lips. “Nothing to forgive,” she said. “Indeed, I should thank you. For so much, over these past months.”

“Oh? For insulting you in the Cardinal’s garden? For molesting you in Spain, and deserting you there? For constantly opposing your wild schemes?”

Her smiled ripened. “Naturally, for all that,” she said with mock seriousness. “But also,” she added softly, “for saving me from the worst of my . . . wild schemes.”

“There’s a lot there worth saving,” he said seriously. God knew he meant it.

A puzzled look flitted over her face. “You’re so different from . . . well, from that time in the Cardinal’s garden.”

“So are you.”

She lowered her eyes for a moment. “In any case,” she said, “it’s you who must forgive me. I was wrong about you. I took you at first for a drunk and a wastrel, but you’re neither.”

He cocked an eyebrow at the backhanded compliment. “Thanks.”

She was studying him. “And Anne Boleyn. I was wrong about her, too, wasn’t I? I mean, about you having a . . . a friendship with her?”

“Yes,” he smiled. “Wrong again.”

He caught a glitter in her eyes. Mischievousness? “Not wrong, though,” she added, “in deducing that was exactly what Anne wanted from you.”

He shrugged. “Hard to believe, eh?”

“No,” she said steadily, looking into his eyes. “Not at all.”

The sheer sincerity of it startled him, thrilled him. God, what a woman. He reached out for her. He slipped his arms around her waist, bent his head to kiss her.

She suddenly drew back. “No.” But her palms were warm on his chest. There was no strength in their pressure. Gently, he pulled her to him. “Honor . . .”

“No, Richard.” This time she tried to jerk free. But he read desire in her eyes. Unmistakable. So he held her. And felt her muscles soften.

“Unless . . .” she began.

“Unless?” Anything!

“Unless I’m wrong about something else too. Your wife.”

Thornleigh felt the last word like a slap. Ellen. Till death us do part.

They looked hard at one another. From somewhere across the deck, a sailor began to sing a ditty.

“But,” Honor said softly, “I see that I am not wrong.”

“No,” he answered. Disappointment and desire surged in warring waves. “I have a wife. I can’t change that.”

He let her go. She stepped away and turned from him. He felt the thread of intimacy snap. Not looking at him, she said, very low, “I will not be a married man’s dalliance.”

He walked to the door, opened it, and left.

Alone, Honor doused the lantern. She unfastened the lacings of her clothes and let the heavy garments drop to the floor. She pulled back the coverlet of Thornleigh’s bed and crawled naked inside. She lay with eyes open in the dark, aware of the smell of him on the sheets. From across the deck came the sweet-sad music of a sailor’s pipe.

I have a wife
, he’d said.

And I?
Honor thought.
I envy her
.

She yielded her weary body to the rocking
Speedwell
, and to sleep.

She was on deck at dawn. Crewmen jogged by her to their stations, some still rubbing sleep from their eyes. From the forecastle deck Samuel Jinner barked orders. The bosun’s whistle shrilled. Boys, monkey-quick in the rigging, readied to set free the great, cocoon-like shrouds. One unfurled above her, stirring and rippling in the morning breeze as if it, too, was just awakening. The first rays of the sun sparked the red and white banners that snapped above the crow’s nest, and suddenly the whole ship basked in soft morning sunlight. Her oiled oak timbers glowed. The gay designs of stripes, chevrons and stars on the outside of her hull flashed off the water in bright ripples of red, green, white and gold. Honor took it all in, along with a swallow of sweet, salt air. The
Speedwell
was indeed a beauty!