The Queen's Lady (45 page)

Her eyes widened, and she waited to hear the story. Jinner obliged. He told her how, in the small hours of yesterday morning, he and Thornleigh had fired the
Dorothy Beale
.

“What? You set fire to her while I was in the hold?”

“Aye. A right beautiful blaze, too. Worked like a charm. But after we had you safe out and back aboard
Speedwell—
Pelle was watching the house, you see—well, then the master was in as foul a mood as ever I’ve beheld him. For when we looked back, damned if Pelle’s men hadn’t doused that fire.”

“Why should that make him angry?”

“Well, in getting you out seems he’d left the hatch off the hiding place. He was afeared they’d find it—open, when it was closed in their searching, see?—and there’d be questions.”

Honor was struggling to remember something of the rescue, some glimmer, but it was still all blackness.

“He stalked this deck till dawn,” Jinner continued. “Then he decided to strike.”

“Strike?”

Jinner closed his eyes as if to savor the recollection. “You’ll hardly credit it, m’lady. He’s done some fool things before, and I’ve seen most of ’em, but this beats all. He barged into Pelle’s own house—I was right behind him—and shook his fist in Pelle’s poxy face, and demanded an apology!”

“What?”

“Aye! For impounding his ship unlawfully, and letting her burn while in his custody! Oh, it was rare. Master stomped and fumed and swore, and Pelle had to listen, all the while twiddling his thumbs like a grubby priest who’d been caught with his hand in the alms box. And what d’ye think? Master not only got the
Dorothy Beale
released, he demanded payment for damages. And what’s more, he got it! So that’s the upshot of the whole blessed foofaraw, m’lady. Which is to say, nothing at all.”

Honor’s wondering gaze was drawn to Thornleigh on the forecastle. What a gamble he’d taken! She had to smile, for she could well imagine his performance with Pelle, a fine display of ruffled Thornleigh feathers with much noise and fury. Yet all the while he must have been wondering if the manacles would be clamped on him before he got the last oath out. A gamble, indeed!

She watched him at his calculations as he checked a steering compass, unfurled a chart. He wore a loose white shirt and coppery breeches, and the ruddy-gold sun burnished his auburn hair. He was the incarnation of this very light.

He stepped aside to put away the chart, revealing the table’s far end, and Honor was startled to see there a child—a well-dressed boy, perhaps nine years old. He stood over the table and pushed a tangle of brown hair from his eyes as he worked a pair of dividers over a map.

“Who’s the boy, Sam?” she asked.

Jinner glanced up. “Master’s son.” He went back to his whittling.

She had known of the boy’s existence. He lived, though, at Thornleigh’s manor of Great Ashwold near Norwich, and Honor’s work on the missions had brought her only to Thornleigh’s townhouse in Yarmouth. This was the first she had seen of his son. A handsome lad, she thought, watching him. Tall and straight and easy-moving, like his father. But there was also a shyness in the face, a doe-eyed quality that made her curious about what other strains made up the mettle of such a fine-looking young creature.

No, she thought, it was more than curiosity. She had never imagined Thornleigh’s wife as being attractive. Stately, perhaps, and dourly conscious of the wealth and status she had brought her husband; a haughty woman who might well drive a warm-blooded man into other, kinder, arms. That was the picture that had made sense to Honor. But the boy’s face spoke of gentleness, not pride. Honor felt a stab of jealousy. Was there more to keep Thornleigh at home than she had believed?

“Tell me Sam, what’s the boy’s mother like?”

Jinner frowned down at the angel’s face emerging from his chunk of wood. “Master doesn’t speak of her. Bade me not as well.”

An odd answer, Honor thought. She drew up her dignity. “Perhaps not to other, common ears,” she said, “but surely you may to me.” Her voice was tinged with authority, as she had intended, and she winced to hear the hardness in it. It was a craven ruse. Yet her curiosity burned.

Jinner nodded, accepting her command like fate. “Mistress Ellen. A simple lass. Oh, she be my better, I do mind, being a great knight’s daughter, and me bred out of the lead mines of Swaledale. But she be of a simple
nature
, if you catch my meaning. Quiet-like. Sometimes singing all to herself. I’ve known the lass many a year.”

No stone-faced matron, clearly enough. Here was a startling new picture. “But why does he not speak of her?” Honor asked. The question was hardly out of her mouth when a companion question hovered in her mind: was Thornleigh so fond of his wife that he hated even to bandy her name? Hesitantly, she added, “Does he love her so very much?” She wanted with all her heart to hear it was not so. She knew she had no right; knew that, after refusing him herself, the wish was petty. Still, she longed to hear Jinner contradict her.

He shrugged. “Love? That I couldn’t say. They don’t talk much. She sometimes seems more child than wife.”

“Then why his silence? Tell me, Sam.”

Jinner was mute a moment, and kept whittling. Then: “A while back the master was called to the Bishop’s bawdy court. His lady was being held there.”

Stranger and stranger. “What was the charge?”

“No charge. A whispering neighbor had led the ’paritor to suspect her of reading heretical tracts.” He shook the wood chips from his sleeves. “Oh, she be no madwoman, no raving witch like some I’ve seen. The suspicion were all nothing. It seems a trifle now. She’d got a bit of writing at a scribbler’s stall, and the neighbor who saw it thought it strange she should be meddling with books.”

“But it
is
a trifle. They don’t usually harass for so little cause. Especially a knight’s daughter with a respectable clothier husband.”

“But the father was dead and the husband was not about, m’lady. And, like I said, she be a simple soul. Felt the shame of being called to court right keenly, poor thing. Well, the master went and argued there, for they had no right to keep her. She was let go, and went home with him, and all was well again.”

Honor nodded. But the explanation unsettled her. Thornleigh, she now saw, had his own grievance against the Church, his own private reason for involving himself in these dangerous missions. It meant he was not acting just for the payment she was promising to make one day. The realization surprised her, as did her own reaction: she felt it like a kind of loss.

Still, she thought, his wife’s incident at the Church court did not seem so dreadful. She sensed that there was more behind Jinner’s reticence. “Sam,” she said sternly, “what else?”

“Oftimes,” he said, “Mistress Ellen sinks into a powerful sadness.”

Honor shrugged. “So do we all, sometimes.”

“Not like her,” Jinner said darkly. “A demon sometimes steals inside her and sucks her happiness away. I’ve known her since before the master married her, and that cursed demon’s always been with her. But one day . . . one day was the worst.” His gaze drifted up to the furled sails above their heads. The angel carving lay forgotten in his lap. “All Saints Day if I recall aright—’twas four year gone, for I recall the lad yonder was just turned six—the master and me rode home to his manor hard by Norwich. We’d just sailed back from Flanders on
Vixen
. Her hold was fairly bursting with damask and oranges and spice. I can still smell that cinnamy-bark if I close my eyes tight.”

He did so, and Honor smiled indulgently, waiting.

“We rode into the master’s courtyard, and all was quiet as the grave. Master said to me then and there he wondered if his lady’d been taken by one of her strange, sad fits. But then he thought it couldn’t be so, for his lady was then nursing a baby daughter, and the wee ones always made her merry. Well, the grooms in the courtyard said not a word, but slunk away into the stable. Master caught up with a maid and asked her what was what. At first she wouldn’t speak. And then, when the master shook her, then she
couldn’t
speak for weeping. But soon it all came out.

“Things was bad, the chit said. Very bad. Days before, Mistress Ellen had wandered into the cow byre with the babe and sat down there to suckle it. But the black mood was upon her. The devil, you see, had stolen her wits, and when she wandered out of the byre she left the wee thing in the straw. Alone it was, all the night. The milkmaids came in the morning. The babe was dead—chewed all over by rats.”

Honor’s mouth opened, but no sound came.

“The master came before the coffin, his face as white as the babe’s winding sheet. And when the mistress, weeping there, saw him, she shrieked as if she was in pain, a terrible sound, like a marten I saw once strangling in a snare. Mistress Ellen jumped up and ran for a knife and sliced at her wrists, one after the other, till the blood fairly gushed. The master slapped her face to stop her. He had the maids bandage her wounds. Then Mistress Ellen slept and slept and slept.”

“Merciful Jesus,” Honor whispered.

“Amen to that,” was Jinner’s low reply.

Overhead, the pipe tune twined with the screeling of gulls. The sky’s radiance was fading. The sun was a sinking red ball.

“Master took it hard,” Jinner summed up. “For a long while after, I thought he was goading the Devil to take him. Gone to seed, he was, with drinking and dicing and carousing. Once, he got into an evil scrape at the King’s palace, no less.”

“Brawling on the tennis court,” Honor murmured, piecing together the past.

“Aye, and almost got his hand chopped off at the King’s command.”

Honor was recalling the glimpses she had caught in days past of Thornleigh’s self-destructive bent. Had grief driven him to act that way?

“And this much more I can tell you,” Jinner said. “When he found that babe dead, ’twas himself he blamed. Said if he’d got home sooner he could have stopped it.” He spat on the deck. “Aye, that were an evil time.”

Vigorously, as though to dispel such unwelcome reminiscences, Jinner attacked his carving afresh. “He’s better these days, though,” he said. “And I credit it to the good work you’ve snagged him into, m’lady. Less of drink and dice, and a lot less wenching.” He caught himself and looked away with a blush. “Lord, now I’ve said too much.”

Honor’s thoughts were a jumble. Thornleigh grieving. Thornleigh wracked by self-doubt. These were new images, indeed. And they engendered such new feelings of tenderness in her. Every time she thought she knew this man, he proved her wrong. And lured her closer to him.

Uncomfortable with her own thoughts, eager to dispel them, she bent to examine Jinner’s handiwork. The angel looked more like an exhausted whore. Its haggard face was a flat, sorry lump. “Samuel Jinner,” she said and laughed, “you’re an honest creature, and I’d trust you with my life, but you’re no artist, man.”

“You should value your life more than to trust it to Jinner.”

It was Thornleigh’s voice. He stood before her, eclipsing the red sun. The boy was beside him.

Honor pulled the cloak tighter around her shoulders.

Jinner jumped up. “Be you cold, m’lady? High time you were back in your warm bed. I’ll fetch some broth for you and light a candle inside.” He hustled away.

Thornleigh placed a formal hand on the boy’s shoulder. “My son asked to meet you. Adam, this is Mistress Larke.”

The boy bowed gravely. Honor tried to match his gravity but a smile escaped her, for the velvet shyness in his brown eyes was bewitching.

“I’m happy to meet you, Master Adam,” she said. “Is this your first time aboard the
Speedwell?”

“It is, madam.”

“And how do you find her?” Having seen his rapt effort over the map she made a guess at his passion. “Would you like to be master of her one day?”

Adam’s seriousness dissolved and his face glowed. “I
will
be! My father says he will put me as ’prentice to Master Fulford, and Master Fulford has sailed all the way to Prussia.” He glanced up at his father with an expression that knew nothing of fear.

“Not till you’re thirteen, boy,” Thornleigh said.

Adam’s face fell, though he absorbed the fiat with a stoic nod. His eyes darted to Honor as if afraid he had betrayed himself by showing too juvenile a disappointment. Then, bravado surfaced. “That’s alright,” he said stoutly to her. “By then I’ll know even more than Master Fulford’s pilot, for my father is teaching me, both sea and stars.”

“Then I have no doubt you’ll surpass even Master Fulford himself,” she said warmly. Adam smiled, his cockiness melting into a relaxed confidence that she thought suited him well.

Honor was aware that Thornleigh was watching her. His expression was not unlike Adam’s earlier gravity. “Go on, now,” he said to his son. “Pack away the charts. We’ve done for the day.”

Adam bowed again to Honor, but this time with ease, already a friend. She and Thornleigh watched him slip down the stairs and cross the upper deck. For a moment neither spoke.

“Thank you,” she said softly, smiling up at him. “For my life.”

Thornleigh looked hard into her eyes. “I’ve said it before. You take too many risks.”

She turned away, stung.

Jinner was approaching the stairs with a bowl of soup. They waited through another silence as he carefully climbed, shuffled past them into the cabin, and began to clatter around inside.

Thornleigh began awkwardly, “In the hold . . . that was . . . an ordeal. How are you?”

Honor turned back, all business. “Very well, thank you. Shaky, but well.”

She looked up as a trio of curlews careened over the mainmast. She watched them head for home. “I wonder when this will end,” she said with a sigh. “The hiding, the persecutions. The deaths. And all because people want to read the Bible. You’d think . . .” She gasped. “The Bible!” In the happy haze of recovery she had forgotten it. Words began to tumble out. “Richard, when you brought me out of the pit did you retrieve the Bible too?”

“Bible?”

“Edward’s. I took it with me down there. He’d written names in it.”

“Jesus.”

“You mean you didn’t bring it out?”