“We’re missing the acrobats,” Robert complained.
Will looked at the island. “Is that your destination?” He looked back at Justine, clearly disappointed. “Now? I wanted . . . that is, I’d hoped . . . to speak to you.”
Her heart leapt. “Oh?” She wished the children would evaporate. She yearned to hear what he had sought her out to say.
“Look, a fire-eater!” Robert cried, eyes on the island.
“Story,” Nell pouted.
“Two competing claims on you, it seems,” Will said. His tone turned serious, his voice low. “And I would make it three.” He reached out and took her hand.
At his touch, her breath stopped. She felt as if her very heart might stop.
He said, “Mistress Thornleigh, we have not known each other long, but—”
“Long enough.”
He looked startled. Happily so. “Long enough, indeed.” He squeezed her hand.
“Jugglers! Look!”
Will did not take his eyes from Justine, nor she from him. “I know this is hardly the time nor place—”
“It’s perfect,” she said, a thrill coursing through her.
“Is it?” He looked eager, hopeful, but not quite trusting his luck. “I would wish perfection of time and place, indeed, if I were to ask you to be my wife. For I would be asking you to take a man who’s far from perfect.”
All she heard was
wife
. She blurted, “Yes!”
He seemed crestfallen. “Ah . . . I dare say you know my flaws.”
She laughed. “No, I mean, yes I
accept
.”
He understood then, and his eyes went wide. The air felt charged between them. Fireworks sizzled overhead. On the shore, three fire wheels as tall as trees spun showers of flame in green, gold, and purple. Justine felt sparks shoot through her as Will slipped his arm around her waist and pulled her close. “I love you, Justine,” he whispered. She lifted her face to his, yearning for his kiss. He hungered for it, too, she knew. But people were everywhere. He withdrew his arm, clearly conscious that he should not compromise her.
“I’ll go and find my uncle,” he said, his voice intimate and low. “And get his consent.”
“Oh, Will.” She had never felt such happiness. Like fire wheels inside her.
He grinned. “And I’ll ask for his assurance that we are not cousins, you and I. I don’t want to wait for a church dispensation.”
He was jesting, she knew. Only royalty required a dispensation. But it sent a shiver up the back of her neck. He thought she was a remote Thornleigh relation. He didn’t know who she really was.
And never will,
she silently vowed. She would keep her past life banished forever. But marriage! Overjoyed though she was, this posed a wrinkle she would have to smooth out with Lord Thornleigh. “No, not just yet,” she said. “It will be too much of a surprise for him. Let me speak to him first, prepare the way.”
“If you think it best.”
“I do.”
“Can you talk to him tonight? Now?” His wry smile returned. “I told you, I don’t want to wait.”
Justine wanted him so much she was afraid she might kiss him, never mind the people all around.
“Master Croft?” a voice called.
They both turned. Frances was hurrying down the jetty toward them. “Will Croft, it
is
you,” she said, reaching them. She looked pale and a little out of breath. “I come for news. I was looking for Sir William.”
“Lady Frances.” Will’s bow to her was stiff. “How can I help you?”
His sudden coldness shocked Justine. He knew, as everyone connected with the family did, that Adam Thornleigh had been at sea for over a year. Was he really making Frances
ask?
It seemed cruel.
“Has Sir William any word yet of my husband?”
“Nothing.” Another stiff bow. “Now, if you will excuse me.” He stepped away from her as if from a felon, his face hard. Justine could not account for it. Why should he be so unkind to Frances? Then he said to Justine, his voice warm again, as if they were alone, “I leave you, Mistress Thornleigh, for I would not keep you from your task. And if—”
A man’s shout made all three of them turn. It came from the Queen’s pavilion. The words were indistinct, but the tone was one of alarm. There was a commotion at the pavilion, people rushing this way and that. “Make way!” a herald cried, and Justine glimpsed Her Majesty moving quickly down the stairs, making for the house. Her ladies rushed after her in a flurry of colorful silks.
What was happening? Was Her Majesty ill? Justine looked for Lord and Lady Thornleigh. In the moving mass of people she could not see them.
The crowd on the lakefront path, too, was suddenly abuzz. The cheerful mood had turned tense. A man leaving the pavilion area on the run came down the cockleshell path and passed the jetty.
“Sir Henry!” Will called to him. “What’s amiss?”
The man stopped. “A messenger, Will. News from the north. Have you seen my wife?”
“Not bad news, I hope, sir?” Justine asked.
“You be the judge, mistress,” was the enigmatic reply. “Mary, Queen of the Scots, has been routed in battle and has crossed our border. She has arrived in Cumberland with nothing but the clothes she stands up in. She has thrown herself on the mercy of Her Majesty!”
2
The Secret
R
ichard, Baron Thornleigh kept a tell-nothing card player’s face as he made his way through the keyed-up crowd milling in his long gallery, his wife Honor at his side. At sixty-eight, Richard had plenty of experience keeping state secrets. The news was big, but he wasn’t about to get caught up in the hubbub of his gossiping courtier guests, male and female, all abuzz about the messenger’s report that had put a sudden halt to the fireworks: Mary, Queen of Scots, her army defeated, had fled across the Solway Firth in a fishing boat with a handful of supporters and stepped ashore in England as a royal refugee. Richard remembered how a year ago these same courtiers had been buzzing about whether Mary had been complicit in the murder of her husband, the swaggering Lord Darnley. Now he saw faces craning to get a glimpse of him and Honor as they passed, and the question in everyone’s eyes was: What would Elizabeth do with her notorious cousin Mary? Well, they weren’t going to get anything from him. He didn’t know.
He glanced at Honor, proud of her elegant composure as she offered calm smiles and nods to all the inquiring looks he was ignoring. She was a decade younger than he was and still so beautiful he often thought she had scarcely changed since the day they had been married over thirty years ago. They were on their way to Elizabeth’s suite. They had spared no expense in having the rooms specially prepared for her visit; now she had called for a hurried consultation there with her councilors, Richard among them. What a foolish uproar his household was in for, he thought. Every lordling and hanger-on was either rushing to get packed to follow Elizabeth, who had said she would leave on the morrow, or rushing about asking for more details
before
packing. Richard groaned inside, knowing his chamberlain would soon be faced with the monumental headache of moving dozens of people out of their rooms, and his master of horse with rousing the grooms and stable boys to make ready the scores of guests’ horses. A couple of overeager young gents had already jumped into the saddle and were on the road in the moonlight, eager to be first to bring the gossip to London. Richard wasn’t sorry this crowd would soon be gone. Honor might be chagrined that all her meticulous preparations for housing most of Elizabeth’s court were coming to so abrupt an end, but it would save him the expense of feeding such an army.
“Our household folk have their work cut out for them,” he said to her under his breath as they passed bearded old William Paulet, the Marquis of Winchester, his head cocked as he tried to catch Richard’s words. They were approaching the door to Elizabeth’s suite. Flanked by two of her palace guards, the door led to the tower where she had three chambers for herself and her ladies.
“As you have your work,” she replied quietly. “Richard, you must warn Elizabeth of the danger she is in.”
He glanced at her, knowing that beneath the tranquil countenance she put on for their guests, she was as anxious as if Elizabeth were their own daughter facing a highwayman intent on rape. The two of them knew, as their guests did not, of a second messenger who had arrived for Elizabeth, this one bearing a letter from Thomas Percy, Earl of Northumberland, the most powerful lord in England’s north. He was claiming the right to take charge of Mary, Queen of Scots as his guest. “It’s started,” Honor had said grimly. “The faction readying to fight for Mary.” Richard was sure she was overreacting—and sure they were not going to see eye to eye on this. But he knew her fears were heartfelt, making her calm front all the more impressive.
A front as false as mine,
he thought, wincing at the pins and needles in his left foot.
Please, let it hold off until this meeting with the Elizabeth is over.
Twice this week his foot had gone so numb he had to drag it along the ground as he walked. Luckily, he had been alone both times, in the yard behind the stables. He hadn’t told Honor. The numbness came and went, so he was hoping it would eventually just disappear the way the spell of blurred vision had last month. Thank God. With only one good eye, a patch over the one he’d lost three decades ago, he was careful of the other. He would be sixty-nine next month, and after an active lifetime on land and sea he cursed these signs that his body was no longer under his control. He had been captain and master of his own ships, an international trader in wool cloth and successful merchant in the commercial centers of Bruges and Antwerp. He was the owner of tin mines whose operations he oversaw with keen interest and had the lordship of thousands of acres on manors in Hertfordshire, Wiltshire, and Kent, where he took seriously the welfare of hundreds of farming tenants and their families. Decrepitude? Feebleness? It was a state beyond his ken, as foreign as the life of a slave. The prospect horrified him. The only way he could think to deal with it was to simply
not
think of it.
Besides, he had something else on his mind. Something he wasn’t sure what to make of, a moment he had glimpsed this evening on the jetty. His ward, Justine, and his nephew, Will. It looked like they’d been about to kiss. It jarred Richard, the liaison so unexpected—yet he rather hoped it was true.
“Your lordship. Your ladyship,” the guard said, bowing as he opened the door for them.
They started up the circular stairway. The great house, Honor’s design, was barely a year old, and the tower, the last part to be built, was so new that Richard could still smell the masons’ stone dust. In daylight it was bright with sunshine from the windows; now the light was from torches in brackets and it glinted off the gold and silver threads of the hanging tapestries. They were alone, climbing the steps, and as Richard heard the door at the bottom close, a tight sigh escaped Honor.
She’s as relieved as I am at being out of the throng,
he thought. Yet her determined look told him that this was just the beginning.
“Mary must not be allowed to stay with Northumberland,” she said. “Nor even stay in England. You must make that clear to Elizabeth.”
“What would you have her do, truss the woman on a horse and slap its rump to bolt back to Scotland?”
“I only wish she would.”
“Impossible. Mary is her cousin.”
“A dangerous cousin. She must be sent back.”
“Abandon her to the men who locked her up? Honor, she’s a
queen
. Anointed by God.”
She snorted. “A queen does not ride off and leave her supporters leaderless when they need her most. A queen does not think only of herself. Which is all Mary Stuart cares about.”
“You are hard on her. And wrong about the power she wields. She’s just a weak young woman, beaten, with no influence left. More to be pitied than feared.”
“Do not underestimate her. She has been scheming for years to be proclaimed Elizabeth’s heir.”
“You cannot refute Mary’s blood. She’s a Tudor and has a claim.”
“Which she never lets anyone forget. Northumberland certainly hasn’t. He would like nothing better than to see Mary ruling England. A Catholic queen to overturn everything Elizabeth has done.”
“Nonsense. England is a Protestant nation now. It’s entrenched.”
“What’s built can be destroyed. Mary could decree an English Inquisition. Burnings, Richard. Never forget.”
The old battle over religion. Richard was tired of it. Not that Elizabeth deserved any blame. Her first act on becoming queen nine years ago had been to forge a peace between the skirmishing Catholics and Protestants. She was the only monarch who had ever legalized religious tolerance. He admired that. Honor certainly did; she considered the religious peace more sacred than any tenet of
any
church. No wonder. Across the Narrow Sea the French were massacring Protestants, and the Spanish burned them in the hundreds every month just for refusing to say that the bread of the mass was Christ’s actual body. Meanwhile here, despite Elizabeth’s ban on the capital punishment of Catholics, the new Puritans could be vicious to any secret priest they hounded out of hiding, hell-bent on shredding his “papist” clothing. The older Richard got, the less patience he had with people fighting over asinine things.
It was why he took heart at what he’d seen pass between the young couple on the jetty. The opposite of fighting. Love. And yet, he wasn’t sure he should allow it. Should he put a stop to it for his poor sister’s sake? Joan’s spirit had been broken by the horrors of the feud that had festered years ago between the houses of Thornleigh and Grenville. But that was the past, as dead as Christopher Grenville himself. Eight years ago, Richard had decided to make peace. It was the reason he had taken in Grenville’s daughter. To make a new beginning.
“What do you know about Justine and Will?” he asked.
“Who?”
“Joan’s boy. Has Justine talked to you about him?”
Honor looked exasperated. “What has your sister’s son to do with the hazard Mary Stuart poses to Elizabeth?”
He let it go. After all, he could be wrong. He might have read too much into that moment he’d glimpsed on the jetty.
A jab in his foot made him clench his teeth. The foot was worse, the pins and needles now a painful grind. He and Honor had almost reached the top of the staircase and he hoped the damn thing would not go numb until he was in Elizabeth’s chamber. When he wasn’t moving he could hide the problem.
At the top, a landing led to the arched door of her suite. The door was open and he heard men’s voices. Their words were indistinct, but it was clearly an argument. He recognized Cecil’s voice, and that of Henry FitzAlan, the Earl of Arundel, who was louder. Elizabeth walked past the doorway, listening in silence to the men, her arms folded, head lowered in thought. Then she moved out of Richard’s vision. Blanche Parry, a lady-in-waiting, bustled after her with a decanter of wine.
Honor laid her hand on Richard’s arm to stop him before he took the last step. She spoke so quietly it was almost a whisper. “Don’t pretend you don’t understand the threat Mary poses, Richard. You have been Elizabeth’s tireless champion. You stood up for her when she was a friendless princess who feared for her life. You fought for her rights. Stood by her at her coronation. You cannot now let Mary undo everything Elizabeth has wrought by claiming to be her heir.”
“Then who shall inherit? Tell me that. Elizabeth refuses to marry and produce an heir of her body. Unless she does, her legitimate heir is the Queen of Scots.”
“She would wrench the realm back to Catholicism.”
“That’s a lesser evil than civil war, which is the fate of a realm with no proclaimed heir. I remember, as a boy, the misery the warring, great houses of York and Lancaster left in their wake. Decades of misery. It could happen again. Over-mighty lords battling for power, spilling Englishmen’s blood. If Elizabeth should die childless—”
“Die?” she said, vexed.
“It’s possible.”
“You men. You all want to force her into a marriage, however wretched.”
“Nonsense. I want no such thing. But if she should die—”
“Again—die!”
“She cannot live forever.”
“She is in her prime!”
He bit back a retort. It was pointless to argue. “You’re right,” he said with a weary sigh. “In her prime. Like me, eh?”
His sudden capitulation startled her. Then she smiled, amused—his reward for having offered the olive branch. She said warmly, “You have been in your prime for forty years, my love.” Even her eyes smiled. He had always loved that. She had lived through perils that would have left a lesser woman a quivering husk, but nothing stopped Honor. Challenges fueled the inner flame that had always been the source of her beauty. Looking at her, he suddenly knew he wasn’t wrong about his nephew and Justine. He had seen the way Will looked at the girl. He remembered the feeling, with Honor, that glorious hell of wanting.
“My lord?” Blanche Parry said, coming out to the landing. “Her Majesty thought it must be you. Do come in.”
“Yes, we’re coming,” he said.
Blanche went back in, and Honor turned on the step to go down.
“You’re not joining us?” Richard asked her. “She values your opinion as much as Cecil’s.”
“No, I must see to our household. Must impose
some
order on this decampment.”
He was about to go on up the last step when she gripped his elbow. “Richard, I warrant she will refuse Northumberland’s request to take charge of Mary. She’ll have someone tame like Lord Scrope manage her for the moment. But after that, she’ll need to send someone to Mary that she can trust. Someone with backbone. Ask her to send
you
.”
The decampment, as Lady Thornleigh called it, took days. It was the most frustrating week Justine had ever spent. Will’s marriage proposal still had her atingle, and she didn’t know how she had managed to keep quiet about it for so long. That night under the fireworks she had been almost jumping out of her skin wanting to tell Lord Thornleigh and get his blessing, but the blast of news about the Scottish queen had ruined everything. Everyone had gone slightly mad, as though Mary were some tempestuous goddess who had sailed down from the clouds to bedazzle Englishmen. Lord Thornleigh got caught up in meetings with Elizabeth, and when Elizabeth left the next morning Will left, too, with Sir William Cecil. For days Rosethorn House was in a commotion as courtiers and their entourages left, one after another, their baggage packhorses following, and then, once they had all gone, the household workers, under the direction of Lady Thornleigh, began packing up to remove to the Thornleighs’ London house. Justine had watched the bustle in aggravated silence. With affairs of state on her guardians’ minds, plus the domestic upheaval, it had been impossible to talk to them of what mattered most urgently to her: Will.
She wanted to blurt it out to them, and might have rashly done so at one of the rushed meals if it hadn’t been for her promise to Alice. That task—getting Alice settled—had kept her busy, thank goodness. She had spoken to Lady Isabel, the Thornleighs’ daughter, praising Alice’s needlework skills so highly she had easily convinced Isabel to hire her. She’d even managed to sneak a brief meeting with Alice in the village, by the pond behind the inn, to tell her the good news. They had shared a hug, and a laugh, then a tear at parting yet again, and had promised to write. When Isabel and her husband and their children had set out for the Great North Road to make the journey back to Yeavering Hall, Alice was among the servants who went with them. Justine felt very satisfied at having arranged it all so cleverly.