The King's Daughter (63 page)

She caught sight of the Queen at the mirror, her head bent as she tried to fasten a necklace at the back of her neck. “Let me help you,” Frances offered.

“Thank you, my dear. I cannot seem to manage the clasp,” Mary said, handing over the necklace. It was a circlet of pearls and emeralds with a large pendant cross of gold and pearls, and an oblong ruby at the crucifix center. Mary looked at Frances earnestly and added, “This is the first time I have worn it.” Her voice was vibrant with a sense of occasion. Frances understood. The necklace was a gift Prince Philip had sent along with his portrait. To the Queen, it was a proxy for the wedding ring she would soon be wearing.

Frances fastened the necklace at the back of the Queen’s neck, then rested her hand on the Queen’s shoulder. The eyes of the two women met in the mirror. Mary smiled. The jeweled cross nestled just above the thin gold necklace Mary always wore, the only possession of her mother’s that she had been allowed by her father to keep, so many years ago.

The Queen gasped a small breath. “Oh my, I forgot, Frances. Forgive me. Sir Edward is among the … the ones at Smithfield, isn’t he? My dear, shall I call Lord Paulet back? Dictate a pardon? If you wish it, I will do so instantly.” She laid her hand lightly on Frances’s hand that lingered on her shoulder. “When all were deserting around me, Frances, you never wavered. Only bid me, and Sir Edward shall be spared.”

Frances knew how much this offer cost the Queen. A letter had been found on the traitor Richard Thornleigh, a letter written by his heretic wife to Edward. It had been brought to the Queen, and Frances had felt sick to her stomach when the Queen had showed it to her. The damning parts were burned into her memory:

Dear Edward,

Of course I will keep your secret.

How could I not when I trust you will do the same for me. We heretics must stick together … I know what hell you have suffered, fleeing England as an outcast, plagued by guilt that others might have died because of you, fearful every day since your return that your criminal-past would be uncovered … Your secret is safe with me.

Honor Thornleigh

In the mirror, Frances stared into the eyes of her monarch and friend, the woman she had shared twenty-five years with, through Mary’s childhood joys as a princess before King Henry turned on her mother, then through the years of hardship and degradation. During all that time Frances had never once seen Mary despair of her religious faith. That the Queen was now offering to pardon a man who had proved to be guilty of the one sin she could never tolerate—the sin of heresy—was proof indeed of her unshakable friendship.

A pardon for Edward? Frances knew she held his life in her hands. But it was too late for pardons. She would never forget that shattering moment when she’d stood in the doorway of his parlor and saw him reaching out for Isabel Thornleigh. Putting his mouth on hers. Kissing the little bitch. Frances felt the sting of tears, but no tears came. She was squeezed dry of tears. “No, my lady,” she said steadily. “Edward betrayed you. He betrayed us all. And for that he must pay.”

36
The Fletcher’s Cart

“O
oh, look at that one kick!” a woman in the crowd exclaimed.

“He’ll be kicking at Satan’s pitchfork soon!” a man said merrily.

The crowd laughed. Ten condemned rebels were swinging from the gibbets. Isabel thought she was going to be sick. One of the hanging men was Tom, the guard who had guided her through Wyatt’s camps.

These ten dead were the fourth batch. Thirty had already been hanged and cut down, their bodies taken away on wagons in which, moments before, the same men, living, had been carted from the condemned ranks and delivered up to the gibbets. When the first executions had begun, the crowd had watched in a hush of awe. Then someone had shouted a jest and people had relaxed, and now the atmosphere was like that of the summer fair, with people joking and chattering, a few women among them hawking pies and ale. But Isabel, standing by her father’s side, felt she was in the middle of a nightmare. He had not spoken a word to her, nor even looked her way.

There were now only sixteen prisoners in front of them. A wagon rattled up. The guard on the seat got down and helped the bad-tempered guard on the ground shove the first ten men into the wagon, thinning the rank in front of Isabel and Thornleigh down to six. The wagon rumbled off toward the Elms with its prisoners. The bad-tempered guard shoved Thornleigh forward—he would be in the next batch to go to the gallows—then grabbed Isabel’s shoulder and pulled her out of the line.

“No!” she said, struggling to go back. “Father!”

The guard shoved her aside again so roughly she stumbled. “The woman’s brainsick,” he muttered.

“String her up, too,” a bald man in the crowd suggested eagerly. “That’d be a sight. I never did see a wench swing.”

Isabel heard the terrifying clatter of another wagon. She whirled around. It had come so soon! The prisoners just taken weren’t even at the gallows yet. This wagon was smaller than the others, no more than a cart. The guard driving it stilled the cart horse and jumped down from the seat. Isabel clawed at his back, desperate to stop the nightmare, but he shrugged her off without even turning and went straight for her father. He clamped Thornleigh by the collar, and as he dragged him to the cart Thornleigh twisted around and faced him. The driver’s back was to Isabel, but she saw her father’s astonishment. “You!” Thornleigh cried. “What are you—” The driver’s fist smashed Thornleigh’s jaw. “No!” Isabel cried. Thornleigh staggered and dropped to his knees, blood dripping from his lip.

“What’d you do that for?” the bad-tempered guard asked.

“He called the Queen a bitch,” the driver replied.

Isabel caught the accent, and now she saw his face. Carlos. He wore a tabard of royal livery over his doublet. She reeled at this final blow: Carlos was carting her father to the gallows.

“Bastard,” the bad-tempered guard said in response to the insult to the Queen. He kicked Thornleigh in the stomach. Thornleigh doubled over, still on his knees, moaning.

“Bastard,” the bald man eagerly agreed. He kicked Thornleigh’s forehead with a vicious crack. Thornleigh jerked back and lay on the ground, suddenly still.

“No!” Isabel screamed. She dropped to her knees at his side. Her father was unconscious. She jumped up and turned on Carlos, her fists raised to strike him. He grabbed her wrists and yanked her close and said quickly in her ear, “Help me get him in.”

She blinked at him. Help haul her father to his death? To be strung up unconscious like some slaughtered buck? Was he mad? But Carlos was already dragging Thornleigh’s inert body to the cart’s open rear. He lifted Thornleigh’s torso up and heaved him onto the lip of the cart platform, then grabbed his legs and rolled his body in. Thornleigh came to rest on his back, unmoving.

“You
can’t!
“ Isabel flew at Carlos, wildly hitting his chest and head until he snatched her arm and twisted it around to the small of her back. In pain, she swayed. He picked her up and threw her into the wagon beside her father, the floorboards scraping her backbone.

“That’s right,” the bald man said gleefully to Carlos, “hang the wench too!”

Isabel was scrambling on hands and knees toward the back of the cart to attack Carlos again, but he grabbed hold of her by the hair and held her head rigid. “Lie down!” he said into her ear. “We will take him away!”

Isabel froze.

“Stop those prisoners!” Carlos yelled with sudden authority, pointing away from the cart. The bad-tempered guard pushed off in the direction Carlos was indicating, looking for the would-be escapees. Carlos quickly strode to the front of the cart, got up on the seat, and flicked the harness reins. As the horse moved the cart lurched forward, and Isabel, on her knees, was thrown onto her side where something scraped her shoulder. She saw that it was the tip of a longbow, one of many, all unstrung, lying in two stacks at the front of the cart. There were quivers of arrows, too, lashed together with twine to form a bristling bale. Carlos had stolen a fletcher’s cart!

She looked out the back. The bad-tempered guard was watching the departing cart with a puzzled look. But when another wagon drew up beside him he shrugged and went back to his job of shoving prisoners into the new wagon. The bald man, however, started to walk after the cart, watching Isabel with a chilling smile of anticipation at her imminent hanging.

She dropped to the floor and lay flat on her back to keep from being seen by anyone else. Her father lay beside her, unmoving but breathing regularly. Blood from his split lip trickled down his jaw. The cart creaked on at what felt like a crawl. On her back, Isabel could see nothing but the wooden planks of the cart’s sides and the misty sky above, but she heard the crowd’s chatter, first swelling as the cart lumbered past the voices, then growing fainter and fainter. Did she dare believe it? Was Carlos steering the cart away from the crowd? Away from the place of execution? She slipped the tips of her fingers through a crack in the cart’s side and held on tightly, not for balance, but to keep still, to keep from leaping up to see if this miracle was real.

She could bear it no longer. She raised her head just enough to look out the back over her toes. As she did, the Smithfield crowd sent up a roar of approval as another ten bodies kicked and swayed under the gallows. She caught a glimpse of the bald man who’d been following the cart. He had halted at the border of the crowd, but was still watching with a scowl as the distance lengthened between him and the cart.

Isabel dropped her head to the cart floor again, breathing hard. She heard Carlos muttering Spanish to the horse and she felt the cart’s motion change slightly as they turned at a curve in the road. She knew it was the curve at the edge of Smithfield as it narrowed into Giltspur Street. She tilted her head backwards to look at Carlos, and saw him upside-down, just his head and shoulders visible above the seat back. He was saving her father.
Everything
was upside-down.

“Halt there!” The voice had come from ahead of the cart. Isabel stiffened. A guard posted at Smithfield’s boundary? She pressed closer to her unconscious father, though the high cart sides and seat hid them. “Where’re you off to, then?” the voice asked.

“Whitehall, Sergeant,” Carlos said. “Orders of Lord Howard.”

“The palace? Why?”

“The Queen asked to see these two dead ones.”

“Cooper, have a look,” the sergeant said gruffly. Isabel realized there must be two of them, maybe more. She flipped onto her stomach and threw her arm over her father’s stomach to mask his breathing with her cloak, then buried her head and legs as far as possible under his side. Then, she lay as still as a corpse. She heard a horse plod closer, moving along at the cart’s side. Then a voice, presumably Cooper, at the cart’s rear: “Must be important buggers.”

“Not any more,” Carlos said lazily.

Cooper chuckled. So did the sergeant. “All right,” the sergeant said. “Carry on.”

The cart jolted forward again but Isabel didn’t dare yet come out from under her father’s shoulder. The cart creaked on, Carlos keeping its pace at an unsuspicious crawl. Finally, Isabel stole a glance up at the sky. The tavern sign of the Hand and Shears passed overhead, which meant they’d passed Pye Corner. They were less than a quarter mile from Newgate, and once they got under that arch and were inside the city, who on crowded Newgate Street would notice another cart among so many? Isabel’s heart pounded. They were going to make it!

She lifted her head enough to peer across her father’s chest and out a crack in the far side of the cart as Carlos took them around another bend in the road. Through the crack she could just make out, in the distance, the bald man hurrying toward a trio of horsemen stopped at the entrance to Smithfield. The trio, she realized, had to be the sergeant and his guards who’d stopped them. The bald man pointed toward the cart.

The horsemen looked. The sergeant angrily gestured forward. The three of them kicked their mounts and in a moment they were cantering toward the cart.

“The guards!” Isabel cried up to Carlos. “They’re coming!”

He looked over his shoulder. He whipped the reins. Startled, the cart horse quickened its pace, but only for a moment, then settled down to its previous sedate walk. Carlos jumped from the cart seat onto the horse’s back. It skittered and whinnied in alarm. Carlos kicked its sides hard. It burst into a canter.

Isabel stuck her hand through the crack in the cart side and held on tightly.

She needed to. They careened around the corner and passed under Newgate and clattered into the city, the cart’s wheels groaning and squealing. People scattered out of its way. Isabel looked back. A hay wagon was lumbering across their wake, blocking her view of the pursuers, but she heard their horses’ hooves thundering hollowly under the stone arch of Newgate. And then she saw the horsemen again, rounding the back of the hay wagon, pounding after the cart.

Carlos drove the horse recklessly eastward along Cheapside, dodging pedestrians, horses, wagons, all at a bone-jarring pace. Isabel was thrown against one side of the cart, then against her father’s prostrate form, and she flung her arm over him to hold him as steady as she could, her pretense of death abandoned. The longbows and bundled arrows clattered against the cart corners. In one violent swerve, as Isabel fought for balance, she tore her eyes from the pursuers, and by the time she looked out again there was no trace of them. She caught sight of a familiar cobbler’s sign and knew that Carlos had swerved the cart south to Candlewick Street. People on foot and on horseback filled in the street behind them. Isabel breathed again. She sat up. Carlos had shaken off the guards.

But he hardly slackened the pace. The cart rattled onto New Fish Street. Isabel could see the gate tower of London Bridge rising in the distance ahead. She realized with dismay that Carlos was racing for the bridge. He had no idea of the escape plan with van Borselen’s Flemish ship. The plan had been so firmly in her mind for so long that no other had occurred to her. Would it still work? Could she really expect van Borselen to still be waiting? With Sydenham now a condemned traitor? She had to risk it. She shouted to Carlos above the din of horses’ hooves and cartwheels, “Not the bridge!”