The King's Daughter (52 page)

Telling the tale had not helped his mood after all, it just made worse the awful weight of his failure nine days ago to protect Honor from Grenville. Now he imagined her fighting for her life, fevered from her wound. She’d cheated death before by the sheer strength of her will. But could she do it again?

He felt the shameful prick of tears, so he gruffly said, “That’s the past. This is now. We march to London tomorrow, and I’ll be marching in the front rank. I’m no soldier, but I can use a sword.” For he had his own fight now. To save his property for Honor and his children. Maybe even save his own life. To stop the Grenvilles and this vengeful Queen, he would do all he could to help Wyatt to victory.

There was a sound of tramping feet beyond the trees. Carlos’s head snapped in that direction. Thornleigh, too, glanced over his shoulder. Through a break in the trees he could make out four soldiers, mere silhouettes in the dusk, trudging across the footbridge. “That’ll be my relief,” he said. “Along with his drinking friends, by the look of it.” The soldiers left the footbridge and disappeared into the trees, coming toward the riverbank.

Thornleigh was turning back, about to get up from the log, when Carlos kicked the pike from his hands. In one swiftmotion he was suddenly behind Thornleigh, his hand clamped over Thornleigh’s mouth and pinning his head back against his thigh as he held a dagger at Thornleigh’s throat. “No sound!” he said in a fierce whisper.

Thornleigh’s mind raged at his mistake. He’d been duped! If he could just call out to the soldiers, warn them. But the hand pressed his mouth and nose so brutally he could barely breathe. He clawed at the fingers. If he could just manage one shout.

“Do not try it, old man. There is a hundred pounds for me if I kill you. Do not make me do it!”

Thornleigh’s body jerked stiff, betraying his shock.

“Now you know,” Carlos said. “I was not hired to save you. I was hired to kill you.”

In a flash Thornleigh saw the truth. There had been no mysterious friend trying to arrange his rescue, only more enemies.

“But your daughter wants you alive,” Carlos said, his voice a mixture of resignation and self-disgust. “And I will tell you something more. She’s searching London for you still. With the help of Sydenham.”

Sydenham?
Suddenly Thornleigh understood. Suddenly
everything
was clear. His splayed hands flew up in a gesture that implored:
I’ll make no trouble … let me speak!

Carlos’s grip slackened. Thornleigh gasped a breath. “He’ll kill her,” he blurted.
“He
hired you to kill me!”

Carlos twisted him around by the shoulders. “What?”

Thornleigh’s words came tumbling out, linking suspicions that had been fragments in his mind until Carlos’s statement fused them. “Sydenham’s come home to marry.” He spoke quickly, urgently. “Marry Lord Grenville’s daughter, the Queen’s best friend. So he has to cover his heretic tracks. Last week the only people who knew his past were me and my wife. Grenville removed Honor. That left me.” Seeing Carlos’s wondering face, the words rolled out in a rush. “Sydenham’s the only one left who knows the password. Don’t you see? He sent his servant to you with the password so you could identify me. Sydenham and I never met.”

Carlos’s jaw dropped. “Sydenham … hired me?”

“Yes.” In Thornleigh’s mind the last piece of the puzzle rammed into place. “And I think he goaded Grenville to come to kill my wife.”

He and Carlos stared at one another. “And now … my daughter is with him.”

There was turmoil in Carlos’s eyes. “He will kill Isabel?”

“If he suspects she knows his past, yes. My wife and I never told her about the old days, for her own safety. I pray God her ignorance might just save her.” An idea took hold of him. “What does Sydenham look like?”

“A fox,” Carlos said. “Red hair, thin face, fine clothes.”

“Another reason for me to march in the front line to London.” If he could get into the city, he could save Isabel. He would kill Edward Sydenham.

Loud voices startled them both. The soldiers, still not visible in the trees, sounded very near. In a moment they’d be here.

Carlos’s dagger flashed under Thornleigh’s nose. He said in a threatening whisper, “I am going to warn your daughter. Do not raise an alarm.”

Thornleigh watched him jump over the log and run for the trees. With a knot in his stomach, he hoped Carlos would make it.
My enemy’s enemy is my friend.

Carlos disappeared into the trees just as the soldiers emerged onto the riverbank.

Edward Sydenham opened the door to his parlor. Seeing Isabel sitting on a stool by the fire, reading, he came in, closing the door. “Do forgive me for leaving you alone so long. The Queen’s business,” he said with an apologetic shrug.

“Of course, sir,” she said, closing the book on her lap. “Those gentlemen in your hall seemed very agitated. Is it bad news about the rebels?”

“On the contrary. The Queen’s oration this afternoon had a tremendous effect on the city. The guilds are promising a thousand more men-at-arms. It was all I could do in there to contain everyone’s enthusiasm. And I must confess to a personal satisfaction in the matter, for it was I who urged the Queen to address the citizens.” He smiled at her. “My only regret is that the business kept me so long away from your company tonight.”

Isabel lowered her eyes.

“And,” Edward added triumphantly, “I have brought someone to meet you.”

She looked up, pale with hope. “Not …?”

“No, not your father. Forgive me for rousing your expectations. Though we
will
find him, do not fear. And that is why I have asked this friend—” He broke off at the sound of a knock. The door opened.

“Pardon, Sir Edward.” It was his steward, Palmer. “A gentleman to see you.”

A man of about forty, with a luxurious black mustache, appeared at the door. Palmer left and the visitor came in. His manner was gruff, at odds with his fine attire: a doublet of moss green velvet, a filigreed silver sword hilt, a tear-shaped pearl dangling from his velvet cap.

Edward turned to Isabel. “Mistress, allow me to introduce Nicholas van Borselen, shipmaster.”

The man bowed to Isabel. She stood.

“Van Borselen is no ordinary captain,” Edward assured her with a smile. “He is shipmaster to the Emperor’s secretary for Spain and Flanders. He has just delivered letters to Whitehall for the secretary, and his ship now lies at anchor off Billingsgate, about to embark for Antwerp. I have asked him here to meet you.”

He went to his desk and from a drawer took out an oval emerald the size of a robin’s egg. He addressed the captain. “I want you to postpone your departure until this lady comes out to your ship. It may be a day, it may be longer, but you will wait for her. She will come aboard with an older man.” Edward reached out and lifted van Borselen’s hand. He placed the emerald in the shipmaster’s palm. “You will set sail the moment this lady and her guest are on board. Do you understand?”

“I understand, Sir Edward,” van Borselen said with a heavy accent. His eyes, though hooded and shrewd looking, flashed excitement. The emerald was worth a small fortune.

“Thank you,” Edward said. “You may go.”

The shipmaster bowed to Edward, and again to Isabel, and walked out.

Edward moved to his desk and sat, stretching out his legs, his eyes on Isabel. She seemed lost for words. His instruction to van Borselen had worked its charm. He’d suspected that the girl had been holding back some information, some names and places where her father might be hiding. Now, she would trust him with it all. Of course he had no intention of either Thornleigh or his daughter ever making it out to that ship. He smiled at her. “You will recognize the ship by the Emperor’s flag, the black eagle on the forecastle deck.”

“Sir,” she stammered, “you are so kind. I do not know … how to thank you.”

“Your sweet smile is thanks enough.”

She blushed faintly and looked down. She sat again on the stool before the fire, clasping the book to her.

“What were you reading, mistress? A book of mine?”

“No,” she said distractedly. “This belonged to my mother.”

He barely listened. He was admiring the swell of her breasts above her bodice. The gown she wore, a lavender blue satin, was one he’d asked his chamberlain to procure for her, her own clothes having become so bedraggled. He’d found it peculiarly satisfying, this fact of dressing her. She really was quite lovely—the thick dark hair and creamy skin and trusting blue eyes. And the swell of her breasts promised a voluptuous body. Not as young as he preferred, but there were compensations: this girl had awareness. Given that, her blushes and lowered lashes produced an effect that was uncommonly enticing. She looked very forlorn, he thought. Almost lost. And there was a new pallor to her face, not present when he’d first met her. It was this pallor, he realized, that made her blushes, when they came, appear almost fevered. Like one afraid, or in pain. It stirred him.

He stood and came to her. He took up her hand and held it. “You have exhausted yourself in this search for your father, my dear. It distresses me. Master Thornleigh will not thank me if I reunite him with a daughter fallen into sickness. Tomorrow you must rest and leave the search completely to me and my agents. You must not leave the house. Nor even leave your bed.” He smiled at her and squeezed her hand. “I command it.”

She looked up at him as though unsure.

“Promise me?” he said.

“I promise.”

30
London Bridg

I
sabel was true to her word. All the next day she did not leave Sydenham’s house. Not until darkness was falling.

All day Sydenham had hosted defense meetings in his home while his steward managed the private search for Thornleigh. As twilight approached, Sydenham and John Grenville hastened off, Sydenham to more meetings at Whitehall, John to join Lord Howard in armament preparations on London Bridge. As soon as they were gone, Isabel quietly left the house. A hurried walk up to Ambassador de Noailles’s lodging at the Charterhouse, an anxious wait for him at the yew-canopied wicket gate in his back garden, a furtive meeting with him, and then she was on her way again. But not back to Sydenham’s house. Her route lay through the city streets and riverside lanes down to Coldharbour on the Thames, and the Old Swan water stairs.

Everywhere, people were scurrying home before the nine o’clock curfew should sound. Isabel made it in through Aldersgate just before the citizens’ patrol closed the gate. On Cheapside, she passed a constable marching his band of armed men toward Newgate to take over the night watch there. In the growing darkness the fear in the city was almost palpable. Earlier, street traders had hastily dismantled their stalls and hauled their wares to safety. Householders had bolted their doors. No children had played in the twilight lanes. Late that afternoon, shouting voices had spread the alarm that the rebels’ pennants could be seen through the trees on the south shore of the Thames as their army approached along the Kent Road, and Isabel herself had heard the half-dozen ineffectual cannon shots that had boomed across the river at them from the Tower, more in panic than aggression. Wyatt’s army had finally arrived. But in Southwark, just across London Bridge, they had halted.

Isabel reached the river just as the curfew tolled from the Bow Bells. Now, anyone caught out of doors on any pretext but official business would be hauled off by a constable to one of the city’s jails. Isabel had picked this wharf just upstream from London Bridge on the assumption, based on what she’d overheard at Sydenham’s, that Lord Howard was posting his riverside forces in three main locations: at the Tower to the east, on the bridge in the middle, and on wharves near London Wall to the west. That would leave the small area around the Old Swan Stairs free. She hoped.

The waterfront felt eerie: normal yet different. The barking of mastiffs from the kennels of the Southwark bear gardens echoed across the water as always, but none of the usual bursts of bawdy laughter from the brothels there. The windows of the multistoried shops and houses crowded on London Bridge glowed, as usual, in a spangle of torches and candles, but the nearby docks of Fish Wharf and the Steelyard were dark, empty of the customary linkboys with their lanterns. Muffled voices, as usual, sounded between the buildings above the river’s swirling waters, but rather than the chatter of peaceable citizens, the voices came from anxious, armed men on watch against the enemy. But Isabel took heart in seeing that she had been right about one thing: the Old Swan landing area seemed vacant of royalist soldiers. Shivering, she walked down to the broad water stairs.

She had to step gingerly, for the stone stairs were slick with a new sheen of ice, and the only light came from a cowardly half-moon that slunk behind clouds more often than it dared show its face. But she had no trouble finding a boat. The landing was crammed with tethered barges and lighters and skiffs. A mixed blessing, she grimly reminded herself. A proclamation that afternoon had commanded that all river craft be brought by their owners to the north shore and left there, on pain of death.

She climbed down into a skiff whose bow pointed toward the river. She slipped the painter, sat at the oars, and grasped the handles. Even through her gloves they felt cold as gun metal. She looked over her shoulder straight across to the far bank, her destination, and saw the flickering lights of torches on the wharf of Winchester House. They looked impossibly far away. She looked sideways, to the bridge. It seemed close, frighteningly so, for she reckoned that her biggest challenge would be to keep the boat from being drawn downstream by the current toward the bridge. There, the river was compressed by twenty piers into twenty-one small but dangerous rapids. A common saying nattered in her brain:
Wise men go over, fools go under London Bridge.
Going over it was out of the question with Lord Howard’s men stationed on it. And going under it was what she must avoid. She must go nowhere near it. But did she have the strength to row across the Thames? She wondered if the beefy build of the lightermen who ferried people and cargo was a prerequisite for the job or merely a result. Well, she told herself, taking a deep breath, she would now find out.