The King's Daughter (62 page)

Isabel watched in horror as her father was marched away with the other beaten men.

35
Smithfiel

I
t was almost warm. The morning air held a promise of spring. That was Isabel’s first thought as she stepped out of the stable into the courtyard of the Anchor Inn after a sleepless night in the straw. The illusion of spring shattered at her second thought. Today, her father was going to hang.

She looked up through the bare chestnut tree limbs above her head. The pale sun hovered inside a pearly mist, and last night’s beads of ice, which, in the moonlight, had clung to the underside of the branches like frozen tears, had now melted, and gleamed as if changed overnight into pearls by some merciful hand. A crow flapped onto the tree, beating broad black wings, scattering a shower of droplets. One slithered down the back of Isabel’s neck like an icy finger. This was not spring. And there was no merciful hand anywhere.

She left the Anchor and started walking toward the church of St. Michael’s Cornhill.

“Prisons can’t hold all the buggers,” a Guildhall constable had told her last night. She had stood on the marble floor of Guildhall with a crowd, waiting through five hours of hasty mass trials. Finally, her father, among a batch of twenty rebels, had come before the judge. The judge had listened to the single witness, a Billingsgate fishmonger—only one witness was required by law—and then had sentenced the twenty to hang and called in the next batch. “Nigh on six hundred’ve been nabbed,” the constable had told Isabel. “They found ‘em cringing in warehouses like riverfront rats.” So many arrests had been made that churches throughout the city were being used to hold the captured men.

Now, she walked on, approaching the church of St. Michael’s Cornhill, its façade shadowed by tenements built on the churchyard fronting Cornhill. A crowd had already formed, eager to watch the prisoners about to be taken out to execution. Isabel pushed through toward a guard.

“May I see my father?” she asked.

The guard scratched the morning stubble on his chin. “See him at the gallows.”

She’d expected the answer. Her plea had become mere rote. Over and over last night she had asked the same question, first at Guildhall and then here at St. Michael’s until curfew had sounded and she’d been forced to leave. Her moment of fame as the “angel of the gate” gave her no currency; here, she was just one among hundreds in the crowd. Over and over she had been told to go home.

Home? Walking away along Cornhill last night she had wondered: Where is home? Her family’s abandoned house at Colchester, barren now of every sound of life? She could not go there. Martin’s house on nearby Bucklersbury Street? It was to have been her home as well, but it, too, would be barren of sound, save the weeping of a mother for two lost sons. She would not go there. The Crane Inn, whose owner, Master Legge, had helped her close the gate on Wyatt’s brave men? She could not bear to go there.

So she’d walked on like some lost child until she’d found herself outside the Anchor Inn. Her money was all gone, so she went around to the stable. No one was there. It looked the same as on the night she had found Carlos grooming her mare, and he’d talked about his life, about conquistadores and the wide New World. The stable’s same inhabitants—the dappled pony and the old black gelding—glanced over at her, munching their hay. The stable boy was gone, probably out with the rest of London’s waifs, excitedly peering at the prisoners packed into the churches, but he had left behind a hunk of bread and an old apple. Isabel sat down in the straw and ate a few bites. Here, there was no one to tell her to go home.

She looked at the stall where Carlos had slung his jerkin that night, and a thought crept up on her. That day he had burst into Sydenham’s hall and made that wild attempt to take her into custody, had he simply been trying to get her out of Sydenham’s house? Had he somehow learned that she was in danger from Sydenham? Learned it from her father in Wyatt’s camp? The facts fit. And what had she done? Fought him, spat at him, done everything she could to make him hate her.

Yet what did any of that matter any more? Carlos was now one of the Queen’s captains. And Wyatt’s rebellion was crushed. And her father was going to hang.

Wearied by misery, she had sunk into a black and heavy sleep in the straw, and had woken to the discordant clang of church bells.

“Here they come!”

The doors of St. Michael’s opened. The crowd crammed in closer. Isabel stood on tiptoe and craned her neck to see past the heads and shoulders. Filthy, bleary-eyed prisoners were being led out of the church. They filed out in a silent, shuffling line, perhaps forty of them. Isabel gasped as she glimpsed her father, his face gray and haggard. But amongall the other condemned who walked with bowed heads—bowed in fear, or in remorse, or in shame before the crowd—he walked with his head high.

“God-cursed traitors!” A clump of fresh dung smacked a prisoner’s neck. He jumped. Some of the crowd laughed.

The guards prodded the prisoners into Cornhill Street and they started walking westward. Isabel did not know where they were being taken. She followed with the crowd. Boys darted to the sides of the moving pack of the condemned. The rest of the people kept close behind, like waiting scavenger birds. Isabel tried to edge between two guards to reach her father, but was pulled away. “Follow with the rest,” the guard said, and shoved her roughly back.

The entourage of the condemned and the crowd moved slowly along Cornhill. At the Weigh House, where merchandise was weighed on the Great Beam, the carters and porters and packhorses were forced to make way for the execution party, and Isabel heard a carter grumble at the inconvenience. It seemed to her hideous that the money-changing business of the city carried on.

They reached the tall houses at the foot of Cornhill. Merchants congregating in the passages that ran through to Lombard Street glanced over as the prisoners walked by. Butchers and buyers stood watching at the edge of the covered Stocks Market. Women leaned out of windows, pointing as the condemned passed. More people joined the following crowd.

The entourage made its way into Poultry, passing haberdashers and grocers. At the Great Conduit—the lead water cistern in the middle of the street—water carriers with buckets strapped to their backs watched them pass. Here, the street widened out into Cheapside, and the moving execution party had to flow to one side of the market stalls ranged down the center. On Goldsmith’s Row, sun glinted off the gold platters and goblets displayed in the goldsmiths’ windows and shoppers stood in the doorways, watching.

On they went, past Mercers’ Hall, past Ironmonger Lane where the clanging sounds of the foundries reached Isabel above the shuffling of feet around her. Only a block away was Blackwell Hall, the woolcloth market where she had often helped her father check his apprentices’ reckoning of cloths and bales. On they went past Bread Street, where the smell of fish cooking at the Mermaid Inn made Isabel’s stomach lurch. On past the tenements of St. Martin-le-Grand, where thieves and whores and poor immigrants lived, many of them now ambling out to join the execution parade.

On into Newgate Street, passing its slaughterhouses and drinking shops, its country women hawking turnips and tallow and winter apples. They came to huge Christchurch, and the guards suddenly halted the party. Isabel heard some commotion ahead and craned to see. More rebel prisoners were being brought out from the church, another hundred at least. Isabel caught sight of Edward Sydenham among them. His once-fine clothes were foul with dried mud, and one satin sleeve was ripped. His face was white as paper. Pushed by a guard, he stumbled in among the swollen ranks of prisoners. He stood blinking as though in disbelief, gnawing a fingernail.

Newgate rose ahead. From its four stories above the open gate, faces peered out from the barred prison windows. The swollen entourage pushed on under the stone arch and passed through as the bells of St. Sepulcher clanged. The entourage turned right, wound its way up Giltspur Street, came to Pye Corner, and went by the Hand and Shears Tavern. Finally, Isabel realized where they were heading. The execution ground at Smithfield.

Walking at the side of the grim parade, her whole concentration had been on her father as he trudged on, his head unmoving, his gaze straight ahead. But now that she knew that Smithfield was so near, a kind of panic overtook her. She pushed once again toward him, and this time, whether because the guards were too busy keeping prisoners in line or because they simply could not bother with her anymore, she made it through to him. She came beside him. He did notglance at her but kept on walking, his expressionless face set straight ahead.

“Father,” she said, keeping in step with him. “Father, please look at me.”

But he would not. She felt his estrangement like a knife to her heart. It was because of Ludgate. She remembered his look of horrified amazement at seeing her shutting the gate. Shutting Wyatt out. Abandoning his last men to death or capture. But didn’t he know she had done it for him? All of it—leaving Martin, betraying Wyatt—all had been to save him.

But she had failed. He was going to die. She stumbled along beside him in a kind of daze. Whether he would speak to her or not, she would stay with him to the end.

“Stop him!” a guard called. Edward Sydenham was trying to claw his way out of the condemned pack. A woman tripped him and he toppled. People laughed. A guard hauled Sydenham to his feet and shoved him back into line, and he staggered on, hemmed in by the crowd and by his fellow prisoners as if by walls. Isabel saw that he was shaking.

“Halt!” the guard called from the front of the line. They had arrived.

Isabel looked around. Smithfield was a famous fairground in summer: Bartholomew Fair. On one August visit when she was a child she had skipped around the stalls, munching a gingerbread cat her father had bought her. She had dashed back to grab her mother’s hand and beg for a Bartholomew Baby—one of the painted dolls—until Adam, laughing, had taken her to pick one out. The succulent aroma of roast pig, and the din of fortune-tellers, horse traders, ballad mongers, and performing animals—it was intoxicating. That was summer. In spring and autumn Smithfield was used as a market for horses and sheep. But now, on this drear February morning, it was nothing but a large expanse of bare earth pocked with clods of dung.

She looked across to the Augustinian priory church of St. Bartholomew the Great. Here, she thought, in front of this church, her mother had been tied to the stake to burn as a heretic. Here, on the church’s lantern tower, her father had leaped about like Satan, terrifying the crowd and rescuing his wife. The tower was gone now, pulled down at the dissolution of the monasteries, and the church was used by Sir Richard Riche as a residence. Isabel looked to the north of the fairground. Not far from the church there were empty sheep pens, a stagnant pond, and the Elms. This last name was the Londoners’ grim jest: years ago, a stand of elms had been replaced by gallows.

A party of officials quietly waited at the Elms. Among them were several gentlemen of the Queen’s council on horseback, and her military commanders. Five open, empty wagons stood by, ready to cart off the dead. On each wagon a guard wearing a tabard of the royal livery in green and white sat on the seat, waiting. There were also two dozen guards standing in a wide semicircle, each with a longbow at his back. A fletcher’s cart with extra arrows was stationed nearby. The hangman, hooded in black, already stood with his helpers on the gallows scaffold.

And there was one other face that completed this picture of horror for Isabel. Carlos, on horseback, beside the gallows. He was part of the Queen’s execution party. He looked impressive in a new, gentleman’s doublet of some rich material in black. Even his mount was new, a fine gray Arab. Isabel imagined that the silver sword, its handle gleaming in the scabbard against his thigh, was also a gift from the grateful Queen. Had the Queen awarded him lands, too? Maybe even knighted him? Isabel looked away. The mercenary had been well rewarded. He had got everything he’d always wanted.

Voices rose. Another long stream of prisoners was being led in from Aldersgate. They joined the halted gang where Isabel stood with her father. The condemned now totaled several hundred. Isabel stared at the Elms. Five gallows. Two nooses hanging from each one. Ten men could be hanged at a time.

Spurred by a primeval impulse, the crowd at the rear surged forward around the halted mass of prisoners, running to claim choice viewing places at the gallows.

Frances Grenville pulled aside the stiff brocade curtain at the window of the Queen’s private chamber in Whitehall. She squinted in the morning light, her eyes accustomed to the dim interior. Since dawn the Queen had been praying, thanking God for her victory and deliverance. She had just finished her orisons and Lord Paulet had been admitted to the chamber.

“A pardon?” Frances heard the Queen ask, repeating the suggestion that Paulet had just put to her.

“Yes, if there is any among the rebels you would spare, Your Majesty,” Paulet said. “If so, now is the moment to do so. A messenger could deliver your pardon to Smithfield immediately.”

“Oh, no,” the Queen said, frowning as though at some young person’s rash, emotional outburst. “I think not, my lord.” She moved to a mirror on the wall.

“As you wish, Your Majesty.” Paulet was fully recovered after the crisis, and had proffered the suggestion of pardons with all his former punctilious care for proper form, but with little concern.

Yes, everything was back to normal, Frances thought, still looking out. Calm had been restored in the city. Rewards had been handed out to the loyal; her brother John had already been made a baron. The rabble traitors were being dispatched today en masse at Smithfield, while Wyatt himself lay in the Tower awaiting a more significant, ceremonial execution. “Good day, Your Majesty,” Paulet said from the doorway. He bowed and went out.

The bells of St. Sepulcher’s tolled. Frances pulled her gaze from the spire of St. Paul’s rising above the thicket of lesser steeples that made up the London skyline. She looked down at the courtyard below. A mongrel dog prowling the cobbles came upon a spaniel bitch. The bitch stood still while the dog slunk around her and sniffed her rear. Frances shuddered and quickly turned away from the window.