The Lost Duchess (44 page)

Kit looked stricken. ‘He raped you?’

‘Yes. He said it would join us as man and wife, even without a priest.’

He hung his head. ‘O, God. O, my dear Emme.’

He looked up and met her eyes and she saw a great hurt in him that she longed to heal, but she also knew that the hurt was her own. His manner was grave. ‘You did not promise yourself to him knowingly and freely as you did to me?’

‘No, never. I loathe him. I would never be his wife, duchess or anything else.’

‘
Duchess?
’ He gave her a sad half smile as if it pained him. ‘This rogue was a duke? Who? Are there any dukes left?’

She blew her nose and wiped her eyes. Nothing she said now could make any difference. Kit would know the whole truth, and perhaps, at least, they could part as friends.

‘The Earl of Hertford, Edward Seymour, son of the Duke of
Somerset and first in line to the dukedom when that title is reinstated. The lord who was imprisoned for getting Lady Catherine Grey with child.’

‘That scoundrel! He should never have been released from the Tower.’

He turned to her and took her hands, kissing them gently. ‘Forgive me for my hard questioning.’

She cried silently. ‘Forgive? You do not need forgiveness. It is I who needs your compassion.’

‘For what? What wrong have you done? Is a lamb to be blamed for the cruelty of the wolf? No, Emme.’ He held her again and looked at her intently. ‘You are the best of women, the lady I wish to marry, and if I am the first to whom you have freely offered your love then I will be privileged above all men alive.’

He fumbled in his purse and took out the ring once more. ‘So will you be my wife?’

She drank him in, sight, sound and smell, the salt and the sea. They would never be parted in this world and the next. ‘Yes. Oh, yes.’

She held out her left hand for him and he placed the little ring on the very end of her fourth finger.

‘With this ring I thee wed; with my body I thee worship: and with all that I have I thee endow. In the name of God. Amen.’

He looked at her.

‘It is done. I think we may kiss.’

Dear God, but she wanted to kiss him, though she feared to. She pressed her lips against his like a desert traveller falling on an oasis whose mouth is too parched to drink. He was the essence that gave her life meaning, her soul’s milk and nectar; he was strength and
sweetness, her rock and her succour; the fire of her desire. He made her complete, but he could also destroy her. Why fear that now? She put all her longing into her kiss, and when they drew back to breathe she whispered against his chest. ‘I should have told you before.’

‘And I should have told Rob before.’ He rubbed her shoulders. ‘We have both wrestled to set down the burdens we have carried from the past. But now they are shared; you are released and so am I, undeserving though I am.’

‘No, not undeserving, the most admirable of men, my angel …’

‘Hush.’ He put his finger to her lips. ‘Let me show you how much I love you. My body is yours to serve you in devotion to my last breath.’

He rose and unbuckled his belt and all the accoutrements of war, stripped off his jerkin and shirt, kicked away his boots, peeled off his hose and galley breeches until he stood before her almost naked, and the sight of his body in the lantern light was enough to melt her inside. He was perfect and powerful. She could see every muscle under his smooth bronze skin, and the curling hair that glistened like filigree over his legs and chest, and in a dark line down from his navel over his flat stomach. She bowed her head. What could she offer him but her innocence, her softness never fully seen before by a man?

He reached out to her and drew off her shawl, untied her bodice and sleeves, ushered her to stand and took off her kirtle as she slipped out of her shoes. With his hands under her shift he rolled down her wool stockings, and the touch of his fingers around her bare thighs made her tremble with terror and longing. At that point he broke contact and waited, with his hands close to her hips but not touching. She was shivering, she knew, but she could contain
that if she tried. She peeled off her own shift, and he got down on his knees before her, like a supplicant to her modesty, raising his palms as if in veneration. Then she drew his hands to her breasts, arched back her head and let him continue. His hands reached up as his head sank down sending sensation shooting through her, and together gradually his hands slid over her breasts as his mouth moved up over her legs, kissing and caressing.

She knew him fully as more explosions made the small room rattle, filling their bower with flashing light and leaving a fuzz of drifting smoke, but they seemed distant and insignificant. Her being was with him, around him and through him. She could appreciate nothing else.

When they rose and dressed, and kissed, and moved to look outside where the birds were beginning to sing in the still black sky, she once again found the place on the sill where Rob had scratched his one-time name, then she asked for Kit’s knife, and scratched through ‘Little’, and beside it wrote ‘Doonan’. Kit smiled and inscribed his own name too, and so did she, not ‘Emme Fifield’, or ‘Emme Murimuth’, or even ‘Emmelyne Seymour, Duchess of Somerset’, never that, but the woman she was now and would be forever, the woman she was always meant to be: ‘Emme Doonan’.

‘… There we espied towards the north end of the Island the light of a great fire through the woods, to the which we presently rowed: when we came right over against it, we let fall our grapnel near the shore, and sounded with a trumpet a call, and afterwards many familiar English tunes of songs, and called to them friendly; but we had no answer, we therefore landed at day-break, and coming to the fire, we found the grass and sundry rotten trees burning about the place …’

—From the entry for 17th August from John White’s Narrative of his 1590 Voyage to Virginia describing his return to Roanoke

‘Are you ready?’

Kit squatted down beside Emme, looking through the upper gun port in the palisade above the roofs of the storehouses around the fort. His gaze swept over the wall of tree trunks which stretched from the cliff top southwest in a crooked curving line, beyond the belt of ground cleared of trees that had been reduced to huge logs
and dragged together to form the star-pointed ramparts, to the dark woods that rose at its edge and disappeared into the haze where Wanchese’s warriors would be lying in wait. He was sure of it. He did not need to hear or see them. The first hint of dawn was brightening the sky, and he looked over the dormant forest imagining the men like fleas in the pelt of a beast that could spring into life at any moment. He drew back and scanned the dirt platform where Emme sat by the bronze falconet, taking in the heap of one pound shot for the cannon, ramrod and wadding, powder barrel and scoop, reamer and the linstock for firing that she held like a spear, shaft down beside her, the slow match smouldering at its tip.

‘You know what to do?’

‘Yes,’ she said quietly, appearing dwarfed by both munitions and defences: a slight, soft woman in the midst of weaponry that could butcher a whole company of men, clad like a soldier in brigandine and helmet.

‘You must bring the match to the touch hole slowly,’ he said. ‘Then you must wait for the smoke that will tell you the priming powder had taken hold. After it catches, stand back smartly and cover your ears. Don’t get behind the gun. Don’t bend over the touch hole or the blast will burn your face. Don’t bring your match to the touch until you hear the other guns firing. There will be a delay between ignition and discharge; you must expect that.’

‘I understand,’ she said.

He didn’t doubt it. She was quick-witted and stout-hearted and he knew he could depend on her. He should leave her to check on the others, but leaving was hard. This might be the last time he saw her. Just as he’d come to know her, they had to part. She was his Emme whom he adored almost more than he could bear, so rare a
lady he didn’t know how he could have been favoured by the love she had shown him. She was like a comet passing Earth: a wonder to admire and expect to lose in a stream of fading light, except that last night he’d possessed her fully, and the treasure of her body had been his as a gift. Now all the shying away she’d previously displayed he could properly understand, because of the hurt that had been done to her by that earl he’d like to run through. No chance of that now, no reason and no need. Emme was his wife and she’d never be another’s.

He turned his head to kiss her, and thank God he could do that without her pulling from him. There might not be another chance.

She put her arms around his chest, plate armour and all.

‘God bless you, husband,’ she murmured.

‘God bless you, wife.’

That had to be their farewell. He turned to go before resolution failed him and he stayed to die by her side, but then defeat would be inevitable and, if he put his plan into place, at least she would have a possibility of escape, however small. He turned from her, and started to bound down the dirt slope; then he gave her one last instruction over his shoulder.

‘Don’t try and load the gun to fire again.’

If she answered, he didn’t hear her. He had to trust her not to attempt such a thing. He had told her to leave for the pinnace as soon as the firing began, and she had said that she would. She must get across quickly in the tender once the savages attacked. One shot, then go: that was what she had agreed to do. He paced around the strong-house to the place where the great nine-foot saker pointed out from the cliff top over the sound. There was Lacy in the shadows, busy recharging the gun, loading one of the five-pound
balls into the muzzle, ramming and wading it home. He’d ask Lacy to make sure Emme left.

Lacy moved to the breech of the gun and took hold of the linstock left propped against the strong-house wall. The gun overlooked the water through a gap in the palisade, and, from that vantage, Kit could see the pinnace lying below to the east, and the clear expanse of the sound above which the morning star twinkled in an indigo sky. Near the horizon, over a band of grey cloud, the blue was beginning to lighten. Nothing moved but the rippling breeze and a flock of seabirds rising and wheeling, dropping back further away to settle again in pale streaks. The scent of pines and saltwater was in the breeze, and something sweet like the aromatic spicebushes that grew to the southwest, and from all this Kit sensed the way the wind was blowing. Under the canvas that screened the gun overhead, Lacy’s face was barely visible, but Kit caught the gleam of his eyes when he spoke.

‘Nothing to report, Master Doonan.’

‘Good. Keep firing to the west without haste. When you hear the rest of us in salvo, get Mistress Emme to the pinnace.’

‘Aye, sir.’

‘Give us five minutes to join you, no longer. Don’t wait after that. You must leave for Croatoan.’

‘We will. God speed you.’

He clapped Lacy’s shoulder and strode back. As he left the closed palisade, he heard the boom of the saker firing again, and the much quieter splash far off as the shot hit the water. He picked up the ladder he had used to scale the inner defences, and carried it with him as he negotiated the barricades between the houses, following routes he knew well, doubling back and circuiting through the maze of partially concealed pathways.

The bastion he reached first was the position to the east manned by Rob. It was guarded by a fowler behind one of the projections in the wall of tree trunks. The gun was an old iron breech loader, about eight feet in length but narrow in bore, mounted on a stock with two wheels, firing stone shot covered in lead. It couldn’t fire far with any accuracy, but it could be reloaded fast. Kit cast his eye over the spare chamber, ready charged, that lay near the rear of the stock by a small pyramid of round shot. He gave a nod of approval and clapped the boy’s shoulders.

‘All set?’

‘Yes, father.’

It felt good to be called that. He patted Rob’s back.

‘Don’t fire until you hear the other guns.’

‘I’ll wait.’

Rob nodded and straightened his back. He stood with his smouldering linstock, looking every inch the battle-ready soldier, helmeted and armed, his chest and back protected by a steel cuirass. His son seemed to have grown on the voyage, no longer a boy but a man. Pray God, Rob would live to talk about this day in years to come. Pray he’d die quickly if he didn’t see the day out.

Kit looked through a gap between the tree trunks that served as a crude gun port at the bastion’s point. He peered along the long barrel ringed with wrought iron hoops, and saw the forest beginning to flood with colour. Dark greens lightened to purples as gold rays streamed from below the rim of the sky. Rob would be firing straight at the sun, but he didn’t need to aim, only ignite the primer. The gun was pointing point blank. Its two-inch shot would rip through foliage and shatter on impact with anything solid, tree or man. After that …

‘Once you’ve fired the gun then you must leave.’

‘Not without you,’ Rob answered resolutely.

‘With
or
without me.’ Kit pointed to the ladder which he’d left by the outer wall and his voice hardened. ‘Use that to get over the palisade; then make for the pinnace with Mistress Emme.’

He spoke again as he left. There was no more time for reasoning with him. ‘I’m relying on you to do that.’

He raced to the next bastion, past all the weapons that had been left ready to hand: pikes and bills; longbows and boxes of arrows; crossbows with their strings winched back; quivers full of fire bolts specially prepared by Lacy, swollen behind their arrow heads, their shafts wrapped with gauze packed with a mixture of nitre, sulphur and charcoal. There were a few loaded calivers, as many as they had left, and low braziers of smoking coals, well away from the gunpowder kegs. The position was unmanned but another fowler lay ready, its powder chamber locked in place, loaded and primed. More weapons were stacked at the foot of the wall: an axe and another crossbow, fully cocked; fire bolts, arrows and a longbow. He moved on and found Tom Humphrey with their third fowler; the fourth guarded the closed entrance gate.