Emmie and the Tudor Queen

by Natalie Murray

  Our barge rocked as the tip grazed the water gate. Nick gripped my elbow to keep me steady.

  “His Majesty, the King!” cried a guard on the platform. Nick and I took a step forward, and a whiz of wind exploded past my ear.

  I grabbed the soft folds of skin there. “What was that?” I said, but was cut off by loud yells.

  “Duck! Save the king!”

  A sudden force tackled me to the ground. I screamed in shock, my chin banging against planks of wood. Fingers clawed at me to roll me over, and I spun into Nick’s shaking arms. Shouts and screams tore through the air above me.

  “We are being ambushed,” Nick hissed as my eyes searched through the wall of black-leather boots surrounding us.

  “Stay back!” a guard shouted above us. “Protect the king!”

  Two more whizzes sounded, followed by a thud. A woman screamed, and a heavy weight dropped onto my leg, nearly crushing it. I cried out, but my calf was pinned.

  “Every man down!” another guard cried, and bunches of fabric sank over boots and heels as people crouched all around us. Nick kept my torso pressed tightly to his. His heart hammered like a bass drum where our bodies pressed together.

  The barge fell silent, amplifying the sloshing of waves against the side as our boat rocked in the water. Male voices bellowed in the distance. Footsteps rushed toward us and then stilled before the thwicks of releasing arrows began in fast sequence. Nick gripped me tighter.

  Endless minutes later, boots thundered closer to the wharf and voices shouted, briefing our guards that the assassins had been apprehended. The guards gave the all-clear for the king to rise within a funnel of men that offered a complete circle of protection.

  “Is everyone okay?” I said hoarsely as Nick helped me up and shoved away a guard who tried to touch me. My chin stung, and my lower leg ached.

  “We must make haste,” Nick said, wiping my chin with his sleeve. The damp spot hurt, confirming that I was bleeding. The barrier of guards escorting us off the barge made it impossible to see, but a woman moaned behind me, and a commotion of people tried to help her.

  A second later, Francis’s unmistakable voice cried out. “No, no, no! By God’s grace, no—I pray you!”

  I spun around with my heart in my mouth. “Where’s Alice?” I said to Nick.

  “Make haste!” he said again, pulling me close as we climbed onto the landing stage. Nick appeared unscathed, but his eyes flamed bright green with a blinding rage that I’d rarely seen.

  A coach waited on the road behind the king’s water gate. Guards with crossbows sat poised inside each window as Nick and I were speedily ushered onto the opposite bench. Perhaps walking up the slope to the palace would be too dangerous.

  “Was someone hurt?” I said through the bile in my throat as I angled to see past the guards. People were still huddled over someone on board the barge.

  “Who took the arrow?” Nick snapped at a page outside the coach window.

  “I believe it was Mistress Alice Grey, Your Majesty,” the boy said, his crooked teeth chattering. “I saw the arrow strike the lady in the chest.”

  The noise that blasted from my lips sounded inhuman. Nick took me in his arms, catching me as I howled into his side.

  16

  I was trapped inside a nightmare, worsened by the sickening jolts of our coach tearing across boggy ground. I sat up, absorbing the passing blur of tangled woodlands and farming cottages. Hampton Court Palace was long behind us.

  “Where are we going?” I said in a choked voice.

  “Robin House,” Nick replied. “Hampton Court Palace is no fortress.”

  “But neither is Robin House.”

  “Few know of the manor’s existence,” he explained. “You shall be more safe there.”

  I slumped against the window, watching the brave bowmen on horseback riding alongside our carriage, ready to strike at anyone following us.

  Alice was shot in the chest with an arrow. Francis was howling. Alice is dead.

  My throat constricted until I couldn’t breathe. There was only one reason the king’s barge would be ambushed on the eve of his wife’s coronation: no matter how well I played the part—no matter how much I tried to fit in—the people didn’t want me as their queen. The same way the Duke of Norfolk, Thomas Grey, and even Francis Beaumont hadn’t. Would this ever end?

  “They are having bonfires in London,” Nick said, pointing at a blush of light haloing the horizon. Given the circumstances, I was pretty sure they weren’t fires of celebration.

  The memory of Alice’s face pushed into my mind again—her smitten smirk melting into Francis’s—and another sob convulsed from my throat. Nick squeezed me tightly, his breaths deep and heavy.

  We held each other until our coach slowed along the mossy pathway leading to Robin House. The guards rushed ahead to check over the manor and light the fires, but Nick and I barely saw them as he ushered me upstairs. We said nothing to each other…the creaking of floorboards as we moved was the only sound to penetrate the unbearable silence.

  Not wanting to see anyone, we untied each other’s intricate coronation outfits and climbed into the bed, grasping for each other’s warmth. Exhaustion sent me to sleep without effort, but I soon woke to an inky-black sky through the leaded windowpanes. Nick lay sleeping, a peaceful silhouette of a troubled angel. I knew he loved me—he wouldn’t have risked everything to be with me if he didn’t. But for Alice to die before she was meant to...just because Nick and I had defied the path of history to be together? The thought tasted like bitter poison.

  Emmie, what have you done?

  When the thoughts turned so cold that I shivered, I tugged the fur blankets to my chin and took slow, focused breaths so I didn’t end up with an asthma attack on top of everything else. I twisted every which way to shake off the despair in my heart, but there was nowhere to hide.

  By some miracle, I slept a while longer until my eyes twitched open to the relief of daylight and an empty mattress beside me. The memories of the night before resurfaced, and I dodged them by dozing for as long as I could. Before long, however, my mounting concern about Nick’s whereabouts pushed me out of bed.

  After sluggishly dressing in the simplest kirtle I could find in the clothes chest, I headed downstairs. Nick was in the dining chamber, huddled over a hand-painted map with four of his privy councilors, but there was no sign of Francis Beaumont. He must’ve stayed with Alice while she…I swallowed a sob. One of the earls was addressing the king about war taxes, but when Nick saw me, he excused himself, guiding me outside to the courtyard.

  “Are you well?” he said, surveying my injured chin. “I wished not to awaken you.”

  I tumbled into his arms, my stinging eyes locked on the patch of ground where, just a few days ago, we’d married each other with nothing but hope in our hearts.

  As I struggled to speak, Nick pulled me to look at him. “Emmie, my lords brought word from Hampton Court. Mistress Grey is alive.”

  Tears rushed to my eyes. “Are you serious?”

  “The lady was shot in the shoulder, not the chest. Doctor Norris says she will be well.” He exhaled like he still couldn’t believe it. “Mistress Grey is being tended to at court, and Lord Warwick will remain with her.”

  The hopeless, heavy mass inside me exploded into a burning ball of light. I wanted to cry and scream and shout from the rooftops.

  “When can we go back?”

  Nick cleared his throat. “You shall not return to the palace, my lady. However, I will take my leave from here this day.”

  I didn’t know how to reply. Why would he leave me here?

  Nick took my silence as an objection, and his eyes pleaded with me. “It is much too dangerous for your person to be at court during this time. My council has gathered news throughout the night.” His cheeks reddened, his jaw tight. “Fires of high treason are blazing across London in protest of your coronation. Henry Howard’s rebellion against you is spreading, and we believe he sent
the archers to the coronation feast. Fear not, my lady; when I find that devil, I will see him dragged through the city alive, and then hung, drawn, and quartered, with his innards fed to the street dogs.”

  My stomach rolled with nausea. Hopefully, Norfolk didn’t feed me to the dogs first.

  “Just tell me what to do,” I said, shaking away the terrifying image. I couldn’t believe this was happening—that people actually wanted me dead for marrying the king.

  “You will remain at Robin House under close guard,” Nick said firmly. “You may keep a maidservant, but no one must know you are here—not even your ladies; do you understand? Few know of this place, and there is nowhere more safe for you to be while I crush Howard and every traitor who seeks to defy his sovereign king.”

  He began detailing a play-by-play about arrests and burnings and beheadings…the words right out of a textbook about Nicholas the Ironheart. His hands balled into fists so tight that his knuckles whitened. I wanted to calm him down—to talk him out of this merciless spiral—but my lips wouldn’t open. Not only did I need Nick to continue being honest with me, but I was no longer sure that kindness and mercy were the best ways to govern a sixteenth-century country. Norfolk’s allies had just tried to assassinate me, nearly killing Alice in the process. I had to stop acting like we were living in the twenty-first century. If this fight came down to Henry Howard, the traitor, or Nicholas Tudor, the reigning King of England, I would support my husband, regardless of how much blood was spilled.

  “Please be careful,” I whispered, my body weak at the thought of losing him. For all I knew, harming the king was part of Henry Howard’s plan to get back at me.

  Nick caught the fear in my face and tried to hug it away, a tingling heat coursing through our connected bodies. When we parted, he twisted the blue-diamond ring off his finger and slid it onto my thumb.

  “What are you doing? I uttered.

  He pressed his lips together, steadying himself. “My dearest love, it is time for you to make me a most important promise.”

  I froze, hanging on every word that Nick struggled to say.

  “Emmie, if your life is in danger—at any moment—you will wear this ring and do everything in your power to use it. Wait not for me. Do you hear me? If your life is at stake, you will go home to your time without hesitation. I must have your word.”

  I couldn’t grasp my whirring thoughts. The enchanted ring had acted strangely for so long now that I wasn’t sure how many time travel trips were left in it. What if I did what Nick asked, and then I could never get back here to him? I’d made my choice—it was to stay here with Nick. We were married now, and I wasn’t going anywhere.

  A sheen of tears glazed his restless eyes as they searched mine.

  “I don’t want to use the ring any more without you,” I said. “When I went back to my time to get Susanna Grey, the ring was struggling to work again. I woke up in Massachusetts, like, four times. Now that we’re married…now that we’ve been together…I–I can’t be that far away from you. We have to figure something else out.”

  He stepped forward, threading our hands together. “Let us then make one more vow. Should your life be at stake, you will use this ring to journey home without me. I beseech you to give me your word on that. But for any reason other, we will use this ring only together.”

  I squeezed his fingers. “Only together,” I affirmed. “I’m never leaving you again unless it’s to literally save my life.”

  “Only together,” he repeated in a strained voice. “We will swear it.”

  We sealed the vow with a prolonged, distraught kiss, and I cried into his chest, dreading letting go.

  Our goodbye was quick and heavy with despair. We couldn’t even look at each other for fear of it being the last time we ever would.

  Tears streamed down my face while I watched from the upstairs window as my husband climbed aboard his coach. It careened away from the house in a fog of dust.

  My back slid down the stone wall until my bottom hit the floorboards. I rested there for a while, listening to the reassuring sound of the guards’ footsteps pacing the manor downstairs. A scary number of people wanted my head on a stick, and I was pretty sure that Robin House didn’t have a panic room. I had to come up with a hiding place where I could fall asleep in case the assassins figured out where I was and stormed the house—if the enchanted ring even worked properly. I slid it onto my thumb and curled my fingers over the smooth stone.

  So much had changed in a handful of months. I’d gone from arguing with Nick over my right to use the blue-diamond ring whenever I wanted to hating the idea of traveling to my time without him. Things had become worse here than I could have imagined, but what mattered most to me now was that we stayed together.

  Only together.

  As long as Henry Howard doesn’t jam Nick’s head onto a pike and parade it through the city of London.

  A descending curtain of dread sent me to my feet. I had to dig myself out of my grisly thoughts before they buried me alive. I moved to the cloudy standing mirror and sized up my appearance, straightening my lacy sleeves. After dragging an ivory comb through my knotted hair, I braided the unruly waves and pinned a hood over the top. Despite being under glorified house arrest, I was still the wife of the King of England.

  My young maidservant Clemence entered with a buttery-smelling custard tart and a bowl of winter berries. I wanted her to stay and chat with me, but she didn’t dare impose, and I was too slow to request it. The door shut behind her, and I ate in gloomy silence except for the soft slurps of my lips savoring creamed sugar.

  Those sounds—alongside the clink of pewter plates, the thud of oak doors closing, and the shuffling boots of guards on patrol—became my life for the next few weeks. I stopped counting how long I’d been at Robin House after seven days because time was moving agonizingly slowly and keeping track only made it worse.

  During our breathless farewell, Nick had explained that we couldn’t write to each other and risk the letters being intercepted. He kept to his word, and no news came. Knowing nothing about his efforts to capture Henry Howard was like living in purgatory. One minute I’d be dusting the bookcase and imagining the former duke spearing Nick with a ten-foot sword; the next, I’d be perked up by a vision of my king in a parade of victory. Which one was it to be?

  To release some of the nervous energy bubbling up inside me, I asked the chief guard, Joseph Blackburn, if I could jog along some of the wild pathways around the house if I took a bodyguard with me. He agreed with visible reluctance, and I set off in my leather boots down the slope to the birch trees and back again, with four plain-clothes guards trailing me. On day two, a painful blister had formed where the knot of my garter held up my woolen hose. Without any gym shoes, I was going to have to make do with brisk walks instead of jogging. I fell into a favorite route that ended atop the grassy hill overlooking the hamlet, where chirping birds rollicked in the rustling trees. I’d sit there for a while and watch the villagers tending to their winter gardens, taken by the simplicity of their lives. I ached to go down there, not only to see a sixteenth-century farming settlement up close, but to feel less alone here. Aside from Clemence and the guards, I hadn’t seen a human face in weeks.

  When I asked Mister Blackburn if I could visit the village, he declined with a physical recoil. Later that night, I overheard him arguing with one of the younger guards. The kid warned Blackburn that refusing the queen’s request could be a shortcut to the Tower of London—or worse—if the king learned of it. The next morning, Mister Blackburn apologized and offered to take me to the hamlet himself if I agreed to avoid the villagers, in case any of them had been in the city for my coronation—as unlikely as that was—and recognized me. Shadows circled his bloodshot eyes. The poor guy hadn’t slept a wink over this thing.

  I borrowed some clothes from a confused Clemence, noting the relief that blew across Mister Blackburn’s face. No one would guess that I was the persecuted queen in a tawny wool
en kirtle and a plain apron and coif. I wore no jewelry but kept the blue-diamond ring close to me, hiding it on my thumb inside a pair of woolen gloves.

  Four guards hid on the hillside as Joseph Blackburn and I approached the village on horseback, disguised as father and daughter out for a ride. The hamlet was no more than a dirt path lined with single-story wattle-and-daub cottages with few windows. We tethered our horses to an iron ring in a wall and strolled down the dusty track on one side, clinging to the last strip of sunlight. A trio of grubby-faced girls in knitted dresses were feeding scraggly lettuce leaves to a goat beside the pigsty. When they saw us approaching, they scampered to hide behind a man tending to a crop of onions with a hoe.

  Mister Blackburn’s horse grunted from the wall a few feet behind us. The poor steed had trodden into a tangle of sheets hanging from a wooden frame. Joseph paced back to untwist the horse, apologizing to the farmer. The man stopped weeding and rested on the handle of his hoe, giving us a slight nod of greeting that also delivered a message: we were being watched, so we’d better not be here to start trouble.

  Mister Blackburn moved us on, and we ambled past a pen of undersized sheep and healthy bed of spinach and cabbage, before reaching what looked to be a small alehouse.

  “Shall we make ready to return?” Blackburn said, chewing the inside of his lip.

  The sight of a marking scratched into the wall beside the alehouse interrupted my response. It was the shape of a flower within a circle, which I’d seen before—carved into the cheeks of the witch Agnes Nightingale.