by Barbara Kyle
She clambered into the skiff.
“Take the oars!” Carlos said.
She realized he was making no move to get aboard. “But you must come with—”
“Row!” he said. He jerked the painter knot free of the iron ring and tossed it aboard.
Isabel watched dumbfounded as he ran back to the cart, reached for the quiver, grabbed another arrow, and fitted it into his bow. He stepped out into the open, aimed, and let the arrow fly. It clanged off the smithy chimney and rattled on the roof. Carlos ducked back behind the cart just as an arrow whizzed over his head. Another hit the water step, its tip screeching along the stone. Carlos hunkered behind the cart. Another arrow clattered into the cart wheel spokes.
Isabel watched in horror. He was so exposed, even behind the cart. And the guards had all found sheltered positions to fire on him. She glanced at her father. He sat slumped against the gunnel but was struggling to get up as if to help. “Stay here, Father.” She scrambled out of the skiff, looped the painter through the ring, and ran back to the cart. She crouched beside Carlos, panting.
He waved his arm angrily at her. “Get out of here!”
“You can’t stay!”
“You need cover to get out into the river. I will hold them off. Go!”
“But they’ll kill you!”
Ignoring her, he dumped the quiver of arrows, slewing them out along the lip of the cart floor. He whipped out his sword and laid it among them, readying it, then fitted another arrow, stood out, fired, and ducked back.
Isabel stared at the sword, incredulous. “What can you possibly do with that?
There are at least eight men left.”
He glanced at the sword as he snatched another arrow. “Last resort,” he said, almost to himself. “Now go!”
“No, I won’t leave you. Not after what you’ve done for me and my father.”
“Not for him,” he said, fitting the arrow. He looked at her. His voice was low. “I do this for you. Go. Ve tu con Dios.”
Isabel felt her heart in her throat, as if it had swelled inside her breast. “But … you’ll die if you stay.”
“That is my work.”
“To die?”
He smiled grimly. “It was only a matter of time.”
“No! I won’t have it!” She grabbed his sword. She was surprised how heavy it was. An arrow thudded into the cart floor inches from their backs and Carlos twisted around to gauge its source, and before he could stop her Isabel had moved to the wharf edge. Holding the sword with both hands she heaved it around in a wide arc and let go of it. It splashed into the water and disappeared. Carlos stared after it in appalled disbelief.
“Now come with us!” Isabel cried, rushing back to him.
Two arrows whizzed by. Carlos looked at her, his eyes wide. “No … they will fire on you as you go. I must—”
“They won’t be able to see us. Look!” She pointed out to the river. The fog had rolled in swiftly, and now it shrouded all the ships in the middle of the river. Van Borselen’s carrack could no longer be seen. Only a band of water was still visible between the wharf and the bank of fog.
Carlos blinked at the sight.
“Come!” Isabel said. She took hold of his sleeve and pulled. He took a step forward, but then, unsure, turned to look at her. She turned too, about to push him toward the skiff.
The arrow pierced her thigh from the back. Its force, like an ice pick, buckled her leg and pain like lightning jolted up her backbone. She fell forward, limp, the arrowhead buried in her flesh.
Carlos caught her. “Isabel!” He lifted her in his arms and ran. With her face to the sky, Isabel gazed at the pearly vista yawning overhead.
Carlos reached the skiff. “Thornleigh! Take the oars!”
“My God … Bel!”
“Move!” Carlos yelled.
“Yes … yes!”
Isabel was jerked in Carlos’s arms as he kicked free the painter. She felt the wobble of the skiff, felt his arms tighten around her to cushion their fall as he thudded with her onto the bow seat. Fire blazed through her leg. Holding her on his lap, Carlos flung her arm around his neck for her to cling to. Her head lolled against his chest. An arrow crunched into the skiff’s gunnel.
Carlos’s voice, loud above her ear: “Row to the Emperor’s ship!”
Her father: “But … where is it?”
Isabel lifted her head. The fog was coming at them like a white wall. There were no ships. There was nothing but the fire raging in her leg and the wall of pearly moisture about to suck them in.
“Just take us into the fog!” Carlos ordered. “I must get the arrow out.”
“Oh, God, is she—?”
“Row!”
The splash of oars. The boat rocking wildly. Guards’ shouts from the quay. Arrows hissing overhead. A tearing of cloth as Carlos’s dagger ripped her skirt to reach the protruding arrow. Cold air swept the burning skin of her naked thigh.
Then, suddenly, the arrows stopped hissing. The oars stopped splashing. They were inside the fog.
Gasps of exhaustion came from her father, and ragged breaths from Carlos, his chest hot against her cheek. Faint curses came from the quay. For several moments there was no other sound, except the lapping of low waves against the skiff.
Carlos gently lifted Isabel’s head. “The arrow,” he said to her. “It must come out. If I pull backward, it will be worse. I must push it through. You understand?”
She blinked, afraid. The pain was fire. His face stared at her through a flame of red and orange.
He said, “Hold on to me.”
She sat up and placed both trembling hands on his shoulders. He reached over her leg and grasped the arrow at its feathered end and snapped it off. The vibration quivered up through the arrow’s shaft into her thigh. He clenched his teeth, preparing to push the arrow through. She closed her eyes tightly, anticipating the agony. She did not think she could bear the pain.
“No,” he said quietly. “Look at me.”
Their eyes locked. Under her hands on his shoulders she felt his breath drawn in and held. Her eyes did not waver.
He jammed the arrow shaft upwards. The arrowhead slit through the skin at the top of her thigh. Fire raged down to her calf and up to her hip. Her fingernails dug into his shoulders. His eyes never left hers as he wrapped his hand, wet with her blood, around the arrowhead. He wrenched it up. The shaft sucked out of her thigh. The fire became lava boiling through her. She gave herself to Carlos’s eyes, craving their cool gray depths.
Her neck muscles gave way. Carlos whipped his arm around her back just before she went limp against him. He cradled her head against his chest. Her eyelids trembled, and she saw her blood, bright on his fingers. But the edges of her vision were darkening.
“She must have help!” her father said hoarsely. “Where in God’s name is the ship?”
Isabel forced her head up. Over Carlos’s shoulder, she saw it. The Emperor’s black eagle on the awning, blurred by fog like a spider trapped in ice. “There,” she said. But she was not sure her voice had come out beyond her lips. There was no strength to make it more than a whisper. She lifted a hand as heavy as a hanged man, and pointed to the eagle. “There …”
The blackness overtook her.
37
New Loyaltie
It was a familiar sound, and comforting. The creak of wood on wood of a ship making good way in partnership with the wind. As a child Isabel had listened to it often enough at night as she drifted into sleep, snug on a berth in her father’s caravel.
She opened her eyes to the ceiling, suddenly awake. This was not her father’s ship. A desk sat at the foot of the berth she lay in, and on the desk was a leather logbook with a black eagle embossed on its cover. This was van Borselen’s ship. This was his cabin.
We made it.
Yet she could remember nothing of coming aboard. How long had she been lying here? The cabin’s window was shuttered, but rosy sunlight seeped around its edges. Was
it morning? Had she been unconscious, asleep for a day andnight? The faint splash of waves against the hull and the soft whump as a puff of wind hit a sail told her they must be out in the Channel.
A dull pain throbbed through her left leg. She pulled herself to sit up. She lifted the blanket, and then her skirt, splotched reddish-brown with dried blood, and looked at her leg. A fresh white bandage was wound around her thigh, its ends neatly knotted on top. She saw, in a flash of memory, the bloody arrowhead breaking through her flesh as Carlos had pulled out the shaft. Carlos. She leaned back against the wall behind her and saw him. He was asleep, sitting low in an armchair by the head of her berth. His legs were stretched out before him, his arms folded over his chest. His head rested on his shoulder in sleep.
Her eyes traveled over him. The familiar, scuffed riding boots. The new breeches, their fine black wool speckled with dried mud after the frantic ride from Smithfield. The tooled leather scabbard at his hip, empty of sword. The rich black velvet doublet, its new sheen marred, like the breeches, with the dust of dried mud. She looked at his large hands, one tucked under his folded arm, the other resting in the crook of the opposite elbow. She looked at his face, his chin shadowed with stubble, his right eyebrow puckered with the scar from Colchester jail. She had to admit something she had never before allowed herself to acknowledge. Rugged and strong, he really was a most beautiful man.
And astonishing. He had given up everything. All that the Queen had just rewarded him with. Riches, status—everything he had craved. She remembered lying on her back in the cart as they fled Smithfield and seeing him upside down. She thought: That’s how everything has been for two weeks—upside down. Her parents’ newly revealed characters. Martin deserting her. Sydenham’s false friendship. Carlos rescuing her father. No one was the person they had said they were. Isabel wondered, was she? She recalled Carlos saying, that night in the stable, “Words. They mean nothing. It is what people do that counts.”
He had done something extraordinary. He had given up all his hard-won rewards, just to save her father. And the fact that he had made this sacrifice—had been ready, in the end, to give up even his life—amazed her now with a rush of happiness that seemed to swell her breast and force out her breath. “I do this for you,” he had said on the wharf.
His eyes opened and focused on her. He sat up quickly and rubbed a hand roughly over his face. For a long moment they looked at each other. The ship listed gently, creaking.
“How do you feel?” he asked.
Thankful, she thought. “Alive,” she said quietly, and then remembered with a stab of guilt: Unlike Wyatt’s men. She closed her eyes at the thought.
“Pain?” he asked.
Pain, indeed—the torture of knowing she had done a terrible thing. An unforgivable thing. She had destroyed Wyatt and his cause. Tears pricked her eyes as she thought of his trusting men … of good old Tom. Her chin trembled.
Carlos jumped up. “There is a doctor. I will get him, yes?”
“No. No, it’s not my leg.”
He sat and pulled the chair closer to her, frowning with concern. “What then?”
She bit her lip to hold back the tears. “I was helping Wyatt. Taking him messages. But in the end I betrayed him … to save my father. Because Sydenham had set archers at Ludgate to kill him.” The baseness of her act struck her now with its full impact. “I shut the gate. Wyatt’s men died because of me.” The look of surprise on Carlos’s face made her torment cut deeper. She turned away.
“Not because of you,” he said. “They were going to die anyway.”
“No, not if the French army had come. And if—”
“There was no French army. They would never invade to help such a revolt. Englishmen were not enough behind it. A French force, alone in hostile territory?” He shook his head. “Suicide.”
Isabel stared at him, and realized, with a slight shock, that it must have been true. That the help coming from France had only been the wishful thinking of Ambassador de Noailles. A fantasy. “But … Wyatt did have a strong following,” she insisted. “He and his men could have done it alone. They were so dedicated.”
“In war, that is not enough.”
“It might have been, if London had been opened to them. You told me Pizarro did it. You said he conquered Peru with less than two hundred men.”
“Pizarro struck like lightning. His attacks were ruthless. And once he had stunned the enemy, he had the might of all Spain behind him.” He leaned closer to her, his arms resting on his knees. “Wyatt took Rochester, then he waited. The worst mistake. It gave his enemy time. Then he came to London with almost no support. And would not use his big guns to kill.” He shook his head again and said definitively, “Wyatt did not have a chance. From the very beginning.”
Isabel felt a wave of pity for the leader of the doomed rebellion. But she felt an overwhelming release, too, like a dam breaking. This absolution from Carlos broke her heart. Her tears spilled. Her very relief made her weep in shame.
But weeping would change nothing. She knew, deep in her bones, that there was no solace for her. Even if her closing the gate had had no bearing on the outcome of Wyatt’s rebellion, the fact remained that she had betrayed him. Her culpability for that, she knew, was a burden she would have to live with for the rest of her life.
As she wiped the tears from her cheeks she was aware that Carlos was studying her face in wonder. “You really shut the gate?” he asked.
She looked down, acutely aware that her mere acceptance of guilt did not entitle her to any kindness. “Like my father, you think I’m wicked. So disloyal.”
“No. I think you are …” He hesitated, searching for the word. He did not find it. Instead, he reached out and touched her cheek gently, uncertainly. “I wish …”
A spark shot through her body, firing her blood. His touch had always had that power over her. Carlos swallowed, but said no more. He did not have the words. But Isabel didn’t need words. She knew what he wished.
He wiped the trace of a tear from her chin. “Is this for your man?” A wrangle of emotions played over his face: tenderness, jealousy, hope. “You cry because he was hanged?”
Isabel realized he meant Martin. He thought Martin had been executed as part of Wyatt’s army.
He added awkwardly, “I understand. It makes you sad.” He tried to force somberness into his voice but did not do it well. His satisfaction at Martin’s removal rang through. His hand rested on the bed beside her.
“No, Martin didn’t hang,” she said, wanting to make it clear that she was no longer betrothed. “He left England days ago.” Aware that she and Martin shared the shameful distinction of disloyalty, she added soberly, “Like me, he’s safe.”
Carlos’s face darkened. He drew back his hand. Isabel saw that he had misinterpreted her words. He didn’t know that Martin was gone from her life forever. She longed to explain, and was about to speak, when there was a knock at the door. It opened, and her father’s pale face peered in. Carlos got up.
Thornleigh’s expression was full of relief at seeing Isabel conscious. A sigh shuddered from him. “Thank God,” he whispered.
He came to the foot of her bed. He shot a glance at Carlos. Carlos moved away to the window and opened the shutter. Thornleigh came hesitantly to the chair and perched tensely on its edge, as if not sure that Isabel would suffer him so near. His shoulders were hunched. “How are you, Bel? Is the leg terribly painful?”
She was struck by how much weight he had lost. During the crisis she hadn’t noticed it. Saw, too, that his face was haggard. A scab had formed on his lower lip where Carlos had struck him at Smithfield, and there was a purple bruiseon his forehead where the bald man had kicked him. She recalled seeing him in Colchester jail the day after her mother had been shot, and thinking he’d seemed like a man who had been punched but had not yet toppled. That same look of dazed uncertainty hung about him still.
“It’s not too bad,” she answered quietly.
&n
bsp; He plucked at the edge of the bedcover, avoiding her eyes. “The doctor on board says you’re strong. Says the wound will heal in no time.”
She nodded.
“Bel, I … I want to say—” He stopped and glanced over at Carlos. Carlos turned and walked out, closing the door behind him.
“Bel,” Thornleigh said, “there’s so much to say …” He shook his head, despairing of finding a way to begin. He looked down at the floor, distractedly rubbing one hand over the back of the other. “I couldn’t forgive you … for Ludgate. And I was trying to steel myself to be hanged … and then you saved me and—”
“It was Carlos who saved you.”
Ignoring this, he repeated, “I couldn’t forgive you and that was wrong. But you were wrong, too, Bel. Sacrificing Wyatt and his men, just for my sake. That was not justified. Do you see that now? See how wrong it was?”
She watched him. His brow so furrowed, his fingers aimlessly rubbing the back of his hand. Wrong, she wondered? She was only too aware that her act at Ludgate was a weight that would always be on her—but wrong? That judgment seemed somehow simpleminded, childish. She had made a decision at a moment of crisis, nothing more, nothing less. No “right” decision had been available. Faced with the fact that choosing either way would make her responsible for someone’s death, she had made a choice. That was all.
She would not apologize. She would live with what she had done, live by her actions. She was a child no longer.
Her father’s gaze was on her, a parent awaiting her contrition. She struck back. “Were you not wrong all these years—and my mother too—to keep secret from me the facts of your past? Keep me a child?”
She saw that she had amazed him. “Master Legge told me,” she said. “The dangerous missions you and Mother ran to rescue heretics. Mother condemned and almost burned at the stake.”
“We thought it best. Keep you ignorant … to keep you safe. Was that … wrong?”
Seeing him struggle for the words as though overwhelmed by it all, Isabel felt a rush of understanding. Of true kinship. “No, sir, you were not wrong. You made a choice, and stuck by it. It is all any of us can do.”
