by Barbara Kyle
“She has not plotted. I would pledge my life on it.”
He snorted. “Your life is a paltry thing. I would my father had snuffed it out before your husband murdered him.” Honor felt his hatred like a fire reduced to embers but no less scorching. “However, the life of the heretic Princess is worth a great deal. And I will allow you to go on enjoying yours, if you will sign this statement of her crime.”
She could not speak. Elizabeth’s life for mine.
He held the paper out for her. “There is pen and ink,” he said with a nod at a small table by the window. “Stand, and sign.”
Silence was her answer.
He cocked his head at her. “It disconnects the joints, you know. Shoulders. Wrists. Ankles. Hips. Tears the tissue out of the sockets.” He was looking at her—no need to look at the apparatus.
She dared not look. It would force out the scream threatening in her throat.
“I will ask you one last time. One last chance, you understand? Will you sign this paper?”
Yes. The unspoken word squirmed behind the silent scream.
“It is not a difficult question. Yes or no?”
Yes! Give me the pen! She did not move.
He shook his head like a teacher disappointed in a pupil. “Your choice.” He nodded to his servants. They pulled her to her feet. Dragged her toward the rack. She knew she could not hold back the scream.
But the rack went by her. They dragged her on, all the way to the wall. Two iron cuffs hung on chains from a high steel frame. She had not seen them before. Had seen only the rack.
They clamped the cuffs around her wrists, their iron cold as stone. The sunshine blazed on her face, making her squint, turning Grenville into a blur. She heard the pulleys squeal and felt her arms lifted. Felt her whole body lifted off the floor like a carcass. Her shoulder sockets screamed. Her panicked brain made her hands grope for the chains to take up the slack, sheer instinct, futile. The pain was so sharp it sucked out her breath and churned her bowels.
“Enough?” Grenville’s face was so close, the bony scar above his lip seemed to smile.
Pain. Panic. “Stop…please…stop!”
“Agree to sign this confession, and it will stop.”
Stunned by the pain, she retched.
“Will you sign?”
She made herself move her head in answer. No.
He nodded to the men. The pulleys screeched. The pain was so fierce, bile shot up her throat.
“Think about it,” Grenville said.
Gagging, she saw his blur go out the door. Leaving her. To suffer. How long? Panic overwhelmed her. Don’t leave me! But he was gone. Her head lolled in agony between her stretched arms. Leaving her to suffer…to faint…to die.
No. She had not come this far to abandon everything—everyone—by giving in to death. She forced her head up. Squeezed every drop of strength to fight down the bile and the terror. She blinked in the sunshine. Was it shining on her home? On her garden? On the tender blossoms struggling to live? Even as her shoulders and wrists screamed, the thought of her flowers soothed the core of her suffering. An oasis in the desert of her pain. She gave herself to it. Her roses. Climbing the trellis by the copper sundial. Damask roses, red and white. Yellow pansies with sly, winking faces. Violet nasturtiums fluttering in the breeze…
Her vision darkened. She slipped into the void of darkness.
“Will you sign?” Grenville was back.
Her head jerked up, a snap of pain. His narrow face loomed close to hers. The thin lips, the scar turning white as he smiled. She was disoriented by pain…had he been gone for hours? Minutes? The sunshine had darkened to dusk. A feeble purple light chilled the room. So, hours…
“Enough?” His horrible face! It shot fresh fire through her wrists and shoulders. She closed her eyes and struggled to stay in the oasis. Herb garden. Rosemary, thyme, mint, sage. Brush past them with the hem of her skirt and smell the fragrance. Tap the morning dew off the pink eglantine…stroll past tall, purple-red poppies…tissue-thin white marshmallows…bold oxeye daisies…the riot of daffodils that tumbles down to the water meadow…
“Sign, and this ends.”
His face swam before her. She could barely focus. Barely force out a croak. “No.”
He glanced at one of the men, and she gasped feebly, waiting for the screech of the pulleys and worse pain.
The screech came. But not pulling her higher into agony. Lowering her.
Her feet touched the ground. She staggered. Her legs were afire with the numb torment of pins and needles and would not support her. She pitched forward. Her arms were so stiff she could not break her fall. She twisted just in time and fell on her side.
They hauled her to her feet. Dragged her to the rack. Her mind screamed I’ll sign! Sign with my blood if you want! Just don’t…
They dragged her past the rack. To the door. “Let her go,” Grenville said.
They let go of her arms. She swayed in place. Instinctively, her hand shot out to Grenville’s arm for balance. She rocked back, sickened by the thought of touching him.
“Walk with me,” he said.
To freedom? She ached for it, ached so hard it was torture.
Down a corridor they went. She shuffled as fast as she could, trying to keep up with him, his two men at her heels. Anything to get free. Yet, how could that be? What could have changed to make him release her? They went down a stone staircase that wound like a corkscrew, and the farther they went, the darker the stone vault became. They carried on down another corridor, narrower and cold as ice, passing occasional torches that flickered in wall sconces, giving just enough light for her to glimpse black slime on the walls. Feeble voices sounded from somewhere, the moans and whimpers of prisoners, sending a shudder through her. The smell was so foul she had to hold her breath.
Terror seized her again. She was not being taken to freedom but to something worse than before. Death? Shivering overtook her. Her legs refused to go on.
The two men gripped her arms and forced her along the last twenty feet to the end of the corridor. They stopped in front of a cell whose door was iron bars. The cell was no bigger than the space for a dog to turn around in. Its floor glinted with black wetness and the stench was putrid. A man sat there, his back against one wall, knees pulled up to his chest, boots touching the opposite wall. It was so dark that all she could make out at first was his hulked shape and the bushy beard that engulfed the lower half of his face. Then he saw her. He struggled to his feet, and a shock knifed through her. Richard.
“Honor?” He lurched to grab the bars. “Honor?”
Tears scalded her throat. “Oh, my love,” she moaned, “my love…” His filthy clothes hung on his bony shoulders like rags. She wrapped her hands around his fingers on the bars, and the familiar roughness of his skin made her tears spill. She pressed her body against the bars to reach in to touch his face, but Grenville jerked her back.
“None of that.”
“Why is he kept like this? He has done no crime!”
“Other than murder my father?”
She wished she could scratch out his eyes. “But it’s information on the rebels you want. He knows nothing.”
“You do. Sign, and he’s a free man.”
Free! She looked at Richard’s sunken eyes blinking at her, glinting with anguish, with love, with fury. He had not lost his wits. Despite everything, his fierce spirit seemed stronger than ever. His suffering cracked her heart. She would gladly die to let him live.
“Honor…” His hoarse voice was parched from thirst. “Whatever he says…don’t believe him.”
“Quiet, Thornleigh, or see your wife altered. How fetching do you think she’d look with her ears cut off?”
They both lurched to the bars again, desperate to touch each other.
Grenville’s men hauled her back with such brutal ferocity it brought a roar from Richard. They dragged her away, down the corridor. She twisted to look back at him, but he was a fading sha
dow among shadows, shouting.
She hardly knew how she stayed on her legs all the way back.
“I have been easy on you,” Grenville said when they returned to the room with the rack. “Perhaps that was a mistake.” He strolled around the apparatus as though appraising it. He patted its wood frame and fingered one of the screws like a master craftsman sure of his work. “Eventually, I promise you, you will sign. Nevertheless, my offer stands. Sign now, and your husband will go free.” He walked past her to the door and beckoned his men to follow. “Take the night to think about it,” he said, as though making a reasonable business offer.
When they left, they took away even the stool.
The long night was more horrible than she could have imagined. She relieved herself, skirts hiked up, into a gutter whose vile effluent streaming from several other cells trickled out a hole in the wall. She lay on the stone floor as cold as a block of ice, and curled up to hold on to a flicker of body heat. Did Grenville have Adam crammed in some foul cell, too? Could Richard survive another week? His misery tore her apart, worse than any rack, as she thought of him in that filth, that cold, that darkness. A corpse in a coffin had more space.
If I leave him there he’ll die, slowly, in agony.
If I sign Grenville’s confession, Elizabeth will die, her head severed by an axe.
Both nightmare images sawed her mind until, exhausted in mind and body, she sank into a pain-fogged drowse. Clanging at the barred door jerked her awake. It was Grenville’s men, banging to keep her from sleeping. Every half hour or so they clanged and shouted, leaving her lurching between desolate nightmares and even more desolate wakefulness.
When dawn lightened the frigid room, they came again. Grenville wore a fresh linen shirt under a sumptuous yellow velvet doublet. Honor struggled to her feet, shivering. Every bone throbbed with pain. Every muscle felt shredded.
“I hope the night’s rest has cleared your mind to see the wisdom of cooperating,” he said.
“I have tried—” she began, but she was so weak her words came out slurred, and this humiliation seemed harder to bear than all the rest.
Impatient, he did not wait for more. “Here are your choices. You can sign the statement, in which case I will immediately escort you to a room upstairs, where a breakfast of fresh bread and Dutch cheese awaits you along with clean clothes, and you will see your husband sent home this very day, unharmed. Or you can refuse to cooperate, in which case I will stretch your body on that rack like a hog’s hide until your shoulders and ankles spring from their sockets. Your screams will not interest me. Only your signature. You have one minute to decide.”
She was almost thankful. No more torture of thinking. “I do not need a minute.”
“Good.” A slight smile.
She struggled not to slur the next words. They might be her last. “This morning, my lord, I find I am not hungry.”
His rage was all the worse for being controlled.
She willed control, too. She had decided just before dawn, remembering Richard’s words. “Don’t believe him…” He was right. Grenville would never release the man who had killed his father. And he could not be holding Adam. If he were, he would have used him, too, to threaten her.
They dragged her to the rack. Tied the straps. Fitted the screws. She willed her mind to wind inside the flowers of her garden. Pale pink rose petals, warmed by the sun…the leather straps cut the skin of her ankles and wrists. Sprightly blue speedwells, jeweled by the dew…the long screws creaked…her body was elevated, suspended…her legs spread, her head lolled, her panic roiled…Maroon veins of iris…blood red gillyflower…
21
Lord and Master
June 1556
The Elizabeth hit the bottom of the wave trough with a bone-shuddering crash. Adam and his crew staggered to keep their footing and their handholds. The next monster wave picked up the ship and hurled her into the sky. Everyone hung on, suspended in air, stomachs sickeningly lifted, waiting for the next shuddering descent. Rain lashed their faces. Wind screeched in the rigging. The ship crashed down and men reeled, some tumbling to the deck. One cried out to Jesus.
Adam, at the wheel high on the sterncastle deck, swiped rain from his eyes and looked over his shoulder at the damage that threatened to sink his ship. The mizzenmast had snapped and crashed onto the leeward rail, trailing its canvas and rigging in the churning foam. Waves pounded the tangled mess, half drowning it, dragging the Elizabeth onto her side. The ship wallowed and slewed as tons of water mercilessly beat the wooden hull. If Adam could not get her under control she could capsize.
“Master Curry,” he yelled to his first mate standing beside him.
Jack Curry, gripping the binnacle for balance, did not hear Adam’s voice above the howl of the storm. Adam shook him by the shoulder and yelled into his ear, “Master Curry, cut loose that spar!”
“Aye, sir!”
Curry staggered away to command the nearest crewmen. At his order, five of them pulled their knives and hacked at the dripping ropes. They stumbled, knocked off balance by the giant seesaw the ship had become. Adam’s knuckles whitened, his grip on the wheel never slackening. The men struggled to their knees, then to their feet, and again sawed the ropes. The last taut line severed with a crack that whipped an end to slash a man’s cheek. The waves snatched the freed mizzenmast with its tangle of shredded sail and rigging, and churned it. Adam and his men watched it hurtle up through the foam as if thrashing in the jaws of a monster. It tumbled away in the black water to their stern, and into oblivion.
Adam felt the ship right itself with a shudder like a dog shaking water off its back.
Another mountainous wave reared up above the rail, about to swamp them. He wrenched the wheel over, turning the ship into the waves. The Elizabeth pitched and fell as she cut through the writhing hills of water, but Adam knew he could control her now. Spray flew at his head, his hair shaggy with water. He felt salt sting a gash between his thumb and forefinger, turning his blood to pink water.
Jack Curry, dripping, made his way back to him and shouted, “Captain, we should turn back.”
Adam looked at the men clinging to the rails and to handholds on the mainmast, some white faced, some shaking, like so many ghosts. They were afraid. And angry. They didn’t like him taking them straight out into the storm. They were only hours out of Calais, and if he turned back now they could limp into the French harbor and into warm beds by nightfall. He looked ahead at the black clouds charging him from the west. From home. The executions have begun, Cecil had written. Adam shook his head at Curry. “No.”
With that decision, he settled into the motion of the ship, and into that space of calm that surrounded him at times like this. It was like standing in the eye of the storm itself, where there was peace. It wasn’t that he relaxed, for his muscles stayed tight and his mind stayed sharp to every change in pitch of the wind’s keening and every shift of balance underfoot. It was simply that he felt more alive, more in tune with all of life, the whole tumultuous world, when he was steering his ship in harmony with it. It was part thrill, part peace, like nothing else.
Not true, he thought. It was like looking into Elizabeth’s eyes.
She was a prisoner of the Queen, again. How was she bearing it? And the poor fellows who had stood with Dudley—his heart bled for them. And raged at the only explanation that made sense. We were betrayed. Inside his soaked leather jerkin the letter from Cecil lay next to his breast.
The executions have begun. Peckham and Daniel were hanged, God rest their souls. Kingston was arrested, and on the way to London he killed himself. St. Loe is under house arrest. Courtenay, Bray, Perrot are all in custody, awaiting trial. Ambassador de Noailles has fled. The lady Elizabeth, too, is penned up in her house, under close guard. I know not what fate awaits her.
And this sad litany is but prelude to my sadder song. Your good father, a prisoner in the Tower these many months, is kept still in that forsaken place, and now, it griev
es me to tell you, so is his lady wife. Lord Grenville, it is said, is using her very roughly. Indeed, her suffering, as I have learned, would make the angels weep.
I send you these dreadful tidings not to unman you with grief, sir, but to exhort you to bear up by seeking God’s grace to endure, and to assure you that I am at your service, and ever your good friend,
Wm. Cecil
Adam’s grip on the wheel tightened, steering for home. Everyone I care about. Everyone I love.
A shout. He looked to the foredeck as a bowsprit sheet snapped. The bowsprit sail blew out with a loud, raw rip. The ship bucked. The tattered canvas whipped in the screaming wind like a creature demented.
“Secure the sail!” Adam shouted.
“Secure the sail!” Jack Curry yelled, and men clambered up the ratlines.
Curry loped, lurching, back to Adam’s side. “Turn back now, sir?”
Adam was watching the wind tear at the lateen-rigged sail on the foremast. The furious force of the wind threatened to rip it, too.
“Sir,” Curry yelled, his eyes on the same sail, “if we lose that one we can’t go on.”
“See to your business, Master Curry. Secure the bowsprit sail. Send two men to the hold for spare canvas. Stand by the foremast.”
“Captain, the men—”
“Will do as I say. To your business, Curry. Now.”
Adam turned his face into the teeth of the wind. It screeched in his ears, like a tortured voice wailing, The executions have begun.
He was sailing home.
“I will not stand in a queue with these fellows,” John Grenville said impatiently to Frances. They stood in the antechamber of the Queen’s apartments with ten or twelve other milling courtiers left to cool their heels.
“Don’t worry,” Frances said, “I’ll get you in before them.” Her status as Mary’s closest friend ensured that privilege. But she had something to ask of John first. If only she could think of a way to broach it without letting on about her real motive. She longed for Adam. This last separation from him seemed endless, ten heavy months so far. It had been bad enough when the witch’s daughter had kept him by her side at Hatfield as he’d recovered from Sturridge’s arrow. It made her ill to think how near he had come to death. But then, recovered, he had launched his ship and sailed away. Gone on business across the Narrow Seas, the servants at his house had told her man Dyer. Yet what could possibly be keeping him away for so long? This is how people in love suffer, she told herself with a small thrill. To lovers, being apart for even a week is hard.
