The Queen's Lady

by Barbara Kyle

  There’d been a skirmish. That was it. Tate had fought back. Been killed. All the crew were dead and no one knew she was here!

  Stop it! There was no reason for Tate to fight. Soon he’d come. But, oh, how much longer? Was it day or was it night?

  In her ears the washing of the ocean swelled and sighed as if a monstrous living seashell breathed inside her skull, and that brought even wilder fantasies…

  Tate had confessed to Pelle! Told him everything. They were both up there, sitting on deck, smiling together like two toads slimy with the scum of this pit, smiling and waiting for her to perish below in this tomb!

  Violently, she beat her forehead on her knees, smashing the hallucination.

  How much longer…?

  Jinner sat in the deserted tavern staring into his mug of ale. From the neighboring precinct of the Benedictine priory came the unhurried chanting of monks at Compline, their eight o’clock service to God. Jinner buried his face in his hands. Ten hours she’d been in the hold.

  The sergeant who had come to the house had accepted his story that she had ridden off to Norwich. “After that, it’s back to London,” Jinner had said. Then he had asked, feigning surprise, “What’s this all about, Sergeant?”

  “Dorothy Beale’s impounded.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Dr. Pelle’s got his reasons. Crew’s been brought ashore, too.”

  Jinner had waited a moment. “When can they go back aboard?”

  “You ask too many questions, mate.”

  At least the crew had not been arrested. The cabin boy of the Dorothy Beale had skulked by Thornleigh’s back door to deliver that news. Pelle suspected a stowaway, the boy had told Jinner, but didn’t have enough evidence for arrests.

  Over his ale Jinner rubbed his face with both hands, cursing Pelle, cursing Edward Sydenham. “And curse that harbor rat, Claypole, to the hottest coals in hell!”

  Honor heard a sound overhead. A man, cursing softly. Very close. Tate had come! No, wait! She must be sure!

  She was so tense that her teeth ripped off a piece of the inside of her cheek, and she had to clamp her knees to keep her quivering muscles still. She craned her neck to see a sliver of lantern light sifting down the crack at the hatch edge, and strained to hear.

  “Just my rotten, God-cursed, pissing luck,” the voice whined.

  Her heart plunged. Not Tate.

  “Aw, leave off,” a second voice said, this one deep and rumbling. “The faster we get through this lot, the faster we’ll be above deck.” The timbre of his voice was so low that Honor imagined the wall at her back was reverberating, and though he spoke of hurrying, his words rolled out slowly, with deliberation.

  “And out of this pissing dungeon,” the first voice whined. “Christ, I hate a hold.”

  “Leave off, I said.”

  “But it’s such a pissing waste of time. There’s no poxy stowaway. What’re we looking for anyway?”

  “There might be printed Lutheran smut. Tuppence if we find any.”

  “Just tuppence? Christ, Legge, I swear you’d step into the jaws of the Devil if a penny lay on his tongue.”

  “Look, I’ve got six mouths to feed,” the bass voice said, “so shut yours and help me shift this lot. Captain said look round the galley.”

  Honor heard more thudding, more grumbling. The men’s voices became indistinct as they moved to another part of the hold. The sliver of light died. Then, from farther off—at the top of the stairway?—a shout. “Hoy! Legge! Captain says come up.”

  “Right,” the bass voice answered.

  “About time,” the whiner said. Boots clomped toward the steps.

  The bass voice called up, “Do we go ashore then?”

  “No luck,” the voice at the top of the stairs answered. “Captain says we bunk down in shifts. Keep a watch on every deck, and search regular as long as it takes to find the bugger. Dobson, you’re to stay below here.”

  “Me?” the whiner cried. “Christ, how long?”

  “Till you’re relieved, man,” said the voice on the stair. Then he laughed. “Never mind. Can’t take us more’n a few days. We’ll either see him…or smell him.”

  The others’ boots clomped off.

  The whiner’s voice was faint, as if he were slumping down alone on the stair. “Aw, piss on this.”

  Silence.

  …a few days!

  She felt the insects of panic crawl over her skin. She had to come out now! Smash the hatch up and crawl out of this hell-hole. He’d seize her. They’d question her. But they’d be lenient with a gentlewoman. Yes, that was it! She’d invent a tale—she’d done it before. Spew out some excuse, spin some lie, confuse them with enough female-flabby babble to save herself…save herself!

  Suddenly, as though an icy wind had blasted her, all her mind’s motion froze. Only one word howled on inside her brain, desolate, alone. Myself. It moaned like a grieving soul lost in barren wastes. Herself…abandon the others…save herself…

  If she saved herself, the Bible would be found, with its names. Others would suffer. Some would die.

  And she knew she could not do it, whatever the cost. She could not snuff out a score of lives, not for just herself…

  And if the cost was her own life?

  She swallowed.

  But they’ll leave before it comes to that…

  Leonard Legge emerged on deck into the blustery twilight.

  A guard with teeth like moldy cheese ambled toward him shoveling food from a wooden plate into his mouth. “Cold beans and grog in the fo’c’sle,” he mumbled through a mouthful. “Find anything down there?”

  “Nothing,” Legge answered. Irritated, he ran a hand through his long black hair lined with streaks of silver and swept back from his forehead like a mane. His only vanity, it did little to balance his coarse, red face. Legge scowled. “Seems we’re staying.”

  “Aye. Plenty of grog, anyway,” the guard said, and shuffled on.

  Legge walked to the railing, rested his elbows on it, and looked out, thinking. He’d been working Pelle’s harbor patrol for only a month and didn’t know what to make of the sight he had caught that morning. He had been rowing the captain’s boat, and they had approached the ship just as Mistress Larke’s skiff was pulling away. As he watched her go he was sure he’d seen a bright orange lock of hair lick out from her hood before her hand swiped it back under. A large hand. And her form…the hunched shoulders, the bowed head, the stiff neck…those couldn’t belong to the little flirt—the dark-haired flirt—who had amused him and the other men in the Tolhouse hall. And why hadn’t she even looked back when they had boarded her ship?

  He pried up a splinter of wood from the parched railing and used it to pick his teeth. Dobson’s right, he thought. Piss on this.

  …Was it day or was it night? How many days? Or nights?

  The ship swayed and her head rolled back and forth along the wall like a doll’s. Slime clumped her hair. Vomit-flecked spittle caked her mouth. She retched, but there was no liquid left in her squeezed-out stomach…

  The guards were relieved regularly. There was always one on watch. Not even a breath of air above the hatch was possible.

  The first time she had felt the warm trickle of urine seep between her legs she had cried tears of shame. The grimace of weeping had split her cracked lips and she’d tasted the metal bite of blood. But that was the first time. Now…now, she hardly felt the trickle…her drawn up legs were slumped apart and felt nothing…her foot crunched the rodent bones and felt nothing…her cracked lips bled, and she felt nothing…

  Shortly after eleven o’clock on the second night Jinner and Tate stood on the town wall, as still as stone monuments. Rain lashed their faces as they gazed at the lantern lights—mere sparks—on the far-off Dorothy Beale. Beyond the dunes, white-crested waves stood up as furious as fighting cocks, battering the beach, battering the anchored ships, and battering the rolling Dorothy Beale.

  “Think they’ve found
her?” Tate asked.

  “They’d have brought her ashore.”

  “Not in this storm.”

  They looked out in silence.

  “She must’ve come out,” Tate said. “No one could stay down there this long.”

  Jinner gnawed the end of his mustache. “You don’t know her.”

  “Jesu,” Tate muttered, “how can she bear it?”

  Rain trickled around Jinner’s drooping, bloodshot eyes. “Curse this storm for a witch’s spell, a skiff can’t get out in it.”

  “Even if we could, we’d never get aboard past Pelle’s men.”

  “Think I don’t know that?” Jinner snapped. “But, Mother of God, how much longer can she last?” He watched the ship. Finally, he said quietly. “Let’s shove off.”

  They turned and walked away.

  They were trudging up a dark street when a door opened not far ahead, spilling candle light. A man tottered out to the doorstep. Claypole. Tate and Jinner stopped. They watched him as he turned back to a blowzy, half-dressed woman in the doorway. He squeezed both of her massive breasts, then slapped her buttock in farewell. She closed the door. The wet street went dark and cold again. Claypole tugged his hat down to fend off the rain and started up the street, whistling.

  Jinner and Tate exchanged glances, then followed him. At the intersection of an alley, they struck. Jinner gagged him from behind, ripped his arm back, and hauled him off the street. While Jinner held him, Tate smashed his nose, then plowed a boot into his groin. Claypole fell and writhed in the muck, gasping and spitting blood. Jinner drew a knife. Tate crouched, took a fistful of Claypole’s hair and yanked his head, face up, to stretch the scrawny neck across his knee.

  Claypole’s eyes gleamed with terror as Tate pried apart his jaws. Jinner straddled his chest. With the tip of his knife, Jinner hooked out the informer’s tongue, grabbed it, and sliced it off.

  “Point a finger at us again, rat,” Jinner said, “and next time it’ll be your throat.”

  …Was it day or was it night? How many days…or nights? Were her eyes shut…or open? Was it black…everywhere? Everywhere…ubique. Quod semper, quod ubique, quod omnibus…“What has been believed always, everywhere, by everyone.” But it wasn’t dark everywhere…was it? Didn’t the sun shine…somewhere? On lakes…waterfalls…sparkling cool water…water…

  In her pain-fogged mind only one bright thread—the merest filament—still glimmered: she had kept faith. She had only to come out, but she had not done it. She had decided to die rather than send others to death. Against every urging of her body, she had kept faith.

  But that body was no longer under her command. She could not restrain the feeble sobs that struggled up from deep in her belly. They reached her ears as if they came from somewhere else, someone else…some forgotten prisoner whose mind wandered in madness…from a living grave by the mainmast that sang in the keelson…sang of captivity, chained to a coffin that rolled on the fathomless sea…

  And there were other voices…

  …the siren song that coaxed ceaselessly, “Come out! Confess, and be saved!”

  …Kyrie eleison…Kyrie…“Father, have mercy upon us…”

  Father!…“Christopher Larke, we damn thee unto the pain of Hell. We curse thee…within and without, sleeping or waking…lying above earth or under earth…in wood, in water, in field, in town…”

  Ralph!…“selling illegal Bibles in the English tongue…”

  Richard!

  Suddenly, she knew she was dying. She had been clinging to a precipice, but it was crumbling away. She could hold on no longer. There was one moment of sheer, insane terror—a crimson explosion inside her brain.

  She let go.

  But death did not snarl at her from the pit as she fell. It did not open its fangs to savage her. It enveloped her, tenderly, quietly. Then she knew. Death was no more than a gentle stopping of all the motions of her body. It was like a strong warm wind on a summer hilltop, a wind that streams so powerfully on the face, it closes the eyes and stops the breath. She gave herself to it, to this overwhelming summer wind, and as she allowed herself to fall into it, it cradled her in its comforting embrace.

  She had chosen this death. She had battled the pain and the terror for three days. She had succeeded. And this was peace.

  On the evening of the third day the Speedwell’s banners frisked in the breeze as she slipped through the lightly frothed waves toward Yarmouth harbor. Thornleigh took the stairs up to the sterncastle deck two at a time and strode along the starboard railing, filling his chest with the sweet tang of the evening. He stopped by the hanging bronze bell he was bringing back from Antwerp. It was a beautiful object, cast by Peter van den Ghein of Mechlin. He spread his hands around the gleaming metal. Its engraving felt new-minted sharp beneath his callused palms. Cost a fortune, he thought, but what a piece of work. She’ll love it. And he let his finger fly against it just to hear its brassy ping.

  They were close enough to see the lazily turning windmills on Yarmouth’s beach when the bowsprit lookout yelled, “Boat off port bow!”

  Thornleigh crossed and gazed out. A skiff was bobbing through the low waves toward the ship. He saw the red cap on the man hauling at the oars. Jinner. The skiff came alongside.

  “What’s amiss, Sam?” Thornleigh called down.

  Jinner lifted his face, showing gray skin around hollow eyes.

  “Christ,” Thornleigh said, “you look like you’ve walked with the Devil himself. What’s happened?”

  “Let me aboard. You’ll hear it all.” Jinner tethered his boat to the ship and stood to come aboard, but as the ladder was thrown down for him he did not move forward. He lowered his head and wept.

  22

  The Bible

  Thornleigh’s face burst above the water, his teeth clenched around a knife. He sucked breath, desperate for air, but he saw with relief that he had surfaced less than ten feet from the Dorothy Beale’s bow. Panting, he glanced back. Under gathering storm clouds that blotted the moon, Jinner, in the skiff, was almost invisible.

  Thornleigh swam to the anchor line and grabbed hold. From under the bulge of the hull he could see nothing up on deck, but he knew there were sentries. He and Jinner had spotted two on lackadaisical patrol, one fore and one aft. He doubted there were more; they wouldn’t be expecting attack. He adjusted the tightly bound, oiled leather bag slung over his bare back, pulled in a last deep breath, and began to grapple his way up.

  Just below the upper deck he braced his foot on the shelf-like plate that spread the chains to the shrouds. He swung himself, hand over hand, along the plate until he was past the forecastle. Groping for a handhold, he peered up over the deck. A sentry clomped by only feet away from the top of his head. He waited, straining to keep his grip on the slippery oak. When the sentry was halfway to the main mast there was a long rumble of thunder. The noise cover gave Thornleigh his chance. He heaved himself aboard, darted up the forecastle ladder to the forward mast, and crouched behind it.

  At that moment Jinner’s voice burst out of the blackness, bawling a tavern song. Right on cue. Both sentries idly moved to the port railing and joined one another to look out. Thornleigh wrenched the leather bag from his shoulder and dug out the tinder box. He sparked the flint on the steel. Instantly, the linen strip caught fire. He dropped it onto a coil of rope under the mast. As soon as the rope flared, Jinner’s voice swelled into a lewd and highly original chorus of the song. The sentries laughed at the invisible drunkard’s increasingly obscene interpolations. They didn’t see Thornleigh cut off a flaming length of rope and dash with it toward the main mast where he tossed it into an open keg of pitch. And they didn’t hear him, over Jinner’s caterwauling, as he dove off the starboard side.

  A sleepy guard emerged on deck from the companionway and halted abruptly. Before him, flames were leaping up the forward mast. “Fire!” he yelled.

  The sentries whirled around. The bases of both masts, and all their lower rigging, were aligh
t. One sentry sprinted to the sterncastle to ring the bell.

  “Fire!”

  In the water Thornleigh listened to the bell clanging and the sentries shouting. He felt his way along the hull to a battened gunport just above the water line, and waited. He heard guards begin to scramble up on deck, but he held himself back, giving time for all of them to come up. When their noise on deck had become a din he smashed his knife against the gunport hatch until it splintered away. He swung one leg over, heaved himself through, scraping his ribs along the jagged opening, and tumbled inside.

  He whipped the knife from his mouth and crouched, ready to fight any stragglers. But he had timed it well—there was no one, only abandoned hammocks and the bedroll litter of encampment. He headed for the companionway down to the hold. He could only hope that no guards had remained below.

  He went down the final steps into the silence of the hold. In the gloom, his chest pounded with relief as he sensed that all was clear.

  He made his way towards the ramp, bare feet slipping on the cold slime of the floor, then up to the platform between the bays. His fingers, still numb from the water, fumbled for the recessed opening. He found it. He sheathed his knife in his belt, and was about to pry the hatch loose when he heard, beneath the muffled frenzy of the crew above him, a sound—eerie, low—a sound that scraped a claw of dread over his heart: the mournful song of the mainmast in the keelson.

  He shook off the premonition. Bending, he pried up the hatch and laid it aside. A blast of foulness struck his face. He looked into the pit. A shape was slumped in the shadows, motionless. A corpse.

  His fists clenched in rage. He refused to believe it—even to believe the overwhelming odor of death. He dropped to his knees and thrust his hands out for her, and wrenched her up by the fabric on her back. He hauled her out of the pit and dragged her along the platform, and laid her on her back. He took her face between his hands. It was cold. Cold and still. He slapped her cheek, hard. Nothing. He laid his ear on her breast and tried to hear—to feel—some throb of life. Nothing. He took up her hand and crushed it inside both his hands as if with his strength he would crush life back into her. But her hand lay cold and still.