The Fugitive Queen

by FIONA BUCKLEY

  “You lost my scent? What happened? They were furious when they found I wasn’t Mary. They’ve married Pen to Andrew Thwaite by force. Tobias’s cousin Magnus Whitely, who I dismissed from being Tyesdale’s steward, was going to murder me!” I said, putting it as succinctly as possible. For the moment, for the sake of brevity, I left out Lapwings and Mistress Holme.

  “Going to murder you, was he?” said Sir Francis grimly, descending from his own horse. The other men did the same and led by Sir Francis, we marched indoors and into the midst of the wedding party. “Well, well. So these are the rascally conspirators. Good morning, Master Littleton. You’re looking well. I doubt if you’ll seem quite so healthy much longer; nasty damp places, dungeons. Which of you is Magnus Whitely? I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure.”

  For a moment, there had been a threat of resistance, mainly from the Grimsdales and their mining relatives, who had bristled up at once at the sight of a crowd of armed men marching into the room. The sight of swords being drawn discouraged them, however. They backed away against the wall. Will Thwaite, who had come back inside with us, seemed completely bemused. “What’s going on? What’s all this about conspirators an’ murder?”

  “I beg your pardon. I should have introduced myself. I am Sir Francis Knollys, from Bolton Castle.”

  Sir Francis paused, glancing toward the stairs. Pen’s voice, raised in sobbing protest, could still be heard from the upper floor. “What’s happening up there?”

  “My son’s on his honeymoon,” said Thwaite. He seemed more bewildered than ever. I had not hitherto been certain that the Thwaites were really quite unaware that Andrew’s marriage had been linked to a scheme to free Mary Stuart but now I saw that it was true. As far as the Thwaites were concerned, I had offended their friend Magnus and he had agreed to bring them Pen Mason as a way of making a little money while being revenged on me. They were innocent of treason, if not of much else.

  I started to say something of this to Sir Francis but I was interrupted by a hoarse scream from overhead and a crash as though someone or something had fallen over heavily. Will Thwaite swung around to face the stairs. The maidservant Rosie clutched at the nearest arm, which belonged to one of the younger miners. Another scream came. It died away into a horrible bubbling, choking sound.

  It hadn’t been Pen. I was as sure as I could be that that dreadful noise had not been made by Pen.

  A shadow moved at the top at the stairs and Andrew blundered into view. He started downward, lurching, keeping upright by fending himself off from the wall and the banister with hands which left red marks behind them. He was naked except for the blood that ran in a stream from his gasping mouth and pumped from a huge wound close to his heart, veiling the front of his body in scarlet.

  Before he was halfway down, his eyes went huge and blind and he sagged, losing his balance. Will Thwaite, crying out, ran forward with outstretched arms to catch him as he fell headlong.

  Thwaite sank at the foot of the stairs, holding his son in his arms. He put a hand behind Andrew’s head and shook him, calling his name, and Sir Francis went quickly to kneel beside them, resting his hand on the boy’s neck where the great pulse of life beats as long as life endures. Presently, he shook his head and stood up. Will Thwaite, still cradling his son, stared up at him and then back at Andrew’s face. “It isn’t true! It can’t be true! Andrew, Andrew, answer me, it’s your father! Andrew . . .”

  A sound from above made us look up once more. Pen was coming down the stairs. She seemed to be unhurt and she was still dressed, but she too was splashed with blood. She was carrying a sword. Its blade was stained with red and between her crimsoned fingers I saw the glint of amethyst.

  “It’s the sword that he was wearing,” she said, in answer to our questioning eyes. Her voice was a monotone, as though she had been shocked beyond the power of expressiveness. Halfway down the stairs, she stopped, because Will Thwaite and Andrew were in the way. She spoke to us from where she was.

  “He took it off when he undressed and I picked it up and told him that I’d never wanted to marry him and we weren’t married. I said to him: ‘I shouted I won’t at the very altar; why didn’t you listen?’ But he took no notice. He laughed at me. He said we were man and wife all the same and I’d got to sleep with him whether I liked it or not. He was going to force himself on me . . .”

  Her voice had gone up now, becoming shrill. “Gently, mistress, gently!” said Clem in a kind voice.

  Pen looked at him. As though he had asked her to explain, she said: “He told me to put the sword down and he came toward me, still laughing—he didn’t expect me to do anything to him; I could see that. I backed against the wall and then I couldn’t go any farther and he came near enough for the swordpoint to be touching him and told me not to be silly. Not to be silly. He was going to . . . going to . . . and he told me not to be silly! It’s heavy.” She looked down at the sword. “But I was holding it in both hands and I was so frightened and so angry—I lunged. It went into him. The blade was so sharp! I only meant to hold him off, to make him jump back, but it ran him through! He . . . he screamed and then he turned and stumbled out of the door . . . there was so much b . . . blood . . .” She was beginning to cry. Her eyes shifted to Sir Francis. “I heard your voice . . . is . . . is he dead?”

  “Aye.” Very gently, Will Thwaite laid his son down. Rising to his feet, he faced her. “You murdering bitch,” he said. That he didn’t shout but said it quite softly somehow made it doubly menacing. “You’ve killed my son. My only son. My only hope for tomorrow. You’ve killed him.”

  “B . . . but I didn’t m . . . mean to kill him. I didn’t!” The tears were streaming down her face and with her spare hand she was leaning on the banister for support. “I j . . . just wanted to hold him off. He was g . . . going to rape me!”

  “Rape you? You were his wife! And,” said Will Thwaite grimly, “t’murder of a man by his wife—that’s got a name, that has. That’s petty treason and the woman burns for it.” He swung around to face Sir Francis. “Isn’t that t’law? Tell her!”

  “It’s also the law that a forced marriage isn’t valid!” I said loudly. “Pen never said I will. She said I won’t at the top of her voice and no one listened.”

  “She and Andrew were declared man and wife by an ordained priest and that’s enough for me!” snapped Thwaite. He turned again to stare at Pen. “T’law’s clear and even Sir Francis here can’t deny me when I tell him to take thee into custody. Thee’ll go to t’stake for this, my lass, and I’ll be there when t’faggots are lit and . . .”

  “Except,” said Pen shrilly, “that Father Bruno isn’t an ordained priest and Andrew was never my husband in any sense whatsoever.”

  “What?” shouted Thwaite.

  Father Bruno, who had been standing back in the shadows, pushed his way forward. “Mistress Mason—which is still her name—is quite correct. I am not a priest and never have been.” He spoke without a trace of Italian accent, though there was a tinge of the English countryside in his voice.

  The daylight was full by now. For the first time I could see Father Bruno properly. He smiled at me and my jaw dropped. “Brockley!” I said.

  “Brockley?” said Sir Francis questioningly.

  “Yes!” I had even seen Brown Berry in the byre and noticed his hairy fetlocks, but because of the bad light I hadn’t recognized him. “This is Roger Brockley, my manservant. He went off a couple of days ago saying that he had an idea about protecting Pen, but . . . but . . .”

  “Walnut juice to stain my face and a black dye for my hair,” said Brockley. “I stopped before I got to Fernthorpe to use them, and while I was at it, I clipped my hair and shaved the top of my head to make a tonsure. I took the cassock and a prayer book and this silver crucifix I’m wearing from the chapel at Tyesdale. I’d raided Agnes Appletree’s stores for the walnut juice and the black dye. She keeps such things for coloring cloth. It was the best I could do. I reckoned that if I could get
myself into the Thwaite home as a priest, they might use me if it came to the point of forcing a marriage on Mistress Pen. Then the marriage wouldn’t be legal and couldn’t bind her.”

  “I might have known!” I gasped. “I had no idea where you’d gone, what you were doing, what had happened to you. I should have known you wouldn’t fail us. Oh, Brockley!”

  “What’s all this? Is he saying he’s not a priest? That he’s . . .?”

  “He’s my steward, and he’s certainly not a priest,” I said to Master Thwaite. “Pen hasn’t by any stretch of the imagination killed her husband. She resisted rape, that’s all. A woman’s entitled to go any lengths she likes to fend off a man who wants to take her against her will.”

  “Is that t’law?” Thwaite demanded, turning to Sir Francis.

  “I knew who Master Brockley was before that so-called ceremony began,” said Pen. She brushed her knuckles across her wet eyes, and though her voice shook, she spoke with determination. “I recognized him the moment I went close to him. That’s why I knelt to pray beside him.”

  “And what I said, when everyone thought I was praying,” said Brockley, “was that if she would let me conduct the service, it wouldn’t be lawful and the Thwaites would have no hold on her afterwards. I said I would bring help as soon as I could, and meanwhile, she had best smile and be complaisant and—do what she must—and soon she would be rescued.”

  “Only I couldn’t! I couldn’t!” Pen said. “But I didn’t dare tell Andrew about Brockley—he’d have said I was lying and anyway, that was before I understood that Sir Francis had come and I thought that if Andrew did believe me, I’d put Brockley in danger. But I’d have spoken out at the inquest, in public, and I’ll still do that if I must. Andrew and I weren’t married. We were not!” She looked down at herself. “I’m all over blood,” she said wonderingly.

  Then the reaction came. She began to shake. The sword she was still holding dropped from her hands, falling onto Andrew’s body where it still lay at the foot of the stairs. I ran forward, meaning to jump over him and get Pen into my arms but Clem Moss was ahead of me.

  He leapt onto the stairs and caught hold of her as her knees gave way. She sagged against him, sobbing. Two of Sir Francis’s men, moving suddenly, as though released from some kind of paralysis, hastened to lift Andrew’s corpse out of the way and Clem, picking Penelope up, carried her down the last few stairs and placed her gently on the settle. “Easy. Easy!” He sat down beside her and his voice was warm and soothing. “There, there. If there’s an inquest, I’ll bear witness that you were deceived and takken by force to be used against your will and against t’law and I’ll call out any man of t’jury that brings owt but a verdict of right and just killing against you.”

  Sir Francis let out a snort of something very like laughter, but Will Thwaite simply stood there, his face bloodless. “So there’s no justice for Andrew? Thee’ll all stand against me, an old man that’s got no son, no future . . .”

  “As a matter of interest,” said Brockley inquiringly, scratching at his black tonsure as though it itched, “why were you so wild to get Andrew married to Penelope? You even tried to kidnap her before she’d reached Tyesdale and that was before you’d seen her. It must be Tyesdale that you wanted but what’s so wonderful about Tyesdale?”

  From where he stood, backed against the wall beside the staircase, Grimsdale suddenly laughed. “Coal!” he said.

  “Coal? What do you mean?” I turned to him in astonishment. “There’s no coal on Tyesdale. I know there are some old workings on it—like the ones on Fernthorpe land, where Pen was imprisoned. But they’re abandoned. They were no use.”

  “They’re old. I was never happy with that report. I had a feeling about it,” said Magnus Whitely sullenly. “Two months back, I had another survey done. There’s coal all right, and plenty too, and near the surface at that. You go into those old workings and you’ll find new digging inside one of them. I told the men to be secret, so the rubble that was dug out was shoveled into a tunnel where the lode really had run out. There was another tunnel that told a very different tale. Oh yes, there’s coal on Tyesdale. The prospector’s bill hasn’t come in yet, though I’ve got the report. I kept that under my mattress. Your prying eyes never found that. I took it away with me. Tyesdale’s worth a fortune. If you’d let us alone, or let Pen get married to Andrew . . .”

  In Clem’s arms, Pen’s sobs grew momentarily louder but subsided as he whispered to her and patted her shoulders.

  “They’d have shared it between them, I suppose,” said Brockley contemptuously. “Littleton, Whitely, and the Thwaites. Now it becomes clear. The Earl of Leicester,” he added thoughtfully, “will probably have a seizure when he realizes what he kindly gave away to Mistress Pen!”

  “It seems,” said Sir Francis grimly, “that there is a fine tangle to undo. But the first step is to take a number of these people into custody. Mistress Stannard, what were you saying about Master Thwaite being unaware of the scheme concerning . . . a certain lady?”

  Thwaite looked at him in evident confusion. “I think the Thwaites genuinely know nothing of it,” I said quietly. “I think they were only concerned with getting hold of Pen—and her coal mine.”

  “There’d have been grandchilder, too,” said Thwaite. “My lad were a bridegroom this morning and now he’s dead.”

  Andrew’s body was still on the floor, where Sir Francis’s men had laid it after shifting it away from the stairs. Once again, Will Thwaite sank down at its side and gathered his son into his arms.

  He was a horrible man, a barbarian. I hated his squalid home, his gap-toothed mouth, and the spittle when he talked. I hated him and Andrew alike for their greed and their ruthlessness and their cruelty. I hated Will more still when, as I passed close to him, going to help Clem lead Pen away, he caught at my arm and said: “I’ll maybe go t’law yet and get a rope round t’bitch’s neck if nothing more.”

  Yet I pitied him, too, as he crouched there, clutching the body of his only child and weeping.

  Enough so that I paused to whisper to him: “If you will let Pen go in peace, I will not point the finger at you when we take up the body that’s buried in your old mine, and carry him to a decent churchyard.”

  He blanched and held his burden tighter. “No use pointing fingers at me, girl. It were Andrew that slew t’lad and that were only by accident.”

  I had seen it happen. I could even remember the build of Harry’s slayer and I would have said it was a younger man than Will Thwaite. In all probability, I had just been told the truth.

  “But you can’t prove it wasn’t you,” I said softly. “Not if I chose to say so. So leave Pen be. And I’ll say nothing.”

  I turned away. We left him still holding Andrew’s corpse and crooning to it as though it were an infant he wished to soothe to sleep.

  I suppose barbarians, too, can know what it is to be bereft. If so—I knew about grief. My mother. Gerald. Matthew. I had endured and survived because I was still young. Will Thwaite was not. His future hopes, all his proud dreams, had died with Andrew. Nothing lay before him now but an empty old age, and grief might well bring his decline on before its natural time.

  According to Dr. Lambert, with whom I had begun to study Greek along with Meg and Pen, the Ancient Greeks had a word for the fate which had befallen Will Thwaite. They called it hubris.

  26

  The End of Enchantment

  On the way back to Tyesdale, I noticed that the imitation Italian priest who was riding with us on Brown Berry had a most unclerical sword at his side. It was in its sheath but the violet gem in the hilt was instantly familiar. “Brockley, where did you get that sword?”

  “It’s the one Pen used, madam. I went upstairs before we left to collect my own saddlebags and belongings, and collected the sheath and sword belt for this while I was about it. Will Thwaite isn’t going to argue. We can send the sword home to Harry’s parents.”

  “Thank you, Brockley.�
�

  • • •

  I was thankful beyond belief to see Tyesdale again and not only for my own sake. I was exhausted, but Pen was in a worse state than I was. Clem rode beside her all the way, talking to her in a calm and reasonable manner, but the girl had just killed a man and wouldn’t, I thought, get over it quickly. She shivered constantly, although Clem gave her his cloak, and I think she cried the whole way. She almost collapsed as she dismounted.

  Mercifully, Sybil was there to take charge of her and Sir Francis did the necessary explaining. I left Sybil, wide-eyed with horror, but kind and practical as ever, to look after Pen and give her a dose of my sedative, while I stumbled upstairs and surrendered to the ministrations of Dale, who helped me to bed, brought me some porridge and mulled wine, pulled the coverlet over me, and sat beside me until I slept.

  Mary Stuart was gone. I had gathered during the ride home that Sir Francis had not brought all his men to Fernthorpe. Three of them had taken her back to Bolton. Thank goodness for that, I said. I could have my own bed again. I presume that Sir Francis also took some rest but he was up and active when I woke, later that day. “I take it,” he said when I joined him in the hall, “that your remarkable ward is still abed?”

  “Yes. Sybil gave her some of my sleeping potion. Pen has been very brave,” I said. “Foolish to start with, but then brave and determined. There—won’t be any charges against her. I have seen to that.”

  “Ah. You threatened Thwaite, did you? But according to you, he really is innocent of treason. We didn’t arrest him.”

  “I still—er—managed to frighten him,” I said circumspectly. I added: “Pen will suffer greatly, you know. What she did wasn’t in her true nature. She was terrified and desperate. She’ll remember it in nightmares for all the rest of her life.”

  “I agree with you. Don’t worry. I too spoke with Thwaite before we left. He certainly seemed frightened. Natural enough in the circumstances, but I take it that you helped to petrify him. There will be no inquest on Andrew Thwaite. His father seems anxious to cause no trouble and avoid getting into any. His family had enough of that in the past! He said he would give it out that Andrew died of a sudden consuming fever and see that the maidservant, Rosie, never says otherwise, either.”