Queen Without a Crown

by FIONA BUCKLEY

  It was all quite crazy. I was still full of the exhilaration of speed and triumph. As we galloped on, I shouted: ‘That was marvellous! Let’s go back and do it again!’

  Trelawny stopped singing and began to laugh, doubling over his pommel. We all began to laugh. The horses shook their manes as if in wonder at the insanity of their riders. We were free. We were exhausted, our feet were going numb in their stirrups and our ungloved hands on the reins ached with cold, but we had escaped. We had the night and the moonlit snow to ourselves. We had information which must be delivered as soon as possible to the right quarters, but deliver it we would. We had no doubt of that.

  Sobriety did not return until, when we had slowed down again to let the horses breathe a little, Brockley noticed that Brown Berry was moving unevenly. Carefully sheathing his knife and putting it back into his belt, he stopped us while he got down to examine the cob’s near fore. ‘It’s only balled snow again,’ he said. ‘Wedged between the frog and the shoe. I can get it out . . . There we are. That will make you more comfortable, my boy. I think we can take things more steadily now, anyway.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be so sure,’ said Trelawny.

  Brockley, still stooping over Brown Berry’s hoof, turned his face upwards in surprise. I looked at Trelawny too, puzzled.

  ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Listen.’

  We did so. It was faint, but even as we cocked our ears, it grew louder. It was the baying of the hounds of Ramsfold, on our scent.

  NINETEEN

  Black and White

  The cry of hounds is exciting when you’re following the hunt. When you’re the quarry, it freezes your veins and sends your bowels into terrified spasm. In a quavering voice, I said: ‘Whatever do they want hounds for? We’ve left tracks enough in the snow!’

  ‘They want to bring us to bay and hold us till the pursuit from Ramsfold House can get to us,’ said Brockley. He released Brown Berry’s hoof and remounted. ‘The dogs will probably outdistance their horses. Or ours.’

  We could do nothing but ride on, as fast as the conditions and the strength of our mounts would allow, over empty moorland terrain we didn’t know, in the cold and inadequate moonlight. There had been no further snowfall that day, and the air did not seem quite as bitter as it had been, but the going was still quite bad enough. Soon we realized that although we were still going westward and therefore towards the border with friendly Cumberland, and although we still seemed to be on a track of some sort, it was the wrong one. We had missed our way.

  It wasn’t likely that the chase would worry overmuch about crossing the county boundary, but our best chance of finding help nevertheless lay across that boundary. We needed a friendly village – or better still, a friendly castle – and had no idea where to look for one. All we knew for sure was that there were many lonely miles between us and the sanctuary of Carlisle.

  Sanctuary. I said the word aloud. My companions turned their heads. ‘On the way here,’ I said, ‘didn’t we see churches in some of those little hamlets? There’s an ancient right of sanctuary in churches.’

  ‘I wonder if they’d respect it?’ Brockley said, glancing back.

  ‘Local vicars might be annoyed if anyone tried to drag fugitives out of their churches,’ said Trelawny. ‘We must be near the Cumberland border by now,’ he added. ‘We’ve been riding westward long enough.’

  Brockley said: ‘There’s a river ahead.’

  The track was going downhill. At the bottom, there was indeed a river, and a ford, thinly iced over but usable. The horses crunched their way across and started the scramble up the slope on the far side. Behind us, the hound voices were louder. At the top of the climb we emerged on to a further wilderness of moonlit moorland. The shadowed vales, where the hamlets and churches would be if they were anywhere, were deep in blackness. If there were dwellings there, we couldn’t see them.

  And then, with infinite thankfulness, we did see just one.

  By sheer good luck, sometime in the past, some pious lordling had honoured his creator by building a church on a hill. Brockley saw it first and pointed. Very likely, the villagers it served grumbled about the climb to their place of worship, but there it stood, its square crenellated tower clear against the starry sky and glinting in the moonlight.

  ‘That’s surely the path,’ said Trelawny, pointing, and there indeed it was, ahead and to the right, branching off from ours. Like ours, it was a sunken lane between banks – snowbound, but with its entrance visible in the moonlight – and suddenly we saw that there were hoof marks and wheel prints in both tracks, proving that habitations were close. We veered towards it. The hound voices were very loud by now, and behind them, faintly, we could hear shouts.

  We came to the village first. The baying noise had woken some of the inhabitants, and as we cantered through the main street, lights were appearing in cottage windows. Then an authoritative figure, waving a cresset and shouting, burst suddenly from a doorway ahead of us and ran into our path. Perforce, we pulled up, looking down into his face.

  He was very much a northerner, with pale-blue eyes and white eyelashes; a descendant, no doubt, of Norsemen, and his voice, too, was broadly northern. It was also furious.

  ‘What’s all this to do at this hour o’ t’night? I am Thomas Dennison, vicar of this parish of St John’s-On-The-Hill. Stand and explain thysen!’

  Villagers were emerging into the street, but by the sound of them, the hounds would be in the street too, at any moment. ‘We seek sanctuary in your church!’ I said. ‘I am Ursula Stannard, lady in waiting to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth. I and my escort have been about her business in Northumberland, and our pursuers are remnants of the rebellion who don’t want us to carry news of their doings to Lord Sussex in York. Are we in Cumberland yet, and if so, is Cumberland still true to the queen or not?’

  ‘Aye, you are, and aye, Cumberland is.’

  I looked over my shoulder. The first hounds were in sight, and I glimpsed riders behind them. I heard a woman’s voice. Anne of Northumberland had joined the hunt.

  ‘We need shelter!’ Brockley snapped at Dennison. ‘Now, quickly!’

  Thomas Dennison, mercifully, did not have one of those bucolic, parochial minds. He responded without hesitation. ‘The church isna locked. Get up to it. Take t’horses in with you. I’ll hold back t’chase! I’ll ask questions later, mind!’

  ‘That’s quite in order,’ Brockley told him.

  Dennison stepped aside, and we urged our mounts past him, driving them, tired and blowing though they were, to the last climb up the hill. They had had enough, poor things, fetched from their warm stalls in the depth of the night and forced to gallop for miles through the snow.

  The path slanted across the hillside, and we could watch what was happening below simply by glancing to the side. Dennison had made the people in the street form a line across the road, checking the hounds. As the riders caught up, we heard him command them to halt.

  They did so, but not for long. There was a brief altercation, and then our pursuers spurred their horses forward. Villagers on foot had little chance against determined horsemen brandishing drawn swords. The chase broke through, and their hounds came with them, bounding up the hillside ahead of the horses, yelling as they came, to encircle us just before we reached the church door so that we could not enter.

  Trelawny, controlling his frightened mare as best he could with one hand, leant from his saddle and killed the biggest dog with his dagger, but two more sprang at him, snarling, while a couple of other brutes were baiting Brown Berry. The cob was kicking and squealing, and Brockley could do nothing but cling on, unable even to spare a hand to pull out his own blade.

  Roundel, just as terrified, was plunging beneath me, and a lean grey dog, half lurcher and half mastiff by the look of it, but agile as a greyhound, was nipping at her heels. I had managed to get at my knife and tried to attack the beast with it, but I couldn’t reach. The riders – Ulverdale, the three Ramsfold men and Lady Anne – c
ame up, laughing.

  They called off the hounds, but the pack remained close by, circling like wolves while their masters closed on us. We fought. I scored someone’s arm, and Brockley, who had finally succeeded in wrenching his weapon from his belt, jabbed it into someone else. Anne of Northumberland, manoeuvring her horse on the outskirts of the struggle, shrieked encouragement to her men, urging them to kill both Brockley and Trelawny. Ulverdale drove his horse towards me, shouting: ‘I’ll have you now, my lady!’ and stretching a gauntletted hand to drag me from the saddle. At that moment Brockley regained control of Brown Berry, broke free of his assailants, saw a gap in the ring of hounds and drove Berry straight through, to clatter up the church steps, which were fortunately shallow. At the top, leaning from the saddle, Brockley wrenched the door open and shouted to me and Trelawny to follow.

  I seized the opportunity and went after him. Roundel didn’t like the dark archway and baulked at the top, but a hound bounded after her, snarling, and with a rush she dashed into the church. Brockley, waiting just inside, leant out of his saddle, and his knife spitted the hound as it sprang after her.

  The hound had a collar. Brockley somehow caught hold of it and threw the dying animal out of the door and down the steps. I swung Roundel so that I, too, could face the door and see what was happening. Trelawny was still beleaguered at the foot of the steps. I did not want, anyway, to go further into the church, for I felt uneasy at having a horse inside a holy place myself, even though we had the vicar’s consent and, after all, God made horses as well as people. Brockley, however, only cried: ‘Carew! Come on! Come up here!’

  But it was too late. Even as Brockley shouted, Trelawny was dragged from his saddle. He was on his feet at once, standing on the steps, holding off an attack from our pursuers, led by Ulverdale. Ulverdale looked half mad. His mouth was ugly, darkly stained, presumably with blood as a result of the sharp dish I had flung at him in the hall, and he was driving his attack home with a sword which he clearly knew how to handle. Trelawny was fighting hard, but a dagger is a poor answer to a sword, let alone three, and though one of the Ramsfold men was out of the fight, clutching his side, the other two had driven their horses one to either side of the steps and were striking upwards at him.

  One of them – the one I had wounded – was dripping blood, but it only seemed to make him more savage. Our friend was outnumbered, and Lady Anne was shouting: ‘Kill him! Kill him!’

  Someone obliged her. A sword blade took him in the neck, and before our eyes, he fell.

  I remember thinking how strange it was that in that snowy, moonlit world, there was no colour. None at all. Blood on moonlit snow isn’t red but black, and his upturned face, which not so long ago had been joyously creased in exultant laughter, was white, death white, surrounded by a spreading, inky stain.

  TWENTY

  Bearers of Ill News

  Trelawny’s fall, and the fact that Brockley and I were indeed on hallowed ground, did create a pause: a breathless, furious hiatus in the struggle. I sat in my saddle, dumb and sick, but Brockley shouted ‘Murderess!’ at Lady Northumberland, who rose in her own saddle, gripping the pommel to pull herself up, and retaliated by screeching the one word:

  ‘Heretics!’

  I had never before heard such hate in anyone’s voice. She was no dignified sight, in flung-on clothes and with the stains of splashed pottage still on her hair, but she was frightening.

  The loathing that she felt for us came at us in a wave. ‘That is all you are! You deny the faith! Your lives are worthless!’

  My dumbness passed. I found that I, too, could shout. ‘And you want to bring back the Inquisition! To bring back the days of Bloody Mary and her heretic hunts! Murderess!’ I screamed, echoing Brockley.

  I had seen by this time, and so had Brockley, that help was on the way. After we left his village next day, we never again met Thomas Dennison, vicar of St John’s-On-The-Hill, but I think he was a man both loved and respected by his parishioners, for they had turned out in force to aid him. The figures we had seen making a line across the street had now become a crowd, and at the moment when Trelawny fell, their pastor was leading them up the hill on foot and many of them had weapons.

  Dennison was furious, berating Lady Anne and Ulverdale and their companions the moment he was within earshot, threatening them all with both earthly and spiritual calamity for killing a man on the steps of a church and demanding that they should surrender their swords to him.

  They didn’t, of course, but the weapons in the hands of the mob on Dennison’s heels included pitchforks, billhooks and rakes, as well as quite a few old pikes and swords. Our foes were the outnumbered ones this time.

  Anne spat something at Dennison, calling him a traitor to God and to the lawful queen (she clearly didn’t mean Elizabeth), but by then, a bristling line of pitchforks, pikes and the like had formed up between our enemies and the church. Defeated, she and her companions fled, galloping perilously downwards, the horses slithering and throwing up plumes of snow as they bucketed down the slope. The man Brockley had wounded was swaying in his saddle but clinging on. Someone blew a horn and the hounds went too. We were thankful to see them go.

  Brockley and I dismounted and led our horses down the steps. A villager had caught Trelawny’s mare, Strawberry, and now took our mounts’ bridles as well, so that we could kneel beside our friend in the hope of finding life still in him. But there was none.

  Brockley closed the blank eyes and drew Trelawny’s cloak over his face, and we stood up. Without thinking about it, or finding it in any way strange, we turned silently to one another, and for a brief moment we stood in each other’s arms, glad of the comfort. Then, still silently, we stepped apart and turned to Dennison.

  It was he who now took charge. He brought Brockley and me to his vicarage for the rest of the night. He gave us hot soup and rye bread, water to wash in, pallets to sleep on and, in the morning, a breakfast of ale and porridge. He put the horses in a stable behind his house and gave them warm bran mashes. He also had Trelawny placed on a trestle in the church and promised that he should be laid out with decency.

  I didn’t expect to sleep, but exhaustion overtook me. Despite the dreadful images of Trelawny’s last moments, despite the throbbing of my body after that long ride through the snow and Lady Anne’s whip, oblivion came. I had stiffened anew in the morning, but it improved again when I moved about; sleep had begun to heal me.

  We were grateful to Dennison and always will be. He was a Cumberland man, but so close to the Northumbrian border that he was in a position to hear news from the neighbouring county. His instant championship of us made me think that in Dennison we could have come across another of Sussex’s informants. I didn’t ask, however. I had learned from experience that if one is an informer, the fewer people who mention it, the better.

  While we were breaking our fast, he fetched two men who turned out to be, respectively, the village carpenter, which also meant the local coffin-maker, and the sexton. Yes, said the carpenter, he had a coffin or two in stock; and yes, said the sexton, there was a grave ready. ‘I allus delve out a couple afore winter sets in, for folk give up and die easy when nights get long and cold, and it’s trouble, trying to dig when the ground’s frozen. I likes to get ready while the work’s easy.’

  By noon, Carew Trelawny, who last night had doubled up with laughter over his saddle pommel, who had rescued us from our dungeon and called us lackwits for not seeing at once what splendid weapons sideboards and tables and chandeliers and pewter plates could be, was in his coffin and the sexton was filling in the grave from the pile of frosty earth beside it. One sword-stroke had wiped him out of the world.

  Urgent though our errand was, it was impossible for us to leave that day. Brockley and I were exhausted, and so were the horses; and poor Brockley was heartbroken at the loss of his old comrade. During the committal, tears ran down his face. ‘And to think I wanted to fight in the north and upset Fran saying so!’ he said.
/>
  I wept, too, for him as much as for Trelawny. As during that wild and half-hilarious retreat through the hall and kitchen at Ramsfold, I felt my mind unite with his, and this time it was his pain I shared.

  Dennison sent us off next day, however, with three of his villagers as guides, mounted on the sturdy dun ponies which were the local breed. We led Trelawny’s mare. The weather was markedly warmer, with the thaw setting in in earnest, and we made good speed to Carlisle. We went straight to the castle this time, anxious to pour our news into authoritative ears at last. It was the right thing to do, for we found Sussex there. He had battled personally through the snowdrifts to join the northward pursuit and was on the eve of setting out for Scotland. ‘To smoke out the hornets’ nest of rebels over the border. Queen’s orders, and if I have to ride into Scotland to get at them, I am to do so.’

  When he had heard our story, he sent men at once to Ramsfold. We learned later that they found their quarry gone, servants included, and Blanche Winthorpe free but roaming bewilderedly through her otherwise empty house. At her request, they took her to her mother in Kendal.

  Sussex, though, was chiefly concerned about the schemes we had heard Lady Northumberland making, especially the threat to the life of the Scottish regent. Thomas Radcliffe of Sussex was not young, but he was still spare and active and very conscientious, though he had an air of one who for years had striven against unfair odds, which in a way was true.

  I already knew him a little, having met him at court in the past. He was one of Elizabeth’s most devoted councillors, though at times a bewildered one. I was aware that he believed, quite mistakenly, that Elizabeth, like most other women, longed for marriage and children. He had striven to promote her marriage to this suitor or that and been repeatedly surprised and disappointed by his failure. His short hair, his little, slightly untidy, beard and small ruff, somehow suggested a man forever trying to solve an enigma, with no spare time or energy for elaborate barbering or clothes.