S
he needed this glorious day, the queen thought, as her entourage’s horses clattered through Fareham and headed toward its harbor. The sky was blue; the salt-scented air was crystalline. The sun was warm but gentle. And again, her people cheered.
This was not a planned parade, but those working or walking along her route bestowed upon their monarch their spontaneous fervor, which made it all the better. Surrounding her and Drake rode seven guards, including Jenks and Clifford. So as not to overtax Drake’s hospitality, she had brought only two of her ladies-in-waiting and Robin. Let Norfolk and Southampton fume and do their worst, for she’d left them behind—being covertly watched by Meg, Ned, and Keenan.
Elizabeth ignored how Drake’s armor bounced against her hipbones when she rode, for it made her feel secure, even as his own protective arms would. She blushed at that wayward thought and shook her head. He was a man newly wed and her captain, who served her purposes nationally, not personally—and yet, though no one would ever know, he did move her that way. Maybe Robin had been right to instinctively dislike the man. Perhaps he had sensed that to which she had paid no heed at first—that Captain Francis Drake, in many ways, social class aside, was a man after her own heart.
“There she is, Your Majesty,” Drake said, and pointed into
the distance. He grinned and added more quietly, “The other ‘she’ in my life beside my wife and my sovereign.”
She laughed with him but felt her face grow warm, and not from the midmorn sun. It was almost as if he had read her mind.
“Why are ships always referred to in the female gender?” she asked, keeping her voice light.
“Forgive me, Your Grace, but ships, like females, may be beautiful, yet they can be difficult to control.”
Robin laughed too loudly at that, but it reminded her that he was here, watchful as ever. She lifted herself slightly in the saddle to see the place on the wharf Drake had pointed. Evidently thinking she was responding to their cheers, the crowd of sailors, vendors, and workers bellowed louder.
She knew then that she’d like to come again, without all the din and danger. If only she could be a woman friend of Drake’s just dropping by the
Judith
without this entourage in tow …
“She’s much more of a sight at sea, Your Grace,” Drake was saying. “When she’s bare sticks and rigging like this without her sails full of wind, without breasting the waves, she’s hardly what she’s meant to be.”
He wasn’t looking at his queen now but at the ship as they reined in where it was tethered to huge mooring posts. Yes, Elizabeth thought as both Robin and Drake helped her dismount, she’d like not only to come again but to see this ship in all her glory out at sea.
The crew, wearing sky blue shirts and caps, lined the deck railings and clung to the highest riggings. When their queen smiled up at them, they waved their caps and huzzahed with three crisp cheers: “The queen! The queen! The queen!”
It was a thrill for her to walk the gangway to board the ship. Why must a ruler be land-bound? Her father had sailed more than once to France. Was not the water lying beyond this pretty river and the broad bay called the English Channel, so was not she queen there, too?
Drake introduced her to his beaming first mate, Haverhill, then took her on a tour of the ship, pointing out places where his men had fallen in the battle with the Spanish, showing her
numerous patches in the sails and the plugged holes where
quadrellos
had pierced a mast or the deck.
“Driven deep, just like the one in my coach,” she observed.
“Driven deep if they weren’t first stopped by flesh and bone.” He frowned, evidently recalling the horror of the battle—and yet, she thought, it had made him dedicate himself to fighting the Spanish, and she needed him for that. Didn’t his cousin Hawkins, who seemed so jealous of and angry with this steadfast, younger man, realize they both needed men like Drake?
The only part of her visit she did not like was eating in the small, crowded captain’s cabin, though the food was adequate and the wine surprisingly good. She felt closed in, however safe. She wanted to walk the deck again, to crank the windlass he had showed her that hoisted the anchor, to push the capstan herself to raise the topmasts and cargo, and to take the helm in her own hands to steer this ship.
As she prepared to leave the table, Drake slipped her something wrapped in a linen napkin. At first, she wondered if it could be some sort of private gift, but he whispered, “One of the
quadrellos
the blasted Spanish left aboard as a token of their deceit and destruction. You can compare it with the other one.”
She nodded her thanks. Though she was eager to look at it, she put it up her sleeve and carried it out that way.
At the bottom of the gangplank when she was ready to depart and the others couldn’t hear, she asked Drake, “Is there any reason—excuse—for you to put briefly out to sea in the next few days?”
“You mean, Your Grace, besides obeying my cousin, who does not realize he cannot command me to leave you when you sent for me?”
Cannot command me to leave you when you sent for me
echoed in her head, as if they were hurried words between two lovers.
“Just for a short while, I mean,” she said, feeling her face heat up again. “To show me how it is at sea. Perhaps to check the sails or some such.”
“Of course, if that is your desire. How many should I plan to take out, then?”
“In these times, I would not come as the queen,” she told him, speaking even more quickly since she saw Robin coming their way. “I would be in plain garb with but one woman and four guards.”
His eyes widened; his lips parted.
“There have been times of need,” she rushed on, “when I have briefly traded places with my herb woman, Meg. She stays in my rooms, then, of course …”
“What’s this about a course?” Robin asked, wedging his shoulder between the two of them.
“We were discussing,” Drake put in before she could answer, “the course the ship must take when I sail her out of the river and into the waves of the deep.”
“Soon, I hope,” Robin said, as he offered the queen his arm and she took it. “For a sea captain should be guarding our shores against those Spanish dogs, eh, not riding ahorse through forests and towns. The sea must remain your realm, Drake, not the queen’s
terra firma
.”
All the while he spoke, Robin slapped his leather riding gloves, held in one hand, against his thigh. He’d drunk a great deal of Drake’s fine wine, so she hoped there would not be some sort of scene. Drake stood as if made of stone with one hand on his sword hilt and his other in a fist at his side.
“The queen’s
terra firma,
” she said to break the palpable tension, “will too soon hurt her feet in these new boots, and I am ready to ride back. Are you coming, then, my lord Leicester? I believe Captain Drake has work to make his ship seaworthy again, but years ago I put you, man, in charge of my horses.”
She pulled her arm from Robin’s and walked away, but he quickly caught up with her and, before Jenks could, linked his hands to give her a boost up into her sidesaddle. When Jenks left to get his own horse, Robin said up at her, “You hang on his every word, that is all, my queen.”
“I would hang on yours, too, if you would stop talking of such petty concerns as—”
“Petty?”
“Do not interrupt me,” she whispered down at him. “And let go of my foot!”
“If it indeed hurts, I could tend to it, rub it until it feels much better.”
“Stop!” she hissed. “Both the queen and her captain need your help and support in these tense times.”
“The queen and
her
captain?” he muttered, as if he hadn’t heard her order to desist. “It sounds like a romantic drama, perhaps one your master of revels, Ned Topside, could write and stage.”
She yanked her foot from him. “Keep away from me unless you amend your topic and your tone, my lord. I need support and protection from those who would harm me with arrows, so if you are not
for
me, I will assume you are against me. And the others are starting to stare!”
“My queen, the only darts I would ever shoot at you are Cupid’s arrows, and you deflect those—perhaps to others. You don’t think that I had aught to do with the attacks on you—or on
your
Captain Drake?”
“Why would I think that? Because you are madly jealous and can neither control your temper nor take orders from your queen? Because you’d like to scare Drake back to sea or worse—or frighten me back into your arms?”
She moved her horse away, and Robin scrambled to mount and keep up with her. He was sullen and sulky all the way back, but she couldn’t have heard him over the cheers and sporadic shouts of “God save our queen!” anyway.
Yes,
she thought,
please, Lord God, save the queen. Save her from the dire possibility that someone she cares for, someone she trusts, someone she is even kin to could want to take her throne and her life.
L
ate that afternoon, the vast halls and many chambers of Place House echoed only with the footsteps of servants, for, at the queen’s insistence, her hosts and her courtiers had gone hunting. Keeping Lady Rosie with her, Elizabeth was supposedly lying down to rest. The truth was, she, disguised as
Meg Milligrew, was going hunting, too—hunting for Hern the longbow maker. Meg stayed behind with Rosie in the royal suite, guarded, as it were, by Cecil, who was working on business in her outer presence chamber.
With Her Majesty rode Ned, her guards Jenks and Clifford, and Justin Keenan. At the last minute, over Cecil’s protests, she’d brought him along. No one else, not even Robin or Jenks, sat a horse as well as Keenan.
“I pray,” Elizabeth said to Ned, as they rode into the woods east of the mansion, “that your directions from that shopkeeper are good enough to get us there and back directly and quickly. If any of the servants ask Meg later why this party rode into the forest, she is to say she went to bring back curing herbs, and I insisted she take guards.”
Even though she had donned Meg’s clothes, she wore Drake’s armor again under her cloak. She was getting used to it, and it made her feel not only safer but more alert. Then, too, it reminded her she was looking forward to her second visit to his ship on the morrow.
“Hern’s hut is supposed to be a few furlongs in, east and then to the north of this path,” Ned told her, as he rode just slightly behind her horse. “A boy from town sometimes takes him bread and cheese. I couldn’t find the lad to lead us in, but I can go ahead of Jenks now if you’d like.”
“No, let him lead. Ned, Meg is much better—in spirit and temperament—isn’t she? I would not have left her in my stead if she were not.”
“She has moments when she stares off into emptiness, but fewer of those. I’d like to claim credit for that, but it’s the boy Piers who’s changed her—that, and your bolstering her through it all.”
“Perhaps,” Keenan spoke up from behind, “we’d best stop talking. If the old man is blind, as I have heard, his hearing might be quite acute. We could startle him or even make him hide before you can question him, Your Grace.”
“Point well taken,” she said, as they turned in single file onto a narrower path through the thickening stands of trees, taller ones here, stretching for their share of the sun.
Yes, Elizabeth thought, she had been wise to demand that Cecil share Keenan with her. The man was useful for more than just carrying messages hither and yon; he spoke not often but always circumspectly. He’d even managed to pick up the fact that this old man was blind.
Still, Keenan had reported earlier that he hadn’t seen Norfolk and Southampton together while she’d been at Drake’s ship, whereas Meg and Ned had reported the opposite. It turned out that the duke and the earl had been huddled over a card game in the center of the sunny courtyard for hours, where they could be seen but not overheard. Yes, Cecil kept his chief courier closeted with him too much these days, or he would have informed her of that, too.
On this narrower path, branches and bushes seemed to reach in, grabbing at them. They even snagged her narrow skirts and smacked against her new riding boots.
In a whisper, Jenks asked, “Can this be the way? It doesn’t look like many come through here.”
“He’s a recluse,” Ned hissed, “and the only one allowed to live this close to Lord Southampton’s deer park. They know, however skilled an archer the old man once was, he’ll not be poaching game.”
Even here, outside the boundaries of the earl’s hunt park, they saw and startled several deer, which bounded away to be swallowed by the depths of deep foliage. A snorting boar charged across their path to drown the rat-a-tat of a lone woodpecker, as if someone were knocking on a door. Chattering squirrels and twittering birds suddenly went silent, though Elizabeth noted well, through the screen of leaves above, a hawk soaring aloft in an updraft as if spying on them.
Again she recalled her poor falconer, Fenton, who might have died in her place—or in Drake’s. But for the occasional creak of a saddle and the sighing of a breeze through the trees, their horses’ hooves became the only sound.