Worse, he was suddenly affrighted that the queen might think he’d turned tail and fled just now—and believe him a coward or traitor, as his cousin no doubt still did.
He turned his horse to ride toward the upheaval around the queen. He muttered a string of sailor’s oaths he never used, no, not even when he’d fled the massacre at San Juan d’Ulua, not so much, as he always claimed, to fight another day but because he was terrified he’d lose his first ship and never be trusted to command
one again. His only opportunity for a future now was to convince the queen that she could trust him and that he’d never flee again.
A
fter Dr. Huicke had come in haste and examined Meg, who was not even bleeding, Elizabeth had sent him away. Then fear and fury flooded in, and she came back to herself again.
Though she’d screamed in shock, since she’d been certain Meg was not hurt, the queen had stared silently at the arrow that had stuck in the gilded wood of the coach beyond and barely above her head. She glanced at the terror-struck Meg, still ahorse, with her hair wild, then to the arrow again. Other than that, Elizabeth could not move, could not think. Her guards had reacted, though: Some had gone into the forest.
Slowly her thoughts settled. Someone had shot through the trees expertly, exactly through Meg’s hair and the curtain beside the queen’s head and into the coach. Or else the shot had gone awry and missed what it was meant to hit—either Meg or her, but either way, the shooter could have meant to hit the queen.
Her mounted guards and closest courtiers had made a solid wall of protection around her, but they were now crowding Meg away from the coach.
“Get in here, Meg!” She found her voice at last. “Get in here!” The woman half fell, half dove into the coach. The queen slapped the pierced curtains shut on the side from which the missile had come.
Outside her coach, chaos continued. She watched out the other side as more yeomen guards peered in. Robin, Norfolk, and Cecil appeared at the side she had open.
“Shall I lead the search, including for the arrow?” Robin cried, leaning down to look in.
“It’s stuck in here.”
“I’ll stay close. Guards!” he shouted, and began to give orders. “However deep the thickets and foliage, more of you, go! On foot if you must! Boonen,” he cried to her driver, “we can’t
coast along here like sitting ducks. Onward! We are far closer to safety at Titchfield than in turning back. On, man, and at the fastest clip you can safely manage!”
Elizabeth was both moved and annoyed by his taking over. “And Robin!” she cried, as her brain began to really work again, suspicions and all.
“Yes, Your Grace?”
“Send someone back through the entourage to tell the others I am well but to beware. They should strive to keep up even if we leave the baggage carts behind. And someone fetch Ned Topside here to his wife!”
“But he mustn’t leave little Piers unattended!” Meg cried, and that made the queen realize she, too, had recovered her wits.
“At least the bolt only grazed your skull,” Elizabeth said.
“My cap flew off, though—it was close.”
“Very close,” the queen said, and scrutinized the offending bolt stuck in the painted and gilded wood. Her own head might have been there had she been sitting straight up in the center as she usually did, or perhaps if the curtain had not slowed or deflected the shaft. Then, too, Drake had been nearby again when it hit, but where was he now?
She kept her hand firm on her friend’s shoulder, hoping to comfort her. But indeed, Meg could have been mistaken for herself on that horse, and she began to shake harder than her herbalist or the bouncing coach.
T
hough it was no doubt but a few moments, it seemed to Meg an eternity until Ned rode up to the coach. She cried when she saw him and knelt to reach up to take his hand through the crack between the pierced curtains. He rode quickly and jerkily along beside them, since the queen’s driver was going at a good pace.
“Slow down, Boonen!” the queen shouted, and yanked the curtains open wider on Ned’s side. “Boonen, we are away from the attack, man, and my bones and teeth can’t take the jolting!”
“Better you keep the curtains closed, Your Grace,” Ned piped up, “than face another bolt from the blue.”
“From the greenwood, you mean. And no jesting! I can’t abide this dark, damned forest. Take Meg back with you and sit her down in a wagon, not up on the seat. It is possible that the shooter believed she was me, although the fact the bolt plunged into my coach may make that a pointless point.”
Meg saw Her Grace shake her head at her own inadvertent punning. Meg held hard to Ned, but, in the stronger light now, she studied the bolt the queen had mentioned, stuck deep in the wood. The vehicle slowed as Francis Drake rode up hastily on Ned’s other side.
Meg frowned up at the bolt. She’d seen the first one at close range, and this one looked pretty different to her. “Your Grace,” she said, her voice trembling, “this one looks like an arrow, not a bolt, doesn’t it? Maybe it wasn’t even shot by the same man—or shot by someone who is skilled with any sort of bow.”
A
s Ned rode away with Meg sitting before him on his horse, the queen clenched her hands so hard that her fingernails bit into her palms. She was furious with herself for letting panic command her actions and cloud her brain. While she cowered, her herb woman, no less, who had been as endangered and shaken by the deadly missile as she had been, had the presence of mind to see that the bolt was not a bolt at all but an arrow!
Two attempts on her life—if they were that. By more than one person, as Meg had suggested? She had a bolt and an arrow for evidence, yet perhaps was no closer to knowing who was the expert marksman or-men, who had, thank the good Lord, evidently missed everyone this time.
Then, too, Drake had been nearby, on his horse, his head probably even visible to the shooter above the height of Meg’s head and the top of the coach. It was feasible that the marksman had mean to hit Drake, she reasoned as, on her knees to give herself some height and leverage, she tried to dislodge the arrow. She amazed herself by not being able to budge it from the wood, at least not without perhaps snapping it off. Yes, indeed, this was not a bolt but an arrow, a fully fletched one with a shaft longer than a bolt.
“Drake,” she cried, “climb in here and pull or pry this arrow from where it stuck.”
He tied his horse’s reins to something outside and slid in from the saddle as if he were walking the yardarm of a tossing ship. He adeptly avoided her wide skirts and looked where she pointed. She opened the curtains of the side it had shot through to give him more light, for two guards blocked her view of the forest now.
“Ah,” he said, “driven deep, as if the shooter were close, when he obviously was not or someone would have spotted him. And to place it so, through all those thick trees and hanging foliage …”
“You sound as if you admire his skill.”
“I’m afraid I do, though I am thankful he was just a whit off—unless, of course, he was right on target.”
“Who was his target, do you think? It was not my falconer, Fenton, who stood between you and me this time but my herb woman. Had you thought that you might be the target as well as I again?”
“Yes—yes, of course.”
“Then what do you mean that the shooter might have been right on target?”
“That he might have only wished to affright you—again—or to warn you this second time. Or me.”
“Exactly, Captain. Both of us—either of us—could have been the bull’s-eye again, to be warned or killed. But warned to do what—to flee from whence we came? To simply fear whoever hates us? For it seems the marksman is lurking in each place we stop or pass, and that, of course, means it could be someone either stalking our progress or
in
our progress.”
“Yes, I agree,” he said, frowning. His usually commanding voice sounded shaky now, but perhaps that was from the jolting of the coach.
“I can hardly turn everyone in this large retinue into spies watching each other for who disappears into the forest from time to time,” she muttered.
Hastily, as if to change the subject, he said, “I shall pull the arrow out and try not to snap it off.” He started to say something else, then tugged and wrenched the arrow out. “At least four inches into that hard oak,” he reported. “To come the distance it did—but longbowmen are few and far between in this modern age,” he added, as if to himself.
“Longbowmen? You think that arrow was shot from a longbow? Those went out with my father’s reign.”
“I say that because this arrow,” he said, glaring at it in his big hands, “must have come a long ways, and an arrow cannot be shot by a crossbow, which also would have the distance. A shortbow would have been useless from a ways within the forest fringe.”
“Yes, surely someone would not have shot from the first line of trees, or he could have been seen. And if he were farther back, the thick foliage should have gotten in his way, especially with a shortbow. So I—or we—may have now been shot at by a crossbowman and mayhap a longbowman who should be nearly extinct but for decrepit, old men …”
“Well, it cannot be a marksman back from the dead or some sort of forest phantom. Your Majesty, I must tell you that I noted both my men were missing when this arrow was shot,” Drake blurted. “I searched for them and found them emerging from the forest far behind the end of the procession. They both had loose innards today, they say, and were seeing to nature’s urgent call. They had no weapons of any sort on their persons and, I believe, could not so swiftly have covered the distance in the forest from the place from which this came to where they emerged, nor, I can assure you, do they have crossbows or longbows in their saddle packs.”
“I see,” she said, taking the arrow from him. “That was quite a lengthy recital—confessional, perhaps. It is good you acted quickly and told me quickly. I charge you to keep an eye on them both.”
“I shall. I told you also lest someone who does not appreciate my attending you on this progress should report to you that I fled like one guilty.”
“Another thing we share then, Captain,” she said, carefully placing the arrow on the opposite leather seat, “is necessary devious thinking for our own personal protection and advancement.”
Their eyes met and held.
“Yes,” he admitted, then added, “and one more thing I must confess.”
She frowned. “Which is?”
“I have—Your Majesty, I have seen arrows like this, not with the same fletching, but the shafts are much the same. Look,” he said, gesturing toward it, “a pyramid point that tapers to a square base, cleverly carved.”
“But what’s this wrapped around it?”
“That’s quite characteristic and also gives it away,” he whispered, then cleared his throat. “It’s wrapped tightly with a strip of soft leather so it rotates in flight and digs deep into its target—much more deadly. These were the very sort some of the Spanish bowmen shot at us at San Juan d’Ulua.”
She sucked in a quick breath. “Spanish! I knew it. I feared it. Then—your men, like you, perhaps, could have collected such arrows for keepsakes of your deliverance.”
His fine features seemed to clench around his narrowed eyes. “True,” he said. “I have a few yet in my captain’s cabin.
Quadrellos,
the Spanish call these arrows, Your Grace. They bored so deep into the bodies and bones of my men, we call them homicidal arrows.”
A
s the afternoon wore on, the royal entourage, tired and distressed, pushed on through fields, villages, and a final forest. Never more than on this day had Elizabeth regretted England’s law that each local parish must maintain its own roads by spending but four days a year repairing them. That included cutting back brush and filling holes larger than pots with stones, neither of which had been done here. And if an obstacle was in the way, such as an ancient tree trunk or thicket, the road might take a sharp jog around it, so the queen’s progress must, too.
Yet Elizabeth was certain she could smell the sea, and that kept her spirits up a bit. She thought the horses pricked up their ears and pulled harder at the scent, too. As they burst from the shaded tunnel of the last deep woods, the sun-struck scene awaiting them before the town of Fareham startled them all.
It looked as if the entire population of the village, perhaps of the whole area, had turned out for a grand and glorious welcome. Cheering, waving people, six or seven deep, packed the rutted dirt road into the town. Banners, many improvised from tablecloths or petticoats, smacked smartly in the breeze as people waved them or held them aloft on poles. Some sort of low wooden scaffolding had been erected and was strewn with leafy boughs, evidently as a stage for a pageant. In the midst of it all, Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton, and his wife,
Lady Mary, rode to greet them on flower-bedecked matching horses.
Elizabeth called to Cecil and Robin from the depths of her coach, “I was expecting hard looks and meager cheers. Perhaps I was in error to judge, though I know well enough the tricks of pretense and artifice.”
“But you had ordered,” Cecil said, bending down a bit to look in at her, “that we would ride straight for the shelter of Place House. Your Grace, after that possible attempt on your life today …”
“My people, Cecil, are awaiting, and in an area I had been fretting was not strong for a Protestant queen. I will not cower from terror, even in this open area with many about we do not know. Especially, their queen shall not sit, as if some guilty prisoner, in her coach to watch these festivities. But,” she went on to stay the further protest coming from him, “I am not disillusioned that those white-teethed smiles coming this way may not be the bared fangs of wolves. Boonen, halt here!” she shouted. Then she added quietly to Cecil alone, “Deploy my guards carefully, my lord, and do put on a pleasant face.”
The twenty-four-year-old Earl of Southampton, Henry Wriothesley, whose last name was pronounced Rise-lee, was a young whelp Elizabeth still had hopes she could tame. These last few years, he was much more at court in London and was becoming a vocal member of her nobles, though she was afraid he listened far too much to Norfolk. What galled her most about Southampton as a covert supporter of her rival, Mary, Queen of Scots, was that his father had been one of her father’s staunchest supporters when the old religion was being supplanted by the new.
The first Earl of Southampton, Thomas, had worked for King Henry VIII and his chief advisor, Cromwell. Twenty-seven former monastic manors, including Titchfield Abbey but a half mile from here, had been awarded to this earl’s father for “his good and true and faithful service” to the Tudor king. Young Henry had inherited the earldom at the tender age of five but had somehow turned back to the Catholic faith while yet wallowing in the wealth that had flowed from the Tudors.
Perhaps, Elizabeth thought, as the young couple dismounted and approached her coach still all smiles, Henry Wriothesley was somehow trying to atone for his father’s headlong ruination of the Catholic faith in England.’S blood, she’d smarted silently for the brutal way it had been accomplished by her father, but she’d never say so. After all, Great Henry had done it to wed her mother as surely as he’d meant to get his hands on the wealth of the corrupt old church—and for his conscience’s sake, of course.
“Your Gracious Majesty, it is our honor and delight to welcome you to Fareham,” the earl declared as he, then his wife, Mary, dismounted and bent to kiss the beringed hand the queen offered them.
“I am pleased at the fine greeting, my lord, and look forward to our time with you.”
“If you would deign to delay your further progress for but a few moments,” he went on, “we—my family and the town folk—have prepared a short fantasy in your honor. If you would but mount the rural throne we have built under the leafy bower on the dais, we can commence and then, afterward, head onward to our domicile, which we have readied for you and the court.”
“I would be pleased to see the play,” she said, nodding and smiling as a footman put down the wooden steps for her to dismount. Behind the Wriothesleys, she could see Cecil frowning and shifting from one foot to the other. “
If
,” she added, “you, my lord and lady, will both stand close beside me during it all.”
“A great honor,” the pretty, green-eyed Mary declared with another quick curtsy. “I have been looking forward to this moment ever since we heard you would bestow a visit on us, here in the deep south country.”
It was a good thing, Elizabeth thought as she climbed down, that noble marriages were arranged early, or this skinny, sallow-faced boy, however fine his attire and smooth his manners, would never catch a beauty like this one.
Elizabeth made certain she walked close between the two of them, keeping a light touch on their arms as if to escort them to the leafy bower they had built, which arched over the silkdraped
wooden throne. “Sit,” she said, “each of you on one of the arms of my chair, yes, like that.”
The poor girl blushed a bit to be pulled so close, perhaps to have her satin skirts overspill the queen’s own costume. Elizabeth knew she would have taken to the earl if Cecil’s spies and the young man’s intercepted notes to that traitor Norfolk hadn’t revealed his true colors. Now he fidgeted, too, and spent a long moment getting his clanking sword and scabbard out of the way as he perched on the outer edge of the other arm of her chair.
Among the crowd turned expectantly her way, the queen noted well that Cecil had deftly deployed her red-liveried yeomen guards. Most were facing out toward the crowd, keeping a good eye on them, though a few closer watched her courtiers and scrutinized the approaching players. In this imagined forest setting, she wondered if her guards who had plunged into the real forest several hours ago would find the shooter or any sign of him.
Well, Elizabeth thought, as she settled back to watch the little fantasy, just let someone dare to shoot at her right now.
A
handsome lad began the entertainment by reading from a scroll in a loud voice, proclaiming that “the great deer hunt park of the Earl of Southampton at Titchfield near the town of Fareham in Hampshire welcomes the queen of the realm, Elizabeth of England, the great virgin goddess of the hunt, as was the Roman virgin goddess Diana!”
Everyone nodded and whispered at that. The queen did love to ride and hunt, but she had no desire to do so in the near future, not since she was evidently the hunted lately.
Glancing off to the side, she saw Ned Topside studying each gesture on the stage, no doubt wishing he were the principal player this time. He had on his shoulders the younger Naseby boy, Piers, all eager eyes at the stage before him.
She saw that handsome courier of Cecil’s, too, Justin Keenan, perhaps just arrived. Off to the side, he still held his lathered horse with his wheezing second horse behind, so he must have ridden them hard. Cecil had sent him, not to London
this time, but only back to Guildford to learn if Sheriff Barnstable’s men had come back into town so they could be questioned.
“And so, we begin,” the prologue went on. “As our queen has emerged from the forest, so once did the virgin goddess Diana return from the hunt!” The man rolled the scroll closed, bowed to her, and exited.
Traipsing in from the side of the makeshift stage depicting a forest, to stand before the queen’s seat on the dais, came a beautiful, red-haired, slender girl in green satin with a fine leather quiver over her shoulders and a bow in her hand against which rested a ready arrow.
Elizabeth realized she was leaning forward and sat back in her seat. No, the arrow bore no resemblance to the
quadrello
that had been shot at her earlier.
What else caught her eye was that the woman was played by a female and not a young boy whose voice had not deepened. Behind the goddess trailed a bevy of beautiful nymphs—actually girls, too—ones to rival the queen’s own ladies in fair countenance if not in poise, for they were, no doubt, women selected from the town. Two of them squirmed in their tight-laced bodices, and one scratched an itch under her arm. Their stilted dialogue told of the fine aim and skill of the goddess Diana, who was tired and wanted to bathe and rest after the long hunt on this day.
Her nymphs divested Diana of her weapons and cloak, then stood around her as if to block the view while she supposedly bent to bathe in a forest pool, made from a circle of shimmering blue silk laid on the rough floor of the stage.
“Now comes Actaeon on the scene, Your Grace,” Mary Wriothesley blurted in a whisper, as if, like a child, she could not help but tell what was coming next.
Elizabeth knew the mythological tale of Diana and Actaeon well, as did most of her court, no doubt. She watched as Prince Actaeon, the comely son of King Camus, entered with four hunt hounds at his heels. He spoke of his own hunting expedition on this day. Now he was, he said, “led thither to my destiny.”
The prince accidentally came upon Diana bathing. He gasped as he peeked past her nymphs to gaze upon her nakedness.
Beside the queen, Lady Mary sighed so hard she inadvertently elbowed Elizabeth’s shoulder.
The nymphs screamed and tried to protect the goddess from the eyes of a strange man and mere mortal. Diana stretched her arm for her bow and arrow, but they were out of reach; instead, she splashed water, cut pieces of silk, in Actaeon’s eyes.
Then, cleverly for a rustic player, the queen thought, as Diana’s curses met the man’s ears, for his punishment, he began to turn into a stag. From under her garment, one nymph slipped a deer hide on the actor, and another passed him stag’s horns he cunningly strapped on his head.
Staggering about the stage, horrified at feeling himself turning into the animal he had oft hunted, the doomed man gasped as his hounds bayed at his heels. Surreptitiously dropping pieces of meat to them, crying out in horror, he rushed headlong away through the counterfeit trees before the pack supposedly attacked and devoured him in the unseen forest depths.
When his cries halted and the audience heard only the howling of the dogs, everyone grew quiet for a moment before exploding into cheers and applause. They hushed again when Diana held up her hands for silence, then turned sideways between audience and queen and spoke.
“Just as,” the red-haired maiden declared in a clear, high voice, much like her own, Elizabeth realized, “when the ancient Romans lived in this area and replaced the old Anglo-Saxon deities like Woden, later Catholicism came to conquer all pagan gods, so I, the virgin goddess Diana, a mere figment of foolish minds, was displaced by the true faith.”
The queen wondered if she would mention that Catholicism, too, had been replaced by the truer faith of Protestantism, but then this area was yet a stronghold for the old religion.
“And so, in honor of that,” the young woman went on, “I, the virgin queen of the hunt, must give way to the Virgin Mary, the rightful queen of heaven.”
Elizabeth stiffened as another fair young woman, draped in a blue robe, even over her head, came out and took the place of the banished goddess Diana, who fled offstage with her nymphs. This woman’s hands were clasped as if in prayer, and
she gazed up toward heaven while the awed crowd finally began to cheer again.
The queen’s wide stare snagged Cecil’s. He had suddenly appeared in her line of sight, just over the shoulders of Robin, who looked most annoyed, and Norfolk, who seemed to be stifling a grin.
Elizabeth’s eyes narrowed as her brain took in the clever words:
the virgin queen … must give way to Mary … the rightful queen
… Surely they did not dare to insult her with clever treason favoring Mary, Queen of Scots! Still, it was not blatant, and she would appear a fearful, weak woman if she acted like one.
“An interesting turn of words at the end,” she said, rising so quickly she almost toppled her hosts off their tenuous perches. “’Tis much more pleasant, I warrant, to be queen of heaven than queen of this earthly realm, for everyone in heaven is good and true.”
Ignoring the wary expressions on their faces, she turned to wave at the crowd as their cheers swelled and broke over her. At least, despite Southampton’s—or maybe Norfolk’s—duplicity, the common folk, who probably didn’t discern the deeper meanings of this play, were simply glad to see their queen.
Elizabeth marched straight back to her coach and told Boonen to head for Place House, following their hosts on their fine horses.
“I’m not running away with the dogs at my heels,” she muttered to herself as the coach jerked into motion. “I intend to stay and fight.”
I
was not deceived for long, I’ll tell you that!” Elizabeth ranted to her Privy Plot counselors—without Drake this time—as they met in her chamber in her suite of rooms at Place House that evening after dark. Fortunately, a thunderstorm was raging outside, for she was finding it difficult to keep her voice in check. The more she realized how slyly her hosts had pulled her into the snare of their pageant, the more she wanted to shake down the rafters of this place.