The two exchanged a startled glance. “Impossible,” Elizabeth said to Honor, letting go of her hand. She stood. “You do not understand the situation. I barely escaped the wrath of my sister. Your son is taking me to safety.”
“I do understand. The Queen’s order that you marry the Duke of Savoy. Master Parry’s message explained it all.”
“Parry?” Adam said in surprise. Then, darkly, “The turncoat.”
“No,” Honor said. “The realist.” She lowered her legs over the edge of the berth and lifted her useless right arm to lay her hand on her lap. Rubbing her throbbing temple, she looked up at Elizabeth. “I wish you had listened to him.”
Elizabeth turned to Adam, anxious. “We
will
carry on, won’t we?”
He smiled at her. “With these winds we’ll be there by tomorrow night.” He reached out to her and she clasped his hand and smiled back at him.
Honor watched them in wonder. She had long thought that there was a special bond between these two and now, as they stood before her, ardent and handfast, it was heartbreakingly clear. Adam loved the girl. And she loved him.
“I know your concern is sincere,” he said, “but the Princess has made her decision. You are unwell, madam. You need to rest. And I need to hoist sail. We are bound for Bruges. If there is anything you need, ask any of my crew.”
She could not fight them both. “It’s true,” she said, sinking back against the pillow. “I am very tired.” She closed her eyes. “Go, Adam, see to your ship.”
“Take heart,” he said quietly to Elizabeth. Honor heard him walk out.
“Your son is right. You need rest,” Elizabeth said gently as though to an invalid. “I will let you sleep.”
She was almost at the door when Honor pushed herself off the bed, overtook Elizabeth, and closed the door. With her back against it, she said, “You cannot leave England.”
Elizabeth looked shocked. “I have no choice.”
“Everyone has choices.”
“Not like the ones I face. This marriage—”
“The demand that you marry some day was inevitable. You are a princess of the blood royal. Arranging your marriage will always be an option of state business.”
“Princess. Hah. I am a pawn.”
“Whatever you call it, you must have known that both Queen and council would one day make a marriage for you to further some policy of the moment.”
“Not with a sword at my throat!” She paced in the cabin’s small confines, hugging herself. “Always she holds this over me, this threat of execution. She hunts for ways to call me traitor—she
invents
them. For colluding with rebels. For heretical beliefs. For being my father’s bastard. And now, for obstructing the Crown by refusing this marriage. I have lived in the shadow of her threats for too long. I will abide her terror no longer. I will be
free
of her.”
“You cannot leave your people.”
“My people?” Elizabeth scoffed. “What phantom flocks are these?”
“Neither phantoms, my lady, nor sheep. They are your friends. Your supporters. The loyal gentlemen and yeomen of England. There are more of them than you know, living quietly throughout the length and breadth of the realm. They keep you in their hearts because you are King Harry’s daughter.”
“And may God keep them all,” she said acidly, “but forgive me if I leave without bidding them farewell. When Mary threatens me with the axe, such ‘quiet’ friends are little use.”
“Nevertheless, a day may come when you will need them. And they will not be there for you if you forsake your country.”
“You do not seem to understand. She threatened me with
death.
”
“If you flee you
will
die. Think. In exile you will be unprotected, friendless, alone. She will take full advantage of that, may even bless you for escaping. It perfectly opens the way for her to dispatch an assassin to kill you.”
Elizabeth seemed to suppress a shudder. “You are wrong,” she said, looking up at the ceiling as if imagining Adam striding the deck above them. “I have a protector.”
Honor sadly shook her head. “Yes, Adam stopped one assassin’s arrow. And I can see that he is ready to stand with you and do so again—ready to hazard all for you.” She came close to Elizabeth so they stood eye to eye. “That is why you must not ask it of him.”
“I? I have asked nothing of him but passage to France. I—”
“I…I. Can you think of no one but yourself? What of Adam? If you do this, you make him your accomplice. To interfere with a princess of the blood is treason. At best, he will have to remain in exile all his life, never able to come home again. At worst, the Queen’s men will hunt him down. You know the penalty for treason. They hang the victim by the neck, then cut him down while still alive and disembowel him and hack his limbs off one by one.”
Elizabeth looked aghast. It was hard even for Honor to go on. But she did.
“And what of faithful Master Parry? Another accomplice. Another victim bound to die in agony as an example to the people of the consequences of treason. And your loyal servants—they, too, will pay a price. Imprisonment. And afterward, shunned and masterless, destitution.”
“Have you no mercy?” Elizabeth cried. She pushed past her in a rush to the door.
Honor grabbed her arm to stop her. “The misery will not stop there. Throughout the realm, those who now silently support you as a bulwark against the Queen’s tyranny would see you gone—their best hope, gone—and would despair of any change coming to England. Despair breeds bitter judgment. Blaming the Queen for your flight, they might revolt in small cohorts, unprepared. Acting in such disarray, leaderless, what chance would they have to overcome her forces? She would crush them. Executions and mass hangings would bring the country to its knees.”
Elizabeth covered her ears with her hands. “Stop.”
“And then, having cut down all the brave men who would oppose her will, the Queen will turn with a vengeance to the task she calls her true mission. The extermination of heretics. Already she has burned hundreds. With no check on her, she will order the fires lit regularly in every market square, and as masses of her innocent victims burn she will praise God for keeping her throne and her people safe from
you.
”
“Stop!”
“You alone can save your country from this fate. Do not condemn Adam and Thomas Parry to a traitor’s death, and your servants to beggardom. Do not condemn countless innocents to perish in the flames.”
Elizabeth lowered her hands from her ears with the agonized reluctance of someone going to her death. Her voice was as thin as a child’s. “And so I am to sacrifice
myself?
”
“I know you, Elizabeth. You may have been selfish, but you are not heartless.”
She said bleakly, “What you are saying is that I must submit. I must marry Savoy.”
“No. That is the Queen’s way of neutralizing you, sending you out of the realm. You must stay with your people. You must refuse the marriage.”
Elizabeth blinked at her. “Refuse? Again? To her face?”
“Yes.”
“And be sent to the scaffold,” she wailed.
Honor shook her head. “She will not make good that threat. She does what her husband wants, and Philip needs you alive. If you are gone, Mary of Scotland stands to inherit the throne, and she is betrothed to the future king of France. The last thing Philip wants is France controlling England. He saved you twice before from his wife’s wrath. It is in his interest to do so again.”
Elizabeth looked desolate. “To you it is all politics. To me, it is my life.”
They are one and the same for you,
Honor wanted to say. But she held her tongue. It was hard enough for Elizabeth to bear this moment. She was not yet ready to accept that her life would be forever confined by the immutable fact of her royalty.
“But even if you are right about my sister, Philip wants this marriage as much as she does. A state policy of his own, to marry me to his Hapsburg cousin. Am I to refuse to his face, too?”
“Yes.”
Elizabeth looked overwhelmed. “You expect much of me.”
“Because you can win this. Philip cannot arrange the marriage without your consent.”
“You say that he will stand by me again, but since he has come home to ask his wife for war funds, this time she may get her way.” She lifted her chin, raising her troubled eyes to the small port window that overlooked the sea path to France. “No. You cannot ask this of me.”
“Not I, Elizabeth. You must ask it of yourself.”
The huge audience chamber at Whitehall Palace was splendid with sumptuous hanging tapestries and the lavish, bejewelled apparel of dozens of courtiers. The courtiers kept their distance from the royal dais where the Queen and King were receiving Princess Elizabeth, and they confined their talk to whispers, not for the sake of discretion, but in eagerness to overhear any snatch of the royal interview. The King’s Spanish entourage watched in excited approval of the proposed marriage of the Lady Elizabeth to one of their princes, the Duke of Savoy. The English watched in sullen suspicion that her union with the family that ruled most of Europe could turn England into a Hapsburg client state. No one had forgotten how recently the Queen, in declaring that she would marry Prince Philip, now King of Spain, had so angered Englishmen it had triggered the Wyatt rebellion that had almost lost her her crown. But she
had
married Philip and she remained queen, and the English lords and gentlemen here kept their sights firmly on that reality. Even an event not in the best interest of England could be one that might improve their personal fortunes.
To Elizabeth, as she curtsied low before the Queen and King, the chamber had never felt so vast and the audience so threatening. The Spaniards were watching her like hyenas waiting to pounce for the kill, the English waiting to see which way to jump. Gone was Mistress Thornleigh’s brave voice to give her courage. Gone were Adam Thornleigh’s strong arms to protect her. And before her sat the two people who held her life in their hands. Mary, languidly fanning herself with a Spanish pearl-encrusted fan, all smiles at having her lord and master home beside her. Philip, as haughtily certain of God’s plan in making him king of half the world as if it were Scripture. Elizabeth had never felt so alone.
She straightened. Standing before their thrones, she waited, for etiquette decreed that she must not speak until in answer to Their Majesties. She wished the silence would go on forever—that she would never have to say what she had come to say. It had been hard enough to find the courage to tell Adam to turn back the
Elizabeth.
“You don’t have to listen to her,” he had said, his voice raw with anger. “Listen to your heart. In France you can be free.”
She loved him for all that he was ready to risk for her sake. And loved him too much to ask it of him. “You would not run away thus.”
“It is not my life at stake.”
She looked up at the billowing sails of the
Elizabeth
. “If your ship were in peril, would you forsake your crew? If a reef in a storm threatened to tear her apart and fling your men to drown in the sea, would you jump to safety in a boat and leave them to their fate?”
He had looked at her in agonized silence. It almost broke her heart.
“Notre soeur,”
Philip said, eyeing her as he crossed one leg sheathed in white satin over the other. Elizabeth was not surprised that the interview would be in French, since Philip still had not learned a word of English. She was just grateful that he had called her, not unkindly, “our sister.”
Mary snapped her fan closed, her gaze on Elizabeth hardening. Philip’s tone hardened, too, as he modified his phrase with emphasis.
“Notre soeur têtue.”
Our stubborn sister.
That sent a chill through Elizabeth.
Mistress Thornleigh is right,
she kept telling herself as she curtsied again.
He needs me alive. He cannot lose me as heir. And Mary follows him in all things.
Philip went on in French, “We trust that you have had sufficient time to reconsider the offer of my cousin Savoy’s hand in marriage.”
“Indeed, Your Majesty,” she replied in French, “I have thought long and hard on it.”
“Excellent.” He looked over her head in the direction of the aristocrat who represented the duke, and lifted a hand, about to beckon the man.
“And I must tell Your Majesty,” Elizabeth interrupted, “that such a marriage is an honor for which I do not consider myself worthy.”
He stared at her. “Pardon?”
Mary spat, “It is
life
you are not worthy of.”
Philip held up his hand to quiet his wife. Her eyes on Elizabeth narrowed in anger, but she obeyed her husband. The rapt courtiers had fallen silent. The whole room seemed to hold its breath.
“Perhaps, sister,” Philip said carefully, “I misunderstood you. To be joined in holy matrimony with my kinsman Savoy is a great honor, to be sure. As great as my own wish to see the union take place. So you may rest assured that your consent is entirely to our liking. And consent is, surely, the answer you intended.”
“You did not misunderstand, your Majesty. I cannot accept this most gracious lord as my husband.”
“For what possible reason?”
I must stay with the ship, Adam.
“My reasons, Sire, are between me and God.”