Dawnlands, page 49
“Exactly!” he said eagerly. “So I sound like a man ruled by his mother as well as a fool. An obedient fool.”
“You have to be obedient,” Gabrielle said mildly. “And now that your stepfather is dead, there is only your mother.”
“She terrifies me,” he said frankly.
“She is…” Words failed Gabrielle.
“She dares… it’s as if she has no fear.”
“At court?” Gabrielle guessed.
He nodded. “I dare not say—she has no fear even in the very greatest of events.”
“Well, you wouldn’t have this house if she did.”
“I know, and I should be grateful. I am grateful—but what she dares!” He shook his head. “And she employs me…”
“You haven’t done anything…” Gabrielle was tentative. “Matthew, you haven’t done anything… bad?”
“I hardly know!” he burst out. “I do a little part of the whole, but I don’t know what the whole of it is. Just before the prince was born, she had me running errands around London, it was like a dream. There were riots in the streets, and fires burning at the crossroads, and lights in the Protestant windows, and people tearing hangings out of the chapels, and I went from Lincoln’s Inn to the palace to Hester’s house and back again, and I had no idea what I was doing! I took her to Uncle Rob when it was past midnight and the house was dark and still she went in, and I have no idea what she said!”
“Dr. Reekie was part of it?”
“No!” he suddenly exclaimed. He knew that he should not speak of Rob. “No, he had nothing to do with it. Don’t think that. He refused to do… a favor. The Nobildonna sent me to ask something of him, and he refused me. And later she told me he had refused permission for my marriage to Hester.”
“But why?”
“She said it was the lawyers. Then she said she could not say.”
Gabrielle rose up from her chair and put her hand on his shoulder as he stood at the fireplace. “Oh, Matthew,” she said tenderly. “Oh, dear Matthew. This is too much for you.”
He turned and she stepped into his arms and he held her, his cheek resting against her smooth hair. “Gabrielle, I was really afraid. I am afraid that she has done something…” He could not tell her what he feared.
Gabrielle felt his arms around her and made herself stand still, not pressing against him, nor looking up for a kiss. Matthew felt the rise of his own desire and released her at once; they stepped apart.
“We are friends,” Gabrielle told him. “They both asked me to speak to you this evening to say that we all want to be friends as we were, as we have always been.”
“That’s generous,” he said. He dropped onto a stool before the fire and pulled another over for her to sit beside him. “I can’t pin the blame on my mother,” he said. “I don’t hide behind her apron strings.”
“No. But none of this was of selfishness. You offered Mia your heart and the Nobildonna forbade it. You said sorry to Mia, and she forgave you. The proposal to Hester was an arranged marriage that both parents were making for you, without either of you having a say in it. Nobody can blame you if they changed their minds.”
“I am so sorry,” he said wretchedly.
“You must tell her, and then we can be friends again.” She rose up and offered him her hand. “Agreed?”
He took her hand but, instead of shaking it, he drew her to him and he kissed her gently, just once, on the lips.
BRIDGETOWN, BARBADOS, SUMMER 1688
The cannons exploded from the fort and the bells of all the town’s churches started to ring. Johnnie’s customers put down the goods they were choosing and went to the shop door. They could hear the cheers from the Exchange and the rattle of people firing muskets into the air from the quay.
“What is it?” asked one of the ladies. “Good news?”
“It must be the royal birth,” another said.
“Please God it is a prince, only a prince will keep Barbados safe from France.”
Johnnie stepped past them and grabbed a man who was running from the quay to the Exchange.
“What news?”
“It’s a boy!” the man bawled. “It’s a prince! The king has an heir and confounded his enemies!”
“God bless the queen, God save the king!” Johnnie said quickly, wondering where Ned was and how this news would affect him. “Is it news just in?”
“A ship from Plymouth, the baby was born in mid-June. Strong and well. They’re serving rum out of the governor’s house to drink his health.”
The women in Johnnie’s doorway were hugging each other. “Mr. Stoney, what news!” they exclaimed.
“Hurrah!” Johnnie said politely. “Let me pour you a glass of punch, we should toast the new prince. And I have had a bolt of silk—Prince of Wales purple. Now at last I can allow it to be seen.”
“New?”
“New in from London for this very occasion.”
“And you bought it in ready? How clever of you.”
Johnnie gestured to one of the slaves to fetch the bolt of silk from the back, and she spread it, in a ripple of color, on the measuring table. It had been sitting for months on the shelves of the shop, overpriced and a hard color to wear. But now it was “Prince of Wales purple,” and Johnnie knew he would sell out.
REEKIE WHARF, LONDON, SUMMER 1688
London was gripped by riotous crowds, the people seemed ready to turn on the palaces and break into them as they had already raided Roman Catholic chapels and businesses and embassies of France and Spain and nobody, not the magistrates of the city, not the Aldermen or the heads of the guilds, not even the Lord Mayor of London could halt the rapturous progress of outraged crowds through the streets.
Alys made a flying visit overnight from Foulmire, unable to settle in the country without confirming that the wharf was safe, and found her neighbors all but barricaded into their wharves, unloading ships at speed, and sometimes even refusing cargos from Rome and Italy for fear of triggering a protest among their own lumpers, who were refusing to touch “papist goods.”
Alys went down the quayside to the boarded-up coffeehouse for news and was told by more than one person, with complete conviction, that the Lord Mayor had sent the keys of the City to William of Orange, that Rear Admiral Herbert, dismissed by the king for his Protestant faith, had been replaced by a Roman Catholic commander of the navy. The sailors threatened mutiny when the new admiral brought priests on board his flagship and held a Mass in the face of his determinedly Protestant crew. Everyone said that the dismissed Admiral Herbert had sailed for Holland to be appointed chief admiral of the Dutch navy.
“And that’s a man who knows every inch of the coast,” Alys said to one of her regular captains. “If he commands the Dutch navy in an invasion of England, he knows exactly where to come, he’s got the charts of every port. He can sail right in.”
“He could sail right in anyway. No port in England’d turn their cannons on the Protestant Princess Mary and her husband, William,” he replied. “They’re the true heirs, not some papist changeling. He can land where he likes.”
The whole country, even the royal forces, had turned against the king and queen. The army, at camp on Hounslow Heath, were ordered and paid to celebrate the birth of the prince; but they cheered and set off cannon when the protesting bishops were freed. Oxford University openly defied the king’s threats, refused his nominee for the new chancellor, and elected their own choice.
“Mrs. Shore, this here says that the king is bringing over troops from Ireland,” Captain Walter said, pushing a newssheet over the common table to Alys.
“We won’t stand for an Irish army,” she predicted. “Everyone would take arms against papist Irish. Lord, you’d think he was bent on destroying himself. And not one man in ten believes that he fathered that baby. The things they are saying are scandalous.”
“But they said, from the moment he was conceived, that they knew it was a boy; how can anyone trust that it was their child? How could they know unless they always planned to bring in a boy?”
“What’s it going to do to business?” Alys demanded. “There’s Captain Shore at sea right now, and I daren’t even open the warehouse. I can’t keep the lumpers at work and, to be honest, I don’t want to show lights at the window.”
“It’ll end well,” Captain Walter claimed. “You mark my words, Mrs. Shore. The Princess Mary will come in, and we’ll have the Dutch as partners, not as rivals, and together we’ll have the biggest navy in the world. Then we’ll divide up the world between the two of us, just like the Pope did for the papists. You mark my words.”
HELLEVOETSLUIS, HOLLAND, SUMMER 1688
In the magnificent dockyard of Hellevoetsluis the hundreds of warships of the huge Dutch fleet were finally ready to sail. Cannons and armaments were loaded, supplies stowed. The fleet was under the command of the English Admiral Herbert, newly arrived from England. Ned was attached to the regiment of English volunteers in William of Orange’s army. Their status was uneasy: as treasonous rebels against their king, they had to prove their loyalty to his daughter Princess Mary and his son-in-law William, and their presence was an open secret, as was William’s intention to invade. Everyone knew the English volunteers were there, arming and ready, everyone knew the fleet was preparing to invade, but William declared nothing.
“I mean, this is going to happen, isn’t it?” Ned asked, while drawing weapons and uniforms for his regiment from the Dutch stores. The commissioner shrugged. “Whatever the Elector orders,” he said, taciturn. “For sure, the Dutch people have no wish to invade England.”
The English recruits learned that William had written to his father-in-law, James, King of England, assuring him of his continuing loyalty and friendship.
“Double-dealing,” Robert Ferguson remarked.
“Lord, I hope so,” Ned said with grim humor. “Because if he is a loyal son-in-law and hopes for nothing but good for his papa, then I have come all this way for nothing. And at my age—I begrudge it.”
“He must invade! What are all the ships for?”
Ned smiled. “I wager it will be like the last time, we’ll have to wait for the wind. But at least we won’t have the Dutch authorities chasing us out of the port.”
“Aye. Now that was a gamble. It was your little lad went for the duke, wasn’t it?”
Ned smiled, remembering Rowan going down the mooring rope like an acrobat.
“Aye. That was a greater gamble than this,” Ned said. “How many men does William have?”
“Fifteen thousand,” Ferguson told him.
Ned gave a low whistle. “He’ll need them,” he agreed. “The king has a standing army of twenty thousand, and when I left England, they were talking about bringing in troops from Ireland.”
“But can he count on their loyalty?”
“He pays them. Once he got parliament to agree that he should have his own army and the funds to pay them, we lost the greatest liberty we ever had. We shouldn’t have given that away. I wouldn’t give a standing army to any ruler, not even to Cromwell.”
“Maybe we’ll win it back,” Ferguson said. “Have you seen the offer from the Whig lords? It doesn’t give Princess Mary the throne in the old way, it sets conditions on her. We’ll maybe have a king and queen; but we’ll never have a tyrant again. This is a new world we’re making, Ned, and this time we have the church and the lords, the parliament and the people on our side.”
WINDSOR CASTLE, AUTUMN 1688
Livia, admiring the queen’s gown for her birthday ball, allowed herself to be persuaded into borrowing a waterfall necklace of diamonds and a pair of diamond earrings from the collection that the treasury had sent to the queen.
“It’s hard to be merry,” Mary Beatrice said as she picked out a tiara for her hair and seated herself before her mirror.
Livia stood behind her and adjusted her curls of dark hair. “So many faces missing,” she complained. “So disloyal to stay away from your birthday ball. But with London so unsafe you know that it’s not a slight on you. They don’t dare to come in from the country.” She smiled at their reflection. “I would never fail you.”
“I know you wouldn’t.”
“And you have to show yourself, dearest, even if half the court has stayed away. And you are looking so beautiful.” She paused, dropped a kiss on Mary Beatrice’s naked shoulder. “With a prince in the cradle, it’s only a matter of time before people realize that the succession is certain, and they settle down.”
“Father Petre says we must grind heresy out of their hearts,” Mary Beatrice said.
“I’m sure he’s right. But not tonight!” Livia said cheerfully. “Tonight, you must dance and be happy—”
She broke off as the door was flung open and a lady-in-waiting curtseyed low. “The king!” she said.
Both Livia and the queen curtseyed deeply, but the king hardly saw them; he brandished a paper in his hand. “Look at this!” he demanded. “Proof that your son-in-law is lying to me! Certain proof! They are loading cavalry horses at Rotterdam. So he cannot be preparing a blockade for the French at sea as he said. Why would he want horses at sea? He has to be planning to invade?”
Mary Beatrice had nothing to say. Her hand crept into Livia’s.
“He has played me for a fool! He has lied to me! And my own daughter has lied!”
“Mary might not know?”
“Not know that her own husband is to make war against her own father? And she has not sent me a word. Not one single word of warning!”
“Mary wouldn’t be disloyal,” Mary Beatrice protested. “No daughter would.”
Livia, who had a higher opinion of the female dishonesty, said only: “But if they’re loading horses, they must be coming at once?”
“I’ll have to put the lord lieutenants and the magistrates back in post,” James said, almost to himself. “I’ll have to apologize and reinstate them. No leave for the army and I’ll turn out the militia. We defeated Monmouth, didn’t we? What is this, but another bastard claim from a heretic poor relation against his father, his king, and against God Himself?”
“William is coming?” Mary Beatrice whispered as if she could not believe it.
“But when?” Livia asked.
Mary Beatrice leapt to her feet. “The prince must go to safety,” she announced. “We have to get him safe. Far from London!”
“Portsmouth,” the king assured her. “I have Irish troops in Portsmouth who will never fail me.”
“And what about the ball? Shall we say…?”
“We hold the ball as if we feared nothing,” he proclaimed, his face gray with fear.
“But when will they come?” Livia asked again.
“It should be never,” the king told her grimly. “When the wind lets them out of port. When they have the wind with them.”
“They wait only for a wind?” Livia asked incredulously. “We watch for the wind to change?”
“We wait for the wind,” the king told her grimly.
TORBAY, DEVON, AUTUMN 1688
The month of the king’s fifty-fifth birthday saw an eclipse: the sun, the symbol of royalty itself, went dark, and then, finally, the wind swung to the east. A Protestant wind, and a few days later the invading fleet anchored off Brixham in Devon, and landed the horses and men at Torbay.
Ned, riding in the munitions wagon under a banner that read THE LIBERTIES OF ENGLAND, picked a branch of holly for lack of anything else green and put it in his hatband. The army marched east, as Monmouth had done before, and declared at Exeter in front of a crowd who remembered Monmouth and the deaths that had followed that uprising, and were quiet and sullen.
“Come on!” Ned recruited men from his wagon. “I was here before with the duke, I was here before that with Cromwell. It’s the same cause: the rights of the men and women of England. And this time we’ll win.”
A few men came forward, but it was cold, and in the night the army camped in the fields, without any visits from cheering townspeople. There was less confidence and little camaraderie on this march. Ned was not disheartened, he remembered that Monmouth’s men had been volunteers, serving him for a belief in his cause and in freedom, Cromwell’s army driven by a sense of injustice and their own mission. William’s army was a mixture: some professional soldiers of the Dutch states, mercenaries of all nationalities and many faiths, a few believers marching in a holy war, and a few staunch old Cromwellians. Ned judged that everything would depend on whether the king’s army would rally to him to defend their homes against an invasion by a foreign power, or whether he had made himself so hated that they now found him even stranger than his Dutch son-in-law. It was a gamble—as it always was—between people’s greed for the old ways, or their courage to dare for new.
Ned was in his element. On the cold frosty mornings he looked at the sun rising and thought of Rowan’s dawn prayers. In the evenings when he took a bowl of stew from the field kitchens, he thought of her poaching game and making him soup. Every step of the march through the west country he remembered her at his side and felt that this march was a tribute to the one they had done together, and that when he was marching for freedom, he was most truly himself.
WHITEHALL PALACE, LONDON, AUTUMN 1688
James was closeted every day with his advisors, and they all recommended different courses of action. But every day another of them was missing from his place at court. James would turn for an opinion, strongly expressed the day before, and see an empty chair as one lord after another slipped away to his country seat, or to France, or even—in the greatest secrecy—to the disinherited heir: Princess Mary and her husband William of Orange.
They hardly saw the king in the queen’s rooms, and the queen and her ladies depended on Father Petre for news. It was him, not the king, who told them that William had landed with a force strong enough to face the English army in battle.
“You have to be obedient,” Gabrielle said mildly. “And now that your stepfather is dead, there is only your mother.”
“She terrifies me,” he said frankly.
“She is…” Words failed Gabrielle.
“She dares… it’s as if she has no fear.”
“At court?” Gabrielle guessed.
He nodded. “I dare not say—she has no fear even in the very greatest of events.”
“Well, you wouldn’t have this house if she did.”
“I know, and I should be grateful. I am grateful—but what she dares!” He shook his head. “And she employs me…”
“You haven’t done anything…” Gabrielle was tentative. “Matthew, you haven’t done anything… bad?”
“I hardly know!” he burst out. “I do a little part of the whole, but I don’t know what the whole of it is. Just before the prince was born, she had me running errands around London, it was like a dream. There were riots in the streets, and fires burning at the crossroads, and lights in the Protestant windows, and people tearing hangings out of the chapels, and I went from Lincoln’s Inn to the palace to Hester’s house and back again, and I had no idea what I was doing! I took her to Uncle Rob when it was past midnight and the house was dark and still she went in, and I have no idea what she said!”
“Dr. Reekie was part of it?”
“No!” he suddenly exclaimed. He knew that he should not speak of Rob. “No, he had nothing to do with it. Don’t think that. He refused to do… a favor. The Nobildonna sent me to ask something of him, and he refused me. And later she told me he had refused permission for my marriage to Hester.”
“But why?”
“She said it was the lawyers. Then she said she could not say.”
Gabrielle rose up from her chair and put her hand on his shoulder as he stood at the fireplace. “Oh, Matthew,” she said tenderly. “Oh, dear Matthew. This is too much for you.”
He turned and she stepped into his arms and he held her, his cheek resting against her smooth hair. “Gabrielle, I was really afraid. I am afraid that she has done something…” He could not tell her what he feared.
Gabrielle felt his arms around her and made herself stand still, not pressing against him, nor looking up for a kiss. Matthew felt the rise of his own desire and released her at once; they stepped apart.
“We are friends,” Gabrielle told him. “They both asked me to speak to you this evening to say that we all want to be friends as we were, as we have always been.”
“That’s generous,” he said. He dropped onto a stool before the fire and pulled another over for her to sit beside him. “I can’t pin the blame on my mother,” he said. “I don’t hide behind her apron strings.”
“No. But none of this was of selfishness. You offered Mia your heart and the Nobildonna forbade it. You said sorry to Mia, and she forgave you. The proposal to Hester was an arranged marriage that both parents were making for you, without either of you having a say in it. Nobody can blame you if they changed their minds.”
“I am so sorry,” he said wretchedly.
“You must tell her, and then we can be friends again.” She rose up and offered him her hand. “Agreed?”
He took her hand but, instead of shaking it, he drew her to him and he kissed her gently, just once, on the lips.
BRIDGETOWN, BARBADOS, SUMMER 1688
The cannons exploded from the fort and the bells of all the town’s churches started to ring. Johnnie’s customers put down the goods they were choosing and went to the shop door. They could hear the cheers from the Exchange and the rattle of people firing muskets into the air from the quay.
“What is it?” asked one of the ladies. “Good news?”
“It must be the royal birth,” another said.
“Please God it is a prince, only a prince will keep Barbados safe from France.”
Johnnie stepped past them and grabbed a man who was running from the quay to the Exchange.
“What news?”
“It’s a boy!” the man bawled. “It’s a prince! The king has an heir and confounded his enemies!”
“God bless the queen, God save the king!” Johnnie said quickly, wondering where Ned was and how this news would affect him. “Is it news just in?”
“A ship from Plymouth, the baby was born in mid-June. Strong and well. They’re serving rum out of the governor’s house to drink his health.”
The women in Johnnie’s doorway were hugging each other. “Mr. Stoney, what news!” they exclaimed.
“Hurrah!” Johnnie said politely. “Let me pour you a glass of punch, we should toast the new prince. And I have had a bolt of silk—Prince of Wales purple. Now at last I can allow it to be seen.”
“New?”
“New in from London for this very occasion.”
“And you bought it in ready? How clever of you.”
Johnnie gestured to one of the slaves to fetch the bolt of silk from the back, and she spread it, in a ripple of color, on the measuring table. It had been sitting for months on the shelves of the shop, overpriced and a hard color to wear. But now it was “Prince of Wales purple,” and Johnnie knew he would sell out.
REEKIE WHARF, LONDON, SUMMER 1688
London was gripped by riotous crowds, the people seemed ready to turn on the palaces and break into them as they had already raided Roman Catholic chapels and businesses and embassies of France and Spain and nobody, not the magistrates of the city, not the Aldermen or the heads of the guilds, not even the Lord Mayor of London could halt the rapturous progress of outraged crowds through the streets.
Alys made a flying visit overnight from Foulmire, unable to settle in the country without confirming that the wharf was safe, and found her neighbors all but barricaded into their wharves, unloading ships at speed, and sometimes even refusing cargos from Rome and Italy for fear of triggering a protest among their own lumpers, who were refusing to touch “papist goods.”
Alys went down the quayside to the boarded-up coffeehouse for news and was told by more than one person, with complete conviction, that the Lord Mayor had sent the keys of the City to William of Orange, that Rear Admiral Herbert, dismissed by the king for his Protestant faith, had been replaced by a Roman Catholic commander of the navy. The sailors threatened mutiny when the new admiral brought priests on board his flagship and held a Mass in the face of his determinedly Protestant crew. Everyone said that the dismissed Admiral Herbert had sailed for Holland to be appointed chief admiral of the Dutch navy.
“And that’s a man who knows every inch of the coast,” Alys said to one of her regular captains. “If he commands the Dutch navy in an invasion of England, he knows exactly where to come, he’s got the charts of every port. He can sail right in.”
“He could sail right in anyway. No port in England’d turn their cannons on the Protestant Princess Mary and her husband, William,” he replied. “They’re the true heirs, not some papist changeling. He can land where he likes.”
The whole country, even the royal forces, had turned against the king and queen. The army, at camp on Hounslow Heath, were ordered and paid to celebrate the birth of the prince; but they cheered and set off cannon when the protesting bishops were freed. Oxford University openly defied the king’s threats, refused his nominee for the new chancellor, and elected their own choice.
“Mrs. Shore, this here says that the king is bringing over troops from Ireland,” Captain Walter said, pushing a newssheet over the common table to Alys.
“We won’t stand for an Irish army,” she predicted. “Everyone would take arms against papist Irish. Lord, you’d think he was bent on destroying himself. And not one man in ten believes that he fathered that baby. The things they are saying are scandalous.”
“But they said, from the moment he was conceived, that they knew it was a boy; how can anyone trust that it was their child? How could they know unless they always planned to bring in a boy?”
“What’s it going to do to business?” Alys demanded. “There’s Captain Shore at sea right now, and I daren’t even open the warehouse. I can’t keep the lumpers at work and, to be honest, I don’t want to show lights at the window.”
“It’ll end well,” Captain Walter claimed. “You mark my words, Mrs. Shore. The Princess Mary will come in, and we’ll have the Dutch as partners, not as rivals, and together we’ll have the biggest navy in the world. Then we’ll divide up the world between the two of us, just like the Pope did for the papists. You mark my words.”
HELLEVOETSLUIS, HOLLAND, SUMMER 1688
In the magnificent dockyard of Hellevoetsluis the hundreds of warships of the huge Dutch fleet were finally ready to sail. Cannons and armaments were loaded, supplies stowed. The fleet was under the command of the English Admiral Herbert, newly arrived from England. Ned was attached to the regiment of English volunteers in William of Orange’s army. Their status was uneasy: as treasonous rebels against their king, they had to prove their loyalty to his daughter Princess Mary and his son-in-law William, and their presence was an open secret, as was William’s intention to invade. Everyone knew the English volunteers were there, arming and ready, everyone knew the fleet was preparing to invade, but William declared nothing.
“I mean, this is going to happen, isn’t it?” Ned asked, while drawing weapons and uniforms for his regiment from the Dutch stores. The commissioner shrugged. “Whatever the Elector orders,” he said, taciturn. “For sure, the Dutch people have no wish to invade England.”
The English recruits learned that William had written to his father-in-law, James, King of England, assuring him of his continuing loyalty and friendship.
“Double-dealing,” Robert Ferguson remarked.
“Lord, I hope so,” Ned said with grim humor. “Because if he is a loyal son-in-law and hopes for nothing but good for his papa, then I have come all this way for nothing. And at my age—I begrudge it.”
“He must invade! What are all the ships for?”
Ned smiled. “I wager it will be like the last time, we’ll have to wait for the wind. But at least we won’t have the Dutch authorities chasing us out of the port.”
“Aye. Now that was a gamble. It was your little lad went for the duke, wasn’t it?”
Ned smiled, remembering Rowan going down the mooring rope like an acrobat.
“Aye. That was a greater gamble than this,” Ned said. “How many men does William have?”
“Fifteen thousand,” Ferguson told him.
Ned gave a low whistle. “He’ll need them,” he agreed. “The king has a standing army of twenty thousand, and when I left England, they were talking about bringing in troops from Ireland.”
“But can he count on their loyalty?”
“He pays them. Once he got parliament to agree that he should have his own army and the funds to pay them, we lost the greatest liberty we ever had. We shouldn’t have given that away. I wouldn’t give a standing army to any ruler, not even to Cromwell.”
“Maybe we’ll win it back,” Ferguson said. “Have you seen the offer from the Whig lords? It doesn’t give Princess Mary the throne in the old way, it sets conditions on her. We’ll maybe have a king and queen; but we’ll never have a tyrant again. This is a new world we’re making, Ned, and this time we have the church and the lords, the parliament and the people on our side.”
WINDSOR CASTLE, AUTUMN 1688
Livia, admiring the queen’s gown for her birthday ball, allowed herself to be persuaded into borrowing a waterfall necklace of diamonds and a pair of diamond earrings from the collection that the treasury had sent to the queen.
“It’s hard to be merry,” Mary Beatrice said as she picked out a tiara for her hair and seated herself before her mirror.
Livia stood behind her and adjusted her curls of dark hair. “So many faces missing,” she complained. “So disloyal to stay away from your birthday ball. But with London so unsafe you know that it’s not a slight on you. They don’t dare to come in from the country.” She smiled at their reflection. “I would never fail you.”
“I know you wouldn’t.”
“And you have to show yourself, dearest, even if half the court has stayed away. And you are looking so beautiful.” She paused, dropped a kiss on Mary Beatrice’s naked shoulder. “With a prince in the cradle, it’s only a matter of time before people realize that the succession is certain, and they settle down.”
“Father Petre says we must grind heresy out of their hearts,” Mary Beatrice said.
“I’m sure he’s right. But not tonight!” Livia said cheerfully. “Tonight, you must dance and be happy—”
She broke off as the door was flung open and a lady-in-waiting curtseyed low. “The king!” she said.
Both Livia and the queen curtseyed deeply, but the king hardly saw them; he brandished a paper in his hand. “Look at this!” he demanded. “Proof that your son-in-law is lying to me! Certain proof! They are loading cavalry horses at Rotterdam. So he cannot be preparing a blockade for the French at sea as he said. Why would he want horses at sea? He has to be planning to invade?”
Mary Beatrice had nothing to say. Her hand crept into Livia’s.
“He has played me for a fool! He has lied to me! And my own daughter has lied!”
“Mary might not know?”
“Not know that her own husband is to make war against her own father? And she has not sent me a word. Not one single word of warning!”
“Mary wouldn’t be disloyal,” Mary Beatrice protested. “No daughter would.”
Livia, who had a higher opinion of the female dishonesty, said only: “But if they’re loading horses, they must be coming at once?”
“I’ll have to put the lord lieutenants and the magistrates back in post,” James said, almost to himself. “I’ll have to apologize and reinstate them. No leave for the army and I’ll turn out the militia. We defeated Monmouth, didn’t we? What is this, but another bastard claim from a heretic poor relation against his father, his king, and against God Himself?”
“William is coming?” Mary Beatrice whispered as if she could not believe it.
“But when?” Livia asked.
Mary Beatrice leapt to her feet. “The prince must go to safety,” she announced. “We have to get him safe. Far from London!”
“Portsmouth,” the king assured her. “I have Irish troops in Portsmouth who will never fail me.”
“And what about the ball? Shall we say…?”
“We hold the ball as if we feared nothing,” he proclaimed, his face gray with fear.
“But when will they come?” Livia asked again.
“It should be never,” the king told her grimly. “When the wind lets them out of port. When they have the wind with them.”
“They wait only for a wind?” Livia asked incredulously. “We watch for the wind to change?”
“We wait for the wind,” the king told her grimly.
TORBAY, DEVON, AUTUMN 1688
The month of the king’s fifty-fifth birthday saw an eclipse: the sun, the symbol of royalty itself, went dark, and then, finally, the wind swung to the east. A Protestant wind, and a few days later the invading fleet anchored off Brixham in Devon, and landed the horses and men at Torbay.
Ned, riding in the munitions wagon under a banner that read THE LIBERTIES OF ENGLAND, picked a branch of holly for lack of anything else green and put it in his hatband. The army marched east, as Monmouth had done before, and declared at Exeter in front of a crowd who remembered Monmouth and the deaths that had followed that uprising, and were quiet and sullen.
“Come on!” Ned recruited men from his wagon. “I was here before with the duke, I was here before that with Cromwell. It’s the same cause: the rights of the men and women of England. And this time we’ll win.”
A few men came forward, but it was cold, and in the night the army camped in the fields, without any visits from cheering townspeople. There was less confidence and little camaraderie on this march. Ned was not disheartened, he remembered that Monmouth’s men had been volunteers, serving him for a belief in his cause and in freedom, Cromwell’s army driven by a sense of injustice and their own mission. William’s army was a mixture: some professional soldiers of the Dutch states, mercenaries of all nationalities and many faiths, a few believers marching in a holy war, and a few staunch old Cromwellians. Ned judged that everything would depend on whether the king’s army would rally to him to defend their homes against an invasion by a foreign power, or whether he had made himself so hated that they now found him even stranger than his Dutch son-in-law. It was a gamble—as it always was—between people’s greed for the old ways, or their courage to dare for new.
Ned was in his element. On the cold frosty mornings he looked at the sun rising and thought of Rowan’s dawn prayers. In the evenings when he took a bowl of stew from the field kitchens, he thought of her poaching game and making him soup. Every step of the march through the west country he remembered her at his side and felt that this march was a tribute to the one they had done together, and that when he was marching for freedom, he was most truly himself.
WHITEHALL PALACE, LONDON, AUTUMN 1688
James was closeted every day with his advisors, and they all recommended different courses of action. But every day another of them was missing from his place at court. James would turn for an opinion, strongly expressed the day before, and see an empty chair as one lord after another slipped away to his country seat, or to France, or even—in the greatest secrecy—to the disinherited heir: Princess Mary and her husband William of Orange.
They hardly saw the king in the queen’s rooms, and the queen and her ladies depended on Father Petre for news. It was him, not the king, who told them that William had landed with a force strong enough to face the English army in battle.
