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She slid a sideways look at him. “Rowan? Named for a tree? Neither girl nor boy but a being from the forest?”
He smiled ruefully. “Of course, you saw her at once. Aye, she’s a lass. The granddaughter of a woman who was kind to me when I was first in New England. They call themselves the Pokanoket, the People of the Dawnlands.” He corrected himself. “No. Not anymore. They did. They were the ones killed in the wars, and now their name is forbidden.”
“Have you escaped one war to wage another?” she asked him acutely.
He glanced to her closed bedroom door, as if even in her own house, he was wary of eavesdroppers. “Aye, I got a message,” he said shortly. “Old comrades tell me that the new king is a papist and a French spy. They say that no one will stand for it, the people will rise again and put the Duke of Monmouth in as a new Lord Protector. Another Cromwell. So I came at once. Like an old horse at the sound of the trumpets! To see it happen—the freeing of the people. Once again.”
She nodded. “It’s true,” she said. “Captain Shore keeps his own counsel, and we’re far away from St. James’s Palace, but even the merchants’ coffeehouses say that the new king prays like a papist in a foreign tongue, kneels for Mass with his foreign wife, and the court is bought and sold by France. There’s not an honest man among them. And the young Duke of Monmouth is said to be in the Low Countries, building a fleet. They say he’ll come to save us and the Church of England. The country’ll be divided again into royalist against roundhead.”
“There’ll be a war?” he confirmed. “Another civil war?”
“Not for you,” she urged. “Not for you, who left England rather than be subject to a king. You’ve done enough, Brother. Come to watch if you must. But don’t you risk a beating. You can’t bear that grief again.”
His slow smile told her that he regretted nothing. “Nay,” he said. “All my life I’ve thought that God made man and woman, not kings and servants. I was proud to serve under Cromwell to set the men of England free. I was glad we won our freedom. I was sorry we gave it away again. I’d be proud to fight for the men of England once again.”
“We can’t,” she told him. “The family can’t. We’ve taken years to build the warehouse trade, and now we have our own ship: Captain Shore’s ship. We’ve bought the wharf next door, we trade in fine things from Sarah in Venice. Johnnie is a writer at the East India Company and Rob is a doctor, he’s put up his door knocker in the City—our Rob! A proper doctor! We can’t throw that away for the king’s bastard. We can’t do it, Ned. You can’t ask it of us—not of the young ones when they’re doing so well. Not of Captain Shore and Alys now they’re settled.”
“No, no,” Ned said quickly, clasping her hand. “Not any one of you. I’ll go to Monmouth as a single man, without ties, without family. This is my battle—not theirs. If the Duke of Monmouth takes me into his service, I’ll be Ned Ferryman come from New England to serve my countrymen—and nothing to link the Reekie wharf to me.”
“You’ll think me chickenhearted,” she said ruefully.
He shook his head. “I wouldn’t have you lose your home again. Once was enough.”
“It’s not home,” she said quietly, thinking of their house beside their ferry on the tidelands. “But it’s a good living.”
“Course,” he agreed. “And maybe I’ll come out of this so well that I’ll buy you a house at Foulmire, and you and I will end our days there, watching the waters rise and fall in the harbor, with no lord ruling over us and no king over England, and it’ll be a new dawn.”
ST. JAMES’S PALACE, LONDON, SPRING 1685
The newly crowned queen was sick: bleached by the pain in her chest, in her back, cold despite the heaped lambswool covers on her bed. No doctor had been able to cure the cough which came and went with the seasons; the hard-hearted courtiers said it was a weakness of her family, and that she would die before she was thirty. She would see no one but Livia, who lay with her in the bed, as close as a lover, warming her with the heat of her body.
Mary Beatrice could not rest. She spoke feverishly of the conversion of England, of the winning of all the souls to the true faith, with fire if need be. She coughed and said that she must have a son, a son baptized into the Roman Catholic church to cement the conversion, that her life would be wasted if she died of this cough, of weakness, before giving the Holy Father a papist prince of Wales, an heir of the true faith for England.
Livia, too much of a courtier to argue, thought the country had been Protestant for too long to change back again, the church lands sucked into private estates, the abbeys rebuilt as private houses, the nuns married off, the priests vanished. Not even the stones stood where the monks had set them, the relicts of the saints were missing from honored tombs, the pilgrim ways growing grass. The lands dedicated to holiness were growing wheat at a profit. English lords had exchanged God for great wealth, and it would be hard to change them back again.
“My son will be crowned by the Pope,” the queen predicted. “Not like us, in secret.”
“You were crowned by the Archbishop of Canterbury in Westminster Abbey, before everyone?” Livia corrected her gently, thinking she must be delirious.
“Of course, we had to go to Westminster Abbey, as the Protestants wanted, but it was an empty show. We were first crowned and anointed in secret, in the Roman Catholic chapel at Whitehall, by the king’s confessor.”
Livia was aghast. “My dear, you must never repeat that! People would go mad if they found out. They would tear down the palace.”
“Of course, it is secret,” the queen said more calmly. “But think of the glory! I am the first queen crowned in the true church since England turned heretic. Think of that! I am the first queen crowned by a priest since the sainted Catherine of Aragon, since Queen Mary.”
“Because the church changed! England has changed.”
“I will change it back…” Her voice trailed off as she fell asleep, but Livia did not close her eyes. She gazed up at the rich canopy, half dreaming, half planning, as if she could see the future in the golden embroidered sunburst, the circling stars of silver thread, trying to imagine if this queen and king could dominate the country, could remake England. Mary Beatrice stirred in her sleep, and Livia turned to her like a lover and kissed the line of her neck from her ear to her collarbone, pressing herself gently, tightening her hold.
REEKIE WHARF, LONDON, SPRING 1685
Ned, flushed and awkward, waiting for his nephew, Rob, and the family’s foster son, Matthew, to arrive for dinner, felt too big for the parlor at the front of the warehouse, ungainly at the window overlooking the river, awkward at the dining table. In the kitchen, Rowan, equally out of place, was clumsily loading a tray with a bottle of wine and glasses and an earthenware pitcher of small ale.
“Take it! Take it!” Tabs commanded, sweating over the stove. “You’re his serving lad, ain’t you? Serve it!”
Rowan abandoned the attempt to claim that she was a serving lad who did not serve, and carried the heavy tray into the parlor.
“Here, lad! Put it down before you drop it,” Ned said, helping her with the heavy tray as the glasses clinked dangerously together. “Neither of us is at ease here.”
