The King’s Daughter. Christie Dickason

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ his ropes and knots. It would begin soon. Soon they would be making me ready, pinning up my hair, removing my collar.

      Then reason pulled me back from my leap to certainty. They were not preparing me, reason pointed out. I was here, looking down, buffered by staircases and corridors, not in a cell or a room more convenient to the Churchyard with a bishop praying over me and inviting me to repent.

      I was not going to die today. Other traitors would die—real traitors, not an ugly troll of my father’s imagination that pretended to be me. I was not here to die but to watch.

      I felt the solid thump of truth. This was the clarifying sight that my father promised me in Coventry.

      I stepped back from the window.

      The Bishop’s man gestured politely for me to return to my position.

      With sudden clarity, I heard my father’s avid voice in my head, as he questioned the bishop’s man. ‘How did she bear it? Tell me, mon! Did she avert her eyes? At which death did she flinch the most? Did she seem to know any of them? Did she weep?’

      I was still on trial.

      I waved the man aside and noted that he took a position from which he could see my face.

      Below me, the edgy crowd moved as one. Heads turned all in the same direction and craned to see over their neighbours. The dignitaries standing on the scaffold turned. Through the crowd, I saw the bobbing heads of three horses. Voices in the crowd shrieked curses at the prisoners. A fourth horse approached from the Gatehouse, where a woman was screaming. Then I heard a small boy’s voice cry, ‘Tata! Tata!’ before a hand muffled him. The shouting of the crowd grew louder. A tussle broke out. Men-at-arms broke from the doorways.

      Mrs Hay turned away from the window. ‘I’m over here, if you need me, my lady.’ She sat on a stool in the corner. After a moment, she gave our watcher a look and pulled out a defiant handkerchief.

      Four horse-drawn hurdles broke out of the crowd, carrying the condemned men. They stopped at the foot of the scaffold. A woman struggled out of the crowd, threw herself down onto one of the prisoners and clung to him, weeping. Men-at-arms hauled her off and lifted the men up from the hurdles.

      The reek of sweaty animal excitement rose from the crowd. The horses stamped and tossed their heads. A torch juddered below the window, sending up gusts of pine and burning pitch.

      There was a moment of consultation and confusion. Then the first man to die climbed the steps onto the scaffold. I gripped the windowsill. I could not breathe.

      Though Digby was changed, I recognised him clearly. He still had golden hair, but no sunlight dappled his head and shoulders. He stood close enough to me that I could see beard stubble darkening his chin. In the strange dull light of early morning, he looked pale and heavy-eyed, as if he had not slept during his last night before eternal sleep. Even when about to die, he kept his air of amiability, lost only in our last desperate moments of struggle.

      Then I realised that I could not hear the other man in the room breathing. His attention had fastened onto me so intently that his breathing echoed my own. Over my shoulder, I saw Mrs Hays’s eyes on me. Surely, she did not doubt me, as well! Had the air at Combe hummed with suspicions about me that I never heard?

      The small boy again cried out to his father. ‘Ta ta!’ Digby turned his head to the sound and smiled at his son’s voice. His straight back and erect head reminded me of Henry. He opened his mouth to speak.

      The crowd grew more silent than a playhouse.

      Don’t look up! I begged. I could not bear it, if he saw that I was there but dared not acknowledge him. The shame…Given what he had done and tried to do, I didn’t understand why I should care, but I did.

      In a strong clear voice, Digby admitted that he had broken the law. He apologised to the king. He asked forgiveness of God, the king, and of all the kingdom.

      Heads nodded. There were murmurs of approval in the crowd.

      But these were fatal admissions for me, if I had been mired in the plot by their confessions.

      ‘…but Father Garnet knew nothing of our plot,’ he was saying. ‘The Jesuit priests knew nothing.’ No one else knew what they had intended.

      He lifted his head to my window. His eyes locked onto mine for an instant but moved on before I had time to respond.

      In a clear voice he insisted that only the plotters themselves had known what they meant to do. No one else. No one!

      He kept turning his face to include the whole crowd and all the people watching from all the windows, but I knew that he spoke to me and to any others who feared betrayal. He could not have known for certain that I was there, nor at which window. But he had guessed that perhaps I might be there, or had sent someone to report to me.

      Relief unstrung my joints. I leaned harder on the sill.

      Digby had not betrayed me in his confession, after all, whatever Cecil had implied. I was certain of it now. We shared a strange intimacy after our encounter in the forest. He was a good man, as I had told him. The wrong one for the task. As an abductor, he had tried not to alarm me. Even when about to die, he tried to console and reassure. I was certain of it. My relief was as intense as my earlier conviction that I was about to die.

      Don’t cry! Don’t cry, with those eyes watching you, waiting to report every blink of eyelid and twitch of your lips. I felt myself growing older in a rush, like music played too fast or the riffled pages of a book.

      Cecil had been testing me with his hints of confession, just as my father had been testing me, but with more subtlety. They didn’t know what had happened in the forest at Combe after all. They had nothing more than suspicion to hold against me.

      I pushed away the memory of Cecil’s warning nod when I had been about to blab to the king. And the sharp-cornered question of my letter to Henry.

      I watched Digby take his leave of the courtiers gathered on the scaffold. He took their hands with such friendly good will that he might have been setting out on a hopeful sea voyage to the Americas. A strong young man in his prime, sailing off on his next adventure.

      Then he was climbing the ladder. He bent his head to accept the noose. Was pushed off the ladder, jerked, kicked, swung only briefly before being cut down, choking but still alive, and delivered to the butchers’ knives.

      I closed my eyes, not caring who saw me. I wanted to stop my ears. The greatest courage in the world could not suppress his scream at disembowelment. Cries from the crowd beat at my ears, of fury mixed with grief. Women screeched and wailed. I imagined I still heard his reassuring voice above the crowd, but it wasn’t possible, because, when I opened my eyes, a man was holding aloft his heart, shouting, ‘Here is the heart of a traitor!’

      I felt a heavy downward pull. All my weight was sinking into my feet. My eyes blurred and my head swam.

      Don’t fall! I was the First Daughter of England.

      I leaned my elbows on the sill, as if to see better. Three more to go. God have mercy on them!

      The First Daughter would not close her eyes again. Let that weasel-spy report that I watched without flinching. Though it was wicked for me even to imagine that I suffered. I locked my knees.

СКАЧАТЬ