The Noble Assassin. Christie Dickason

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      ‘Dear Lord!’ exclaimed her lady-in-waiting. Elizabeth heard the horses groaning and blowing. Behind them, oxen protested. The carriage swayed and creaked like a ship in a storm. She dropped the curtain across the window. She needed both hands to clutch the front of the seat. The interior of the coach was now dark and no warmer, but the curtain at least kept out the snow.

      ‘Stop!’ A scream rose behind her. She leaned from the window again, into the icy needles of snow. A voice fought its way to her against the wind, through the shouts of the carters and coachmen and the protests of the horses. ‘Wait, Your Majesty . . .!’

      Then the wind blew the voice into ragged tatters.

      ‘Stop!’ she cried. Cold air filled her open mouth. Her teeth ached from the cold. ‘Who is that?’

      It’s too late, she thought. We’ve been overtaken.

      ‘Your Majesty!’ The voice shouted again.

      Then she saw the man staggering and sliding through the snow alongside the track. Not a Hapsburg soldier: one of Frederick’s gentlemen. Clutching a bundle of cloth in his arms, he fought his way forward towards her carriage.

      ‘Your Majesty,’ he shouted again. He overtook the carriage behind hers. ‘Dohna, the King’s Chamberlain went back . . .’ He slipped and almost fell into a drift. ‘. . . into the castle to check that everyone was gone . . . That nothing valuable had been left . . . Look!’ He stumbled alongside, panting, beneath the carriage window, holding up the bundle of cloth. ‘I was in the last carriage. Dohna threw him in . . . left behind in the nursery!’

      The bundle gave an angry wail.

      The carriage slid sideways. Elizabeth nearly fell from the window as she reached out. The man shoved the bundle up into her hands just before he fell. Elizabeth fumbled, re-gripped and fell back into her seat. It was her youngest son.

      ‘Rupert!’

      One of her ladies whimpered.

      Alive. Very much alive. She could now hear his steady screams and feel the pumping of his breath. The scrap of his face that showed amongst the wrappings was brick red. His body arched with rage.

      Frightened faces stared back at her across the carriage.

      ‘Where’s the prince’s nurse?’

      But she already knew. She remembered now. She had not seen Rupert’s nurse waiting with the others. The woman had fled.

      Behind her she heard the coachmen and carters cursing and shouting as their beasts piled into the ones in front of them, trying not to run into her carriage.

      ‘Onwards,’ she shouted through the window and heard the order reverse itself back down the line. As the carriage lurched forward again, she braced herself against the motion, with her son pressed against her guilty heart. For the first time, she truly felt the enormity of what had happened to them all, of what was happening, and would go on happening. However calm she had pretended to be, what had happened was so terrible that it had almost made her leave behind her youngest child.

       Chapter 3

      LUCY – MOOR PARK, 1620

      I lie in my cold bed, breathing out warm clouds, my feet close to the iron brazier filled with coals at the end of the mattress. My maid Annie snores gently from her pallet on the floor. A nodding house groom tends the fire.

      I think about the news Edward has given me. The daughter of the King of England – my Elizabeth – is in flight, pursued by the armies of a Catholic empire that rules most of northern Europe from Russia to Flanders, only a short sail away across the North Sea. The long rumbling of war on the Continent between Catholic and Protestant powers has suddenly turned to the thunder of guns that can be heard in England.

      She will be frightened and confused, though, as always, she will seem to command. She will fear for the children. They are all in danger.

      I know I should not feel happy. How dare I rejoice?

      I duck down under the covers to warm my hands on the brazier, curling like a cat in the small warm cave.

      I am being given another chance. If I can think how to take it.

      The next morning I rise as if the world were not changing. I dress, eat my frugal breakfast of bread and small beer. Wearing old fur-lined gloves with the fingers cut off, I sign orders to buy sugar and salt that we can’t afford. I approve the slaughter of eight precious hens. I count linens as they come back from the washhouse, and the remaining silver returned from being washed and polished in the scullery. While Lady Agnes frowns at a peony she is working in tiny knots to hide a patch on a sleeve, I try to do my own needlework. But I prick myself so often that I throw the torn pillow cover across the room.

      Agnes tightens her mouth and ignores me. After a time, I pick up the pillow cover myself.

      After the midday meal, I write to my old friend from court, Sir Henry Goodyear, begging for news. I would have written to Elizabeth, but do not know where to send a letter. I take out her many letters to me and re-read her joy at her babies, her excitement at moving to Prague, her confession how she had offended her new subjects by misunderstanding their early gifts.

       . . . So I made certain to display the gift of a cradle for the coming babe on the dais in the great hall, as if it were a holy icon. I believe that the people were puzzled by this strange English custom, but pleased . . .

      She had always trusted me with her indiscretions as well as her joys. I press the letter to my forehead.

      If she were dead or captive, Edward would have told me. Therefore, she must still be alive and free.

      As the early winter darkness closes in, to get through the time, I try to write verse as I had once done so easily at court.

      Remembering the good-natured, bibulous, literary competitions, I attempt to write an ode in the style of Horace – a challenge we had often set ourselves after dinner, made arrogant by wine and youth. But my metres now trudge heavy-footed where the Roman poet’s had danced and skimmed like swallows.

      No thoughts or words seem important enough to distract me. All my being waits trembling on the surface of life. It should be anguish, but I confess that, even while tearing up my attempt at Latin verse, I feel alive once again.

      Above all, I need more news. Even without the distortion of malice, accounts of past or distant events are always slippery. The truth often proves to be, insofar as one can determine it, a little less vibrant than the tale as told. The tale is almost always simpler. The true narrative most often proceeds by bumps and hiccoughs, not in great sweeps.

      I need a letter from Elizabeth. She has clung to England by writing letters, first from her husband’s German Palatine, more recently from Bohemia. I know she will write to me as soon as she can.

      Goodyear writes back by return of messenger. He has heard that Elizabeth and her children struggled down the mountain to spend the first night in Prague, in the house of a Czech merchant near the Old Town Square across the Vltava river from the palace. There, she waited while Frederick and his generals argued whether to try to defend Prague. СКАЧАТЬ