Jane Feather - The Hostage Bride

As she opened it, the clamor from the city across the river swelled into the dim seclusion of the boathouse. Olivia shivered at the wild savagery of the sound. “C-Can you hear what they’re saying?”

“They’re yelling, ‘His head is off, his head is off!’ ” Portia said knowledgeably. “They’ve just executed the earl of Strafford.”

“But why?” Phoebe asked.

“Lord, don’t you know anything?” Portia was genuinely shocked at this ignorance. “Strafford was the king’s closest advisor and Parliament defied the king and impeached the earl and now they’ve just beheaded him.”

Olivia felt her scalp contract as the bloody, brutal screech of mob triumph tore into the soft May air and the smoke of bonfires lit in jubilation for a man’s violent death rose thick and choking from the city and its surroundings.

“Jack says there’s going to be civil war,” Portia continued, referring to her father with her customary informality. “He’s usually right about such things… not about much else, though,” she added.

“There couldn’t be civil war!” Olivia was horrified.

“We’ll see.” Portia shrugged.

“Well, I wish it would come now and save me having to go back to the wedding,” Phoebe said glumly. “Are you going to come, Portia?”

Portia shook her head, gesturing brusquely to the door. “Go back to the party. There’s no place for me there.”

Phoebe hesitated, then followed Olivia, the ring clutched tightly in her palm.

Portia remained in the dimness with the cobwebs for company. She leaned over and picked up the piece of gingerbread that Phoebe had forgotten about in the events of the last half hour. Slowly and with great pleasure, she began to nibble at it, making it last as long as possible, while the shadows lengthened and the shouts from the city and the merrymaking from the house gradually faded with the sunset.

Rothbury House, Yorkshire, England, 1617

“My lord, they’re coming!”

William Decatur, Earl of Rothbury, lifted his gaze from the parchment he was penning and carefully laid his quill across the top of the silver inkwell. His eyes, as vivid blue as summer lightning, seemed to look right through the messenger.

“How far are they?”

“A mile behind me, m’lord… riding hard.” The messenger wiped his brow with a grubby linen kerchief. The reek of sweat and horseflesh hung Tike low clouds around him.

The earl sanded the parchment, dropped wax from a lit taper alongside his signature, and pressed his signet ring into the wax. Without urgency, he pushed back his carved oak chair and rose to his feet. His countenance revealed nothing. “How many of them?”

“At least a full battalion, sir. Cavalry and infantry.”

“Under whose charge?”

The messenger hesitated.

“Under whose charge?” The question crackled like musket shot.

“They’re flying the Granville standard, sir.”

William Decatur exhaled softly.

The door opened behind the messenger. It opened quietly, hesitantly, but the woman who entered was neither quiet nor hesitant. “They are coming?” Her eyes fixed upon the earl with painful intensity. “They are coming to put us out of our house. Is it so, my lord?”

“Aye, Clarissa, it is so.” Her husband’s blue gaze was unreadable as it rested on the brown-haired woman and the young boy standing wide-eyed beside her. The child that Clarissa carried beneath her belt, with its great ring of household keys, was visible only in the slight thickening of her waist, but one hand rested on her belly, the other on her son’s already sturdy shoulder, in unconscious protection of the life both born and unborn.

“They will take you away,” she said, and the struggle to control the tremor in her voice was harsh on her countenance. “And what will become of us, my lord?”

William flinched from the hard bitterness of her resentment, of her refusal to understand the driving power of conscience that forced him to make this sacrifice, to drive his family into penniless exile, to besmirch a proud family name with the vile tag of traitor.

Before he could answer, however, the thundering roll of hooves surged through the open window. Clarissa gasped and the boy, Rufus, Viscount Rothbury, son and heir to the now disgraced earl of Rothbury, stepped away from his mother, moving closer to his father as if to separate himself from a woman’s weakness.

The earl glanced down at the red-haired boy and met the child’s clear blue gaze, as vivid and as steadfast as his father’s. William smiled, a half smile that yet carried deep sorrow for this child whose birthright was to be snatched from him, who was to be condemned to an outlaw’s life. Then he placed his hand on his son’s shoulder and drew him beside him as he faced the open window.

In the gathering dusk, the invading force swept inexorably, rank after rank, onto the gravel sweep before the soft weathered facade of the Elizabethan manor house. They carried pikes and muskets, infantry filing behind the three ranks of cavalry. The royal standard of James Stuart, King of England, snapped in the evening breeze.

But it was not his king’s standard that set the lightning forks blazing in the earl’s eyes. It was the banner that flew beside it. The banner of the house of Granville. And beneath it, George, Marquis of Granville, sat on his great black steed, his head bare, his gloved hands resting lightly on his saddle.

A herald’s trumpet blew a long note, and a voice bellowed from below, “William Decatur, Earl of Rothbury, you are hereby commanded in the king’s name to surrender yourself to His Majesty’s justice.”

It was as if a spell had been broken in the room. The earl swung from the window. He strode to the fireplace. His fingers moved across the stones and slowly, silently, the great fieldstone swung back, revealing the black cavernous space of a priest’s hole. “You know what to do, Clarissa. Take Rufus and go. My brothers are waiting for you beyond the coppice. I’ll hold this scum here until you’re safe away.”

“But, William…” Clarissa’s voice died, and the hand she extended toward her husband hung as if forgotten in midair.

“I will follow you,” he said shortly. “Now do as I bid, and go. ”

A wife did not disobey her husband, not even in this extremity. Clarissa reached for her son’s hand, but he snatched it away.

“I will stay with Father.” He didn’t look at his mother; his gaze was fixed intently upon his father. And William understood that his son knew the truth. The earl of Rothbury would not be following his wife and son into exile. He would not run from the king’s justice and earn the name of coward as well as traitor.

He took the boy by the shoulders and said softly, “You are your mother’s keeper, Rufus. You are her shield and buckler now. And it is for you now to avenge our honor.”

He turned aside to the table and took up the parchment, rolling it carefully. He held it out to the boy. “Rufus, my son, I lay upon you now the most solemn trust: that you will be avenged upon the house of Granville, and you will bear our name with pride even in the face of those who call it dishonored. You will by your deeds make the house of Rothbury a watchword for truth, justice, and honor even though you are condemned to live outside the law, to create your own world, your own truth, your own honor.”

Rufus swallowed as he took the rolled parchment. His throat seemed to have closed under the dreadful weight of his father’s words. He was eight years old, but his shoulders stiffened as if all the better to bear the great burden of this responsibility his father had laid upon him.

“Do you swear so to do?”

“I swear.” Rufus found the words, though they sounded strange, as if coming from a great distance.

“Then go.” His father laid a hand on the boy’s head in a moment’s benediction, then he kissed his wife and urged her toward the priest’s hole. Rufus looked back for an instant, his hair ablaze in the light of the oil lamp the messenger held high; his eyes, no longer the innocent, candid eyes of an eight-year-old boy, were filled with the foreboding of loss and the dreadful knowledge of duty. Then he turned and followed his mother into the darkness.

The messenger followed them, and the stone on well-oiled hinges closed silently behind them.

William strode from the chamber. He walked down the wide sweep of stairs to the stone-flagged hallway and out into the dusk, to stand on the top step and survey his accusers. To look in the eye of the man he had once called friend… the man who had now come to dispossess him of his house, his lands, his family honor.

For a moment the two men looked at each other, and the silence stretched taut as a bowstring between them. Then William Decatur spoke, his voice low, yet each bitter word thrown with the power of lead shot. “So, this is how you honor the vows of friendship, Granville.”

George, Marquis of Granville, urged his horse forward, away from the line of cavalry. He raised one gloved hand as if in protest, “William, I come not in enmity, but in-”

“Don’t insult me, Granville!” The furious words cut through the other man’s speech. “I know you for what you are, and you will pay, you and your heirs. I swear it on the blood of Christ.” His hand moved from his side, lifted, revealing the dull silver barrel of a flintlock pistol.

Rooks wheeled and shrieked over the gables as the hideous shock of the explosion faded into the stunned silence. William Decatur, Earl of Rothbury, lay at the foot of the steps to his house; blood, a thick, dark puddle, spread beneath his head. His eyes, sightless now, stared upward at the circling rooks, the scudding clouds, the first faint prick of the evening star.

A soldier stepped forward, carrying a pitch torch. The flame flared, blue and orange under a gust of wind. He stepped over the fallen man and hurled his torch into the open doorway.

George Granville sat his horse, immobile. He had come here to oversee the king’s justice. He had come to mitigate that justice, to work with his old friend to avoid the worst. But his intentions were so much chaff in the wind now.

The earl of Rothbury lay dead at the foot of his burning house, and his heir, a lad of eight summers, was cast out into the world beyond the laws of man with a burden of vengeance that sat ill on the shoulders of a child, but that, George Granville knew, the lad would grow into. Rufus Decatur was his father’s son.

Edinburgh, Scotland, December, 1643

Acrid smoke billowed around the windowless room from the peat fire smoldering sullenly in the hearth. The old crone stirring a pot over the fire coughed intermittently, the harsh racking the only sound. Outside, the snow lay thick on a dead white world, heavy flakes drifting steadily from the iron gray sky.

A bundle of rags, huddled beneath a moth-eaten blanket, groaned, shifted with a rustle of the straw beneath the stick-like frame. “Brandy, woman!”

The crone glanced over her shoulder at the hump in the corner, then she spat into the fire. The spittle sizzled on the peat. “Girl’s gone fer it. Altho‘ what she’s usin’ to pay fer it, the good Lord knows.”

The bundle groaned again. A wasted arm pushed feebly at the blanket, and Jack Worth struggled onto his elbow. He peered through slitted eyes into the smoke-shrouded room. Nothing had improved since he’d last looked, and he sank back into the straw again. The earth floor was hard and cold beneath the thin and foul-smelling straw, pressing painfully into his emaciated body.

Jack wanted to die, but the flicker of life was persistent. And if he couldn’t die, he wanted brandy. Portia had gone for brandy. His enfeebled brain could hold that thought. But where in the name of Lucifer was she? He couldn’t remember what time she’d gone out into the storm. The blizzard obliterated all signs of time passing, and it could as well be midnight as dawn.

His pain-racked limbs were on fire, his eyes burned in their sockets, every inch of his skin ached, and the dreadful craving consumed him so that he cried out, a sound so feeble that the crone didn’t even turn from the fire.

The door opened. Frigid air blasted the fug, and the smoke swirled like dervishes. The girl who kicked the door shut behind her was wire thin yet exuded a nervous energy that somehow enlivened the reeking squalor of the hovel.

“Brandy, Jack.” She came to the mattress and knelt, drawing a small leather flask from inside her threadbare cloak. Her nose wrinkled at the sour stench of old brandy and decaying flesh exuding from the man and his sickbed, but she pushed an arm beneath his scrawny neck and lifted him, pulling off the stopper of the flagon with her teeth. Her father was snaking so hard she could barely manage to hold the flask to his lips. His teeth rattled, his lifeless eyes stared up at her from his gaunt face, where the bones of his skull were clearly defined.