The Hooded Hawke Read Online Free PDF Page A

are dismissed, Sheriff, to go about your important business.”
    He bowed again, and she could almost hear the poor man’s joints creaking. Just outside the doorway, she saw Jenks unwrap the bolt to display it to him. As Elizabeth went back to the work Cecil had sent her by courier yesterday—how she wished he were here already from London—she heard a gasp and a yelp.
    “What goes?” she asked Sir William, as he made to follow the other men out into the hall.
    Adrian Barnstable came back in, faster than she thought he could move. “The crossbow bolt,” he cried. “I recognize the fletching on it from one of our finest shooters in the shire. The man fashions his own shafts and fletches them, too, keeps birds on our tables all the time, even brought them in for your larder here, Your Most—Majesty.”
    “Who is this man?” she asked, but Barnstable was out the
door again. This time, his words alone rolled back in: “I’ll have him arrested, interrogated, and charged in a trice, Your Majesty. Fear not!”
    She almost sent Sir William after him to demand who it was he suspected, but she trusted Jenks to report back straightaway. If someone local had tried to kill the queen, at least the murderer couldn’t be those of national import she most feared might want her dead.
    T he battle at San Juan d’Ulua was a disaster from beginning to end, Your Majesty,” Francis Drake explained that evening, as they sat over wine and apricots by the open window of her withdrawing chamber. The night was warm, but a western breeze wafted in to shift the velvet draperies. Elizabeth had sent all her women out except for Rosie Radcliffe and kept only one yeoman guard inside the door. When she’d asked Drake if he could have been the target of the fatal attack today, he’d admitted he did have an enemy who might want to harm him—besides the Spanish—but said she’d understand more if he unburdened himself about the battle.
    Unburdened, that’s what he’d said. “Take your time, Captain, and tell me all that matters,” she said.
    “All that matters—the bloody defeat and its aftermath, my flight—have haunted me since, but, by my faith, I’ll brook no words to tell you how it truly was. As you know,” he went on, frowning out the window at the blowing, rustling oak leaves as if he saw the sea again, “my cousin John Hawkins, England’s hero for his earlier voyages, was in command of our little band of ships, two of which you had loaned us.”
    She nodded. “The Jesus of Lubeck and the Minion, both small and old, but all I could spare. Our royal navy leaves much to be desired, but we shall get to that. Say on, man.”
    “Preparing to return home from our voyage to the New World last August—’twas almost exactly a year ago—we were hit by a violent storm and had to set in for repairs at San Juan d’Ulua, a small, isolated Spanish outpost on the Gulf of Mexico. We heard from people ashore that a massive Spanish fleet
would be arriving soon, so we hastened to be out of their way in time. God’s truth, Your Majesty, we had no desire to pick a fight, for we were outnumbered and far from any friendly town to lend us sustenance. They could barely be convinced to sell us water. But too soon we spotted thirteen sails—indeed an unlucky number that day.
    “We knew if the Spanish fleet trapped us in their harbor, we were doomed, and all our bounty we had traded for would be forfeit. We trained our cannon on them to keep them at bay until we could slip out. I repeat, we did not want a battle, for more than one reason. We thought they might let us go so their little town would not be caught or harmed in possible crossfire. With our spyglasses, we could see they had cannon on deck and crossbowmen in their rigging, but so did we.”
    She nodded, picturing the scene, though another dreadful image kept intruding: a crossbowman, perhaps aloft, maybe in a tree, ready to catch her or Drake in crossfire of another sort.
    “I