The Queen's Exiles Read Online Free PDF Page A

his agent’s letter, Adam had felt the hot excitement of vengeance. When he caught up with Frances he would drag her home to hang.
    Except what about Katherine and Robert? She would be twelve now, the boy nine. Every day Adam cursed his wife for taking them. Stealing them. His spry, clever Kate. Robert, his son and heir. Adam so missed their shining faces. They must have been so frightened, torn away from their home and everything they knew. Were they frightened still? And how were they living? What had Frances been doing all this time? He looked east across the water, toward the darkness where Europe lay. Weary though he was, he itched to track down the wretched woman. Not to exact vengeance, not anymore—that was a cankerous obsession, and he knew he had to let it go. All he wanted was to get his children back.
    It came to him over the echo of a razorbill’s cry: Now is the time to do it . His ship would be out of commission for weeks, and he couldn’t bear to loaf on this island backwater. He’d been on his way home to report to Elizabeth on his mission, first to the Dutch Prince William of Orange in exile on his German estates, then to the French Huguenots in La Rochelle. All these dissidents wanted Elizabeth’s support, but first she had to know how strong they were, what real chance they had of disrupting her adversaries, the Catholic kings of France and Spain, so eager for her downfall. She was waiting for Adam’s report, but his return to England would now have to wait until his ship was refitted. That didn’t mean he had to wait here doing nothing. He could go quietly, privately, to Brussels. If he didn’t, Frances might slip through his fingers again. She could slip away to hell for all he cared, but if she left the capital she would take Kate and Robert with her and he’d lose them again, this time perhaps forever. Looking out at the dark horizon, he made his decision. He would go to Brussels, get his children, and take them home.
    “Her name’s not Craig,” Doorn said suddenly.
    The words cut into Adam’s thoughts. “What?”
    “Fenella. After she left Scotland she married.”
    He felt a prick of disappointment, almost as though he’d lost something. Absurd. He barely knew the woman. But he could not deny his intense curiosity about her. “So her name now is what?”
    “Doorn.”
    Adam blinked at him. She’d married this crippled old man? “She settled in my village. Polder. It’s in Brabant, north of Bergen op Zoom, on the River Scheldt. Her brother left her a little money when he died and she opened a chandlery. Nothing much, just a counter and a shed, but Nella knows boats, and word of her Swedish blocks and quality cordage got round. That’s where she met my son, Claes. He was a shipwright like me. I lived with them, my wife and I, and when she died I went on living with them.” Doorn was watching the seabirds wheeling around the cliff top. “Glad I am that she died when she did, quiet-like.”
    The old man’s solemn tone gave Adam a twinge of unease. A foreboding.
    “Three years Claes and Nella had been married,” Doorn went on, “three years to the day. That’s when the Spanish soldiers came riding in. Like a squall they hit us. Some folk in the village had been printing pamphlets against the Spanish occupation, tracts against the Duke of Alba, the new governor come to subdue the whole Dutch people.” He spat in the sand. “Curse him to hell.”
    Adam knew all about the pitiless Duke of Alba. The Dutch had paid a bitter price for daring to oppose him.
    “He hanged so many in Antwerp, they say the price of rope shot up,” Doorn said with grim humor. His look turned grave. “It was a quiet morning in Polder when the soldiers thundered in with sword and axe and pistol. And with fire. We heard screaming and shooting. It was slaughter. Soldiers threw a torch into our house. I took a stick to one of them and cracked his head, but another raised his sword and hacked off my arm.”