The Queen's Exiles Read Online Free PDF Page B

grains scenting the manchet loaf made her feel she was feasting like a duchess. Not tonight. This bite was hard to swallow, her throat had gone so dry.
    She forced it down with a mouthful of wine. A Baltic trader had given it to her, three barrels of the renowned wine from Madeira as part payment for what he’d owed her for repairs to his carrack. She had gifted one barrel to the Seigneur of Sark as a mark of their friendship and one barrel to the church elders to keep them out of her hair. The last she savored in the evenings with Johan, or with Madeleine Benoit, the rigger’s wife, who liked a laugh as much as Fenella did. She drained the Madeira from her goblet. Johan always scoffed at how she stood to eat when she was by herself. She didn’t like sitting at a table alone. Made her feel unready. Though for what, she couldn’t say. She set down the empty goblet, her mind on the Spaniards who might soon be coming for her. Her trembling hand made the glass rattle on the wood.
    A rasping sound. She glanced at Johan’s closed door. A snore? Annoying, but at least it was a healthy sound, not like his awful coughing fits. Johan was getting sicker. It gave her a pang. Was she going to lose him? How bullheaded he was about wanting to go home to fight the occupation. Idiotic. He’d deserved the tongue-lashing she’d given him. The Spaniards would crush him like a bug. And yet something in his fierce wish to go home gave her a twinge of shame. Who was she to say how any man should live his life? Or sacrifice it. The rasp sounded again. Not a snore, she realized, just his window shutter grating on its hinge, nudged by the breeze. A west wind had risen.
    Her gaze rose to the loft above his room. That’s where she slept. Her big feather bed shared the platform with bolts of canvas and heaps of cordage. She liked the snugness of the loft, like a ship’s berth, and loved its window view overlooking the bay and her shipyard. She had taken refuge up there after leaving Thornleigh’s ship, her hand still smarting from the kick of the pistol. She had sat stiffly on her bed and watched through the window as the men careened the Elizabeth, her crew and Thornleigh’s working together.
    Adam Thornleigh. The way he’d looked at her as she held the smoking pistol. A look of shock, but something more, too, something mysterious. Admiration? It sent a spark through her. For eleven years Thornleigh had smiled at her in her dreams. Claes Doorn had been a good man, quiet and calm, and he had cherished her. No woman could have asked for a better husband. But he had not fired her blood the way Adam Thornleigh had done with a single glance.
    She straightened up in self-disgust. He looked at me as a murderer . What else could he see? He, a great lord, a baron, honored at the court of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth. Me, as common as barley bread . Besides, he had a wife. When he and Fenella had left Scotland, in his fever he’d spoken of his wife being with child, their first. His bairn, she thought, envying his wife. It tugged an ache inside her. She would be thirty-one at Michaelmas. No man. No bairn.
    Foolish, lack-brain thoughts. She had a far bigger problem. The noose. She clapped the crockery lid back on the cheese pot to clear her head and swept bread crumbs off the table. Her noisy bustling brought a whimper from Jenny, the young maid asleep on the straw pallet in the corner by the hearth. Fenella stopped with a sigh. Let the girl sleep. I should do the same. God knows what tomorrow will bring.
    She took the candle and climbed the stairs to the loft. Sleep didn’t seem likely. She set down the candle on her nightstand, a priceless ebony prie-dieu she had salvaged from a Portuguese wreck. She freed her bunched hair from her mobcap and shook it loose. Unlacing her bodice, she undressed down to her shift, then turned to the night-dark window, so black it reflected her image as clearly as a mirror. She kept no mirrors, had no time for them, but