London - Edward Rutherfurd [357]
Orlando Barnikel’s original plan, when he arrived in London, had been to find a wife. He was tired of the women of the port he encountered. He had money enough, whenever he chose, to settle down; and often, as he sailed in distant waters, he had thought of his red-haired old father and his burly, friendly cousins at Billingsgate, and considered how he would like to find a bride in the only place in the world, he supposed, which he could call home.
The Barnikels of Billingsgate intimated to him that no girl in London, no matter how humble, could be induced to marry a blackamoor. “I have money,” he protested. There were women in some Mediterranean ports who would have had him gladly. But the fishmongers had shaken their heads. “You’re our cousin and always will be,” they had explained magnanimously. “But marriage . . .” Alderman Ducket had uttered similar cautions.
Orlando had briefly hoped that the unexpected play would cast him in a better light – enough to impress some girl, somewhere. But that, too, had been a bitter illusion.
And so, debating whether to kill Meredith or not, he had come to a different conclusion. Why give these Londoners, who despised him, the opportunity to put his head in a noose one day? His fury, his hurt and his honour might call for Meredith’s death, but he had not achieved what he had without being cunning. He could punish the young man another way, and solve his own problem at the same time. Twice he had watched the couple together and seen they were close: he would steal Meredith’s woman.
As for the problem of her kidnap, if he ever returned to London, he smiled. “She will say she came willingly with me by the time we go back,” he predicted to the mate. He had experience to prove that in many a place.
And so Jane, who had no illusions about what was to come, gazed out at the eastern horizon and, having resigned herself to her fate, felt a strange sense of excitement as they entered the open sea. She thought of her parents, of Dogget and of Meredith with affection, and then, deliberately, cast their images into the wind.
GOD’S FIRE
1603
In the wet and windy days of March 1603 two men, several hundred miles apart on the island of Britain, waited anxiously. Each was expecting a personal signal from God.
In the north, James Stuart, King of Scotland, waited for a messenger. For down south, in a Thameside palace, old Queen Elizabeth was dying. It was no secret. The bright wig she wore, the thick paint on her face, the carefully staged appearances – nothing could now conceal the ravage of time. The creaking play was done. And who should be her heir?
The virgin queen could not bring herself to name her successor, but everyone – the court, the Parliament, the Privy Council – knew that it must be James. His grandmother had been a Tudor, great King Harry’s sister, making him nearest by blood. And although he was the son of that treacherous Catholic, Mary Queen of Scots, James himself was free of taint. Placed on the throne of the mother he scarcely knew, he had been trained to reign as a cautious Protestant. The dour Scots council had seen to that. He would suit England very well.
And England would suit James. After the long, bleak years in his poor northern land, the rich kingdom of England seemed to him a warm and pleasant place indeed. Was this the wonderful destiny that God had planned for him and all his heirs to come?
Then, one morning, God’s hand was seen. Like a cold draught down a long gallery, blowing curtains, taffeta, silks and gee-gaws before it, time’s wind came, and swept through the gallery of the Tudors. A messenger was riding northwards. The Stuart age had begun.
Just down the lane from St Mary-le-Bow, on the site of a tavern and by the place where once, centuries before, the sign of the Bull had hung, there was a very handsome house. A mixture of brick, timber and plaster, five storeys high and surrounded