He unrolled the Foulmire deeds on the breakfast table, clearing a little space and moving the plates. The two women looked at the vellum, the sealing wax, and the wide ribbons.

  “What’s this?” Alys asked.

  Alinor put a hand out and touched the document. “Deeds?” she asked. “For land?”

  Matthew turned the document towards her and unfolded it so that she could see the twirling gothic writing: Deeds of the Manor and Parish of Foulmire in the Manhood of Sealsea Island, county of Sussex.

  “The queen gave it to my mother for me.”

  Alys rose up from the table as if the document were a venomous snake that might lunge towards her. “What d’you have to do for it?”

  He smiled. “No more than I’ve done already. I was loyal to the queen when she needed someone. I brought her here. You would have given her passage to Rome. This is our reward.”

  “From the queen, perhaps,” Alys said, her hands on the back of the chair, staring at the document. “But Livia’ll want something more for it. This is not a gift but a bribe.”

  “I’m not bribed!” Matthew said indignantly. “This is a reward. We could’ve been the saving of the queen’s life! She has rewarded us. And of course, my mother’s prosperity is mine.”

  “Her debts too, her crimes too,” Alys insisted.

  “Ma Alinor!” he appealed to the older woman. “I thought you would be pleased? I thought I’d take you to your home?”

  Alinor was silent for a moment, her hand resting on the pages, then she drew them towards her and, carefully, her finger tracing under the long words, read the list of the property: the manor house and stables, barns and outbuildings, the equipment tools and beasts, the field near the seashore, the seashore itself. The settlement at East Beach, the ferryboat at the wadeway, the harbor known as Wandering Haven, and the quay at Sidlesham. The woods, the shore, the fields, and the summer pastures. The fishing rights and the church tithes, the living, and the seawall, the game birds in the air and on the ground, salvage rights from the sea, the samphire on the beach, and the minerals under the earth.

  “It’s all here,” she said wonderingly, as if she could see the landscape laid out before her, the old Priory house nestling in the meadows, the shingle beach beyond it, the church beside it, and in the graveyard her own mother’s stone, and beyond that the ferry-house where her brother and father and grandfather had worked the ferry between Sealsea Island and the mainland.

  “It’s all mine,” Matthew said simply. “I’ve won it for you. For you both. Will you come and live there, Ma Alinor? Shall I take you home?”

  BRIDGWATER, SOMERSET, SUMMER 1685

  Monmouth called a meeting of his senior officers and trusted sergeants in St. Mary’s Church. Ned leaned against a pillar at the back of the church listening, as the duke, looking years older than the arrogant aristocrat of Amsterdam, outlined an audacious plan. “My lords, my comrades, this very day I have learned that the king’s army is camped not three miles from here, all unprepared in the marshlands.”

  There was a murmur of excitement. Monmouth threw up his hand. “I know!” he said gladly. “It’s a chance, given to us by God. We outnumber them, and He is on our side. They outgun us; but they are sleeping tonight, with no idea that we are so close.”

  “How is it they don’t know we’re here?” demanded Charles Speke, leader of Speke’s Ragged Horse.

  Monmouth smiled. “A good man, and a true churchman, saw them set up their camp, the officers commanding quarters in the houses at Westonzoyland, the men raiding the inns for ale and food and setting camp in the fields just outside. This man, Godfrey, came to tell me of them, and he’s going to lead us through the wetlands.”

  A shepherd holding a well-worn crook ducked his head and nodded at the company.

  “We’re going to circle the royal camp,” Monmouth promised. “Just as we did at Philipsnorton. The infantry will engage them at the front and the cavalry will circle round and attack from their rear, like we did then. They’re behind a drainage canal, called the Bussex Rhine; they’re trapped in a bow of the water. The cavalry will drive them forward into the river, and the infantry will finish them as they struggle out on the bank. Your task”—his dark gaze raked the men sitting in the pews, leaning against the pillars at the back of the church—“your task is to draw your men up to attack, in darkness, through wet and rough ground, in complete and total silence. Can you do it?”

  “Aye.”

  “Yes, sire.”

  “God bless you! Yes!”

  The muted answers echoed round the church as if the officers were observing silence already.

  Monmouth’s face was bright with confidence. “Very well then. Break camp at ten. You’ll hear the bell. There’s a moon but it’s cloudy, and we should be invisible. March in silence! Complete silence! And may God be with us as we do His work!”

  Some men said “Amen,” some said a muted hurrah. Ned bowed his head in prayer for a moment and went out to find Rowan.

  She had lit a fire for him and his messmates, and was stewing a soup in the embers. A loaf of bread sat on a tin plate with a big wheel of cheese. She looked up as Ned came towards her, noted his grave face.

  “Sannup?”

  “I don’t know the best thing to do,” he said bluntly. “We’re going on a night attack, you can’t stay here. If we lose, the royals’ll fall back on this village and God knows what they’ll do in revenge.”

  “Then I won’t stay here,” she said simply.

  “I don’t know where you’ll be safe,” he said.

  “I’ll go into the country,” she offered.

  “It’s not woods!” he exclaimed. “There’s barely any cover. It’s as flat as the Hollands, if you get on a rise you can see for miles. And there are drainage ditches and canals and rivers all through it, hardly any hedges, just willows in the ditches and scrub. It’s a marsh.”

  “I can hide here,” she assured him. “It’s easy.”

  He knew she could melt into a landscape. “Keep hidden and follow the road to London.”

  She poured soup into a bowl and handed it to him. Ned took his spoon from his boot, soldier-style, and started to eat. “If we win, we’ll march on London.” He gave a little smile. “If we win, it’ll be a triumphant march. You’ll hear it from ten miles away. We’ll have won the war, down here in the Somerset Levels. It’ll be a parade.”

  “And if you lose, will the enemy chase you back to the sea again?”

  He grunted, cutting himself a hunk of bread and eating it with the cheese. “Don’t you come back,” he said. “I don’t want you coming back to the battlefield. Whatever you hear. You can wait by the London road, and if we’re not marching up the road, then it will have all gone wrong. You go up the road to London anyway. Go to my sister. And if our army is marching but I’m not with them, don’t join. Go to my sister.” He looked up as she started to argue and all but growled at her. “Do as you’re bid, Rowan.” He did not say that if he was not with the army, then he was dead in a ditch and he did not want her to find him.

  He pulled out a purse from his pocket. “Take this. It’s enough to get you food and lodging on the way. And if anyone asks: say that you’ve come off a ship that docked in Plymouth from the Americas, and you’re making your way to London. Say you’re Captain Shore’s servant at Reekie Wharf.” He paused. “Say that you’re his slave so that people return you to him. God knows you shouldn’t be here. God knows I should never have brought you. I pray to God, you get home safe.”

  “Pray for us both,” she recommended, optimistic as ever. “Why should you not win?”

  He nodded. “We might,” he said begrudgingly. “It’s a bold plan, against a half-hearted enemy. Better now than later, when they’ll get reinforcements from the north. Best now, while they’re drunk and sleeping. Go up the road to London, and if God wills it, we’ll meet tomorrow night, and you can poach a rabbit for my dinner.”

  “I will!” she promised him. “I will obey you, Ned.” She dropped down to sit beside him and put her arm around his shoulders like a comrade. Ned froze. He sat like a block of wood as she kissed his stubbled cheek and laid her forehead against his broadcloth shoulder.

  “God keep you safe tonight and bring us together again,” she said.

  He nodded in silence. She looked up at him. “D’you not bless me?” she asked him.

  He could barely speak for the love that was choking him. “Bless you,” he said gruffly. “God bless you and keep you safe.”

  ST. JAMES’S PALACE, LONDON, SUMMER 1685

  The queen and her ladies were at prayer in her oratory, as Father Mansuet, his back turned to them, prepared the Mass at the altar. Incense filled the air, a junior priest censed the room and sprinkled holy water. Livia watched as the queen lifted her face and closed her eyes to the smoke and the water, as if they were a blessing falling on her.

  Livia watched the ladies pray, measuring the likelihood of any one of them being sincere. It was Livia’s belief that few would be in the oratory if it were not the fashion of the royal court, the known route for royal favor. The whole country was determinedly Protestant; but the court, following the king and queen, was almost wholly converted. Every appointment that the king made favored his co-religionists, and every lady in the queen’s room either converted to the Church of Rome or was ostracized as a heretic.

  Even the army was now led by Roman Catholics. Parliament had granted the king the right to appoint Roman Catholic officers to the army and commanders to the navy, and the Roman Catholic gentry were allowed to arm and lead their tenants. The king had put a sword in the hands of the enemies of the English church, and no one knew where he would stop. The battle, which would come either in the west of England or on London Bridge, would decide whether the king was beheaded on the scaffold like his father, or triumphant as a tyrant: turning the Church of England into the Church of Rome.

  They came out of the oratory into the blaze of sunshine streaming through the high glazed windows and walked down the long gallery towards the queen’s dining room for breakfast. The usual crowd was waiting to see the royals go by, a murmur of alarm that the king was missing, a whisper of concern at the pallor of the queen. A few people stepped forward and bowed, petitions in their hands. Livia, as a senior lady-in-waiting, gathered them up with complete indifference to the whispered pleas for help. Then a man bowing to the queen stood erect and caught Livia by the hand. In the sudden shock of recognition, she saw her husband: James Avery.

  “James!” she exclaimed. “Oh God! It’s you!”

  “And good morning to you,” he said quietly. “I believe that I ordered you to come home?”

  Livia saw the queen glance back. “Your Majesty, may I present my husband, Sir James Avery.”

  The queen extended her hand and Sir James bowed low. “I am so pleased you have come to court. These are troubled times, we need our friends around us.”

  “I was just telling Sir James that I may not leave,” Livia hinted.

  “Oh no! I cannot spare her now. Not while…”

  “I understand completely,” Sir James said urbanely.

  “You may breakfast with us.” The queen led the way to her dining room, where four great tables were laid for the principal officers of her household, the royal confessor and three Benedictine priests, her ladies and their companions.

  Livia made sure that her husband was seated near her, as befitted his status, but not so close that he could speak privately, and she took her place near to the queen. Proudly, she did the work of the first lady, serving the queen with the ewer and towel for her fingertips, and folding back her long sleeves to dine.

  James bowed his head for the lengthy Latin grace, ate heartily, chatted to neighbors at the table, and rose respectfully when the queen went to her private rooms. Livia went to follow her, but the queen waved her away. “Go and see your husband, I am sure he is eager to talk with you.”

  Livia curtseyed, feeling no gratitude at all, and turned back to meet the steady brown gaze of the man she had trapped into marriage. “Shall we walk in the gardens?” she asked.

  “We’ll go to your rooms,” he ruled. “You will want to explain to me in private, without interruption.”

  Nothing could be less true, Livia thought, as she led the way through the courtiers and up the stairs to her private rooms. A maid was on her knees sweeping out the fireplace. Livia snapped her fingers and waved her away, and seated herself at the table by the window, looking across the gardens.

  Sir James stood opposite her, leaning on the back of a chair. “I ordered you home and I sent my carriage,” he said quietly.

  “You surely had my letter explaining why I could not come?”

  “No, that must have miscarried.” His tone made it perfectly clear that he thought there was no letter.

  She clasped her hands. “Oh no! But I was advised by His Majesty himself that it was not safe to travel north until the Earl of Argyll was captured! I have been so anxious for you!”

  “I am obliged to you,” he said icily. “But my carriage will have arrived after his rebellion failed, and in any case, it has been days now, since his execution.”

  “But then we heard of Monmouth’s advance,” Livia said glibly. “I assumed you would be raising a troop and coming to defend London? Have you not brought a troop with you now?”

  He narrowed his eyes. “I can’t raise men in the middle of haymaking and shearing, as everyone knows. And they are militia—local troops. I am required to muster them to defend their homes; not to march them to Somerset.”

  “But I thought you would want to?” Livia gleamed at him. “I thought you would want to defend a king of the true faith, against a Protestant rebel? You—who served his father against Cromwell?”

  “My wife does not question my loyalty,” he said shortly.

  “Then I pray you don’t question mine,” Livia said sweetly.

  “But why didn’t you take the carriage?” he demanded. “Why stay in London in danger? It’s not like you.”

  “My duty was with the queen,” she said smugly.

  “You could do nothing for her! She’s surrounded by guards and nobility.”

  “I provided a ship for her!” she said triumphantly. “No one else did! I got her a passage on a ship to Rome to go to her mother. If Argyll had marched on London, I would have got her safely away. The king himself was glad of it. He has rewarded me.”

  He was astounded. “But how did you get a ship?”

  She widened her eyes at him as if he were a fool. “Of course you remember that I shipped my family treasures from Venice to London?”

  “I remember you shipping stolen goods and fakes at a profit!”

  She turned her head, as if she cared nothing for his contempt, and looked out of the window towards the river. “I suppose that you remember the wharf?”

  He was suddenly intent. “Of course I remember them. But I said that neither of us would ever go there again.”

  “I had to! I commissioned a passage on their ship. I took the queen to the wharf to wait for the tide. Then I got news that Argyll’s army had deserted, and I brought her back to the palace.”

  He was deeply troubled. “Livia! We both of us gave our word that we would never trouble them again.”

  “When the Queen of England’s safety depended on it?”

  He could think only of the woman whom he had loved and had last seen more than fourteen years ago. “Were they…? Is she…?”

  She let him flounder.

  “Is she still alive?”

  “Allora! You don’t even know that?”

  “I keep my word. I have not seen her or heard of her since I married you. I begged her pardon. I told her I loved her. And I walked away from her and have never seen her since.”

  “An odd way to treat the love of your life!”

  “The right thing to do. And it was what she wanted. She wanted me to leave her there—at the wharf—and never speak to her again. And so I have.”

  She almost laughed at his discomfiture. “Toll-loll! Well, I can tell you she is alive. And now, I have given her the one thing she wanted: her old home. She is very grateful to me. You—of course—she will never see again. But she will live for the rest of her life on my bounty, as a guest in my house. I am her greatest benefactor.”

  He drew out a chair and sat down as if he could not stand.

  “The queen gave me the manor of Foulmire.” Her voice was ringing with triumph. “You never thought of that for her? Alinor’s childhood home, that she loves so much? I got it for Matteo. The boy who had no inheritance from you. It will be his, and he can take her and take her daughter—take all of them, for all I care—to live there.”

  “She accepted?”

  “With tears of joy.”

  He doubted it; but he had no strength to argue with her. He rested his arms on the table and felt the old impotent rage shake his heart.

  “She will live in the manor where she was nothing but a servant. And she will be buried in the graveyard though she was denounced as a witch,” Livia announced. “I have restored her. Not you; just me. You ruined her but I have made all things well. They are grateful to me; I have been nothing but good for them.”

  He put his bowed head on his arms as if he would sleep. “They forgive you for all that you did? But they still do not even speak of me?”

  “Allora!” Livia remarked as if this had just become apparent to her. “As you say! It is just so. Quite unfair on you, is it not?”

  WESTONZOYLAND, SOMERSET, SUMMER 1685

  Ned, lit only by the moon, watching his footing on the rutted path, guided his troop along the wagon track called Marsh Lane that ran between the low-lying fields. Mist breathed from every ditch and stream that intersected the landscape, swirling around them so Ned, looking back, could hardly see his troop. As Monmouth’s own regiment, the Red regiment, they led the way; ahead of them, Godfrey the guide walked beside the mounted officers. The track was little more than beaten mud through wet fields. The deep wagon ruts made it impossible for more than two men to march abreast, so they went in double file, sometimes splashing through standing water, or dragging their feet out of deep mud, past Peasey Farm, which sat squat in the low-lying fields like a becalmed brig with no lights showing. They circled it in silence, like a ghost army in the mist.