TEXEL ISLAND, HOLLAND, SPRING 1685

  The Helderenberg rocked in the strong onshore wind, with two smaller ships moored nearby, loaded with weapons, armor, and uniforms for officers who were waiting in England, banners for the crowds, a printing press to publish the duke’s manifesto, a printer to set the type, barrels of the rusty brown water of the island, famous for good-keeping on long voyages, barrels of wine, small ale, crates of fresh food, and two brace of hens to lay eggs for the duke’s breakfast.

  Eighty-three men were mustered to sail in the invasion, some dismissed from William of Orange’s army to follow the beloved duke, exiles from King James’s England, his lordship’s own servants who would die for him, and only one other nobleman: Lord Grey of Werke, who had been set on overturning the monarchy for all his life.

  “But never heard a shot fired in anger,” Ned said quietly to Samuel Venner, a veteran who had served under Monmouth against the French in the Dutch War.

  “He’s gentry,” Venner replied. “So he can ride a horse, can’t he? Cavalry officer? They don’t have to do more than gallop in the right direction. And he’ll bring out all of Sussex for us.”

  “Are we landing in Sussex?” Ned asked.

  “I don’t know where,” Venner said. “And I don’t care where, just as long as the wind changes and we can get out of port.”

  “A papist wind,” Ned said sourly.

  Every day the danger increased that King James’s urgent demands to his son-in-law William of Orange would stir the Dutch authorities into arresting the rebels and impounding the three ships. Every day that they bobbed at the quayside increased their visibility.

  “Surely they’ll turn a blind eye to us,” Venner suggested. “We’ve had nothing but goodwill from the people of Amsterdam. They’re praying for our success in the chapels. They’ve fought papists for years.”

  Rowan appeared at his side, so soft-footed that Venner started and cursed her. She said nothing but touched Ned on the sleeve and pointed down to the twilit quay beside them. He could just make out two figures, city fathers by their rich clothes, broad beamed as barges, waddling towards them, papers in hand.

  “Trouble?” she whispered.

  Ned went without a word to the bridge, found the young recruit William Hewling on anchor watch, and ordered the gangplank to be drawn in and the duke and his officers informed.

  “They’re onshore, dining,” Hewling said, looking anxiously over the side of the ship at the approaching officials. “I don’t even know which inn.”

  Ned turned to Rowan. “Go and find the duke,” he whispered. “Make sure you’re not seen. Tell him not to come back to the ship until we know who these men are. Tell him he might have to get away.” He caught her hand as she turned for the gangplank. “Not that way, they’ll see you. Can you get down the mooring rope?”

  She nodded and disappeared before his eyes. It was as if she had melted into air. One moment he held her warm hand and saw her confident smile under the shadow of her hat, and the next there were just shadows, not even the outline of her shadow, not even the whisper of her cape. He looked aft where the rocking ship was pulling the line taut and saw her for just a moment, silhouetted against the gray horizon as she slung a leg over the rail, then she was gone. The men holloing from the quayside had their backs to her as she wormed down the rope, going hand over hand with her legs wrapped around it, and jumped soundlessly onto the shore. She dropped into a low crouch and froze as Ned leaned over the side doffing his hat. “Good evening, Mijn Heren,” he bellowed.

  On the bridge behind him he heard the quiet click of Venner arming a musket. William Hewling behind him was white as a sail.

  One of the men looked up. “Are you captain of this vessel?” he demanded.

  “The captain is off watch, sir,” Ned replied. “May I serve you?”

  “What’s its name and where is it bound?”

  Out of the corner of his eye Ned saw a shadow—nothing more than the torchlight flickering—and knew that Rowan was on her way.

  “It is the Helderenberg, bound for Bilbao.”

  “We have information that this ship has been commissioned by the Duke of Monmouth for an invasion of England.”

  Ned shook his head, the image of doltishness. “Nay, I don’t know anything about that,” he said slowly. “We’re laden with baccalà—salted codfish—and sailing for Spain as soon as the wind drops.”

  “Where is the duke?”

  “What duke?”

  “Monmouth! Where is Monmouth?”

  “Near Wales, I believe,” Ned said earnestly.

  Hewling, caught off guard, snorted with laughter.

  “We can do nothing without the facts!”

  “No, sir. No more can I. What facts?”

  The men spoke among themselves. Ned could not understand their language, but he could see the worldwide unwillingness of small-town officials to exert themselves in uncertain times.

  “I cannot admit you on board unless you have papers,” Ned said apologetically. “Do you have papers?”

  From the exclamation of irritation from one of the gentlemen, Ned guessed that the necessary papers—in this most bureaucratic of countries—had not been provided.

  “We will come back when we have the right papers,” the senior man said. He brandished a handful of documents. “The English envoy failed to make the correct request.”

  “The English envoy tried to stop us selling codfish to Bilbao?” Ned asked, deeply shocked at the interference in trade.

  “A mistake,” one of the men said irritably. “And us looking like fools.”

  “Not at all! Not at all! Come back when you are fully certified. If you would be so gracious as to let us know when, I can make sure the captain is here to receive you.”

  The Amsterdam official consulted his timepiece, a handsome large silver watch chained over his broad belly. “When the envoy makes the correct application, we will return,” he said. “And you are?”

  “Let me give you a note of my name,” Ned said. He found a piece of paper and dipped a pen in the ink-standish. “Sir James Avery, Northside Manor, Northallerton,” Ned wrote with mischievous joy, scattered it with sand to dry, tied it in the plumb line, and tossed it down to the officials.

  The Amsterdammer untied the note and read the aristocratic scrawl. “Sir James?”

  “At your service, sir,” Ned said, reeling the line in. “Sir James Avery. Trader in codfish.”

  * * *

  Rowan led Ned at a loping run to the quayside inn where the duke was dining.

  “I told him,” she said shortly.

  Ned patted her shoulder. “You did well,” he said. “You went down that rope as quick as a rat.” He left her at the door of the private parlor, knocked, and put his head inside the room. The duke was dining with his senior officers, Lord Grey at one end of the table, Colonel Foulness, Lieutenant Tallier, and Captain Kidd between them.

  “Your pardon, sire, reporting from the ship,” Ned said.

  “Come in,” Monmouth said. “We’ve been waiting. You did well to send your lad to warn us. What’s happened?”

  “Amsterdam officials, inquiring about our business,” Ned said. “I told them we were bound for Bilbao with freight, but they’ve been set on us by the English envoy and they’ll be back. They have to get a proper warrant before they can impound the ship—I couldn’t understand it all, sire, they spoke in their own language among themselves. But I did get—loud and clear—that they’ll be back. My advice is that we sail, whatever the weather.”

  “You’ve done me a service,” Monmouth nodded. “Ned Ferryman, isn’t it?”

  “We could go on the ebbing tide, at night,” one of the men said.

  “The wind’s still against us,” someone else answered. “We’ll struggle to get out of port.”

  Monmouth shook his head. “We can’t wait a moment longer.” He glanced at one of the men. “Hire barges, extra barges, to tow us out. Once we’re out the harbor we can run before the wind wherever it takes us. But we leave in the first lull.” He rose, and everyone leapt to their feet, calling for the reckoning and going to their rooms for their belongings. Ned, an old campaigner, quietly pocketed two bread rolls from the table and turned to the door.

  REEKIE WHARF, LONDON, SPRING 1685

  Matthew was not late on Friday, as he had threatened to be. He came home early, oddly subdued, hung his coat on the hook in the warehouse, and kissed his foster mother.

  “I thought you were out roistering,” Alys said.

  “No, I wanted to come home. Is the Sweet Hope sailing soon?”

  “Next month. Why?”

  “Someone asked me.”

  “Is everything all right, Matthew?”

  He did not look at her. He thought how the other woman had called him “Matteo,” as if he were someone else. “Yes.”

  “You’ve not lost money gambling?” She went straight to her greatest fear.

  “No, Ma. How often do I have to say!” He checked himself at her stricken face. “No. But I’d like to talk to you and to Mother Alinor. Is she well enough to see me?”

  “She’s well, she’s in her room.”

  He led the way upstairs so that she should not hurry in front of him and warn her mother that he was in trouble. Alys followed the polished heels of his smart shoes and felt her heart sinking with dread.

  Matthew tapped on Alinor’s door and heard her take a breath enough to say “Come in!” and stepped inside the room. He stood before her, hands at his sides, his face as blank as the beautiful statues that he resembled. Alinor raised her silver head and took him in, from the velvet bows on his shoes to the crown of his dark curling hair, noting his grave expression and the hurt in his eyes.

  “Oh, you’ve seen your mother,” she said at once.

  Alys dropped into a chair as if she had been winded. “Oh,” she said. “Oh! Is that it?”

  Matthew nodded. “She sent for me to meet her in a coffeehouse,” he said.

  Alinor held out her hand. “Come, my son, sit here.”

  He crossed the room and sank onto a stool at the side of her sofa. He leaned back, and she stroked the dark curling locks of hair from his forehead. Suddenly, he looked very young, and Alinor was reminded of the little boy he had been, the baby who had been left in their care because his mother did not want him. She laid her hand on his forehead as if she would test the heat of his skin for fever. “Go on,” she said gently. He was steadied by the coolness of her hand and the faint scent of herbs in the room.

  “This is my home,” he said.

  “It is,” Alinor confirmed quietly. “No doubt of that. You’ve got nothing to fear, and neither does Alys. Nothing can untie the love you two have for each other. You don’t have to be born a son to a mother, to be a mother and son. You two have a bond that nothing will break.”

  He nodded. “It’s true,” he said. He looked across at Alys, who was frozen in her chair. “It’s true,” he repeated. “Don’t look like that, Ma.”

  “How do I look?” she demanded.

  “Like I was threatening you with a knife.”

  “Aye,” she said bitterly. “She’s a sharp blade. What did she want?”

  “I don’t know what to tell you…” he began.

  “Better say it all,” Alinor counseled. “There’s enough secrets already.”

  “She wants a passage on Captain Shore’s next sailing. She wants two berths. I said he took passengers and that he was due to go out next month as soon as she was loaded.” He turned to look up at Alinor. “Was that all right to say?”

  “Aye,” she said shortly. “Go on.”

  “She told me who the berths are for—but I don’t know if I should repeat it.”

  “For herself,” Alys said harshly. “She never does anything for anyone.”

  “It’s for herself and for the queen,” he said, his voice low. “In case Argyll and Monmouth invade.”

  “The king’s going to surrender?” Alys demanded incredulously. “He’ll go like his father? Give himself up to them?”

  The youth shook his head. “I don’t know. That’s all she told me.”

  “And what did you say?” Alinor prompted gently.

  “I said I would ask. I made no promise.” He shifted uneasily and Alinor’s hand tightened comfortingly on his shoulder. “She said some other things…”

  “Did she?”

  “She said that she would serve me, take me to court, that we should help each other rise in the world.”

  “I daresay she will serve you,” Alinor spoke before her daughter could reply. “Why shouldn’t she? She’s your ma by birth, she’ll be ambitious for you. Of course, she’ll want you to do tasks for her. She’s a woman accustomed to service.” She felt the rapid pulse at his collarbone. “Did you like her, Matthew?”

  “She called me caro figlio,” he said. “It means dear son.”

  “She said she would never take you from us!” Alys burst out.

  “She hasn’t done so,” Alinor said steadily. “She’s given him some errands to run. She can’t take him, Alys. He spent his childhood with us, he’s had our love poured on him. Nobody can take that from him.” She smiled at Matthew, whose color had risen. “Nobody can take him anywhere—nor can we keep him. He’s old enough to choose where he wants to live and what sort of man he wants to be.”

  “Here?” Alys turned to the boy she had raised as her own son, her blue eyes imploring in her square face. “You’ll live here, in your home? As we raised you.”

  He rose to his feet. “Ma—this will always be my home and you’re my mother.”

  She waited.

  “But of course I want to rise in the world!”

  There was a silence in the sunlit room. Outside, the gulls cried over the flowing tide, wheeled on silver wings.

  “We have risen,” Alys said defensively. “You’ve no idea what it was like here when we first came. We’ve risen. Through hard work. Slow but steady. Trading, little profits, well earned. Hard earned. We never sold underweight. We never borrowed, we always paid on the nail. We never issued a note of credit without money behind it.”

  “You didn’t send me to Lincoln’s Inn to come home to be a wharfinger.”

  “It was her who sent you,” Alys said resentfully. “To turn you into a gentleman. I always feared she would spoil you—”

  “I am a gentleman!” he exclaimed. “I was born a gentleman! I am descended from the Fiori family!”

  “Are you?” Alinor asked.

  “Yes, of course. I am stepson to Sir James Avery!”

  “Was he there?”

  “No. Just her. I don’t know what she wants. Only what she tells me.” He looked at Alys. “What am I to tell her?” he asked.

  They both turned to Alinor, as if her foresight could keep them safe.

  “You can tell her that she can have passage in Captain Shore’s ship, if he agrees to it,” she said gently. “You’ll have to ask him yourself. Make sure he knows who he’ll be carrying. And you can tell her when he’ll sail. I doubt he’ll wait for her and you shouldn’t ask it of him. If we’re no use to her, she can find someone else.”

  He nodded. “Is that all right with you, Ma?”

  Alys’s face was shut and resentful. “She comes to us whenever she wants something and then she goes again. Sir James is just the same. They just turn up when they want something, and they break our hearts and go…”

  Alinor’s smile at her daughter was filled with compassion. “Yes,” she said. “They have to come to us, because they have so little of their own. They have to come to us, they are so poor themselves.”

  “I think she’s very rich…” Matthew said tentatively.

  Alinor smiled at him. “They are poor in heart.”

  TEXEL ISLAND, HOLLAND, SPRING 1685

  Monmouth was on the bridge of his ship, checking that men and stores were aboard before the gangplank was run in and the lines cast off from the shore. Extra barges surrounded the ship, lines attached, preparing to tow the Helderenberg out of the harbor into an onshore wind that was wheeling at last to the east, the stocky bargees spitting into their work-worn palms and predicting that it would be a hard pull. The little ships were readying themselves to follow. The Dutch pilot was beside the steersman, pointing a route through the sandbars and mudbanks, warning of the wrecks in the shallows. Tentatively, the ship rocked and then started to glide away from the dark shore studded with flickering lights from lanterns. The waves slapped loudly against the keel as the wind blew them back onshore and the barges, with their crews straining to keep the pace, fought to tow the ship out of the harbor. Ned had a familiar feeling in the pit of his belly, a mixture of excitement and dread, and knew that he was headed into battle again, surely the last battle of his life, for the freedoms of the men and women of England.

  He turned to Rowan, at his side as always. “When we land, I’ll give you money and you must make your way to London, to my sister’s warehouse. She’ll give you a bed and your keep until this is over.”

  He could not see her expression, her face was hidden by her hat, but her voice was clear. “I’ll stay with you.”

  “I’ll be going into battle if the king’s army comes against us,” Ned said. “And if it doesn’t, I’ll be training men. I don’t even know where we’ll land, but we’ve got to take the capital. If we land up north, up the east coast, it could be many days’ march, south to London.”

  “Then you’ll be going to London as you say I must,” she pointed out. “I’ll go with you.”

  “Not with an army of raw recruits!” he exclaimed.

  “Don’t you want me with you?”

  He checked his sudden denial and measured his words, conscious of her trusting gaze on his face. “Rowan, this is my mistake. I never thought we’d sail at once. I should’ve left you in London.”

  She stepped a little closer. “But as your servant…”

  “We both know that you’re not my servant. I bought you out of slavery to set you free.”