Page 177 of Dawnlands

Both Livia and the queen curtseyed deeply, but the king hardly saw them; he brandished a paper in his hand. “Look at this!” he demanded. “Proof that your son-in-law is lying to me! Certain proof! They are loading cavalry horses at Rotterdam. So he cannot be preparing a blockade for the French at sea as he said. Why would he want horses at sea? He has to be planning to invade?”

Mary Beatrice had nothing to say. Her hand crept into Livia’s.

“He has played me for a fool! He has lied to me! And my own daughter has lied!”

“Mary might not know?”

“Not know that her own husband is to make war against her own father? And she has not sent me a word. Not one single word of warning!”

“Mary wouldn’t be disloyal,” Mary Beatrice protested. “No daughter would.”

Livia, who had a higher opinion of the female dishonesty, said only: “But if they’re loading horses, they must be coming at once?”

“I’ll have to put the lord lieutenants and the magistrates back in post,” James said, almost to himself. “I’ll have to apologize and reinstate them. No leave for the army and I’ll turn out the militia. We defeated Monmouth, didn’t we? What is this, but another bastard claim from a heretic poor relation against his father, his king, and against God Himself?”

“William is coming?” Mary Beatrice whispered as if she could not believe it.

“But when?” Livia asked.

Mary Beatrice leapt to her feet. “The prince must go to safety,” she announced. “We have to get him safe. Far from London!”

“Portsmouth,” the king assured her. “I have Irish troops in Portsmouth who will never fail me.”

“And what about the ball? Shall we say…?”

“We hold the ball as if we feared nothing,” he proclaimed, his face gray with fear.

“But when will they come?” Livia asked again.

“It should be never,” the king told her grimly. “When the wind lets them out of port. When they have the wind with them.”

“They wait only for a wind?” Livia asked incredulously. “We watch for the wind to change?”

“We wait for the wind,” the king told her grimly.

TORBAY, DEVON, AUTUMN 1688

The month of the king’s fifty-fifth birthday saw an eclipse: the sun, the symbol of royalty itself, went dark, and then, finally, the windswung to the east. A Protestant wind, and a few days later the invading fleet anchored off Brixham in Devon, and landed the horses and men at Torbay.

Ned, riding in the munitions wagon under a banner that readTHE LIBERTIES OF ENGLAND,picked a branch of holly for lack of anything else green and put it in his hatband. The army marched east, as Monmouth had done before, and declared at Exeter in front of a crowd who remembered Monmouth and the deaths that had followed that uprising, and were quiet and sullen.

“Come on!” Ned recruited men from his wagon. “I was here before with the duke, I was here before that with Cromwell. It’s the same cause: the rights of the men and women of England. And this time we’ll win.”

A few men came forward, but it was cold, and in the night the army camped in the fields, without any visits from cheering townspeople. There was less confidence and little camaraderie on this march. Ned was not disheartened, he remembered that Monmouth’s men had been volunteers, serving him for a belief in his cause and in freedom, Cromwell’s army driven by a sense of injustice and their own mission. William’s army was a mixture: some professional soldiers of the Dutch states, mercenaries of all nationalities and many faiths, a few believers marching in a holy war, and a few staunch old Cromwellians. Ned judged that everything would depend on whether the king’s army would rally to him to defend their homes against an invasion by a foreign power, or whether he had made himself so hated that they now found him even stranger than his Dutch son-in-law. It was a gamble—as it always was—between people’s greed for the old ways, or their courage to dare for new.

Ned was in his element. On the cold frosty mornings he looked at the sun rising and thought of Rowan’s dawn prayers. In the evenings when he took a bowl of stew from the field kitchens, he thought of her poaching game and making him soup. Every step of the march through the west country he remembered her at his side and felt that this march was a tribute to the one they had done together, and that when he was marching for freedom, he was most truly himself.

WHITEHALL PALACE, LONDON, AUTUMN 1688

James was closeted every day with his advisors, and they all recommended different courses of action. But every day another of them was missing from his place at court. James would turn for an opinion, strongly expressed the day before, and see an empty chair as one lord after another slipped away to his country seat, or to France, or even—in the greatest secrecy—to the disinherited heir: Princess Mary and her husband William of Orange.

They hardly saw the king in the queen’s rooms, and the queen and her ladies depended on Father Petre for news. It was him, not the king, who told them that William had landed with a force strong enough to face the English army in battle.

“You must persuade the king not to march out himself,” the queen declared. “What if he were to fall in battle?”

“But where are we to go for our safety?” Livia asked her. “If the king leaves with his army, who is going to defend London?”

“Portsmouth,” the queen replied. “Baby James is to go to Portsmouth now, this very day with his nursemaid, and I am to meet him there. The fleet is in Portsmouth, they will guard him until we arrive.”