Page 38 of Dawnlands

“I couldn’t join my enemies.”

“What about the People you don’t know? If you were to go south of the Dawnlands? Somewhere safe? I’ve read of them that live in Virginia…” He hesitated. King Philip’s war that had destroyed the Pokanoket was only one of many savage wars that the English colonists had waged. The Powhatan people had been driven from their homes, beyond the English borders, forced to walk, starving, into exile. The Pequot people had been all but destroyed when settlers burned them out. A thousand Narragansett had died in the Great Swamp Massacre; the colonials turned on their allies the Occaneechi, killing them without warning. At Turner Falls the English militiahad killed women and children while they were fishing in the river, clubbed them to death among their fishing nets.

“I don’t know where’s safe,” he admitted. “These are troubled times. Maybe go farther west?”

“No,” she said. “The people are not my people. We don’t speak the same language. You look at us with your blind eyes, and you think with your empty heads that we are all the same. But one nation is as different from another as you are from us. But you don’t like to think that. You like to look at a stranger and think all strangers are the same; that it is only you who are special.”

“But where will you live? You have to go somewhere!” The thought of her in a strange country, trapped between two armies, made him nauseous with anxiety.

“You shouldn’t have bought me if you didn’t want me,” she said reasonably. “You saved my life. I’d be dead by now if you hadn’t bought me. You saved my life—it is yours.”

“I don’t want it,” he said meanly. “I don’t want your life. I don’t want you. I can’t…”

She looked at him, saying nothing for a moment.

Ned clamped his hands on his knees to stop him reaching for her. “I can’t keep you with me.”

“But I am yours,” she said simply. “It is a debt.”

ST. JAMES’S PALACE, LONDON, SUMMER 1685

The queen was composing a letter of congratulation to her stepdaughter Princess Anne, on her safe delivery of a healthy child. Livia was at the table, her pen poised, waiting to write. Mary Beatrice, oppositeher, rested her heavily coiffed head in both hands as if the weight of the hairpieces and the jewelry was too much for her.

“Oh, write whatever it is I should say!” she exclaimed. “You’re absolutely sure it’s a girl?”

“It’s a girl. God be praised for His favor to you: she’s not had a Stuart boy.”

“But even so…”

Livia waited in case the queen would say any more, then she put the quill down and went to stand behind the younger woman, bending over her, wrapping her arms around her shoulders. Mary Beatrice leaned back, her head pillowed on Livia’s breasts, giving herself up to the gentle rocking, as if she were a hurt child.

“There would still be no reason to grieve, even if Princess Anne had a dozen boys,” Livia told her softly. “You will live long and conceive many children of your own, and they will come before any child she has. Princess Anne will be thrust down to third place, her child to fourth, and she will not matter anymore.”

Mary Beatrice turned her tragic face up to her friend. “But what if I don’t?” she demanded simply. “What if I don’t conceive a son? Then there is the Protestant heir Mary and her husband, William, and after her, there is Anne. Two Protestant queens, one after another: and I will have failed in my duty to my husband and to my God.”

“But why should you not have a son?” Livia regretted the question the moment she had asked it. She had been in court long enough to know the whispered gossip that French pox had left the king infertile and would bring him madness in his old age, and his wife would break out in chancres all over her body and die in agony from his disease.

“The king goes… elsewhere,” Mary Beatrice said quietly, her head drooping as if she were ashamed. “He always has done. And he has bastard sons, so everyone knows he can make a boy.”

“Bastards don’t count,” Livia said staunchly.

“Half of England wants to put the last king’s bastard on the throne,” Mary Beatrice argued. “He’s coming over the seas towards us right now!”

There was a bleak silence. “My son is coming today,” Livia said encouragingly. “He’ll take our bags for safekeeping, ready to load on the ship. We could set sail next week. You can disembark at Rome.You can write to your mama, tell Her Grace Duchess Laura that you are coming soon. We have a plan, we are ready, if the king loses.”

“If he loses?” the queen said flatly. “With two Protestant armies coming against him from either end of the country, how can he possibly win?”

There was a tap on the bedroom door. Livia went to answer it, opening it a crack to look out.

“A visitor for you, Lady Avery,” the lady-in-waiting said resentfully. “A young man. I did not know if I should interrupt you or no?”

Livia turned back to the room, to find Mary Beatrice drying her eyes. “There!” she said. “Did I not promise that Matteo would come?”

The queen led the way through the privy chamber, where everyone rose and curtseyed, to the small antechamber beyond. Matthew was standing nervously by the table. He bowed very low when the queen entered, and Livia raised him with a gesture and kissed both his cheeks.

“My son!” she said, proud of his youthful good looks in his smart dark suit.

“Ah! He is so like you!” The queen smiled at him. “Such a handsome boy. If I had seen you before you were at college, I should have made you my page.”