Page 42 of Dawnlands

Ned said: “Come on, my lord, this is no way…” and tried to get hold of Fletcher, who shoulder-barged him and shouted:

“This is mutiny! Mutiny! To me! To me!”

Men tumbled out of the inn and from the town hall to see the brawl. Venner returned to the doorway. “Come on now, Fletcher!”

“It’s theft! You let go my horse!” Dare shouted and raised his whip to strike down on Fletcher’s shoulder. But the horse jerked, pulling Fletcher up, and Dare’s whip missed his shoulder and lashed his face. The man screamed at the sudden pain of it, released the horse, tore himself out of Ned’s grip, and dived through the door of the inn.

In the sudden silence Thomas and Ned exchanged one shocked look. “What the—” Ned started to say, then Rowan from the town hall door shouted a warning: “Sannup!”

Ned whirled around and saw Fletcher in the doorway, a red weal on his face and his primed pistol pointed at murderously close range.

“Stop!” Ned yelled. There was a tremendous explosion and at once the horse reared up, huge hooves high above their heads, then wheeled and clattered down the street, reins trailing as Dare dropped, crumpled on the ground.

Ned gave one aghast look at Fletcher, who had lowered the pistol, suddenly sober with shock.

“My God,” he said. “It went off. I meant to just…”

Ned dropped to his knees beside Thomas Dare and turned him over. He was completely limp, his face horribly smashed by the musket ball, blood pouring over the cobbles and running in scarlet streams between the stones, a gray mass of his brains pouring from the cavernous gap that had been his mouth and nose.

“He’s dead,” Ned said coldly to Fletcher. He rose to his feet. “You’d better go and tell the duke that you’ve fired the first shot in his war. And you’ve killed his Paymaster.”

Venner ordered the men to carry the body of Thomas Dare in a sailcloth to the square-towered church up the hill. William Hewling, fighting down vomit, walked alongside the men with the bloodstained burden, and saw that they laid it down on the chancel steps. Rowan caught the horse and led it to the pound. Ned found her sitting on the fence of the town field for straying animals, watching the horses grazing on the summer grass.

“Is he dead?” she asked him.

“Aye.”

“What happens to the savage?”

“Sent back to the ship under arrest.”

“Are you not allowed to kill each other?”

Ned remembered that she had seen English soldiers overrun her own people while they were sleeping, stabbing them and scalpingthem while they begged for mercy. “No, you’re not,” he said shortly. “Not your own side.”

“We still go to war?”

“We do. But we’ve lost a good cavalry commander in Fletcher, and a brilliant recruiter in Thomas Dare. And it’s a bad feeling…” He shrugged off his sense of darkness. “Tomorrow we march.”

“You don’t listen to the bad feeling?” she asked him.

He hunched a shoulder and shook his head.

ST. JAMES’S PALACE, LONDON, SUMMER 1685

Once again, the king summoned his parliament, denouncing a rebellion, demanding more funds to defend against it; but this time the queen did not go with him. She and Livia walked together in the palace gardens followed by a quartet of musicians. The queen nodded her head in time, as if she were enjoying the music. The plumes in her hair bobbed, the diamonds at her neck sparkled. Only Livia knew she was listening for cannon fire from the city walls. “The king has gone to parliament to demand that they change the law to allow Roman Catholics to be commanding officers,” Mary Beatrice told her quietly.

“But how does that help?” Livia asked.

“They will be faithful to us, if they are of our faith.”

“But to the soldiers, to their own men, they are heretics?”

“We can’t trust Protestants,” she said miserably. “The king says we can trust none of them.” Her head jerked up. “Was that cannon fire? Did you hear that?”

“No, no.”

A messenger came across the graveled paths and proffered a letter to Livia.