“Because I love to be free,” she says. “I love to feel the horse stretch out and the thunder of his hooves and the wind in my face and knowing we can go on and on forever.”
She turns her horse for she cannot go on and on forever, or at least not today, and leads the way back to the castle.
“I have prayed every night to see her restored to her own again,” I say quietly to my friend Percy, and I hope he cannot hear the tenderness in my voice. “She is not a woman who can be confined in one place. She does indeed need to be free. It is like mewing up a falcon to keep her in one small place. It is cruel. I have felt as if I were her jailer. I have felt that I was being cruel.”
He shoots a sideways look at me, as if considering something. “But you would never have let her go,” he suggests in an undertone. “You would never have turned a blind eye if someone had come to rescue her.”
“I serve Queen Elizabeth,” I say simply. “As my family have served every King of England since William of Normandy. And I have given my word as an English nobleman. I am not free to turn a blind eye. I am honor bound. But it does not stop me caring for her. It does not stop me longing to see her as she should be—free as a bird in the sky.”
He nods and compresses his lips on his thought. “You have heard she is to marry Howard, and they will be restored to Scotland together?”
“She did me the honor of telling me. And Howard wrote to me. When did the queen give the marriage her blessing?”
Percy shakes his head. “She doesn’t know yet. She flies into such a temper over the marriages of others that Howard is waiting to pick his time to tell her. Dudley says he will broach it when the time is right but he is delaying too long. There are rumors, of course, and Norfolk has had to deny it twice already. He’ll probably tell her on the summer progress. Dudley has known from the beginning; he says he’ll introduce the idea gently. It makes sense for everyone; it guarantees her safety when she is back on her throne.”
“What does Cecil think of it?”
He shoots me a quick hidden smile. “Cecil knows nothing of it, and there are those who think that Cecil can steep in his ignorance until the matter is signed and sealed.”
“It would be a pity if he advised against it. He is no friend of Howard’s,” I say cautiously.
“Of course he is no friend of Howard’s, nor yours, nor mine. Name me one friend of Cecil’s! Who likes or trusts him?” he demands bluntly. “How should any of us befriend him? Who is he? Where does he come from? Who even knew him before she made him steward of everything? But this is the end for Cecil’s power,” Percy says in a low voice to me. “Howard hopes to drive him out; this is all part of the same plan. Howard hopes to rid us of Cecil, of his enmity to the Spanish, and to save the Scots queen from his spite, and to see him reduced at court, perhaps thrown out altogether.”
“Thrown out?”
“Thomas Cromwell rose greater and Thomas Cromwell was stripped of his badge of office by a Howard at a Privy Council meeting. Don’t you think such a thing could happen again?”
I try to check my smile at this but it is no good. He can see my pleasure in the very thought of it.
“You like him no more than the rest of us!” Percy says triumphantly. “We will have him thrown down, Shrewsbury. Are you with us?”
“I cannot do anything which would conflict with my honor,” I start.
“Of course not! Would I suggest such a thing? We are your brother peers. Howard and Arundel and Lumley and the two of us are all sworn to see England in the hands of her proper rulers again. The last thing we want to do is to demean ourselves. But Cecil pulls us down in every direction. The pennypinching he wants at court, the enmity to the Scots queen, the persecution of anyone but the strictest of Puritans, and”—he drops his voice— ” the endless recruitment of spies. A man cannot so much as order a meal in