The Princeling

Book 3: Morland Dynasty

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

Genres: General Fiction; Historical Fiction

Synopsis

1558: Elizabeth I is on the throne, though still challenged by Mary, and her Protestant faith threatens the Catholic Morland family.
The reign of Elizabeth I means that the Morlands must seek new spheres of influence to restore their fortunes. John, heir to Morland Place, rides north to wed the daughter of Black Will Percy, the Borders cattle lord, and learns that the way to win her heart is through blood and battle.
His gentle sister, Lettice, has also travelled north to marry the ruthless Scottish baron, Lord Robert Hamilton, and in the treacherous court of Mary, Queen of Scots, she has to learn the bleak and bitter lessons of survival.

Release date: August 25, 2011

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 416

Sample

The solar at Watermill House was warm and steamy and fragrant with rosemary and camomile from the bathwater in the tub in front of the fire. James Chapham was finding it too warm, particularly around the neck where the starched and ruffled collar of his shirt prickled his skin, and he squinted down the smooth, stuffed black silk expanse of his doublet and sighed noisily.

‘Not so tight, Matthew,’ he said. ‘I shall lose all feeling in my legs.’

The servant, Matthew, who was kneeling before him tying the garters that held his nether-stocks and canions together, looked up imperturbably.

‘You want them tight, Master, for to get them smooth. It won’t shew off your fine calves, else.’

There was a crow of laughter from the smaller of the two beds in the room on which James’s sixteen-year-old son Jan was sitting, tying his own garters.

‘A touch, a touch!’ Jan cried. ‘He has you there, Father, pricked in your vanity.’

James rotated the upper part of his body carefully so that he could look at the boy. It was not possible simply to turn his head – the high, upstanding Spanish collar kept his neck rigidly in one position.

‘It was no touch,’ he said, trying to look stern. ‘I am the least vain of men, child, you should know that.’

‘Yes Papa. Of course Papa. I tremble before your wrath,’ Jan said, springing off the bed and dropping on one knee in mock humility. ‘May I crave your indulgence to ask a question?’

‘What is it?’ James said, managing to retain the frown. It was difficult, though, in the face of this lovely laughing boy. Jan, with his mop of black curls, his shining dark blue eyes, and his fine-cut, impish face drew love as surely as the moon drew the tides.

‘If you have no vanity, Father, why did you buy a new suit of clothes for this occasion, when you had a new suit at Midsummer, not three months ago?’

James sighed again, and turned the other way, towards the great bed, beside which his wife stood patiently while her maid Audrey slowly and painstakingly tied the points of her sleeves.

‘My dear,’ he said, ‘are you going to allow me to be baited so in my own house?’

Nanette looked across at him and laughed.

‘No, of course not. For shame, Jan! Your father vain, indeed! You know he hates to wear new clothes; and he only shaved off his beard out of compliment to the Queen.’

Matthew grinned all the more, and murmured, ‘It’s no use, Master, you’ll get no help there.’ James looked frustrated.

‘Now, Nan, you know I shaved it off because—’

‘Because it was grey and you did not like to appear a greybeard,’ Nanette finished for him inexorably. James began to smile sheepishly, and Nanette came across to him, half-sleeved as she was, and cupped his smooth jaw in her hand. ‘You are a handsome man, dear heart,’ she said, looking, with her blue eyes and mischievous smile, so much like Jan that it was hard to believe she was not his mother, ‘so why should you mind who knows it? Being clean-shaven suits you. And this Spanish black suits you. I’m afraid I am like to fall in love with you again.’

Their eyes exchanged the private messages of accustomed lovers. ‘If this doublet and collar weren’t so stiff,’ he said, ‘I’d kiss you, Mistress Morland.’

‘What, in front of the servants?’ Nanette pretended to be shocked and backed off, returning to Audrey’s ministrations.

‘And in front of the children?’ Jan added, looking across at Mary Seymour, Nanette’s young protegée, who was sitting as patient as a rock on the clothes chest in the corner, waiting to have her hair dressed. Mary was ten, a fair, pretty child, with quiet, dainty ways, and Jan always felt very protective towards her.

‘Quite right, we forget ourselves,’ James said. Matthew had finished with the garters and was approaching with the short cloak, and James said to him, ‘Be sure you hang that so that the lining shews at the fold-’

‘And be sure, Matthew,’ Jan interrupted sternly, ‘that it hangs at exactly the angle of a line drawn from the centre of the earth to the rising sun at the autumn equinox. The master will have it so.’

Everyone, even little Mary, laughed, and James growled, ‘Another word, and I shall refuse to come to the dedication ceremony at all!’

‘There, Jan, see what you have done with your teasing,’ Nanette said. ‘But I still have an arrow in my quiver – if the master refuses to come to the dedication of the new chapel at Morland Place, I shall refuse to come to the dedication of his new school at Akcomb. That will do, Audrey. You had better see to Mistress Mary’s hair now – time is growing short. And Matthew, when you have hung the master’s cloak, do you send for someone to take the bath away, and see that the horses are ready. And find what’s come of Master Simon and the child.’

‘Yes Madam,’ Matthew said, and departed at once on his errands. James made no protest at her ordering of the man, for Matthew was really her servant, brought with her when they had married, along with Audrey and four lower servants. Besides, the atmosphere at Watermill House was informal. They did not live here in a grand way, for it was so small. There was the great hall in the centre, where most of the life of the house went on; at the warmer, southern end there was the winter-parlour on the ground floor, which James also used as his audience-chamber and steward’s room, and above it on the upper floor the solar with the two beds, the larger one in which James and Nanette slept, and the smaller in which Jan and Matthew slept. At the other end of the hall were the buttery and pantry and over them the small bedchamber in which Mary slept with Audrey in one bed, and in the other Nanette’s chaplain, Simon LeBel with his young charge Alexander.

And that was all, apart from the kitchen which was beyond the buttery and pantry in a separate building. The rest of the servants slept in the Hall, in the old manner; but despite the lack of grandeur and comfort, the atmosphere was always very cheerful at Watermill House. James had a large house in the city, on the Lendal, but they were not often there. Nanette disliked living in York, feeling that it was unhealthy, and she had some evidence for her fears in the successive plagues of illness which had struck their Lendal neighbours, her cousins the Buns.

Nanette’s mother had been Belle Butts before she married, and had been born and brought up in the great Butts house which occupied a fine site at the end of the Lendal, its many ramifications and outbuildings running down to the River Ouse just below the Lendal Bridge. Belle’s brother John was the master of the Butts family, and his two sons had married Nanette’s younger sisters, Catherine and Jane. Jane’s husband Bartholomew and their three daughters had all been struck down by one of these plagues eight years ago, and only the youngest daughter, Charity, had survived. Jane had said afterwards that it was a pity Charity had not died too, for the illness had bent and warped her body as if it were soft clay, and had left her permanently crippled; and now Jane too was dead, killed by the pox only that summer. No, York was not a healthy city; it was beautiful, but noisome and stalked by plague and pest.

Here at Watermill House the air was clean, blown in off the moors, smelling of bracken and heather; implicit in it was the sound of curlews crying, the shadow of a hawk’s wings crossing the sun, the cold mossy taste of water, cupped in the palms, from a tiny rill that ran between gleaming black lips of peat. The past came to Nanette through the medium of that breath of air; it was all of life to her, the life of the north, of the bleak open places where the sky was huge and the earth reared up to meet it, life that beat with the pulse of the earth itself. Life was the breathtakingly savage fang of winter, when death came in like a dog to lie up against you in the night, and each new day was another won from its jaws; and spring, wet and green and so budding and thrusting with life it was almost painful, like the pain of blood returning to a deadened limb; and the sweet, long, wheaten days of summer, drunk and drowsy, mad as sky-larks, when you felt that you would live for ever, emperor of the world; and the haunting days of autumn, smelling of woodsmoke and bright with the gleam of fruit like jewels, hidden treasure discovered by the turning back of a leaf.

Through those seasons her own life came back to Nanette, brought to her mind as the changing year came to her senses through the scents of the air. From her own springtime came the faces of the bright young people with whom she had shared her giddy youth – the Boleyns, Hal Norys, little Frank Weston and the rest – faces bright and untarnished, blown in from the place where it was spring for them still, from the place where they had ceased to grow old. Her brief summer had brought her love and marriage and, indirectly, a child – Jan, who was her son and no son, who was in some sense the child she and her husband Paul had been given no chance to have.

And now she was in her own autumn, a sweet, gentle season, rich with the fruits of years, and wisdom, and love sown long ago and brought to the harvest. Her second husband, beloved James, and their life together here at Watermill House with Jan and their loyal, affectionate servants would have been harvest enough, she felt, for all her gratitude; but a little breeze had turned the leaves, and there was the bright gleam of the unexpected, hidden fruit, their jewel, their God-given Alexander.

Nanette had been past forty when she had married James; James was thirteen years older, and had been married three times before and three times left a childless widower; and in marrying Nanette he laid down his last expectation of leaving behind him a child of his loins. But six months after their marriage, Nanette had conceived, and in the March of 1550, at the age of forty-two, she had borne her first and last child, her son, whom they had named Alexander because it had seemed the only name large enough for such a large miracle. The labour had been hard and exhausting for Nanette – it was then that she had gone grey – but had it cost her her life she would have felt all was paid for by the holiness of the joy she saw in James’s face when he first held in his arms the son he had not thought to have.

Now, eight years later, that joy was no less holy. Nanette looked at James’s face when the door opened to re-admit Matthew, accompanied by Alexander and followed by Simon, who was his tutor; James struggled, not very effectively, to appear stern, for Alexander’s lower lip was guilty.

‘What was it this time?’ he demanded of Matthew.

‘It seems we were chasing a cockerel through a muddy part of the yard, and soiled our shoes,’ Matthew said imperturbably. James examined the trace of moisture on the child’s cheek.

‘Have we seen the error of our ways?’ he enquired.

‘We have, sir, and been beaten.’

‘Then there’s no more to be said,’ James replied, and held out his arms, and Alexander ran to him and was hugged.

‘I wasn’t chasing him, Father, I was playing with him,’ Alexander said, tilting his face upwards. ‘And I forgot about the mud until it was too late, but Master Simon says he wasn’t beating me for getting muddy but for going outside when I was told to wait in the hall.’

‘That’s right, my child. Obedience is one of the first things a Christian must learn,’ James said gently. He was glad that he had passed over to Master Simon both the right and the duty of chastisement, for he doubted if he could ever have brought himself to beat this child, even to save his soul. Alexander’s eyes were a brilliant golden-hazel, set on the slant like a fawn’s, and luminous with the remains of his recent tears.

‘I didn’t really disobey,’ Alexander said judiciously. ‘I forgot. If I had remembered, I would have obeyed.’

James met Nanette’s eyes across Alexander’s fair head and she smiled at his dilemma.

‘A reason is no excuse, my darling,’ she said. The Evil One lays traps for each of us where we are weakest, and your weakness is that you remember what is pleasant to you and forget what is unpleasant.’ Alexander looked up at her and nodded. He was always more formal with his mother than with his father, for she was sterner than he was, and talked about duty and virtue and such other cold words. His eyes now strayed back to his father, and Nanette looked at James too, and said to him, ‘It is a good thing for the child that he has Master Simon and me to offset your influence.’

‘You are right, Mother,’ Jan added quickly. ‘Father never beat me once in all my life, and look what has become of me.’

Nanette laughed. ‘God has blessed me in my old age with not one son nor two, but three. And a beloved daughter,’ she added, gathering Mary into the group with a glance. ‘And now we must go, or we shall certainly be late.’

‘But Mother,’ Alexander said as they went down the stairs, ‘you’re my mother more than Jan’s, aren’t you?’

Nanette had always been worried that Jan might be jealous of Alexander, and she looked quickly at her tall, dark boy while she tried to think of an answer. Jan intercepted the look, and answered her thought for her.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘I don’t feel that I lack for anything. After all, I’ve had three mothers – the one who bore me, the one who suckled me, and the one who chose me. And do I need to tell you which one I love the best?’

The chapel at Morland Place had been destroyed in 1541, and there had been times when it had seemed that it would never be rebuilt. During the successive protectorates of the boy-king’s reign, the country had been forced further and further down the road towards Protestantism, and Paul Morland, third of that name and master of Morland Place, had not dared to rebuild. Then King Edward had died of the wasting sickness, contracted during his summer progress, and Queen Mary had come to the throne, turned the country about and rejoined the Church of Rome.

But though the religious climate was then right for rebuilding the chapel, the financial and commercial chaos that prevailed had made it hard for Paul to find the money. In the end he had sold some property in the city – the large house on Coney Street and another on Petergate – and later the small outlying estate at Bishopthorpe, and in the end he had still had to receive donations from John Butts and from James Chapham to finish the work.

But now it was done and the Bishop had come to consecrate it and the family and the tenants had gathered to give thanks for the completion of work done for the glory of God. The chapel was beautiful, with its fen-vaulted ceiling, its elaborate column-bosses painted blue and gold, its exquisitely-carved screen, and its richly coloured stained glass windows. The ancient wooden statue of the Holy Virgin had been repainted, with plenty of gold leaf; before it had stood on a plinth against the foremost pillar, but now it was housed in a separate Lady-chapel to one side of the main chapel. In the Lady-chapel, too, was the marble memorial Paul had had made to the common ancestors of himself and his wife Elizabeth, to replace the one which was destroyed with the old chapel. It shewed Robert Morland and Eleanor Courteney lying, richly robed, full-length upon an elaborately decorated plinth, their feet resting on a wool-sack to shew whence the family fortune sprang. Around the frieze of the plinth ran the words: The brave heart and the pure spirit faithful unto death. In God is death at end.’

As well as great pride, Paul felt great relief, for it was the culmination of a seventeen-year-old vow, which he had made when the deaths of his father and elder brothers had placed him unexpectedly at the head of the family. After the consecration and the mass came the feasting in the great hall, and sitting at the high table with his family around him and his tenants and neighbours before him, Paul Morland felt for the first time in those seventeen years completely happy.

‘Well, Paul,’ James Chapham said when the first course had been served, ‘you look like a contented man.’

‘As he should be,’ added Nanette, who was seated between them. ‘It’s a beautiful chapel. More beautiful even than the old one.’

‘It isn’t quite finished,’ Paul admitted. The screen has still two panels uncarved, and the corbels along the north side of the aisle want their decorations, but otherwise—’

Jan leaned forward from the other side of his father and said with a serious face, ‘My advice to you, Sir, is to finish it as soon as possible, before we are all asked to stand upon our heads again.’

Paul raised his eyebrows in surprise, and James smiled with a rather grim humour. ‘You must pardon the boy, Paul. He refers to the bad reports we have had of the Queen’s state of health. It is thought she may be near death, and if she dies—’

‘We shall have the Princess Elizabeth for Queen,’ Paul finished for him. ‘I have thought about it, I assure you.’

‘But why should you be afraid?’ Nanette broke in. ‘The Princess Elizabeth is no Papist, certainly, but she is as true a Catholic as her father was. I know her—’

‘You knew her,’ Paul corrected. ‘pardon me, Aunt Nan, but you do not know what she may be now, and the Protestants certainly claim her for their figurehead.’

James said quietly, ‘It’s my belief that she may well wish to steer a middle course as her father did; but her father was a man, and a powerful monarch, and he found it hard enough. What chance will a mere, weak woman have?’

Paul’s cousin Hezekiah, head of that branch of the family known as the Bible Morlands, joined in. ‘Besides,’ he said, ‘she will have to marry a Protestant prince, for no Catholic prince will have her, and then we shall have war with Spain and France both.’

‘Perhaps she may not marry a foreign prince,’ Nanette suggested. Hezekiah shook his great leonine head.

‘If she marries a courtier, we shall have civil war, and that will be worse. No, no, it’s a bad business altogether.’

Suddenly into Nanette’s head came the remembered voice of her father, dead these forty years : There will be no more Queens of England. It won’t do, Nanette. Depend upon it, a girl can’t take the throne.’ She remembered the occasion as vividly as if it were yesterday, remembered her father’s arm round her and the lovely comforting smell of him close to her as he explained to Nanette-the-child why King Henry the Eighth needed a son, and could not make do with his baby daughter Mary. And behind that contention lay all the sadness of King Henry’s life, and all the tragedy that touched his wives, and all the confusion that gripped his people. That baby daughter was now forty-two and dying, a barren Queen; when she was dead her sister Elizabeth would be made Queen after her, because the only other possible contenders were female too, the female heirs of the King’s sisters.

There is talk,’ James was saying now, ‘that King Philip has already spoken of marrying her when Queen Mary dies, in order to retain control of the country.’

‘Elizabeth would not marry him,’ Nanette said abruptly. The people would not like it – they made that plain when Queen Mary married him and brought the Spanish yoke down on their necks – and Elizabeth would never do what the people did not like. Even when she was a girl, she always had an instinct for what the people wanted.’

She had spoken more forcefully than she had intended, and everyone was silenced. James touched her hand warningly, and changed the subject.

‘The next dedication we shall have will be my school. I hope I can rely on your presence at that ceremony, Paul?’

‘Of course,’ Paul said. ‘When is it to be?’

‘In October, on St Edward’s day. We shall call it St Edward’s school.’

‘Not Chapham’s school?’ Paul said with a smile. ‘I would have thought you would want to be commemorated by it.’

‘The good work it does will be reward enough for me,’ James said. He had been increasingly occupied with works of charity over the last few years. There will be twelve places for the children of the poor, perhaps more later, if I can interest other men of standing in the idea. Alexander goes there from the day of opening, of course, and I hope you will support me and send your children to be educated by my schoolmaster. Come, what say you to sending your younger children along?’

Paul smiled indulgently. ‘I don’t know, James. We Morlands have always been educated at home—’

‘Promise me Young Paul, at least, and Mary,’ James pressed him. ‘Come, now, Paul, you can’t refuse me that, not when I have given you so much help with the chapel. And then we must think about opening a hospital – something must be done about the beggars and vagabonds, particularly the women with young children. I cannot bear to see them lying out in all weathers along the sides of the roads—’

‘One thing at a time, James,’ Paul cried in defence. ‘I will give you young Paul for your school, but for the rest you will have to wait. The chapel has cost far more than I ever expected, and a hospital would need money, money I haven’t got at the moment.’

James nodded. ‘Very well, I’ll wait. I shan’t forget, though.’

The Queen died in November.

‘She believed almost to the end,’ Nanette said, ‘that the growth in her womb that was killing her was a child.’

Elizabeth looked up from her sewing with a frown of pity. Nanette, attended by Mary and Audrey, had called in on her at Morland Place, for she had recently been delivered of another son, a small fair child whom they had named Arthur, who was lying on a cushion at her feet while she worked. Elizabeth was still drawn and pale from the birth, and the Spanish black, which all ladies of fashion wore, made her look paler still.

‘Poor lady,’ she said, and glanced down at her newest child. ‘It is hard enough to bear a child, but it must be harder still to want one.’

Nanette nodded. ‘I can’t help remembering her when she was young, before she was disinherited. She was such a pretty young woman, and fond of dancing and singing. King Henry had her in to dance before all the foreign ambassadors. He adored her, for all that she was not a boy.’

Nanette’s sister Catherine, who had ridden in from the Butts house on the Lendal to pay her first-day visit, said sternly, ‘When I think of the late Queen I think of the screams of those poor Christian souls she had burned to death, and I thank God she has been taken to her judgement.’

‘She did it to save their souls, Catherine, not to please herself.’

‘To please her husband—’ Catherine began, but Elizabeth interrupted more gently.

‘Aunt Nan, you don’t really believe it is right to burn people to death, do you? You don’t really think it does save their souls?’

‘I don’t know,’ Nanette said. The Queen believed it, with all her heart.’

‘If it is true, then you must want to have me burned to death,’ Elizabeth said very quietly. Her eyes met Nanette’s.

‘And me,’ Catherine added. The Butts family had always been more reformist by nature than the Morlands, and Catherine had followed her husband a good way along the path to Protestantism, further than Nanette liked to think of.

‘And,’ Mary Seymour added shrewdly for such a young woman, ‘what of your dear Master Cranmer?’

Nanette’s eyes filled with tears. The death of her former confessor, gentle Tom Cranmer, had been a blow to her, and had seemed so unnecessary; almost ironic, seeing that he had survived the reigns of King Henry and King Edward, and most of Queen Mary’s, and would have received great honour had he lived on under Elizabeth.

‘Poor Tom,’ she said. ‘Of course I would not wish to see you burned. I think we should leave such things alone, and let God judge for himself. I do not believe He would wish us to torture and torment one another, for what ever reason. We are not clever enough to peer into men’s souls and read what is written there.’

‘Queen Mary thought she could,’ Catherine said, ‘and no doubt now the new Queen Elizabeth will think it her duty. Well, we shall be safe enough – but what about you, Nan? What will happen to you when she discovers you are a secret Papist?’

Nanette stared at her sister in surprise, for there was a strain of viciousness in her voice that shocked and dismayed her. Nanette knew that the Butts house was a meeting-place for some of the more extreme Protestants in York, but she had not suspected that the taint had so far discoloured her sister’s thinking. Before she was able to think of an answer, Elizabeth spoke again.

‘Aunt Nan will be safe – the Princess would never harm her. Would she, Aunt? You were her mother’s friend, and you knew her when she was a child.’

Nanette exchanged a swift glance with her maid, as each remembered the years when Nanette had been companion to the Princess’s stepmother, Queen Katherine Parr, in whose household the Princess had lived; and the stormy ending to that relationship.

She said calmly, ‘The Princess will remember, I am sure. She never had an ungrateful heart. Elizabeth, your wool is knotted, child. If you pull at it like that it will never come undone. Here, let me—’

Elizabeth yielded up her work willingly, and Nanette smiled at her. ‘You were never happy with your needle, were you? Shall you read to us instead, and Audrey can finish off this piece. There is not much to do.’

‘I am tired,’ Elizabeth said. ‘It seems so hard to be a woman. I have been married fourteen years, and in that time I have had ten pregnancies. I love my children, but it does seem that things are arranged unfairly. Men have all the pleasure and women have all the pain.’

Catherine looked shocked. ‘You should be grateful that your children survive,’ she said sternly. ‘All of mine died but two. Thank God for your blessings, instead of scolding Him for what you please to think of as your pains.’

Nanette tried to deflect Catherine’s attention. ‘I have always said it is unhealthy, living in the city, and is it not proof of it, that so many of Elizabeth’s bairns survive compared with yours?’

‘Aye, I know about this fancy of yours, sister,’ Catherine said, smiling suddenly, ‘and why you live like a yeoman’s wife at Watermill instead of in a proper style on the Lendal. I wonder you ever let Alexander so far from home as Akcomb, and to mix with city children too. Aren’t you afraid he will catch some pest?’

Nanette shrugged, that strange, foreign gesture she had caught in her youth from Anne Boleyn and never lost, and said, ‘He is a strong, healthy boy. And what God wills for him will come. For myself, I care only that he learns enough to be a useful man, but poor Simon is afraid all his work on the boy will be lost. He questions Alexander like an inquisitor every night when the boy comes home from school, and relieves his frustration as a tutor by teaching Mary Greek and Astronomy.’

Mary smiled, and Elizabeth laughed and said, ‘Do you remember, Aunt Nan, how Master Philippe grumbled when he was ordered to teach me Greek and Latin as well as the boys?’

‘And you learned Greek and Latin much more readily than sewing, as I remember,’ Nanette said. ‘There, I have your knot free. Shall you take your work back, or shall I give it to Audrey?’

‘No, I’ll do it,’ Elizabeth said with a sigh. ‘My father always wished I had been born a boy, because I was his firstborn, and I have always concurred with his wishes.’

Nanette looked at her sympathetically, and thought how many of the misfortunes of womanhood had befallen Elizabeth in her time. She had been sent from home when very young to a strange place to be betrothed to Nanette’s nephew, Robert, a young man she had never seen before. Robert had been killed before they were wed, leaving Elizabeth a helpless dependant. Elizabeth had been foully raped during an attack on Morland Place and left pregnant, and Nanette herself had removed the child at its birth so that Elizabeth should never see it or know what became of it. Though afterwards she had married Robert’s younger brother Paul and become mistress of Morland Place after all, yet continual pregnancy was no easy lot, even though all but three of her children had so far survived.

All this, Nanette thought, when Elizabeth had always loved best riding and hunting and hawking, the free life of men. But even as she looked at her, there was a sound of horses and men’s voices in the courtyard, and Nanette saw Elizabeth’s face light up. There were compensations to being a woman, and one of these had just ridden in to the yard.

‘It is John!’ Elizabeth exclaimed, and got up and went to the window. She looked down, and her face coloured as she waved to the person below, smiling with a tenderness that would not have looked strange on the face of a lover. She turned to Nanette and said, ‘Jan is with him. They must have met up on the way back. They are coming up.’

‘Good,’ Nanette said, ‘then Jan can take us home, and we need not disturb your servants’.

There were running footsteps on the spiral stair, and then the door was opened and Elizabeth’s firstborn son came in, laughing, followed by Jan.

‘Look, Mother, look what I have for you!’ John said, cradling something with difficulty in the bosom of his jerkin, som