The Noble Assassin. Christie Dickason

of its handle in her fist.

      They no longer pretended to converse, in any of the several languages spoken around the table. All words had now deserted them. Up and down the long polished table, people stared at their food as if puzzled by it or chewed on morsels that they forgot to swallow. All their senses seemed to have deserted them except that of hearing. Sir Edward Conway, one of the two ambassadors sent by James from England to parlay for peace with the Hapsburg enemy, sat with one hand at his hip, resting on an absent sword hilt. Even the servers standing behind each chair forgot to offer the food they held, frozen in listening.

      Cannons had begun to boom far too close, from the west.

      The child in her womb jumped.

      Elizabeth could almost have persuaded herself that the guns were summer thunder bouncing off the mountains.

      ‘It’s noisy for a Sunday that was meant to be a day of truce,’ said the other English ambassador, Sir Richard Weston.

      ‘We’re high here,’ said Elizabeth. Her unspoken meaning – the Hradcany Palace, home to the King and Queen of Bohemia, sat on a rocky summit high above the Vltava river. Sounds from far away reached them with unnatural clarity. Therefore, the fighting was not as close as it sounded. She was reassuring her white-faced husband as much as the rest of them.

      Her husband shook his head. Frederick, elected King of Bohemia for a little more than a year, had been weighed down beyond his strength from the age of sixteen by his leadership of the German Union of Protestant Princes. ‘They’re fighting on the White Mountain. I should be there, not at table.’ He stood abruptly. Fabric rustled and stool feet squeaked on the stone floor as everyone else rose with him. Then he paused uncertainly, head lifted, listening to the sounds of the battle.

      The forces of the mighty Catholic Hapsburg Empire had engaged Frederick’s twenty-five thousand German mercenaries and Protestant Bohemians less than half an hour’s ride from the city.

      ‘But we have them outnumbered,’ said Frederick. ‘They’re only seventeen and a half thousand men.’

      ‘Go tell the stables to prepare His Majesty’s horse,’ Elizabeth ordered a serving groom.

      The fear and relief on the boy’s face as he ran from the hall made her question whether he would take her order to the stables or flee from the castle entirely.

      ‘You must go arm yourself, my love,’ she told her husband quietly.

      ‘Oh, Lizzie!’ He looked at her with terror in his large dark eyes. ‘I fear that we can’t . . .’

      ‘I shall come serve as your armourer, myself.’ Elizabeth, First Daughter of England and child of its King, married to Frederick at fifteen, now the twenty-four-year-old Serene and Puissant Queen of Bohemia, took her King firmly by the arm and led him towards the door of the great hall.

      ‘You must leave Prague at once,’ said Frederick. ‘Go early to Bresslau.’ She was to spend her confinement in Bresslau. He had already ordered some of her furniture sent there.

      She shook her head. ‘I stay here in Prague as long as you do.’

      The doors had no sooner closed behind him than they opened again on bad news. The arriving messenger smelled of gunpowder, blood and horse. Elizabeth could scarcely hear his words through the thunder of cannons inside her head.

      The messenger finished speaking.

      Behind her, Elizabeth heard screams and the crash of falling stools. Courtiers ran past her out of the hall, pushing and jostling in the door.

      ‘Where are the other German princes?’ she demanded. ‘Our allies? Where’s Thyssen? Bethlem Gabor and his Hungarians? Are they on their way to relieve us?’

      ‘I don’t know, Your Majesty. But our army is on the run with the Imperial army on their heels.’ The messenger looked back at the door.

      ‘Go run with the rest of them, then!’ she said with contempt.

      She stood in a small still centre of the maelstrom unleashed by his message. She saw a man run by her carrying two jewelled goblets from the royal table.

      ‘Your Highness, do you wish me to take your knives and forks?’ A voice at her elbow, her chief lady-in-waiting, balanced on her toes, wanting to run, but still at her English mistress’s side.

      She looked back and saw a waiting woman rolling up one of the Russian carpets on the royal dais.

      Reality hit her. A hostile army was about to invade this very space in which she was standing.

      Feeling unnaturally calm, she nodded at her lady-in-waiting. ‘And all my jewels.’ She turned to the two English ambassadors, still present, heads together. ‘You must return to England and tell my father to send soldiers and money at once!’

      Weston nodded, but looked away.

      Into the maelstrom, a white-faced, trembling Frederick returned. ‘It’s too late, Lizzie. My army has deserted. Even Anhalt and Hohenlohe were clamouring at the city gate in the midst of their own soldiers, begging to be let back inside the walls. We must all leave Prague now!’

      ‘Then you can ride with me and the children,’ Elizabeth said. ‘We will need you and the castle militia to protect us.’

      Scarcely a year after she had arrived in Prague as the new queen of Bohemia, Elizabeth packed to leave again.

      First, the children. The boys must not become Imperial captives! Thank God the Crown Prince had already been sent to safety in Berlin! Get the others away from here! Look to their needs. Clouts for the coming babe, petticoats, toy soldiers, cups and spoons, coverlets, shoes and boots, bread and wine. Gloves.

      Oh God! She could not think with that thunder in her head.

      Cradle . . . a welcoming gift from her new people less than a year ago, for Rupert her first Bohemian child . . . Too heavy to carry?

      She looked out of a high window as if expecting to see Hapsburg soldiers climbing towards the castle.

      Snow, falling. Great pillows of snow fell onto the thick coverlet that already hid steps and cart tracks. The staircase down to the river looked like a smooth white slope. They would have to take the wagons and carriages the long way round, to the north where the land rose more gradually, towards the advancing enemy, before curving south again.

      Money chest, she thought. Petticoats, riding boots. Fill brass warming pans with charcoal. Likewise the iron heaters for the carriages. Feather mattresses . . . Leave all farthingales behind to save room in the carriages.

      All the time, her ears listened to the gunfire, growing closer.

      ‘Madam . . .! Madam!’ cried frightened voices. ‘Do you want me to take . . .?’

      No time. They must leave now!

      The First Daughter of England, child of the would-be Peacemaker English King, could not become a prisoner-of-war.

      Apart from all else, she thought, my father would never forgive me for forcing him to take a stand. Not after he had advised Frederick to stay at home in Heidelberg and refuse the Bohemian crown.

      ‘Into the second and third carriages,’ she ordered the children’s nurses with their bundles. Where was the castle steward who should be overseeing this rout?

      Food! she thought. And ale. Who was supervising the packing of food and drink for them all?

      How many were they?

      She sat on a packed chest, pulled up her skirts and hauled on her riding boot unassisted. Her ladies were all running with loaded arms. Or had vanished.

      And who can blame them? she thought. She hauled on her other boot.

      How far away was her intended refuge in Bresslau? Too far. The mountains would be impassable in this weather.

      Our departure from Prague is merely a series of problems to be solved, she told