The Noble Assassin. Christie Dickason

she thought again. Don’t let yourself become distracted from the most important things.

      She found the steward in the kitchen courtyard, making a tally of flitches of bacon and smoked hams as they were thrown into carts.

      ‘Where are your clerks?’ she asked.

      He gestured at the mêlée around them and shrugged. ‘I want to be certain, myself . . . Bread already in that cart, madam.’ He pointed, then ran across the courtyard to chivvy along two men who were loading barrels of ale onto another cart. She saw a guardsman carrying a pike.

      The armoury! She ran back to the steward. ‘Weapons,’ she said. ‘We must not leave weapons for the enemy to take.’ He nodded and pointed at bundled pikes and stacked shields waiting to be loaded.

      We must go to Berlin, she decided. A long ride in this weather. But once there, they would find warmth and food and safety, for a time at least. Time to think about their suddenly unthinkable situation. She didn’t entirely believe it, even now.

      Snow was already blanketing the contents of the carts. Churned-up slush washed past the ankles of her boots as she ran back into the castle to oversee her own chests, which were being loaded onto carts in the main courtyard. And her money chest and jewel case, stowed in her carriage at the front of the forming line. And the chest holding state papers.

      Letters!

      She turned to go back to her apartments, but a militiaman blocked her way.

      ‘No time, madam,’ he said. ‘You must leave now!’ The militiaman disappeared again.

      She lifted her head. The cannons had stopped. For a moment, she felt an intense silence, as if the world had stopped turning. Then shouts and gunfire, and the screaming of wounded horses arrived on the wind, far too close.

      Children already in their carriage. Shadowy heads and the heads of their nurses . . .

      Cloak. Gloves. Money pouch tied under her soft riding skirts, over her seven-month bulge of belly. Dagger.

      She clambered up into her carriage. Two women in it already. Her chief lady-in-waiting sat huddled under a bearskin rug with Elizabeth’s jewel case in her arms.

      She helped to wrap Elizabeth in another rug. ‘Put your feet here, my lady.’ Elizabeth lifted her soaked boots onto the iron warming pan of burning charcoal. Melted snow was already making a puddle on the floor of the coach. She lifted back the curtain over the window to watch their departure. In both directions along the line, indistinct figures took shape in the snow then disappeared again, both mounted and on foot. Though the light felt unnaturally bright, she could scarcely see the walls of her adopted home.

      Frederick appeared on his horse, armed for war. ‘I’m giving the order to go forward.’

      She nodded at him through the open square of the window. ‘To Berlin.’

      He leaned close and said quietly, ‘I’m sorry, Lizzie.’ ‘Don’t be a fool,’ she said. ‘We’re having another adventure.’

      ‘Do you think we’ll survive?’

      ‘I shall. And I don’t like the prospect of widowhood, however you imagine you might arrange it.’

      He nodded, then swallowed. ‘If I could face your father to win you, why should I fear the army of the Hapsburg emperor?’

      She smiled more brightly than his sally warranted, to reward him for attempting it at all. They clasped gloved hands through the carriage window. The ends of his dark curly hair were tipped with snow. Flakes were already settling on her skirts.

      ‘I’ll see you safely to Berlin,’ he said. ‘Then I must ride north to try to raise more men. I’ve learned that it was only the mercenaries who deserted, not our local troops. The people of Bohemia will defend us yet.’

      ‘And I will give you all my jewels to pawn to pay them.’ She held up the curtain and watched him dematerialise again as he rode away to the head of the long line.

      Her carriage jolted forward, throwing her back against the seat. Behind her the shouts of the drivers travelled like a wave back along the line of carts and carriages. The carriage dropped suddenly as its wheels slid into buried ruts in the frozen mud. The seat banged the ends of their spines.

      ‘Dear Lord!’ exclaimed her lady-in-waiting. Elizabeth heard the horses groaning and blowing. Behind them, oxen protested. The carriage swayed and creaked like a ship in a storm. She dropped the curtain across the window. She needed both hands to clutch the front of the seat. The interior of the coach was now dark and no warmer, but the curtain at least kept out the snow.

      ‘Stop!’ A scream rose behind her. She leaned from the window again, into the icy needles of snow. A voice fought its way to her against the wind, through the shouts of the carters and coachmen and the protests of the horses. ‘Wait, Your Majesty . . .!’

      Then the wind blew the voice into ragged tatters.

      ‘Stop!’ she cried. Cold air filled her open mouth. Her teeth ached from the cold. ‘Who is that?’

      It’s too late, she thought. We’ve been overtaken.

      ‘Your Majesty!’ The voice shouted again.

      Then she saw the man staggering and sliding through the snow alongside the track. Not a Hapsburg soldier: one of Frederick’s gentlemen. Clutching a bundle of cloth in his arms, he fought his way forward towards her carriage.

      ‘Your Majesty,’ he shouted again. He overtook the carriage behind hers. ‘Dohna, the King’s Chamberlain went back . . .’ He slipped and almost fell into a drift. ‘. . . into the castle to check that everyone was gone . . . That nothing valuable had been left . . . Look!’ He stumbled alongside, panting, beneath the carriage window, holding up the bundle of cloth. ‘I was in the last carriage. Dohna threw him in . . . left behind in the nursery!’

      The bundle gave an angry wail.

      The carriage slid sideways. Elizabeth nearly fell from the window as she reached out. The man shoved the bundle up into her hands just before he fell. Elizabeth fumbled, re-gripped and fell back into her seat. It was her youngest son.

      ‘Rupert!’

      One of her ladies whimpered.

      Alive. Very much alive. She could now hear his steady screams and feel the pumping of his breath. The scrap of his face that showed amongst the wrappings was brick red. His body arched with rage.

      Frightened faces stared back at her across the carriage.

      ‘Where’s the prince’s nurse?’

      But she already knew. She remembered now. She had not seen Rupert’s nurse waiting with the others. The woman had fled.

      Behind her she heard the coachmen and carters cursing and shouting as their beasts piled into the ones in front of them, trying not to run into her carriage.

      ‘Onwards,’ she shouted through the window and heard the order reverse itself back down the line. As the carriage lurched forward again, she braced herself against the motion, with her son pressed against her guilty heart. For the first time, she truly felt the enormity of what had happened to them all, of what was happening, and would go on happening. However calm she had pretended to be, what had happened was so terrible that it had almost made her leave behind her youngest child.

       Chapter 3

      LUCY – MOOR PARK, 1620

      I lie in my cold bed, breathing out warm clouds, my feet close to the iron brazier filled with coals at the end of the mattress. My maid Annie snores gently from her pallet on the floor. A nodding house groom tends the fire.

      I think about the news Edward has given me. The daughter of the King of England – my Elizabeth – is in flight, pursued by the armies of a Catholic empire that rules most of northern Europe from Russia to Flanders,