Gertrude had returned, balancing a tray almost as large as she was, piled high with more food than Lune could possibly eat. Judging by the way Gertrude nibbled at the cherries while setting out dishes, though, she and Rosamund intended to share. “What were you hoping for?” she asked, licking her fingers clean of juice.
“Some sort of agent,” Lune admitted. “A friend you might have in Fife, or someone you know in one of the other Scottish courts, who could go there and not seem out of place. My courtiers are almost all English fae, or more foreign than that.”
“A spy?” Rosamund said.
As Ben Hipley conducted the Onyx Hall’s covert work among mortals, so did Valentin Aspell, her Lord Keeper, handle that which dealt with fae. But for certain matters—more delicate ones—the Goodemeades were Lune’s best, and least suspected, resource. She said, “You know of the attack on the alder tree. As much as I wish I could believe Taylor was sent on his errand by a traitor in my own court—as strange as it is to wish for such a thing—I have reason to believe Nicneven is behind it. Which means something has changed in the North. I must find out what.”
Gertrude gestured, admonishing her to eat, and obediently Lune began to butter a hunk of fresh bread. This plainer food might appeal to Eochu Airt, she thought, remembering his disdainful comments about the more elaborate meals of her court. The Irish, as she understood it, feasted in simpler fashion. I may try this, and see if it sweetens his mood.
She was allowing herself to become distracted; the problem at hand was Scotland, not Ireland. Communicating through glances and the occasional half-finished word, the Goodemeades had already carried out an entire conversation. Now Rosamund said, “It might not be the Gyre-Carling. You know who’s at her court.”
The bread caught in Lune’s throat; she washed it down with mead. “Yes,” she said, heavily. “Kentigern Nellt. And yes, I have considered that this may be nothing more or less than revenge for Halgresta.”
The giant had not loved his sister; Lune sincerely doubted him capable of love. But Kentigern had taken deep offense when Halgresta died in battle, and he had cause to blame Lune, for that battle was her doing. She had exiled him precisely to avoid any attempt at vengeance; had he tried, she would have been forced to execute him, and that she would not do. But exiled, he had gone back to his old home in the North, and found a place serving the Unseely Queen of Fife.
Leaving behind his brother Prigurd. Who alone, among the brutal Nellt siblings, served out of loyalty instead of rapacious ambition, and was willing to bestow that loyalty upon Lune. Some had argued that she should not trust him, at least not so far as to award him Halgresta’s old position as captain—but the Onyx Guard was all Prigurd knew. And though he was not bright, he was at least faithful in his duty.
“If it’s revenge,” Gertrude said, “then it might be cleared away if you sent Prigurd north.”
Rosamund and Lune both frankly stared at her. “Prigurd as a diplomat?” the other brownie said, disbelieving. “Mab love him, but he hasn’t three thoughts in his head to call his own. Kentigern would skin him, joint him, and serve him to Nicneven raw.”
“I doubt anyone could dissuade him from revenge by words alone,” Lune said. Gertrude’s sweet disposition was admirable, but sometimes it resulted in naïveté. “But I also doubt that this is simply Kentigern’s doing. Left to his own devices, he would storm the Onyx Hall one night, axe in hand, seeking my blood. If anything, Nicneven is restraining him, not being driven by him.”
Kentigern was not the only courtier who departed at her accession, nor even the only one who had found a home in Fife. The others, though, had left peaceably—or else had fled so far she no longer feared them. And—
Lune groaned out loud as a thought came to her. The sisters gave her matched looks of startlement. “Eochu Airt,” she said. “He claims to have some information of use to me. There have been dealings between Ulster and Scotland before. It may be King Conchobar, or another in Ulster, knows something of this new malevolence from Nicneven.”
“What do they want in return?” Gertrude asked.
Ireland free of all English settlers, with no English King over her. “The removal of Wentworth,” Lune said. “Which I have no graceful way to accomplish. I have offered him everything I can, but none of it suffices. I must find a way to get my own agent into Fife.”
The brownies exchanged dubious glances. “We shall try,” Rosamund said, without much hope. “We have a few friends along the Border, who might be of use.”
“I would be most grateful,” Lune replied.
“Good,” Gertrude said. “Now I would be grateful if you don’t let this pheasant go to waste. Tuck in, your most sovereign Majesty; you cannot solve all the island’s ills if you do not eat.”
ST. STEPHEN’S CHAPEL, WESTMINSTER: May 5, 1640
Three weeks of this chaos, and nothing to show for it.
The refrain echoed incessantly in Antony’s mind as he crossed the lobby outside St. Stephen’s Chapel, where the House of Commons sat. Three weeks of increasingly contentious argument, Pym and his supporters holding firm even though hostilities with Scotland had opened once more. From religion to control of the militia, the list of changes they sought kept growing.
Antony was not without resources, but they only went so far. Lune’s faerie spies and Ben Hipley’s mortal agents kept their fingers on the pulse of the House of Lords and Charles’s privy council, but he had no control over those bodies; he only knew the general tenor of their discussions. And what he heard did not bode well. Charles believed, as he ever did, that the opposition in the Commons was the work of a few malcontented individuals, while the majority held a more tractable stance. But this was the same man who invariably expected matters to go according to his wishes, regardless of circumstances; the same man who closed his ears to any indication the reality might be worse than he thought. His advisers were weak men, and those few who were strong—Wentworth and Archbishop Laud—were also hated. The rottenness in England’s government went far beyond one man.
Even at this early hour, the lobby was well filled with clerks, servants, and men with business they hoped to place before the Commons. It was worse than the Guildhall; Antony had to fend off petitioners from three different counties before he passed the bar that marked the entrance into the chapel. Complaints about ship money, all three of them, and no surprise there. It was the most hated tax in all of England.
The problem—his thoughts kept returning to the Commons—was lack of leadership. Wentworth, who had been one of the most able men in the House eleven years ago, was recently created the Earl of Strafford, and as such had his seat in the Lords. In his own way the man was as blind as Charles, and far more adept at making enemies, but at least he was effective. In his absence, the King’s men floundered, while John Pym and his fellows organized a strong opposition.
Antony’s reservations about Pym had grown from niggling suspicion into outright distrust. It would be bad enough if the man were simply a champion of the godly reformers, but his ambitions did not stop there. Pym seemed to view Parliament, not as the King’s support, but as his leash. He wanted control of matters that were manifestly the prerogative of the King, and that Antony could not support.
Which left him caught in the middle. Standing on the floor of the chapel, with the tiers of seats rising around him in a horseshoe, Antony felt briefly like a bear staked out for baiting. Then he took his seat with the other members for London, near to the Speaker’s chair. He felt no allegiance with them: Penington and Craddock were firmly in Pym’s camp, and Soame was increasingly of their mind. But Sir Francis Seymour sat behind them—an old friend of Antony’s father, allied with him in the last Parliament, and a comforting presence in this maze Antony had not yet learned to thread.
As he slid onto the bench in front of the knight, murmuring a greeting, Antony marshaled his resolve. It has only been three weeks. I will master this dance. Neither for the King’s demands, nor for Pym’s turbulent
reforms, but for a moderate course between the two. It would not be easy, but given time, it could be done.
Then an oddity caught his eye. “Where is Glanville?” he whispered into Seymour’s ear. The Speaker’s chair stood empty, even though it was nearly time for the opening prayers to begin.
Seymour shook his head. “I do not know. Nor do I like the look of it.”
Neither did Antony. Glanville had spoken with some force the previous day, which could not have won him favor with the King. Would Charles go so far as to depose the Speaker of the House of Commons? Pym was overfond of declaring everything a breach of the privileges of Parliament, but on this point Antony would have no choice but to agree with him. Surely the King would not give such flagrant offense—not when the House was already at odds with him. It would destroy any hope of conciliation.
He worried about it as he bowed his head for the prayers. What would happen, if Glanville had been removed? Speakers, he knew, had met bad ends before; there was a reason the chosen man was traditionally dragged to his chair. But Antony had thought that all in the distant past.
“Amen,” the assembled members said, some with more fervency than others. And then, without warning, the doors to the chapel swung open.
A man bearing a black rod of office entered and positioned himself before the Speaker’s table. The clerks who sat at one end paused, pens in the air, staring in surprise. Maxwell, Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod for the House of Lords, had the duty of summoning the Commons to attend any full meetings of the entire Parliament. Given Glanville’s absence, it was not a promising sign.
In a loud voice, Maxwell declared, “It is his Majesty’s pleasure that you knights, citizens, and burgesses of his House of Commons come up presently to his Majesty, to sit in assembly with the House of Lords.”
Antony’s own oath was drowned out by louder ones around him. A few men stood, shouting questions, but Maxwell ignored them all; he simply waited, impassive, to guide them to the greater chamber where the Lords met.
“You have more experience of this than I,” Antony said to Seymour, under the cover of the shouting. “Tell me—is there any good cause for which his Majesty might summon us now?”
The older man’s face had sagged into weary lines, and his eyes held the bleak cast of hopes on the verge of death. “If you mean good for us ... unlikely. A terrible defeat in Scotland, perhaps. Or rebellion in Ireland; these plans to arm the Irish against the Scots may be reaping their expected reward. Or some other disaster.”
And that is the best we can hope for. Antony gritted his teeth, then raised his voice over the clamor. “It does us no good to argue it here! We are summoned to the Lords; our answers lie with them. Let us go and be done.”
Still muttering in confusion and anger, they formed up and let Black Rod lead them through the Palace of Westminster. Antony’s blood ran cold when he entered the Lords’ chamber and saw Glanville at the far end. The dark circles under the Speaker’s eyes stood out like bruises.
Near him, in a richly upholstered chair, sat Charles Stuart, first of his name, by the Grace of God, King of England, Scotland, France and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, et cetera. The dais on which the chair sat elevated him to a position of prominence, but could not disguise the King’s low stature. Antony sometimes wondered if some of his obstinacy were not born of that deficiency, which put him at perpetual disadvantage against taller, stronger men.
Certainly obstinacy was writ large in his expression. The members of the House of Lords were in their seats; filing in, the Commons stood on the floor between the peers and the bishops. Antony had a poor view, blocked by the men who had crowded in front of him, but by shifting his weight onto his left foot he could just see the King’s face. Behind his luxuriant mustache and pointed beard, Charles’s lips were pressed into a thin, impatient line.
When the doors closed behind the last man, the King spoke.
“There can no occasion of coming to this House,” he said, delivering the words in a measured cadence designed to minimize his unfortunate stammer, “be so unpleasant to me as this at this time.”
Antony’s stomach clenched. And the sickness in it only grew as Charles continued to speak, thanking the Lords of the higher house for their good endeavours. “If there had been any means to have had a happy end of this Parliament,” the King said, “it was not your lordships’ fault that it was not so.”
Whatever hope old Seymour might have clung to, that they were called forth to be told the Irish were revolting and the Scots had overrun the North and the Dutch had sunk all their ships and Charles had sold England to Spain, it must have died in that moment. For his own part, Antony was not surprised. Not since he had seen Glanville.
Glanville, who led the House on which Charles was squarely placing the blame.
Oh, the King made a passing nod, as he went on, to the Lords’ part in presenting grievances. “Out of Parliament,” the King added, most unconvincingly, “I shall be as ready—if not more willing—to hear any, and to redress just grievances, as in Parliament.”
No, you will not, Antony thought, fury and disappointed rage boiling in his gut. If you were, we would never have come to this pass.
Charles could claim all he liked that he would preserve the purity of religion now established in the Church of England; he could remind them that delay in supplying his war was more dangerous than refusing. None of it mattered a rush, for everyone heard the words, even before Charles commanded the Lord Keeper to speak them.
The words that burnt to black cinders all Antony’s victories, and all his hopes for the future.
“It is his Majesty’s pleasure,” the Lord Keeper said, his words echoing from the walls of the chamber, where less than a month before they had conducted the opening ceremonies, “that this Parliament be dissolved; and he giveth license to all knights, citizens, and burgesses to depart at their pleasure. And so, God save the King!”
THE ONYX HALL, LONDON: May 5, 1640
Lune tapped her fan against the arm of her chair in time to the beat of the allemande, watching the fae of her court swirl past in their finery. The music this time came from an entire consort of mortals, which rumor said had been snatched from one of the fine houses along the Strand, where some peer or other had contracted them for his own amusement.
But the musicians did not look unhappy to be here, and so she let the matter pass. So long as no one was mistreated, the occasional temporary theft did not bother her. They would be returned no worse for the wear, and in time might even come to frequent this court. That would please her immensely.
Which her courtiers knew. She was therefore not surprised to see the black head of Sir Cerenel coming her way, with a man in tow behind him. The stranger, a human in ragged clothing, gaped open-mouthed at everything around him, devoting his attention impartially to goblins and shoes, her ivory chair and the sharply arched ceiling of the hall in which the fae danced. Cerenel had him firmly but not unkindly in hand, and with gentle pressure convinced the man to kneel with him before Lune.
“Your Majesty,” the knight said, “I beg your indulgence to bring a guest to this occasion.”
In Antony’s absence, Lune glanced around and gestured for Benjamin Hipley to approach. “Who is he?”
Cerenel glanced sideways at the unwashed stranger, then up at her. “I found him in London, madam, where I had gone to call upon a lady. Though I was well masked in a glamour, and protected against its failure, this fellow saw my true face through that concealment.”
“A lunatic,” she said, straightening in her chair. No one had brought such a mortal below for quite some time, though they used to be fashionable. “Escaped from Bedlam?”
“More likely he was permitted to leave,” Hipley said, when she looked to him for clarification. With her permission he approached the man, who flinched back, but did not run. “The violent ones are chained, and not likely to escape. Did he have a small bowl?” That last was directed to Cerenel, who nodded. “Licen
sed to beg, then.”
He did not look happy at the madman’s presence in the Onyx Hall, but whether it was because of the stranger’s mean status, or Cerenel’s notion of entertainment, Lune could not say. She herself was not fond of lunatics; she remembered too well how this court had once abused them. But this one would not be mistreated now—and it might be useful to welcome him. Let her subjects see that she favored those who dealt kindly with the mad. “Has he a name?” she asked.
“None I can get from him,” Cerenel said. She believed him, too. He had not always been concerned with mortals as people, but he was one of Lune’s better converts; over the years since her accession, Cerenel had come more or less to share her way of thinking. Not quite with such fervency, but she counted it a victory.
The allemande had drawn to a close, the musicians playing out their final measures long after most of the dancers had ceased to move. Courtiers jostled for position, trying to see the stranger.
“He is welcome among us,” Lune declared, loud enough for all to hear. “As an honored guest. Food and wine for him, from Lord Antony’s store.” Addressing the madman, she said, “Be of good cheer. Tonight, you need not beg for your supper.”
She did not need to tell Hipley to watch after the man. Nor, she was glad to see, did he do so alone; while several ladies flirted with Cerenel, feeding on the minor status he had just won, Lady Amadea devoted her attentions to the lunatic, keeping him safe from the more predatory of courtiers. As for the madman, he gorged happily enough on the sweetmeats and candied fruit brought for him, though he watched the room through skittish eyes.
Her supervision was interrupted when the usher at the door announced the Prince of the Stone. Everyone paused in their places, bowing to Antony as he entered, but no one approached him; the black look on his face forbade it.