“Eleven.”
“Oh, you’ll change your mind,” Portia said knowledgeably.
“I won’t. I’m n-never going to m-marry.” Olivia’s brown eyes threw daggers beneath their thick black eyebrows.
“Neither am I,” Phoebe said. “Now that my father has managed to make such a splendid match for Diana, he’ll leave me alone, I’m sure.”
“Why don’t you want to marry?” Portia asked with interest. “It’s your destiny to marry. There’s nothing else for someone as well born as you to do.”
Phoebe shook her head. “No one would want to marry me. Nothing ever fits me, and I’m always dropping things, and saying just what comes into my head. Diana and my father say I’m a liability. I can’t do anything right. So I’m going to be a poet and do good works instead.”
“Of course someone will want to marry you,” Portia stated. “You’re lovely and curvy and womanly. I’m the one no one’s going to marry. Look at me.” She stood up and gestured to herself with a flourish. “I’m straight up and down like a ruler. I’m a bastard. I have no money, no property. I’m a hopeless prospect.” She sat down again, smiling cheerfully as if the prophecy were not in the least disheartening.
Phoebe considered. “I see what you mean,” she said. “It would be difficult for you to find a husband. So what will you do?”
“I’d like to be a soldier. I wish I’d been born a boy. I’m sure I was supposed to be, but something went wrong.”
“I’m going to b-be a scholar,” Olivia declared. “I’m g-going to ask my father to g-get me a t-tutor when I’m older, and I want to live in Oxford and study there.”
“Women don’t study at the university,” Phoebe pointed out.
“I shall,” Olivia stated stubbornly.
“Lord, a soldier, a poet, and a scholar! What a trio of female misfits!” Portia went into a peal of laughter.
Phoebe laughed with her, feeling a delicious and hitherto unknown warmth in her belly. She wanted to sing, get to her feet and dance with her companions. Even Olivia was smiling, the defensive fierceness momentarily gone from her eyes.
“We must have a pact to support each other if we’re ever tempted to fall by the wayside and become ordinary.” Portia jumped to her feet. “Olivia, have you some scissors in that little bag?”
Olivia opened the drawstrings of the little lace-trimmed bag she wore at her waist. She took out a tiny pair of scissors, handing them to Portia, who very carefully cut three red curls from the unruly halo surrounding her freckled face.
“Now, Phoebe, let me have three of those pretty fair locks, and then three of Olivia’s black ones.” She suited action to words, the little scissors snipping away. “Now watch.”
As the other two gazed, wide-eyed with curiosity, Portia’s long, thin fingers with their grubby broken nails nimbly braided the different strands into three tricolored rings. “There, we have one each. Mine is the one with the red on the outside, Phoebe’s has the fair, and Olivia’s the black.” She handed them over. “Now, whenever you feel like forgetting your ambition, just look at your ring… Oh, and we must mingle blood.” Her green eyes, slanted slightly like a cat’s, glinted with enthusiasm and fun.
She turned her wrist up and nicked the skin, squeezing out a drop of blood. “Now you, Phoebe.” She held out the scissors.
Phoebe shook her fair head. “I can’t. But you do it.” Closing her eyes tightly, she extended her arm, wrist uppermost. Portia nicked the skin, then turned to Olivia, who was already extending her wrist.
“There. Now we rub our wrists together to mingle the blood. That way we cement our vow to support each other through thick and thin.”
It was clear to Olivia that Portia was playing a game, and yet Olivia, as her skin touched the others‘, felt a strange tremor of connection that seemed much more serious than mere play. But she was not a fanciful child and sternly dismissed such whimsy.
“If one of us is ever in trouble, then we can send our ring to one of the others and be sure of getting help,” Phoebe said enthusiastically.
“That’s very silly and romantical,” Olivia declared with a scorn that she knew sprang from her own fancy.
“What’s wrong with being romantic?” Portia said with a shrug, and Phoebe gave her a quick grateful smile.
“Scholars aren’t romantic,” Olivia said. She frowned fiercely, her black eyebrows almost meeting over her deep-set dark eyes. Then she sighed. “I’d b-better go back to the wedding.” She slipped her braided ring into the little bag at her waist. With a little reflective gesture, as if to give herself courage, she touched her wrist, thinly smeared with their shared blood, then went to the door.
As she opened it, the clamor from the city across the river swelled into the dim seclusion of the boathouse. Olivia shivered at the wild savagery of the sound. “C-Can you hear what they’re saying?”
“They’re yelling, ‘His head is off, his head is off,’ ” Portia said knowledgeably. “They’ve just executed the earl of Strafford.”
“But why?” Phoebe asked.
“Lord, don’t you know anything?” Portia was genuinely shocked at this ignorance. “Strafford was the king’s closest advisor and Parliament defied the king and impeached the earl and now they’ve just beheaded him.”
Olivia felt her scalp contract as the bloody, brutal screech of mob triumph tore into the soft May air and the smoke of bonfires lit in jubilation for a man’s violent death rose thick and choking from the city and its surroundings.
“Jack says there’s going to be civil war,” Portia continued, referring to her father with her customary informality. “He’s usually right about such things… not about much else, though,” she added.
“There c-couldn’t be civil war!” Olivia was horrified.
“We’ll see.” Portia shrugged.
“Well, I wish it would come now and save me having to go back to the wedding,” Phoebe said glumly. “Are you going to come, Portia?”
Portia shook her head, gesturing brusquely to the door. “Go back to the party. There’s no place for me there.”
Phoebe hesitated, then followed Olivia, the ring clutched tightly in her palm.
Portia remained in the dimness with the cobwebs for company. She leaned over and picked up the piece of gingerbread that Phoebe had forgotten about in the events of the last half hour. Slowly and with great pleasure, she began to nibble at it, making it last as long as possible, while the shadows lengthened and the shouts from the city and the merrymaking from the house gradually faded with the sunset.
Prologue
It was the dark hour before dawn. Rain fell in a ceaseless torrent upon the sodden clifftops and smashed straight as stair rods onto the churning, white-flecked sea beneath. Great waves rose in the Channel and surged around St. Catherine’s Point to curl and break upon the jagged rocks in a thundering, relentless roll, sending white spray into the darkness.
There were no stars. No moon. Only an occasional flash of lightning to illuminate the island crouching like a whale at the entrance to the Solent, its downs and valleys black with rain. The melancholy sound of the bell buoy off the rocky point pierced the rushing wind, bringing warning to the ships battling the summer storm in the seething Channel. Warning and a welcome sense of security.
A small boat plunged into the troughs, the men at the oars grim-faced as they fought to keep the fragile craft upright. They approached the bell buoy, the boat vanishing into the waves, then bobbing up like a piece of driftwood. From the stern, one of the men hurled a rope around the buoy and hauled the boat hand over hand until it was touching the rocking buoy and the rhythmic sound of the bell was deafening amid the roar of the water and the wind and the ceaseless battering of the rain.
No one spoke; the words would have been torn from them anyway, but they had no need of speech. The oarsmen shipped their oars while the man in the stern held the boat fast to the buoy and one of his companions swiftly, deftly, with hands of experience, wrapped thick cloth around the bell’s tongue, silencing the dull clang of its warning.