Crossed Bones by Jane Johnson Read Free Book Online

that James I was the son of the executed Mary, Queen of Scots; what I had not known was that he had a Danish wife, and flaunted such a succession of male favourites that when he inherited the English throne it was openly voiced that ‘Elizabeth was King; now James is Queen!’ Nor had I known that James had come poor and unpopular to the throne, with a seriously extravagant spending habit which drove the country so deeply into debt that he was forced to sell titles and land and had stopped paying the navy – asserting his divine right to do as he pleased and dissolving Parliament rather than risking criticism. He had attempted to marry off his surviving son, Charles, to the rich Spanish Infanta at a time when England was fiercely Protestant; the Spanish had high-handedly rejected the marriage proposal and a humiliated Charles had eventually married Princess Henrietta Maria of France some months before the death of his father, coming to the English throne in March 1625 at the age of twenty-five. He was just six years older than Catherine Tregenna.
    Even more interesting was the fact that King James’s chief adviser had been Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury. Wasn’t the Countess of Salisbury mentioned as the source of Cat’s commission? In a sudden fever of excitement, feeling like an amateur detective, I went back to The Needle-Woman’s Glorie .
    10 th daie of Juleye. Todaie has been the most vexing daie of my lyf, enow to dryve a sowle to distraction. All the wrath of the Lord has fallen uppon mee, as if I am punished for my temeritee in desiring better for my selfe. I am felynge so encholered I can not think of ony thynge, what with Will Chigwine’s wyf Nell callyng mee a Temptress & the Harlot of Babylon & Mistress Harrys takyng her parte, & now my cozen forced uppon mee …
     

6
Catherine
June 1625
    Cat smoothed a hand across The Needle-Woman’s Glorie . Dawn light slanted through the window, illuminating her intent expression and making a bright halo of her red-gold hair. She had woken with an image twining through her mind like a skein of ivy, at once obdurate and fragile: she felt that if she so much as blinked, it might disperse into the air, and she was determined that should not happen. For, even as she surfaced from sleep, she had recognized the image for what it must surely be: the design for the altar cloth, come to her like a divine visitation.
    It had been weighing heavy upon her these many weeks, the responsibility for this commission; not just for its aesthetic challenges, but also for the chance of advancement and escape it might represent. Secretly, Cat harboured a dream: that if she created an altar frontal that pleased the Countess of Salisbury sufficiently, then that august personage might decide that Catherine Tregenna was a necessary ornament to her life and home, and bear her away to her grand London house. Given such a possibility, Cat knew that she would leave her position at Kenegie, leave Penwith; leave Cornwall and everyone and everything in it with barely a backward glance. She would gladly exchange the southerly winds and sparkling seas, the gorse-grown hills and lichen-rosetted granite of her homeland, for life in a properly aristocratic house. The gossip and backbiting of Kenegie stifled her; her duties for Lady Harris – no matter how pleasant her mistress might be – bored her; and the likelihood that her cousin Robert might be the best husband she could aspire to made her fair weep with frustration. She was born for greater things: her mother had always told her so, and she believed it with every bone in her body.
    She had gone to sleep pondering the altar cloth, its theme, its design, the materials she would use; and a strange alchemy appeared to have taken place during the night, drawing desire and inspiration together into visual form. The vision shimmered in her head: but could she capture that form and set it down before it escaped her? Her whole future might depend on her