So, she'd been on edge for weeks. Lefferts and his people were ready to carry out the jailbreak whenever Melissa gave the word. They could have done it anytime over the past month, in fact. But what was the point of getting out of the Tower if they couldn't get out of England? The small party that would accompany Cromwell into the Fens could probably manage that task, well enough. But that was because the much larger party making its escape to the estuary of the Thames would draw most of the pursuit. Even leaving that aside, there was simply no way fifty-some-odd people could evade capture if they had to spend weeks moving through the English countryside. Perhaps in the Fens, they could—but they'd never get that far in the first place.
Willy-nilly, the escape from the Tower had to wait on the war being waged on the continent. Only at the point when Gustav Adolf and Mike Stearns could afford to divert warships across the North Sea did it become a feasible proposition.
Now, the wait had become easy. Even for Melissa, who didn't handle waiting well.
Darryl's grin had subsided into something more along the lines of a smug smile. For him, of course, the wait hadn't been hard at all. Since the alliance with his fiancée's family had been forged, Victoria had evidently put down her foot in light of the new circumstances. So to speak. Darryl had been through that window so many times since that Tom Simpson was starting to call him Peter Pan.
Nearby, in the Bloody Tower, Thomas Wentworth studied the ravens on the grounds below, ignoring the guards at the open door and the cleaning woman going about her duties in his chambers.
They were quite fascinating birds, actually. In a macabre sort of way.
After he heard the last of the bolts close, Wentworth went immediately to the bread and broke open the loaf.
Two passages, this time, both from Paul's Epistle to the Romans.
Chapter 14, verse 5:
One man esteemeth one day above another: another estemeeth every day alike. Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind.
And chapter 15, verse 4:
For whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the scriptures might have hope.
The meaning was clear enough. Frustrating, of course. But at least she'd stopped citing that tedious business about time and seasons. Thomas had never been partial to Ecclesiastes.
PART FOUR
Now days are dragon-ridden
Chapter 44
Copenhagen
May 1634
Eddie Cantrell stared out the window, reflecting sourly that the worst part of the new accommodations was the so-called toilet. The rest, he didn't much care about. In some ways, the comparatively stark nature of his new prisoner's room in Copenhagen Castle's notorious Blue Tower was something of a relief, after the opulence of his quarters in Frederiksborg. For a young man who'd spent most of his life living in a trailer park in West Virginia, royal Danish notions of "stark" were hardly the severe punishment that King Christian IV must have thought they'd be.
Except for the damn toilet. Granted, the sanitary arrangements in Frederiksborg hadn't been anything to write home about. But at least Frederiksborg had been a modern castle—"modern," that is, for the seventeenth century—designed by Dutch Renaissance architects. It had running water, and the toilets had a crude but reasonably effective flushing arrangement.
Copenhagen Castle, on the other hand, was over two hundred years old. Practically medieval, as far as Eddie was concerned. It didn't help any that the current king of Denmark hadn't paid much attention to the castle's upkeep. Being no slouch when it came to his own comfort, Christian IV had decided that he needed something more modern and fancy for a royal residence when he stayed in Copenhagen instead of at his favored Frederiksborg, some thirty miles out of town.
So, he'd built Rosenborg Castle, in the center of the city. Also designed in the Dutch Renaissance style, and also with its elaborate gardens surrounding the palace. And also, needless to say, with modern plumbing.
Not for Eddie, such digs, however—not now that Christian was furious at him. No, no. Eddie got to stay in the old castle perched on a small island in the city's harbor. Slotsholmen, the Danes called it, which translated into English as "castle island." With a view from the Blue Tower that was a long step down from overlooking fancy gardens. Now, Eddie got to look out the window at Copenhagen's commercial seaport. What was worse, he had to smell the city's harbor.
Worst of all, in his old quarters at Frederiksborg he'd been able to sit on a toilet. Here, in the finest medieval tradition, squatting was considered de rigeur, and flushing was a synonym for gravity.
So be it. In retrospect, Eddie knew he was lucky that he hadn't fallen afoul of the king's temper much sooner. He'd known that Christian IV had a complete edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica in his possession, since the king bragged about it constantly. But Eddie had assumed that since the king of Denmark had spent a small fortune to get his hands on a copy of the entire Britannica, he'd had enough sense to get the great 1911 edition, which was by far the most useful one for down-timers.