The Hooded Hawke Read Free Page A

coming at a dead run, then Robin grabbed her and dragged her flat onto the ground. She lay between the big men as Robin shouted, “Cover! Everyone, take cover! Someone’s shooting arrows!”

Chapter the Second
    S creams and shrieks jolted Meg from her butchery of the yarrow herbs. She stood and shaded her eyes, then ran in the direction of the tumult. The cries of women, the shouts of men: It was like the day they lost the baby—her own shrill voice and Ned, talking incessantly, insisting that it wasn’t her fault.
    “What is it?” she asked the first servant who ran past her.
    “The queen’s falconer’s been shot. We’re to take cover.”
    “I didn’t hear a firearm.”
    “An arrow in his chest.”
    “Is he dead?” Meg cried, but the woman didn’t turn back to answer.
    For the first time in weeks, Meg marveled, she could feel something, care about something. “Is the queen or anyone else hurt?” she demanded of the next person, but her question was lost in the flood tide of courtiers and servants alike, fleeing the meadow and crossing the open lawn toward the gray-stone manor house.
    Meg stooped to grab a handful of cut yarrow. She’d failed to save her own son. Mayhap she could save someone else’s. After all, yarrow’s other name was wound wort, and apothecaries used to pack it in the bleeding wounds of jousters or knights lying on the battlefield.
    Her knife in one hand and the long-stemmed snow white
yarrow in the other, Meg ran through the line of chestnut trees edging the meadow. Some courtiers crouched behind tree trunks; guards, with Jenks leading them, ran headlong away, evidently in the direction from which the attack had come.
    On a slight rise in the lea, the queen, the Earl of Leicester, and the sea captain were bending over a prone figure while six standing yeomen guards surrounded them.
    “Your Majesty, is he bad hurt?” Meg asked, peeking past a guard’s shoulder. “I have wound wort here.”
    “Oh, Meg,” the queen cried, looking up. She was holding the falconer’s hand. “We’ve sent for Dr. Huicke, but I gave him leave to go to town. Here, see if you can help.”
    Meg knelt beside the queen; the earl shifted away to give her room. “If this herb is to stop the bleeding,” Meg told them, “the shaft of the arrow will have to come out—straight out, even if it pains him more. I know this just looks like flowers, but they used to pack the wounds of soldiers with it, fresh cut like this. Maybe it’s a godsend—to save him.”
    “Yes, all right,” the queen said. “We can’t just let him bleed to death like this.”
    “I’ll help pull the arrow out,” the red-bearded sea captain said. “By my faith, I’ve done it oft afore.”
    T hough he’d lived through a terrible, bloody battle with the cursed Spanish, this simple scene in the meadow shook Francis Drake to his very boot soles. It brought it all back—the horrid memories he’d tried to bury this last year by going home to Plymouth, by wedding and bedding.
    They carefully sat the poor man up and steadied the tip of the arrow, which had gone right through him to emerge barely an inch out his back, between his shoulder blades. While the Earl of Leicester cut his surcote away, then held the arrow firm, the maid named Meg sawed the point of it off with her knife so the shaft could be pulled out the front of the falconer’s chest.
    The earl made a motion to throw the arrowhead away, but the queen, her voice taut, commanded, “No. Keep everything. We
will need it to discover who did this, should my men not catch the culprit.”
    Meg quickly decapitated the large-headed flowers and pressed two of the downy blooms against the wound where the arrow had tried to exit. When the others turned the man face up again and held him down, Drake put both hands on the arrow shaft. Not a quick jerk out, he recalled the ship’s leech had said, but a strong pull with a steady hand. His hands had hardly been steady since they’d