Free The Queen's Exiles by Barbara Kyle

Spanish authority in the city, a captain’s eyes seemed to bore right into her, knowing, accusing. She looked up at the flags emblazoned with Alba’s crest fluttering above their heads.
    “Alba,” Johan growled. He spat in the dirt. “Satan.”
    “Shush!” Fenella could have pinched him. The soldiers were watching everyone. “Do you want to get us locked up?”
    He grunted his contempt. “Smell that? The sulphur of hell.”
    “It’s burnt sugar, you daft man. The refineries.” Ships laden with sugarcane and molasses from Spanish plantations in the New World crowded the riverside wharfs, for Antwerp was the sugar capital of Europe, and the nearby refineries belched a bittersweet-smelling smoke. Johan looked ready to spit again but coughed instead, that awful cough that plagued him. He’d started using a handkerchief to cough into, and this morning Fenella had glimpsed alarming spots of blood on it. Now, he balled it secretively in his gnarled fist, which only deepened her worry. “Here,” she said. “Turn here.”
    She hustled him into Zilvermidstraat, relieved to get him away from the eyes of the soldiers. His hatred of the Spanish, her fear that he would do something stupid, had kept her on edge for the two days they’d been at Mevrouw Smit’s lodging house on a lane in the shadow of the cathedral. It had taken Fenella that long to find the home address of Joseph Oliveira, the banker who held her bullion. She did not dare call on him at the Bourse, the international money market where merchants and bankers traded under its vast roof. Notice might be taken of her in such a prominent public place. She would keep to Antwerp’s byways. Zilvermidstraat, where ordinary people were going about their business in the shops, would lead her to Oliveira’s house. She spotted a gallows at the mouth of a side street. It was barren, no “gallows fruit” left hanging to rot and stink as a warning to the people as she’d seen elsewhere in the city. But a black bird sitting atop the scaffold made her shiver, recalling what the landlady had said at breakfast.
    “Magpies. They’re everywhere.” Mevrouw Smit had been talking fretfully about her loose-tongued neighbor, a so-called magpie because his gossip about one of her lodgers being absent at mass had led to the lodger’s arrest on suspicion of heresy. Smit was a widow who looked careworn at the burden she’d been left to shoulder. “Anyway, it freed up the chamber for you.”
    “We won’t be staying long,” Fenella had said, eager to change the subject. “So many shops are closed.” Her story was that she had come from a northern town with her manservant to buy a wedding gift.
    “It’s the new taxes,” Mevrouw Smit had said gloomily. “To pay the Spanish troops. People feel if they have to pay more tax for their goods they’d rather close shop.” She shook her head. “I have to go clear down to the wharf these days to find a baker selling bread.”
    Fenella lurched to a stop in the middle of Zilvermidstraat. A man’s corpse was tied to a stake, slumped, mouth agape. A skinny dog had one of the man’s ankles in its mouth, tugging the gray flesh, making the corpse jerk as though alive. Fenella stiffened at the stench. The bloody hand of Alba was everywhere.
    Johan took her elbow and nudged her forward. “Come on, Nella. Almost there.”
    She looked at him, glad of his dour resolve, and together they hastened past the corpse. How she hated this place! She couldn’t wait to leave it. One more week, then she could sail away. Taste the clean sea air again. Breathe freedom under the open skies. With Adam Thornleigh. How wonderful the voyage from Sark with him had been. The happiest four days of her life. Sunshine and fair winds had smiled on the Odette, and the little fishing smack had carved through the Channel as though she, too, yearned for freedom. There were just the three of them aboard, Fenella and Thornleigh and one-armed Johan, and she had loved