Linda Root

The Empty Noose Linda Root

The King's First Minister Lord Robert Cecil, Earl of Salusbury, had set May 3rd as the date for the execution of the Jesuit leaders convicted of complicity in the Gunpowder Treason. He had delayed it twice before in hopes his army of Pursuivants would capture the remaining fugitive, flamboyant John Gerard in time for him to witness the grisly execution of the elderly Jesuit Superior, Henry Garnet, knowing he was to be the next to suffer. However, Gerard had eluded gallows justice more than once. His most notable effort had occurred while Elizabeth lived when the Jesuit escaped his Tower prison in an aerial fete involving linens and ropes. Other forces, not all of them English, had a rescue in the making involving the Scottish adventurer Will Hepburn's ship, La Belle Ecossaise. It was far short of an ironclad scheme. Sir William Hepburn had an unbridled distrust of the English and scant affection for the newly anointed King James I, ostentatious son of the Queen of Scots who for a few months almost forty years ago had been his infant stepbrother. Moreover, Hepburn had inherited his dead father Bothwell's abiding distrust of all things Catholic. When James was wee, Bothwell stood outside of the door during the Christening. He had made Queen Marie cry by refusing to marry her in a Catholic ceremony. Even if the powers seeking Will's cooperation found a way to manipulate him into participating in a most unlikely a rescue, Gerard's supporters would have to find him first and deliver him to a coastal port and row. Will knew more enough about the Earl of Salisbury and the Gunpowder Treason to feel safer in open waters than at the Stuart Court. Also, Hepburn had promised his guidwife Daisy Kirkcaldie never again to set foot on English soil. While Hepburn was an adventurer famous for his derring-do, Daisy was no one to be crossed. Moreover, even if the rescue party had the means to enlist Hepburn's sense of honor and engage Daisy's determination to ride into the breach, what if the charismatic English Jesuit John Gerard were to have conflicting passions of is own?