دانلود رمان انگلیسی “تبعید”

Seagulls patrolling the Solway Firth on the afternoon of Sunday, 16 May 1568, would have spied a small fishing boat slip out of Port Mary Cove, near Dundrennan in Galloway, and begin the four-hour crossing to England. Even from a height it would have been obvious that this was no ordinary fishing trip. On deck was a group of around twenty passengers, none of them in fishermen’s garb. Among them was a tall young woman with shorn auburn hair and shabby, cast-off clothes, whom the others treated with deference. They were better dressed than she was, but despite her outward appearance, her demeanour was regal. As the boat crossed the invisible border between Scotland and England, history was made. This was Mary, Queen of Scots’s escape from the country where she had been forced illegally to abdicate. As she watched the Galloway hills and coastline fade into the blue distance, she did not consider herself to be turning her back on her homeland. Dread of her halfbrother James Stewart, Earl of Moray, whose army had recently routed hers, was the impulse behind her flight; but she fully intended to be back home within a few months, along with an army to help win back her throne. With the sea air in her face, and no sign of her enemies in pursuit, she must have allowed herself to hope that her fortunes were on the turn. Although the passage to Cumbria was swift, speeded by the strength of the treacherous tide, it was to prove the most fateful of the many journeys Mary had undertaken in her twenty-five years. As a child of five, she had been sent from Scotland by the hazardous west-coast sea route to France for safety. Her return, in 1561, as an eighteen-year-old widow, had also been fraught, dogged by the risk of capture by the English before she could take up her throne. Yet this May-time crossing, while calm and uneventful, was the most risky of all.