by David Field
If they were heading for Cambridge, and given that there appeared to be only one road, then he would be less likely to alert suspicion if he rode ahead of them and waited for them to pass him again. His only immediate concern had been whether or not the horse was up to another day of riding, but once past the inn in which those he was following would no doubt stop for at least an hour or two, if only to eat, he’d taken the road ahead at a slower pace, allowing his mount to take water, and graze on the grass at the side of the road, whenever the opportunity arose. His earlier life on the land had given him a basic understanding of horses and how to handle them, and hopefully he hadn’t been asking too much of this one, which in his mind he’d christened ‘Chester’.
The thought of food had set his stomach rumbling again, and he was glad that he had taken Mary’s sound advice and eaten a good supper two evenings ago. Even so, he would have welcomed the opportunity to stop and buy a meal at one of the several inns along his route, had he possessed any money. Hopefully he could think of some suitable role to adopt when the party from Dunmow reached their destination, and in that role he could prevail upon some kitchen wench to sneak him a loaf of bread or a bowl of potage.
He smiled as he remembered the days when he could acquire almost anything his heart desired from a comely wench, simply by turning on the charm with which Dame Fortune had equipped him. Inevitably his thoughts drifted to the one he had most recently charmed, then fallen in love with; the one who was carrying his child, and for whom he offered a silent prayer as he tried to imagine the reaction to his departure from Dunmow in suspicious circumstances.
Subconsciously he became aware of the soft rumble of an approaching body of horsemen, and he flattened himself into the grass and looked up towards the road above him. There were seven of them, just like the party he had set off in pursuit of, and so far as he could tell they were the same ones, although he’d only seen them from half a mile to the rear, and for much of the time in poor light. But he’d need to take a gamble, and Chester appeared to have eaten and drunk enough, so after a decent interval he led him back onto the road and looked north, where the party that had passed him was still just visible. He quickened the pace slightly in order to gain a little ground on them, then sat back at the same slightly slower trot until he saw them swing into a gateway to the left up ahead. They had just passed a crossroads with a signpost of sorts that announced the existence of a village named ‘Cherry Hinton’ half a mile to the north. Time to dismount again, and decide how to handle this next stage in his mission, which involved gaining entry to this new house by some form of subterfuge.
He sat by the side of the road deep in thought. He was tired of pretending to be a gardener, and wished he were a Constable again. Then he chuckled as he remembered how, in his former life, he’d arrested men for doing precisely what he’d done back in Dunmow when he stole a horse. The chuckle died in his throat as the answer came to him – he could pretend to be a Constable in pursuit of a horse thief!
Head held high he cantered the weary horse up the main drive and dismounted, throwing the reins to a stable groom who scurried out to meet him. ‘Where will I find your master?’ he demanded, and the youth nodded towards the house. ‘In the Main Hall, sir, where he just received a party of guests – are you one of them, arriving late?’
‘Not exactly,’ Giles replied as he headed for the front door, and instructed the menial standing just inside it that he required an audience with the Steward without delay. The man in question met him in the hallway and demanded to know his business.
‘I’m Constable Giles Bradbury, and I’m in pursuit of a man who stole a horse further south of here. Has anyone of that description been seen in this vicinity?’ Giles asked in what he hoped was ‘proper’ English. ‘I’ve no idea,’ the Steward replied with a puzzled expression, ‘but a party arrived from down south less than an hour ago. They’re in the Main Hall with the Master – do you wish me to announce your arrival?’
‘If you’d be so good,’ Giles smiled, and less than a minute later he was introducing himself, announcing his business, and enquiring as to the identity of his host. A florid faced man in expensive looking attire answered his question with a haughty sneer.
‘I’m Sir Humphrey Audley, and this is my estate of Cherry Hinton. These gentlemen are my guests, and I can assure you that none of them is a horse thief.’
‘And I can assure your lordship that this man is no Constable,’ one of the group announced as he stepped forward. A thin young man with little hair, but a familiar face. ‘The last time I saw this so-called Constable he was posing as a gardener in Dunmow. He must have followed us up here, and I suspect that he’s a spy sent by Queen Elizabeth.’
‘Seize him!’ Audley commanded, and two of the men who had presumably just arrived stepped forward and grabbed Giles’s two arms in a firm grip. With a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, Giles recognised the man who’d just denounced him as the one he’d chatted idly with in the garden at Dunmow, and attempted to bluff it out.
‘You must be the man I’m after,’ Giles announced with all the air of authority he could summon up. Audley stepped forward with a curse and struck Giles hard across the face with a hand hardened by many years gripping a sword and a bridle.
‘That man is no horse thief, you scum! He’s an ordained priest of the Church of Rome!’ He seemed to realise what he had just divulged, and nodded to the two men holding Giles firmly by the arms.
‘Take him out and hang him!’
Tom stretched both hands upwards into the darkness and located the second pair of metal rungs set into the chimney breast. Then he carefully located each of his boots firmly on the lowest pair of rungs and pulled himself up. Satisfied that he could maintain his balance in this way, and that the rungs would support his weight, he reached up for the next set of rungs and pulled himself up onto the next level. There was a flurried twittering sound from somewhere above him, as nesting birds took off and showered his head with soot. The chimney had obviously not been used for some time, but had once known blazing logs, to judge by the amount of choking black powder that now covered his head and his clothes. He coughed as some of it landed on his nose and mouth, and there was an anxious call from Mary a few feet below him.
‘You all right?’ ‘Yes!’ he whispered hoarsely, ‘but keep silent, for both our sakes!’
He continued the climb, inch by hesitant inch, and on the fifth rung he risked another face full of soot by looking upwards. There was light of a sort up there, but not very much, bearing in mind how bright the day had been when he had been escorted back to the house. If the chimney top was decorated with all those fancy turret chimneys, he might not be able to break through, but he would never know if he didn’t keep climbing. Then when he reached up for the seventh rung, his hand met nothing. Frantically he waved his hand in a wide circle, but to no avail – he had come to the end of the rungs. This made sense, since the rungs had only ever been intended to allow a priest to hide in the chimney, not to scale it to the roof, but it meant the end of Tom’s escape bid unless he could find a substitute for the rungs.
He suddenly felt insecure with only his feet planted on rungs, and his arms hanging by his side, so he reached out carefully and discovered to his relief that the sides of the chimney breast were now narrow enough for him to maintain his balance simply by pressing outwards against them. Another inspired idea came to him, and he reached upwards with his left hand to discover that the inner core of the chimney had been so roughly laid by the masons who had constructed it, no doubt working for a miserly fee and with poor materials, that there was an outcrop of rough stone some two feet up to his left. When he discovered an equivalent one off to his right he decided to take the risk of plummeting ten feet down into the fireplace if he was wrong, and placed, first his left boot, and then the right one, on the outcrops and pushed upwards with a heartfelt prayer. Mercifully, both his hands encountered further outcrops.
Wreathed in the sort
of sweat that only fear can generate, he inched his way another ten feet or so up the inside of the chimney by the same means, until his broad shoulders were almost touching both sides as the channel narrowed. Then his head brushed up against something soft and prickly, and instinctively he let go of the latest outcrop to his left and punched upwards. There was a series of outraged squawks and a cascade of something light and sticky, then suddenly he was bathed in bright daylight as the remains of the destroyed birds’ nest, complete with its now broken eggs, tumbled down over his shoulders and fell towards the fireplace.
Elated, he pulled himself free of the top of the chimney by reaching upwards and pressing down on its narrow circular top. Mentally noting that he was fortunate not to be a larger man, he squinted hard against the bright daylight that had previously been obscured by the birds’ nest, and enjoyed the sudden onset of a fresh breeze and warm light on his face. Then he looked around carefully in all directions until his gaze fell finally on the front drive, and he couldn’t resist a gruff cheer that turned into a cough as he expelled the last of the soot from his besieged lungs.
A large group of horsemen was pounding up the drive towards the house, and the one in the lead was carrying a royal banner.
Giles lay on the rear lawn of the country estate that he had foolishly entered without any thought that one of those he had followed would be able to recognise him. He rolled over and retched as another kick rattled his ribcage, and waited resignedly for the next one to land. Instead he heard a commanding shout from somewhere behind him.
‘Don’t kick him to death, you oafs! I said he was to hang – but before you do that, bring him indoors and let’s see what he can tell us about who sent him.’
Giles groaned inwardly at the prospect of finally learning how well he could withstand torture. He’d heard enough about it from the horrible tales brought into Nottingham by those tradesmen with their origins in London, some of whom had in turn heard tales of what went on in the Tower of that town, in which Giles had briefly been a mere guest during the pretence of his arrest for desertion what now seemed like a lifetime ago. He’d heard about the ‘rack’, the ‘thumbscrews’, the hot irons, and the knotted string in the eyeballs, all of which were allegedly employed to extract information from the more reluctant of the Tower’s inmates, and he’d often wondered, in idle moments, how long he could resist telling the torturer what he wanted to know, whether it was the truth or not. Now, it seemed, he was destined to find out.
His two days as a guest of the Constable of the Tower had been before he married Mary, he recalled, and tried to decide in his own mind whether it was better for him to die a brave man who refused to betray his colleagues, leaving behind an unborn child who would grow up with no memory of the hero of whom many tales were recounted by its heartbroken mother, or to tell them what they wanted to know and live to hold the next generation of Bradburys in his arms.
Then, as he was being carried back indoors, the thought occurred to him that there might be a third alternative. His captors didn’t know what he knew, which was why they were no doubt seeking to learn of it by dint of fear and physical agony. So whatever he told them, if he put on a sufficiently convincing show of being mortally terrified, they would perhaps believe. All he had to do was invent a suitable story that sounded believable, but did not involve Walsingham, Tom, or the fact that Queen Elizabeth was on the hunt for Catholic priests.
His inventive brain was working at high speed as they dumped him on the bare floor in the back room, where an indifferent fire was being pumped into renewed life by means of a bellows. He was rolled over so that he could witness the actions of the grinning henchman as he thrust a long thin brand of wood into the flames, held it there for a minute, then withdrew it to display the glowing redness at its tip.
‘Hot enough for our purpose,’ the man leered at his companions. ‘Now lower his hose.’
Walsingham looked up towards the roof when he heard the familiar voice shouting down at him, then issued his instructions to the ten or so men who had ridden in with him.
‘Enter the house, secure everyone inside it and herd them into the same room. I’ll join you in just a few moments.’
The armed men ran inside, and Walsingham dismounted and grinned up at Tom. ‘They have strange birds on this estate, it would seem,’ he shouted, to a cursing rejoinder by Tom. The two men stared at each other for a moment before Walsingham broke the silence.
‘Well, don’t just stay up there playing games on the roof, man. Get down here and join me.’
‘I would, if I knew how!’ Tom yelled back as he looked fearfully down at the roof tiles that sloped away alarmingly to the edge of a twenty foot drop onto the roughcast driveway. ‘I got up through the chimney, but I’ll be buggered if I intends to go back down the same way.’
Walsingham looked towards the stables, outside which was a cart containing fresh straw bales intended for bedding. A few minutes later he’d ordered the terrified stable groom, at sword point, to manhandle the cart under the eaves of the house, then he yelled up at Tom.
‘If you can make it down that slope of roof tiles without breaking your neck, here’s a soft landing. Now get on with it, since I have more important business inside!’
Advising himself with curses that he was finished with chimneys and roofs for the rest of his life – if he lived – Tom lowered himself onto the tile ridge, then attempted to slide in a measured fashion down the tiled slope. It proved slippier than he had calculated, and it was undoubtedly a miracle that when he reached the bottom edge and flew into open space with a terrified shriek, it was immediately above the straw cart, into which he bounced with nothing worse than a jarred spine and a punctured dignity. Satisfied that he was still alive, Walsingham ordered Tom to follow him into the house.
There were a dozen or so estate servants gathered in the Main Hall, under the pretended authority of a very frightened Steward. Footmen mingled with maids, and the cook was surrounded by menials from the kitchen, all under the stern supervision of half a dozen armed men, as Walsingham strode into the room with Tom limping slightly behind him.
‘Where are Giles and his woman?’ Walsingham demanded, ‘and are there any priests left here?’
‘A long story,’ Tom advised him. ‘Giles must have headed off somewhere after priests who had been hidden here, as I instructed him to do, but I don’t know where to. As for the rest of your question, come with me.’
Tom led the way into the back room from which he had only recently escaped via the chimney, and pointed to the wooden frame around the former fireplace. ‘That’s where they hides the priests if anyone comes calling, and there’s another hiding place under the stairs. As for Mary Bradbury, you’ll find her inside there,’ he added as he nodded towards the covered fireplace.
‘If that’s Tom Lincraft, I’m in here right enough, so shift your arse and get me out!’ came a woman’s voice, to which Tom replied ‘Watch your language – I’ve got Walsingham with me. You’re lucky he didn’t bring the Queen as well!’
‘How do we get in there?’ Walsingham enquired as he stared at what, to all intents and purposes, was a panelled outcrop of the main wall. Tom grinned as he replied ‘I been wondering about that myself, but I reckon as how there must be some sort of catch at the side of one of the panels. There wasn’t when I left off putting it up, but they must have added that while I were down in Hendon’
‘Well hurry up and find out,’ Walsingham instructed him, and Tom limped to the covered fireplace and began exploring with his fingers between the panels and the frames that supported it. There was a click, and a shout of triumph from Tom as he slid back the panel to reveal Mary on her knees, deathly white in the face and looking down at a pool of liquid that was soaking the hem of her gown.
‘About bloody time, Tom Lincraft,’ she snorted. ‘And if it’s all the same to you, you can assure me that you knows all about delivering babies, because unless I’m very much mistaken there’s one on its way.’
Chapter Nine
Walsingham strode into the main room in which the household of Sir Henry Felton had been gathered, and demanded their complete attention.
‘You are all under arrest on suspicion of treason against Her Majesty!’ he announced, before allowing the collective gasps and wails to subside. Then he continued. ‘However, there may be an opportunity for at least one of you women to work towards your freedom. Does any one of you have any experience of childbirth?’
In the silence that followed it was the cook who seized her chance. ‘I reckon I could say that,’ she shouted back, ‘since I’ve had four of my own. And I helped to deliver two of my sister’s.’
‘Very well,’ Walsingham announced after a nod of agreement from Tom, ‘take two of your best women into that room at the back with the covered over fireplace, and assist the lady you’ll find in there upstairs to the Master’s former bedchamber. He won’t be needing it, since his new abode will be in the Tower. Once you have her up there, see to it that she has the best assistance of which you’re capable. If she and her baby survive, you may well have earned your freedom. Now set about it without delay!’
Calling on one girl to begin boiling some water, and another to tear up some bed linen into strips, the cook bustled out into the back room and assisted Mary to her feet, sniffing at the drying moisture on the floor. ‘That’s your waters, right enough,’ she tutted. ‘Can you walk, my dear?’
Mary assured her that she could, trying not to giggle at the kind concern for her welfare that she was receiving from the old witch who had previously only ever yelled orders at her. As she wobbled rather unsteadily out of the room, she was met by Tom and Walsingham, who first enquired after her health before Walsingham asked ‘Do you happen to know where Giles went?’ Mary nodded.