‘Ah. You didn’t pass no boy on the road? Lad of … let me see, now … fifteen. One of our boys. Of the village.’
Marlowe leant forward on the bench he and Lewgar had been given, setting his wooden mug on the rush-strewn floor. ‘Can’t say as we did, my friend. Why?’
‘Ah, but nor it’s nothing. One of our boys run off.’ Gillingham made a circular gesture with his hands. ‘’appens. Like as not he’s gone off up to Plymouth for a mariner. ’appens. If it’s nor London nor it’s Plymouth.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Marlowe, ‘he’s gone off on Walter Raleigh’s venture.’ Lewgar twisted on the bench, one eyebrow raised, but Marlowe continued addressing the old man. ‘It’s the news in every man’s mouth in London. Sir Walter Raleigh has sent ships to the New World. To establish us there. Englishmen, I mean. Perhaps your boy wished to join them.’
‘Sir Walter Raleigh,’ echoed Gillingham, his tone blank. ‘Nor. Them whole fleet of ships sailed out of Plymouth some while back. We ’eard the cannon. Our boy’s just gone off. But I thank you Mr – what was it?’
‘Tyndall,’ said Marlowe. ‘And Sir Walter did not go himself. Funded and directed the voyage, so I heard. Perhaps he means to send more ships.’ Finally, he turned to Lewgar. ‘You hear such things,’ he smiled, ‘when you speak softly to people.’
Lewgar said nothing for a while, preferring to stare into the murky depths of his own mug. He took another swallow. ‘So, you were right,’ he said, as Gillingham bustled off to pass more of his ale out of the window of the small room.
‘I often am.’
‘About the ship. She was stripped.’
‘Stripped and sunk. It was being so lightened, I fancy, made her a feather weight for an angry sea to spew her up. No, Neptune will not be cheated. He wants none of a ship cast down without a golden offering. A fellow of temper.’
Lewgar considered this, though his own doubts were even sharper. As he did, his eyes wandered over to the window-cum-serving hatch. For the first time, he saw Gillingham extracting money for his wares, taking a coin before he passed out a ladleful from the big barrel in the corner of the room. The recipient was barely looking at him. He stared instead into the room, squinting: a tall, pallid man with dark hair and just a whisper of a ruff above what looked like either a black doublet or black robes. When he saw Lewgar looking back, he snatched away his filled mug and was gone.
Odd.
He must, Lewgar decided, not have been a local. Or perhaps there were some provincial politics at play, about which he neither knew nor cared.
‘So,’ he said, looking back to Marlowe. ‘The gold is not here.’
‘Therefore the gold is elsewhere. Dispute?’
Lewgar clenched his jaw. This was how dialectics passed at the university – circular arguments with no conclusion reached. Sighing, he said, ‘the gold, not being here, does not exist. Men speak of it. Yet words are air, not gold.’
‘Not so. Words are gold,’ said Marlowe. His voice softened as he spoke. He cleared his throat. ‘To find the treasure, we must trace the words. Discover what drives them. Everything has its source. We might discover that and thereby the truth.’
‘Veritas omnia vincit,’ offered Lewgar. Truth conquers all. Yet there seemed to be something else at work in the story of the Sparrowhawk: something that made the obvious truth – that she had been sunk and her treasure lost on the seabed, only to be cast up by a storm – less truthful.
Gillingham shuffled over. ‘Another drink, Mr Tyndall?’
‘Yes,’ said Marlowe, ‘and I thank you. It is very good. Though – I do not suppose you have anything stronger? That water was very cold. Positively Stygian. I would thank you most heartily, my friend.’ Gillingham paused for a second, torn between being a good host and a cautious one. The former won.
‘Of course, sir.’ He left the room, returning with a bottle. ‘Sherri-sack. Fine stuff.’ He uncorked the bottle with a grunt and poured amber liquid into Marlowe’s mug.
Marlowe swallowed it back in one long draught, his eyes closing, and gave a grunt of satisfaction. ‘A marvel,’ he said.
‘Ho!’ Gillingham laughed. ‘A fine man for a drink, sir. Yar, that you are. ’ere,’ he said, pouring in more. ‘And for you, sir?’
‘No, and I thank you,’ said Lewgar. ‘Tell me, though – is it possible that a ship should lie broken and flooded on the bottom and yet be cast up, still whole and–’
‘Mr Lewgar here,’ Marlowe belched, ‘is not of my mettle.’ He took another long draught.
‘I think we’ll be needing another bottle,’ the old man smiled.
‘Go to, then, and do us the honour of joining us in it!’ Marlowe’s voice had changed, lightened and loudened. Lewgar didn’t like the sound of it. As with everything, Christopher Marlowe appeared to be a man of excess.
‘Steady, Mr Tyndall,’ he ventured. ‘Or our host will think you do not know when to stop.’
‘Who speaks of stopping?’ boomed Marlowe. ‘Temperance is for timid spirits and milkmaids.’
And so the evening wore on, with visitors coming and going, and with poor Gillingham’s store of drink steadily draining. Lewgar promised himself he’d leave behind some money, unobtrusively, in the morning; they had already been promised a bed for the night, given their troubles at sea. Old sea stories filled the air of the place, shared over the warm glow of the central hearth. Children shepherded in and out by parents were frightened by tales of ghostly sailors who roamed the sea bottom and ventured onto land seeking justice. Maids were scandalised by whispers of the New World’s savages, who went around with their pillicocks barely covered by scraps of animal hide. Men spoke in rapturous tones of the great treasures that now gilded mermaids’ crystalline palaces, and of the snake-necked serpents which guarded them. Music accompanied the tales – not fine lute music or the virginals, but old-fashioned rebecs played with more enthusiasm than skill.
And Marlowe drank and drank and drank, until eventually Lewgar had to hook an arm into his and haul him to his feet.
‘Get your fucking hands off me,’ he cried. ‘You damned cowardly whoreson!’
Shocked, Lewgar drew back. A few of the village folk still present were likewise appalled; they looked at one another, before polite excuses and thanks were given out and they rose to leave. The word ‘cupshotten’ was whispered more than once as they departed.
‘Will you none of you stay up and drink? Timid. Fucking timid!’ barked Marlowe. ‘Infirm to,’ he hiccuped, ‘to a man! You all…’ Another belch.
Feeling a flush rise in his cheeks, Lewgar began dragging him, fighting a tide of curse-filled insults and oaths. Marlowe, he realised, was a vicious and mean drunk. The thing to do with such men was to force them to bed, there to stew like the slatterns they were. With Gillingham’s help, he got him into the back room and threw him onto the straw pallet. Almost before his head hit the woollen cloth, Marlowe was asleep.
‘I’ll bid yar both goodnight, then, and God send yar good rest.’ Gillingham was peering around Lewgar, a look of distaste written on his face.
To apologise for Marlowe or not?
For some reason, loyalty won.
‘Goodnight, Gillingham,’ he said shortly, hustling the man out of his own back room and closing the door. He turned to look at Marlowe – a small form, snoring loudly. He would have a job getting him undressed. Down to his shirt should suffice.
What a puzzle you are, sir, he thought.
And then he bent to remove the fellow’s boots.
All thoughts of the man who had been watching them through the window had long since departed, lost in tales of the sea and drunken fury unleashed without warning.
6
Howton closed his eyes as the warm water cascaded over his head. It felt good, cleansing, as though washing away the disgust he’d felt at living in the crumbling old house by the sea. He braced himself for another soaking.
‘Enough,’ he said.
He sank down, letting the water enve
lop him. Dutifully, Bess shuffled backwards on her knees, away from the large, pressed tin tub and towards the fire dancing in the grate, the jug she had been using to help bathe him still clasped in her hand. He opened his eyes, blinking away water, and smiled at her. She had powdered her face, in the way London women had taken to doing, to cover her black eye. Her golden hair tumbled in a cascade.
She would not boast of her past conduct again, he felt sure.
‘I should be glad to leave this place,’ he said, wiggling his toes in their cosy womb. ‘Frightful place.’ Bess didn’t answer. ‘Would you not like to return to London?’
‘If it please you,’ she said in a small voice.
‘In London you might have fine gowns. Periwigs. Pearls. Jewels. Certainly, when we discover the truth of this lost treasure.’ He studied her reaction but found little. She had learnt to guard her feelings, the cunning wench. A fit of pique descended. He flicked water at her face. He missed, and it sizzled into the fire. ‘Help me rise,’ he snapped.
Timidly, as though expecting him to strike out, she came forward and helped him up out of the tub, dabbing at him gingerly with a woollen towel. He closed his eyes as she dried him, forcing his mind away from lust and to the matter at hand.
The backwards country folk were simple, ignorant, credulous things. He had concluded that they knew nothing of the ship, save that it had been washed up on their shore, or near enough to it. Worse, their minds were clouded by their idiocy. To them, the wreck was a ghost ship bringing ill luck. They neither knew nor cared for its supposed treasure and so could provide no good information on what had become of it – or the damned ship itself – in the years prior to its sudden reappearance. He had sent Fray Nicolas out to it, of course, days before – but all he had done was survey the wreck, looking into holes bored into her by the local coroner’s men. She had, of course, been divested of the treasure she was said to have carried out of the New World.
Annoyance flared, directed primarily at the people of Wembury and their lack of interest in the wider world.
Queen Elizabeth would be dead soon enough, either by an assassin’s hand or Father Time’s caprice. There was no longer any hope of her bearing children, the thoughtless old crone. There was talk of the Scotch king, the son of the spent force Mary Stuart, succeeding – and certainly the Protestant governors of the realm seemed to have hopes of him. But the Scotch king was a young nothing, and Scotland could never stand in its claim against any greater power. No, the best that might be hoped was that when rudderless England inevitably fell to the might of Spain, he, Howton, would be on the right side. And it wouldn’t be so bad – it would be better, in fact, when a dynasty with heirs and offices and households held the sceptre. If the few frowning Puritans who were choking the nation presently chose to grumble – good. More offices and places would be open in the times coming for more malleable men who had proven their loyalty and friendship to the new powers.
It baffled him that other men could not see this – that still so many clung doggedly to a single old woman who was niggardly in her distribution of offices. He, with his good mind and old family and fair fortune, would find some good work in the new state, where he had found only closed doors and frowning, pious old men unwilling to give him work in the old.
The Catholic Church, at least, seemed forced by its antiquity to think in great swaths of time, when English Protestants looked no further than tomorrow and tomorrow.
As if in agreement, the Catholic Church knocked softly on the door.
Fray Nicolas, thought Howton, with a grimace.
‘One moment,’ he said.
Bess slid a clean white shirt over his head and began fumbling at its laces. He pushed her away with a flutter of his hands, drawing a sable-lined cloak about his shoulders and pulling it closed. ‘Come.’
Fray Nicolas slid into the room, closing the door noiselessly behind him. Howton grinned at the look the friar gave Bess. He showed no distaste, no pious disapproval, but simply glanced at her, blinked, and stepped forward into the wavering pool of light cast by the fire in the manor’s little bathing chamber. Bess, he noticed, shrank back, her skirts rustling and whispering on the rushes.
‘What news?’ asked Howton. He’d sent his enforced confessor into Wembury to discover what the stupid villagers spoke about – to find out whether they shared more news than the dead lad had shared before his death.
‘There are two men come to town,’ said Nicolas.
‘What? Who?’ This was bad. Howton had hoped that the official creatures – the slaves of Drake, likely, and Queen Elizabeth – might have come and gone, discovering nothing, recording the reappearance of the lost ship and riding back to London as quickly as their horses could be re-shod. He knew, from what he’d heard in the city, that they had found no treasure – that the rumoured hoard remained lost. If others were on its trail too…
‘Perhaps not in front of the woman.’ Nicolas raised his chin.
‘No,’ said Howton, deciding to be obdurate. He lifted an arm and held it out even as Bess began shuffling forward. Fray Nicolas might have been forced upon him, but he had intended from the first to make clear that he remained the master. ‘She stays.’
Fray Nicolas didn’t press the issue. Instead, he said, ‘as you like it. There are two men come into the village this day. They were taken out to the ship, as I was.’
‘And? What did they discover? Who are they?’
The friar gave a long, silent look of reproach. Howton felt himself colour. ‘Answer me!’
Nicolas cleared his throat. ‘I cannot see that they discovered anything. Nothing more than we suspect, I am sure. They know, as those in London know, that the ship lies wrecked. They must know that she carries no gold. It seems, from the cries of the foolish people, that the men boarded her.’
‘Boarded her?’
‘Yes. And fell into the sea in their attempt.’
‘Ha! Better it were that they both drowned. Well – for whom do these block-headed water-sprites work?’
Fray Nicolas frowned. Or, rather, lines appeared in his smooth forehead, like ripples in a bowl of cream. His mouth worked silently for a moment before he spoke. ‘They come, so I hear, from Cambridge and London. A college and the city.’
Howton felt the colour drain from his face. He drew his cloak tight about his neck and glared first at Fray Nicolas, then at Bess, then at the tub. Light danced on the water’s still surface. Moving over to it, he kicked the tin just enough to make ripples.
Cambridge.
College.
University.
Howton had, himself, been an Oxford man, at least through his Bachelor’s degree. Then, his head full of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, he had expected to find advancement at Queen Elizabeth’s court – or, at the very least, in some clerical or ecclesiastical role in the state. Instead, he had found himself ignored, passed over, and given none-too-friendly advice about travelling abroad. He had written to them all with offers of service and requests for a place: the great favourite – and reputedly Elizabeth’s old stallion – the Earl of Leicester. No response. To Burghley, the old treasurer – a single note of crisp refusal, written by some underling. To Walsingham even, the spymaster – to receive only curious requests for information about his friends, again signed by some clerk of whom he’d never heard.
Henry Howton spat on the word ‘university’ and on all its bootless learning.
He was the son of a man – a prosperous, good man – hanged for taking part in the northern rising in ’69. Oxford had not washed away that taint. Always, he’d realised, he would be a little suspect, a little unfit for the cosy circle of counsellors and their minions which made up England’s government. Rhetoric, grammar, and logic would not buy him entry into their self-satisfied coterie.
All of this he thought, balling and unballing his fists, as the water in the tub settled. He stared into its depths, catching his reflection whenever a flame leapt. He was a handsome man, his beard golden and
trimmed and his nose strong, still young enough, still invested with all the good outer virtues and a dose of wit. His time would come.
He turned away from the water.
‘These … university … men. What are their names?’
‘As I understand it, Lewgar and Tyndall.’
Howton mouthed them, silently, as though the shape of the syllables might spur recollection. It didn’t. ‘I do not know these men.’ He gave himself a shake. ‘Yet I doubt they work for their institution. No. They must be employed by some other, greater, creature who would tread the path we have started upon. They would have King Philip’s gold, Fray Nicolas. What think you of that?’
The friar simply made a sign of the cross. And then he said, ‘God will not see fit to let thievery prosper.’
‘Ha. He has in England.’
‘The heretical pretended queen will not reign forever. Her usurped throne will be reclaimed.’ Again, Nicolas crossed himself. Feeling that he should, for appearance’s sake, Howton did the same.
‘Have these creatures discovered any more than we?’
‘I cannot say. I heard only whispers amongst the low creatures here. Yet they are lodged in one of the houses. With an old creature called Gillingham. They are enjoying the hospitality of this place. Drinking,’ added Nicolas, ‘with the common folk.’
Howton squeezed his upper lip between thumb and forefinger. His hand was warm. Though he was freshly bathed, he began to feel perspiration driven out by the heat of the fire in the little chamber. ‘Then they might buy of these Wembury folk some knowledge. Some knowledge the little brat didn’t have or wouldn’t give.’
‘What would you have us do?’
Howton tilted his head back. The ceiling was of carved wood, though its paint had long since faded. He breathed in, deeply, and then as slowly out. ‘What of the boy?’
‘The heretic is thought to have run from the place. As well he might.’ Nicolas paused. ‘He will not, I think, trouble us again.’
‘Good. God’s work.’ Howton drummed his fingers on his damask-covered hip, well pleased. The lad had deserved death, for his silence as well as his last attempt at mockery. Unconsciously, a hand wandered to his wounded ear, now unbandaged but still tender. ‘And these men … the house they lodge in – it is not a well-protected place?’
The Queen's Gold: A Christopher Marlowe Spy Thriller Page 6