Divided Loyalties: An Elizabethan Spy Thriller

by Steven Veerapen

  Before he could scream, he was being drawn deeper into the space between the houses, was pivoted, and a hand was clamped over his mouth. A voice whispered in his ear – a voice he recognised as belonging to Father Thomas. Something ran through his head about hunters and hunted, and he cursed himself for a fool. ‘Thank you for following me, son. A good pair of eyes you have. You’ve been playing us false, Jack Wylmott. If that’s your name. You’ve much to explain.’ Jack whimpered, gnawing on the hand over his mouth. First the Protestant lot stifling him, and now the Catholics. Thomas took it away.

  ‘I do. And I will. Jesus, let us go somewhere safe.’

  Within fifteen minutes, he and the three priests were assembled in the cellar of the old Friary, where the other two had apparently been saying Masses all evening for visiting Catholics. Thomas had bundled him in as though he were parading a thief freshly caught in the act and threw him down. The other two had looked up in surprise as the door was locked. Jack remained half-sprawled against one wall, the Jesuits with their backs to the one opposite. Thomas seemed ecstatic. ‘I told you, didn’t I? I said this lad was playing us false.’

  ‘Peace,’ said Adam. ‘What do you know?’

  ‘I followed him. Watched him, as he’s been watching us. He left his rooms in company with one of the English queen’s men, or Cecil’s – the one spoken of by our true friends. Some old woman has died out in the town this night. The pair of them followed the crowd, thick as thieves. Old friends, or so it appeared, him and this fellow.’

  ‘Who? How do you know?’

  ‘Polmear. The gypsy-looking fellow. Watches the ports – boats coming to the north and going out. We were warned to be wary of him even in Douai.’

  ‘Is this true?’ asked Robin. Jack looked at him and then looked away. Robin seemed younger than ever, not a trace of hair even on his trembling upper lip. Somehow that made losing his trust all the harder.

  ‘They have my wife,’ he said. ‘The queen’s secretary, Walsingham, and … and that man. But I’ve told them nothing. I swear. It’s true that I’m Catholic – what I said was true. Please, fathers … let me confess.’

  ‘Liar!’ spat Thomas. ‘Traitor!’

  ‘Let him speak,’ said Adam. ‘Who are you?’

  Sighing, Jack told them his story, his head bowed, beginning with his instruction to deliver the countess of Northumberland to her enemies and ending with him being deposited in the north, his wife a hostage for his pursuing and betraying Catholic priests. Throughout, he maintained that he intended no harm, and had been all along trying to think of ways of protecting both them and Amy.

  ‘I believe him,’ said Robin.

  ‘Of course you do,’ spat Thomas, turning away. ‘Though he admits to consorting with our enemies.’

  ‘Yet we are still alive,’ said Adam. He moved to stand under a torch. ‘You haven’t delivered us to this Polmear. Why?’

  ‘I … In truth I said I have met three men who might be of the old faith. But no more. We were interrupted by the news of this woman’s death. They were all saying Jesuits done it. Killed her. Destroyed her books.’

  ‘Heretical books,’ Adam said. Robin looked at him, his mouth falling open, but Thomas nodded.

  ‘But … it can’t be true. The Holy Father has not turned you into killers. You didn’t do this?’ Jack realised he sounded more like he was pleading than questioning.

  ‘Of course we didn’t bloody do it,’ said Adam. ‘We’re here to save souls, not burn old women.’

  ‘Then it was the diamond league. I told you of them when I first met you, remember? Polmear – he thinks – I think too – that they’re neither Catholic nor Protestant. They’re something else. If we can just–’

  ‘Enough about this fantasy,’ snapped Thomas. ‘Let him and his friend chase after these ghosts. If they are destroying heretics, so be it.’

  ‘Father!’ Robin cried.

  ‘Not just them,’ said Jack. ‘The priests who came here out of Douai before you, the ones … the ones there were all those dirty tales about. It might be they were killed by this league too. A conspiracy.’

  ‘Then you and your priest-hunter can spend your time sniffing it out,’ Thomas said, folding his arms. He dropped one and slapped the palm of his other hand into his forehead. ‘They warned us about the wildness of England. At home – at Douai – they told us. But the things that go on here! This whole blasted country is waxing dangerous. Every man, even the faithful ones, are but two pots of ale away from doing whatever mad thing runs in their mind. You, boy, might be the worst of them. It’s clear we cannot trust you.’ Finality tinged his words.

  ‘Yet,’ said Adam, putting a hand on the older priest’s arm, ‘he might be of use. If we keep him by us.’

  ‘How so?’ asked Robin. Jack detected enthusiasm, faint but definitely there. Young Father Robin would be his ally. Adam shrugged.

  ‘A man who is loyal to neither side, who works for both … tell me, Jack, in the grace of God and in all truth, do you bear love for our faith?’

  ‘I do,’ said Jack.

  ‘And yet none for Walsingham, or this creature of his?’

  ‘No. No, I am their prisoner, really. They have my wife.’

  ‘Across the sea?’

  ‘Yes, but they’ve given me no word of her safety. They will be using her too.’

  ‘Well, then, I think we must have faith,’ Adam concluded. Robin smiled, but Thomas threw his hands in the air.

  ‘A man who is loyal to neither side might get us all killed. Taken to London and torn apart.’

  ‘Then he will suffer for it,’ said Robin, his eyes shining in the torchlight. ‘And we go to God as martyrs.’

  ‘Let us pray it doesn’t come to that. Thomas, Father Robin and I are agreed. We shall continue to trust this man – to some small degree – rather than cut him from our side.’ Thomas said nothing but glared stonily at Jack. ‘If we flee from him, we lose any chance of knowledge of what the heretics do.’

  ‘You trust him as you list. On your head be it.’

  Robin crossed the room and held out a hand. Jack reached up and took it, allowing the fellow to help him to his feet. ‘I promise,’ he said, with all the dignity he could muster, ‘that I will do all I can to protect you. I will warn you of any danger. As long as I can be sure my wife is safe, you will be too.’ He hoped that he could prove the truth of his words, and yet had a nagging doubt that he could not.

  5

  Amy rolled over on her cot, the double blanket doing little to keep out the chill that crept into the room despite the low fire. It was normal for her mind to work her into a fury when she slept alone – her thoughts were like fire themselves, and she could not extinguish them. For weeks the thought of Jack had kept her up. When she did sleep, it seemed to be only for minutes at a time; some nightmare would intrude, in which he was drowning and she desperately reaching over the side of a boat trying to save him. She would fail. He would sink deep, leaving her staring at her own reflection in the glassy surface.

  She would stir from the recurring image not with fear, but with renewed determination. If he was dead, she would know it; she would have felt it happening somewhere inside herself, as she had known the night her ailing mother finally slipped away. There would be some crack in the heavens, a sign of some kind. He might well be on the moon, for all she knew, but he was alive somewhere and trying to get back to her. The thought sustained her like strong meat and drink.

  Weeks had passed. Christmas had come and gone. Gradually, Amy had accustomed herself to the life of a dame, which, she swiftly realised, was simply glorified service. She had had no time alone with the rather frightening Queen Catherine, who had made only sporadic visits to the capital to gather money for her son’s and daughter-in-law’s state entries and deposit more lower servants to aid in making the royal palaces ready for their new mistress. The king and queen were apparently making a slow and stately progress across the country, partly because of heavy rains washing awa
y the roads from the Austrian border, and partly because young Queen Elisabeth was a sickly girl.

  Amy’s days had thus been a stultifying round of Masses, walks, choosing and arranging furnishing, rubbing her hands on cushions and doorframes to check for poison, and, rather enjoyably, watching as a doddering old physician waved a magnificent spiralled unicorn horn, its tip sharpened to a needlepoint and coated in solid gold, about each chamber to ward off poisonous airs. She was no longer carrying armfuls of laundry, to be sure, but now she was folding and perfuming clean clothes, refreshing ewers, and waving jewelled rings around doorframes. Everything was regimented, beyond anything she had ever known in service – from the order they processed to Mass to who got to sit first, the most senior amongst the ladies down to herself. They had even to bow and curtsy before the closed door to the empty royal bedchamber and innumerable empty chairs of estate. Why so many poor girls dreamed of the life of a court lady she had no idea. Even dressing was a hideous chore – fine for one evening, but a trial when each morning brought several rounds of lacing and pinning. And the silence! Vittoria de Brieux’s claims of friendship had been hollow – hollow, Amy supposed, like most of what came out of the mouths of noble ladies. Kat was useless, always off somewhere doing the kind of work Amy used to do herself.

  Her investigation into the dowager queen’s household had not progressed far, as she had known it could not, despite the royal apartments filling up with those who wished to claim sleeping places ahead of the royal arrival. Yet there was one thing that did bother her. Each night, during the course of her tossing and turning, she had become aware of nocturnal comings and goings from the antechamber off the queen-mother’s bedroom in the unfinished Tuileries Palace.

  She had no idea of the time beyond that it was still some hours until dawn. She lay with her eyes half-closed, and, sure enough, the sound of bedclothes moving and footsteps skipping lightly from the room came to her. There followed the soft opening and closing of a door. Her eyes shot open and she carefully turned on to her side. The fire gave off very little light, making only a semicircle around itself. Heavy velvet curtains cut out the moonlight. In the room with her slept her two earliest, unfriendly companions – the wizened Bianca Gondi, whose stertorous breathing still rumbled, and the younger Vittoria de Brieux, of the doll-like face paint. In addition, their servants, Kat included, slept on scattered rugs in various corners. This room had been their exclusive domain as the first ladies left by Catherine to sweeten the building. It was one of them who was slipping out at night.

  Amy sprang up, dragging her feet silently towards where she knew the door was, careful not to step on anyone or anything that might make a noise. She slipped open the door and crept into the next chamber, where more snoring greeted her. The whole palace, or what there was of it, was built in a series of interconnecting rooms, with a service corridor running parallel. She guessed that the departing woman would not have opted to stroll the darkened chambers, and so she felt along the wall for the door to the corridor, stepping out into light and blinking away the shock of it.

  Once her eyes had accustomed themselves, she set off, not sure exactly where she was going. There was something strange about palaces at night – something unnerving. Small houses and even large manors all slept when the sun went down, but palaces seemed to hum with life at night, as guards patrolled, servants made ready to get to market before dawn, and cooks rose early. There were few guards about with the royal family officially still in residence outside the city, but even so the place was eerily quiet. Amy wandered the corridor, which was still clean and sterile thanks to its relative newness, and came to a set of stairs. She stood at the top, looking down, debating whether to continue what was probably a fruitless mission. At length she descended. A doorway led outside. She opened it, peering out into the mizzling rain. Narrowing her eyes, she looked down at the gravel. There was one set of disturbances, something like footprints, to trouble the gardeners in the morning. Whether it led to or from the building, she could not say, and she could gain nothing by stumbling about the gardens, where only occasional beacons cast festive light.

  Amy sighed, closed the door, and began trudging back upstairs. She could simply stay awake until the missing woman returned, but she would be none the wiser as to why she kept disappearing at night. As she made her way back along the service corridor, though, a new sound came to her and she froze. At first, it seemed like someone was being attacked, and she made to cry out. Before she could, however, she balled a fist and put it in her mouth.

  Though it had been a while – months, in fact, since she had seen Jack – she knew the sound.

  Although she stifled her laughter, she could not stifle the giggling voice in her head. You might scarcely remember what it feels like, it said, but you certainly recall what it sounds like.

  She hurried past the door of the closet from which the sounds of the copulating couple emanated and opened the door back to the royal apartments. As she was about to step inside, she heard the closet door open behind her and she ducked in, popping her head out just enough to see a man in black leave, buttoning up his breeches as he did. Her brow furrowed. There were few men in the makeshift household: Catherine’s knights and gentlemen of honour, her maîtres d’hôtel, her cupbearers, esquires, and carvers, were all with her. Yet she knew him. The door clicked again. She started. The woman, whoever she was, would be coming her way. Amy jerked inside and hurried back to the ladies’ bedchamber. She was back under her covers, both pulled up to her neck, when the adventurous woman came back. Still she could not see who it had been. Instead she let the glimpse of the man return to her mind. Over and over, she scanned her memory, visualising his profile as she had seen it before he turned his back to her and left.

  She had it.

  He was one of the men whom the duke of Guise had commanded to help her get to Queen Catherine the day she had arrived. Satisfaction hers, she drifted into a fitful sleep, in which opening and closing doors might have been real or imagined.

  The steady pulsing of her heartbeat in her ear woke her. Amy could almost feel the dark smudges sagging under her eyes. The light, which was unforgiving in the white-, cream-, and gold-painted room, did nothing to mask them. She sighed, wrinkling her nose. Whether in the newest French palace’s bedchamber or a squalid hovel, dawn rode in on a pungent tide of urine and sweat. The only difference was that here the morning’s piss-bucket reek mingled with herbs and perfumes. Something irritated her and blurred her vision and she shook her head to clear away loose strands of hair. No good. It took a few seconds for her to realise that it was the grit of sleep stuck to her eyelash, and she rubbed it away.

  It was fitting, she supposed, that she had joined Catherine’s band of women too old to serve the new queen. The others were already up, Gondi preparing for Mass by worrying beads in corner, her lips moving silently over toothless gums, and Brieux having her face repainted whilst holding a small mirror. She caught Amy looking in the reflection and deigned to speak. ‘You sleep late, my lady. You had a restless night?’

  ‘I slept poorly.’ The words came out on a gust of sour morning breath and she put a hand over her mouth. She watched, entranced, as the woman’s maid pasted the decoction onto Brieux’s skin. It formed a thick sheen, like the glaze one would see on a pie crust. The wrinkles and pock marks disappeared under it. The goal was to make time melt away, but instead it made her look artificial, like the frightening images painted in French chapels.

  ‘Forgive me, but you might do well to put something on your face. Do you not have such things in England?’

  ‘We do, my lady,’ said Amy, puffing out her chest. Amongst the small number of bodices, sleeves, and kirtles that the countess had sent her off with had been a small box of vials – a gift from someone that Lady Northumberland had claimed to find insulting.

  ‘Well, use them. I was beginning to think the only thing your kinswoman provided were those … uh … charming dresses. Her Majesty never did tell us – w
hat are you to the countess exactly? Her needlewoman?’ She delivered this with as much of a smirk as she could manage under her makeup, and then returned her eyes to the mirror. She nodded sharply. Amy bit her tongue as Brieux’s maid finished painting her dark skin white and began affixing the plethora of jewels she habitually wore. From Kat’s gossip with the other servants, she had divined that Vittoria de Brieux was a wealthy widow, who had bought her way into Catherine’s household, and thereafter done everything she could to seduce the young king, apparently without success. As her mother would have put it, the lady was a jade on the make, and a fading one at that.

  Instinctively, Amy put her hands over the old nightdress she had been given – a plain thing, but of good quality. Then anger rose. She would not let a painted old French whore mock her – a woman pushing forty with thin hair and a face plastered in milk, eggs, and piss. She would not allow herself to be a figure of laughter, she who has always sworn and cursed at the opinions of others.

  ‘Kat,’ she whispered, crossing the room and taking the girl by the arm. She spoke rapidly, low and in English. ‘You remember the men who looked after us when we got here? Someone in this room is swiving one of them.’ Kat’s mouth fell open in scandalised delight. ‘Listen to the servants’ gossip. I know how they do. If you hear anything, tell me.’ A curt nod, almost military style. Amy switched back to French. ‘I’ll dress now.’ She selected the gown which required the least amount of lacing and the fewest pins, pining for Kat’s own plain smock. Having endured the pain of being dressed, she breezily said, ‘bring out the little box. I’ll use the stuff in it today.’ She took the stool Brieux had been using when the older woman was helped up and looked on with trepidation as Kat began pulling out tiny bottle and silver boxes.

  ‘You may use my glass, if you wish,’ said the older woman with amusement. She held out the jewel-encrusted hand mirror. Amy accepted it without thanks as Brieux sashayed away. A desire came over her to crack the woman on the back of the head with it, and to the devil with bad luck.