by Peter Tonkin
‘I would dispute that Master Poley, having seen you and Master Parrot at work in the Marshalsea,’ riposted Will bitterly.
‘But it is not so much a disguise I believe,’ explained Tom before the exchange became heated. ‘It’s just that she couldn’t climb through the window in whatever finery she wore to dinner. And going places without clothing has got her into a deal of trouble already.’
It was perhaps just as well that the conversation paused while they tried to catch their breath. But because they did so a strange vibration made itself audible. It was a deep note that seemed to hover somewhere between being heard and felt and to come from every direction at once, like the bass rumbling of the waterwheels beside the north bank.
One of Bates’ men touched a bannister and jumped in surprise. Tom did the same and frowned. It seemed that the entire building was trembling, almost thrilling, under the spell of this strange sound.
‘So, Sir Walter,’ said Tom after a moment as they clattered on downwards, his voice raised above the strange vibration, ‘it was none of your doing but all for love.’
‘It was as though she was possessed,’ he shouted in reply. ‘I have known men become like that on the battlefield or in close encounters at sea but never a woman. I would never have done so much or even dared so much.’
Tom paused for a moment, all too well aware that Raleigh was far too experienced a courtier and politician to say anything that would condemn himself in from of men like Sir Thomas Walsingham and Robert Poley. Any final facts he wished to clear up would be severely limited in scope, therefore. But Sir Walter was clearly happy enough, like Adam coming out of Eden, to blame his woman.
*
‘And yet you stand by her,’ he observed. ‘You will not see her brought to book.’
‘How could I? Even though none of this is my doing - I even reached out to catch the boy as he pulled my hair out before he fell back down the stair, I have been active at the edges, trying to make everything right again.’
‘But Spenser and Hal are both dead because of the pair of you.’
‘Because of my weakness, perhaps, but through none of my doing.’
‘“The woman tempted me,”’ quoted Will, ‘“and I did eat…”’
‘Well, Adam stood by Eve in the end and she bore him sons, away in the Land of Nod which was east of Eden,’ answered Raleigh.
‘And that’s what you are doing, isn’t it?’ said Tom. ‘Sending your Eve west of Eden so that you can face your Queen rather than your God with your hands clean even though your conscience might be stained.’
‘My conscience is as clean as my hands,’ said Raleigh. I but do what the woman asked.’
During this conversation the ten hunters at last closed with their quarry - in the most unlikely place of all. The latrine was secured to the side of Nonsuch with wooden pins as strong as any others used in the house’s frame. But, unlike the rest of the house it overhung the river with no support beneath. Tom and the others stepped down into a long room, perhaps thirty feet from wall to wall. Three yards in, there was a raised platform standing at knee-height the better part of a further yard deep in which there were ten round holes. Behind the raised section, above a foot or so of outer wall, there were windows reaching from one side to the other, each perhaps a yard in width and a yard in height.
Kate, in Sir Thomas’ ill-fitting clothes, was kneeling between two of the holes, leaning out of an open window. Her knees were spread and her left fist was closed tight on the frame. For the whole room was shaking increasingly fearsomely. Tom had experienced more than one earthquake during his time in Italy, but never anything like this. A quick glance around established that the quaking had reached such intensity that the room was beginning to come apart.
‘Kate!’ Both Tom and Raleigh called her name and leaped down onto the straining floorboards of the room. No sooner had they done so than the floor began to tear apart. Spaces opened between the floorboards, some revealing the roiling river, others revealing more planks sitting distantly below. Tom’s logical assumptions had proved right. There was a ship there, hard up against the bridge, being shaken like a rat in a terrier’s jaws by the power of the rushing River - waterfall and all. The mast was wedged against the side of the building, passing the vessel’s violent motion straight into the wood-pegged structure, the weakest part of which - the latrine- was coming apart. Kate cared nothing for that. Her plan was to climb through the window onto the rigging that held the shaking mast in place.
Kate had not heard them, so when they reached her and grabbed a shoulder each she jumped with shock. Tom got a glance through the open window she was leaning out of that confirmed everything he suspected since seeing the flag pressed flat across Sir Thomas’ study window. But no sooner was everything confirmed than everything really began to fall apart. The entire wall, windows and all, sprang free and started sliding downwards like a headsman’s axe. Kate reared back, no longer paying any attention to the men holding her shoulders. Then she threw herself forward again, tearing free of their fists.
*
Immediately outside the room the cause of its destruction stood fully revealed - the foremast and rigging of an ocean-going galleon. The topmast and crow’s nest were an easy leap away. A brawny sailor was standing in the crow’s nest reaching out for Kate but even were he and she to miss each-other, there was a web of rigging for her to cling to, reaching higher up still, to the pennant at the masthead that had been pushed flat across Sir Thomas’ window, and down to the deck far below.
Without a second thought, she hurled herself outward, leaving her two would-be rescuers standing. The man in the crow’s nest caught one arm and swung her onto the rigging. She clung for a moment then she began to scramble down. She spared not one glance for her two latest lovers standing in the slowly-collapsing latrine from which she had just escaped, nor her family standing in shocked silence behind them.
A distant voice bellowed, ‘Let go all!’ And, with a whip-snap of parting ropes and groan of timbers, the great ship slowly edged back downriver as she turned, pushed away by the six-foot wall of water underneath the Bridge. Turning further as she moved to head downstream she passed between the other shipping like a swan among ducks. Sailors swarmed busily all about her masts and spars so that by the time Kate stepped onto the deck, she was under full sail, heading for the North Sea and all points beyond.
Tom and Raleigh did not stay to observe Kate’s escape. They turned, side by side and pounded back across the disintegrating floor. Tom made it back to the safety of the doorway first and turned to catch Raleigh, heaving him upwards and wryly thinking that Raleigh had failed to perform exactly the same service for the unfortunate Hal. Raleigh said something - perhaps in thanks - but the noise of destruction made everything else inaudible. Then they all stood crowded on the outer edge of the main house’s solid flooring and watched the wreck of the latrine fall away into the wake of the departing galleon.
The wind backed, sending the cold breeze that had pasted the flag to Sir Thomas’ window to make them shiver and that in turn broke the spell that had held them so that they began to move. They climbed silently up to Sir Thomas’ study and the servants were dismissed - though Bates was ordered to bring a bottle of the best usquebaugh recently brought south from the Scottish court. Seated around the fire-bright room overlooking the bustle of distantly departing ships they sipped the golden liquid and discussed the situation. Raleigh confirmed what Tom had worked out, even apologising - as far as his honour would permit - to Will and forgiving him for giving his circle of poets and philosophers the name they all associated with the death of their friend and colleague Christopher Marlowe - and hatred in consequence. There was an opportunity there for Poley to apologise for his part in Marlowe’s murder - which he chose not to take. Then matters turned almost exclusively to Kate. Her murder of Spenser had not only settled matters for Raleigh in her mind but also furnished her with a great deal of money when she stole his purse and pension. Sh
e bought new clothes - and a complete wardrobe that was aboard with her now - under the watchful eye of a waiting gentlewoman she had also hired. Such trifles as a basket of ruinously expensive lampreys stood neither here nor there in her new world of riches.
So they finally came back to the lamprey pie she had poisoned and sent to Tom: ‘A complexity,’ he explained. ‘At once a revenge for my taking advantage of her trust and drugging her, a way of closing any further inquiry into the business from myself - as the man she feared might come too close to the truth too soon; soon enough to stop her at any rate. Which, as it turned out, was a close-run thing. And a kind of confession.’
‘How so?’ asked Raleigh, but it seemed he spoke for them all.
‘Lady Audrey touched upon the heart of the matter,’ said Tom. ‘Lampreys were what caused the death of Henry the First. She was well enough aware that Will was hard at work on his play of Henry the Fifth. But the pie was a reminder of our conversations about Henry the Second - how a thoughtless word from him had caused his followers to act without his knowledge and perform a murder he was later to regret.’
‘At once a means of murder and a confession in itself,’ said Will.
‘Perhaps you can find a way of putting that in a play,’ suggested Lady Audrey.
‘But no more pies,’ said Sir Thomas. ‘There were pies enough in Titus Andronicus full of the flesh of murdered children.’
‘So, she planned to sail away tonight,’ said Tom, returning to the subject in hand. ‘Allowing Sir Walter here to inform the Earl of Essex as to the facts of the murder - so that he can satisfy the Queen and she will sign his commission at last. Then he will be off to Ireland and that will be that.’
‘She asked me to send her far away, Sir Walter confirmed. ‘To a new land west of Eden as you guessed.’ Raleigh paused. Sighed. ‘And I have in this as in all the rest, granted her wish. The vessel is captained by my friend and associate John Watts. She is bound for the settlement I founded some years ago in the New World. We have found it hard to stay in contact with the settlers and there are rumours that they may have moved on. But John is going to discover the truth if he can and Kate will join the colonists if there are any still there.’
‘I see,’ said her sister sadly. ‘And what is this settlement she is bound for called, Sir Walter?’
‘We called it Roanoke,’ he replied.
The End
Epilogue: The Facts of the Case
On Saturday 13 January 1599 Edmund Spenser was found dead in his bed at his lodgings on King Street, Westminster, London. The bells of the local churches rang that afternoon to mark his passing. The Earl of Essex claimed the body, prepared it for burial and arranged the funeral, as described, on Tuesday 16th (though there was no Sin Eater and some of the poems have been ‘adapted’). Ben Jonson later claimed Spenser died of starvation - his castle at Kilcolman had been destroyed by Irish rebels and one of his children had died in the battle. His family was hiding in Cork, where he was Sherriff. His income from his Irish estates was negligible. On the other hand the Queen granted a pension of £50 (the equivalent of many thousands of pounds today) though it is debatable how much of this he ever saw. He also re-released many of his earlier poems hoping to generate income from them. These included the previously banned satire Mother Hubberd’s Tale, the main characters of which are The Ape and The Fox. Queen Elizabeth habitually called Secretary Cecil her ‘Pygmy’ and her ‘Elf’ and - occasionally - her ‘Ape’.
Sir Walter Raleigh and several associates tried to found colonies in America. The most famous of which was Raleigh’s Roanoke settlement. Roanoke is one of the great unsolved mysteries of early American history. The entire settlement vanished. No-one knows why (though failure of supplies and starvation probably featured) or where they went to. By the time John Watts got there in the early 1600’s there was hardly any sign of them and even nowadays their fate is a matter of speculation. Raleigh himself was to become involved in the Main Plot (July 1603) to replace King James with Arbella Stuart and spent many years in the Tower as a result. He was released in 1616 just in time to join the (long, strange) list of men suspected of having murdered Shakespeare. He made one final voyage to the New World but was tried and condemned on his return. He was beheaded on Monday, 29th October 1618.
Essex left with an army of 16,000 for Ireland on Tuesday, 27th March 1599. As he exited the city, a bright, sunny spring day was transformed into a thunderous downpour - an ill-omen that proved true. Will Shakespeare added an extra element to the Chorus in Henry V which was playing at the Globe that day, praising the earl, wishing him well and predicting a happy return. The campaign was a disaster. Fearing his enemies at home (led by Cecil and Raleigh), Essex returned against the Queen’s specific orders, invaded her dressing room and literally threw himself on her mercy. She never forgave him. Little more than a year later, he led his infamous ’rebellion’, having asked his friend Southampton to get the Chamberlain’s Men to perform Richard II at the Globe hoping the story of a weak king’s replacement by strong usurpers would rouse the City. It didn’t. When Raleigh was being sworn in as a witness against him, Essex said, ‘What booteth it (good will it do) to swear (in) The Fox!’
Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex was the last person to be beheaded on Tower Green, just before 8am on Sunday 25th February 1601.
My main source once more is Shapiro’s 1599.
Avid readers of Bernard Cornwell will note my debt to Fools and Mortals.
The post of Pursuivant Marshal is my own creation - unlike Earl Marshal and Knight Marshal, it never existed.