‘I’m amazed and astounded she didn’t bestow a knighthood on you for uncommon valour, Mr Ivory.’
Ivory was too busy talking to listen.
‘The treasure we captured was enough to take a man’s breath away. Thousands upon thousands of rubies, chests full of diamonds and pearls, gold in such abundance the royal coffers could not hold it, silks and calico, camphor and perfumes, spices and ebony. All that and four hundred blackamoors that the Spaniards had taken for slavery. We did set them down upon an island of the Azores, but I could not say what became of them. It was the treasure we all had eyes for; no room for slaves. I heard Ralegh did say later that it was all reckoned at five hundred thousand pounds, which is a number I never even heard of before then. That was the worth of my blue eye to the Queen and this realm, Cooper. Think on that if you will. That’s why you will show me the respect I deserve.’
Boltfoot had had enough. He kicked on a little way ahead. He looked around him constantly. Every time they passed a horseman or wagon, he expected to see a man in a voluminous cape with a wheel-lock pistol. That wounded wrist must be healed by now. He was out there somewhere …
Joshua Peace woke early at his chamber in the Eagle and Child in Ormskirk. His first instinct on being dismissed from Lathom House had been to leave immediately for London. Yet his loyalty to John Shakespeare and his irritation at being evicted so peremptorily by the sixth earl and the commissioners had made up his mind. He would stay a little longer and keep his ears open.
He lay on the bed and wished himself anywhere but here. The room smelt stale, of smoke and sweat. But he would rise from the bed soon and venture out. He wished to find Cole, if he was still in the area after being dismissed as steward of Lathom House, and he wanted to talk with Mistress Knott.
There was a rap of knuckles at the door. He jumped up, smoothed his nightshirt to ensure he was decent and opened the door.
A surly youth stood there, scowling insolently. ‘Are you Peace?’
‘Mr Peace. Yes, I am.’
‘You’re to come with me.’
‘Who are you?’
‘Parfitt. Attorney Hesketh demands your presence.’
‘Tell your master that I shall be happy to attend his offices later this morning, after I have broken my fast.’
‘Now. He wants you now.’
‘Well, Master Parfitt, you can tell him I shall see him in two hours’ time. Good morning to you.’
He began to close the door, but Parfitt’s foot was already there.
‘You can walk across the square with me, Peace, or I shall drag you through the mud and horse-dung. Which is it to be?’
Peace sighed heavily. ‘Wait one minute. I will clothe myself and come with you.’
Thomas Hesketh leant back in his richly carved oak chair.
‘You know why I have summoned you here, Peace?’
‘No, Mr Hesketh.’
‘Because you are in possession of a letter, a traitor’s letter, which should have been handed to me when first it was discovered about the person of the boy-priest Lamb.’ Hesketh stretched out his fat hand. ‘Give it to me now.’
‘I have no letter.’
‘Where is it?’
‘I have no idea what you are talking about, Mr Hesketh. And I do not much care for your manner of asking.’
Hesketh turned to his assistant. ‘Search him, Parfitt. See what you can find. If it’s not on him, search his room at the Eagle and Child.’
‘By what authority-’
‘My own.’
Parfitt was standing in front of him, unhooking the buttons of his doublet. Peace struggled, but the boy, though lean, was powerful and tore the garment from him. He proceeded to feel every seam, paying particular atttention to the padded foreparts and sleeves. The boy took a poniard from his belt and slid it through the stitching, then pushed his ink-stained fingers up into the gaps, pulling out wool stuff. Peace looked on in horror.
When Parfitt discovered nothing in the doublet, he turned his attention to Peace’s shirt, then his hose, upper stocks and nether-stocks, patting the searcher most intimately. Thomas Hesketh, attorney to the Duchy of Lancaster, watched all the while, his moist eyes half hidden in the folds of his overfed face.
‘Nothing, Mr Hesketh, sir. It’s not on him.’
‘Go to his chamber then.’
‘This is an outrage!’
Hesketh glared at him. ‘I don’t know what you think you are doing in Lancashire, Peace. But I want you away from here by nightfall. If you are not gone by then, you will be arrested and charged with necromancy, for men have seen you consorting with the dead, casting spells over bodies, bidding them to rise. Am I clear, Mr Peace? Am I clear? Now get out of my sight — and do not return to the inn. Any possessions found there by Parfitt will be burnt.’
Gathering up his pack-saddle and sword, Shakespeare strode out into Oxford’s morning sunshine. The day was already warm and would be hot.
He looked about him. Who here might know the truth of Andrew’s flight from justice? What would he, Shakespeare, do in the same circumstances? Where would a boy alone head for? His first instinct, surely, would be to run wildly and then, when he had time to consider his options, to try to head for Stratford or London. Yet, at the front of Shakespeare’s mind there was still the fear that this had all been planned, and that Andrew might already be making the crossing to France, assisted by the underground network of Jesuits and seminary priests so active in England these days. Then he would follow the long trek south to the Catholic colleges of Rheims or Rome.
Shakespeare rode northwards and westwards. A mile outside Oxford, he turned left along a track, starting a tight circuit around the city, anticlockwise. He would do a circle at a time, like the rings on a target, calling at every village along the way, and speaking to every man, woman and child he encountered.
At a fork in the path, he spotted a group of farmhands sitting at the side on a grassy bank, eating their bread and drinking their cider. He stopped.
‘I am seeking someone, a runaway boy. A tall, strong lad. He would be dressed in black like a scholar.’
The men looked at each other blankly and shook their heads. He thanked them and rode on. Again and again he hailed passers-by and workers, asking each the same question. Some thought for a while, made suggestions as to where he might have gone, but none was convincing and Shakespeare stuck to his planned route. He followed the track around Oxford in this tight circle, then again in a wider circle, stopping every person he saw and constantly sweeping his eyes across the woods, fields and lanes for some sign of Andrew. It did not seem a hopeless mission; someone must have seen him. He must be somewhere.
Chapter 30
Panting for breath, thirst raging in the early afternoon heat, Andrew and Ursula threw themselves down to rest, high up on a broad slope in the curve of the folded hills. They lay on their backs in the tough downland grass. Laid out before them, England seemed to stretch for ever. Above them, a solitary cloud drifted by.
As his breathing subsided, Andrew turned to his companion. ‘We’re first here.’
‘You were right. You are pigging fast.’
‘Is there any water left?’
‘We’ll get some.’
‘Where?’
‘I don’t know. Watch and learn. Think I’ve survived seventeen years on the road not knowing how to get pigging water!’
He laughed and saw her bristling. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t laughing at you.’
‘You better pigging not be.’
‘Do you think everyone got away?’
‘Don’t know. Annis Jolly is eight months gone. Not easy for her to run, nor one or two of the old ones. But they’re all good at hiding and probably found a hole in the woods somewhere. Tell you this, though. Reaphook won’t be happy. He wanted to stand and fight. Too stupid to see we’d all have got killed or rounded up and hanged.’
‘If he hates Staffy so much, why doesn’t he just leave and go some
where else?’
‘Go where? This band is his home. You still don’t understand. It’s home to all of us. You don’t just run off because you’ve got a brabble with someone. You have it out with them.’
Andrew listened and tried to make sense of it. It seemed to him the trouble between Reaphook and Staffy was a little more serious than that.
‘Why did Staffy tell you to look out for me?’
‘He does that when new ones come in. Same way as he has always looked out for me. That’s why I stay with the band. And that’s why you should, too. You don’t stand a hope without the band. Whatever else you’ve done, the burgesses and justices will take you and whip you at the post until you bleed — just for being a sturdy vagrant beggar. And then they’ll put a halter around your neck for thieving — even if you haven’t been caught stealing nothing. That’s why you need friends. Stand together, you got some strength. Go on your own, you’re nothing, lower than pig slurry.’
‘But I can’t stay.’
She raised herself on her elbows. ‘You going to cross England like that? In your black gown? You look like a big bear cub dressed for its own funeral. We’ll buy you a jerkin,’ she said with undisguised disdain. ‘I’ve got money.’
‘So we won’t steal it — just use stolen money? That will make it legal and moral, will it?’
‘It will, yes. You’re learning fast, Andrew Woode. Now let’s have a better look at your ear.’
Roughly, she pushed his head down to examine his injury, then proclaimed him sound.
‘Would he have killed me?’
‘Spindle? I don’t know. He’s a strange one. Does pretty much what Reaphook tells him. He might just have been trying to raise a laugh by making you piss yourself.’
Below them, in the vale, they heard a distant sound, carried on the warm air: the beat of a single drum. They raised their heads and gazed down. In the west, coming in their direction, they saw a column of men, perhaps twenty or thirty, marching slowly through the valley.
‘Who are they?’
‘Soldiers.’
‘Are they the ones that attacked us?’
‘No, those were townsfolk and villagers. These are soldiers, pressing men for the war. I heard they been around here a couple of days. Steer clear of them, Andrew. No good can come of them.’
As the column of soldiers passed by, their eyes turned right in the direction of Andrew and Ursula.
‘They’re looking at us. Should we run?’
‘They’re looking at the pigging white horse, you fool.’
He laughed. Of course they were. The giant chalk white horse carved into the grassy hillside where they lay.
Joshua Peace walked disconsolately towards the stables where his horse was liveried. His doublet hung from his shoulders in tatters where Attorney Hesketh’s boy had cut its seams. He felt defeated; he had failed his friend John Shakespeare. There was nothing left for him here now; he had little gold left in his purse and no possessions apart from his mare.
He felt a hand on his shoulder and turned. It was the curious woman from the corner of the earl’s chamber. She seemed agitated, her hair awry.
‘Mistress Knott-’
‘Come with me, quickly, before we are seen together.’
Peace hesitated but she tugged at his sleeve and pulled him.
‘What do you want of me?’ he asked.
‘You are a friend of Mr Shakespeare’s?’
He nodded.
‘Then say nothing, just come with me. You will see.’
They walked out of Ormskirk, south and west, for two or more hours, deep into the countryside, until the sun was high in the sky. They came to a wood and the woman stopped. She looked at Peace questioningly, as though doubt had suddenly seized her.
‘Are you a man of God, Mr Peace?’
Was he? Perhaps not in the way she meant it. He said nothing.
‘This is Sceptre Wood. There is darkness here. Turn away now if you wish.’
He shook his head. He had come this far; he would go on.
At first the wood was dappled and light, with well-spaced oak and ash, but then it became more dense and overgrown, thick with broken, dead trees and briar.
She stopped and lifted her chin, pointing ahead with her face.
He tried to see what she was looking at. They were at the edge of a clearing. And then he saw it, hidden in a tangle of sticks and vines and leaves. A squat cabin or shelter, built of branches and mud, and so constructed that it was part of the very forest itself.
Mistress Knott pushed him forward. ‘Go in,’ she said. ‘You are expected.’
‘No, you go first.’
‘I cannot go in. It is an ungodly place.’
Joshua Peace wished more than anything to turn and run, but he was as rooted to this course of action as the trees that surrounded him. He stepped forward. There was no door to the cabin, just a gaping entranceway, with a step that went down into the earth.
A grey-haired woman was sitting on her haunches. She was thin and bent and her face was lined. Their eyes met. She smiled.
‘Welcome, master, welcome,’ she said, her voice as thin as her small, sunken frame.
He looked away from her and surveyed the interior of the shelter. There were earthenware pots and glass vials all around. She followed his eyes.
‘I have love philtres and charms, remedies for the ague and pox and a hundred other ailments. I can rid you of the stone or the gout or turn a falling prick to oak. Tell me what you wish, master.’
‘I was told you were expecting me. Mistress Knott …’
As he said the name, he looked closer at the old woman. Though she was very different, though she exuded malevolence, yet he could see clearly now: she was Mistress Knott’s kin. No, more than that; she was her mother.
‘Indeed, yes indeed. I have the very thing. I gave it to one who came before you, but you shall have it, too.’
She laughed, an unearthly sound like birdsong in water, then began scraping at the earth close to her feet.
Peace watched her in ghastly fascination. Her quill-thin fingers scratched at the mud until they clasped something about the size of a large pebble. Then he saw that it was a glass vial. She rubbed it against her long black skirts to clear away the earth, then offered it to him. He touched it and tried to discern its contents. There seemed to be something dry and dull-coloured, grey or brown, in the little bottle.
He tried to take it but she snatched it back and held it to her breast.
‘Two marks. I want two marks. The one who came before gave me a sovereign.’
Peace knew he had no more than ten shillings in his purse. It was all he had to get him back to London. He shook his head.
‘I do not have it.’
‘Then give me your knife and a lock of your hair.’
Every part of him told him this was superstitious nonsense, yet he was fearful. What would she do with his hair? More powerful yet was the sense of duty he still felt he owed to John Shakespeare. He took the knife from his belt and cut a lock from the thin ridge of hair that was all that remained encircling his pate. He handed the hair and the knife to the woman. She placed the vial in his hand.
He took out the little wooden stopper and put his nose close to the opening. He immediately caught the faint whiff of rose petals and went cold …
Parfitt knocked at the door to Thomas Hesketh’s room and went in. His master was there, with the slender young man from London.
‘Well, Parfitt,’ Hesketh said. ‘Did she take him to the old woman in the woods?’
‘She did, master.’
Hesketh turned to his guest. ‘Then we must act, Mr Ickman.’
‘Indeed,’ Bartholomew Ickman said. ‘It is time to tie up the loose ends of this entanglement.’
Chapter 31
In the early evening, soon after beginning his third — and yet wider — circuit of Oxford, Shakespeare came to a village alehouse a few miles west of the city. He handed his hired bay ma
re to a sullen ostler and told him to feed it well with oats, water it and wash it down.
The taproom smelt of sweat, smoke, ale and farmyard manure. He ordered food and settled into a corner booth to rest an hour. The food was poorly seasoned and the beer was indifferent, yet he barely noticed. His mind was elsewhere. After eating and paying, he spoke with the landlord, asking him the same questions he had asked all day. The words tripped from his tongue by rote.
The landlord was curt. ‘Got more than enough fugitives in these parts without your boy. Vagabonds and rogues. They been around here for weeks, thieving. No house is safe while they are about.’
‘Where are they?’
‘They had their camp in the woods around an old cowhouse four miles from here, towards Faringdon. Three of their women came into this village one day, begging, trying to sell wildflower posies for farthings and clutching babes that they said would die without food. Well, I gave them horsebread and some oats and told them to clear off. When they had gone, a bridle from my stables was missing, the devil damn their dirty hides. What’s more, the washing from Mistress Crispin’s line had been filched. No guessing where that all went. But with luck they’ll have gone for good now, with broken bones and cracked skulls to speed them on their way.’
‘Tell me more.’
The landlord scratched his balls, then belched. ‘Some farmers and their men were getting an armed band together against them, to drive them off. I’d go further than that, though. Hang them all, every last vagabond in the land, I say. Why don’t Her Majesty the Queen take care of these enemies at home rather than fighting her foreign wars in Belgia and Brittany? Get the militias in against them …’
Shakespeare listened to the grumbling and managed to get a clearer idea of where to find the vagabonds’ camp. He considered the hour. It was getting late and he was tired from riding all day. Still, he wanted to see this camp.
The ride took him an hour over fields and lanes. The only people he saw were farmworkers in their smocks, trudging homeward with the tools of their trade. He was in a hurry, but still he stopped and spoke with each one he saw, both to ask whether they had seen a boy like Andrew and also to ask if he was on the right route to the vagabond encampment.
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