by Peter Tonkin
Defying the apparently logical assumptions of his two companions, however, Tom did not cross to the bloody table, in spite of the fact that this was clearly the end of his recent quest. Instead he led them through into a tall, silent hallway where a set of stairs mounted to silent, shaded upper rooms. Across the dusty hall he crept, with his two friends following, exchanging confused, enquiring glances, until he came up against the inside of the big front door. This was secured by a lock of equal age – and equal weakness to the Black Arts – as the one on the back door. In an instant he had opened it and swung the door back an inch or two, peeping out into the street. Then he closed it, locked it again and swung round to face the others. ‘We must be swift,’ he said. ‘We will search the kitchen for more details and clues as soon as we may, but I think we must also look through the whole of the house.’
As he crossed to the stair he whispered to Ben, ‘It is the house, Ben – the very house on Water Lane in whose doorway the leader of the footpads met the stranger in the cloak and mask as the boy lay dying in your arms. Remember: I saw them as I came past. And Kate, who watched the footpad run in, saw neither one of them come out.’
To Talbot he said, ‘Take care, old Law, for these are dark waters – deep and dark.’ Then he fell silent as the three of them climbed the stairs. As soon as they stepped off the top stair, Tom’s eyes were on the floor. The house was as good as derelict, the flooring thick with dirt and dust; but there were signs of occupancy – to wit, footmarks. Tom followed the trail of these into a privy whose simple downward opening sat above a midden in the garden; then to a bedchamber, which seemed tidier than the rest so far – certainly the ancient four-poster was neatly made with clean linen – and still the footsteps led out and on, their number – or the frequency of their passage – dwindling, speaking of occasional, private, perhaps even secret, visits.
This last set of footprints brought them to a short, recurved staircase winding up into the eaves. At the head of this stood a gallery, almost a passage, some eight feet long, and at its end, a door. On their left an inner wall stood eight feet tall, built up to the high-point of the roof. To their right it sloped down a little, clearly towards the guttering. The door reflected this shape, for it was not quite square, but sloping a little down towards their right hands. Again, this one was locked. On the slightly shorter side, a padlock gleamed in the gathering shadows, and it was modern, well maintained: solidly fixed.
Tom looked at it and shrugged. ‘This one is far beyond my mastery,’ he said. ‘Nick o’Darkmans and Kit Callot both would be hard put to pick through this.’
He and Talbot turned away, defeated, but Ben stopped them. ‘Wait,’ he said, flinging the word over his shoulder as he looked closely at the door itself, then crouched a little on the lower side. ‘I know neither of the worthies that you name and doubt that I would like to know them; but if your masters of the Black Arts could not get you through this door, I know an apprentice bricklayer who can. For see, the wall built inward from the roof-pitch here is merely lath and plaster. The frame seems to be settled here and bricked in, but these bricks are near as old as Julius Caesar and are more sand than substance. And the wood, I swear to you, might well have been part of the Ark. If I were to put my shoulder here’ – he suited the word to the action, obscuring the whole newly locked side of the ancient construct – ‘and if I were to push with all my might and main just here...’ A groaning ensued, and a creaking splinter, and the whole door grated slowly open, taking the lock and the jamb to which it was secured right into the secret room with it. Because the hinge was secured to the taller, inner wall, and the door also opened inwards, away ahead of them into the room itself, the jamb settled back and the whole thing opened freely.
The three friends walked into a long room with a sloping roof, lit from their left by the rays of the afternoon sun. The place had the air of a chapel and, considering the provenance of the building, it might well have been one, once. In the room there were three things: a chair, of plain wood, its seat padded with leather and polished with constant use, before which stood a table, backed against an inner wall; and on the table stood a picture. The picture was a portrait of a woman, head and shoulders, extended almost to the waist, set against an indeterminate background of clouds and sea. It was not the work of a great master, but there was something about it of Holbein’s liveliness and accuracy. Certainly Tom had no trouble in recognizing its subject – the golden ringlets bound up into that old-fashioned filigreed headdress; the even, golden brows beneath that clear, snowy forehead; those forthright eyes that stared straight into his, as still and deep as the most fathomless of pools; that decided nose, a partner for that strong, faintly dimpled chin; and, between, those sculpted, strawberry, ever-silent lips.
It was Lady Margaret Outram, Countess Cotehel, whose messages calling for his help and whose messengers who had brought them lay lost and dead within a couple of hundred yards.
No sooner had this fact burst into Tom’s consciousness than so did two others, each one more urgent and disturbing than the last. The portrait had obviously been taken some time since – or for private purposes – for Lady Margaret was dressed in a high ruff plunging to a low point, revealing her breast, in a manner reserved only for maiden ladies, to a deeply shadowed valley; and that valley, of a sudden, put Tom disquietingly in mind of Kate lying in the crook of his arms at the beginning of all this a scant couple of hours ago. For Kate’s stays had been unloosed, her shift a-gape and more than her cleavage on show. Tom crossed to the portrait, frowning, wondering why such an image should have come to his mind just then.
And he saw that, from throat-pit to breastbone, the portrait had been cut – cut with a razor-edged knife, as though whoever wielded it had dreamed of cutting away the Lady’s clothing. Perhaps even more.
No, certainly more, for, as he looked more closely at the thing, Tom realized that there were two more cuts across the canvas: one across the mouth, separating the lips exactly at their join, so that for a moment she seemed to breathe; but that was clearly impossible, for the other slit cut right across the throat, beheading her entirely.
Then the sinister slits in the portrait stirred again and Tom realized that the still air in the strange, unholy chapel had been stirred.
That a door downstairs had been opened.
Five: Greek Fire
Tom led them down the stairs, walking silently with his back against whichever wall was nearest, his sword leading in whichever hand was foremost. He was, at once, certain that someone had just entered the house, careful of losing the element of surprise, keen to overhear any unguarded talk and most potently in remembrance of the evil-looking pistol that the cloaked stranger had carried in the very doorway below. Talbot followed silently at his heels, walking more square-on, armed with sword in his right hand and dagger in his left, content to follow where Tom led and confident in his leader. Ben brought up the rear with his Toledo blade safely in its scabbard, Lady Margaret’s ravished picture beneath his arm and his square face folded in a mutinous scowl – for he wished to be a warrior, not a beast of burden.
As they crept along the long, dusty hallway, it became possible to hear quiet voices weaving impenetrably upwards out of indeterminate sounds – scraping, bumping, a kind of muted thundering. Tom strained to make out the words, to guess how many men were below at the least – but all to no avail. At the end of the corridor he paused, straining to see down the stairwell. The sun, which had illuminated the room up in the eaves, was setting behind the bulk of Bridewell now and it was suddenly surprisingly dark down there. From what he could see, the hallway seemed empty. The bustle and whispered conversation had moved through into the kitchen area where a sudden, slopping liquid element was added to the strange sounds that came creeping through the shadows to his ears.
As careful as a hunting cat, Tom put his right foot on the top step and shifted his weight down on to it. The stair remained blessedly mute. Swiftly and silently he crept downwards, plac
ing his tip-toes where the stairs promised to be strongest. Talbot followed in his footsteps like Eurydice following Orpheus out of hell. On the half-landing where the stairs turned, Tom paused and crouched, looking through into the kitchen area. It seemed brighter there, and shadows came and went monstrously through the half-open door. A shaft of light suddenly shot across the hall and settled, as bright as sunset, upon the inside of the main door. Tom saw that it was locked and bolted; but, on the sudden, this information took second place to other, much more vital. Ben stepped on to the stairs above him and they groaned like a bull at the baiting. The moment that he did so, however, what Tom could see and hear was swept aside by what he could smell. Under the kitchen door, under the shaft of sunset brightness, was pouring a thick liquid shadow that would have put him in mind most forcefully of blood had it not been for the overwhelming stench of it. It seared his nostrils – indeed, the whole back of his nose and throat. It was a terrifying odour – one that reared horrifically out of his young manhood at school with Maestro Capo Fero in Siena. It was a smell with the most terrible associations – from the one time he had seen someone being burned at the stake. The stench was that of naphtha. The thick black liquid was the legendary, unquenchable Greek Fire invented, so legend said, by Archimedes himself.
Revelation exploded in his head even as something much more dangerous and tangible exploded in the kitchen with a whoomph! that blew the kitchen door off its hinges and sent a wall of fire rolling across the black mess on the hall floor. Even as Tom sprang back and the two above him turned again, he saw a tall sea of flame come rolling across the hallway to batter like blinding surf against the back of the bolted front door. Mounting the stair hard on Talbot’s heels, then, he thought of Ben’s words – how old, dusty and dry this ruin was. The element so actively ablaze beneath them would feed upon the fabric of this place like a starving man upon a pie. Even as he leaped up into the corridor, he heard the deep, rumbling thunder that is the voice of great conflagrations.
‘I last heard a sound like that when we fired Nijmagen,’ bellowed Talbot, echoing his very thought.
Ben led them into the first bright bedroom and Tom saw at once that the brightness would cost them dear in this situation. The window – their only way out – looked west over the herb garden, and that was well ablaze. The desperate temptation of a two-fathom leap was, of necessity, removed unless they wished to roast. The second room Ben led them into was little better, the crazy flooring of the house adding another six feet before they came to a tiny window looking nearly twenty feet down on to the cobbles of Black Friars itself. Tom had escaped from a predicament like this one in times past by jumping out through one window and in through the window opposite, which usually stood a scant yard distant; but Black Friars was six feet wide at this point and the windows of the house opposite looked further away even than that. The next room they found was the privy and they paused here for a desperate moment, considering how best to rip up the plank with its one central hole and squeeze through to drop into the softness of the midden heap below. Unlike the door above, however, this wood was well secured in strong brick.
‘A later addition, like as not,’ bellowed Ben knowledgeably.
This time when they came back out into the corridor they were greeted by the sight of the stairhead gushing flames upward at a terrifying rate. A great cloud of spark-bright smoke came rolling along the ceiling towards them. Tom turned to Ben, coughing, choking and shouting, ‘Is there any other part of this structure we can break through as you broke through the doorway upstairs? Think, Ben. It is the master bricklayer we must look to now, or we all get a taste of hell itself together.’
Ben paused, thinking, but only for a moment. Then he nodded and they were off. Up that curving little staircase and into the long room under the eaves he led them. Hard on his heels they followed, across the smoking floor to the solid chair and empty table that had recently held the picture that remained, still, firmly under his arm – until he turned and passed it back to Tom. Tom sheathed his sword and took it. The smoke in the room was growing dangerously thick disturbingly rapidly, pouring in strange lines and columns through the ill-fitting floorboards; and the boards down at the stairwell end were beginning to spit and smoulder themselves.
Ben pulled the table into position and slammed the chair into place beside it so that he could use the one as a step up on to the other. Then, standing four-square on the table, he wedged himself at a half-crouch under the sloping beams in the ceiling above and, even as Tom’s quick mind saw exactly what he was up to, he heaved with all of his square-bodied, bricklayer’s strength.
So the three of them went through the roof. Ben went first, scattering old tiles and ancient timbers hither and yon. With the good eye of an apprentice to his trade, he had brought them through within easy reach of the central ridge. Thus he was able to kick himself out to the waist, use Talbot’s shoulders as the Bishop’s Bailiff leaped on to the table in turn, and squirm out. Then, holding the central ridge with one hand, he pulled Talbot past him as Talbot in turn kicked off from Tom’s shoulders. Finally, the pair of them reached down for Tom, who needed more help because the room at his feet was well ablaze, because there was no one presenting shoulders for him to stand upon, and because he refused to leave Lady Margaret’s portrait to the flames. Then, with Ben still in the lead, they ran north along the sagging roofs of two more houses until they were able to slide down a gentle pitch and clamber on to the top of the old gate by the opening into Water Lane. From here it was a simple matter for them to run down its internal steps and out into the street.
Tom’s plan now was to put Lady Margaret safely in his rooms, then to join the throng who were already fighting the blaze under the direction of the Watch. His exit from a burning house, through the roof itself, had by no means gone unnoticed, however; and if Talbot was well known in Southwark and Ben in Islington, everyone in Black Friars knew Tom, so no sooner was he safely out into the street than he found himself face to face with Captain Curberry.
Tom was used to terse, quick-fire debriefings under battlefield – and near-battlefield conditions. He had given one such to the Earl of Leicester beneath the walls of Nijmagen – one that had founded his fortune, as well as those of Talbot Law, Ugo Stell and Will Shakespeare, who had been there with him. He had given one – and more than one – to Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon and Lord Chamberlain, the Queen’s cousin, half-brother and most trusted advisor, whose Man he was together with all of Will Shakespeare’s acting troupe the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. He had given one to Lord Robert Cecil, Master of the Queen’s Secret Service, in a shadowed room in Elfinstone Castle. He had given one to the Earl of Essex, Master of the Queen’s Horse and sometimes of her heart, as they had run across London Bridge pursuing a madman with an axe. He had given one to his uncle and namesake the Lord of the Waste at Bewcastle on the Scottish Borders as they had taken a war-band into the black heart of Liddesdale pursuing more madness, murderers and a monstrous, ghostly hound; and he gave one to Captain Curberry now as Ben once again became responsible for the portrait and the Bishop’s Bailiff added observations of his own.
‘I will have to refer this to Sir William Danby,’ decided Captain Curberry in the end. His concern about the political impact of the situation outweighed other, more immediate, practical aspects. Not even Tom could turn him from his moment of hesitant deliberation while the Watch down Water Lane behind them oversaw the pouring of bucket after bucket of water into the blazing house. ‘This is more than a simple matter of murder now. And if, as you say, there may be some threat against the House of Outremer, the Queen’s Coroner himself will want to be involved.’
‘And I had best refer it onward and upward also,’ said Tom, exchanging a look with Talbot Law. ‘For anything taken to the Crowner’s ears had better also be taken to Lord Hunsdon, at the very least, and probably Lord Robert Cecil.’
However, a combination of events arising from the arsonists’ use of Greek Fire and Captain Cur
berry’s failure to take Tom’s word that this was an important element to the problem confronting them took the matter to more general notice in any case. The water pouring into the front of the house swept through into the garden and thence it settled into the Fleet Ditch; but because Greek Fire was composed of lighter, fiery elements, it rode upon the water’s back and, instead of being quenched, it simply poured out of the garden and into the river. So that the Fleet river exploded into flames. The noxious gases given off by the rotting foulness in the dark water blazed for a glorious moment that threatened Bridewell Palace itself, then flames flowed out on to the Thames. Wherries, ships and shallops headed south. The dangerous floating conflagration spread along the river wall, past the Black Friars steps and threatened Puddle Warf, Paul’s Warf and even Bayard’s Castle before it petered out, broken up and smothered, not by the hand of man but by the roughness of the waters beneath the rapidly falling tide.
By this time too the fire was under control. The two houses beside the Gate were ruined beyond recovery, but the top of Water Lane and the rest of Black Friars was safe. Wearily, Tom dragged himself homeward with Talbot by his side. Ben had come and gone about various commissions and Tom expected to find him guarding Kate in his rooms above Aske’s the Haberdasher. But Kate was gone. Not even her reputation was likely to remain unblotted were she found to be sitting half-dressed in the middle of a matter such as this one. She had rooms she shared with her sister Audrey and Audrey’s affianced husband-to-be Sir Thomas Walsingham, nephew and heir to the Spy-Master, at Nonesuch House on London Bridge. Tom would find her there, when this matter was less dangerous to a hopeful lady-in-waiting to the Queen.