by Peter Tonkin
Even as the thought stirred, like a worm in an apple, so he and his apprentice in the Mastery of Logic perforce stood back while two huge wagons laboured past, packed with barrels of powder and pulling a great gun apiece. Ben would have stepped into the road again immediately in their wake, but Tom held him back, allowing the silent troop of well-armed guards to canter by before they proceeded.
***
‘You brought a gallon of ale and a loaf the last time you called this early,’ said Poley. He was full-dressed and pale-faced. The darkness beneath his eyes bespoke a sleepless night, and the pout with which Mistress Yeomans put milk and bread on the table between them confirmed that his wakefulness had not been spent with her.
‘Have you the passes?’ asked Tom urgently. ‘I see you have been busy enough in the night.’
‘I have them. And more. But...’
‘What is it?’
‘Matters that need not concern you.’
Tom nodded, but his eyes were narrow. He had never trusted Robert Poley – not since their first meeting. Poley was as much master of equivocation – duplicity – as Tom was a master of logic – detection. Plain, blunt Robert Poley was a Cambridge man, graduate of Lord Burghley’s university and seedbed of Walsingham’s Secret Service. Poley had deceived the traitor Thomas Babbington, making the poor fool believe he could release the Queen of Scots and put her on the throne. Poley had deceived him, betrayed him and seen him tortured to confession and then drawn and quartered with all the rest of his sad confederates; and Poley had been at Fotheringay to see Mary Queen of Scots beheaded. Poley had deceived Kit Marlowe Cambridge graduate, playwright, mentor to Will Shakespeare and spy – into believing he was safe at Mistress Eleanor Bull’s big house in Deptford nearly two years since – deceived him, and held him still while Ingram Frizer ran a twelvepenny dagger through his right eye and into his too-clever brain.
No. Trust was never the strongest amongst the strange buttresses that held the relationship between Tom Musgrave and Robert Poley sound. Yet there was an obscure sort of affection – a respect for an equal if darker intellect, of the Glasgow graduate for the Cambridge man, of the Master of Defence for the Master of Duplicity, of the Master of Logic for the Master of Lies; the grudging love of Abel, perhaps, for his big brother Cain.
‘What is it?’ asked Tom, again, gently.
‘Matters that need not concern you,’ said Poley – again. In the silence that followed, another pair of powder-laden carts went creaking by on the lane outside and another troop of guards cantered after them, their tack a-jingle like duelling foils.
‘Very well,’ said Tom, abruptly. ‘Then let us have our passes. And more.’
***
The passes were for three men about the Council’s business, their bona fides attested by the Lord Chamberlain, Lord Hunsdon, himself; the more came from the same source: directives to the stable hands at the inn immediately opposite the opening to Hog Lane on Bishopsgate Street to release three of the first-quality black geldings normally reserved for messengers speeding up the Great North Road, into the charge of Her Majesty’s most faithful and trusted servant, Thomas Musgrave – this in spite of the fact that he would take them not north, but south.
‘This is the most powerful steed I have ever ridden,’ called Ben, uneasily.
Tom, one set of reins easily in one hand and another loosely in the other, glanced back over the riderless horse he was leading, at his increasingly nervous apprentice. Ben had become a bricklayer again, suddenly. He was all elbows and knees – and none of them tightly in to where they were meant to be. ‘You have five minutes to settle yourself,’ Tom called. ‘Then we’re back through Bishops’ Gate and into the bustle.’
Back through the gate they went and on across the junction of Wormwood Street and Camomile Street. One street led to one of Lady Margaret’s great closed London mansions, Wormwood in Jewry; and the other to another great house, St Mary’s Papey, where Poley’s mentor Francis Walsingham had set up his Secret Service, lived and died.
Between them, thought Tom darkly, the streets led from one end of this matter to the other.
Then on down Bishopsgate Street and into the press and bustle of the stirring town. At the well, where Bishopsgate widened as Threadneedle Street joined it, Tom reined in and let Ben push past. The gesture was not altruistic – it was to save his neck, for he had been craning over his shoulder twice in every instant as Ben gasped, groaned and threatened to tumble headlong. ‘Straight on down into Gracechurch Street,’ called Tom above the heads of the heaving crowd; and, as it was early and these the first horses to press on by, the crowd, hearing the order and seeing the state of its recipient, parted amenably so that the horse could follow its head.
Gracechurch Street led to New Fish Street and New Fish Street led to London Bridge.
Here the bustle of the heaving crowds thickened, the noise intensified tenfold and the horses began to curvet uneasily. How Ben stayed in his saddle along the arcaded tunnel sections through the midst of the great houses, between the loud brightness of the shop-fronts, Tom could hardly imagine; but so he did, and was confident enough to rein in on the outskirts of a central open area while Tom swung down and hammered on a doorway there.
‘What place is this?’ demanded Ben, as though affronted that Tom should slow his progress south.
‘It is Nonesuch,’ answered Tom, as amenable as the crowd. ‘Home to my friend Sir Thomas Walsingham and lodging to Kate and Audrey Shelton. I have a letter for Mistress Kate.’
This last was addressed to the serving-girl who opened the door to him.
‘She’s still abed, sir,’ said the girl.
‘Of course she is. Give it to her when she stirs.’ He swung into the saddle as the door closed. ‘Though I expect we’ll be far down the Kent Road by then,’ he added wryly.
And so they were, though Tom had no way of knowing it. They were past the Butts at Newington with its ramshackle little theatre where Philip Henslowe had transferred Will Shakespeare’s play of Romeo last year so that its famous sword fights would tempt the crowds come to practise there. They were just coming south of Greenwich, in fact, and thundering towards the Roman road that led like an arrow’s flight to Dartford and Gravesend.
They stopped only once, at the edge of the cobbled slope of the South Warke of London Bridge, still under the shadows of the piked heads atop the Great Stone Gateway. Here Tom dismounted again and hammered on the door of the Borough Counter to rouse the Bishop’s Bailiff.
The last time Tom had sped out to Elfinstone, he had caught the ferry to Gravesend and ridden down from there; and under most circumstances, the river was quicker than the road. This morning, however, things were different. They were not saddled with knackered jades, ancient and broken down from a rental. Instead they sat astride steeds that seemed close kin to Pegasus in the way they flew over the ground. The weather remained fine – and March had been dry of late so that the trackways that passed for municipal thoroughfares were mud-free and firm beneath their racing hooves. Where the roads sank into defiles between cultivated plots and hedgerows, or where they became busy with other travellers – on foot and snail-slow for the most part – it was easy enough to turn aside, up on to well-drained grassy slopes, and ride three-abreast under the broad blue heaven.
Even the Roman road, more than a thousand years old, by reputation at least, was overgrown – little more than a straight line over the rolling country, worn to a track by constant use rather than by maintenance or modern engineering; but it led them, as it had led the legions, straight towards their goal.
The only accident sufficient to slow their progress came when Ben’s horse cast a shoe and they were forced to linger, supping dark Kentish ale in the tiny hamlet of Wainscott – little more than an inn, a church and a smithy – while the local blacksmith repaired matters. Then off they rode again, and did not slow until the gates of Elfinstone’s castle park loomed.
Tom found himself a prey to a disorientating
whirl of conflicting emotions as he guided his black gelding’s head beneath the arch of Elfinstone’s great gate and past the empty gatehouse into the parkland that surrounded the ancient castle. The last time he had been here, the place had been in the hands of a hated enemy, who had been entertaining the Earls of Essex and Southampton – entertaining the Earls, who had been content to be entertained by a man so inferior to them in birth and breeding, each harbouring the hope that he would allow him access to his untold fortune, for they were both on the verge of ruin; entertaining them with the distant promise of Tom’s murder and the immediate prospect of hunting Lady Margaret to death, at the very least, with horse and hound. And that had been no mere act of gratuitous cruelty, for the Lady, and the child gotten upon her by a rape seven years earlier still, were all that stood between the three of them and the fortune they so coveted. Indeed, the woman and the child represented, to the Earl of Essex at least, one of the few things that could destroy his standing at Court, in the bright sun of the Queen’s favour, in support of which he had squandered his fortune in the first place.
In that little coppice over there, Tom thought, he had found her, all but naked, a wild, mad thing, as terrified of the snapping pack as the gentlest of hunted hinds; but silent, even then. He could almost feel, even now, the marble-cool weight of her as she rested on his saddle-bow and faced down a baron, two earls and their wild huntsmen with him.
And he remembered her, later, pulling from the ruin of her bodice the will that made her son the heir to all this land, all these riches, if they could only survive to claim them – a secret she had kept hidden in spite of all she had suffered, and that she revealed to him alone in the certain hope that he, and he alone, would save her and her boy. That certainty had made her fit for a mad room in Bedlam if nothing else had done, thought Tom with unaccustomed self-mockery.
He had hardly seen her since, believing – how naively, he now saw all too clearly – that the promised protection of the Council in the person of Lord Robert Cecil, Essex’s deadly enemy, would hold her safe in the face of the mortally ambitious Earl’s undying enmity.
***
The pathway across Elfinstone Park was better tended than the Roman road had been, though a good deal less direct. The three horses cantered down it towards the great grey fortress whose first stones had been laid by one of the Conqueror’s barons. Over the brow of a hill they came, with the westering sun setting behind them and the great castle before them seeming to sink into a grey lake of shadows with only its topmost turrets aflame. The associations in Tom’s mind added vividly to the brooding atmosphere of the place, and it was all too easy to envisage the Lady Margaret trapped within it, terribly aware of watching eyes, caged like a dove, mute as a swan.
Preoccupied though he was, Tom was using his eyes as well as his mind; and it was they that alerted him. ‘Ben,’ he said, ‘do you see any lights?’
‘No,’ said Ben shortly.
‘There should be lights by now. This is not some broken-down mansion chambering a family fallen on ruin, conserving their warmth and their brightness for an occasional guest. This is the home of one of the greatest fortunes in the land. There should be lights. And bustle.’ But all remained dark and silent as they rode silently down to Elfinstone.
The roadway ended in an ancient entrance, turreted to hold a drawbridge but closed now by a great pair of black oak gates the better part of twenty feet high that met at the top in a Gothic point. In one gate there was a smaller, lighter door, more fit for the use of humans than giants, but still ten feet high – big enough for a mounted man to enter through, if he were willing to bow his head.
Tom rose in his stirrups and beat upon this door. The sound made by his pounding fist echoed across a courtyard immediately beyond and was then swallowed by the great maw of the building itself. The three of them looked at each other. They had little time to linger or to speculate. If the castle was closed and empty – for whatever sinister reason – then they had better turn away soon, for the night was falling fast; they were a small party in a great desolation, and once the dark was down, then the roads would fill with all sorts of deadly dangers. Tom knew the nearest inn and it was an hour’s ride from here, through some notoriously lawless country.
Even before he could draw breath to voice his thoughts, however, Tom’s sharp ears heard a door squeak open.Youthful, energetic footfalls clapped across the flags of the yard and the tall door was opened to them.
‘My name is Tom Musgrave,’ Tom told the young man who held the door. In his yellow brocade with its hastily fastened buttons askew, he was the very image of the messenger so lately removed from Tom’s blood-boltered bed. ‘Your mistress summoned me.’
‘The Lady Margaret is no longer here. I had thought you must be...’
‘Your brother, returned from London?’
‘Indeed, and Master Mann...’
‘Master Mann the castle’s chamberlain,’ hazarded Tom, thinking of the dark-suited, silver-bearded corpse from the Fleet: the Council’s eyes in the place.
‘Indeed. The King of Elfinstone, he calls himself – when My Lady cannot hear.’
‘They are not here. But do you know me, boy? By name or by sight?’
‘By both, Master Musgrave. I was here to see you fight the Spaniard before the Earls of Essex and Southampton.’
‘Then you will know that your mistress would want you to let me in. For I have much to do this night, and much to talk about.’
Eight: Dead Mann’s Kingdom
There was light enough in Elfinstone, and bustle too; but it was all in the dark bowels of the place, down in the servants’ hall. Hither, at Tom’s impatient prompting, the young man in daffodil brocade led them while the Master of Logic sought ways to break his tragic news and Ben Jonson silently wrestled with the leaps of logic underlying the apparently devilish knowledge his master had so thoughtlessly displayed. Talbot Law, old soldier that he was, followed his nose and hoped for provender.
‘Since Lady Margaret’s departure on Monday three days since, we have been but a small company,’ the lad was explaining as they walked through the gloomy corridors, led by the dancing brightness of his taper-flame. ‘Though when my brother and Master Mann return, we will, as ever, turn to the cleaning of the place. It is spring, so the castle must be cleaned. It has been ever thus. The New Year brings new brooms.’
‘But if Lady Margaret and her family do not celebrate New Year here, then where do they do so?’ asked Ben, still preoccupied.
‘At Castle Cotehel in the far, foreign depths of Cornwall,’ answered Tom as though the bricklayer were a buffoon; and only the dazzle of the logic again displayed distracted Ben’s dangerous temper from the tone. ‘We are on the right mission but have come to the wrong place. I knew it as soon as we saw no candles. Fool that I am! Blind, impatient fool! Elfinstone is the family’s future, its bright and modern face, with the houses in London closed. Cotehel is its past, louring over the sea-borne trade routes that are the ancient foundation of its fortune. Where else would the family celebrate an ancient, traditional festival? Moreover, old Law, you know as well as I that Her Majesty’s father’s generosity always came at a price. If he added to Cotehel’s fortifications, then he’ll have demanded the family be there to defend it themselves as castellans during the raiding season; and what better time to move than this? But we have work enough here for an evening at least, if young James here will lead us on.’
‘You know me!’ The imperturbable young servant stopped, frozen with surprise; and the other three stopped behind him, scarcely less surprised themselves. ‘You know my name!’
‘A lucky guess,’ said Tom. ‘I have seen your brother – of an age with you and as like as two peas in a pod. Castor and Pollux seemed so unlikely for a pair of country twins, and so I thought James, perhaps, and John.’
‘We have also seen Master Mann, your chamberlain, I think,’ added Talbot, catching up with Tom and Ben at last.
The tone of their v
oices alerted young James to the weight of the news they carried, and he led them silently on for a step or two. Then he began to speak. ‘I have perhaps spoken unfairly of Master Mann. He called himself King of the Castle only in jest, for indeed the Lady Margaret has no other lord to protect her...’
‘And she needs protection, does she?’ probed Tom at once. ‘Who from?’
‘From the World, I meant,’ answered James, unease increasing in his voice. ‘Not from the Flesh nor any Devil I can name. But my lady shows a lively affection for the man – as much as her station will allow. And she places an absolute trust in him as well.’
‘As much as in young John and in yourself,’ continued Tom smoothly.
‘As much as our youth and inexperience will allow, indeed, though Master Mann has always been a powerful voice for our promotion to increased responsibility. The message John carried was entrusted to him on Master Mann’s word, in despite of –’
The name of the person who did not trust the boys – or Master Mann’s faith in them had to wait. For on that very word, James stepped through a doorway and down into the servants’ hall itself.
The servants’ hall of Elfinstone was a large, open cellar-like room, combining kitchen, bakery and work area with a sizeable dining area for the servants. When the castle was full, the place was probably packed. Now it was all but empty, though their arrival caused a bustle of speculation amongst the people there.
Tom’s practised eye swept over a range of servants here assembled for their supper while an ample under-cook and a couple of scrawny slatterns got it ready. These were castle staff, and the few extra needed to feed and tend them, people who lived here, required for the smooth running of an establishment such as this, and with nowhere else to go even when the mistress and the personal servants were all away: gardeners and groundsmen; keepers of stock, game, horse and hound; stable lads and kennel maids; cleaners and washerwomen – nobody senior; nobody apart from James with any brightness or intelligence in their eyes; honest country faces, not a little awed to find such gently dressed folk amongst them; none here used to dealing with the Lady Margaret and the family on a personal basis; all the body servants gone with the family to the wilds of Cornwall to celebrate New Year at Castle Cotehel, leaving only the most menial here to keep this place clean and ready against Her Ladyship’s return, with Master Mann, James and John to lead them. Or so it had been planned.