by Peter Tonkin
'Let us hope,' said Ugo dryly, 'that he has not studied his Machiavel as well as you did in Siena.'
Their conversation was terminated by the arrival of its subject. Poley's eyes grew round at the sight of Ugo's workshop with its piles of black powder, measured and unmeasured, its scales and mixing bowls. Its rows of moulds for making shot of varying weights. Its little furnace for melting lead and its little leaden ingots. Its assemblance of barrels in varying sizes and of varying lengths and compositions. Its array of handles carved in wood, strengthened with metals of all sorts. Its seemingly infinite variety of firing mechanisms from match locks through wheel locks to dog locks and snaphaunces. Tom watched the spy gaze around like a bumpkin at Court, thinking that Ugo was safe in this man's hands until he got possession of this cornucopia. A man who carried a Solingen blade but relied on an elderly wheel lock would never cast away such riches as this except at the final extremity. 'Ready to go?' Tom asked him quietly.
He had to repeat himself twice before he received any reply from Poley.
'Why have you not been in Morton's lodging already?' asked Tom as soon as the two of them stepped out into the evening. The sun was somewhere far beyond Green Park, all but its upper brightness hidden by London Wall. Around them, especially up against the great, grey, stone cliff of the defensive works, the houses reached up to three storeys and four, jutting out in over hangs that closed off all but the thinnest lines of sky. Not that either man was foolish enough to look up. At their feet the roads sloped into central gutters or kennels, choked with household waste and excrement as yet unclaimed by the City Scavenger. Tom disdained them and cleaned his boots in consequence, but he saw Poley wore fashionable slippers over his shoes to protect them from the filth whose odour assailed their noses like the stench of the plague. There were cats everywhere, most of them alive. Anyone who wished to remain upright was always careful of where he put his feet.
Turning through Ludgate, they got a flicker of setting sunlight from the west before their attention was claimed by inmates of Ludgate gaol begging through the bars. Tom handed down a penny or two without a second thought, but Poley lingered, bestowing his charity on the pinkest cheek and the fullest bosom. These were gentlefolk for the most part, fallen upon hard times and, uniquely in all the London jails, it contained women of passable looks who disdained whoring to eke out their penury. But, Poley no doubt calculated, the kindness of a gentleman to a gentlewoman in distress might garner a reward in time.
Then they were through Ludgate and into Alsatia, and their way craved wary walking of another kind. 'You said Holborn,' said Tom quietly, his eyes narrow as the Fleet Bridge approached.
'I was misinformed. He was roomed at a house in Hanging Sword Court.'
When they reached the place, Tom saw at once why Poley had not ventured here this afternoon. Hanging Sword Court was near enough the heart of Alsatia. The City Watch did not come south of Fleet Street nor west of the Bridewell out the length of Whitefriars; they did not dare. There wasn't even the Bishop's Law to run in these streets, nor a brutal bailiff to enforce it. The place was a-bustle with lean-faced, narrow eyed men in russet and fustian; men with black teeth, sallow skins and sharp daggers. More than once Tom saw the gleam of a steel thumb - a new fashion among cut purses. He was glad enough that he had left his own purse at home, safe on Ugo's bench in the space left by the gun he carried in its stead. Poley, he assumed, had brought his own. He hoped it was the one Ugo had fixed.
Before they could attract too much un welcome attention, however, they turned into Hanging Sword Court. It was as overbuilt and as narrow as any of the streets nearby. A glance upward allowed Tom to calculate that it would be easy enough to jump from one top-storey window to that opposite. The place was shadowed, nearly dark, and the shadows seemed to have attained a kind of physical form with the power of the stench it contained. The kennel down the middle of the road did not run away - though it angled down to the river, parallel with the Fleet River a street or two eastward - but was stopped instead by the back wall of a house. The wall, as blank and grey as the City Wall itself at first glance, had a great stinking pile of rubbish piled against it; and here again the cats ran wild, hunting all the rats and mice tunnelling through the mess.
As they came up to the house, Poley began looking around. An intelligence far meaner than Tom's would swiftly have deduced the spy had left a guard of some kind to keep an eye on the place. But before any watcher appeared, another man hurried up to Poley.
'Well met, Master,' he puffed.
'In good time.' Poley stopped looking around, but not, Tom thought, because he had found what he was looking for. 'You have your picks?'
'If you have my price.'
'You'll be paid inside. Now make haste.'
The lock-pick led them up to a doorway in the wall that Tom had failed to notice, probably because it was so close to the enormous rubbish pile. The little man fell to work on the door's big, old-fashioned-looking lock and Tom turned to look back up the Court towards Fleet Street. The filthy little byway had been empty when he and Poley entered it but it was rapidly filling with people now. All of them men. None of them here by accident. And none of them, by the look of things, used to observing the laws about compulsory Church attendance o' Sundays.
'Poley. Tell your man to make haste.'
Poley turned at Tom's word and spat a curse. His hand disappeared into his clothing but Tom's fingers closed on his forearm. 'It's early days for that,' he said. 'Especially as you've only two shots.'
He walked forward. 'Give you good den, gentles,' he called easily as he moved. 'How can I serve you?' There were six of them, he calculated, now that proximity allowed him to see more clearly. Armed with an assortment of knives and clubs.
'Serve us, cully?' called one of them in reply. 'Why by rendering up your gold, your weapons and your duds. Or you'll likely render us up your very life and soul. And you won't be the first today.' He glanced meaningfully at the rubbish heap against the wall - but Tom knew better than to look over his shoulder.
Instead, one of Ugo's finest appeared in Tom's fist then. It was a snaphaunce pistol, but unlike Poley's double-barrel it was the last word in modern armoury. For it was a revolver. It boasted six chambers, all loaded and capped, which were primed in turn by the pulling-back of the cock-head. Tom snapped back the head and targeted the speaker. 'A little lead, perhaps, if you come any closer,' he warned.
'Charge.'
Tom shot the first man in the chest and cocked again in an instant. The second discharge sent a second man sprawling across the feet of his companions and broke the charge. Even so, it required a third shot to stop them. 'I make that one dead and two like to be crippled,' said Tom.
'And all of Alsatia roused,' snarled one of the survivors.
'Until they arrive, it's just we few,' said Tom. 'So who'd like to die next?'
'Tom,' called Poley. 'We're in.'
Tom walked backwards unerringly to the open door, with Ugo's pistol aimed straight for the leader's face. Only as he entered the doorway itself did Tom risk a glance to one side, mindful of what the dead man said earlier.
There, from the rubbish pile, the dead eyes of Poley's watcher stared up at him.
Beneath the gape of his mouth, the gape of his cut throat was wider. Then the door slammed shut and Poley swung a great balk of wood down across it.
'Not even the whole of Alsatia could break through that now,' he said with satisfaction.
'True, but on the other hand there had better be another way out of here,' said Tom.
Out in Fleet Street the man in black who had been watching Tom since the incident of the Rose continued to observe the ebbing and flowing of the men of Alsatia as they carried out the dead and wounded and then began to gather in angry conversation, temporarily thwarted by the impenetrability of the battlements protecting Julius Morton's apartments. Then he began to work his way round, certain that there must be another way out of the house - down towards the river, p
erhaps. That would be the way they would have to come now. Out into Salisbury Court and then down past Bridewell, perhaps.
And as the black-clad watcher moved, made briefly conspicuous as he was going in the opposite direction to everyone else, Ugo Stell pocketed the second snaphaunce revolver and fell in behind the sinister stranger, watching him from the far side of the street.
Chapter Thirteen - The Bishop's Bailiff
Immediately behind the bolted door was a tiny chamber filled with almost Stygian darkness. Only the faintest grey glimmer showed where a stairwell reached upwards towards Morton's living quarters. Here the three of them paused to gain their breath. As they did so, Tom slipped the half-empty revolver back into his clothing. 'We'll never get out of here alive,' snarled the lock-pick. His words were emphasised by a tremendous crash against the door immediately behind them. With a strangled cry, the lockpick pushed past Poley and began to run up the stairs. He had gone perhaps half a dozen steps before there came a sharp click and a short, vicious whirring sound. The lock-pick was blasted bodily back down the stairs and the sound of his skull hitting the inside of the door gave pause to the thunderous blows raining outside it. His heels drummed briefly against the lower boards, but that was no more than the passing of his spirit, thought Tom. No one was going to survive a crossbow bolt pinning their head to a door like that. And sure enough, the lock-pick's movements stopped almost immediately. Tom went down on his knees at once. It occurred to him that he might essay a quick prayer while he was down there, but this was not the primary objective of the action. It took him out of range of anything else unpleasant hidden upstairs. It also allowed him to progress up towards the light by gradual degrees, checking for more booby traps. But the broken ends of the trip wire attached to the trigger of the crossbow were all that defended the stairwell. Easing himself up over the top step into a surprisingly large and airy chamber, Tom asked, 'Is there likely to be anything else like that hidden up here, Master Poley?'
'I cannot begin to guess.'
'You knew him, surely. You can hazard ...'
'I had no idea he was so...'
'Terrified? I understand. Best take care, then. And, while we have so much privacy from prying eyes and listening ears, now is the best time I think for you to tell me what you conceive to be afoot here.'
It was at this point in their conversation that the battering on the door below was resumed, and the speed of their actions began to gain increasing urgency.
'Tell me what you believe,' countered Poley defensively. 'I will add, subtract or correct as necessity dictates.' Tom picked himself up and Poley followed suit, continuing, 'To do anything else would be impossible. I have been an intelligencer for nigh on fifteen years. I have seen plots come and go, kings and queens, lords and ladies, soldiers and courtiers, ministers of state, aye and spies in plenty. It is as though we sit atop a pyramid of Egypt here. We seem to be on the littlest point - one murder and a little mystery; but away beneath us stretch great walls aslope into the very heart of the desert, hiding secrets without limit and murders without number. You tell me what you can see from your little pyramid point and I will shield you from the momentous depths on which we sit.'
'Like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants,' said Tom softly, remembering Aristotle's words culled from Socrates, read somewhere in his schooling. Something in the man's words touched him deeply. Truth, perhaps; or something sounding like it. 'Very well. You had set Morton to cull information on something of greatest moment to the Chamberlain and the Council. Were I a betting man, I would suppose that it was a part of the matter of Lord Strange's death, for Morton was Strange's man and I learn now that my lord was murdered. You had furnished him with protection and with contacts. But the more he discovered, the less he disclosed to you and the more fearful he became. And things came to a crisis yesterday when he discovered something that he knew would kill him. He came here. He set his trap, so he expected trouble to follow him home at least. He contacted his woman and whoever else. You already suspected he was running out of your control and so you had him and his woman followed but you lost him to the Spanish assassin - who we must assume to be at least a part of what he feared. And you have lost her to you know not who or what. You are beset on every side. Your watcher here is dead - perhaps killed by the men of Alsatia. They were suspiciously swift to exercise their rights to life and death upon us. Logic dictates that the guts in the rubbish below is your watcher from the Rose, so if there is anything he has not told you about the play, the death or the missing woman you are too late to hear it now. And yet, beset though you may be, you cannot afford to lose control of this, whatever it is, for if it scares Lord Hunsdon, then it is like to terrify the rest of us and that can only mean the Queen's at risk, or someone very close to her. And you, the spider of intelligence, had all the threads within your grasp until a day or so ago. And now they are all slipping away faster than quicksilver.'
As Tom exercised his mastery of logic, the two men, mindful of the battering on the door below, had been searching carefully through the room. There was a tumbled, truckle bed along one wall. Its ill-piled coverings the only untidy things in a fastidious room. At the end of the bed stood a table and, upon this, neatly piled papers. Beyond that there stood a clothes press, its top shut. Above that a bowl and jug, both wanting water. Above the bed, covered for the most part in greased paper, windows looked out at windows a yard or so away. Tom knelt and pushed his rapier under the bed, hooking out a pair of slippers. Again with his blade, gingerly, he lifted the coverings but disturbed little more than a flea or two.
Poley was busy with the papers. 'Mostly copies of his lines. What is this madness about Queen Mab? Is it a part of the new play?'
'It is. Anything else?' Tom crossed to Poley's side and began to glance through the papers too, swiftly sorting out the speeches from Romeo and Juliet, setting them apart to return to the Rose. 'Was he getting funds from your purse - or the Council's?' he asked.
'Something. Sometimes.'
'Then you weren't paying him enough. Look.' A series of letters to courtiers begging for preferment. 'If you want a man to focus on the matter in hand, then you remove his most pressing distractions,' he said. 'I should suggest that pinchpenny spycraft is next to worthless.'
'True, but only partly so. Spies have deep purses and many distractions. Do you think I could ever have paid Julius Morton enough money to stop him getting distracted?'
'Probably not. But he needed all his wits about him yesterday and look, he was begging the Earl of Southampton to grant him an audience. And Essex too, by God.'
'Let me see those.'
'Wait. There's one here sealed. It's heavy. Stiff.'
'Give it here to me. Give all of it-'
'No. Wait. When I was in Italy, I heard of a device ...'Tom laid the letter down and stood back. He slid the point of his sword beneath the seal and twisted, as anyone might do wishing to open it. One section of the paper snapped back and a hail of little darts leaped out. Because both men were standing well back, the pins harmed neither of them, but had they been opening the thing in the normal way they would have been blinded at the very least. 'Spanish pins,' said Tom. 'Poisoned, like as not.' He went up to the letter and moved it gingerly. 'Safe now,' he said. 'God's teeth, there's writing in it.' He flipped the package over and glanced at the front. There was a name scrawled there. But like the rest of Morton's room, his writing was neat. Easy to read. 'It's for you,' said Tom and handed it to Poley.
'We'd best take all of these papers,' said the spymaster, his voice shaken and low. He snatched up a solid-looking leather document wallet and began to stuff the papers into it as swiftly as he could.
'As long as it's not too much to carry,' warned Tom. 'And as long as we can move it swiftly...'
The battering at the door had suddenly been succeeded by a sinister splintering sound.
Tom turned to the last of the items Morton had left in the room. He crouched and slid his sword under the lid of the clothes
press, easing it up fractionally. He had placed himself carefully so that the last of the light shone over his shoulder into the widening crack. The moment he saw the silver thread which stretched tautly down from the lid into the black depths of the box he stopped, slid his sword out and stood.
Below stairs, the door crashed wide. 'Time to go,' he decided. He took a step back, holding his sword level with his shoulders across his chest. Then he turned and threw himself bodily at the window. He dived through the waxed paper and flew over the three-foot gap a couple of storeys above the street to crash through the facing window into the house opposite. He rolled forward, careful of his sword, and rose to his feet. Shrugging the wreckage of the window frames from his shoulders, he pounded through a series of small, empty rooms with Poley close at his heels.
They had just reached the next outside window, overhanging the broad brown wash of the Fleet River itself, when the first of their pursuers reached the window of Morton's room. The pursuer had a clear view through the ruined walls and open doors at the pair of them and had he been carrying one of Ugo's guns he might have done some harm, for they were standing, momentarily irresolute, stopped dead by the stench arising from the putrid river below. But all he had was a club. And then his opportunity to do anything at all stopped, for one of his confederates threw open the lid of Morton's clothes press, and just had time to scream something mercifully unintelligible before the three pounds of gunpowder it contained blew up. The top of Morton's room - and the house at the end of Hanging Sword Court - disappeared. A wall of sooty fire rolled outwards along the corridor opened by the fleeing intelligencers. Tom's uncharacteristic hesitation ended. The pair of them plunged through the window and into the Fleet River beneath a breath of flame worthy of Hell's mouth itself.