The Point of Death

by Peter Tonkin

  'It is, your grace. Though how you come to know me I cannot begin to tell.'

  'Oh I know you, Master Musgrave,' purred the Earl of Essex coldly. 'Though I regret that our acquaintance shall be sadly short-lived.'

  Chapter Twenty-Three - The Point of Death

  Any attempt to spy out the land in secret was now at an end. With the half-naked woman sitting, shrinking, across his saddlebow, Tom turned the black gelding's head towards the main gate and the thoroughfare leading down to Elfinstone's grand entrance. All along this open, public way were the marks of earlier celebrations. A cart of deer hunted to death yesterday trundling inwards for tonight's table. The blackened, smouldering craters of huge bonfires, the scars of the blazing, showering and exploding of fireworks. An empty pavilion down by the castle's wide fishponds, a gilded barge pulled on to the sloping sward beside it. What looked like a mermaid's tail, eerily empty. An antique tomb lying open, blasted wide, apparently by some pyrotechnic accident. The atmosphere of dissipation spinning into wild excess closed relentlessly around them as they approached Elfinstone's craggy walls.

  Tom, Ugo and the silent Lady Margaret passed through a lengthy series of rituals as they were guided deeper and deeper into the cold grey heart of the place. In the graniteflagged courtyard inside the huge portcullis, they were relieved of their horses, which were led away by Lord Outremer's grooms. They were assigned servants to take the baggage that the horses had carried and to guide them through the maze of the massive, steely keep to Tom's chamber first, then Ugo's bed in the servants' hall. As a guest of the chamber, Tom fell under the sway of my Lord's Chamberlain, and that assured him of elevated status in accommodation, of service and at meals. And, indeed, he was to be flattered with one of the most commodious chambers, on the outer wall above the midden, with its own private garderobe, four-poster and wide ewer of fresh water. From its one tall window, it commanded a view across the western grounds, over the blasted tomb towards the forested cliffs. Ugo was destined to sleep in the hall, pitched in with the retinues of the other visiting dignitaries; but even he took precedence over the lowlier servants of Elfinstone Castle itself, many of whom had been dragged in from farms and smallholdings on the estate and nearby for the occasion.

  This was just as well. Ugo bore no indentures and was a freeman in a guild of his own. Only his association with actors over the last few months allowed him to move out of his real self, forget what respect was due to him, and assume the person of the Master's man he seemed to be. Tom, of course, had taken to duplicity as though it had come to him with his mother's milk - though had he been the man he pretended, he would have been wet-nursed.

  Now he gazed deeply into the wide, trusting eyes of Lady Margaret as she sat, rigid on his bed. Ugo finished loosening the straps that had pinioned her arms. She moved them stiffly, as though unused to having them free. Such was her fierce concentration on Tom's face that all else seemed blotted out to her - not least the utterly revealing nature of the few shreds of rag that were all she wore beneath her waist. Hesitantly, like a virgin lover, she reached out to Tom. Tom, all but entranced, reached out to her in return. Gently, she took his hand and pressed it with fearsome strength to her bosom. Through the stiff bib of her bodice Tom could feel the pounding of her heart, the urgent swell and fall of her breasts. She looked at him, frowning with concentration, her mouth wide and working, but silent.

  'What is it, my Lady?' he asked gently. 'What would you have of me?'

  Frowning more deeply still, she crushed his hand to her softness, but he could not understand what she was trying to tell him.

  His kindness and concern were focused upon her, but in truth his mind was not. He wished to see her properly dressed, and wondered how to go about that. He wanted to explore the castle - to find out where his enemies were, and where they held his friends. He ached with impatience to assure himself that Kate and Constanza had not been harmed. And yet he was held here by the wild eyes of this poor mad girl, the strength of her grip and the burning softness of her bosom.

  The door to the chamber opened behind him. He turned, hearing a quiet step and the swish of a skirt. 'God's my life, Tomas. I cannot visit you these days but I find you sporting with some naked trull. When you wish to end an amour, sir, you certainly go about it hammer and tongs!'

  'Bella!' he cried with relief. 'Are you well?'

  'Why should I not be well?'

  The simple innocence of the question gave him pause. He had supposed her ravished away; and yet, apparently not. 'You are a guest here?' he asked.

  'Of Señor Salgado, the Spanish Maestro, friend and advisor to His Grace of Essex.'

  'He is your lover, then?' asked Tom with some relief.

  'Tomas! Not in front of Signor Stell, whom I know well, and certainly not in front of some doxy I know not at all! Why does she press your hand to herself in this manner? What in all the world is that mess she is wearing?'

  Ugo rose to the occasion while Tom was caught between framing a lie that would cover it all and trying to recover his hand. 'She is a maudlin woman we found in the woods, madonna. Master Tom wishes to take care of her and was trying to find out about her when you came in.'

  'So, she has her past engraved on her heart, has she? Well, her future must involve some bathing and some dressing. Maudlin, you say. Is she new escaped from Bedlam then? Does she rave? Is she dangerous?'

  'The opposite,' said Tom. 'She has been ill-used beyond imagining and yet she sits silent as a puppy.'

  'Well, I will tend to her,' decided Constanza. But her simple plan was lent unexpected complexity by Lady Margaret's intractable refusal to leave Tom's room. Constanza swept out to get her maid and some clothing. Tom sent Ugo out to look for the servants' hall and reconnoitre as he did so.

  The instant they were alone, Margaret let go of Tom's hand. He stood back a little, frowning down at her, all too aware that her presence here was a responsibility and a handicap he could well do without. He glanced at the door, crossed to it and exchanged a nod with the servant standing guard outside, closed it again then turned back to the bed - and found Margaret stark naked. Above the scratched and battered paleness of her body, her eyes claimed his again. There was nothing of carnality in them; little enough of madness. Simply an absolute, child-like, overwhelming trust. Out above the mottled moons of her breasts, she was thrusting the verminous wreckage of her clothing at him, the bodice of her gown spread taut. He took it automatically, and the moment that he did so, he realised what she had been trying to tell him. The layers of material crackled stiffly between his fingers. He brought the bodice up closer and looked at it. There was layer upon layer of neat stitching around the edge where layer after layer of extra cloth had been sewn on to the inside. He slid out his dagger and slit the cloth with all the care of a barber surgeon. And pulled out Lord Outremer's missing will. One glance at the ornate writing on the official-looking parchment was enough. This was the document Wormwood in Jewry had been torn asunder to find. And she had carried it next to her heart all along. Constanza's jibe had been true enough after all. His eyes met Margaret's over the top of the document and both of them smiled.

  The door opened and the fleeting moment of intimacy was past. As was the tiny instant of sanity. The naked woman's eyes were blank, fathomless. 'Tomas!' cried Constanza. 'What now?'

  He stood between the women, using his body as a shield while he folded the will into the breast of his doublet. 'I think Lady Margaret is ready for a wash,' he said. Then he wasted ten more minutes explaining to Constanza how he knew the lady's name and title all of a sudden, what little he knew of her - what little he dared reveal to Domenico Salgado's new amour.

  The Great Hall was a wild bustle. It was a room large enough to have contained the Rose, tall enough to have held two of its three galleries. And it was galleried indeed, on three walls, with tall windows standing high above. Below, the east and west ends of the room were distinguished by the Great Door and the Lesser Door and along the walls to north an
d south stood suits of armour holding huge swords such as might have been wielded in the heroic days of old.

  Above the Great Door hung the coat of arms of Lord Outremer. Through this door, beneath these gilded arms, all the guests would process to table tonight. Above the Lesser Door to the west stood a gallery like the minstrels' gallery at the Rose, which would indeed be a minstrels' gallery tonight, until the play transformed it into Juliet's bed chamber, and her tomb.

  Between the Great Door and the Lesser Door, tables, trestles and trenchers; benches, chairs and stools were all lying scattered hither and yon. Chairs lay ready to seat the guests and, in the centre, a huge gilded throne, backed with the arms of Outremer, sat ready to elevate the Baron Cotehel. Boards and costumes, props and playbooks were generally disposed. Chamber staff, kitchen staff, actors and onlookers bustled and gestured, rushed and dawdled and lolled. Somewhere a lutanist was practising an ancient air by Thomas Tallis. Somewhere a consort of viols was preparing the latest fashionable air by Peter Phillips, a musician popular amongst those who had spent time in the Low Countries, his 'Dolorosa Pavane' and 'Galliard'. It was mid afternoon and the feasting was due to start at six.

  After two hours of eating and drinking, accompanied by music and general entertainments, there would be dancing to music livelier than Phillips's 'Pavane', after which the Rose Company would give Romeo. Then Maestro Domenico Salgado would execute Master Thomas Musgrave for the amusement of the new Lord Outremer and in elegant completion of his designs for usurpation and revenge, and the company would go to bed at midnight.

  Or that, thought Tom grimly, was the plan. He leaped easily up on to the low stage that stood to one side of the Lesser Door at the west end of the chamber, ready to be pushed into place beneath the gallery there when the feasting was done and the coming-andgoing at an end. He needed to learn these boards, for it was likely that his duel with Salgado would be fought across them. But he needed to talk to Will Shakespeare more.

  The playwright was pacing through Mercutio's death with the relevant actors. Luckily, the Rose's stage was small enough to be perfectly reproduced here - or Tom would likely have been distracted in earnest, called in to restage Romeo's mock duels with Tybalt and the County Paris before undertaking the deadly reality of his own. 'Will,' called Tom. 'Have you seen Kate Shelton?'

  'No. But I've seen both Salgado and Baines. And I hear Constanza's here some where too.'

  'Are you all staying after Romeo for the rest of the entertainment?'

  'For your duel? Of course. I have laid ten angels that you best him within the first five passes.'

  'Can I call on you? Can I count on you?'

  'Is Ugo not standing with you?'

  'Yes. But if I need to, can I count on you?' Will looked straight into Tom's eyes. He said nothing. In spite of his light banter about betting, Will knew there was something more serious at hazard here. But would he stand with Tom if the dreadful need arose?

  Tom thought of the summer Will had spent in Southampton House and moving through the Earl's country residences with the Earl, the Earl of Essex and their courtly circle. He was asking the playwright to walk away from undreamed riches, all but limitless influence. From the love of a powerful patron, bosom friend to Her Majesty's current favourite. 'I must spend the remainder of the day avoiding Salgado's poisons and Baines's bullies simply to stand on level ground tonight,' he persisted. 'Cotehel is the kind of man that hunts women through his parks with his hounds for his pleasure and holds Kate somewhere in this palace he has slaughtered a family to get, and he wants me dead and you know well enough why. I'm surprised he's let you live as long as this yourself, for you were there with me at the start.'

  'Now why should I fear the fox,' asked Will quietly, 'when I have slept with the lion?' On that he turned back to his business and Tom went away about his, wondering why Will should leave it until this moment to confirm at last that he had read the long-banned, deadly dangerous works of Niccolo Machiavelli.

  There were only two places Kate could be, thought Tom grimly. In a private chamber or a dungeon. If Morton's fears for her had any basis, then a dungeon seemed most likely, unless she, like Will and Constanza, was sleeping with the enemy already - or, like him, was destined to be exhibited tonight so their fates could be sealed in public. These thoughts were chilling enough, but the alternative was worse - especially to his ears that remembered the sounds Kit Callot had made on Topcliffe's rack when he had thought the tortured screams were hers.

  Using the bustle that ranged throughout the castle, therefore - the fact that there were so many guests and servants stranger here, and most of them lost for much of the time - he spent the next two hours in fruitless search. It was only when a heavy hand fell on his shoulder and a flustered, familiar servant, discovering him in Lord Outremer's own quarters, backed this time by a dangerous-looking guard, insisted on guiding him back to his chamber, that he was forced to give up.

  Ugo and Margaret were both waiting for Tom in his chamber and while one filled his ears the other filled his eyes. 'I've discovered a clear path for our retreat and escape if needed,' said Ugo. 'It was no easy task for I've been dogged every inch of my way. Whether you noticed or not, you have been yourself, Tom. It seems to me that every enemy we've crossed swords with during the last few days is here. I keep expecting to find Nick o' Darkmans lurking, or Topcliffe in the cellarage. Are you listening?'

  'Aye,' said Tom. Constanza had put Margaret in one of her old dresses but the green gold brocade suited her colouring well. The servant-girl had washed her breast, face and arms at least, and Constanza had lent shoes, so that she sat demurely, a high bodice pinned in place across a snowy cleavage and tiny golden toe-tips peeping from under her hem. They had not washed her hair but they had combed and brushed it until it sprang out into a riot of curls that swept over her shoulders and halfway down her back. A little white arsenic to pale her cheeks and a little rouge to redden her lips. There had been no need for belladonna to deepen the fathomless sparkle of her eyes. 'Even so,' persisted Ugo grimly, 'we'll be hard put to walk away from this, even had we just ourselves to care for. Your duel is to the death.'

  'To the death,' nodded Tom. Slowly at first, then with gathering decision and energy as they talked, Tom began to wash and change.

  'Then when you kill Salgado this Baron Cotehel's likely to call his people down on us, and even apart from Baines, there's a good number of well-armed guards about. Even if I didn't already have good reason to be nervous, I'd be extremely nervous stuck in this place tonight. There's evil afoot. Evil at the least of it. Have you sounded out Will and the others?'

  'Will?' said Tom, pulling off his doublet and laying it, wrapped around the will, beside her on the bed.

  'Can we count on him? What did he say?' 'He quoted Machiavel at me. Il Principe.' He stripped off his shirt and crossed to the ewer of scented water Constanza had left behind.

  'God's death, the spy's bible. What did he mean by that?'

  'He meant to tell me he was the Earl of Southampton's man, and that his life depended upon it.' He dashed a handful of water, violets and lavender flowers into his face. Rinsed his mouth and spat. He straightened, frowning, and crossed to Villalar's box of potions. He lifted out the last vial, the sovereign remedy, and put a drop on his finger, tasted it and spat again. The vial, tightly stoppered, went into the purse at his belt. Then he spoke, slowly, thinking through the implications of Will's words. 'He meant that, like me, he's so deep in the toils of this thing that his life's worth nothing any more. And that only Southampton stands between him and the fate I can expect to meet before the stroke of midnight.' He caught up his doublet again and pulled out the will. 'Therefore I want you to take this through your escape route and bring it to Robert Poley at the Wainscott Inn with all the speed you may. Guard it with your life, and remember, even if Cotehel's plans for me run true, this will shall bring him down at my hand after all; though I be as dead as Will's Mercutio in the play, or poor Kit Marlowe down in Dep
tford.'

  Tom took Lady Margaret down with him when he went to the Great Hall on the next stage of his march towards death. All he had to do was touch her and she seemed to become his puppet. She swept under Lord Outremer's coat of arms and into the glittering bustle like a queen, however, and for a moment her presence stilled every tongue and captured every eye. A lesser man might have hoped the sudden silence was a tribute to his black velvet doublet picked with silver and slashed with rose silk almost as dark as the rubies in his ears. Or the way his twin swords swaggered astride his black galligaskins above his Spanish kid boots. But Tom knew when he was bested - and he wryly hoped that this was the only time that he would be bested tonight.

  He sat her at his side on the high table where, with Cotehel and his circle, he sat above the salt. But, having been placed - at the expense of some shuffling to allow the extra guest, right at the end of the table - neither Tom nor Margaret could be tempted by the feast.

  The servants labouring in from the kitchens through the Lesser Door laden with course after course for the main tables and the long removes beneath the galleries could not catch their attention. The servants standing solicitously behind each one of them offering to pile their trenchers with food they could not reach, to fill their glasses with drink of every sort, got no reply to their enquiries and soon stood silently themselves. They joined politely in with the applause accorded to the Master Cook when he came in with his masterpieces, but nothing he had prepared passed down their throats.