Death of the Fox: a novel about Ralegh

by George Garrett

  The keeper reported nothing new.

  Perhaps he still believes the King will not dare to kill him.

  Perhaps, upon landing at Plymouth and finding himself free, he misunderstood his position. Believing then, and clinging to it now, that the King is not truly offended.

  Or believing the King wishes him out of the country and his hands for politic reasons.

  Perhaps Ralegh wishes to force the King to end the game by killing him.

  But why should any man wish for that?

  The King of England sighs.

  All malice, real and imagined, Ralegh’s and the King’s, will die upon the instant stroke of an ax. Be buried with him. His faith, then? Whatever remains will be parted. Some will go with the head and some with the headless body. Let them look for each other upon Judgment Day. Perhaps on that day, in the haste of it all, the bodies of traitors will have to settle for heads other than their own. Some inevitable mismatching of villains and rogues will take place. And one fine bony fellow will spy his skull upon another’s body. Then another. And then maybe we shall be witness to the brawl and battle of the bones.…

  The King nods. His spectacles slip off his nose. He feels them fall away and does not care. Now he can sleep at last. In a while they will wake him. At dawn, clad in hunter’s green, he will raise a horn to his lips and blow a call as loud and clear and strong as any huntsman in England. He loves to shatter the dim silence of dawn—and the stiff decorum of the English—with that earsplitting blast. And he loves the belling, boiling answer of the hounds, more faithful and useful than all his Court. He loves to sit in the saddle and ride into dew and wind, ride like the wind, toward the blood of the rising sun and the blood of noble game.

  The Bible slips from his fingers as he falls quiet at last.

  He wakes with a sudden cry. Frightens the courtier in the Farthingale chair. Rouses the servant by the hearth. Alerts the guards outside the door of his chamber.

  Where he has been, what he has dreamed, he cannot remember. Some part of it seems to have been at the Tower, that fearful place whose first foundations were tempered by the clotted blood of slaughtered beasts. In the dream Henry was alive and well. Christian of Denmark was there too. The keeper was baiting one of the lions with bear hounds. But it was a sad lion that would not fight the dogs. The dogs were all snarls and teeth like knives. The sad lion looked at him. A lion with his own face …

  Then he was somewhere else. He cannot remember where. Only that, cold sweat on him, it was as dreadful as hell itself.

  He curses the servant and the courtier. He shouts at the guards outside and curses their rattles and muttering.

  Then for a moment there is a blessed quiet again. He thanks God for the candles burning in his chamber.

  He will not sleep again. He will lie back against pillows and wait for the morning.

  Head resting on soft silk. But hands, poor troubled hands, will not be still for him. They are still dreaming. He clenches them into tight fists. A sound like a cracking nut. One hand is falling to pieces, bones and all. Warm and damp.… He dares to open it and look. Laughs first at the sight of the spectacles crushed to slivers in his palm.

  How foolish!

  But his palm stings and he looks to see droplets of blood on palm and fingers. Drops as fine and small and round as rubies.

  He gags.

  “Steenie!” he calls. “For God’s sake, Steenie! I have cut myself. I bleed …!”

  Like a white shadow the young courtier is beside him, holding his hands, speaking words of comfort. Eased, the King feels lightheaded, drunk with emptiness.

  If it were not for the warm salt of tears in his eyes, he would laugh out loud for joy.

  Bells have tolled, some near, some distant. It is past two o’clock.

  Faint stirrings, muffled voices, vague odor of smoke prove the servants are up, the fire in the kitchen is alive. It will soon be three and time for Henry Yelverton, as for any serious man, to wake and rise up to be about his business.

  He hears the soft-footed stride, like the pad of a cat on the rush-strewn floor, of his servant, Peter, moving to the fireplace to stir embers and to kindle the fresh fire. Peter will never learn to walk on tiptoe like your Continental servant. No, he will pad as if his large feet were made of velvet. Yelverton smiles while Peter coughs a hacking, croaking, morning cough and the kindling wood, dropped, rattles on the hearth noisy as a bag of old bones. Peter will try to walk soft so as not to wake his sleeping master. But otherwise, save for the obeisance of his feet, he will always be himself. So much for your English servant. Peter, a countryman by birth, would have broken his fast and milked the cow by now, and he will never live long enough to approve of city ways. Trained at Court, he will do lip service to his station and your own. But, Lord bless him, he will cough when he has to and scratch when he itches.

  Not many like him in these days, Yelverton allows. Not many who share his views, his whims, his independence. He is left over, a beached and rotting hulk, a vessel of the last age. Peter will never admit that. In truth, he deems himself a man of the times, the more so because he can so clearly remember the bad times of the past. He will say if asked—and let us not ask him or there will be no silencing him betwixt now and dinner hour—that the times are not bad and are growing better. He is the living proof of that.

  But …

  But, in a trice, to prove his case, like a clumsy lawyer, he will turn prosecutor against himself. Will, as the old always do, rail against the restless young, who know nothing of where they come from, know only the keen dissatisfactions of the times, caring nothing for forgotten discontents. The young, who, in ignorance and impatience, not wishing to imagine the past, unable to imagine the future, grind their teeth in surly present time or, upon impulse or out of frustrate outrage, tear up their own roots. Leave farm and village or family craft for something, anything that’s new and strange. Those who would work—many nowdays would rather beg or steal or catch a conny in a hundred ways—care little for skill and only for gain. They fill up jails and clinks. They swell the ranks of foreign armies. They go forth in rotten ships to the ends of the earth and the bottom of the sea.

  Your new-fashioned servant, Peter will tell you, though he may dress neat and clean and smile to do his master’s bidding, makes faces behind the master’s back. Sells secrets for the highest price. Knows nothing of fidelity, but will ape the habits of servility, believing that because his service is falsely rendered, he does not humble himself.

  Will fight for nothing save greed or to keep his life, which even a black rat will do. Knows nothing of honor or honest pride. Would as lief be a Frenchman or a Spaniard. Except that he is too lazy to learn another tongue.

  In short, Peter, to prove these are good times, will demonstrate a most dismal future for England.

  Of course, Yelverton thinks, I am past prime myself. He is a foolish old man, but my man. And, for all his faults, he’s a comfort to me. Sometimes I suspect he may be right. Or that I, too, am stiffening with years. Even the baker’s youngest apprentice is restless and ambitious. Busily seeking continual change, as a poet wrote. Well, Henry Yelverton thinks, we live in a time of change, when only change is constant, and who can blame a lad for rowing his boat with the tide? The old wheel goes up and down, round and around, and some go high and some go dashing low. Some wax fat and some are ground exceeding fine. Old Peter has at least spared himself a ride on Fortune’s wheel.

  He cannot make complaint against Peter. He is like an aged dog, with a few tricks and many bad habits. But, like a good dog, he will be faithful. If thieves in the night or, God save us, foreign enemies burst and batter into this chamber, Peter will put his body between them and Henry Yelverton, old as he is. He would be a comedian, a Will Kemp or a Tarleton, armed with a rapier or broadsword. But give him a knife or a stout cudgel and he fears no man alive.

  Once riding a road together, daylight failing and the inn still a far piece ahead, they were set upon by some wild rogu
es, ragged and desperate men, who came out of a hedge like rats from rushes. Yelverton had his sword and dagger and a case of pistols. But it took a moment to get at those and fire them. He gained that moment when Peter rode straight at the rogues, laying at their randy heads with a short stick. His young law clerk, fresh minted from the Inns of Court, whinnied like a colt, and rode away. But Peter Rush made heads ring like a blacksmith’s anvil and curses fly up like a covey of quail before Sir Henry could fire his pistols, and the rogues, howling, vanished into the briars they had come from as if carried by the puff of smoke.

  “Oh, sir, we could have kilt the lot if you had but drawn sword and spurred!” Peter reproached him.

  Peter has no trust in powder and shot. He would go forth against an arquebus, armed with his longbow and perfect confidence. He would fight when he had to and run when he had to.

  Poor Peter, what need does he have of weapons now? If he opened the ruined gate of his mouth—as even now he blows heavy on the embers of the fire—with here and there a ruined leaning tower of tooth left, if he opened wide and breathed upon the enemy, they’d fall popeyed into a swoon of stone. Odor rich as an open tomb. Peter believes in the use of a sweetwood toothpick after a special feast; but not for him the daily ritual of tooth soap and a soft linen cloth. Nor any ablutions with warm water and soap sweetened with rosewater and violets. Let Henry Yelverton, lords and city merchants, primp and care for themselves, sweeten and brighten. Yet the worm will have them too. And after a season in earth, who can tell Sir Henry’s skull from Peter’s?

  The kindling fire spits and crackles. Peter hawks and spits back at it. New light falls through the hangings of the bed and, glancing, Yelverton can see the shadow of Peter huffing and puffing, rimmed with an orange glow of fresh flames. Smoke and the odor of dry wood burning well. The fire begins growling like a mastiff on a chain.

  Sleepy and comfortable, Henry Yelverton recalls the story he has heard from his latest clerk, one passing among lawyers who hover about at St. Paul’s. Of some country gent whose fortune took a change, a high vault. Perhaps had mortgaged his land and risked all, buying himself shares in some privateering venture. Some fellow, for whom the coast of France was as far as the moon, risking his estate on a rotten ship and a cutthroat crew. Mortgaged land and bartered plate and the roof over his head. And then, mirabilis!, after lean and worried times, the ship returns, all of a piece and now rich-laden with foreign goods and the gains of a prize or two. And behold, our gent has his money back and ten times over. He who had been dining on dry peas and tough beef, on country ale and barley bread, finds himself, by sudden chance and change, a rich man.

  Well, so this story goes, he decided he was too old to change his habits very much. Rich food ruined his digestion. Rich cloth on his back made him feel naked and womanish and gave him the itch. The one luxury he allowed himself was a bed, a fine bed like a lord’s. And likewise he ordered a servant to wake him on the hour all through the night so he could have the pleasure of knowing he could sleep a little longer in that bed.

  That pleased, but was not sufficient.

  Then he hit upon a happy idea. He hired an old actor, broken down from years of bombast. And this man earned his keep as a sort of night watch, walking to and fro in the garden beneath the squire’s bedchamber, not guarding anything, but talking to himself.

  “Cold, cold, Lord, I am cold! I’m all a cold pudding. I’m cold as a clock and cold as a key. Colder than clay on a whetstone or a dog’s nose. Brrr … I’m cold as charity …”

  Which our squire found gave him more comfort than a warming pan.

  “Sir?”

  He must have laughed out loud.

  “I am awake, Peter,” he says. “Light the candles and bring me my Bible.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And look to my great robe.”

  “It’s as clean as a new kettle. I saw to it myself.”

  “See to it again,” Henry Yelverton says.

  Muttered assent from Peter. Who thinks that too much cleanliness is vanity.

  Yelverton will be clean and well dressed today, though. It is only meet and right when your duty is to take the head of such a grand and glittering dandy as Ralegh.

  In moments Sir Henry Yelverton will have his Bible in hand and candles lit in the niches of the headboard. He will read some from the Psalms, then rise to kneel at the edge of the bed and offer up morning prayers. He will wash himself and wash his teeth. With Peter’s help he will be combed and dressed. Henry Yelverton is a sturdy, stout man, shortish and jowly. In the long robe of the Attorney General, feet hidden, he is said to float more than walk, as if set upon little wheels.

  A man of sanguine humor and sound digestion, he will have a hearty, simple breakfast: bread and cheese, salt herring, some cold beef, all washed down with ale. He need not eat to last through a long day, however. With luck and wit he will be done and the whole affair settled by early afternoon.

  Now there is a rapping on the door of his chamber. Peter padding no longer, shuffles to ask who is it and to unbolt the door. Yelverton hears the voice of his clerk, up and dressed early. No doubt that young man has slept lightly too.

  Once comforted by his favorite, once he has swallowed tears and stifled laughter, the King of England acts upon an impulse as if he had weighed it by logic all night long. Thinking perhaps that is true. All his thoughts circled one decision and he did not know it until now.

  Beautiful Theobalds will not do. The hunting is too tame. There are too many hangbys, because they are close to Westminster. If he cannot sleep here, if the hunting is no true pleasure, if there are too many in his company, then there’s a simple solution.

  Besides, he is amused imagining the confusion and difficulty, shouting and anger from steward down to scullion, his decision will create.

  He tells the young man that he has changed his plans for this day.

  The courtier, wrapping a fresh lace handkerchief around the King’s lightly scratched hand, smiles and raises his neat-trimmed brows like a pair of wings. His lashes flutter. So long, so naturally fine. Any woman would envy him.

  They will not hunt game at Theobalds, the King tells him. No, instead, with the smallest possible retinue and least baggage, they will travel north today to the lodge at Royston. He should never have left there to return to Westminster.

  “But there were affairs of state,” the young man tells him.

  He is trying, gently, to reassure His Majesty that the uncomfortable journey to Whitehall to deal with irritating affairs, some of which could have been deferred, was not in vain.

  “But we were content there,” the King says. “Were you not happy at Royston, my boy?”

  Cool fingers, gently rubbing, have calmed the King’s trembling hands. The boy’s eyes are half hidden by lovely lashes.

  “Indeed,” he says. “Yet I find my felicity in the presence of my King, and therefore anywhere.”

  Touched, the King snorts so as not to show his feelings. And, as well, so that the young man will not know how powerful a balm is flattery when one is flattered, not out of love—for true lovers need not flatter—but from the attentions of those most admirable, beautiful, and worthy of love.

  “You shall yet learn some polish in this Court of mine,” the King says.

  “I’ll be all shine and polish like a silver salt.”

  “We shall believe that when it is seen,” the King says. “Enough. It is a mere scratch I have. No cause for a surgeon. Pass the word that we are pleased to proceed to Royston.”

  The young man, still smiling, steps gracefully back from the edge of the bed, bowing. Pauses.

  “An’ it please the King …”

  “Speak up, man. I may yet sleep some before I breakfast.”

  “Royston is far from Westminster.”

  “Indeed? It is said old Burghley made the journey in a single day once. But I doubt it, considering his age and condition.”

  The young man, head tipped still in the beginning
of a bow, edges of his lips pointed with the hint of a smile, waits.

  “Royston is at some distance and Theobalds is closer by.”

  “Good boy! You shall learn our geography yet before you die. Now, be off about your bidding.”

  The hint of a smile is gone and a slight wrinkle creases his brow, even as he bows his head and steps backward.

  “It grieves you, does it not?”

  “Your Majesty?”

  “You do not wish Walter Ralegh to die.”

  “I wish nothing,” the young man says. “Except the health and felicity of the King. I wished only to remind the King that Royston may be too great a distance, should, for any account, the King desire to change his mind.”

  “There is no distance so great, the length and breadth of this whole land, that can frustrate the will of the King. Remember that. Weigh it. Rest assured that Royston is near enough for us to change our mind a dozen times, if that is our will.”

  Bows again. Then, tall and slender, lean-hipped, broad-shouldered, so graceful at times he seems to be dancing to unheard music, he unlocks and unbolts the door. Slips outside, a white silk shadow, closing that door softly behind him.

  Soon a messenger will be off riding hard to Royston’s lodge to rouse the keeper with the news that the King is returning to course the English hare. And, because the timbered lodge is small and the village nearby offers scant accommodations, he can leave more than half of his party here at Theobalds. Taking with him only the best of the lot. There is no such thing as a true privy chamber, as true privacy for a King.

  The King draws the hangings again. And stretches, warm and content, before easing his head to the pillow.

  The servant, awake, is building up the fire.

  Poor boy, he thinks, poor Steenie. His beautiful simplicity. Here he acts out of loyalty, what he deems it to be. Loyal to those he thinks raised him up. Loyal to a man he knows little of. Who, by arrangement, paid him more than a thousand pounds for his assistance in obtaining release to make a foolish voyage.