He could hear somebody singing, a woman or a boy. Taking his dag from his belt, he stood in a corner to shot and wind it, then went forward into the parlour behind the hall, which still seemed to have most of its roof.
It was a place where somebody had made a little cave from the remains of a bed, and a small fire from the broken panelling and roofbeams.
He advanced carefully, for the singing had now stopped, trying to see what was there in the dusk and flickering light. Inside the little cave lay two children and a baby, he thought, carefully tucked up under a blanket. Were they his nephews, nieces? He didn’t know. He took his morion helmet off, for he knew it made him seem monstrous with its plume and fancy chasing.
‘Don’t be afraid,’ he said softly to the children. ‘I’m no Spaniard. Where has your father gone?’
None of the little forms moved. He bent closer, shifted the blanket and froze. What he had taken to be a girl, by her fair hair, had no face but a broken shattered wound. The boy had the broken end of a pike still in him. And the babe … It had been cloven in two and the pieces put back together. Carefully.
He replaced the blanket and turned away to vomit. Then he heard the hissing of a match.
The woman was coming towards him, limping and barefoot, something dark and sticky making her feet and the tatters of her kirtle filthy. Her beaten face was twisted with effort for the caliver was heavy for her to hold and her hands were shaking. The bright match in the lock wavered. Perhaps she had thought to load it, perhaps not. More than likely she would miss. But she might not.
Becket stayed still, put up the hand not holding his helmet.
‘Mistress,’ he said hoarsely, ‘Mistress, where is Mr Philip Becket?’
‘My husband is engaged and cannot receive visitors. Please let my children sleep, sir, I have only just this minute got them to settle.’
Becket drew in a shaky breath. ‘Will you call him, Mistress Becket? I have some important news for him.’
The woman smiled quite sweetly, tilted her face up and called, ‘Philip! Husband! There’s an English Spaniard come to visit.’
Becket knew what he would see when he looked up, for he had seen it often before, not only in England but also in the Netherlands.
His brother hung swinging from a roofbeam, his face a purple joke with its swollen tongue.
The Queen’s Captain-General blinked and swallowed, found the tears trickling into his beard. ‘Mistress,’ he whispered, his throat too tight to speak, ‘if you will put down your firearm, perhaps I could conduct you somewhere … better.’
‘No,’ she said, still smiling, ‘you see, I cannot possibly leave the children until … until things are arranged.’
‘But mistress, your children are—’
Her face curdled, she lifted the caliver and Becket threw himself sideways as it went off, perhaps cracked, perhaps double-charged, and exploded in her arms. She looked down serenely at the rags of her hands and her ribcage, then crumpled to the earth.
Becket rolled to his feet, looked himself over, found a couple of cuts where bits of caliver had hit him, but his buff-coat and cuirass had protected him. He picked up his helmet, put it on and went to look at his sister-in-law, whose guts were spilling as she jack-knifed in agony.
The sound of hooves in the lane. Good. He had a job for them. Becket took out his dag, put it carefully to his sister-in-law’s head, and fired.
Weeping, he went out to where his lads were galloping up in rescue, to tell them to dig five graves for his family. They would put the death date of 5 September 1588.
* * *
Becket woke, still weeping, his heart pounding like a prisoner beating the walls of his chest. He sat for a while, arms wrapped round his knees, trying to stop gasping, to remember what had been in his dream to frighten him so. It was not the same as the usual nightmares, where he was back in the Tower not knowing who he was. This had been different. He had been leading men as he had in his twenties, there had been a smell of burning, a woman …
It was gone. Below in the inn courtyard, the lads were already shouting and leading out the post horses for their exercise, the daylight sliding over the eastern horizon. And he was not in the West Country, he was in Essex where the Thames trickled fat and sour into the sea. And now he should rise and make ready to visit the greatest midden in England.
Groaning and scratching, Becket swung his legs over the side of the bed, felt for the chamberpot. Thank God as a Deputy Clerk of the Ordnance, he could now afford a room by himself and no longer had to share beds with snoring, stinking, farting strangers. He took a drink from the flask under his pillow to ease his headache and went in search of his hose.
* * *
It seems I am fated always to be wading through the shite, thought Becket a few hours later, coughing and trying not to breathe through his nose. Before him stretched a foul plain down to the Thames mudflats, studded with little hills. The nearest steamed gently before him: a dunghill of magnificent, epic size. Stench of piss and shit many weeks old was making the air blue above them and the number of different mephitic and disease-laden odours hardly bore thinking about.
Becket put his nose deep in the little bunch of herbs he had been given and breathed in. It didn’t help at all:
‘This pile is not ripe, of course,’ said the fastidiously dressed little man standing beside him, unmoved by Becket’s nausea. He wore a silver pomander around his neck against disease but seemed nasally immune.
A cart squelched past them and over to the nearest most pungent hill, pulled by a scabby donkey. A troll-like creature hunched on the bench pulled a string, the board slurped and lifted, and the latest haul of London’s nightsoil slithered out.
A shout went up from huts by the river. Three scrawny children wrapped in rags came running out and started scrabbling among the leavings. The littlest found something valuable, a piece of bright blue cloth, hardly marked, and put it triumphantly on his head, only to have it snatched away by the biggest.
‘When … er … when will it ripen, Mr Jarvis?’ Becket asked, trying to ignore the shrill screams and sounds of fist-fighting.
‘Not for a few years. It is the next, over there, that is looking fair for harvest. Would you care…’ Mr Jarvis coughed, hesitated, dry-washed his hands. Never had Becket seen a more painfully clean person: his small ruff was like snow, his nails had been pared until they bled. Only his boots were crusted. ‘Would you care to … er … water the pile?’
‘What?’ Becket was trying to settle his stomach with a gulp of aqua vitae from his worn flask. That did nothing for the stink either. He wiped a few drops off his beard and sighed.
Mr Jarvis trembled. Mr Becket smelled of drink, his grey eyes were dull and bloodshot, his belly strained the pewter buttons of his worn velvet doublet. Only the hat sitting on his greasy black ringlets was new and tolerably fine. He looked like a broken-down soldier who had been bought the position of Deputy Clerk to the Ordnance by a wealthy patron, which indeed was what he was. However, his patron was Sir Francis Walsingham and his purpose seemed to be to ferret out all Jarvis’s comfortable little doings, instead of sitting back and drawing his stipend like a reasonable man.
‘Your … er … predecessor liked to er … water the heap.’ Poor old Staveling, dead of some mysterious jaundice. Now there was a peaceable fellow with no mad questions to disturb anyone’s quiet.
‘What?’ Becket had swung his bulk round to glare at Jarvis. He stood like a Smithfield bully boy, he had a worn-hilted, very businesslike sword on his belt, he was two yards high and at least a yard broad, and there was something about him that had the sullen unpredictability of a thundercloud.
‘To … er … piss on the heap, sir.’ Jarvis was sweating and wishing he had kept his mouth shut. ‘It … er … it helps the saltpetre to grow, sir. Urine, or indeed blood from the Shambles, sprinkled on the surface, followed by a dusting of earth, sir.’ Occasionally the blood did not come from the Shambles and was brought still in i
ts body at dead of night by men working for Pickering, the King of the London thieves, while Jarvis made sure he was somewhere else. ‘It’s a very nice mixture indeed, to encourage our treasure to grow.’
Becket grunted and put his flask away, pointedly without offering it. ‘Sounds like a truffle.’
‘In a way, sir, in a way. Certainly a strange alchemy takes place in these heaps of … er … London’s waste. Cover up the … er … turds of London, sprinkle with piss or blood, bury, leave for a few years, return and dig and there you have it, sir, alchemical magic, the treasure in the dunghill, the very aquila albus itself. How it comes there is a philosophical mystery, but come there it does.’
Becket belched and then laughed. Never had Mr Jarvis heard a laugh less humorous. ‘Ay, well, anything to get it to grow faster.’ He unlaced and watered at large like a boy. ‘Asperges me Dominum cum hyssopo and so forth. Enough?’
‘Indeed, sir,’ said Jarvis, smiling tightly as he sidled to avoid the puddles oozing in his direction. ‘Are you satisfied with your inspection?’
‘No, by God, I’m not. Who digs it up? Where does it go from there?’
They left the track and squelched along a path to where gloomy men were hard at work with shovels to excavate trenches through another mound, a little flatter than the first. The pale brown lumps they found were slung into handcarts, which were trundled by older boys than the urchins into a long low building with many chimneys.
Unhappily, and only after Becket had insisted thrice, Jarvis conducted him into the place, infernally hot and stinking to take your head off. There miserable women tended a long row of large pelicans, bellied alchemists’ pots with a beaklike tube at the top leading to a smaller pot, sitting on a blazing fire. The stink came from the neat squares of dried turd they were economically using to feed the fire.
‘Here we may see the alchemical wonder of the aquila albus, the white eagle, saltpetre. When it is heated, it does not melt but flies directly to a white smoke which being directed to another pot and cooled is thereby instantly cleaned of gravel or any other dirt and may be gathered and packed in barrels.’
Becket blinked at the brown-clad women trudging about and wondered blearily if the late Sir Philip Sidney, onetime Queen’s Secretary of the Armoury had ever come here. Probably not, for if he had there would most certainly have been an elegant rhyme in Latin or English to celebrate the fact. The man had been incorrigible.
‘And here we pack the pure crystals of saltpetre in barrels, as you see, branded with the Tower portcullis, and then it is sent to Her Majesty’s mill at Wilmington.’
Explaining the familiar routines had begun to make Jarvis relax, so his heart nearly stopped when Becket swung round to scowl at him.
‘Oh is it, by God?’
Jarvis dabbed at his mouth with a handkerchief and swallowed. ‘Sir?’
None of the women were worth looking at, yellow-skinned and haggard the lot of them, though they were looking at him. Becket hooked his thumbs in his belt and leaned back to address the blacked beams above, his eyes hooding themselves behind heavily lashed lids.
‘Mr Jarvis,’ he intoned like a schoolmaster, ‘I have it on excellent authority that more gunpowder is arriving at the Hague and, by implication, Lisbon than ever we see at the Tower. I have it from Wilmington that they are constantly hampered by the shortage of saltpetre. As you may know, gunpowder is a receipt compounded of one part charcoal, two parts sulphur and seven parts saltpetre.’ This was a studied insult, to tell Jarvis the composition of gunpowder, as if he were a child. ‘Neither serpentine nor milled powder can be made without saltpetre, therefore. As well make a sword without iron. Now at the Tower, what we receive is serpentine powder, with about the strength of a mouse’s fart, on account of its age and separated condition, and no prettier a smell. They tell me that serpentine needs less saltpetre to make, which I know to be a black lie as well as you do.’
Jarvis, who had been about to agree that it certainly was, swallowed again. ‘Sir?’
‘Now this would have been of no particular moment as short a time ago as last autumn, but, Mr Jarvis, you may perhaps have heard tell even here in the wilds of Essex, that His Most Catholic Majesty the King of Spain is preparing a great fleet for to land his tercios in England, sack London, shoot the Queen and have his Jesuits rape every boy south of the Humber.’
Since the balladmongers had been singing of little else for six months, Jarvis did indeed know and he resented Becket’s sarcasm. He felt it was really nothing to do with him. He could hardly be expected to change the ancient practices, established by his father who had bought the office and by the Lord Treasurer who had sold it to him.
‘Now, Mr Jarvis,’ Becket continued heavily while the women listened as they worked, glad of the entertainment and to see Mr Jarvis discomfited, ‘I have seen tercios in action and you, I suspect, have not. It is only thanks to the love of God and Drake’s raid on Cadiz this summer that the Spaniards are not marching through Kent as we speak. I would prefer Drake and his ships to blow them all to hell before ever the tercios set foot in England.’
‘Amen,’ said Jarvis piously, wondering where this was going and how much longer it would take.
Becket stepped closer and leaned over Jarvis. Some of the women stopped their toiling over the fires to watch. Jarvis was somehow cornered, in his own kingdom, and he started to sweat.
‘Amen, you say.’ Becket’s rumble was thoughtful. ‘Amen? And yet what is Drake to blow them to hell with, eh? Answer me that? For every eighteen-pound ball his demi-culverins fire, it takes nine pounds of milled or eighteen pounds of serpentine to loft the shot. He has told me he cannot get the powder he needs, neither milled nor serpentine, no matter how he begs. And I come and ask here and there, and ask and ask, and I am assured on all sides that the powder is in the making, but where it might be hiding, Mr Jarvis, truly, nobody knows.’
Becket’s breath stank of aqua vitae as well as his sweat, thought Jarvis, feeling sick, and he was much too close and too large. It was unfair. Jarvis had never done anything worse than anybody else.
A broad finger and thumb reached out to pinch Jarvis’s carefully slashed and trimmed tawny velvet doublet.
‘I like your duds, Jarvis,’ Becket said heavily. ‘What did you pay for them? And with what, eh? While we’re about it? At fifty pound per annum, your stipend would not buy you a sleeve of it, let alone the suit.’
‘M … my wife has money.’
Becket stared at him unblinking. Jarvis pulled away from him and stalked out of the shed, nose high.
Becket was about to go after him, when he found his way blocked by two of the broadest women, brawny arms folded over their aprons. He had been right; they did stink, pungently.
‘Sir,’ said one, ‘if we was to lay information against Mr Jarvis, would he lose his place?’
‘He might,’ allowed Becket. ‘But I can pay you now, if you like.’
The two women exchanged looks. ‘How much?’
‘What’s the information?’
‘Where your saltpetre goes to.’
For answer Becket reached under his doublet and brought out his purse, pulled some shillings out and gave the women two each. They smiled at him gap-toothed as the shillings disappeared beneath their stays, and took him to the door, pointed down at the sulky sea lapping an inlet.
‘Small boats. They take it out to the Dutch fly-boats – they can come right in close, you know, sir, they don’t mind if the tide’s up or no. And they pay for it, but we never get nothing.’
Becket nodded. Probably most of the missing saltpetre went to the Dutch for use against Spain, or perhaps they sold it on to the Spanish. He had heard the sorry, mercenary, brainless tale over and over again in the last couple of months. Englishmen who thought only of money had sold guns, ammunition and powder to men who thought only of power. Worse, to Papists, to Spaniards. He had never been one to think the best of any man but the sheer blind stupidity of them all made him long t
o kill someone. If he could find out whose corruption, whose permission licensed the quiet pillage of the Queen’s Ordnance, then perhaps he could watch the man hanged, drawn and quartered. He would enjoy that, he thought savagely, for all his new-grown squeamishness.
‘When do they come?’
‘When they choose, sir. Mr Jarvis takes all the money, never gives us none. Do you think it’s right dealing, sir?’
Their indignation made them red and self-righteous. Becket felt suddenly exhausted. Would they care if the Spaniards landed? Would they know until the tercios came and burned their hovels and spitted their revolting spawn on long lances? Of course not.
‘Thank you, goodwives,’ he said and shouldered past them into relatively fresher air. Jarvis was waiting by the horses.
Becket untethered his horse, climbed into the saddle and found his stirrups. ‘Mr Jarvis,’ he said, ‘Englishmen will die for your pretty duds and so will you. Do you think the Spaniards will care how you helped them when they come to hang you?’
Jarvis opened his mouth with some excuse and Becket stopped him with a raised hand.
‘Mr Jarvis, by my estimate, you are capable of producing twice as much saltpetre from here as you do, according to your accounts. This is what I expect to see coming up to Wilmington. If it does not, I will be back with a warrant for your arrest on a misprision of treason and Mr Norton will be given you to examine to be sure you are not some bastard Papist in disguise. Understand?’
Jarvis gobbled at him helplessly, ‘But … but … we cannot possibly do it, the saltpetre grows slowly and—’
‘And you have four untouched mounds ripe and ready. What are you saving them for, you fool? Dig them up and send us the saltpetre!’
Shaking his head, Becket touched his heels to the horse’s flanks and the nag trotted up the path, dropping his own contribution to the Ordnance as he went.
* * *
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