Gloriana's Torch

by Patricia Finney

  After a night at Walsingham’s household in Seething Lane where he had lodgings, Becket was on the road again, heading west for Bristol, Gloucester and the Forest of Dean to inspect the gunmaking there. With the ease of long practice, he dozed as he rode, because his sleep was mantrapped with ugly dreams that woke him shouting and fighting the blankets. Even Walsingham had noticed the black rings under his eyes and asked after his health when he finished making his report. Lady Walsingham had insisted on giving him a little bottle of tincture of St John’s Wort, sovereign against melancholy and sleeplessness and after tasting it once, he had tipped it out in the road and refilled it with aqua vitae, which was a much surer medicine.

  Although it had not prevented another dream, which had again woken him that morning. That had been doubly confusing, for in his dream he had been woken by a courtier, white-faced and shaking …

  * * *

  ‘Sir, sir, Mr Becket, sir. The Queen wants you!’

  The dreaming Becket had sat up, rubbed his eyes full of hangover, blinked uncomprehending at the young man. ‘What? Why?’

  ‘The Spaniards have landed. They took Gravesend last night.’

  And in the dream his belly had swooped and clenched and he had changed his shirt, combed his hair, put on his buff-coat over his doublet, strapped on his sword and run ahead of the courtier to Walsingham’s stables, which boiled with frightened men and terrified horses. He had to punch a groom to get his hands on a horse and he galloped for Westminster through streets that were already full of people asking each other what had happened, what should they do?

  He knew something was odd, even in his dreaming self, for St James’s Park was leafy and plump with greenery, not pale with spring buds. Late summer of 1588, the year that would end an Empire, according to the prophecy.

  Two of Ralegh’s guards waited for him at the Court Gate. He was hurried past knots of grim-faced, shouting men, weeping women, taken straight into the Queen’s Presence chamber and found her flanked by Ralegh and his tall red-clad men. She was ivory-faced but most splendidly dressed in black velvet sprinkled with pearls and her crown on her head.

  Becket dropped to both knees and bowed his head, feeling his heart thump, somehow more painfully aware of the print of rush matting into his kneecaps than he was of the girls sobbing behind him. The Queen swept down from the dais and stood before him, and he saw that with her knack for the dramatic, she was wearing a poniard dagger on her belt, very splendidly jewelled with rubies.

  ‘Mr Becket,’ she said, ‘we thank you for coming in our hour of need. Will you do us a great service?’

  ‘I am Your Majesty’s liegeman,’ said Becket, wondering what suicidal madness she was going to ask him to undertake now.

  ‘Mr David Becket,’ she had said, her voice ringing through the room, ‘we hereby appoint you Captain of the Rearguard, with complete powers over our sovereign city of London in its defence.’

  Becket blinked for a moment. Ah, that suicidal madness. Something inside him wondered cynically what had happened to the Lord Mayor and his aldermen. Rumour had whispered the week before that they had been locked up in the Tower on account of selling ordnance to the Spanish.

  ‘In my name, you are to delay, frustrate, annoy and murder the Spanish for as long as you possibly can, using every advantage and ally that London affords. You will deny to the Spaniards any benefit that you can. You may not surrender the city under any circumstances.’

  Looked at one way, it was very unlikely that Parma would ask him to, seeing that London had no walls and could not stand siege. Looked at another, it was a backhanded compliment to him that the possibility might even be considered, a compliment typical of the Queen’s corkscrew mind.

  ‘Further, Mr Becket, I desire that you shall not permit yourself to be killed or taken and when the time comes that you shall rejoin us in Oxford.’

  It was a thought to make his booze-battered brain reel, that she was giving him any command at all, no matter what the situation. Gravesend. They had taken Gravesend in the night. Obvious, when you thought of it, for Tilbury was too well-defended and Gravesend, on the opposite bank of the Thames, controlled the river as well. His mouth was full of dust.

  ‘Mr Becket?’

  Something in her voice made him look up. She was smiling at him.

  ‘If we are still alive in a month, make no doubt we shall reward you with great honour,’ and the dry humour in her voice said she perfectly well knew what men said of her promises, and didn’t care. Then she put a heavy gold chain over his head.

  * * *

  The jasmine and rosewater scents of her had woken him, clutching his chest where the chain had seemed to burn him.

  And now, in the Forest of Dean, he looked around him, puzzled to see early spring not late summer. A few green shoots were already scouting out the hedges although the landscape around him was blasted as if some Welsh dragon in league with the Spaniards had passed by and casually scorched it. Fences divided the woods into a patchwork where they were newly coppiced and needed protecting from deer and rabbits. In the parts that were ready to be coppiced again, the saplings grew thick. Charcoal burners moved among them, cutting them judiciously, piling the staves into mounds and skilfully burying the mounds with turves before lighting them and watching through the night as the wood part-burned into charcoal. Smoke rose lazily from turf mounds in all directions.

  It had taken him two days clear to get the stench of Essex out of his nostrils and now he was coming into another place that stank volcanically, only of fire and metal, not ordure.

  He had a great many things to do and he wanted to get back to London as soon as he could. As he took his horse up to a canter on a slightly less rutted piece of road, he came round a corner and had to haul the poor animal back on its haunches to stop himself riding into a line of charcoal burners’ carts trailing slowly up a hill that looked like a manor in hell.

  All the trees were bare and had been turned into frames for holding weights. At the top of the hill a great brick furnace bellowed fire and sparks into the air, the water wheel behind it making a strange, stately whoomf-suck noise as it moved a giant bellows to pump up and down. With each blast of air, the fire in the furnace blazed hotter.

  Becket tried to pick his way past the plodding donkeys and their carts, none of which would move aside for him, their drivers stolidly pretending he didn’t exist.

  Muttering with impatience, he spotted what seemed a clear path and turned his horse into it. He found himself riding beside what looked like a long, straight, empty streambed made of burned earth. It was designed like a tree of Jesse, heading down the hill, so each branch ended in a sink hole of clay, surrounded by gravel. At each branching stood a flagstone on end, to dam the main channel. And in each pot hole, as if in a strange obscenity, a giant’s fancy, hung a long pole dependent on a tree-frame so it did not touch the sides nor the bottom.

  ‘Damn it,’ said Becket, suddenly understanding where he was and what he was riding in. Very carefully, he turned his horse again, urged it up between the scorched trees where men were already waving at him to warn him. At the top where the heat and smell of smoke was choking, he slid down from the saddle gratefully, staggered for a minute, then led the reluctant nag on to the place at the base of the huge chimney where the foundry-master stood, staring at him as if he was mad.

  ‘Ay,’ said the foundry-master gravely, looking at Becket’s warrant upside-down before handing it back. ‘You have come at a good time, sir. Only I’d be much obliged if you wouldn’t stand your horse in the casting channel again, on account of it might spoil the guns to have horseflesh in the metal.’

  ‘My mistake, Mr Arlott,’ said Becket ruefully. ‘I hope I’ve not caused damage.’

  ‘A man’s checking it. Now then, no doubt you are here for the casting.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Becket, although this was the first he had heard of it.

  ‘Second casting this year already and the biggest we ever tried. Tw
o cannon, two demi-cannon, four culverins, two sakers, two falcons, a falconet and a cast murderer. Breech-loading murderer. We’ll saw out the chamber and see if we can make magazines to fit. Bit of an experiment, to tell you the truth, sir. They say that Holzhammer managed it last autumn, but I ain’t seen the gun proved…’

  The foundry master was not in fact talking to Becket at all but into his chest, watching the flames and metal crucible in the furnace intently. Behind it all the wheel creaked round and the bellows pumped. Arlott ran out of words, seemed to forget all about Becket, and began putting on wetted leather armour and a helmet that covered his face, also of leather. As the sparks mounted in the mouth of hell and the colour paled, a lad tugged Becket’s elbow to move him back.

  Arlott waited, watching the fire intently, poised on his toes. Suddenly he darted forwards, carrying a long pole. He flung aside a door across the mouth of hell. Becket found his horse whinnying frantically and hauling backwards away from the terror of it, so he hitched the animal to a tree, turned back to watch.

  Black against the golden, Arlott leaned in with his pole and deftly tipped the crucible. Out poured white hot metal and flooded down the channel built for it.

  ‘First stoppers!’ roared Arlott. Two men in leather jumped forward and stood by the first stone dams. The metal whirled its way into the gun moulds. As the white metal brimmed and overflowed, so they lifted the flagstones on the end of chains and the metal raced onward, crusting a little as it stopped at the next branching. ‘Second stoppers!’

  So two demi-cannon were born in smoke and flame and brimming metal and another set of flagstones went up amongst the bare scorched branches. Mould after mould filled from the pouring crucible, a vast river of earth’s blood from a man-made volcano, until the last trickles sulked their way into the small murderer moulds lying ready for them at the bottom of the channel. The whole side of the hill was smoking and burning and smelling pungently of iron, the channels between clearing slowly as metal congealed. Amongst the pools of molten metal leaped Arlott, dainty as a deer among puddles that would fry his foot in its heavy boot if he slipped. He visited each sullenly smoking mould, tapping with his hammer, watching, tapping again. Once he shook his head as a big bubble came up from the hole, made a cross in the earth by a demi-cannon mould.

  One of Arlott’s assistants tilted the empty crucible upright again, pushed it back into the furnace on its cradle and shut the furnace door. Other men disconnected the wheel from the bellows and stood panting for breath as the bricks dulled to red.

  Arlott came prancing back and looked surprised to see Becket still there.

  ‘By God, Mr Arlott,’ rumbled Becket, taking a gulp of aqua vitae. ‘That was a sight to behold. I never knew cannon-founding was like the wrath of Jehovah.’

  Arlott looked as if he had never thought of this. ‘Not far off as dangerous, sir, and your beard is smouldering.’

  Becket slapped out the burning and thought he should have got his beard trimmed. All the men tending the furnace and Arlott himself were clean-shaven and noticeably piebald with burn-scars.

  ‘What else can you show me of your craft, Master Arlott, before you go to your well-earned rest.’

  ‘Shan’t rest tonight, sir. The last tapping is near enough ready for proving.’

  The foundry-master was stripping off his leathers again, handing them to the lad who had moved Becket out of danger. Under the helmet, Arlott’s face was wrinkled with sweat. He jerked his head at Becket and they began trudging down a little incline and up another hill.

  Becket heard the screeling and screeching long before they came to it. There were vast high frames built of the tallest trees, well enough away from the furnace that no sparks would set light to them. Suspended mouth down from the top of the nearest frame was a demi-cannon, the long pole of the boring iron going deep into it. Below the boring iron, turning the blades so it spun, was a patient, blindfolded horse, pacing round and round in the shafts of his converted milling wheel, while a little tent above protected them from the filings and sand as the boring iron ground and groaned in its cavity, boring it out, smoothing it down, so the demi-cannon could eventually be fired.

  Arlott stepped up to the horse, muttering to it, patted its neck as it stoically continued round, following the carrots it could smell but had never learned it would only catch at sunset. He climbed up on the wheel, pulled a corner of the tent aside and squinted up at the cavity, then jumped down.

  ‘Not so bad,’ he grunted. ‘The new sand is answering.’

  Becket had no more time to waste in sightseeing. ‘Master Arlott,’ he said, ‘how many guns might you approve from each tapping after casting, boring, polishing and the rest?’

  ‘Can’t say, sir. About six or eight. It depends on the weather, the charcoal, the blooms.’

  ‘How often do you make a full casting?’

  ‘We cup about once every two weeks, working flat out to remake the moulds. Takes a week or so after to saw off the filling heads.’

  ‘After which it takes another … ten days to bore out the guns?’

  ‘Depends on the gun, sir. A little falconet might only take two days if it cast well.’

  ‘So shall we say, roughly, you could expect to make ten to fifteen new guns every month, here?’

  ‘With luck. If it didn’t rain.’

  ‘Fewer in winter, no doubt.’

  ‘None at all, sir. We make the blooms in winter, stockpile the clay, design the models. Winter’s no good for gunfounding. We’re casting so early this year because of the demand.’

  ‘You make for six months of the year, then?’

  ‘Something like that, ay.’

  They were walking away from the blasted part of the forest and in the distance Becket could hear the roaring of other furnaces, the pumping of other bellows, the screeching of other borers.

  ‘And this is only one of many foundries in the Forest of Dean.’

  ‘The best, sir,’ said Arlott flintily. ‘We work the best, make the best guns and the most.’

  ‘So I was informed, Master Arlott, which was why I came here.’

  Arlott grunted, slightly mollified. They paced on, at least beginning to find undergrowth, astonishingly even a few sick and scrawny bluebells.

  ‘Allowing for accidents, shall we say as a modest guess that you can expect to make forty guns in a year, of various sizes.’

  Arlott sucked his teeth, scratched his ear, consulted the sky. ‘Ay, sir. Though Sir Francis Drake is forever at us to make culverins and no sakers or falcons, which is slower in the casting. But that’d be a good rate.’

  ‘No other problems? No Dutchmen coming to take them in tribute?’

  ‘Eh?’

  Becket sighed. ‘I came to ask who is stealing them, Mr Arlott?’

  Obstinate blank ignorance suffused Mr Arlott’s scarred, dried-out face.

  ‘Shall we have a drink, Mr Arlott?’

  ‘I’m a busy man. Got to inspect the polisher and then—’

  ‘So am I, Mr Arlott, but it can all wait. Is that an alehouse over there? You must be thirsty after all your efforts, to be sure, sir.’

  Raw suspicion replaced the ignorance and the man was obviously about to balk. Becket put his thumbs in his swordbelt and leaned slightly, staring him down. Arlott might jump around puddles of white hot metal like a doe in the springtime watermeadows, but it seemed Becket could still impress when he wanted.

  They continued to the very small reed-thatched alehouse that served the thirsty men of the foundry.

  Inside, an ugly old woman glared at Becket, served him sour beer with insolence and gave Arlott her best brew from a different barrel. Becket sighed and paid the outrageous reckoning, not having energy to spare to make anything of it.

  ‘I have a mystery here, Mr Arlott, and I very much hope that you can cast some light on it.’ Becket sat down foursquare on the bench, feeling it creak and give beneath him. He fumbled out a grubby notebook, opened it, pointed with a square fing
er, its nail bitten down to the quick. Arlott blinked wisely at the incomprehensible script.

  ‘Forty guns a year from this foundry alone. From Currer’s foundry, another thirty. Holzhammer, ten to thirty, depending if he’s sober or not. And there are about forty foundries here in the Forest of Dean alone. By my reckoning I should be seeing eight hundred guns a year from the Forest of Dean. I only took up my position last summer, Mr Arlott, but in that time I have seen a grand total of two hundred guns, all types, delivered to Her Majesty’s Armoury.’

  ‘Don’t rightly know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘My fault, I’m sure, Mr Arlott. I never pretended to any abilities as a clerk, but I have in my time quarter-mastered a troop of soldiers and I can add and subtract. Let’s put it another way. Let’s say I was a baker and from my oven I expected to get … oh … say eight hundred penny loaves … Let’s say six hundred, to be fair, to allow for the ones that burn and the ones that are dropped and the ones that don’t rise. Six hundred, to be fair. And in my shop I find I only have two hundred penny loaves. What would you say, Mr Arlott?’

  ‘I’d say there was a mistake in your adding.’

  Becket rubbed the singed patch on his chin, smiled sweetly. ‘Could be, could well be. Show me where I’m wrong, make two hundred guns sum up to six hundred.’

  Arlott coughed. ‘Well, there’s Bristol and the ships there. We send off about fifty a year to them. And Southampton and Plymouth.’

  ‘I’ve included those.’

  ‘I don’t rightly know what you’re asking, Mr Becket.’

  ‘Every year, something around three to four hundred pieces of top-quality English ordnance goes missing. It disappears. Some of it leaves Bristol, supposedly being shipped to Plymouth but it never arrives. Some of it leaves Southampton, on its way, apparently to Bristol. Never gets there. Plymouth to Southampton. The same. All the paperwork is in order, you can’t fault the clerks. The papers say, the guns went here, arrived here, were shipped there … It’s wonderful what they say. I’ve spent months tracking them down. And at the end of the trail, Mr Arlott, what do I find?’