Blood's Game

by Angus Donald

  The duke dropped his gaze, pretending to brush at some dust on the coverlet. ‘Very well, read on, boy.’

  The letter was short, dated to the week before, and it was written in the same strange code of numbers and symbols that Holcroft had first seen the day before in the audience room.

  With perfect ease, Holcroft read:

  Sir, I write in haste to impart fresh and, I believe, vital knowledge that I have received from one of the men who kept a watch on Madame before her sudden death at the end of June. Two weeks before we began our surveillance, Madame received a secret visit from two grand English noblemen. Our man Jupon only discovered this yesterday by chance from a ladies’ maid that he has been cultivating. The two gentlemen came directly from London at the end of April and returned there a little over month later at the beginning of June. She has revealed that these Englishmen had no less than three private meetings with Madame in May of this year in Versailles, each one under a cloak of an extravagant party that the King himself was also attending. The identity of these two Englishmen has not yet been revealed. It may be that the source does not know their true names. I await your orders. Your obedient servant, Astraea.

  The Duke of Buckingham was sitting bolt upright in the bed, his earlier lassitude completely discarded. The transformation was astounding. His eyes were bright, his jaw clamped tightly shut. He seemed to be on the edge of a terrible rage. Holcroft did not know what to do. He did not understand quite how the letter he had just read could have angered him so much.

  He said, ‘Should I read another one, sir?’

  The duke looked at him, as if for the very first time that night.

  ‘No. But I have half a mind to send you to knock up those sluggards Osborne and Littleton and the chief clerk.’

  Holcroft got to his feet. ‘Is something the matter, sir?’

  ‘Something the matter? No. But I fear I have been made mock of – indeed, that I have been made to look a fool by my enemies, by my friends even, by the King and the whole court.’

  ‘Shall I go directly and wake the gentlemen?’

  ‘Hmm?’ The duke was deep in thought. ‘No, I have a better idea, boy. Do you think you could write me a message in the same disguised fashion as the one you have just so ably read to me?’

  ‘Certainly, Your Grace. It is but a simple letter transposition.’

  ‘Good boy. Clever boy. Then let us write. Light candles, there are pen, ink, paper, in the desk over there. To work, Mister Blood, to work!’

  *

  The Duke of Ormonde felt himself propelled out of the carriage by a strong hand hauling on the collar of his coat. He fell forward into the darkness and splashed wrist-deep into the mire of St James’s Street. It was dark, a cloud-cloaked night, only the faint glimmers from the brick gatehouse of St James’s Palace at the foot of the hill providing illumination, just enough to make out indistinct shades of grey and black, but no more. A heavy boot crashed into his ribs, flipping him over on to his back. He sat up quickly and swung a fist at the black shape looming above him, connected to hard flesh and heard a yelp. Then there was a sweeping movement above him and a shocking blinding pain above his left eye; he felt the world tilt and slip in strange directions. He was flat on his back in the mud again and for some reason unable to move any of his limbs. He felt the rain pattering against the skin of his cheek. He was aware of horses moving about, the slop of their hooves near his head. There were voices above him, too, fading in and out.

  ‘Shall I do it now, Father?’ said one. ‘Shall I finish it?’

  ‘I’ll fucking do it,’ said another deeper, rougher voice.

  ‘Wait, both of you, wait. I have a better idea. This should not be a dark-o’-night murder. Get him up on the back of a horse and we’ll take him to Tyburn, ’tis not so far and there’re ropes already strung for the business. We’ll string him up like the dirty old thief he is.’

  The last voice had a slight Irish lilt but Ormonde could not understand the meaning of the words. He was no thief. There was a murmur of agreement and he felt strong hands grip him and lift him upwards. This made no sense at all; his house, his servants, his whole life, were all just forty yards away, somewhere in the blackness at the top of the hill. What had happened to Jenny? He hoped she had had the good sense to run away silently into the darkness.

  ‘Good sirs,’ he said, his own voice sounding far away and feeble, ‘I have forty guineas in my purse that you shall have this instant – and a thousand pounds in jewellery in my house yonder. You may take it all. Merely escort me there and you shall be rich men.’

  A blow leaped out of the darkness, smashing into his jaw and snapping his head back. Pinwheels of light danced in his skull. The night roared and moaned in his ears. He barely comprehended the response to his offer, something about holding his filthy tongue and did he take them for mere footpads? He felt a hand roughly groping at his waistband nonetheless and pulling the heavy purse free.

  ‘Get him up on the back of my horse,’ someone said. ‘Tie him there with this.’

  In his dazed and febrile state, he felt hands lift and tug him up and over the back of an animal, behind a huge rider, and before he knew it a cord was fastened tight around his middle, twisted around both arms and pulled in so that he was roped to the big man in front of him, his arms clasped around his thick waist. His head cleared slightly and, at the same time, there was a growl of thunder. A few moments later there was a lightning flash of pale grey that just gave him enough light to see two men, one tall and slim, the other smaller, both masked and shadowed by broad hats, looking up at him. He was roped tightly behind a giant of a man, hatless, the vast round pate glittering with silver stubble. A fourth man, his back towards him, was in the act of mounting a horse. Three still bodies lay on the ground. The door of the carriage sagged open. Jenny was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Get the thieving bastard to Tyburn, lads,’ said the mounted man, his Irish lilt more pronounced in the gloom. ‘I’ll go on ahead and make sure the ropes and ladders are readied.’

  There were noises of acknowledgement and the duke heard the sound of horse’s hooves as he cantered away. He could smell the ancient sweat-soused leather jerkin of the big man. He felt the horse under him begin to move up the hill, it was moving awkwardly, slowly under his considerable weight and that of the other man. The duke could now make out the lights of his own gatehouse, the porter’s lodge at the top of the hill. If his arms had been free, he could have hit it from here with a well-thrown stone.

  ‘Help!’ he shouted. ‘Help me! Murder! I am Ormonde and they have seized me. Help, I say, help!’

  Now they were at the junction of the roads, and turning left on the old western road that led to Tyburn Lane. They were moving away from his house. The rain was coming down harder, masking sight and sound; the prospect of safety slipping away with every stride of the labouring beast.

  The duke collected his wits. Thunder rumbled and lightning bleached the sky. The house was twenty yards behind now. ‘Help me!’ he shouted. ‘You there, the porter. It is Ormonde and I am to be murdered. Come out from the fucking lodge, you lazy good-for-nothing, or I’ll have the flesh off your fucking spine.’

  A massive elbow scythed backwards from the big man in front of him and slammed into the side of the duke’s head. Ormonde was rocked sideways with the force of the blow. He righted himself on the back of the horse but found that, despite the blow, his head was now strangely clear. He had one chance to escape death. Just one – and it had to be taken now. He put his right foot under the huge rider’s right stirrup, brought it up as hard as he could, shoving him off balance, and at the same time threw his whole weight to the left. He felt the rope bite deep into his waist and forearms, but the big man was falling too, and the two of them tumbled from the horse’s back and with a combined ‘Ooof!’ they splashed down into the blackness of the street. He landed on the big man’s back, felt the rope part under the strain and, fumbling his arm clear, he struck out, his fist hittin
g hard flesh. He punched again. But the big man turned under him, seized his shoulder and crashed a hard forearm into his mouth. Ormonde rolled in the darkness, the blood hot on his face and lay still, dazed and spent from his exertions.

  The big man was up on his feet and baying for help from his comrades and the duke was aware that the two other horsemen were circling his prone body. And then there! There, by God! At last. A lantern coming out from the porter’s lodge and a querulous voice saying, ‘Who goes there? Who is it? Who ventures abroad on this foul night!’

  Ormonde sat up with a jerk and shouted, ‘It’s me, Brooks, it’s your fucking master, you incompetent old poltroon! It’s Ormonde. I am captured. Call the footmen! Get all of them out, all of them, get them out here now.’

  The duke heard the big bald villain, the one he had been roped to, running off, sloshing heavily away through the muck. One of the mounted men, still above him, shouted, ‘Kill the rogue!’ aimed a pistol and fired at Ormonde. He felt the lead ball punch through the thick wool of the coat bunched up at his side, but no pain, just a sharp tug of cloth. The second rider fired, too – and missed, the bullet splashing slurry on to Ormonde’s face. The first rider said, ‘Run him through!’ but the other said, ‘It’s too late, Tom,’ for there were more lights coming from the porter’s lodge and cries of alarm and the shapes of men. Ormonde saw the riders turn their mounts and, cursing filthily, canter away west and into the night.

  Sunday 11 December, 1670

  Holcroft discovered, to his surprise, that he enjoyed his new employment. After reading the letter from Astraea that had so disturbed the duke, he had worked with his master for five consecutive nights when all the rest of the house was asleep, writing letters in the numerical code and handing them over to the yawning chief clerk at dawn to be dispatched by courier to parts of England, France and sometimes Holland, too. There was, mercifully, no repetition of the invitation to join the duke on his bed – Holcroft’s refusal was respected and they were, at any rate, both too busy. But Holcroft came to understand gradually that the duke was pleased with his work; that his efforts were valued. It was a novel experience for the new page – being valued. All his life he had either been pitied or despised for his strangeness. But here, in the Cockpit, alone with the duke at midnight, with the curtains drawn, and the candles blazing, his facility with the code, his ability to write a letter out perfectly in numbers and symbols, and to decode an incoming missive as easily as a billet doux was genuinely admired by one of the country’s most powerful men, he felt, perhaps for the first time, that he was a person of some small consequence.

  Of course, there was a vast gulf of rank between them, not to mention age and wealth, but when they were alone Buckingham treated him as if he were – not a friend, that would be absurd – but not as an ignorant servant or dispensable lackey. Sometimes, after a gruelling late-night session, Holcroft was dispatched to the kitchens to bring back bread and cheese or a little cold roast beef, and they would eat together and even share a bottle of wine.

  He did not truly understand all that he wrote at the duke’s behest, and he also knew that during the day the chief clerk, John Mullins, and his trio of inky subordinates also made secret communications with the duke’s other informants. But he understood enough of the correspondence he saw and wrote to recognize that the King was desperately short of money and the duke was labouring to provide him the necessary funds through the French treaty, which was now revealed somehow to be no good, a false treaty or a sham. He knew too that the two English gentlemen who had been in Versailles in May had somehow hoodwinked the duke in this respect.

  Many of the letters that he had drafted concerned the movements of the great men of England over the spring and summer months, and the duke seemed to be coming to a conclusion about the identity of the two mysterious travellers. Holcroft, even though he did not wholly grasp what was afoot, felt privileged to be helping the duke unravel this great secret.

  If Holcroft’s relationship with his master was satisfyingly cordial, the same could not be said for his relationships with the other pages. Unable to catch him out sleeping on night duty, Robert Westbury was still determined to exact his revenge. He sent a succession of pages to wake him ‘accidentally’ on the hour, every hour during the daytime in the dormitory. Holcroft suffered this for two days and then went and found himself a dusty, disregarded corner of the stables in which to sleep peacefully by day. The other pages did not quite know what to make of him. They knew that Westbury was punishing him, and naturally wished to side with their leader; and yet Holcroft also seemed in high favour with the duke. This meant that sometimes they shunned him and sometimes they treated him as if he were backstairs royalty. Holcroft, who found the behaviour of other people a mystery at the best of times, merely ignored them all. He was too busy or too tired anyway to do much more than sleep in his pile of straw, wash, eat and go and attend to the duke when the clock struck six.

  On the fifth night, long after midnight, when Holcroft had been yawning over a letter he was writing in code to the correspondent in Versailles, Buckingham suddenly said: ‘Why is it that you only wait on me during the dead of night? What do you do in the daytime? I needed you yesterday afternoon and no one seemed to know where you might be found.’

  Holcroft had looked at him stupidly: ‘I’ve been allotted night duty by our head page. He has allocated me seven nights in a row.’

  The moment the words were out, Holcroft realized with horror that they might well come under the description of ‘peaching’, talking about another fellow’s activities to the authorities, a sin that his brother Tom held to be the worst of them all. He blushed and looked down at the sheet in front of him.

  ‘The head page is the Westbury boy, is it not?’ said the duke. ‘Hmm. He does not love you, I collect.’

  Holcroft said nothing.

  ‘Well, all that stops now. You are to tell Mister Westbury that you are to attend me at all hours in the new capacity of my confidential clerk. You will sleep when I sleep. I want you available at all times, not whenever Robert Westbury determines. Have Matlock make up a bed for you in my dressing room until further notice and you will send to the kitchens for your food. Now, back to work. Write this to Astraea:

  Holcroft had dipped his quill in the ink pot and began to write:

  ‘We believe that our mysterious visitors can be narrowed down to the three men we have agreed to call A, B and C. I suspect that it is A and C because they often come as a pair and because, in my experience, B would prefer to make the running alone, however I could be wrong . . .’

  5’5’ 2’ – 1 2’ 9 3’ 2’ 5’ 2’ – 7* 6 1’ 7* – 4’ 5’ 5* . . .

  Sunday 18 December, 1670

  After nearly two weeks in his new home – and that time spent almost continually in the presence of the duke – Holcroft was granted a half-holiday by his master one Sunday afternoon and, joyfully, he determined to go and visit his mother in Shoreditch.

  As he walked up Cock Lane, avoiding the mud and puddles lest he mar his new shiny black leather shoes and white stockings, he initially enjoyed that warm feeling of someone about to do someone else a very good turn; for in his pocket, tightly gripped in his hand, was the silver half-crown that the duke had given him on his first day and he was very much looking forward to presenting it to his mother and seeing her face light up when he did so.

  However, that was not the only feeling in his breast – he felt a growing sense of unease, too, as he walked though the mean thoroughfare to his former home. He saw the dead dogs and the gangs of starveling, half-wild children, the shabby, hopeless men, the tough, squat women standing like guardsmen outside their front doors – he saw all of them with fresh eyes. He forced himself to lift his gaze and nod hello to a few, tipped his new black felt hat once or twice, but in his golden coat and fine palace togs they only stared back at him suspiciously and soon he dropped his eyes and focused only on avoiding the potholes. I have changed, he thought. In only two
weeks I am become wholly another person. He saw the trio of boys he had fought on his errand to the Wheatsheaf for his mother and braced himself for another encounter. But they ignored him as he plodded by, perhaps not even recognizing him, and carried on with their day’s amusement – the tormenting of a cornered cat, by pelting it with stones of increasing size.

  If Holcroft had changed, he was surprised to see that the cottage had changed too, and that made him feel even more uncomfortable. Its door was wide open, which in of itself was not so terribly unusual given that Charles and Elizabeth ran in and out from the street all day long. But Holcroft could see immediately when he put his head inside that the house was in turmoil. There were three wooden packing cases on the kitchen floor, spilling wood shavings, and inside he could see the few possessions of the family wrapped in protective rags. The table had disappeared. The dresser had been stripped bare of its crockery, the row of pans hanging on the wall was also gone, and his mother was on her knees before a large leather-covered trunk laying a pile of folded clothes inside. She jumped up when she saw Holcroft’s shape in the door and rushed over to enfold him in her arms.

  Holcroft felt such a wave of dizziness come over him that he could scarcely return his mother’s embrace.

  ‘Oh, Holly, you look so fine!’ His mother put her hands on his shoulders and admired his new golden coat. ‘You look like a prince of the blood. A prince of the Bloods perhaps.’ And she laughed in a slightly manic way. He caught the sweet stench of raw spirits on her breath and realized that she was drunk.

  ‘This page’s coat? Oh, I’ll soon be changing it for a better one. I’ll soon be wearing the black of a confidential clerk. I’ve been elevated, Mother. The duke says I may visit his personal tailor for a new suit when I can find the time.’

  ‘The duke’s own tailor, my goodness!’