Westward. He was going home.
Urquhart started forward, walking briskly. He felt for the knife in his belt, the dagger in his shirt sleeve, and the rounded butt of the long-barreled German wheel lock pistol inside the left breast of his doublet. He hoped he would not have to use it. The noise would bring all London running.
He followed his victim to his house in Basinghall Street. Four stories high and three bays wide, with armorial glass in the windows. He waited outside for some minutes then drew a deep breath and slowly exhaled, taking a moment to reflect on his mission.
He climbed the few steps to the door and knocked hard. A bald man in knee-length breeches answered.
“God speed you. An urgent message for the master.”
The bald man noted the Scottish accent. “Another time, sir, you would be right heartily welcome. Alas, today my master has given instructions that he is not to be disturbed.”
“He will see me. Tell him I come with a message from her ladyship. It is she who bids me seek his help.”
“Regretfully, sir, I cannot disobey an order—”
“You are very dutiful, and that is to be commended, but I urge you, look to your Catholic conscience, and quickly. Her ladyship’s business is a matter of life and death. Tell Mr. Draper I have traveled far to see him in his capacity as Sir Dagonet. He will understand.”
The bald man paused, weighing up his visitor’s appearance and demeanor. He looked at his shoes, dirty with the mud of the street. But the visitor seemed so confident; Mr. Draper might well be angry if he turned away an urgent communication brought by a Scotsman. “Wait here, if you please,” he said, stepping backward into the shadows.
After several minutes he reappeared. “Mr. Draper will see you. This way.”
Urquhart followed the servant along a dark passageway, through a high hall, and past a pair of large wooden benches piled with bright silk cushions. He noticed a gilt-framed portrait of the master of the house, and another of a stern-looking man in an old-fashioned breastplate and helmet—Draper’s father, perhaps. There was a big tapestry of a town under siege at one end of the hall. Above the fireplace were two brightly painted plaster figures of black women in red skirts, their exotic paganism allowing the plasterer to bare their breasts shamelessly. Here was a whitewashed stone staircase. At the top, a picture of the Virgin. Finally they came to a wide wooden door.
“What is your name, sir?” asked the bald man over his shoulder.
“Thomas Fraser,” Urquhart replied.
The servant knocked, lifted the latch, and pushed the door open. Urquhart crossed himself. He loosened his sleeve, felt the hilt of the dagger, and entered boldly.
The room was long, oak-paneled, and warm, and had an elaborate plaster ceiling. Two fireplaces in the far wall were alight, the blazing logs held in place by polished silverheaded firedogs.
The servant turned to his right and bowed. “Mr. Draper, this is the Scotch esquire who has come on behalf of her ladyship. His name is Thomas Fraser.”
Draper was sitting behind a table at one end of the room, looking down at a piece of paper. Urquhart saw the same narrow face and gray beard he had seen outside the hall. He stepped forward and bowed respectfully. He heard the door shut behind him and the latch fall.
“You come from her ladyship?” the merchant said softly, looking up. There were tears in his eyes.
Suddenly Urquhart felt nervous, like a boy about to steal silver coins from his master’s purse. Why the tears? Was Draper expecting him? But there was just one thing to do and the sooner it was done the better.
“Sir,” he said, taking another two steps closer, so he was barely six feet from the table. “I come with an instruction from her ladyship.” He reached for his dagger.
Suddenly a deep north country voice called out from behind him: “Hold fast! Move no further!”
Urquhart turned. Behind the door as it had opened had been a huge, bearded man dressed in a black doublet and cloak. His hair too was black and curled. In his early thirties, he had obviously seen action on more than one occasion. A livid red mark stretched from above his right eyebrow to his right ear. On his left hip he wore a silver-handled side-sword, and he was holding a pistol.
For one throb of his pulse, Urquhart was motionless. But in that moment he understood what had happened. Her ladyship had been betrayed. He did not know by whom, or how, but it left him in no doubt what he had to do. The instant he saw the scarred man move his pistol hand, he pulled the dagger from his sleeve and hurled it at the man’s chest. The next instant he rushed toward him, one hand reaching out to grab the pistol and the other fumbling for the knife at his own belt.
When the gun went off, Urquhart was moving forward. And then, suddenly, he was on his side, the report echoing in his ears.
Only then did he feel the pain. It was as if his scream of agony was a sound formed within the severed nerves of his left thigh. There was a mess of blood and torn flesh. He could see splintered bone. As the sliced nerves and the sight of the shreds of bloody meat combined into a realization of one single, hideous truth, he gasped and raised his head, dizzy with the shock. The rip his dagger had made in the black cloak and shirt revealed a glint of a breastplate. The man was drawing his side-sword.
“You are too late,” the north country voice declared. “Our messenger from Scotland came in the night. Mr. Walsingham knows.”
Urquhart screamed again as the pain surged. He thumped the floor, unable to master the feeling. But it was not the wound that mattered—it was the failure. That was worse than the physical hurt. It did not matter that he was a dead man. What mattered was that his victim was still alive.
Eyes blurred with tears of shame, he thrust his hand inside his doublet for his own pistol. The scarred man was too close. But he forced his trembling hands to respond and drew back the wheel of the lock. Gasping, he twisted around, aimed at Draper’s head, and pulled the trigger.
The noise of the gun was the last thing he heard. An instant later the blade of the side-sword flashed through his throat and lodged in the back of his neck, in the bone. And then he was suffocating and tumbling in a frothing sea of his own blood.
It was not an easy death to behold.
Read on for an excerpt from The Roots of Betrayal, now available from Sourcebooks Landmark.
Saturday, April 29, 1564
William Harley, officially known by his heraldic title of Clarenceux King of Arms, was naked. He was lying in his bed in his house in the parish of St. Bride, just outside the city walls of London. Leaning up on one arm, he ran his fingers down the skin of his wife’s back, golden in the candlelight. He drew them back again, slowly, up to her shoulders, moving her blond hair aside so he could see her more fully. She is so precious, so beautiful, he thought. My Saxon Princess. My Aethelfritha, my Etheldreda, my Awdrey.
He withdrew his hand as the candle in the alcove above him spluttered. He looked at the curve of the side of her breast, pressed into the bed. The feeling of their union was still with him. The ecstasy had not just been one thrill; it had been many simultaneous pleasures—all of which had merged into one euphoria that had overwhelmed him, leaving him aglow.
She turned her head and smiled up at him again, lovingly. She was twenty-five years of age now. He felt lucky and grateful. Not only for the pleasure but also for the knowledge of just how great his pleasure could be. He leaned over and kissed her.
The candle in the alcove above the bed went out.
He lay down and let his thoughts drift in the darkness. Six months ago he had almost destroyed his own happiness, disconcerted and attracted by another woman. Rebecca Machyn. He shuddered as he remembered how he and Rebecca had been pursued, terrified together. She had seen him at his lowest, and he her. They had supported each other and, in a way, he had fallen in love with her. But he had never had doubts about his loyalty to his wife. That was what t
roubled him. Two women and two forms of love. It was not something that most God-fearing men and women ever spoke about.
What did he feel for Rebecca now? In the darkness, he sought his true feelings. There was a part of him that still loved her. His feelings for his wife were an inward thing: a matter of the heart. He loved Awdrey because of what he knew about her and what they had built together, what they shared. His affection for Rebecca Machyn was the opposite: an outward thing. She showed him what he did not know, the doubts, the wonder, and the fear that he knew existed in the world.
That outward-looking, questioning part of his nature worried him. The reason he had spent so much time with Rebecca was his possession of a secret document, and that document was still here, in this house. Awdrey did not know. That in itself felt like a betrayal. The document was so dangerous that men had died because of it. When Rebecca’s husband, Henry Machyn, had given it to him the previous year, the man had declared that the fate of two queens depended on its safekeeping. And when Clarenceux had discovered its true nature—a marriage agreement between Lord Percy and Anne Boleyn, which proved that Queen Elizabeth was illegitimate and had no right to the throne—he had understood why it was so sensitive. Only when Sir William Cecil, the queen’s Principal Secretary, had asked him to keep it safely did his life start to return to normal. But never did he feel safe. Not for one moment.
He knew, later that morning, he would go up to his study at the front of the house and check that the document was still where he had hidden it. It was a ritual. More than a ritual: it was an obsession. Sometimes he would check it three or four times in one day. The knowledge that he possessed the means to demonstrate that the Protestant queen was illegitimate and that the rightful queen should be one of her cousins—either the Protestant Lady Katherine Grey, sister of the beheaded Lady Jane Grey; or Mary, the Catholic queen of Scotland—was not something he could ever forget. His fear of what would happen if he should lose the marriage agreement beat in his heart like his love for Rebecca Machyn. Both were dark and dangerous. The ecstasy of his lovemaking with his wife was so blissful and so pure by comparison—and yet he could not ignore the dark side within himself.
He felt Awdrey turn over and cuddle up beside him, nestling under his arm. He was a tall man and she of average height, so his arm around her felt protective. She ran her hand over his side, where he had been scarred in a sword fight five months earlier.
“How is it now?”
“Fine.”
“I don’t want you to exert yourself too much.”
“If it had torn just now, it would have been worth it.”
He remembered the day when he had suffered the wound—at Summerhill, the house of his old friend Julius Fawcett, near Chislehurst. He wondered how Julius was now. “What would you say to the idea of going down to Summerhill next week?”
“I promised I would take the girls to see Lady Cecil. She wants them to play with her little boy, Robert.”
Clarenceux lay silent. Sir William Cecil’s wife was godmother to their younger daughter, Mildred. The idea of Annie and Mildred playing with Robert was a little optimistic. Robert Cecil was three, their daughter Annie was six, and Mildred just one. It was Awdrey’s polite way of saying that she would not refuse the invitation. Lady Cecil, being one of the cleverest women in England, was something of a heroine to her. Both women had been pregnant together and, although that child of Lady’s Cecil’s had died, she was expecting again, which made her call more frequently on Awdrey. The relationship was not without its benefits to him too. It was immensely valuable to have a family connection through Lady Cecil to Sir William, the queen’s Principle Secretary and one of the two most powerful men in the country, the other being Robert Dudley, the queen’s favorite.
Awdrey moved her hand over his chest, feeling the hair. “You could go by yourself.”
He was meant to be planning his next visitation. Soon he would have to ride out and record all the genealogies in one of the counties, visiting all the great houses with his pursuivants, clerks, and official companions. The purpose was to check the veracity of all claims to coats of arms and heraldic insignia, and to make sure that those with dubious or nonexistent claims were exposed as false claimants. He had completed a visitation of Suffolk three years earlier and one of Norfolk the previous year. He had finished his notes on the visitation of Devon, and had discussed the gentry of that county at length with his friend and fellow antiquary John Hooker. But he could put off actually going to Devon until June, and so could delay the planning for another week and enjoy the late spring in Kent with his old friend.
“I may well do that,” he replied.
Awdrey touched his face. He felt her hand move over his beard and cheek. Her finger traced his lips, then slipped down over his chest, to his midriff.
“How tired are you?” she asked.
About the Author
James Forrester is the pen name (the middle names) of the historian Dr. Ian Mortimer. Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and winner of its Alexander Prize for his work on social history, he is the author of four highly acclaimed medieval biographies and the Sunday Times bestseller The Time Traveler’s Guide to Medieval England and The Time Traveler’s Guide to Elizabethan England. He lives with his wife and three children on the edge of Dartmoor.
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