by Ashly Graham
Arbella smiled. ‘An occupant of the Tower even got paid a salary; under King James it was three hundred and eight pounds a year, and a peer of the realm got five hundred and sixteen. Such people were not on a diet of bread and water.’
‘No, but no amount of luxury could conceal or alter the outcome of one’s residency. “Memento mori!” the heads on the pikes at London Bridge reminded those who passed across it, or in their boats contended with the treacherous swirl of the rapids beneath: “Remember you must die!”’
‘Remember how we lived, more like. What about all those jolly royal progresses by barge to Greenwich, under rippling pennants and blazoned banners, with minstrels playing bagpipes and flutes? With the Knights of the Bath in their violet gowns and hoods lined with miniver, peers in crimson velvet, Ladies of Honour, gentlemen, and esquires. Such pageantry as one can only imagine!’
Carew finished a mouthful of egg and cress, and picked up his coffee cup. ‘It was an impressive sight, I’ll admit.’
‘Good heavens,’ said Arbella, looking up; ‘what has happened to the weather? It was so pleasant, and now the temperature has dropped, and there are some serious rain clouds coming in.’
At that moment Corvax the raven, who had been comfortably asleep on Carew’s shoe with his head under its wing, awoke and drove his beak into the underwriter’s foot. The point went through the leather as if it had been butter.
Carew yelled and leaped off the bench, spilling coffee on his trousers. He dropped the cup and pivoted briefly on his undamaged leg before falling to the ground with his injured limb at an odd angle. Arbella thought she might have heard something snap. Corvax, who had hopped clear, waddled jauntily off across the greensward with—it was plain to see even on a raven—an expression of satisfaction.
Using one arm as leverage on the bench, Carew struggled to get up but grimaced when he put weight on the injured foot, and collapsed again. Arbella moved quickly to support him under his other arm, and assisted him back onto the seat.
The underwriter’s face was white as he regarded the hole in his shoe, and Arbella spoke anxiously. ‘Mr Carew, are you all right? Is the pain very bad?’
‘No and yes,’ he said through clenched teeth. ‘Sorry. My foot is numb to the knee. That ruddy bird’s beak has almost certainly severed a tendon, and now I think my leg might be broken.’
‘Darn Corvax: that’s the raven’s name. The Yeoman Warders call him Bloody Nasty with good reason. He goes for the tourists when they take pictures of him.’ Arbella wagged her finger at the raven as he watched them smugly from the middle of the Green. ‘You’re a wicked bird, Corvax, and a disgrace to the Tower. I will inform the Yeoman Ravenmaster and he’ll put you on short rations for a month.’ Corvax croaked an avian expletive, took a few steps across the lawn, flapped his wings and took off. His flight was unsteady, owing to poor preening habits, but he made it to the ledge outside a pair of open diamond-leaded windows in the Bloody tower and disappeared.
‘That’s very odd,’ said Arbella; ‘he’s had his wings clipped, all the ravens have except for Oswald. Oswald is the Chief Raven. Someone must have mended Corvax’s, and it can’t have been the Ravenmaster because his job depends on their not escaping; not that any of them would want to considering the pampered life they live here. Who could be responsible, I wonder?’
Carew squinted at the aperture above. ‘I’m suspecting a certain person who lives here, as a favour in return for having small items delivered.’
‘Look here, sir, that wound must be treated before it goes septic. There’s a nurse at Lloyd’s, isn’t there? You should probably have a rabies shot or something. We need to get you up somehow.’
But though they both tried gamely it was no use and Carew’s pain increased.
There was a peal of thunder. ‘Oh dear,’ said Arbella, ‘and now the sky has turned black. It looks like we’re in for a hell of a storm. I tell you what, Mr Carew, you wait here [Carew raised a facetious eyebrow at this] while I go and find George the Beefeater. George is as strong as a horse and will help you inside and call the medical officer. Oh good, there’s George now across the Green. I’ll be right back.’
Arbella returned with the ruddy Yeoman Warder, who was carrying a halberd and puffing despite the short distance. ‘Old Bloody Nasty flew?’ he was saying; ‘you’re ’avin me on, Miss Arbella, Ravenmaster Arnold keeps ’is wings clipped at all times. ’E’ll want to wring the dratted bird’s neck when ’e ’ears abaht this. We know what ’appens if the ravens bugger ’orf, don’t we? The Tower and the kingdom’ll be destroyed and I’ll be aht of a job. Now we’re in for a bleedin’ monsoon. Me uniform’s going to shrink tighter than a wasp’s weskit.’
The tourists were fleeing in all directions, looking skyward and holding their guide books over their heads as the first fat drops of rain fell. A powerful wind arrived from nowhere. Thrusting his partisan into Carew’s right hand to use as a crutch, George drew the underwriter’s left arm around his own shoulders and supported the lame man’s back as he tried to escort him off.
Carew reacted unhelpfully by going limp, so that he and the over-exerted Beefeater, who was a lot shorter than he was, looked like a pair of carousing drunks reeling to their next port of call.
As more thunder rolled and the rain started sheeting down, George twisted his neck to address Arbella, who had pulled her jacket over her head. In the increasing gloom, flashes of lightning illuminated the Beefeater’s face, which was already glistening with rain and perspiration.
‘There’s no point in you gettin’ drenched, miss,’ he shouted. ‘Go through that archway next to the Lieutenant’s residence. Dahn a ways you’ll see an archway wiv an iron gate into the guv’nor’s private garden. There’s a shed there, the old Garden-’Ouse, you can take shelter there. Wiv any luck this hullabaloo’ll be short and sharp. I’ll be draggin’ Mr C. in arter yer as quickly as I can wivout givin’ misself a hernia.’
Hearing this, Carew seemed to panic. Disengaging himself from George and pushing him violently away, the underwriter straightened and began half running, half walking, surprisingly fast in the opposite direction to the garden, towards the Tower’s exit. He used the halberd alternately both to prop himself up and to fend off a tourist, who was scurrying for cover and not looking where he was going...before dropping his crutch and continuing without it.
George and Arbella gaped after Carew as he vanished behind the curtain of rain. Then the burly Beefeater shrugged, looked at his watch with dismay as if he was late for something, jabbed several times with his thumb in the direction that Arbella was to take, and hurried to retrieve his ceremonial weapon and resume his duties.
Chapter Ten
Water was already overflowing the gutters and slapping onto the paving, as Arbella ran through the archway into the Lieutenant’s garden. She glimpsed a profusion of shrubbery run wild, and some unpruned fruit trees and weed-rich flower-beds.
Although she was expecting a shed, at the far end against a high wall was a little crooked building of small dark red bricks laid diagonally around exposed timbers. The whole of one side and the ridged tile roof was in the grip of a giant creeper, which might have been all that was holding them in place. The door had a low lintel and was partly open at a slight angle on its hinges.
Arbella burst in with a gasp—she had been holding her breath as if it might keep her dryer—and, lifting it a little by the loose latch or sneck, heaved the door shut behind her. Leaning against the frame she brushed as much rain off her clothes as she could. Her jacket had borne the brunt of the weather and underneath she was not as wet as she feared.
Inside the garden-house promised to be more substantial than it looked from without. George had been right: this was an excellent place to take cover in. The rain was barely audible, there was no sound of water leaking through the sloped roof, and the air was warm. Although the windows were mostly intact they were clouded with age and encrusted with mildew, and admitted only a dim soft light.
Nobody seemed to have been here for a long time, there was no modern-day garbage lying around and, judging from a line of mesh-fronted wooden coops, it seemed that the place had last been used as a chicken-house. There were many flowerpots of different sizes containing straggles of expired plants. A number of cupboards and cabinets had spilled their contents, which were so ancient as to be unidentifiable, onto the floor.
At the far end over the two lowest rafters and propped against the wall were rusty rakes and hoes, forks and shovels, sections of wooden trellis, and bamboo stakes of different lengths for supporting saplings and plants. Smaller gardening tools hung on hooks on the walls amid patches where the plaster had fallen off to reveal the lathes underneath. Everywhere were tiny heaps of woodworm powder, insect carcasses, and long-forsaken spiders’ webs.
It was the sort of place that Arbella remembered from her childhood, when her parents would take her to visit her aunt and uncle in the country. There was a walled garden there too, and a potting shed where she would drop in on the gardener. The old man was only too happy to break off from dibbling in his neat rows of vegetables, sit her down on a sack of potatoes, and, after wetting his whistle from a stone-stoppered bottle and lighting his pipe, tell her stories about country ways, while Arbella inhaled the scent of bunches of dried herbs and lavender that hung from the ceiling, and strings of onions and shallots and garlic, and apples and quinces stored in rows on pallets.
Here in the garden-house there was also a smell of tobacco, but instead of Ogden’s St Bruno Flake it was that of fine cigar-leaf tobacco: perhaps that of the Lieutenant himself when he wished to escape for a peaceful smoke where no one would think to look for him.
On a table were the paraphernalia of what looked like an old-fashioned chemical laboratory: beakers, carboys, alembics, and other glass vessels, and pipes and pipettes; pots, crucibles, iron retorts, glass tubes in wooden stands, and phials and bottles containing the coloured sediment of evaporated liquids; pestles and mortars, funnels, filters, sieves, and tongs.
Testing a bench to see if it would bear her weight, Arbella found it to be solid enough, so she brushed it off. But just as she had sat down, the latch at the entrance rattled and clacked and she jumped up. The door juddered and was thrown wide to admit a stumbling body, briefly illuminated by a flash of lightning accompanied by a clap of thunder. Outside as Arbella strained to see who it might be it was now as black as night; and it was as if the opening of the door had admitted the darkness along with the cyclone of wind and rain that stirred up the dust in the room and made her sneeze, for what little light there had been inside was gone. The door hit the wall and shivered shut on its weak corroded hinges.
Whoever had come in was cursing the elements, in archaic language untypical of any Beefeater known to Arbella and certainly of any tourist. There were the sounds of hard breathing, and clothes being flapped to get rid of as much wet as possible, and what might have been a hat being whacked several times against a leg.
She spoke doubtfully. ‘George? Is that you, George?’ Arbella very much wanted this to be George.
There was a crash as the person tripped over a flowerpot and staggered against a shelf or cupboard containing glassware, and a querulous male voice said, ‘Is’t you, damned Percy, a-spying on me? May a tertian ague plague you. We agreed long ago that you were never to disturb me here. Hell’s bells, here’s yet another berlady cloak ruined.’
Arbella replied nervously, ‘If it’s not you, George, is it the Lieutenant?’ Answer came there none and she tried again, anxious to avoid provoking a violent reaction; ‘I’m sorry, sir, I only came in to get out of the weather. I’m not living here, or doing anything I shouldn’t. I’ll be on my way as soon as I can find the door, storm or no storm.’
‘George? Lieutenant?’ rapped the invisible stranger. ‘A pox on you, Northumberland, and your tricks, and dissembling woman’s voice. This is not some Christmastide foolery.’
The individual dropped something and must have fallen to his knees to recover it. After some fumbling, and scraping, sparks were struck and a shape became visible for an instant. Then a flame appeared, which revealed a man with flint and steel striker crouched before a small pile of dry leaves scraped together on the floor. Beside him was an open tinder-box containing some scraps of char-cloth.
‘The tinder at least is dry,’ he muttered as he applied a stump of tallow to the flame. When it sputtered alight he got up, trod on the leaves to extinguish them, and went to a shelf on which was a miniature candelabra, which Arbella had not noticed, held the tallow to each of the wicks of three half-burned candles, restored the items of ignition to the tinder-box and put it away under the full-length cloak that he was wearing.
The room brightened in stages to reveal a man who under Arbella’s scrutiny from ten feet away appeared to be above medium height, and middle-aged. His features were lean and weather-beaten over a pointed beard.
In the flickering light cast by the candles, Arbella’s first impression was that although it was the face of a man who was proud to the point of arrogance, his nature might not be as defiant as he might wish it to seem. Perhaps he was lonely, or disappointed. She had mixed and fleeting images of intelligence, stubbornness, sensitivity, cruelty, selfishness, impatience, bravery, cunning, and cynicism: one might stand before such a chiaroscuro portrait for hours, she thought.
Whoever he was jutted his chin at Arbella, and approached her holding the candelabra until it was very close. As he took her in from head to foot with a look of increasing disapproval, after at first holding her ground she backed away.
‘Please tell me, sir, are you the Lieutenant? If so, I can explain.’
‘Not the Lieutenant,’ said the stranger, shaking his cloak like a bird ruffling its plumage. The front was sewn with rows of tiny pearls and it had an ermine collar. ‘Why dost thou ask, knave? Art thou a page, some child emissary of the Court? Hath not the King done enough to persecute me already?’
Confused and in some shock, Arbella was moved to be bold. ‘The King? Really, I can’t believe.... No, I am not a page, and most certainly I am not a boy. I should have thought that much was evident even in this light.’
The small eyes glittered. ‘How now! Swear that thou art here on nobody’s account but thine own. And tell me thine errand. Do not lie to me, boy.’ Arbella thought that she detected an accent to his voice…perhaps a west country burr.
‘Look, sir, I’m harmless. I was in a hurry to get out of the rain on Tower Green. I intended to leave as soon as possible. But if you’re not the Lieutenant, and I will take your word for that, perhaps I might hazard a guess that you’re one of those Sealed Knot types, putting on a pageant at the Tower. You know: jousting in the moat, and in the evening a mediaeval banquet with mop-capped wenches pouring tankards of ale and serving wild boar and venison.’
‘Jousting in the moat…what preposterous aquatic pursuit art thou referring to? It mattereth not, I cannot swim. The wenches I would hear more of.’
Putting the candle down on an upturned crate, the man unhooked the chest-fastening on his black velvet cloak from a silver stud, removed the garment with a flourish, shook it so hard that Arbella was sprayed with water droplets, and went to hang it on a peg on the wall. After pleating the folds to minimize creasing he added his bonnet, which was of the same colour and material and wound with a gold chain secured by a medal.
When he turned back Arbella observed that he was attired in a brown velvet doublet embroidered with gold lace and cinched with a silver link belt, black taffeta breeches, and dove-grey silk stockings. His Vandyke beard was curled and neatly combed to a point and he was wearing a wide ruffed collar. There was a poniard at his side with a ruby-coloured stone in the gold handle, and his shoe buckles had glass jewels on them.
Though not comforted, she was relieved. ‘That’s it,’ she said, mentally demoting the man; ‘you’re with some group putting on a historical show. If it’s not jousting, then you’re acting out a play by Shak
espeare or one of his Jacobean contemporaries. You can’t have begun before the storm hit, or I should have seen you all before we came in. Anyway, it is clear that you have no more right to be here than I do. So we may as well be polite to each other. It’s going to be a while before this is over, and everything’ll be a mess. I shouldn’t be surprised if the moat’s filled up again. It’s very professional of you, but the event’s bound to be cancelled so there’s no need for you to stay in character.’
The individual looked scornful. ‘A marine play,’ he said; ‘The Tempest perhaps? Fie! Sailor that I am who cannot swim, my wit at least is not impaired by rain and damp. I have it…thou must be some wretch escaped from his cell who hath lost his senses. Senseless or not thou canst make thyself useful.’
Striding to the rear of the room the man held the candelabra up. Revealed in the light was a tiered slatted rack hanging from mounts on the ceiling. It was of the kind used for drying laundry, which could be raised above head height out of the way, and lowered by means of cords and pulleys at each end in order to add and remove garments and linen, sheets and towels.
Directly beneath the apparatus was a refectory-style table on which reposed a large wicker basket filled with whole tobacco leaves laid flat.
Arbella stared. ‘How extraordinary!’ The odour explained, she longed for a cigarette.
‘Boy, come hither and lower the other end of this contraption. We must spread the leaves out to dry and cure. I cannot afford to have them rot in this berlady humidity. My jars are low, and this will be my last consignment for a long time. With the ague and fever that I am sure to have contracted from being out in such berlady weather, I must soothe my throat by drinking smoke.’
‘I’m a smoker myself and hardly one to talk, but smoking is not generally considered the best remedy for a sore throat.’
The man made a dismissive gesture. ‘The other remedies of lily root, arsenic, and dried toad do not bear thinking about. It seems that thou art as ignorant as King James, who spouteth a great deal of nonsense instead of healthful smoke on the subject. Tobacco, I assure thee, boy, is a sovereign cure for many things and I, not James, am the reigning authority on it. Though in sooth he is no king of England, only the Sixth of Scotland and therefore a Pretender here. Scotland is where he came from, Scotland is where he belongeth, and it is to Scotland that he should return where he hath my full permission to vex his barbarian subjects with as much of his prattle as he pleaseth.’