Becket shook his head in wonder. “Sidney told me she did, but I did not believe him. Well, well. We had best be going.”
They went down the stairs and through Crocker’s Lane to the morning bustle of Fleet Street.
“Farewell, Mistress Thomasina,” Becket said. She nodded brightly and skipped into the street, then turned back and gravely shook his hand. He bowed to her as if she had been a great lady of the Court. It touched her heart and she said impulsively, “Mr Becket, the Queen will be sure not to forget your faithfulness in this matter. I am sure you will be rewarded.”
“No, mistress,” said Becket heavily. “I think you mistake Her Majesty. Knowing what I know, I think she will never forgive me.”
Thomasina bit her lip because this was true, and then ran off down Fleet Street to Leicester’s palace on the Strand. Becket set his shoulders, turned and walked the other way to the City and the goldsmiths along Cheapside, his broad back prickling for fear of pursuivants.
LXXII
NOW MARK HOW THE affairs of men and princes may be turned by the very tiniest of events. You convince yourselves that you are masters of your fate, and so you are, somewhat. But at any time your plans are no steadier than walnut-shell boats, with a sail of paper and a mast of a toothpick bobbing on the ocean swell.
The Earl of Leicester is a puissant lord who has a hundred servants to do his bidding in his palace on the Strand. The man in charge of them, his major-domo, had been introduced to Thomasina in her new guise as a beggarmaid.
Alas, for Mr Benson. Being in his cups on the nights that Ames and Becket escaped from the Fleet, he fell down three pair of stairs and broke his leg and his head. As Thomasina skipped down Fleet Street, through Temple Bar and along the Strand, Leicester’s household was being ruled by the major-domo’s deputy, a plump, efficient fellow who had never met her, and the whole place was in uproar.
“No,” snapped the cook at the child who was standing at the kitchen door, fury blazing in her eyes. “I’ll not disturb Mr Benson, certainly not. How dare you, you little kinchin mort; now get out.”
“I have a very important message for him,” insisted the beggarmaid. “I must see him.”
“You may see Mr Howard and content yourself, it’s more than you’re worthy of.”
“No,” said the beggarmaid. “I do not want to see Mr Howard, I want to see Mr Benson . . .”
The cook pushed her away from the door and picket up a basket of wizened pot herbs.
“Sam, come here and peel these. I want two pounds of breadcrumbs and the lard in the green pot.”
“It is extremely urgent that I see Mr Benson,” repeated the beggarmaid in a high, insistent voice. “This concerns the Queen’s Majesty, it is very very important-“
“Important to get yourself a chance at the silver plate,” sneered the cook. “I know you kind. Get out.”
“No, you fool!” shouted the beggarmaid. “I have a message for Mr Benson, he knows me-“
The cook strode over to her and cuffed her ear hard enough to knock her into a pile of kindling. He threw a stale penny loaf at her.
“There’s some food for you, you little bitch; now get out.”
Unwisely the cook turned his back on her, and was hit on the head by the bread-roll, shrewdly thrown. The beggarmaid was standing up, red with rage.
“How dare you!” she shouted. “How dare you touch me! I must see Mr Benson – ”
The cook picked her up by the back of her ragged kirtle and threw her bodily through the kitchen door so she landed on the midden.
“If you come back, you’ll get a whipping. Go and beg somewhere else.”
A couple of hours later, the Earl of Leicester’s still-room woman went bustling into Mr Benson’s sick-room with a posset and found a beggarmaid climbing breathlessly onto the window-ledge. She stank of vegetable peelings and animal guts and was scratched with hedge twigs from her climb up the side of the house.
The still-room woman knew what to do with thieves. She caught the child deftly after a certain amount of dodging about the room and shrieking, twisted her arm behind her and brought her to Mr Howard. Mr Benson was too deeply drugged with laudanum to wake up.
“She was trying to steal from Mr Benson’s room,” reported the still-room woman, “but I caught her.”
The beggarmaid’s face was ugly with fury as she writhed in the woman’s maternal grip. “I am not a child . . .” she hissed. “I have a message for Mr Benson . . . He knows me.”
“No doubt,” said Mr Howard, looking at her with disgust.
“Will you call the magistrates?” asked the woman.
“No,” said Mr Howard. “I am far too busy to go through that. Besides, the child is undoubtedly working for some upright man to bring him what she steals. I expect she is hungry.”
“She seems plump enough.”
“Listen to me. I tell you I have an important message – ”
“No, child, you listen to me. It is a very wicked thing to go climbing into men’s bedrooms to steal their belongings, especially when they are gravely ill with a broken leg. God sees all you do and knows when you sin, and stealing is a sin. We are Christian folk here and we will not give you to the magistrates if you tell us the name of the upright man that is your master.”
“There’s no upright man, you fat half-wit. I am not a child at all, damn you, I am the Queen’s muliercula – ”
The still-room woman fetched her a ringing slap on the cheek. “How dare you swear at Mr Howard when he is being kind to you, bad girl!” she scolded.
“Let me see my lord of Leicester; he knows me too.”
Both of them laughed at the child’s delusion. “My lord is a very great man,” said Mr Howard. “Being a good, charitable nobleman, he may have given you money in the street, but that does not mean he knows you. Now tell us who ordered you to steal from here.”
“I was not stealing. I was trying to deliver a message.”
“And the message was?”
“To admit me to the house so I can change and to hitch up my carriage so I can return to Court and speak to the Queen, my mistress.”
Mr Howard exchanged glances with the still-room woman and both shook their heads. The little maid was clearly wandering in her wits.
“Child,” said Mr Howard, not unkindly, “to your previous sin of attempted theft you are now adding the further sin of lying. Now come, sweeting, admit your fault and we might even give you a penny.”
The child’s shriek skewered his ears and quite shocked him. Nobody had every suggested he put a penny in such a place before. Over the shrieking, he said quietly to the still-room woman,
“She is obdurate in her wickedness, but we shall still be kind to her. Birch her to teach her to mend her ways and follow God’s law, lock her in the woodshed overnight and then give her some food and let her go. If she comes back here, we will certainly give her to the magistrates who will treat her much less gently.”
True, the child’s stony glare as the still-room woman hauled her away did give him pause. So did her quiet parting shot that she would see him apologise to her grovelling on his knees, dismissed from his place and barred from any other. But so many of the street children had a battered maturity beyond their calendar years, corrupted and aged by their immoral lives. Certainly he had never met one so insolent nor so persistent; most were happy enough to use flattery and humility to escape if they were caught. Perhaps the child was touched with madness as well as being a beggar, perhaps that was why she was a beggar. Truly he pitied rather than condemned her, and forgave her foul language and the time he had wasted on her.
LXXIII
AMID ALL THESE COMPLEXITIES and heroics, where was my daughter-in-law? If she had known then what I know, she would of course have acted differently, but she was still meshed in the web of reality. Her soul still wore its tattered carcass, her bones still ached, her hands were still stiff and swollen, her guts were still disordered and her head still full of tobacco smoke a
nd the fumes of aqua vitae.
At least she was warm. Cold was familiar to her from her earliest days in the nunnery. The nuns’ cells could never be warmed properly in the winter and they were enjoined to offer up the discomfort of breaking the ice on the water in their bowls in the morning to the glory of God and the subduing of flesh. Which was economical of firewood.
She thought of the mirrored room at the Falcon as she sat by a roaring fire, thought of the men and their gold. To my sight then they were children, and she saw them likewise. Large, loud, dangerous children. The one called Father Hart was short and neatly made, with bright knowing eyes; the other a hulk, tall and heavy with a brooding face and black curls, whose eyes found her as invisible and discountable for lack of interest in her wrinkled flesh as any other man. Mary was neither a man nor yet a bonny girl he could imagine lying with; therefore she was nothing.
To be nothing is very painful. I too have been old, although you would never know it from men’s pictures of me. I was in my middle years when I held my Son on my knees and marvelled at the dead weight of Him, at the ugliness of his wax flesh, at the smell of death on Him, when the babe that He was and the man He became melted together in a corpse that stabbed my heart with a sword. So it is with any woman misfortunate enough to live to bury her child. They never show this; all the artists paint me or carve me as a young creature, such as they prefer being men, slender and smooth-faced and virginal. They never show that I had thickened at the waist, as you do, that my face was tired, that my hands were hard with work. Do you think they honour me to show me as a young miss with a bovine expression on her face? No, for I had become something very different, less delicious to an artist but far more honourable. Perhaps I looked as they picture me only once, when I stood bewildered in a garden with Mary Magdalen and recognised the gardener.
After the hurry of that time, even after the flames that came on the wind from heaven, I aged as all flesh must if it live. My hair whitened, my teeth loosened and yellowed, and every pool of water was an ambush of truth, every man’s expression a revelation. Do you think some reversed alchemy aged my inward thoughts as Time’s rape changed my face? No, for our inward thoughts stem from our souls, which are immortal and therefore ageless. Within my battlements of age spots and wrinkles I will still a girl, still surprised at men’s dismissal, when once they had paid tribute. So Mary was also, and so she despised the men she had decided to coney-catch.
As they counted out the gold, Mary laughed to herself, because within the broad compass of each golden crown and angel she saw the barrels of aqua vitae lining up, and also her darling girl Pentecost’s dowry, to match her to a man who would not bear her too badly and free her of the bawdy-house where she was born. Would such a man have her? Certainly he would, if the dowry was big enough. Mary would take care in her choice. She would find a man old enough and sick enough that soon Pentecost would be a widow and could please herself.
Also she laughed because she had cut out the meat of the matter. When making the deal she had felt no compunction at ruining the Queen – what had the heretical bitch ever done for her?
But then she took thought, and in her anger with Father Hart’s refusal to absolve her it seemed to Mary’s fuddled mind that she might make them pay twice. And so, surrounded as she was by multiple truthful mirrors, she hid the Book of the Unicorn among the tattered blue and green velvet patches of her skirts. Her thumbnail she grew long and sharp, the better to cut purses with when she could and also for breaking women’s waters. It was the work of a couple of heartbeats to draw the sharp talon down the gutter between the pages and so cut out the last two pages, fold them and stow them in the pocket of her petticoat. Then she wrapped the gold round her loins, gave the overgrown boys their book and hurried out of the room, down the stairs one at a time to favour her bad knee, along the back passage, into the yard and scuttled as fast as her poor legs could go to Paris Garden Stairs.
Well, no, it was not quite so simple as that. There were men waiting by the back door as well, who moved when Mary first appeared. Then they saw her in their lantern-light: hunched over, ugly, grey wisps of hair starting from her cap, muttering toothlessly to herself and cackling. Had they thought to stop her they could have made a mighty gain for their master Davison. But they did not. They were there to arrest two men who might well fight them and were nerving themselves to do that. To be invisible, to be of less importance than a louse is not always a burden.
It would have been a harder matter usually to cross the Thames, but with the ice, Mary could step down from the jetty and walk across. Even then she was not fool enough to run, for Time rots your bones as well as your face and she was afraid she might break her hip.
However, she did not go to the Whitefriars Steps, not the City. I had conceived a plan even as it occurred to her to keep the Queen’s testament and confession. It was a frightening plan, now she saw the state of the Thames ice, for the ice seemed worn and there were black patches where it had gone thin; it creaked and bounced under her. She stepped as lightly as she could, prancing like a pony sometimes as she heard it groan. When she was at the other side, in the shadow of the walls, she turned left, heading westwards and past the gardens of the great men’s houses on the Strand. For all her fears, I bade her stay on the ice which would not hold a trail. She muttered at me, complaining as the cold broke through the thin soles of her turn-shoes and numbed her bare feet and ankles within. It took a long time. Once she hid in a booth of the Frost Fair, to rest her poor bones and finish her bottle of aqua vitae, and must have slept. When I jerked her awake at the far-off sound of dogs, she was stiff and number with cold. But she got up and shuffled on, talking to me as I encouraged her, flapping her arms to move the sluggish blood about her blue veins.
She was in terror that there would be a hue and cry for her. The heavy man who called himself Strangways had not borne the look of someone who would be lightly coney-catched. She kept close in to the wall, passing by York Stairs and Hungerford House, panting and feeling the burning pain in her chest that came often when she was carrying heavy pails, past the kilns of Scotland Yard where the workmen were already piling in the firewood to heat them up, and at last she came to Mrs Twiste’s laundry. It has a door that gives straight onto the river, so they can draw water direct from the Thames, although there is water piped in from the Whitehall conduit. Mostly the door is rarely used save in a summer drought, but Mary had gone through it to come to the Falcon earlier that day, and left it unlocked.
She passed through into the boiling-room where they were working at the fire under the coppers, to build it up and start the water in its day-long boil. She slipped past, bearing some bolts of wood she had stored just within the door, for nobody questions an old woman carrying firewood.
Of course they were no longer living at the Falcon. In the little cubby where the children keep their cloaks Mary found Pentecost, curled like a puppy, shook her awake and took her blinking and yawning down to Mary’s own kingdom in the basement, where the barrels of piss wait to mature as if they were beer. She did not show the child what she had. She sent her to fetch aqua vitae with a shilling that Mary had saved for celebration, and then she wrapped her great-granddaughter’s dowry in a bag made of a shirt she had stolen and put it in the freshest barrel, hanging on a string. That made her laugh too, though the stink of the place always lifts her head off, and taking the lid off a barrel is something no one would do willingly.
Pentecost came back with the bottle and some bread and cheese. She had a jug of beer as well. They broke their fast companionably among the barrels while Pentecost chattered on about the doings of the little daughters of the laundry women; how Susanna had said this, how Kate had pinched Anna, and was it possible that Lizzy had her own white pony with a golden bridle, as she had claimed? She spoke wistfully of the child-woman that was a Court tumbler and hoped she would come back and show them more somersaults and she complained that she had hurt her knuckles grating soap and Mrs Stevens had s
houted at her for getting blood in it.
Then Mary must get up and put on the yoke to carry her pails. Pentecost turned to go back to her work amongst the laundry women, but her grandma stopped her.
“You come with me today,” Mary told her as she counted the pails on her little wheelbarrow, took up the handles and set off.
It was exciting for Pentecost. She had helped wash the underlinen of numerous courtiers but had never seen the Court itself. So she trotted alongside my liegewoman proudly in her blue kirtle and white cap and little apron and Mary’s heart ached to see her so eager and dainty. Pentecost’s grandmother, little Magdalen, child of her whoredom, that Mary carried strapped to her back along endless hostile roads, had looked just so when she was a child. But Magdalen was a whore by the time she was thirteen and a mother at the age of fifteen. She had five children that she carried to term, one boy who went completely to the bad and two girls who survived to bear children. One was the under-madam at the Falcon, and one was herself a drunken whore, and bore twice, leaving only little Pentecost alive, who killed her. To think of it: so many children in the babe Marry carried and this the last of them that she knew of. Pentecost must have a dowry, Pentecost would have a dowry; this had been all Mary’s thinking for a year, once she began to feel the hot burning pain in her chest and knew she would die soon. At least, if Mary slipped through my Blessed fingers and ended in Hell, she would know she had done her best for the child; her mother and grandmother Mary had killed through her incontinence and drunkenness, but Pentecost she would save, come all the world in arms against her. I, the Blessed Virgin, had promised it to my daughter-in-law, I had sworn on my Immaculacy that she would do it.
Mary had planned out her rounds in the Court to save her back. She went first to the farthest chambers, all the way down to Cannon Row, almost in Westminster Hall. In and out of the chambers went Pentecost and her grandma, every one of them crowded with beds, clothes and jewels, although by that time in the morning most of the courtiers were out of their rooms, out trying to gain an office or a wardship, oiling their way through the many layers of the Court.
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