by Ann Swinfen
An anchor was run out and stamped into the shingle, and another rope tied to a dead stump just above the line of the shingle. Of course, the tide must come in at some times of day and could lift the boats away, but in my ignorance I did not know whether it was low tide or high at the moment.
Now the men were walking over the plank bridge and toward the house where we were hidden. Someone inside opened the door and the yellow of a candle-lantern flowed out, lighting up for a moment the two men who had been standing to one side. I did not recognise either of them. I had half supposed one of them might be Poley, as he seemed to turn up everywhere, like my evil shadow, but these men were quite unknown.
I jerked my head towards the back of the house and mouthed in Andrew’s ear, ‘Back to Rye, as fast as possible.’
He nodded and ran off swiftly in the direction of the thorn thicket. I ran after him.
It was dark behind the house, overshadowed by a stand of taller trees, willows, and as I ran, thinking of speed and not watching my feet, I collided with something heavy and metal, stumbled and fell, striking my head. Darkness rushed over me.
Chapter Twelve
I must have blacked out only briefly, but the next thing I knew I was being heaved along by my shoulders, there was shouting and lights were springing up in the other cottages. Andrew had his hands under my armpits and was dragging me towards the horses.
‘I can walk,’ I gasped.
With that he let me go and we both ran, careless of any noise, desperate to reach the horses before the men reached us. Andrew gave me a leg up, then sprang on to his own horse. We were away up the lane before my feet were in the stirrups. My sight was blurred and my head throbbed, but Hector followed Andrew’s horse without hesitating.
Behind us men were running, but we were away.
Never had I been more thankful for Hector’s speed. When I had ridden away from Hartwell Hall during the night, I was not sure whether or not I would be followed. Now, due to my own carelessness, the men in the fishing village knew that they had been seen. We had noticed no horses, but there must surely be one or two in the village. There had been outbuildings behind the cottages, some of them probably barns.
I cursed myself for having ruined everything at the last minute. My instinct had been right. I had guessed which was the boat that would smuggle the men in. We had stayed out of sight until they had landed and I had caught a quick but clear view of their faces. If we had just managed to ride away without being noticed, everything would have worked out so well that even Phelippes would have been pleased with me.
I crouched low over Hector’s neck and urged him on, passing Andrew and flying on towards Rye. He gave a delighted whoop and spurred after me. Clearly for him it was just an adventure, spiced with the thought of pursuit. Yet the whole purpose had been stealth. I tried to think, but my thoughts were swept away by the speed and the pounding of my heart. Despite myself, despite my aching head, I began to enjoy the race through the night. The moonlight, the silver-black gleam of the sea over to our right, the sharp clean smell of wet rocks and seaweed, all gave the ride the quality of a dream, of some adventure from a knightly romance. Almost I forgot the unpleasant reality behind the dream. Almost.
The town wall of Rye was coming into sight, and on the steep approach up to the gatehouse, I slowed Hector. Andrew was not far behind, pulling up knee to knee with me and laughing.
‘That was a fine race, Master Alvarez. You are good enough on a horse to be a trooper.’
‘I have a very fine horse.’
‘Aye. I thought poorly of him when we first left London, but he’s a very Bucephalus.’
‘He is indeed. Now, do you have the captain’s pass?’
A sleepy gatekeeper shot back the bolts for us and, grumbling, let us through.
‘He’ll no sooner be back in bed than he’ll be turned out again,’ said Andrew.
‘I hope so. I hope they believe us.’
When we reached the inn, Andrew offered to see to both horses while I went to wake Phelippes and the captain. I think perhaps he did not relish the thought of that task. Certainly it was still well before dawn and they would not welcome the summons any more than the gatekeeper had.
‘I will come and care for Hector when I have explained all,’ I said. I could not neglect him after such a ride.
Once inside the inn I found a servant asleep in a chair and shook him awake. He was reluctant to rouse two such important guests from their beds, but when I told him it was on the Queen’s business, he lit a candle and went stumbling away to find them, still half asleep. I sat down in the chair he had vacated and found that my legs were trembling. I also noticed that there was a great gash in my right leg, where I must have collided with something sharp behind that cottage in the dark. I put my hand up to the side of my head, for I realised that it was still throbbing painfully. My fingers came away sticky with blood.
Phelippes and the captain of the guard came down the stairs together just as I was wiping my head with my handkerchief.
‘Kit!’ Phelippes’s voice was sharp with alarm. ‘You are injured! Have you been attacked?’
‘No, no,’ I said hastily. ‘I fell over something sharp, metal, in the dark. It was stupid of me, because they heard me.’
‘Who heard you? Did you see anything in that village?’
Wrapped in a loose gown of dull grey, Phelippes looked somehow younger and less intimidating than usual. The captain had pulled on breeches but his night shift poked out from the neck of his doublet, which was buttoned awry.
‘They have brought two men in,’ I said, ‘using that boat I noticed, the larger one. I think they must be the two men you were expecting, but they heard me fall. I’m afraid it will have alerted them. You must make haste if you want to catch them.’
‘Did you see them well enough to describe them?’
‘I only caught a glimpse.’
I described the two men as best I could from that brief moment when the light from the house door had shone on them.
‘Hmm,’ Phelippes said. ‘One of them sounds like Ballard, but he has a passport, so why should he enter the country this way? Unless he wants us to think he is still abroad. The other isn’t Maud, though. Maud is a much smaller man than you describe. What has happened to Maud?’
There was no answer for that.
‘Where is Andrew?’ the captain said. He had noticed me looking at his doublet and was buttoning it up again.
‘Seeing to the horses. We rode back as if the Devil himself was after us. The horses will be tired.’
‘I’ll rouse the rest of my men. Do you want us to go after them and arrest them?’ He turned to Phelippes, who was tapping his teeth with his thumbnail.
‘No. I want Ballard to run free for the moment. The other one – I’m not sure who he can be. What I’d like you to do, captain, is to use a few of your men, perhaps only two, to follow them at a discreet distance and see where they go. Do you think you can do that? Without them realising?’
He nodded. ‘I have two who can follow without being noticed. I’ll speak to them now. What would you like the rest of us to do?’
‘I think we will spend a quiet day today, rather than be seen rushing back to London. If we are watching them, they may well be watching us. Let them think we had nothing to do with the noise Kit made. Perhaps it was rival smugglers from another village! We will do a little more investigating in the neighbourhood, a little more questioning. That way it will seem that we have discovered nothing so far. We’ll go in the opposite direction, over to the Marsh. I know we were told that it would not be safe for a stranger to land there, but who’s to know we were told? We’ll ride over to Tenterden and the Isle of Oxney, and make a nuisance of ourselves there, well away from your men tracking Ballard and his companion.’
The captain turned and went back upstairs. Phelippes looked at me with his lips pursed.
‘You had better clean up that blood, Kit, then get some rest for what is left of t
he night.’
‘Thank you, sir. But I’ll just see that Hector is settled first.’
‘Hector?’
‘My horse, sir.’
He shook his head and smiled at the idea that something as functional as a horse might have a name. For Phelippes a horse was nothing more than a means of transport. Then he too went back upstairs.
On my way to the inn stable, I went through the dining parlour and filched two more apples. I reckoned Andrew’s horse deserved one too.
By the time I reached them, Andrew had both horses rubbed down and fed, but they welcomed the apples greedily.
‘What a night!’ His eyes gleamed in the light from the stable lantern. ‘More excitement than a month of being a trooper.’
I grinned back at him. ‘I could have done without the shock when I fell over whatever that was behind the cottage.’
‘It scared me too. Your head is bleeding. You’d best have it seen to.’
‘I’ll see to it myself. When I’m not working for Phelippes, I am a doctor at St Bartholomew’s’
He whistled softly, causing Hector’s ears to swivel toward us.
‘And you ride like a trooper.’
‘My grandfather bred horses. I could ride almost before I could walk.’
‘Well, between us we’ve managed to spice up a dull mission. What did the great men say?’
‘Phelippes and your captain? They are sending two of your men to follow the strangers and see where they go, but not to arrest them yet. Phelippes thinks he knows who one of them is.’
‘And the rest of us?’
‘The rest of us are going to create a diversion, making a nuisance of ourselves over in Kent, round the Isle of Oxney, so it looks as though we have discovered nothing.’
He laughed. ‘Clever!’
‘Oh, Phelippes is a very clever man. Now we’d best get to our beds for what’s left of the night. Thank you, Andrew, for your help tonight. If you had not dragged me away from that cottage, I hate to think what might have happened to me.’
As I spoke I had a sudden clear picture of what would have happened. Those ruffians would have captured me, and when they discovered I was a girl – what then? I shuddered.
‘All in a night’s work,’ he said cheerfully.
Compared with the excitement of the night, the next day was exceedingly dull. After breaking our fast late because of our lack of sleep, we set out for Tenterden. In the town and then round the villages on and near the Isle of Oxney, we rode about asking questions doggedly and calling the greatest possible attention to ourselves. It was strange country. The Isle was no longer quite an island, but it was easy to see that once it had been, before this part of the marsh had been drained. Even now the whole area was crisscrossed with ditches and streams, and even where the road ran along a raised embankment, it felt temporary and unstable.
One of the troopers had been born in a village a little north of here and told us that what looked like dry ground now, in high summer, would revert to salt marsh and sea in winter.
‘There’s hardly a winter goes by when it doesn’t flood,’ he said. ‘Then the island is cut off again. You see over there?’ He pointed ahead with his whip to a small gentleman’s estate on the edge of one of the larger waterways which led down to the Rother, one of the rivers which flowed into the port of Rye.
‘That place is known as Kingsgate now. It was there that King Henry embarked for the Field of the Cloth of Gold. His army and his court encamped on those fields before they left. I’ve heard my grandfather talk about it.’
The estate looked sleepy under the summer sun, but I tried to picture the fields filled not with cows but with pavilions and pennants, with royal servants running to and fro, and the king’s ships tied up at what was now a rotting and dilapidated quay. It added a little interest to what was otherwise a very boring day.
That evening Phelippes decided that we could start for London the next morning, having allowed time for the conspirators and the men shadowing them to get well ahead of us. So, on an unpleasantly hot day we set off for home, making our stops again at Hawkhurst and Knoll, and reaching Seething Lane late in the evening of the third day. In the bustle of the stableyard I had only time for a brief farewell to Andrew before the troopers rode off to their quarters in the Tower nearby.
‘Anytime you want another bodyguard,’ he said, ‘I’m your man. I’d rather be creeping around spying and galloping through the dark than doing routine manoeuvres on a parade ground.’
I shook my head with a smile. ‘If the invasion comes, you’ll be doing more than manoeuvres, I’m afraid.’
‘At least it will be more exciting. Take care of yourself, Doctor Alvarez!’ With that, he rode off with the rest. I knew he did not believe I was a doctor. I was beginning to doubt it myself.
After a day’s rest, I was back to my former routine – hospital in the morning, Seething Lane in the afternoon, and, when I could slip away, visits to Simon’s company at the playhouse, where I could put aside all thoughts of treason and conspiracy. I was getting to know more of the players now. There were three boys beside Simon who took the women’s parts, but he was the oldest and most experienced. His voice was changing but fortunately it was not mutating through the swoops and croaks some boys endure. Instead it was simply deepening gradually, though I thought it would always remain quite light. He would eventually sing tenor, not bass. And even while it deepened, he could still pitch it so that it sounded like a woman’s. In my crazier moments, I wondered whether he could teach me to pitch my voice lower, so that it would sound more like a man’s. Fortunately it had always been quite low. It seemed that our voices would meet somewhere in the middle of the musical scale, for I sang alto rather than soprano.
Guy Bingham and I would often make music together during these visits. He would find me a lute or a recorder, and he was teaching me the viol. As well as their chief musician, in charge of three or four others, he was also one of their comic actors, yet his face resembled a mournful monkey’s. Simon told me quietly one day something of Guy’s history.
‘He was left an orphan very young and lived by begging and stealing on the streets. Then he found employment as a scullery boy. He said it was like entering heaven. A warm bed and three meals a day. The mistress of the house heard him singing at his work and discovered his musical talent. She had him trained and he became the household musician until she died a few years later.’
‘Was he out on the streets again?’
‘No, he joined a band of musicians attached to my lord Leicester’s household. He married, and had three little girls in four years. Then the plague came and took his whole family. He doesn’t talk about it, but I think he went a little mad. He was thrown out of Leicester’s household, but Master Burbage found him and took him on.’
‘It seems a strange life for a comic actor.’
‘Oh, you’ll find that most comic actors have some great sadness in their lives. The comedy is a protection, a shell. It helps to arm them against memory.’
‘I see.’ I could understand that. ‘The more I learn about your world, Simon, the more it resembles mine.’ Then, lest he guess too closely what I meant, I added, ‘This world of Walsingham’s service, of spies and informants, coded letters, projections, agents and double agents. Nothing is what it seems. Like the playhouse.’
‘I hope our pretence is for worthwhile ends, to explore all corners of the human condition. We do not do it to deceive and entrap.’
I could see he was a little offended by what I had said.
‘No, I did not mean that. What I was trying to say – I’m confused and not saying this well. Both play with reality. Turn shadow into substance and substance into shadow.’
I wanted to say: And make a girl appear a man. A girl who is beginning to feel that this friendship of ours is more than simple comradeship. Or at least she wishes it could be.
Instead, I changed the subject. ‘I am surprised you all spend so much time here in the pl
ayhouse, even when you are not rehearsing or staging a play.’
Simon himself was not appearing that day, yet here he was.
He shrugged. ‘Where else would we go? Our fellow players are our family. Few of us have anyone outside, being a collection of waifs and strays. And your decent citizen regards us as vagabonds.’
He did not say it, but I could read it in his eyes. Like your father.
‘We live in cramped lodgings, we have no other home to go to but here. So the playhouse provides us with home and family. In the cold of winter when we cannot stage a play, we are bereft. Homeless orphans. You will see, when winter comes.’ His mouth twisted in an ironic smile. ‘And sometimes that is not metaphorical. Actors have starved to death before now in wintertime.’
I remembered that when I had first met him it had been a cold January. Was he without employment then? I had never thought to ask. He had said that his landlady had been kind, that was why he was running errands for her brother, the keeper at the Marshalsea. Perhaps she had let him stay on, rent free, until the playhouses opened again. The next time I had seen him, he had moved here, north of the river, and the weather was warm enough for audiences to sit through a play in the open air, for even the seats in the covered galleries were as exposed to the cold as the seats in a bear pit. I realised that there were aspects of his life that were as unknown to me as my life was to him. Yet it was impossible to cross that bridge between us. The thought twisted in my stomach, so that I was glad when James Burbage pounced on us and led us away to hear a new song that Guy had composed to words by Kyd.
‘Kit, I have an errand for you.’
My heart sank at Phelippes’s words. Not another mission like the one to the Fitzgerald’s house, I prayed. The more I thought about my multiple deceits and play-acting, the more uncomfortable I felt.
‘Now that our two smuggled men are in London, I have had them watched by my servant Cassie, who knows Ballard. He was able to identify the other man as Thomas Barnes.’
Barnes. I should know that name. ‘Barnes? Was he Gifford’s cousin, who acted as courier for a time?’