It had been a time of the most appalling responsibility for Stephen, since by then he was no longer the first mate, but had become the captain. The original captain had succumbed to a fever when they were two weeks out from Africa. He had probably caught it from the black slaves in the hold, among whom sickness was already raging. They had all died before the storm, along with many of the crew and the ship’s Spanish pilot.
Stephen had been made captain by vote, partly because he was the first mate anyway and partly because he was popular with the crew.
The popularity had soared just after the captain fell ill. Stephen, going below to tend him, heard curious noises coming from his own cabin and went in to find the most disagreeable sailor on the vessel, a powerfully built but extremely stupid man called Tom Hayward, on Stephen’s bunk—where he hadn’t the slightest right to be—with a frightened and tearful cabin boy, both of them devoid of all their nether garments.
The captain being out of action, Stephen dealt with the situation. He hauled the boy off the bunk, told him to get dressed and then shouted for assistance and had Hayward put in irons. There was an impromptu trial, held on deck in the presence of the surviving crew, and it soon transpired that he had molested all the younger men at various times. He was too big and strong to argue with, they said, and he’d sworn that if they told, he’d say that they had propositioned him, and not the other way about. Stephen had ordered Hayward to be hanged.
Hayward, sobbing and then howling, pleaded wildly that he came from Stephen’s own home, at least from Rixons, which Stephen’s aunt owned, didn’t she? It made no difference. Hayward’s body was thrown to the sharks and half the crew looked on Stephen as their saviour.
But he couldn’t save them from the storm. The Sweet Promise had carried three small boats, including the one he was now in, but when she finally sank, it had happened so fast that only two were launched, and Stephen had seen the tempest overwhelm the other one before his eyes. He and his two companions were now the only survivors, and they wouldn’t last long unless they found land. Provisions and flasks of fresh water had been kept in the escape vessels, but they were all gone now. If only that distant land proved friendly. “Out oars!” he barked.
The coast, as they neared it, seemed to consist mostly of sandbanks, and when at last they saw an opening, they had to row against wind and tide to get there. But once through, they found themselves in a lagoon. Worn out, they shipped oars and drifted, looking for a landing place. The country in front of them looked green and fertile; there might be game there, and fruits that were good to eat.
It was then that one man said, “If that ain’t the smoke of cooking fires, I’m the King of Spain.” The other added, “Someone’s comin’ out to meet us. Look there. In rowing boats. What travellers call canoes.”
It was going to be all right. The natives were amiable, even kind, though strange to look at, with their coppery skins, high cheekbones and dark almond-shaped eyes. The head of their chieftain was shaved at the sides, leaving a narrow crest of hair like a horse’s hogged mane across the top of his scalp, and in his ears were copper earrings.
They all shook their heads at the filthy and sickly state of the mariners, and Stephen and his companions found themselves being towed ashore by the canoes, taken to a village of wooden houses, then led into one, where golden-brown women, themselves decently wrapped in leather cloaks, fetched warm water so that they could wash, took away their dirty clothes and brought deerskin tunics for them to wear instead.
Then there was food—a feast served on the beach and cooked there over a big outdoor fire. There was venison, some kind of porridge and melons, wonderful melons, which every one of the men seized with instinctive gratitude, as though their bodies had been crying aloud for fruit.
The chief had a wife, who sat beside him, and a young girl, who was evidently their daughter and looked very much like the chief, seemed delighted to serve them.
Halfway through the meal Stephen, rather as Jane had done when she came home from court and fell in love with Peter Carew, became suddenly aware of two surprising things at once.
One was that for the first time in his life, he was homesick. He had never thought he would yearn to be at Allerbrook again, never thought he would miss Exmoor. He had spent most of his young life wanting to get away from it, and when he’d learned of the way his father had died, he had never wanted to see southwest England again. He had returned from London, when summoned by his aunt Jane, with reluctance.
It was odd that Andrew Shearer, who in life had been so little to him—one could hardly count a few grudging words of well-wishing on one isolated occasion—should in death persistently haunt his imagination. He could not bear to think that the body which had given life to his own should have died in such agony and indignity and been turned to ash so that there was not even a grave by which a son, who liked being alive, however it had come about, could kneel to pray.
Now, in this strange, far land, images of Allerbrook House, of the racing peat stream in the combe, of Dunkery outlined against a lemon-tinted evening sky, rose unbidden before his eyes and the thought that he might never see them again filled him with sorrow.
In the same moment he realized that the chief’s daughter, who at that moment was offering him some more melon and smiling at him, was breathtakingly beautiful.
Part Four
ENDING AND BEGINNING
1585–1587
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
The Hills of England
1585
“What I need,” said the swarthy, dark-gowned man whose principal purpose in life was the protection of his sovereign lady Queen Elizabeth, and—as a corollary—the entrapment and destruction of her rival, Mary Stuart of Scotland, “what I need are eyes and ears in every house of any standing, in the whole of England. All of them—not just most. I am fortunate in the agents I have in France, but I need more in England. The country is riddled with these dangerous Jesuits.”
Irritably he paced around his study. “They’re like mice in the woodwork. They slip ashore in disguise and creep from house to house, charming money out of purses and promises out of gullible romantics. They are vermin!”
He stopped pacing. This office in Whitehall Palace had linenfold panelling, exquisitely patterned leaded windows and a view of the rippling Thames. Its beauties, however, mattered little to its proprietor. It was not overlarge and he had stopped pacing because, apart from the fact that the place contained a lot of shelving, several wooden stools and a big desk piled with documents, there were a number of other people present and he kept having to walk around them.
They included two competent secretaries—highly gifted both in code breaking and forgery—and an individual who was supposed to be another member of the secretarial suite but spent much of his time interrogating suspected Jesuits. He was small and inoffensive looking, and skilled at setting verbal traps so subtle that his victims often did not know they had been caught until their questioner himself, smiling pleasantly, pointed it out.
These were all official employees. The others were less official, though equally valuable in the eyes of the queen’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, albeit not in all cases for admirable reasons.
No one knew the details except Sir Francis himself, but rumour had it that Walsingham possessed knowledge that would have had several of them in prison on serious charges, except that they had talents that Walsingham valued. He employed them to seek out treachery and keep him informed.
One particularly valuable agent was Bernard Maude, who had once tried to blackmail the Archbishop of York over an amorous intrigue between the prelate and an innkeeper’s wife and spent three years in Fleet prison for it. Maude had blue eyes with the unwavering stare of inborn dishonesty. He had been released early, after Walsingham, trawling legal records for likely recruits, had picked out his name and interviewed him. Walsingham was prepared to go personally into the most repulsive, damp and rat-ridden dungeons in order to provide
himself with useful spies.
There was also one woman, a lady in her fifties, dressed in a dark blue gown over an apple-green kirtle. The overgown, if one looked closely, hung just a little awkwardly. This was because Mistress Ursula Stannard had a pouch sewn just inside the front opening of all her overdresses, in which she habitually carried, among other things, picklocks and a small dagger.
Mistress Stannard, unlike Maude, was entirely respectable. She was a long-standing agent and had penetrated many conspiracies simply by virtue of being a woman, apparently interested in embroidery and music and the fortunes of her daughter and grandchildren. Behind this harmless facade she watched and listened, examined other people’s correspondence and identified dangerous patterns in seemingly unconnected facts.
Her loyalty to Elizabeth was absolute. She was a love child and it was said that she was related to the queen, though there were varying theories about what the relationship actually was.
“The situation,” said Walsingham, sitting down behind his desk, “is becoming more and more perilous. Ever since that damnable papal bull, practically ordering every Catholic in the land to turn into a potential assassin or risk excommunication, I have hardly had one good night’s sleep for worrying. Nor has Her Majesty, courageous though she is. We have already had two dangerous plots, both centring around Mary Stuart. She is always the focus. There are rumours of further plots. But unless she is implicated in something unquestionably treasonable, the queen will never agree to cut off her head. It needs doing, but…”
He brought a fist down on the desk. “She has been nearly twenty years in England, ever since the Scots threw her out because her husband had been murdered and she was probably a party to it. She is a simpleton. She was foolish to marry Henry Lord Darnley—a spoilt degenerate if ever there was one—and more foolish still to marry James Bothwell. There’s little doubt that he was the one who had the gunpowder put under Darnley’s bed. She fled to England. Elizabeth has taken care of her because Mary is a queen and also a cousin, and she repays by scheming and plotting…arghhh!”
He interrupted his diatribe with an exasperated snarl. His audience, who had heard it all before, was silent. “The plots have always been foiled—so far,” he said. “But she never learns. She is an ingrate and a wantwit and a threat. So I have called as many of you as were to hand, for this meeting. I want you to go out to towns and villages and farms, and find me further aides—as well as seeing what you can learn on your own account, of course.”
After a thoughtful pause Mistress Stannard said, “Which districts are the worst off for eyes and ears? The north, I suppose? The Catholic faction has always been strong there.”
“Yes, the north.” Walsingham nodded at one of the secretaries, who fetched a scroll from a shelf and unrolled it on the desk, weighing down the corners with inkpots and books.
The scroll was a map of England, on which circles had been drawn in thick black ink. One big circle embraced most of the north, and the secretary pointed to it. “If a Catholic rising is fomented, much of its support will come from there. However, there are also suspicious households in the south—here…here…and here….” He indicated three small circles in the home counties. “We have no agents in any of them. And we’re very short of agents in the southwest peninsula. We know too little about the major households there.”
“The kind of people we want to recruit,” said Walsingham, “are people who know their districts and have the entrée to the right houses. I’ll send two of you north. See if you can discover any useful men there. You will receive payment, plus funds for your journeys. Another of you had better deal with the home counties. Find excuses to visit those three houses and do your best to enlist people there who will act for me. Also, enquire about vacancies for butlers, grooms, tutors and the like. I’ll try to find applicants. Now, Mistress Stannard…”
“You have left the southwest for me, have you?” said the lady serenely. “My daughter and her husband are at the moment visiting his cousins in Plymouth. I could certainly decide to join them for a while. They have a wide acquaintance in Devon.”
Walsingham, with a slight smile, said, “I know.”
Mistress Stannard nodded. “Of course you do, Sir Francis. Plymouth will make a good starting point. Once there, I may be able to arrange other visits, to households in Somerset as well as Devon.” She studied him thoughtfully. “The danger is really serious?”
“The queen,” said Walsingham, “calls me her Old Moor because of my dark hair and complexion. Some people think it’s a discourteous nickname. But it could be worse. She could have called me Spider. I myself think I am very like a spider, crouching in the middle of my web of spies and waiting for a careless fly to touch the web and make it quiver. It is quivering, Mistress Stannard. There is trouble on the way.” He looked around and addressed them all equally. “How soon can you all set out?”
Almost in one voice they said, “Tomorrow.”
Have I done the right thing? Stephen, leaning on the rail of the Santa Maria as she glided slowly nearer to Plymouth, turned to look at the young woman beside him. She was tall for a girl, only a little shorter than he was, straight of back, slender but strong. Her amber skin, the curve of her aquiline nose and the set of her long dark eyes told of the foreign blood she carried. She was so like her mother. But when she also turned her head and looked back at him, he saw himself in her expression. In mind, in character, she was very much his daughter. She had both an English name and an Algonquin one. She was Philippa as much as she was Golden Bird.
“Should I have let you come?” he said. “It’s too late now, but I find myself wondering—will you be happy in England? Will you settle? Are you already pining for your home?”
“I chose to come. I didn’t want to be parted from you,” said Philippa. “And it was you or my birthplace. I couldn’t have both, could I?”
“Perhaps I should have stayed.” But even as he spoke, he was glancing beyond her, at the distant hills, green under the October sunshine, drawing closer every moment, and he found himself adding, “Look, there are the hills of England. We’re nearly into Plymouth.”
“You always wanted to come back to England,” Philippa said. “Round the fire in the evening you talked endlessly to me and to my brothers about it. You taught us English, and all about Christianity.”
“I baptized you all. It’s allowed if no priest is to be found. Yes, it’s true. I always hoped that somehow, sometime…but your mother could not have borne to be uprooted. I told her that I wanted our children to understand their father’s world as well as hers, but I hoped she didn’t know how desperately I wanted to come back.”
“She may have guessed,” Philippa said. “She spoke to me once, about the way you so often used to stand on the shore and stare out to sea, toward the east. But I think she knew you wouldn’t leave her.”
“I’d never have done that. Never!”
“I know. But since she died you’ve been waiting for your chance. My brothers knew, too. When this man Sir Richard Grenville sailed in on the Tiger with those people you called colonists, we all realized at once that when he left, you’d go with him.”
“I wish the boys had come, too,” said Stephen. “But they are men of the Algonquin, through and through, and it’s in the nature of things for young men to choose their own path. Philippa, I pray you will be happy. You will have to make your life in England now. I will try to find you a good husband, who will understand.”
“Thank you. Don’t worry, Father. I shall be all right,” said Philippa, and smiled.
And then looked away, because although she was with her father, the voyage on the big ship, surrounded by strangers from his homeland, had been confusing and sometimes frightening, especially when Grenville turned pirate and boarded the Santa Maria, on which they were travelling now. It came home to her, suddenly, just how far she was from her birthplace, and that it was to be forever.
She had known that all along, of course. But I di
dn’t understand what it meant! The realization almost stopped her breath. She held on to the rail, her knuckles turning white, and swallowed hard. Then her head came up and her face was tranquil. The Algonquin rarely showed their feelings. She would not show hers.
Footsteps came toward them along the deck and they turned to see who it was. And then blinked in astonishment, scarcely recognizing the handsome, sunburnt but neatly shaved gentleman who was approaching, his beautiful buckled shoes tapping on the planks, his muscular calves outlined by fine knitted stockings and the rest of him adorned in puffed hose, tight velvet doublet, pristine ruff and wide-brimmed black hat. The last time they had seen him, he had been in seaboots, scruffy knee-length hose and a leather jerkin which gave a good view of his hairy chest, while most of his face was obscured by a mass of beard.
“Sir Richard?” said Stephen. “But…!”
“I had my best clothes in my trunk, waiting for the day of my return,” said Sir Richard Grenville. “I got them out yesterday and went to the galley to steam the creases out. We’ve been sighted—can’t you see the crowd waiting for us? It looks to me,” he added with satisfaction, “that the news that I boarded a Spanish vessel on the way home and seized her cargo of treasure must have got here already. Via Spain, no doubt, since I left the crew alive and allowed them the Tiger to get home in. We’ve got gold, silver, pearls, sugar and ginger in the hold and I fancy we’re going to be welcomed with trumpets and speeches. I wonder if the news has reached the queen yet? I wish you’d let me take Philippa to court.”
“Certainly not,” said Stephen.
“Well, you two had better go below and tidy yourselves up. Philippa, my dear, the colonists I brought over gave you some women’s clothing. You had best get into it.”
Philippa looked down at the breeches, shirt and jerkin she was wearing. “English women’s clothes are not comfortable.”
The House of Allerbrook Page 32