“If they were to change their minds and withdraw now…” Stephen began.
“They would be too late,” said Walsingham. “I hope for your sake that you haven’t already told them that I am privy to their detestable ambitions! Did Mistress Stannard not make it clear that nothing—nothing—must suggest to these plotters that they are under suspicion?”
“Yes, Sir Francis. And I have not done so.”
“I’m glad to hear it.” He paused, transfixing Stephen with that sharp dark gaze. “How much do you know?” he asked. “Mistress Stannard’s report said you had been in the New World for many years, so perhaps you are not aware that Mary Stuart’s husband Henry Lord Darnley was strangled in a garden in Edinburgh while trying to flee after being warned that his bedchamber was about to be blown up with gunpowder. He escaped the explosion but not the assassins. Did you know?”
“Yes, sir. It was part of Mistress Stannard’s briefing.”
“He was an unpleasant young man, but there were other ways of dealing with him,” said Walsingham. “Instead he was murdered. Mary then married the man who almost certainly organized the murder, the Scottish lord James Bothwell. He abandoned her, the Scottish people understandably threw her out and she came to England to be a nuisance to us for two decades, representing herself as pathetic and hard done by. In some gullible quarters she is considered a martyr and almost a saint. Saint!”
There was another pause. Then Walsingham said, “Just what did you say to your relatives?”
“That I thought the scheme too unwieldy and we should withdraw—just us three, the Allerbrooks. I didn’t suggest trying to dissuade anyone else. My kinsmen are thinking about it, I hope,” said Stephen unhappily.
“In vain,” said Walsingham. “Nothing whatsoever is going to interfere with my plans. I intend to pile up such evidence against that woman that even Queen Elizabeth cannot argue with it. You are lodging, are you not, at the Green Dragon in Bishopsgate?”
“Yes, Sir Francis.”
“Not any longer. You will remain here tonight, under guard. Bernard Maude will go to the Green Dragon to pay your bill for you and collect your belongings. He will bring them here tomorrow and you will then return to the west country, under escort. Bernard, whom your relations believe to be a fellow conspirator, will tell them that you have decided to back out and go home. It might be safer for you,” Walsingham added. “You took a risk, my friend. Men who are willing to overturn the realm might not stop at putting a dagger into an unreliable associate and dropping him into the Thames, even if he’s a family member.”
Sir Francis had remained seated throughout the interview. He now reached for a quill and began to trim it. “You can keep the amber ring,” he said. “You did send some useful information regarding a house in Wiltshire and a so-called pedlar in Hereford. You are a competent enough agent, I think. Continue your work, if you will. It could be worth your while. The property of traitors is often confiscated, but out of respect for your services, perhaps Allerbrook may be exempted.”
“I will continue,” said Stephen.
“Good. But don’t even think of attempting to contact Tobias and Robert Allerbrook. That is all. You may go.”
They were dismissed. It was over. Robert and Tobias, unless they had after all listened to what he had said to them, and ran for their lives now, at once, were already as good as dead.
The devil take you, both of you, for what you will do to Aunt Jane and poor Philippa and that unborn child.
But he quelled the thought quickly. Philippa loved Robert, and in any case, the devil had his talons in them already and the devil bore the name of Sir Francis Walsingham.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Contingency Plans
1586
“I did my best,” said Stephen. “Aunt Jane, Cousin Blanche, Philippa, my dear, dear daughter, I did my best. Toby and Robert were determined to go through with it. I could do no more. I left without them.” He had managed to persuade his escort to part from him when once they were in Clicket. Explaining Walsingham’s two dour soldiers to his family could have been difficult. “One thing I can swear,” he said. “I did not betray them. It didn’t come to that. I had…heard things. This man Walsingham—he is said to have spies everywhere. It is very likely that the plot is known already. I just backed out. Toby and Robert despise me for my cravenness.”
“Craven? You?” said Jane. But her attempt to laugh was a failure. Her face was white.
They were in the Allerbrook parlour, all four of them. He was telling as much of the truth as he could. He wasn’t sure what impression he was making. On Philippa, it seemed, not enough.
“You should have made them come home!” Philippa shouted. She had abandoned impassiveness. For once she was behaving like an Englishwoman, not to say an English fishwife. “Didn’t you tell them you thought they were discovered?”
“They would have asked me how I was so certain, and I would have had no answer.”
“But if you thought they were betrayed already, just why did you think that?” Philippa almost screamed. “How did you know?”
“Philippa, be calm!” Jane put an arm around her great-niece. “You will harm your child. I told you—do you not remember?—what such a conspiracy could mean, if it succeeded. Your father knows that, too. It must not succeed. You were not here in the days of Mary Tudor, but he and I were. I think he may know more than he has told us, but he has done his best. I know he has.”
Philippa, breaking down at last, began to sob. Stephen said somberly, “Don’t hate me, Philippa, please. Please. If they are rushing to destruction, it’s their choice, my dear. I wonder myself why they can’t see it. Dear God, even if someone did assassinate Elizabeth, Mary would simply be carried off to a dungeon and the whole country would spring to arms to hold off any foreign invasion. I fancy the council would send to Scotland for Mary’s son, young King James. Her Protestant son. He’d have to decide what was done with her, but I doubt if he’d hand her the crown! The conspirators are living in a dreamland. They’ll awake to…a nightmare. But I did do one thing that might, just might, be a help.”
The three pairs of eyes, brown and hazel and night-dark, fastened on him in wild hope. “What did you do? What?” demanded Philippa. She wiped her eyes.
Stephen looked at his daughter with tenderness. “I suggested that if things went wrong, they should make for Somerset and ask Nicholas Lanyon to help them. He’s family, after all. In fact, I suggest that we approach him ourselves, in advance. At worst, I think he would say no. Exmoor people don’t hand their kinfolk to the hangman willingly.”
“We could do that, yes,” Jane said.
“If it comes to it, I will do all I can to save Tobias and Robert,” said Stephen. “I promise you, all three of you. I swear it.”
Jane said, “Well, I can still ride a pony. Stephen, you and I will go in search of Nicholas tomorrow. We’ll try Lynmouth first.”
Nicholas Lanyon was also of the opinion that his supplicants knew more than they were telling him. “A great deal more, I suspect,” he said candidly.
The fiery Lanyon hair had faded to a brownish-chestnut, but he was still fit and muscular, with good biceps under the sleeves of his brocade doublet. Jane and Stephen, who had duly made for Lynmouth first, had had the luck to find him there. He sat in his parlour with an ankle crossed over a knee and looked intently at them. Jane sat opposite, hands clasped nervously in her lap while Stephen stood protectively beside her.
“You say that Robert and Tobias may have run foul of the law,” Nicholas said. “In what way? Have they turned footpad? Has one of them murdered a rival in love or an importunate creditor? Or have they been plotting a Catholic coup? I am aware that they are Catholic. Tobias told me, as a matter of fact, a year ago.”
The stillness and the silence which greeted this were his answer.
“I see,” said Nicholas. “And you expect me to give them aid if they ask for it.”
“They are on the edge of a
plot, but not among the ringleaders,” said Stephen. “I found that out in London. I told them they were running headlong into danger but they didn’t listen. All the same, I must, must do what I can for them if they need help. Nicholas, they’re family. Yours and mine. My daughter is Robert’s wife, and she expects a child in September.”
“You are asking a great deal. I have a reputation to maintain and a family of my own to care for.”
Stephen said persuasively, “Aunt Jane says you have a boat.”
“My White Wing? Yes.”
“Is she a seagoing vessel? Can she cross to France? Is she easy to put to sea at short notice?”
“She has been to France often and she can indeed put to sea quickly. I have studied the art of sailing and how to make use of crosswinds.”
“Nicholas,” said Jane, “please. We will do all we can to protect you. If…if they do reach you, asking for aid, couldn’t you get them away to France?”
“I could. My crew are loyal. If I carry passengers, it’s my own business. If I carry them.”
“How would you feel,” said Jane, “if the people you were being asked to help were your own sons or grandsons?”
“I trust that none of my family would be stupid enough to indulge in conspiracies. I am sorry if this hurts your feelings, Mistress Allerbrook, but I have never thought highly of Toby’s intelligence.”
“Nor do we,” said Stephen. “I regard him as a nitwit, if you want to know. But he’s still Toby. My cousin. And his son is my son-in-law.”
Nicholas sighed. “If they come to me, I will make my final decision then. I’m not promising that I won’t fling them into my cellar and send for the local constable, but that’s a chance they’d take, whoever they asked to help them. Probably I won’t betray them. I’ll also keep you informed of where I am, whether here or in Bristol, or anywhere else. That is as far as I’ll go.”
On the way home Jane said, “I have a feeling that when it comes to the point, Nicholas won’t let us down.”
“I hope not,” said Stephen.
They rode on in silence, through the world of late May, brushing past the young green ferns and the white cow parsley that edged the steep lanes out of Lynmouth and then taking a track over the high ground where the moor grass was mistily purple as it always was so early in the summer.
It was the seventeenth day of August, just before midday, when Tobias and Robert came home.
“Sir Anthony Babington was arrested on the fourteenth,” Tobias said. Unshaven, red-eyed from fear and sleeplessness, long hours in the saddle and scanty food, he and Robert sat in the hall, consuming the hot chicken soup that Blanche had brought to them, and pushing dunked pieces of bread hungrily into their mouths. As he ate, Robert leaned against Philippa, who sat beside him with an arm across his shoulders, looking at him as though she couldn’t believe he was there. Once in a while he turned to look up at her, and once he spared a hand to reach out and gently, wonderingly, pat the bulge beneath which his child was growing.
“One of his servants warned us,” Tobias said. “And told us that we had been betrayed—he didn’t name the man but it was someone in Sir Anthony’s confidence. The wretch was in Walsingham’s pay all the time. Another of Sir Anthony’s servants told the authorities where to find his master. Is there a house in the land where Walsingham doesn’t have a spy?”
“Very few, I fear,” said Stephen dryly. Jane glanced at him sharply and then looked away.
Tobias, spoon in hand, also looked at him thoughtfully. “You were so very sure that things would go wrong. What made you so certain?”
“I was simply afraid. The plan relied too much on too many people with too little communication acting together on a given date. You called me craven. You were right,” said the man who had fought Spaniards hand-to-hand on the Santa Maria and stood fast to loose two accurate arrows when a tawny panther charged him.
“Tobias. Are you pursued?” Jane asked suddenly.
“I should think so,” said Tobias, turning to her. Letty, who was still active and no more patient with the male sex than she had ever been, brought a fresh platter of bread and dumped it roughly on the table. “If anyone is taken by Walsingham,” Tobias said with his mouth full, “they talk. I daresay someone has talked about us. There is a rackmaster in the Tower, they say, someone called Sir Richard Topcliffe, who could make stones speak.”
“I’ve heard that, too,” said Stephen, who knew what they did not, that Dupont had been taken and had most certainly talked.
“I can’t bear to think of it,” said Blanche. She had seated herself opposite Tobias, and was filling her eyes with him.
“No one interfered with us on the way here, but we travelled fast,” Robert said. “We’ve barely eaten or slept. We rode all night once. It was cooler than in the daytime, though not much. The weather’s so hot. There’s been a fire over toward Dulverton. We had to ride across a whole blackened hillside. Thank God it didn’t affect Allerbrook. What put it out?”
“We had a storm two days ago,” said Jane. “We hoped it would cool the air, but all it did was make things sticky as well as hot. The rain put the flames out, though. We saw the smoke and had fire brooms ready, just in case, but we didn’t need them.”
“But we had to keep hiring horses, and that leaves a trail,” Tobias said. “I think we will be hunted. We don’t mean to stay here. We only came to let you know we were still alive, and to ask for fresh mounts. Then we’re going across the moor to Lynmouth to ask Nicholas Lanyon for help. Your idea originally, Stephen. You seem to have instincts about saving your skin.” The sneer was unmistakable. “Aren’t you under suspicion yourself?”
“As far as I know,” said Stephen, “by leaving London so soon, I avoided becoming a suspect.” Privately, he recalled how he and they and Bernard Maude had all met round Sir Anthony’s table, and sent up a silent prayer of gratitude that they evidently didn’t know that Bernard Maude was their principal betrayer. If they had, they might have found Stephen’s escape from suspicion very hard to believe. “But while I’ve been here,” he said smoothly, “Aunt Jane and I have called on Nicholas. He is in Lynmouth now and I think he’ll get you to France.”
“We’ll work to get you pardoned,” Jane said. “One day you’ll be able to come home.”
“We need some rest, at least for a few hours,” Tobias said exhaustedly. His hunger was assuaged, but his eyes were hot and sunken with weariness.
“What about the hirelings we rode here?” Robert asked suddenly. “They must go back to their stable in Taunton! It’s the Sign of the Falcon.”
“Jack put them in the paddock,” Stephen said. “They’re commonplace nags. No one can prove they’re any particular horses.”
“Commonplace is the word,” muttered Robert, gulping more soup. “Mine was the worst slug I ever got astride.”
“Leave all that to us,” said Blanche. “Eat and rest. We’ll set a watch, won’t we, Mistress Allerbrook? We’ll rouse you if there’s need.”
“Yes,” Jane said. “Where’s Tim Snowe?”
“Here, ma’am.” Tim had been hovering close at hand.
“Send Paul up to the tower to watch and tell him to report to us at once if he sees anyone riding toward the house. Tim…”
“Ma’am?”
“I know you don’t know exactly what has happened, though it must be obvious to you—to everyone here—that something serious has. I can only say that your master, Tobias, and Robert my grandson have been involved in dangerous matters in London and are fleeing for their lives. Can we trust you?”
“Of course. We know ’ee’ve tried to keep it from us,” said Tim, “but we all know what’s been afoot. None of us would betray you.”
“I’ve just noticed,” interposed Tobias, “that there is someone missing. Where’s Gilbert Mallow? He hasn’t been arrested, has he?”
“No. I dismissed him,” said Jane shortly. “But for him, you would never have run into this danger. I ordered him out of t
he house the day you left for London.”
“Mother! You shouldn’t have done that.”
“Oh yes, I should. As far as I’m concerned,” said Jane grimly, “he has thrown us all to the wolves. Why did you listen to him? Why couldn’t you leave crowns and religions to others and just live your own lives? And how dare you entangle yourselves in plans that could have brought a Spanish army onto English soil! Are you both insane? God’s teeth, I’ve tried to keep these everlasting squabbles over power and faith from intruding into my home, and again and again one or other of my family has let them in! Sometimes I think of Allerbrook as a castle under siege, with people inside it who are willing to unbar the gates to the enemy! I will do all I can to protect you, both of you, but make no mistake about it—you have been a pair of fools.”
“Mother!”
“I’ll say it again.” Jane had never been so formidable. “Fools and simpletons! The only one with any sense is Stephen. Do you hear me, Toby? And you, Robert! Don’t you dare sneer at Stephen now, either of you. Blanche, do you intend to go with Tobias and Robert? Philippa obviously can’t, as yet, though perhaps she can follow later.”
“Yes. I’ll go,” Blanche said. Tobias reached out a hand to her and she took it, though hers was trembling. “Where will we go?” she asked him.
“France and then Paris. We have money enough to last a few months. We’ll find a home to rent and I’ll try to place myself and Robert in some great seigneur’s household. Don’t be afraid.”
“I’ll try not to be.” Blanche’s voice was shaking as much as her hands. Bravely, however, she said, “I’ll put some things together, as much as can go into the saddlebags.”
The House of Allerbrook Page 40