Love's Alchemy

by Bryan Crockett

  Somewhere in the night an owl called to his mate. The answer came from such a distance that at first Jack thought it might be an echo. But too much time had elapsed for that.

  The call of an owl on a still, cold night always made Jack feel desolate, but on this night the hollow, plaintive sound made him shudder. He thought of such owls calling to each other some week or two or so hence, when much of the city would lie in blackened ruins. The owls and other birds of prey would feast themselves on unidentifiable bits of humanity. If Jack could not prevent the blast, or at least find a way to remove his wife and children from Cecil’s house in Ivy Lane to Pyrford Place or somewhere else safely distant, some of the charred morsels that fed the birds would be theirs.

  It was unthinkable. Faithless to him or not, Anne deserved nothing but God’s blessings. Jack chafed against the thought, but he knew she had been a better wife than he was a husband, a better woman than he was a man. And those little innocents of theirs who had probably forgotten their real father: how could they possibly die in an infernal conflagration? How could any deity worth the name allow this unholy terror to go forward? Yet Jack knew that God the Father had allowed thousands of his adoptive children—millions of them—to suffer worse fates than to be alive and well one minute, dead the next. Even the Father’s only child not adopted but begotten had drawn his last, tortured breath in the horrific realization that his father had abandoned him.

  Well: maybe God’s secret plan allowed such terrors, but Jack Donne would not, if he could find another way. His head pounded as if he had hit it directly with the heavy hammer, and his burned hand and wrist sent searing bolts of pain up his arm and into his neck. Yet he must not let these things distract him from the business at hand. Soon the owls would give up the treetops to the harmless songbirds of dawn, and by the light of day someone would find him in the smithy. Jack picked up the bloody cloth from the floor beside him. He took one more deep breath and stood, put the cloth in his mouth, and started in again with the hammer. After a few more blows he finally broke through the link.

  Jack repeated the process with the chisel’s blade an inch or so away from the link’s open spot until he had broken through again. He slipped off the link, and since it was no longer holding the hinged shackle closed he was quickly free altogether. He dropped everything—tools, chain, shackle, and bloody cloth—onto the floor and felt his way to the barrel of cold water the smith had used to temper his hot steel. The room was utterly dark, but still he closed his eyes and gritted his teeth, then plunged his badly burned left hand into the water. The pain ripped through him with such force that his knees buckled again, and he slumped beside the barrel. Perhaps he lost consciousness. But when he rose stiffly to his feet, his hand was still in the chilly water, the pain numbed, if only for a time. He pulled his hand from the water, picked up his satchel, and climbed back out through the broken door.

  The blacksmith who owned the forge might have been the same one Catesby and Fawkes had brought in to close the link that fettered him to the printing press when Jack was knocked senseless. Or the smith who had left him in chains might have been some other, and the honest craftsman whose shop Jack had smashed would come to find that someone had senselessly wronged him. The good man had already allowed Jack to make his lock-picking tools in the forge, had charged him only a pittance for the steel.

  Either way, Jack hoped he lived to come back and pay the smith. If he was the honest man Jack took him for, the blacksmith would receive money in plenty for the damage to his shop. But if he was the one who had closed a link in a chain without a lock, a chain that left a man slender hope of escape, then Jack would pay him a different way. First he would ask Sir Thomas More’s advice, and then, if his kinsman permitted it, Jack Donne would match strength for strength with a blacksmith. He would do a better thing than the smith had done to him: Jack would not leave the man to die, but he would make him think again before he consented to enfetter another.

  Now, though, more pressing matters lay at hand. Jack tried to put the blacksmith—along with the pain in his head and his hand—out of his thoughts as he shouldered his satchel and made his way toward Ivy Lane.

  CHAPTER 19

  Robert Cecil sat at his writing-desk, where he had spent three hours hastily signing some documents and hurriedly composing others. The new session of Parliament was about to begin, and a fair amount of preparatory work remained. On the fifth of November, King James and both his sons would preside over the new session’s opening ceremonies. The morning would be taken up with processions, speeches, posturing, applause . . . all the trappings of statecraft Cecil found distasteful. But it all had to be efficiently arranged, and Cecil was the man to do it.

  After the morning festivities the King and both princes would depart, and the real work of the new Parliament would begin—but not until the members of both houses had been sated with food and drink. Cecil preferred his lawmakers dull-witted and pliable in the afternoons. Some would doze through their enemies’ arguments. Or if they stayed awake and the wine they had drunk made them angry, Cecil could assert control by chastising them in public. In the end the bills Cecil wanted to pass would pass, and the men in both houses would take their entertainment in the city or go home for the evening. But he doubted anyone would look forward to going home as much as he.

  These days Cecil spent altogether too much time dealing with matters of state: far less time, though, than even a week or two ago. Then the work had proved a welcome distraction from his troubles; now he chafed against his duties, always yearning with half his mind to return to Anne and the children. Their presence in the house filled him with a sense of purpose, with eagerness to finish his mundane tasks and spend his leisure with them. Never had Cecil liked young children, but Constance, Little Jack, and the infant George, despite their occasional bouts of tetchiness, delighted his eyes. He loved to hold George in his arms, to rock him to sleep while the other two frisked about at their games. Never mind that doting on children did not suit a man of his station—did not in fact suit a man at all. If the servants whispered, let them whisper; he cared not a jot.

  And Anne: more than ever, Anne shone with an effortless grace. Even in the simplest dress she looked radiant next to the ambassadors’ wives, the painted ladies-in-waiting, the gilded butterflies that flitted about the Court. She could converse wittily about nearly any topic on God’s green earth.

  Queen Anna liked her, a fact that could only redound to Cecil’s good. His dealings with the Queen had been strained from the start, probably because he continued to urge the King to dissuade her from keeping her Catholic Masses. The King ignored his chief minister’s wisdom, but Cecil knew it could not be good to have it bruited about that while ordinary Catholics were heavily fined for going to their Masses, and while papist priests were tortured and killed whenever they were caught, the Queen of the realm held Masses at whatever palace she kept. But this king had his crotchets.

  The Queen, though, had already asked Anne to tutor the Princess in Greek. Lucy Harrington Russell, Countess of Bedford, had been looking after most of the girl’s education. But Lady Bedford’s Greek was not strong, so the Queen had turned to Anne.

  What a blessing: already in her brief time living at his house—a matter of days—Anne seemed to intuit the ins and outs of statecraft. Without scheming or posturing, she won over heart after heart, mind after mind. The woman was a wonder.

  And to think that she loved him! It hardly seemed possible, but all her motions told him it was true. She had not yet shared his bed, but Cecil understood that. Donne had destroyed her faith in a marriage she had at one time thought unassailable. It would take time for her to accept a new lover. Not much more time, though. Cecil was confident his joy would soon be complete.

  He was near to setting the last of the agenda. Perhaps only an hour’s work remained before he could return to Anne. He had barely started in again when men’s voices sounded in the hall. One was Cobham’s, telling the other he would have to
wait: Cobham would see what he could do, but he could promise nothing. A tap on the door. Cecil said irritably, “Come in, come in.”

  Cobham slipped into the room and closed the door behind him. He braced his foot against it, as if he expected the man to force his way inside. “The Lord Monteagle waits without,” the servant said. “He says he will not be put off.”

  “Monteagle? What can he have to say to me? Dismiss him.”

  “Yes, my lord. And there is this, delivered by the strangest courier—or courtier—that ever I saw. He waits with Lord Monteagle without. The man spoke in such fair terms and in such firm knowledge of the affairs of these times that I knew him for a man of statecraft. Yet he would not give me his name, but only this missive for you.”

  Cecil took the paper. The cover-sheet said the letter was urgent. Cecil found such histrionics from a stranger who would not reveal his name distasteful. But he tore through the seal. The message was but three words long: Listen to Monteagle. It was signed only Your erstwhile servant. He looked at the back of the paper. Nothing.

  Cecil asked Cobham, “Why, apart from his withholding his name, is this fair-spoken courier-courtier so strange?”

  “For one, he is wild-looking, as if his eyes had seen too much. For another, his beard is long, and wavelets of hair flow all down his back—hair to make many a maiden sigh, and a form to match—but he put me in mind of some eremite away from his hermitage for the first time in his life, an eremite with some urgent business in the city.”

  Cecil said, “Wavelets. Sighs. You read too many poems, Cobham, hear too many plays. First your man is a statesman, then an eremite. I desire no traffic with any such, fair of form or not.”

  Cobham raised his chin a bit. His tone was crisp. “There is one more thing. He appears to have been tortured.”

  Cecil looked at Cobham closely. “Tortured, you say. Topcliffe?”

  “I think not,” Cobham said. “These methods would not have been Topcliffe’s. They are not . . . precise enough. No, the eremite has been beaten about the face, and his left hand has been held to the fire; it is badly burned. He appears to take no note of either injury.”

  Cecil looked once at the papers on his desk, papers that would have to be dealt with before he could return to Anne. He hoped this business with Monteagle and the stranger would not take long. “Well,” he said, “let both in at once.”

  Cobham replied, “Lord Monteagle, begging your Lordship’s pardon, is easily managed. But I will say again the tortured one looks like a man on a mission, a man not to be trifled with. Pray let me post some guard before admitting him.”

  “Very well,” Cecil said, waving Cobham away as if he were sweeping drying-sand off a sheet of paper.

  Cobham exited through a door opposite the one he had entered, and a minute or two later reappeared with three soldiers. He directed one to stand by each door. The third he stationed a few feet behind Cecil. Then Cobham slipped out the door and into the hallway where Monteagle and the fair-spoken stranger waited. “Three minutes only,” Cobham said. “Lord Cecil has an appointment for which he must on no account be late.”

  Remaining seated at his desk, Cecil watched Monteagle bustle into the room, winded as if after a long ride, followed by a tall, well-muscled, black-clad man with a broad-brimmed hat. Cecil wondered at this second man’s temerity in baring his chest—he wore no shirt beneath his open jerkin—and in failing to remove his hat during an audience with the Secretary of State and chief Privy Counsellor. The strange man’s eyes were not clearly visible in the shadow of the brim, but Cecil could see that the side of his face was badly bruised and grotesquely swollen. Could Monteagle have been the torturer? Something about the black-clad man’s bearing told Cecil it must not be so; the stranger did not look the sort who would willingly let an assailant live.

  Monteagle was waving a paper in the air. “Treason, my Lord Cecil,” he said. “Treason! I hold treason in my hand.”

  “Then by all means take the treason out of your hand and place it upon my desk.” Monteagle did as he was told. Cecil read Tresham’s letter hastily. “Who wrote this?”

  “I know not, my lord. A common courier delivered it to me in the night.”

  “So you don’t know who wrote it.”

  “No, your lordship. But—”

  “Come, Monteagle, you must suspect someone. Why was it delivered to you and none other?”

  “I swear to you, my lord, I cannot think who sent it. There is no signature, I do not recognize the hand, and I do not know why—or whether—I alone received it. Mayhap there are others.”

  “No such that I know,” Cecil said. “You are the only one, or perhaps only the first, to come to me. Well. The author must be some hot-headed Catholic, if what he says is no mere ruse. The writer is a papist in league with other papists. If the man be not mad, or attempting to trick us, some conspiracy is afoot, some dread stratagem. He who wrote it must be a friend of yours, or a kinsman. A fellow-Catholic.”

  “No, my lord, I am a good—”

  “Oh, spare me your protestations, Monteagle. I know well enough you’re a Catholic.”

  “But my lord, I have brought this thing to light. I am a faithful—”

  “Yes, yes, if the warning here proves true, you shall have your reward.” Without taking his eyes off Monteagle, Cecil said, “Cobham, Francis Wolley remains in the house, does he not?”

  “Yes, my lord, in the gaming room when last I saw him.”

  “Find him and bring him here. Then tell McCrae to saddle Wolley’s Andalusian.”

  Cobham made a slight bow to Cecil and left the room.

  Cecil muttered, half to himself and half to Monteagle, “They shall receive a terrible blow this Parliament and yet they shall not see who hurts them.” What could this mean? Poison? A barrage of cannon from ships in the Thames? Fires set in the halls of Westminster? Or under the chambers, perhaps. How long since the houses and shops around the palace yard had been searched? Well, they would be searched now.

  Cobham entered without knocking, followed by Francis Wolley, who looked fine in an oxblood doublet of crushed velvet and umber hose. “Wolley,” Cecil said, “Is the King hunting still?”

  “Yes, my lord, in Cambridgeshire. His Majesty means to make his way to London leisurely, arriving on the eve of the new Parliament. Shall I deliver him some message?”

  “I think so, but hold a moment.” Cecil closed his eyes in thought, finger and thumb on the bridge of his nose.

  When Monteagle said, “My lord,” Cecil raised a hand to silence him; he needed to consider the steps he must take. The first would be to augment the naval force at the mouth of the Thames, the second to search the rooms around, above, and beneath the Lords’ and Commons’ chambers. Until he knew more, he wanted to keep the search quiet; only a few trusted men should be involved.

  Then he would have to deal with this nervous, suspicious king, whose own father had been blown to bits, the king known to dive beneath his bed at the sound of fireworks. Once James Stuart knew he was safe, he would suspect everyone, even Cecil himself—no, especially Cecil himself—of inventing the plot to curry favor by pretending to discover it. No, the King should not be informed yet. If the search turned up evidence, Cecil would send for the King and subtly lead him to search out this same evidence; the King must think he himself had discovered the plot. All would stand amazed at His Majesty’s instinctive powers, at the divinely appointed sovereign’s providential knack for sniffing out treason with the Royal Nose.

  Cecil turned to Wolley. “No message to the King. Not yet. But remain about the house. It may hap I will send you to him or to another on a moment’s notice.” Cecil said to Monteagle, “Come with me; I’ve a task for you.” He gestured toward some of the household guard. “You three: gather the rest of the soldiers, within the house and without. All of you are to meet me here in one hour’s time.” From their separate places in the room, the three soldiers knelt in unison. Cecil admired their precision. Well, after al
l, he had himself chosen them as part of his household guard. He turned to his manservant. “Cobham, fetch me Suffolk, and John Whynniard.”

  “Yes, my lord,” Cobham said as Cecil limped out of the room, followed by Monteagle. Cobham nodded to Wolley, then walked out and closed the door after him.

  Wolley strolled casually about the room, inspecting books and paintings, idly looking over the papers on Cecil’s desk. Jack shifted his weight, and Wolley glanced at him and then winced as if coming upon an ugly piece of furniture in Cecil’s otherwise well-appointed house. He said, “Now that, my good man, is a nasty bruise. I don’t know when I’ve seen so many colors on a single face. And ugh! You’ll need some balm on that hand.” His gaze lingered along Jack’s bare torso for a few heartbeats. Then, with a practiced flourish of his cloak as he turned, Wolley walked out of the room, looking like a sprightly soldier on leave from the wars.

  Jack wondered how his own appearance could be so altered that even his old friend, the man in whose house he had lived for four years, the man he had visited only days before, did not recognize him. Maybe it was the broad-brimmed hat that kept his face in shadow. Or, more likely, Wolley was simply acting like himself; the man could be very observant, but only when the thing he was looking at interested him. A battered stranger was not much to his taste.

  Alone in the room now, Jack sat in Cecil’s chair at the desk where the agenda for the new session lay atop other papers. The chair was uncomfortably high; the little man must want to seem above his visitors in physical as well as political stature. Jack found blank paper and pen. He composed a message warning Garnet and the others that Monteagle had betrayed the conspirators. The search would soon begin. All of them—Garnet, Owen, Burr, Tresham, Catesby, Fawkes, and the rest—needed to flee. When he had finished writing he folded the paper, waxed the seal, and put Owen’s name on the cover-sheet; naming the priest posed too great a risk.