Revenger

by Rory Clements

  “Oh, I am sure she exists, Mr. McGunn. It is an intriguing tale. Do find her, Mr. Shakespeare. I should so like to hear what she has to say for herself, about the perils she has endured in the New World and how she came to make her crossing of the ocean home to England. It will be the talk of the court. And, of course, it is certain to discomfit Ralegh, which will be most amusing.”

  “I will do my utmost.”

  She smiled the sweetest smile he had ever seen. “And I want you here tomorrow evening for the summer revels. Do say you will come.”

  “Well, my lady…” He thought of Catherine, back home, turning from him, not even admitting him to her presence. How long was it since he had seen her smile at him like that?

  McGunn’s grip about his shoulders tightened. “He’ll be there, Lady Rich. I’ll vouch for him.”

  “That will be wonderful. I believe you were an intelligencer for Mr. Secretary Walsingham and saved Drake from some Spanish hellhound. I want to hear all about it from your own lips, Mr. Shakespeare. But for the moment, I am afraid I have to leave you.” She reached out and touched his face with the fingertips of her gloved right hand. “The She-wolf summons me and I must obey…”

  He watched her move away from him along the hall. She wore a dress of gold and deep burgundy, almost brown in its intensity, with full embroidered sleeves and a sharply pointed bodice. From behind she seemed to glide, like a slender royal craft upon the Thames.

  McGunn loosened his grip, then slapped him playfully on both sides of his face. It stung. “Watch yourself, Shakespeare. You’re a married man and she’s a married woman, and no good can come of it.”

  “You do Lady Rich a disservice.”

  McGunn laughed aloud. “But then, you don’t know the Devereux women, do you? It’s not for nothing that she calls her mother the She-wolf.”

  “I heard it was Her Majesty the Queen that gave her the name.”

  “Yes, but it was the She-wolf herself who earned it. Except that she hunts and eats men, not lambs in the field. And her daughters are no different.”

  “I am astonished at your temerity, Mr. McGunn, to speak of the Earl of Essex’s mother and sisters so.”

  “Would you have me kiss their feet?”

  Who exactly was McGunn that he could display such disrespect and familiarity to Essex himself and to the ladies of his house? Shakespeare wondered. And how would the lady Lettice take it if she heard this man and her own daughter refer to her as the “She-wolf”?

  McGunn opened a purse of soft leather and took out coins, which he handed to Shakespeare. “Here, fifteen marks in gold. Now, come with me. I run things for Essex and I have something to show you.”

  Shakespeare took the coins, though he felt unclean in doing so. “Are you his steward? His factor?”

  “What do you think, Slyguff? Is ‘steward’ the word for what I do for Essex?”

  Slyguff said nothing.

  “Ah, call me what you like, Shakespeare, I care nothing for titles. But a little warning before we proceed: never cross me. Never. For I always repay a slight. But if you are a good fellow, you will find me the truest friend a man ever had.” He grinned broadly, as though he had never made the threat. “Come. I will arrange letters-patent in my lord of Essex’s name. That will grant you access wherever you require it in your inquiries.”

  They left Slyguff in the long hall and went up a narrow, twisting stairway of stone steps to a high room in a square turret at the back of the house. The room was tall-ceilinged with deep oriel windows, and lit by many candles. The three men seated there, poring over papers, looked up as they entered. Shakespeare recognized them all.

  “Old friends, Mr. Shakespeare,” McGunn said. “They insisted you were the man to help us with this little task.”

  The three were Francis Mills, Arthur Gregory, and Thomas Phelippes, all senior intelligencers with Walsingham in the old days. The last time they had all been together was five years since. They had been an effective if incongruous crew, each working directly for Walsingham rather than as a team.

  The room was a mass of documents and books, a sort of library. What, exactly, was Essex trying to do here? Re-create Walsingham’s intelligence network?

  Shakespeare looked at them each in turn. He shook Gregory by the hand but hesitated over Mills’s proffered hand, recalling the problems he had caused by being too close to Topcliffe. Phelippes did not rise to shake hands, but merely pushed his glasses up his pox-scarred nose and returned to his papers. Shakespeare thought it unlikely that either Mills or Phelippes had suggested his name to Essex or McGunn. Perhaps Arthur Gregory was the man.

  “Mr. Sh-sh-shakespeare,” Gregory stammered. “It is a delight to s-s-see you once more.”

  “And you, Mr. Gregory.” Shakespeare liked him. His face was as pink as a young pig’s, and he was clearly suffering in these hot days. His expertise lay in his careful hands and his uncanny ability to open a sealed letter, read it, and replace it so that the intended recipient was none the wiser. He also devised invisible inks and could easily reveal the supposedly invisible writings of others.

  Mills was another matter. He and Shakespeare had been equals under Walsingham. Like Shakespeare, he was tall, but he was sticklike and more stooped than Shakespeare remembered him. He had been an interrogator, sometimes working together with Topcliffe in the Tower rack room. Mills would speak with soft, coaxing words while Topcliffe raged and foamed and turned the screws tighter on the rack and uttered unspeakable threats and obscenities. Yet this was not the sum of Mills’s abilities: he also had a cold, inquiring mind that could sift through the mass of intercepted correspondence from Spain and Rome and spot what was of importance. He was as valuable at a table of documents as he was in the tormenting chamber.

  Phelippes, though, was the undisputed master of the intelligencer’s craft. His face was so pockmarked and unpleasant to look on beneath his lank yellow hair that children would shy away in fright, but his brain was as taut and beautiful as an athlete’s sinews. His talent was with ciphers and the breaking of them, be they French, Spanish, Latin, Greek, Italian, or English; it was Phelippes who had enabled Walsingham to bring Mary of Scots to the headsman’s block.

  “Surprised, Mr. Shakespeare?” McGunn said. “You had not expected to find these old friends here, I would happily wager.”

  “Yes, ‘surprised’ is the word.”

  “Well, feel free to use their expertise, for I want this woman found. My lord of Essex will allow for no failure in this. You will find much of the information you need among these papers. Come and go at will, Mr. Shakespeare, and report to me what you find. Sooner rather than later, if you will. Good evening to you.”

  Shakespeare watched McGunn leave the room, then looked about him. This was Walsingham’s old library, he was certain. All his old papers were stacked here, high on shelves and over tables-a great mass of secrets that any spymaster would kill for.

  “Here, Mr. Sh-shakespeare,” Arthur Gregory said. “Come, perch yourself with me, for I have gathered some information for you.”

  Shakespeare sat on a bench beside him. “How have you been keeping, Mr. Gregory?”

  “Scratching a living, sir. Times have not been easy since Mr. S-s-secretary passed away, but I have found gainful employment with my lord of Essex.”

  “And Mr. McGunn…”

  Gregory stiffened at the name. “He comes and g-goes.” He took a deep breath as if trying to relax and control his stammer; also, Shakespeare thought, to change the subject. “Anyway, take a look at these papers if you wish. They may help your inquiries into the st-st-strange case of the lost colony.”

  Shakespeare was not to be fobbed off so easily. “But I would wish to know a little more about McGunn, Mr. Gregory. Who is he-and what has he to do with all this?”

  Gregory glanced around him, as if fearful of prying eyes. His voice lowered. “I can tell you this much, Mr. Shakespeare. He is a dangerous man and not one to gainsay.” He moved yet closer to Shakespe
are’s ear. “He had young Jaggard working for him, looking for this Eleanor Dare. Mr. McGunn says nothing, his demeanor rarely changes, yet the boy went missing and McGunn was most aggrieved. That is where you came in. Mr. McGunn wanted the best inquirer in the land. He takes a great personal interest in the matter.” He caught Mills gazing at him and stopped. “I can say no more, except that we hear the boy is dead, murdered in the woods.”

  Chapter 10

  I N THE MORNING, SHAKESPEARE REACHED OUT FOR Catherine. She wasn’t there. He jumped up from the bed, suddenly wide awake. He must have this out with her, settle things once and for all. He could not go on in this way.

  She wasn’t in the nursery, nor in the refectory. He began to panic and found Jane, who looked uncomfortable.

  “She has gone out, Master Shakespeare.”

  “Gone where?”

  “To find Mistress Bellamy, sir.”

  Shakespeare mouthed a silent curse. This was madness. It had been Anne Bellamy who invited Catherine to the mass where Southwell was apprehended by Topcliffe. If he, Shakespeare, had not stood firm, she would now be in Newgate or some other putrid hole awaiting trial for treason. What did she think she was doing, going to see the Bellamy woman now? Was it not obvious to her that Southwell had been set up by Topcliffe and that Anne Bellamy was his instrument?

  “She said she needed to find out the truth of what happened, Master Shakespeare.”

  This was becoming too much. On arriving home from Essex House the night before, he had apologized to her. He had not admitted any wrongdoing, but he conceded that he had, perhaps, been insensitive toward her feelings; yes, it was important she be allowed to worship in whatever way she wished. But… it was the but that hung in the air between them. She thanked him for his apology, but said she would prefer to sleep alone for the present. There was no smile on her face, no warmth.

  He had stayed awake for hours thinking of the day, thinking of what he had found in the turret room at Essex House: Gregory, Phelippes, Mills, and, perhaps most importantly, the collected papers of Sir Francis Walsingham, not lost at all but openly displayed. Clearly the three intelligencers were going through them in fine detail and cataloguing their contents. Did Sir Robert Cecil know of this? Had he known all along? Shakespeare began to fear he was being played like a mummer’s doll-but who was the motion-man, the puppet-master?

  Arthur Gregory had shown him some Walsingham papers he had uncovered relating to Roanoke and the lost colonists. They charted the development of the little colony from its tentative beginnings. First there was the foray of 1584, when two of Ralegh’s captains found a land of fertile soil and friendly natives and returned to England with two captured chieftains, Manteo and Wanchese, who caused a sensation at court. The two captains spoke so highly of the land that Elizabeth agreed it should be named after her: Virginia.

  The story did not run as smoothly as Ralegh had hoped. A second expedition under the command of Ralegh’s friend Sir Richard Grenville explored the region before leaving a garrison of 108 of the troops.

  Their mission was to find gold and set up a base from which Spanish shipping could be harried. But the promised land had begun to turn ugly; there were violent clashes with the Indians.

  Within months, the soldiers and their hosts were openly hostile, all except the tribe known as the Croatoans-the tribe of Manteo’s mother-who lived on an island twenty miles to the south of Roanoke.

  It was with great relief that, a year on, the soldiers saw the ships of Sir Francis Drake arriving with relief supplies. That was the summer of 1586. But instead of accepting the offer of supplies, they opted to go home, and Drake took them.

  Back in England, Ralegh remained undaunted. He would try again the following year, only this time the colony would be made up of a very different sort of settler. Instead of men-at-arms, there would be ordinary families-men, women, and children, and men with useful skills: carpenters, farmers, craftsmen, cordwainers, wrights, skinners, fishermen, and ironsmiths. Their leader and governor of the new “City of Ralegh” would be John White, an artist and surveyor who had been on the earlier expedition. It was a fateful choice, for he was no leader of men.

  In the summer of 1587, while the ships and mariners that had carried this new colony were still at Roanoke, preparing to depart once more for England, trouble was already bubbling up like a brewer’s mash. One of John White’s assistants was killed by Indians while fishing for crabs, his body pierced by sixteen arrows and his skull smashed by clubs. But there was happiness, too, for on August 18, White’s daughter, Eleanor Dare, gave birth to little Virginia and, a week later, Margery Harvey gave birth, too.

  The cloud billowing over the island was a lack of supplies, particularly farm animals and salt for preserving food. It was decided that White should return to England with the ships and organize a relief expedition. He agreed, reluctantly.

  That was where the Walsingham papers left the story, for he had died in early 1590, before White’s futile relief expedition had finally got under way. As the world now knew, they had found the island of Roanoke deserted, the settlers and their houses vanished without trace.

  The question was, what happened to the colonists between being deposited in 1587 and the arrival of the supply ships three years later? And why, now, was someone reporting seeing one of their number-and not just anyone, but that same Eleanor Dare-here in Southwark, thousands of miles across the Western Sea? Shakespeare’s first call would have to be on the woman who had made the sighting-Agnes Hardy, maid to Essex’s portrait painter William Segar.

  Over a light breakfast of herrings, manchet bread, and ale, Shakespeare spread out the paper with the list of settlers and looked again at their names. Seeing them there, scraped in black ink, somehow turned them from a strange tale that titillated the public curiosity into real human beings: John White, governor; his assistants Roger Bailey, Ananias Dare, Christopher Cooper, Thomas Stevens, John Sampson, Dennis Harvey, Roger Pratt, George Howe. And more than a hundred other names, many in family groups.

  In the margin was a note in a hand that Shakespeare recognized as Walsingham’s own: SWR’s great wager.

  SWR: Sir Walter Ralegh. Yes, clearly it had been a great wager. If the venture was a success, his credit at court would soar. If it were to fail-and Elizabeth herself had invested money and expected a good return-his star would fall faster than a shot game-bird.

  Shakespeare finished his breakfast and stepped out into Dowgate. The artist Segar lived two streets away in a half-timbered home in the cramped and narrow thoroughfare known as Windgoose Lane. The housekeeper showed Shakespeare into the antechamber and went to fetch Agnes Hardy from the kitchens. A minute or two later she trundled in, a big, coarse woman with hands that were bony and muscular like a plowman’s. Her face was indeterminate of sex, being more male than female, and it was only her drudge’s garb of linsey-woolsey smock and apron that gave her away as a woman. Shakespeare could scarcely guess her age, but thought she must be in her early twenties if she was a childhood friend of Eleanor Dare.

  “Mistress Hardy?” Shakespeare said.

  “Yes, master.”

  “Tell me about Eleanor, if you will.”

  Agnes sighed as though she had told this story a hundred times and was mightily fatigued of it. “Do you mind if I sit down, master? I ache all over and my head’s a-throbbing like a faulty harrow.”

  “Of course.” Shakespeare smiled. He remained standing, away from her, for she had an unpleasant smell. “I believe you knew Eleanor as a child, Mistress Hardy?”

  “I didn’t like her, though. She thought so highly of herself. My mother worked for her parents as a kitchen malkin, but Eleanor and me played together when we were small. When we were older, though, I wasn’t good enough for her.”

  “Describe Eleanor to me.”

  “Above herself, sir. Like she was somebody and I was nobody.”

  Shakespeare closed his eyes momentarily in frustration. “And her appearance? The color of her
hair. Was she fat, well formed?”

  “Too thin for my liking. I last saw her when she was sixteen and she barely had tits to speak of. Some might have thought her pretty, but I reckon a man would have to be a poor sort of fellow to go after a hop-pole like that one. Her hair was like straw. And I couldn’t abide those clothes she wore. Worsteds and velvets and suchlike, with lacy lawn coifs all above her curls. Little Mistress Nose-in-the-Air is what I called her. Blue eyes she had, very blue with a strange gray ring around the middle if you looked close.”

  “And what happened when you saw her recently? Where were you?”

  “I was by the bull-baiting, waiting to go in, with my friend, when I saw Eleanor White-Dare-in the crowd. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, because I knew her to be lost in the New World, sir, with all those others, killed by savages. I thought it was a ghost. But then she moved a little closer and I saw that it was her, in the flesh. I stepped toward her, but then a man approached her and I held back and watched. They spoke half a minute, then she took his arm. That’s when the gates to the baiting opened and the crowd surged together and she disappeared with the man.”

  “The bull-baiting you say, not the theatre?”

  “No, sir, the bull-baiting. I like to see the bulls tossing the dogs on their horns, sticking them in the belly and their bowels spilling out, sir.”

  “What time of the day was this?”

  “Why, mid-afternoon. A bright day like today, sir.”

  “So you had a good view of Eleanor Dare?”

  “Clear as I can see you, Master Shakespeare.”

  “And how was she appareled?”

  “Now, there’s the funny thing. She was dressed like a strumpet. She had no cap or coif. Her head was uncovered. And her breast was uncovered, also, as though she were an unmarried woman, sir, when she is not. Perhaps Mistress Nose-in-the-Air has become Mistress Eyes-on-the-Ceiling.” Agnes Hardy slipped off her shoes and rubbed her aching feet.