The Spy of Venice

by Benet Brandreth

  Sir Henry leaned back in the chair and took up his glass. He pointed to the board. ‘You neglect your defence. A common fault. How much easier to think of our own plans and schemes. All the while our enemy plots against us. We face an enemy that will not blanch to strike at our heart. Look at the Dutch when Philip of Spain sent a murderer to strike down William the Silent. Their heart gone, their armies shrink and stumble. Already Philip sends men to England, encouraged by the Pope’s edict against Her Majesty. Who are these men? Where will they strike?’

  For a moment Sir Henry looked to another place. Then he shook his head and looked back at William. ‘How much did Connor give to be spared Master Oldcastle?’ he asked.

  William shuffled in his seat. ‘A shilling. Oldcastle the same.’

  ‘My, my,’ said Sir Henry, ‘the price of knowledge.’

  ‘The schoolmaster must be paid,’ said William.

  ‘Without question,’ said Sir Henry.

  He turned back to their game. ‘You must have a care that Connor does not learn how he was gulled. The great good that has come of their dispute, the growth of harmony within our little band, would be undone. I wouldn’t want that. Shall we continue the game?’

  William bent his head to study.

  Burst of a battle

  The new compact in the embassy was sealed a few days later by the whole company fighting as one in a coaching inn on the road to Turin that bore the sign of a cockerel crowing.

  There was something about the coaching inn that had made William uncomfortable the instant he entered it. It took him a moment to recognise the source of that unease: there were no women. Not a single serving-girl to leaven the heavy bread of hard-faced men. The English party found themselves sat beside the members of a French merchant’s caravan.

  William could not say what prompted it. Perhaps it was no single moment but the accumulation of pressures looking for a place to vent. Too many strangers together. Too many nations with their petty rivalries as excuses. Too many tired men, the worse for too much drink for dry, dusty throats. Whatever the cause, tension turned to violence with a rapidity that astonished William.

  One moment there had been raised voices in a babble of languages, the next, one of the French was wrestling with Coll and a general melee broke out. In an instant the whole tavern swept into brawl with all set against all. Watkins, Hemminges, William and Oldcastle found themselves trapped in a corner assaulted from all sides. Hemminges and William stood back to back while Oldcastle urged defiance on them from his crouched position behind the table and Watkins pressed his back to the wall.

  William swung at a lanky man with a red neck scarf who had aimed a blow at Watkins. He heard a satisfying crack as his hand connected with the man’s nose. Watkins cried out a warning and William turned and found a surprisingly hairy Frenchman (‘positively Esau reborn’, as Oldcastle would describe him in the retelling) lunging at him with a knife a good foot in length and sharp on two sides as well as at the point (‘like that with which one imagines Judith took Holofernes’ head,’ Oldcastle would say, warming to his theme).

  William hurled himself backwards, tumbling over a stool and knocking the table with his feet as he went. Wine, beer and food slopped across it. Oldcastle made a wild kick at the knife-wielding Frenchman and missed. Watkins, fortunately for William, was able to reach over and slam a pewter flagon into the temple of the Frenchman. A blow Hemminges followed up by clamping his free hand round the wrist of the man’s knife-bearing hand and, using the table as an anvil, hammering the heavy flagon into his hairy knuckles. A combination of events that induced a mighty wail (‘like unto that heard from Sodom as the Lord rained fire upon it,’ Oldcastle would conclude, still milking the Old Testament for reference), which was only curtailed by William, recovered, whipping a wooden mug across the Frenchman’s face. An event that signalled the end of the battle.

  The landlord and his sons, armed with metal-bound staves, arrived to separate the combatants. By some miracle, other than the general wastage of food and drink and some dents to a pewter flagon, there was no damage to the inn. For this reason alone the landlord, after a lengthy and loud debate with representatives of both parties and the passage of some coin in his direction, was persuaded to allow the French to depart and the English to sleep, as planned and without the need to disturb Sir Henry.

  Though the Crowing Cock had been spared serious harm, the same could not be said for the respective armies. The chief injury was William’s. He received a long but shallow cut to his arm from the knife-wielding Frenchman, who in turn had a broken hand and a bloody face. Another of the French contingent had also received a cruel slash to his face from a clay pot that shattered as it struck him. Several of the English nursed ugly bruises to their faces and many on both sides had clothes heavily stained and spattered with wine and food. Oldcastle was furious to discover that his contribution to the fight had resulted in him tearing his hose across the fork.

  ‘Quite, quite ruined,’ he muttered as he stumped off to his bed to the sound of the general laughter of the company.

  ‘Some slight disturbance last night, I fancy,’ Sir Henry Carr could be heard saying to his steward the following morning.

  ‘A minor altercation, Sir Henry. Quickly resolved,’ replied Fallow.

  ‘Honour on both sides, one trusts?’

  ‘Slight advantage to us, I fancy, Sir Henry. Some of the actors appear to do more than play at fighting.’

  ‘Good, good,’ said Sir Henry. ‘Can’t let the French have it all their way, can we now.’

  Sir Henry paused his horse by the players’ cart and threw a couple of coins down to an astonished and hung-over Oldcastle as he passed.

  Recovering, Oldcastle did his best to haul himself to his feet and offer appropriately fawning thanks to the disappearing figure of his patron. The effort was wasted. By the time he was on his feet and had composed a suitably ingratiating response, Sir Henry was a good fifty yards away and Oldcastle was quite out of breath.

  Hemminges, loading the last of their belongings onto the cart, took advantage of the unusual silence to collar William as he heaved his sack up.

  ‘Tell me, Will, what do you think happens when the play doesn’t please?’ he asked.

  ‘I hadn’t given it much thought,’ confessed William.

  ‘Bloody havoc is what happens,’ said Hemminges. ‘This is unusual business we’re about with this embassy. Soon enough we’ll be back to our usual happenstance, and that’s to play in any place that will have us. Often enough that’s the yard of an inn with an audience of locals who’ve had drink to go with their entertainment. And if they do not like what they’re offered you can forget passing the hat for coins. It’s a question of keeping them from burning your set.’

  William looked to see if Hemminges was jesting with him, but the man’s face held no hint of a smile.

  ‘I know you’re no coward, lad,’ Hemminges said. ‘And we’ve played at fencing enough that I know you’ve speed and skill in you. But if a man throws a knife in your direction you can’t just fall off your stool and wait for another to set about him while you look on.’

  William’s face flushed at the memory of his meagre contribution to last night’s excitements. Youthful pride made him defiant. ‘I fight well enough,’ he said.

  ‘No, lad,’ said Hemminges. ‘At best you duel, like a gentleman does. That’s as well for a player to do since he must act the gentleman from time to time. But a knife is not for duelling. A knife’s for murder. You need to know how to fight when there are no seconds and no trading clever barbs before each thrust. In a tavern brawl you don’t get sent a finely worded challenge full of piss and vinegar in advance. You get some bastard setting upon you when your attention’s elsewhere and you’re swine-drunk. You have to be ready. The world’s full of violence, lad, and it’s a holy fool that wanders through it unarmed.’

  Hemminges finished his speech with a hard stare. William didn’t feel able to do anything but nod. A
pparently satisfied, Hemminges broke away and, passing Oldcastle, snatched one of the coins from the fat fingers that were turning Sir Henry’s largesse over and over. He bent to finish the packing with a complete disregard for Oldcastle’s ensuing ire.

  It seemed that Hemminges took William’s nod as a licence of a kind. That evening and every evening for the next week there was no dancing or fencing. Instead, Hemminges showed William what he had learned in the experience of more than one tavern brawl. William was taught to scratch an eye, and use a wall, a pot or a hastily snatched cobble to best effect. In the course of his education he received sharp jabs in the armpit, a cruel raking of his shins with the edge of a boot and a crack over the eye from a misjudged demonstration of a head-butt. All of which left him distinctly sour. An emotion heightened by the perpetual giggling of Arthur that accompanied every knock and bruise he received.

  William was not, however, proof against the occasional praise Hemminges would dole out after a hard session. The price of the knowledge may have been high in scrapes and cuts, but William was grateful for it.

  The mistress court of mighty Europe

  Sir Henry checked William again.

  ‘You play well, Master Shakespeare,’ Sir Henry said. ‘You’ve an eye for the main chance. You see a stratagem and you work towards it.’

  William moved his knight in front of his king. Sir Henry reached out and moved his own, to reveal another check.

  Since that first night after Oldcastle and Connor’s tourney, Sir Henry had William brought to him after each evening meal and played chess against him. All the while he spoke out loud. William suspected he served as company for a lonely man; the chance to sound out his worries on an inconsequential man possessed of an intelligent mind. William did not object. He learned much. Sir Henry’s openness in discussion increasing as he found in William an attentive and willing pupil.

  ‘Yet your play is only good,’ Sir Henry said. ‘It lacks the touch of greatness. The great players do not look simply to create traps. They work to control the board’s shape. To craft the landscape within which their opponent plays.’

  William looked at the board. He could see no escape for his king. There had seemed such space for movement. He had ravaged through Sir Henry’s pieces. Yet now his own were scattered. Sir Henry’s few were all gathered about William’s king. William found there was one square he needed. It was denied him. Some moves ago Sir Henry had advanced one of his pawns. The square it threatened had been of such seeming inconsequence to the play of pieces. William had ignored it for the glories that lay elsewhere on the board. Yet slowly, slowly the play had moved across the board and now that square was all. He looked up to see Sir Henry looking at him.

  ‘Even a pawn may be powerful,’ Sir Henry said. ‘If it is put in the right place.’

  William turned his king on its side in resignation. Sir Henry sat back in his chair. Outside the dining room the company could be heard in good-natured revel. Sir Henry refilled his glass and gestured for William to do the same.

  ‘It will not be long before we are in Venice. There we may throw off the fiction we are a private party and stand revealed as Her Majesty’s servants. There will our business begin.’

  He gestured at William’s arm. ‘Healing well?’ he asked.

  ‘The scab pulls but heals cleanly,’ William answered.

  ‘Good, good. Can’t have you killed before Venice.’

  Sir Henry began to shuffle pieces on the board. ‘News has reached me from Rome,’ he said. ‘There is a new pope now. As expected, the white smoke wafted for the former Cardinal Montalto. He has taken the name “Sixtus’’. The fifth, I think, of that name.’

  Sir Henry took a sip from his glass and resumed his setting of the pieces. ‘There’s no great news in that. Pope Gregory’s death and Montalto’s rise to replace him were foreseen.’

  ‘How?’ William asked.

  ‘No magic, Master Shakespeare. No scrying glass. The old pope was old. The wonder was he lived as long as he did. As to the new pope. He has many spies, but then, so have we.’

  He looked up and studied William. ‘You look unhappy. Is it to hear that we have spies or that the Pope does? You think white vestments bespeak a spotless innocence? No more than red hands a fouled conscience, Master Shakespeare.’

  William made to protest but Sir Henry held up a hand to stay him.

  ‘These are unstable and uncertain times. You may think a poor player is so far below the concerns of great ones that he need not care for them.’

  ‘I do not, Sir Henry,’ said William. ‘When great ones storm it is poor sailors drown.’

  ‘An apt metaphor. England is a small boat and steers a rocky and uncharted course,’ Sir Henry said. ‘Have you ever felt fear, Master Shakespeare? True fear, for your life, for the safety of those you love?’

  William shook his head but Sir Henry was no longer looking at him but staring at the chess board as he spoke. ‘Philip of Spain is more powerful than any man since the Caesars. His lands, his ships, his men, why all alone he could crush our little island. I fear. I fear what follows.’

  He took the white queen and placed it in the centre of the board.

  ‘We stand apart and with few allies,’ he said. ‘Only the great moat of the Channel defends us, and it is a perilous, narrow thing.’

  Sir Henry planted pawns before the queen.

  ‘Meanwhile,’ he continued, ‘Spain gathers her armies and plots our destruction. Spain is vengeful for Mary, our Queen Elizabeth’s sister, the Spanish king’s dead wife, the queen that was. Spain fights for their hope of a united Church again. To stem the bleeding of their treasure ships by our Admirals Hawkins and Drake. To stop our meddling in their war in the Low Countries.’

  He planted a red queen and bishops, knights and castles in one corner of the board.

  ‘Meanwhile, France . . .’

  He took the red king and placed it in the other corner of the board.

  He pointed. ‘King Henry, third of that name. Catholic majesty of France. Sodomite, they say. I know not. I do know that this King Henry has had no children. I know also that since his brother’s death in December of last year, he has no heir save Henry of Navarre.’

  He placed the white king on the board.

  ‘One trouble only,’ he said, his finger resting on the crown of the piece, ‘Navarre is a Protestant Huguenot and hated of Catholic France. The Guise . . .’

  Sir Henry paused and looked at William. ‘You know the Guise? No, why should you? The Guise are the most powerful nobles in France. They are fanatics for Rome. They will do anything they can to stop Navarre from becoming king.’

  Sir Henry pushed the white king over towards the white queen. ‘Think what might be if England no longer stood alone against Rome.’

  He pushed the red king over towards the red queen. ‘Think what would face England if Spain and France stood together against her.’

  Sir Henry emptied his glass. William watched his face and saw his eyes darting back and forth across the board. The little knight reached out and placed two more pieces on the board. A red bishop and a white castle.

  ‘The Pope,’ Sir Henry said as he held the red bishop. ‘No wonder what he wants. What he will work towards. All united again under Roman rule. Whatever serves to crush the Protestant heresy, to curb England. Yet, Venice . . .’

  Sir Henry put down the bishop and picked up the rook.

  ‘We need a third colour for this piece,’ he said. ‘Venice doesn’t care for red or white. She cares only for herself. If Venice might be persuaded that her best interests favour peace. That commerce comes when ships are heavy laden with cargo bales, not gunpowder and shot. That, in this, our English ships are better suited . . .’

  Sir Henry reached out and knocked over the red king and the red bishop with the rook. Then he placed it between the white queen and king, Venice between Elizabeth of England and Henry of Navarre.

  ‘Venice is money and Venice is time.
With them England may yet stand. Without them . . .’

  He and William stared at the board. Sir Henry looked up.

  ‘We’ve time for one more game before bed, I think,’ he said.

  Five most vile and ragged foils

  The English party made good progress through the south of France. The seventh day after the battle of the Crowing Cock, a month after they had left England, they crossed from France into the Duchy of Savoy and worked their way east past Turin. Azure skies through which no cloud passed to dull the heat of a Mediterranean sun accompanied their journey. The only shade came from the dust cloud kicked up by horses’ hooves and carts’ wheels as they passed along roads baked dry.

  William was uncomfortable. The scab on his arm itched. By the middle of the day the heat was unbearable. Oldcastle was poleaxed by it. He took to lying in the back of the cart, shrouded in a makeshift tent he had constructed from a painted backdrop. From beneath this he could be heard moaning piteously and plaintively crying for water: ‘Or sack or beer or sweet, sweet wine.’

  Hemminges, temper shortened by the weather, would occasionally hammer on the side of the cart and demand silence from the prostrate figure. To little effect.

  Days began earlier in an attempt to take advantage of the relative cool of morning. Still, the heat slowed the party’s pace as they were forced to break more regularly to water the horses and to avoid the main heat in the middle of the day. Despite having begun to travel even before light, they had made slow progress through a twisting valley east of Turin. The angry urgings of Sir Henry’s steward had failed to prevail against the torpor of the horses, their only effect being to put all in the party on edge. As a result they were late approaching their intended rest for that night and were still a couple of miles from it when they reached the bridge.

  The river was not particularly wide or deep at this point in the summer. It was barrier enough though to demand, for the carts’ benefit if nothing else, that they use the old Roman bridge. That would be a problem, for sat across the middle of the central span was a cart with a broken axle and an irate man bellowing at a horse. There was no way to pass.