by Hall, Ian
Two days later, Queen Mary arrived with five knights of England, and their soldier retinue. Most of them brought no more men than I currently employed, but they bolstered the morale of the men inside the fort. Names like the Earl of Surrey and Sir Henry Bedingfield were passed on lips, buoying our spirits, and inflaming our passion.
On every flagpole on every tower, we raised a new standard; that of Queen Mary.
We cheered her from the ramparts as she toured each battlement, until the darkness fell, and she got called into the fortress for her own safety.
The next day, I got summoned, and under secret orders marched my ragtag bunch into Ipswich, with instructions to foment dissent in the taverns and bars in the harbor town.
I must say, my men took to their task with aplomb.
In every tavern, they raised the subject of Mary’s right to reign, how Jane would be a backward step. To my surprise, the people appeared to be behind her, mostly catholic in belief system, mostly loyal to a regime twenty, fifty years ago, the new protestant teachings not having trickled down to the ordinary man in the street.
When Thomas Poley, Princess Mary’s man, arrived in Ipswich the next day and proclaimed her Queen, the town rose to a man.
Chalk one success to Richard DeVere.
Sherriff Cornwallis, and many more prominent local men had no alternative; they announced their support for Princess Mary, and sent men to Framlingham Castle by the hundred.
Norwich proved the quickest town to turn around. On the twelfth of July, they proclaimed Lady Jane Grey to be Queen, denouncing every demonstrator, and carting them off to prison. The very next day, they declared for Queen Mary, and the Norwich people marched for Framlingham, ready to fight for their rightful and lawful Queen.
Chapter 5
July 12th 1553
The Bloodless Coup
But even the cause in Norfolk proved by no means won.
Some knights may have devoted themselves to Mary, but one single name remained; Lord Spalding, his seat in the town of the same name in the northern borders of Norfolk.
Due to my success in Ipswich, I got dispatched with an escort, which I easily outdistanced, completing the journey by vampire speed.
With my power of suggestion, I had Lord Spalding turned within the hour, and his fighting force promised in two days.
Queen Mary stood in complete control of the whole of Norfolk, the nearest and most volatile of populations to London.
And as it happened, we accomplished the union not a day too soon.
On July the fifteenth, as Lord Spalding’s army marched to Framlingham’s ancient walls, the Duke of Northumberland, carrying Lady Jane’s banner, made their lumbering way to Bury St. Edmunds. The two armies were now just twenty-five miles apart.
But the contest seemed hardly fair.
The Duke of Northumberland, his troops deserting by the drove, numbered only five thousand, whilst Mary’s army swelled by the minute, and easily topped twenty thousand.
As word spread that the Privy Council had reversed their decision, and now proclaimed Mary as Queen, the Duke of Northumberland surrendered to the Earl of Arundel, near Cambridge, and got swiftly sent to the Tower.
Queen Mary would be the first woman to rule England, and at thirty-seven, she seemed supremely ready for the job.
I got my next mission almost immediately. Arrest Simon Parks, a Protestant minister in Tottenham.
“I don’t want any word of this to get into the public arena.” Queen Mary’s voice spoke in low tones. “I want him gone from London.”
Her inference seemed clear. She wanted him dead. Hardly an ‘arrest’, then.
I stepped backwards, then swept from the room. It had been a solitary audience; I seemed to be getting used to them.
Just north of the sprawl of London, lay the quiet burgh of Tottenham. And I have to say, Simon Parks proved as easy to find as a lone stripper in a titty bar.
Standing on a street corner, bawling about demons and new versions of the Bible.
But I had to watch out for the shimmer, the effect that hit me after changing time. Wary of being sent back to Connecticut again, I knocked Parks on the head, slung him over my shoulder, and took him to Ipswich. On the docks I found a ship bound for Norway. I paid his fare, then gave him the suggestion that he’d always wanted to see the fjords.
Simon Parks ‘gone from London’. I’d done my duty, and not risked a shimmering.
At the next private audience, Princess Mary’s instructions were far more bizarre.
“Go to the Tower, and try to break in.”
“Your Majesty?” I questioned.
“Try to obtain the release of Lady Jane Grey.”
Her instructions weren’t precise enough for me to act, yet, I felt hardly bold enough to ask clarification. Yet it seemed I must. “I’m not clear of my mission,” I stated, certain my brows looked furrowed. “Am I meant to succeed?”
“Richard DeVere, you are to rescue the Lady Jane Grey from the Tower if it is at all possible.” Her tone allowed no response.
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
And I retreated in silence.
There’s a term in espionage called a ‘rubber duck’ and it means a forced sacrifice. I’d seen it in a movie once, and it had stuck in my head. I felt like that rubber duck right then. It seemed to be a death mission; rescue the Lady Jane Grey, and probably get killed in the process; one more loose end tied up. One more killer out of the way.
So I cased the Tower the next day, walked around it a few times, then flashed past the guards at Traitor’s Gate and into the inner courtyard.
Damned if there wasn’t another inner wall, but I hid until dark, and climbed it, the stonework being rough and easy.
Inside the second wall stood the central Tower; The White Tower, named after its pale Kent stone.
Again, the outside wall proved easy to climb, and I made my way systematically around the whole thing, calling Jane’s name at every barred window.
Eventually, on the top floor, below the roof itself, a soft voice answered me. “Yes?”
“Lady Jane?”
I heard a rustle of paper from inside. “Devil, how can you tempt me?” Her words were terse, harsh sounding.
“Lady Jane, come to the window.”
“Satan, you dare tempt me? When I stand at death’s door already?”
The voice sounded increasingly familiar.
“Jane?” My lips were suddenly dry. I heard movement across a wooden floor. Then a face appeared at the barred window. Even in the darkness, I recognized her. Just over two weeks ago, I’d witnessed a dagger ripping through her heart, then the event had sent me tumbling forward through time to my present day place, in Connecticut.
There, just inches away from my fingers stood Lady Jane, right enough, but it wasn’t Lady Jane Grey. The lady in the cell happened to be Lady Jane Winterbrooke, who I had last seen as a nineteen-year-old, about fifty years ago.
“Richard!” she gasped.
Then her odor drifted up through the bars, and I caught the unmistakable whiff of vampire.
“Fallon,” I said, and she cringed back from me, suddenly ashen and terrified.
Fallon, my vampire enemy had turned her to a vampire.
“He makes me do it,” she cried, tears now streaming down her face. “He’s inside my head most of the time. I can’t help myself.”
I shook with such passion I almost lost my fragile grip on the wall of the Tower. “I’ll return.”
As I climbed higher, she moaned after me. “Don’t leave me! He’ll be back soon. Back inside my head!”
Two beefy guards sat on the flat roof of the White Tower, deep in conversation. It took little effort to cross to their position without being noticed and bang their heads together. Neither rose from their slump, and no shimmer hit me.
So far, so good.
As I stood on the roof, I gave thought to my Lady Jane’s predicament. Keith Fallon must have turned her after I’d been ejecte
d from 1502; it seemed the only story that fitted the facts. And now, he used her to play the part of Lady Jane Grey, and thus leading her to her certain death.
My one problem?
To be so tightly in control of one of your own turnings, you had to be physically close. That meant Baron Exeter had to be in the Tower itself, or nearby, so therefore I needed to be extra-specially careful.
I stripped the red tunic from the larger man and slipped it over my own. Then I flipped the trapdoor quietly, and started down the worn stone steps. Two more guards sat at the bottom, but not red-uniformed Tower men like the two I’d just dispatched on the roof. These looked leaner, probably assassins or soldiers of fortune, probably well-trained, probably well-armed.
“Hey,” I called softly. “Something’s amiss, come quickly.”
To my complete chagrin, they themselves called out, and more guards came from doors on the top floor. I’d walked into a trap, and then activated it. I raced back up the stairs, and waited at the top.
My only redeeming factor proved the size of the small trapdoor; only one person could climb through at a time. And hey, I’m a powerful vampire.
I had no time to engage these men with my sword and risk one of their deaths, as the resultant shimmer would disable me, leaving me at the mercy of the next man. So, as each head raced up the steps, and onto the flat roof, they got such a hard punch to their temples they fell lifeless to the ground.
Seven punches, seven unconscious bodies scattered on the roof to mix with the two others.
I searched each of them for keys, and found a large ring with a single key on two belts.
But I had little time to prepare my Lady for transport, and certainly didn’t want to take the chance that she’d suddenly come under Fallon’s influence when we were trying to escape the castle.
I had to take drastic action. In seconds I’d made my decision. Lady Jane had to die.
A vampire could recover from such mishaps.
I unlocked the door, and burst in, to find her advancing on me, smiling, tears falling down her beautiful face. Smiling in return, I gripped my long dagger tightly, and slipped it smoothly into her chest. I heard her dress tear, I felt a slight resistance as my blade separated her ribs, then I heard the gurgling as I pierced her heart. As she frowned at me questioningly, croaked her last unpronounceable words, and fell limp into my arms, a knife fell to the ground between us, clattering on the floor. Supporting Lady Jane, I was unable to bend down to examine it, but I managed to kick it into a shaft of light from the corridor’s candles. The thin blade had been coated in sticky green ichor. I had dodged another bullet. Or more accurately, I’d dodged the assassin’s poisoned knife.
I tied her hands together firmly, then looped them over my neck. Down the outside of the Tower with a dead weight wasn’t the workout I’d intended, but by the time the alarm would have been raised, I would be out of London, and making my way north.
It hadn’t taken much contemplation. I needed her out of the picture in England. I needed her as far away as I could get her from the influence of Keith Fallon, the vampire that’d turned her. And I had to do it quick. And it had to be somewhere he’d never think of looking, somewhere I’d never been before.
The answer seemed simple; Scotland.
Yes, a daunting four hundred mile run, carrying a presently dead, just about to wake again, vampire on your back.
I also couldn’t go to any inns or taverns on the way; I could do nothing by which anyone could trace the route behind us. The trail had to seem cold.
I felt grateful that I’d returned in July; winters make speedy travel impossible. However, it was July in England, and it began to rain.
I ran for a while, but the pace seemed decidedly slow, and the cross-country going felt tough on both my legs and my back.
Nearing morning, I found us a huge oak, and sat us both beside it. I’d almost fallen asleep when Jane gasped and pushed herself from the tree, clutching her chest.
Then she rounded on me. “Richard!” she railed.
Expecting a ‘come to daddy’ moment, I opened my arms wide.
Bam. Right on the chin. Then blow after blow rained down on poor, unsuspecting Richard DeVere. “You left me, you bastard! Fifty godforsaken years!”
And you have to remember, this might have been the tantrum fit of a nineteen-year-old Tudor Lady, but she had a vampire’s strength, so these blows stung!
I grabbed her by the wrists, and she stood, still struggling, but at least the punches had stopped.
“I got taken back to my homeland,” I said, and watched her face.
“Holland?”
“Yes, and held captive.”
Then she stopped struggling, not that I let her go. “You’ve not aged a day,” she said.
I shook my head, a little bit in shame.
Realization dawned on her face. “Then you’re like me, and the Baron, and the others he’s made into his lackeys.”
“Yes.” I nodded. “I’m a vampire too.”
“Vampire?” she looked at me. “Is that the name for what we are? The Baron just calls us his ‘toys’.”
“I never stopped thinking of you,” I began. “And when I thought you’d been killed, I came back the first chance I got to exact my revenge against the Baron.”
“He told me you’d just run away. He said you were a coward who never loved me.”
I felt my tears rise as I shook my head. Then I decided I might as well take a chance now, rather than later. I let her wrists loose, and she fell into my arms, raining kisses on my face.
“Oh, how I never thought this day would come,” I said, trying not to rip off her clothes, but knowing that we couldn’t stall the inevitable.
“Me, too.” Then she stopped, and looked at me, alarmed. “You do the blood-suck-sex thing, right?”
I nodded, and she grinned like a wild woman.
So for the next few seconds, I wondered what perverse acts had been performed over my love. I thought of his hands and other parts touching her, fucking her. Then, as my fingers undid familiar stays and began to lose clothing, these thoughts drifted slightly. When she’d got kinda naked for me, she grabbed my dick and took it right down her throat, and I lost those dark insidious thoughts altogether. Resigned to the past being behind us, I joined her in her rediscovery, and reveled in everything we did.
And, yes, at the end, we did the blood-suck-sex thing. The first time I’d swapped my blood with hers, and it seemed to be worth the wait.
But as I lay in the hot afterglow of vampire sex, I wondered if the green ichor on the knife had been aimed specifically at me. I’d been caught up in a trap, yes, of that there seemed no doubt, but if it had been aimed directly at me, there needed to be collusion between Princess Mary and Baron Exeter, and I couldn’t see much possibility of that.
No, there seemed no alternative but to believe I’d sprung the trap accidentally, and rescued my baby by sheer fluke.
Now I had to get her out of Fallon’s influence, and out of danger.
Chapter 6
July 18th, 1553
To The North
“So why do we have to part?” she asked.
“Fallon obviously has plans that involve you. He also probably knows I’m back on the scene. If I didn’t leave a detectable scent back at the Tower, then he’s probably deduced it; he’s anything but stupid.”
“But can’t we run away together?”
“I can’t let him get away with all this stuff. He’s got to die, and I’m probably the only one who can do it.”
“And I have to sit in Scotland to see if you come back?”
We’d argued this for more than a morning, and hadn’t gotten much further past these basic points.
In order that I got into a position to kill Fallon, I needed her away from Fallon, away from his influence.
Pretty basic.
In the end, in typical Lady Jane terms, she gave me a time limit.
“Three months; I’m not spe
nding a winter in this godforsaken place,” she said for the umpteenth time. “Then I’m out of there, on the first carriage home. Wherever that is.”
“Okay, I’ll go for that.”
“What?”
In my frustration I’d dropped into present day vernacular. “I agree. If I cannot finish the job in the quarter, you may return.”
“I attended a princess once, destined to go north to a Scottish King.” She continued lacing her dress tighter. “And I’m not staying there for long.”
So, with my help she found accommodation in Edinburgh, and we managed to rob enough money to keep her there for three months, and yes, we did have great ‘goodbye sex’ on my last night.
Then back to London as fast as the terrain would allow.
It gave me a day to think of my next move with Queen Mary. Had she tried to set me up? Or had she known of the switch in Lady Janes?
Either way, I decided to give her one last chance to redeem herself, before I switched sides myself.
After finding Framlingham Castle bare of all troops, I found Mary’s retinue at Colchester, and waited to be presented. Like so many times before, my name got announced last, and after all of the main party had been removed.
“Report, Richard DeVere,” the Queen said, waiting on the last man to leave the room. Our only remaining company were two elderly noblemen. “These are my two ‘Williams’.” The men bowed slightly, which I returned in kind. “This is Sir William Petre and Lord William Paget. Both have been informed of your mission, both are trusted beyond reason.”
“Your Majesty, I have to inform you that the lady held in the Tower proved not to be Lady Jane Grey.” And no one in the room moved a muscle. So I had been played. Now I had to find out the reasoning behind it.
“And yet you removed the impostor from within the Tower, under the guards of Lady Jane’s employ?”
“The circumstances dictated so.”
“And where is she now?”
“She has been taken from the country,” I said. “She no longer stands on English soil.”