A Dangerous Trade

by Steven Veerapen

  What would Jack want her to do? Live, she thought. But how did one live with unexpected loss? Whenever she had thought about her future, he was in it. He stood at the counter of their little shop, smiling at people.

  The days turned into weeks. Along the road soldiers thronged, broken up into troops. Apparently, the northern earls were revolting against Queen Elizabeth, and were marching on Tutbury. Or so people said. To her surprise, she found herself heading in that direction, albeit from the south. She had no clear idea why. Only a vague feeling drew her – a stupid idea that if she went where he used to be, he would be there.

  When she arrived in the town, her dress filthy and dishevelled, she saw a great concourse of people. She ignored them, riding up to the castle under an ashy sky that was building up the courage to rain.

  ‘You can’t enter, er … mistress.’

  ‘Let me in,’ she said. ‘Please. I … I am in service here. A laundress.’ The guard squinted, seemed to recognise her, and drew back in surprise. ‘We … we thought you’d run away. Heard that your man died.’

  Amy said nothing but rode up and into the courtyard. Darts of rain had begun jabbing at the ground, washing the colour out of everything. A fitting place, she thought, seeing the familiar tomblike structure standing against the lighter grey sky. She looked at her gloveless hands, both raw and bleeding. The nails had grown ragged, too. You’ve let yourself run to seed, her mother’s voice tutted. There were hardened patters of muck on her dress and she scraped at them, flaking them off. Then she sniffed her fingers. Winced. Wiped. ‘Mrs Cole!’

  Still bent, she met the eyes of Woodward, the earl’s steward. The shock in them faded to cool contempt. ‘Why have you come here, girl?’ Something in his face softened at the sight of her and he helped her down. ‘But you have brought back one of the stolen horses. I … I was sorry to hear of your husband. The countess thought you might have run mad after his … what happened. When did you last eat, girl?’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘You shall have to be brought before the countess.’ So Bess was back, she thought.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But … I shall have something fetched, and then you must see her immediately. And my lord.’ He gestured around the courtyard and for the first time she registered the activity. People were moving around, shifting crates and wrapped bundles.

  ‘Wingfield?’ she asked. Her voice was rusty from disuse.

  ‘Coventry. The Scottish queen is being moved for her safety, what with these rough northern rebels on the march. Do not let it worry you. For this, my son was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’ He seemed to realise what he had said, and he reddened. ‘I … the prodigal son, of course, the parable. I mean only – the earl and countess shall rather celebrate your return than punish you severely.’ He bustled off and brought her some bread and cold meat. She picked at it before being shown into the half-stripped building, her feet dragging. Sodden leaves had stuck to the bottom of shoes which were nearly worn through.

  She went before her lord and lady in a little office near his chambers. ‘We thought,’ the earl began, ‘that you had run off.’ He was seated, Bess standing behind and to his right, one hand on his shoulder.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Sorry isn’t good enough, my girl. I trusted you,’ said Bess. ‘And then I hear that your husband is blown up with a hidden priest. I was on the queen’s barge, if you please – I saw it all. Her Majesty was right distressed. Hates such clamours. We had to turn back – smooth her than it was some accident. And then your man was reported to the council as having wandered the streets of Southwark buying guns? You fled us - you fled the queen’s castle without permission. Men came for you! After news of your husband buying guns came to Mr Walsingham’s ears. And what could I say? That I’d lost my own girl! What in the name of all that’s holy has been going on? The truth, girl, the truth.’

  ‘The truth would be good,’ said Shrewsbury, reaching up and patting her hand.

  Amy took a deep breath and told them all that she knew.

  ‘And you were reporting to this false madman throughout your time here?’ This was Bess. Amy hung her head. ‘What, was I not a fair mistress, girl?’

  ‘You’ve been a fair mistress, my lady. I’m … I was a fool. I thought to protect …’ She found she couldn’t say his name. ‘My husband.’

  ‘And he has paid the price for your misdeeds. And his own,’ said the earl. ‘I do not pretend to understand any of this. Two men, one a Catholic priest and one pretending to be Cecil’s man – plotting to kill the Scottish queen under my roof? Why?’

  ‘I can’t say, my lord. I only can say what I saw. I think they were in some other plot. Together, just the two of them. And they sought to use us.’ Recollection pricked at her. ‘Yes, they sought to use us. Blame us. Their design was not Catholic nor of the queen’s faith. It was something madder.’ She thrust a hand into her bodice and retrieved the paper she had taken from Brown’s satchel. It was ragged now, and sweat-dampened, but she lowered her eyes and held it out. ‘Being only a woman, I can’t make sense of it, my lord. Only that the two men sought to use us.’

  ‘And you let them,’ snapped Bess. Shrewsbury silenced her with a soft look, reaching out for the paper.

  ‘My word,’ said Shrewsbury. A sharp intake of breath.

  ‘What is it?’ Bess gently eased the paper from his fingers and read herself, her lips moving silently. ‘Well … Hell’s bloody bells. The boy-king of Scotland. Elizabeth and Mary, both dead. You the instruments. And these two men were the authors of this madness?’

  ‘Both are dead now,’ said Amy, keeping her voice brittle.

  ‘Yes, you saw to that. And Heydon took your husband with him.’

  ‘Yet … it seems to me that you have put an end to two wicked plotters,’ said Shrewsbury. ‘When Mr Walsingham would see no plot.’ She thought that the beginning of a smile touched the corner of his mouth. ‘His friend the good Scotch earl might have some explaining to do, having such a man ever in his service. For that we might be grateful.’ It was not clear to Amy whether he meant her killing the men or embarrassing Walsingham. ‘Yet for the deceit you have shown, I am afraid you cannot continue long in our service. Not when you were willing to harm our guest.’

  ‘I was never – I thought,’ she began, a little of her old fire kindling.

  ‘Hush, girl,’ said Bess. ‘Just hush. My husband and I … oh, hang it all – I like you, Amy Cole. You’ve been an addle-pate and worse, but you’ve … you’ve lost your husband. That’s a hard thing. He seemed an odd sort, but if what you say is true – about him being so treated in his past, well …’ She cleared her throat. ‘My lord has ships. Good ships. One of them does trade on the continent. You shall be paid your due, girl.’ This time Shrewsbury coughed. ‘And a little extra, we always give our folk a little extra. And you might take ship. From Kent, if you can shift yourself there. By the time you get there the ports will be open – the queen will have closed them until this northern foolery is finished.’

  Amy burst into tears. At this, the earl began muttering darkly and stood, reaching for his stick and hobbling from the room. ‘He … always … wanted … to … travel.’ She sobbed.

  Bess came and patted at her arm. ‘There, there,’ she began. Then, ‘stop this bloody nonsense at once, my girl.’ Amy did. ‘You are being given a great chance. Go abroad. Your husband is dead, and his name is now stained – a man who sought weapons by illegal means. Get yourself out of England. Go, now, and find fire in Europe enough to put some back in your belly. Find strength. A new beginning for you, girl, with no one to trouble you in it.’ The countess then gave her a hard look. ‘You can keep the dress.’

  ***

  Amy stood at the docks, in a mist of fish and salt. Around her sailors swore and rolled barrels along a cobbled forecourt, ignoring the mizzling rain steaming around their boots. The masts of the ships looked like a forest, and she thought of Brown, and look
ed away. Her eyes fell instead on a seagull as it pecked its way across the ground, its black eyes reminding her for a second of Queen Elizabeth’s. It cocked its head, squawked at her, and skimmed away.

  It had taken her weeks to reach the place. Christmas had passed, spent in the company of strangers at a nameless tavern in an unknown village. The time of revels and new year’s gifts. Though the real new year wouldn’t come for months, the people in the inn spoke of Twelfth Night as the harbinger of new decade: as different, once it settled, from the 60s as the 60s had been from the 50s. A time of peace would come after the yule weeks, they said, after ten years of uncertainty and mad events. New fashions and new ideas would arrive. The wide world was getting smaller. Then they all drank a toast to the queen, whom they said would be the one thing not to change.

  Jack would see none of those wonders, though. Each passing day would simply bury him deeper under the weight of time. And so she did not want to either.

  The northern rising had, apparently, been crushed without a battle, the rebels more interested in saying masses around York than organising anything properly. Where Queen Mary was, Amy neither knew nor cared. Nor did she care for where she was going. She had spent two weeks in a dockyard inn, waiting for The Barque Talbot to be ready to sail. Privately she had decided she would never see the new continent. She recalled thinking about drinking the poison herself once, when she had first been given it. It had been a fleeting thought then – stupid. But sometimes life did batter you enough that there was no other way out. Her mother had once told her about an Egyptian queen who had done it. The Romans, too, took themselves out of the world out of honour. But they were all pagans and destined for hell anyway. Would she meet Jack in heaven if she took her own life?

  On hearing from a sailor that it would still be a while, she returned to the inn. A message was waiting for her, and as she read it, her heart began to flutter. ‘Been trying to find you. Waiting in the yard at the Swan.’ She grabbed the tavernkeeper’s lad who had delivered it and shook him. ‘Who gave you this? Where is he?’ The boy wriggled free, looking at her as though she were demented.

  ‘Some feller in a brown suit. Said he’s been on your trail a good while,’ he said, and darted away.

  Amy went to meet him. In her sleeve, she had hidden a knife bought from the innkeeper himself.

  The Swan was a rival inn, frequented by sailors rather than the ambassadors and foreign visitors in the one Amy had chosen. She wandered into its yard, keeping her back to the wall of the building. She knew how silently and quickly Brown could more.

  And then she saw him. He turned and saw her.

  Within a second Amy had thrown herself into his arms. ‘How? How?’ The knife slipped from her sleeve, clattering to the ground with a tinny splash.

  Jack eased out of her grip and leant in, kissing her. She let him, and then felt angry tears spring our of her eyes. She began to pummel his chest, and he winced. ‘How?’ she asked again. ‘You’re dead.’ He smiled his old, stupid, moon-man smile. ‘How are you here?’

  ‘I … wanted to see you. To find you. I’m supposed to be dead now, the world’s to think – but I got away. I mean, I jumped from a window. Heydon burnt the place.’

  ‘But – they found bodies. Two!’ Anger and joy fought for her. It seemed like, for months, some cruel, evil joke had been played on her, and Jack had been in on it.

  ‘They found me. I … I must have been knocked out. Guards from the castle. When they heard the explosion. They took me, and they took what was left of Heydon. My arm was broken. One of the queen’s bonesetters fixed it.’

  ‘But why – I’ve thought you were dead – I wanted to be dead myself. I was going to jump into the sea from that ship. Why did you not find me? I went to Tutbury, where I thought you might be!’

  Jack sighed. ‘Amy … I’ve been locked up these past months. They told me that from now on Jack Cole was dead.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Sir William Cecil and the other man, Walsingham – they kept me locked in a cell. Asking me questions every day.’

  ‘Did they hurt you?!’

  ‘No. No, they kept me well enough, fixed me up. But in a room, all alone. I told them everything and they believed me.’ Absurdly, she thought: of course they would listen to a man. ‘About Heydon and Brown. About their plan for the Scotch prince, too, and the earl of Moray. I think that fellow will find himself watched from now on. I …’ he grimaced, ‘I betrayed the men of the north. The good, true men – the ones whose names I heard Heydon speak. I had to – I … I had to.’

  ‘To hell with the north. To hell with Cecil and Walsingham.’

  ‘Amy, quiet.’ He tossed his head, making his fringe bounce. It had grown back straighter.

  ‘I’ve been quiet enough! I … am I dreaming?’ She had had similar dreams in past weeks, although always taking place in Tutbury or Wingfield.

  ‘No. No, this is no dream. I’ve … I’ve been turned. I think. They want me to go to Europe. They don’t care what I believe, so long as I inform them what the Catholics are doing. They think the pope will attempt something this year. Maybe this month. So they put me in this suit and told me to go – and to know that I’d be watched.

  ‘But I said I couldn’t without you. So they made what they called enquiries, and found you were being sent on the earl’s ship out of the country. I’ve been chasing you since. We’re both to go abroad, then. Jack Cole is dead. They said I can choose whichever name I want in the world, so long as they know it. I didn’t,’ he added, ‘tell them what I heard. You and that Brown man – about killing Queen Mary.’

  ‘You knew – you heard? I wasn’t. I never was - it was - a fantasy. I could never have carried it through, no matter what he thought.’

  ‘I couldn’t either. I couldn’t kill Queen Elizabeth. Not in cold blood, not even for forgiveness. I’m not made for an assassin. I’m not … you’re a diamond, Amy. Made like one. Not like me. Not wax.’

  ‘A diamond,’ she smiled. She would take that. ‘Yet you’ve lived through a madman’s fire. No man of wax does that. So who are we then, husband? Adam and Eve?’

  ‘I don’t know. You decide.’

  Epilogue

  They stand on the deck of a ship, two nameless people. Elizabeth’s England has disappeared from view. Neither miss it. On the horizon is the coast of France, or Belgium – neither know. They have discussed their future, buried in a tiny cabin in the deck below, where they laugh and cry and make love. A single berth again, no dormitories or separate beds.

  They are to be watched people and watching people from now on. Or they might disappear in some unknown village, learn the language, and be known as the émigré couple who fled the horrors of a heretic queen’s England.

  She continues to care nothing for religion. She is willing to go where he goes and practice whichever happens to be the faith of their chosen homes. She talks a great deal, and the sailors on the ship have already started whispering that the silent young fellow has married a shrew and will repent of it, if he does not already.

  He continues to believe in the Catholic faith. The confessional side of it appeals to him. He knows he was taught the tenets of it by a dead charlatan, and that he is now expected to betray those of the faith. But he might not. He might seek forgiveness instead for betraying England’s northern men. Guilt is addictive, he thinks. When you relinquish it for one thing, for one act or other, you seek it for another as a drunk seeks the bottle. He tells her, grudgingly, about his childhood, and then finds he cannot stop. It seems odd to him – sinful almost – that he kept it from her before their marriage. To his horror – at first – he finds that she already knows. And then he loves her more for her silence. For knowing about him and marrying him anyway. For loving him still.

  She thinks about the men she has killed. There are no regrets. Honour is a man’s burden. A married woman can do as she pleases if it helps him. If she had the opportunity to relive the past, she would do it again. She considers the future, though. In
her private thoughts, she realises that she sees the future every single day. Everyone does. Would the twelve-year-old her have been able to understand or imagine her murdering two men – planning and doing it – and then finding herself on a ship to the continent? Of course not. Absurd. Yet here she is, seeing the future.

  He thinks about the men he has killed, and he is sorry for it. As his wife’s thoughts turn to the future, his turn to the past. He has spent too long seeing it every day. When he realised that he could not run from it, whenever that was, he chose to be trapped in it. He considers that everyone lives in the past, replaying it in their head, letting it chip away at them. Some let it help them grow, others let it hold them back. Some people just plain outgrow the world, wanting to change in a world that remains sluggish and stubborn. He realises that he is not his past, and that he is not hollow. With her, he is himself in the present and the future. He has found what he wants and what he needs - and he believes in it.

  The boat docks and they disembark in a strange town, not knowing the language. To her chagrin, he finds that he can pick up foreign tongues easily. She used to call him a chameleon, so it should not surprise her, but her own lazier ear irritates her, sparking her anger. When she feels an argument brewing, she reminds herself that he might have been dead. And then she argues anyway, because that is part of living, and she has to remind herself that it is all real.

  And so they go on living, their lives and their identities traded in for a new beginning.

  Author’s Note

  In her correspondence, Mary Queen of Scots always referred to her arrival at Tutbury Castle as the beginning of her imprisonment. She had been found not guilty of her second husband, Lord Darnley’s murder by the English Privy Council in January 1569. Her accuser had ultimately been her brother, the earl of Moray, who had assumed the reins of government in Scotland after she had fled in May 1568. Moray, who had been investigated simultaneously for rebelling against his sister, was likewise found not guilty, although he was permitted to return to Scotland and continue ruling in the name of Mary’s son, the infant James VI (and later James I of England). Throughout the whole bizarre charade, Queen Elizabeth (and the English government) had assumed the role of impartial mediators in a Scottish domestic affair. Rather than risk destabilising things north of the border further, the English decided to keep their hard-Protestant and rather deferential friend Moray in charge of Scotland, and the deposed Catholic queen in honourable confinement in England. Those interested in Mary’s life are best served by Antonia Fraser’s Mary Queen of Scots (Philips Park Press, 1969) and John Guy’s My Heart is My Own (Harper Perennial, 2004). Moray’s life is covered in Maurice Lee’s study of the Scottish Reformation, James Stewart: A Political Study of the Reformation in Scotland (Columbia University Press, 1953) and my own Blood Feud: Mary Queen of Scots and the Earl of Moray (Sharpe Books, 2018).