Jack glanced around in alarm, for even mentioning the possibility of the king’s death could readily be construed as treason. But Mulsford had gone, and there was no sign of any of the other patients, or of Franklin the porter.
‘Father, please—’
Peter Stannard seemed oblivious to the interruption.
‘But keep Ryman close, too, so you keep a foot in Duke Norfolk’s camp, in case it yet goes the other way.’ The old leper shook his head. ‘Thomas Ryman, of all men… when I think how he was as a child, in that hovel in old Nicholas parish, before it went into the sea… that he became what he did, that he almost became…’ A pause, then another shake of the head, and his eyes focused on Jack again. ‘God willing, boy, you may rise with the favour of one or other of Hertford or Lisle or Norfolk, and if you do, then Dunwich will surely prosper once more. It can be the place it once was, in the times of the Stannards who came before us.’ Peter Stannard reached out, and rested the stump of his right hand on John’s. ‘All my life I’ve known that one man could save this town. Aye, could make it great again, even. I thought I was that man, but my sins have been too great, boy. See how God has punished me by having my flesh, the flesh I loved too much, betray me. So make it you, boy. It has to be you. You be the man I could not be. You be the man to make Dunwich great again, Adam Stannard.’
Jack gasped. His father was still staring at him intently and with recognition, but he had called him by the name of his long-dead brother. The old leper’s dreadful face showed that he knew what he had done, but there was no correction, no apology.
You’re not your brother, boy. You’ll never be your brother.
But perhaps, at last, Jack was.
ELEVEN
The Pool of London was a very hell.
Horses whinnied their protests as they were pushed onto hoys. The soldiers were little better, companies of Irish kerns jostling at the waterside with northerners from the wilds of Tynedale and Redesdale. Officers and men shouted in a dozen accents or more, trying to make themselves heard above the horses and the barking of dogs. Small boys ran excitedly through the throng, some playing at soldiers, some hoping to steal a coin or two from poorly guarded purses. At the waterfront, men hauled on ropes, blocks and pullies strained, and great cannon were swung from the quay onto the lighters lying alongside. Out in the tideway, ships were getting under sail on the favourable south-westerly, beginning their voyage to France, or else coming to an anchor in mid-stream, awaiting their cargoes. Barges collided with each other, and watermen bawled a seemingly inexhaustible range of colourful oaths.
The dark walls and turrets of the Tower brooded over all. From within came the sound of hammers striking metal as new armour and swords were forged, and the deep rumble of cartwheels upon cobbles as guns and barrels of powder were moved from the ordnance stores toward the river. Incongruously, a gaily decorated skiff lay just downstream of London Bridge. This was filled with expensively attired ladies of the court, whose interest, Will Halliday speculated, was probably less in the detail of the martial preparations, and more in the physical attributes of many of the soldiers in the process of embarking. For a moment, he wondered whether Marion Bartleby, the current object of his affections, might be among them; but even from such a great distance, it was clear that the fashions sported by these women were well beyond the purse of a master pewterer’s daughter, even if she might be inclined to flout the sumptuary laws as blatantly as she dared.
In the midst of it all, upon one of the wharves just west of the Tower, stood William Gonson, seemingly convinced, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that only he could bring order to the apparent chaos around him. Will thought that his white beard and faded gown gave him the look of an Old Testament prophet, alone and defiant amidst the countless hostile worshippers of Baal.
‘The hackbutters must take precedence!’ cried a red-faced, gaudily dressed, proud-voiced young captain, pushing his way through the throng around Gonson and Will Halliday. ‘Get us a ship, I say! A ship, now!’
‘The hackbutters,’ said Gonson tiredly, ‘should not be here at all. They should have embarked at Ipswich, as ordered by your Lord General.’
The young man blustered.
‘There was no such order.’
Will Halliday shuffled the papers in his hand, and passed one to Gonson.
‘From Whitehall, the first day of May, with the additional authority of king and council,’ said the old man. ‘So you can account to the Lord General for your disobedience to his orders, or you can wait your turn.’
The young man looked around wildly, saw he had no support whatever from his fellow soldiers in other companies, glowered at Will, and then turned on his heel.
‘Let us hope he is just as b-b-bold and impatient against the French,’ said Will.
‘Amen,’ said Gonson. His voice was tired, his eyelids heavy. ‘Thirty thousand men, Will. And I have found ships for all of them, praise be to God. The king will have his war with France.’
The king will have his war with France because of you, thought Will. But he could see the cost of the colossal effort in Gonson’s grey cheeks, and could hear it by night, as dreams brought together the countless orders to countless ships with the gross injustice that had destroyed his son. Sometimes Will heard the old man speak as he slept, and when he did, it was often just the one word: Babington. Will was certain that if William Gonson ever encountered the false, perjured Knight of Saint John in the flesh, the years would fall away, and he would slaughter the rogue with his bare hands.
Another company of men, archers this time, was pushing its way down toward the Thames, oblivious to the protests of the Irishmen in their way.
‘Christ’s nails, boys,’ cried their grizzled old sergeant in a broad country accent, ‘this causey’s snided with naught but strangers!’
This brought laughter from the men behind him, and prompted a strange response in Gonson. The old man looked up, smiled, and stepped forward with a sudden speed that surprised Will.
‘Hold, boys!’ he cried. ‘Thisens hail from whereabouts?’
The sergeant studied him curiously, noting the dress of a man of high rank, but clearly perplexed by his words, spoken in an accent Will had rarely heard his master employ.
‘Company of Captain Hastings of Kirby Muxloe, my lord. An’ thee? One of ussens?’
‘That I am, sergeant. William Gonson, of Melton Mowbray born and bred. Good to see the men of Leicestershire sally forth for God, king and old England!’
The sergeant broke into a broad grin.
‘Amen to that, Master Gonson! And y’usen? D’you go to the war, sir?’
Gonson did not answer, but swayed on his feet. Will stepped forward and addressed the sergeant.
‘Master Gonson, here, is the treasurer and storekeeper of the Navy Royal. But he captained at sea in the wars at the start of the k-k-k-king’s reign.’
The sergeant looked at his men, who whispered among themselves. Some inclined their heads with deference and respect, but others looked at Gonson as though he had two heads.
‘One of ussens, going to the seas,’ said the sergeant, shaking his head. ‘Never thought I’d hear the likes. Mesen, I’ve naught been on the sea. Ne’er e’en seen it afore. Be that it?’
He pointed to the crowded Thames.
‘The s-s-start of it,’ said Will. ‘It widens and widens, until you can no longer see the shore.’
The sergeant frowned. He consulted with two of the men behind him, then turned back to Will and Gonson.
‘Well now, sir,’ he said, ‘what be this “shore” ye speak of?’
Will barely heard him: he could see tears streaming down Gonson’s cheeks, and moved to his master’s side. But the old man took a deep breath and recovered himself. Perhaps, after all, they were tears of suppressed laughter, not of ancient memories of better, simpler times.
‘God go with you, boys!’ he cried to the archers, then turned away.
‘You were of this M
elton Mowbray, sir?’ asked Will. Gonson nodded. ‘And where would that be?’
Gonson took a moment to compose his reply.
‘As far from the sea as it is possible to be in England,’ said the treasurer and storekeeper of the Navy Royal. ‘My brother Bartholomew stayed there all his days, he is the vicar there now. You should see his church, Will – our church, our parents’ church – a glorious celestory all around, filling it with light. We laid a brass to our parents there, only last year. Our father was a merchant in the wool staple of Melton, who’d thus bettered himself from the sheep farm the Gonsons held for centuries, in Wasdale of Cumberland.’ Will recalled the old man taking an extraordinary, unprecedented leave of ten days in August, before the summer’s guard was paid off; he had said not a word of the purpose until now. ‘Yet here I am, so very far from Melton, and the Gonsons so very far from Wasdale.’ Gonson looked out across the river, toward a small bark trying to make headway through a tangle of skiffs and barges. ‘What are our lives, Will? What are they, that such things happen? They say there are now heretics in the Swiss land who claim that God has determined our lives before we are born, and that we have no free will. Can that be true, do you think?’
‘The k-king and the archbishop would say not, master.’
Gonson looked out over the shipping in the Pool.
‘Yet I have come from Melton to here. To this. To all of this. And that David went from here to Malta, and thus to…’
He fell silent, and shook his head. ‘I must pray, Will. I must confess, and have the opinion of a worthy priest. My mind swims with it all. Swims with it, Will.’ He seemed older then; so much older than Will Halliday had ever known him. Then he rallied. ‘But first, lad, we have ships to despatch.’
* * *
In his youth, Thomas Ryman reflected, he could have walked the thirty or so miles from Dunwich to Kenninghall Palace in a day, even if weighed down by a breastplate, helm, and enough weaponry to deter even the most determined of banditti. But his feet and limbs now demanded a gentler pace, so he broke his journey by spending the night in a barn outside Hoxne, arriving at Kenninghall early in the following afternoon. The approach had become utterly familiar to him: the road through the wide deer park, leading to the sturdy brick H-shaped residence of the mighty dukes of Norfolk. Perhaps not quite so mighty, since the unbridled promiscuity of the duke’s niece, Catherine Howard, had led her husband, the king, to order her pretty, devious head cut from her lily-white shoulders; but the Howards of Norfolk remained one of the most formidable families in the realm, with the current duke being entrusted with command of the royal armies fighting in France.
Ryman stopped, and took in the view. Kenninghall gave him a comfortable existence, and the duke paid him well for remarkably little work. He knew how lucky he had been to secure such a place, following the dissolution of the Dunwich Greyfriars. Little Meg Stannard once asked him if he was not bitter at the ending of the monasteries, and he had made some bland reply, founded upon Ephesians Four, which she had seen through in an instant. In truth, he had been bitter, even angry and wrathful as Ephesians had it. He had even been tempted to go north and draw his sword again in that glorious but hopeless cause, the Pilgrimage of Grace, as young Friar Martin did; and, no doubt, Thomas Ryman’s song would have ended with him hanging in chains from a gallows, as did his erstwhile young friend. As it was, a place in the household of a worthy but retiring knight presented itself, tutoring the knight’s son, who died suddenly of the sweating sickness in his tenth year. Fortunately, the knight was, in turn, some sort of distant connection of the Duke of Norfolk, and knew that His Grace was seeking a tutor-in-arms, of unimpeachable loyalty to the old faith, for his grandson. Deo gratias, then. The young Lord Howard might be a devious little cub, but for the time being, he was biddable, especially as he was in awe of Ryman’s tales of ancient wars, some of which were even true. This Scottish campaign would provide another fund of stories to keep the lad entertained for many months to come. But he repeated the vow he made to himself as he knelt in Saint John’s church at Dunwich before he set out: Thomas Ryman had fought his last battle. It was time to hang up the sword, live in contentment here at Kenninghall, and earn enough against the day when Lord Howard no longer needed training in the martial disciplines. On that day, God willing, he would purchase a house in Dunwich, tend to his herbs, and watch over the young Stannards until his dying day.
‘Master Ryman,’ said an unexpected female voice, behind him.
His soldier’s instincts were failing him. Once, no-one, least of all a woman, would have got so close to Thomas Ryman without the point of his blade being at their throat.
He turned, blinked in surprise at the sight before him, then remembered his place and bowed low.
‘Your Grace,’ he said.
‘I have been here five weeks, Master Ryman,’ said a diminutive, red-haired woman in her mid-twenties, clad in most unladylike fashion in hunting green, and speaking with an elevated haughtiness that betrayed her station. ‘You, however, have not. In your absence, my nephew neglects all his studies, not only those for which you are nominally responsible. Most nominally, as far as I can judge.’
She stood several paces ahead of the group of men that had emerged from the copse behind Ryman. He recognised a few of the faces: Bleasdale the duke’s falconer, a couple of the grooms, and one of the guards. All were attired in hunting green, and all were armed with bloodied knives.
‘Your Grace…’
Ryman knew how to handle all the members of the immediate House of Howard. The duke appreciated plain speaking, and respected Ryman for having fought under his father at Flodden Field. The duke’s son and heir, the Earl of Surrey, revelled in incessant flattery, especially of his poetry. Surrey’s wife wanted only to hear Ryman and all of Lord Howard’s other tutors declaim as frequently as possible that her son was the most intelligent pupil they had ever taught. But although he had previously encountered her only twice, and then only very briefly, Ryman knew that this woman was a very different case indeed. Cousin to two queens, she might have become a queen herself, had history dealt the cards of fate differently.
‘And even when you are here, Master Ryman, your influence upon my nephew is, shall we say, questionable? I know my brother Surrey gives you free rein, but I wonder if he would if he knew some of the words the future Duke of Norfolk seems to have learned under your tutelage – or, indeed, some of the fighting methods you seem to have taught a child who should become a flower of chivalry, that would disgrace the meanest guttersnipe punk from the Cheapside sewers?’
Mary Fitzroy, Duchess of Richmond and Somerset, would have had rank enough by virtue of being the only living daughter of the Duke of Norfolk. But her marriage had elevated her to become the closest thing England had to a Princess of Wales, her late husband being Henry Fitzroy, illegitimate son of the king, and the undoubted apple of the old monarch’s eye. Ten years before, when Great Harry still had no son and his marriage to the Boleyn whore was failing, it was said that he seriously contemplated legitimising the newly created Duke of Richmond and making him his heir. Then, alas, Richmond died, leaving his duchess a widow at seventeen. But nothing could take away the fact that the proud, angry young woman now standing before Thomas Ryman had been the daughter-in-law of the King of England, and was said still to be looked upon fondly by her sometime good-father. More than fondly, if some of the gossip in the servants’ quarters of Kenninghall was to be believed.
‘Your Grace, I…’ Thomas Ryman began to bluster, as his younger self would have done when confronted by one so superior to himself. But Thomas had lost his deference while fighting and bleeding for worthless generals across the length and breadth of Europe. ‘Well, my lady, what you say is perfectly true.’
The duchess raised an eyebrow.
‘You are impudent, sirrah!’
She turned to her attendants, who either feigned shock or laughed. Bleasdale, for one, had never liked Ryman, and the feeling was reciproc
ated.
‘Perhaps, Your Grace. I have been called worse. But it seems to me that when your nephew becomes the Duke of Norfolk, he might benefit from knowing a little of how the peasants in his fields speak when in their cups. And no matter how great a personage, there is no guarantee that every opponent you ever face will fight you fairly and honourably.’
The duchess stamped her remarkably small foot.
‘Enough, man! I will not be spoken back to by the likes of you! I will not have you, a creature of your rank, dictate what my nephew should and should not know! I have witnesses, sirrah! My brother shall hear of this! My father, too, by God!’
Ryman bowed with exaggerated formality. He had never seen the erstwhile queens Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, but he had often heard both their names mentioned in the same breath as the word ‘bitch’; and the same blood flowed in the veins of their cousin, standing before him. He knew from his young charge, and from allusions by the boy’s father Surrey, that the duchess interested herself in the young Lord Howard’s upbringing, no doubt believing she could make a better job of it than his father, mother and Ryman too. After all, apart from snaring another duke, or even the king himself, as her second husband, one of the few ways in which the duchess could return to the influence she once possessed was by becoming the power behind the future Duke of Norfolk.
Destiny's Tide Page 11
