One day, as autumn was coming on, Ryman heard the unmistakeable sounds of a large retinue leaving the palace; and then, a week or so later, the nearly identical sounds of a similar force arriving. The former could only be the duchess, he concluded, but what was the latter? Maybe Her Grace had returned from a brief visit to a neighbour, perhaps the Duchess of Suffolk at Westhorpe. Or maybe Norfolk or Surrey had returned – but if that was so, why would they be back from campaign so early? Yet still no-one spoke a word to him, and after a few days, Ryman entirely forgot about the undoubted facts that he could hear, and smell, a far larger complement of domestic staff than the palace usually possessed.
The explanation came on a damp, foggy October morning. The door opened, but it was not one of the usual silent, anonymous junior retainers. It was Bleasdale.
‘Great hall,’ he said. ‘My Lord’s command.’
The falconer’s expression provided ample proof of his disapproval of that command.
‘Which lord?’ said Ryman.
Surely that form of address could only mean Surrey: Bleasdale, like Ryman himself, would have referred to the Duke of Norfolk as His Grace. But Bleasdale simply turned on his heel and left Ryman alone. It was only after he had changed into a clean shirt that Ryman registered the startling truth which should have been immediately obvious to him. The falconer had left the door open. There were no guards in sight. Ryman knew the palace intimately, and could easily have turned the other way, gone down to the stables, taken a horse, and ridden away. Bleasdale knew that full well. Which could mean only one thing: Thomas Ryman was a free man once again.
He made his way out of the service wing and crossed the courtyard to the great hall. There was no sign of the mighty retinue lodging in the palace, but then, there was no sign of the duke’s men either. But Ryman could hear distant cheering and jeering, out in the park, and had witnessed enough great lords’ retinues descending upon the palace to know what it meant. Some damned fool had challenged the other establishment to a game of football; there would be blood and broken limbs a-plenty before the day’s end.
The great hall of Kenninghall Palace was a high, well lit room, large windows casting what little light the day afforded onto suits of armour, tapestries, and paintings of the Howards. Ryman strode into the room fully expecting to see Surrey, with his unmistakeable forked red beard, darting eyes, and weak mouth. Instead, he saw only two young boys. One, tall for his age, thin, red-haired and dressed only in a plain white shirt and black breeches, was in a shaded corner, examining a suit of Milanese armour. Ryman could only assume he was a friend, or perhaps the new whipping boy, of the child who stood in the centre of the hall, eyeing him confidently. Dark haired, much shorter than the other but far more richly dressed in an elaborate gown of satin, the young Thomas, Lord Howard, heir and hope of the great ducal line, broke into a broad grin as he saw Ryman approach. He started forward, as though to run into the old man’s arms, but then remembered who he was, and stopped himself.
‘My Lord,’ said Ryman, bowing.
‘Master Ryman,’ said the child confidently, with not a little lordly pomposity. ‘You have your freedom. My aunt left, you see, to go back to court, to plot against the queen. I think she wants to put aside the Lady Catherine and marry the king herself.’
The tall red-haired lad sniggered, but did not turn away from the armour. Ryman suppressed a smile himself. If even this young boy knew exactly what the Duchess of Richmond’s intent was, then Queen Catherine Parr could undoubtedly sleep safe in her bed.
‘But that left me the head of the household, you see, Master Ryman. And I knew a great wrong had been done to you. A very great wrong. All these months – but I could do nothing about it while my aunt was here, no matter what I said to her. And she wouldn’t let me see you, and left orders so Bleasdale and the others stopped me going to you after she left. So I schemed to find another way to secure your freedom.’
A born conspirator.
But it was one thing to be a conspirator if one was a duke, or the immediate heir to a duke. It was quite another to be so as a seven-year-old child.
‘You’ll be thrashed by your father, My Lord,’ said Ryman. ‘Perhaps by your grandfather, too, when they both return from the war.’
‘No, Master Ryman, I doubt that I shall. Although I implored him to do it, you see, it’s not I that I that has freed you, but my good friend Ned, here.’ The lad grinned. ‘Such an easy business, in the end, to convince my aunt I would be lonely when she left, and that she should arrange for another lonely boy to come here for a few weeks, for friendship’s sake.’
The carrot-topped child turned away from the armour at last, and smiled confidently. Ryman could finally examine the little face: the familiar set of the jaw, the unmistakeable similarity of the eyes, the hands on hips, arms akimbo. Then he knew.
How his old comrades-in-arms would have laughed if they had seen him like this, freed solely at the behest of a brace of seven-year-old boys.
No.
When all was said and done, Bleasdale and all the rest of the Duke of Norfolk’s servants would not have deferred so readily to the young Lord Howard, no matter what his future might hold. So Ryman’s liberty had been achieved very much at the behest of the other; and even at such a tender age, that behest could not be denied.
Thomas Ryman bowed.
‘Your Highness,’ he said.
Edward, Prince of Wales, acknowledged the act of reverence with due gravity, the gravity that came naturally to one born to be king.
‘Your freedom comes with one condition, Master Ryman,’ said Great Harry’s son, his voice already full of the arrogance of royalty. ‘Tom Howard, here, says you were at Flodden.’ Then the mask slipped, and an eager, overly tall, excited seven-year-old stood before Ryman. ‘Tell me of Flodden Field, Master Ryman. Oh, tell me, I beg you. Nay, I command you!’
So Ryman did.
* * *
‘A sovereign of twenty shillings,’ said Venison, licking his lips as if he were tasting the coin in question, ‘and a half sovereign of ten. The new coins ordered by the king.’
‘For a man who’ll never touch a single one of ’em,’ said Joan Cowper, towering above the recumbent blind beggar in the corner of the market square, ‘you seem to know much about the king’s new coinage, Venison.’
‘I’ve no eyes, Goody Cowper, true enough. But it don’t mean I don’t hear, and folk say all sorts in my hearing. Their eyes are always cast far above me, so they don’t have to see me and my kind.’
It was market day, and the square was busy with the cries from traders’ stalls. There were fewer now than Joan could ever remember, no more than a half-dozen, so there was plenty of room for the flock of sheep being driven into town from their pastures upon the heath. Although the number of stalls had declined, there was no equal diminution in the number of gulls, who still circled the square in their dozens, cawing venomously as they waited for a momentarily unguarded piece of meat, or for a careless rodent to scuttle into the open. Beyond, the waves of an early autumnal high tide could be heard, breaking loudly upon the base of Dunwich cliff.
‘So a gold royal is now twelve shillings, and an angel eight?’ said Meg, standing alongside Joan and keeping half an eye on Tiberius, who was growling tentatively at a supremely confident ginger cat.
‘Aye, child. And a new silver coin, the testorne, worth twelve pence.’
‘Changes,’ said Joan, taking care to lower her voice, ‘always changes. The churches, and now all this of the coinage.’
‘Prices, too,’ said Venison, ‘now fixed by law. Beef to cost no more than five and eight a pound until Christmas, best lamb two shillings. That’s the word carried in by a tinker from Ipswich, not this hour past. But as you rightly say, Mistress Cowper, I’ll never touch those, neither.’
‘I heard of the prices,’ said Meg, excitedly. ‘Miriam Day’s brother John writes to tell her all that happens in London, even though she can’t read, and has to have everything rea
d to her by her other brother. But there, she says, all kinds of other things have had their prices fixed, too. Swan five shillings, she says. Old peacock twenty pennies, sparrows threepence a dozen. I’ve never tasted any of them.’
‘Sparrow is my banquet, Mistress Meg,’ said Venison, sadly.
‘Here’s a half groat for thee, Venison,’ said Joan. ‘Go see if Goodwife Vicary has slops to spare at the Pelican.’
The beggar could not have seen the slops if he had waited until Doomsday. Meg registered the slip at once, but Joan was oblivious.
‘God be with you, mistresses,’ said Venison, ‘and with you especially, Margaret Stannard. I still pray for Saint Alice’s intercession for your mother’s soul.’
As they walked back toward the Stannard house, Meg looked up at Joan.
‘Was Venison always a beggar?’ she asked.
‘No man was always a beggar, child. Once, he would have run and played and laughed, as you do.’
‘But what was he as a grown man?’
‘Well now, some say he was a Dominican, but that can’t be right, because they all got pensions when the king did away with the monasteries. He wasn’t in the Blackfriars here, for certain. Mayhap he was a lay brother, though – that could explain it. But others say he was clerk to a lawyer in Norwich, and lost his sight poring over papers by candlelight. Either way, he talks quite respectable-like, for a beggar.’
‘Miriam Day says it is a shame on England that there are beggars, and a shame on Dunwich that it does not treat Venison better.’
‘She does, does she? That little madam makes too much use of her mouth, and only uses it to spew forth her brother’s treasonous words. So tell me this, Meg Stannard – if a household of Dunwich, or mayhap the Maison Dieu, took in Venison, and fed him and provided for him, what d’you think would happen? Word would get out, and every beggar in England would make his way here to inflict himself upon our charity. That’s what would happen, you mark my words.’
Meg thought on this. She sensed there had to be some flaw in Joan’s argument, but she could not quite grasp it. Instead, she whistled for Tiberius. The large dog abandoned his half-hearted confrontation with the ginger cat, and ambled to her side, wagging his tail. Meg patted him, then turned to Joan Cowper once again.
‘Why has the king put a limit on prices, Joan?’
The servant laughed.
‘Lord, what a question from one of your years! What a question from a woman of any years!’
Meg already knew – had, in fact, known for almost as long as she could remember – that when Joan Cowper answered one of her questions with a laugh, and such words as the ones she had just uttered, it meant she did not know the answer. When she did know it, or thought she knew it, she answered at great length, and with seeming authority, as she had in the case of Venison. Meg resolved to ask her father, or, failing him, her grandfather. In the meantime, she cast the new coinage over and over in her mind, adding so many sovereigns to so many angels, subtracting so many royals and testornes, and then totalling them back up again.
‘Joan,’ she said, as they neared the house, ‘can I go to the quays?’
‘The quays, child? You spend half your life on the quays. But aye, I must needs attend to your brother. Just make certain that dog doesn’t get amongst the fish catches. Be back by the noon-bell, though, so I can teach you more of the cooking of pigeon.’
Meg detested pigeon, but said nothing. Instead, she and Tiberius ran down Maison Dieu lane, then under the lee of Cock Hill. Father was away, negotiating with some Danish factors at Lowestoft, so she skipped past the Cuddon warehouse, breathed in the delicious smells of freshly-sawn timber, brine and caulking tar, and made for the skeleton of the Alice, rising again upon its slipway. Meg was proud that her mother would have a ship named after her; and if she could not have her mother alive again, to hug and kiss and love, then a ship in her name was the next best thing upon earth. So Meg was impatient to see the hull afloat, to see it fitted out, and to see it sail away, to carry her mother’s name across the seas.
Nolloth was there, as he always was, seeing to the fitting of the first of the new top timbers. He nodded to Meg, who, as was her wont, immediately scurried down into the hull, looking for new hiding places. For his part, Tiberius sniffed around the quay, a place of endless fascination thanks to the spillages from each and every cargo being laden or unladen. It was an old adage that there were no thin dogs, cats or gulls in Dunwich.
When Meg emerged from below, she had a question formed in her mind, but hesitated to ask it.
‘Master Nolloth,’ she said at length.
‘Busy, child,’ said the shipwright, frowning at her.
‘Yes, Master Nolloth. Sorry. It’s just – no, it’s no matter.’
She cast her eyes sadly to the deck. This, she had learned, was a sure way to melt the resolve of most grown men, and Jed Nolloth was no exception to that.
‘Say whatever you have to say, child, then leave me in peace to do my work, I beg you!’
‘Yes, Master Nolloth. Well, I knew the ship before the Southwold men attacked it – before you had to rebuild it. And you’re building it differently now. You’ve shifted some of the futtocks, and the knees – and you’ve altered the keel, and changed the shape of the stern.’
Nolloth gawped at her.
‘That a child, and a girl-child at that, should tell me my business!’ he cried. ‘Damn, how much more can the world be turned upside down?’
‘No, Master Nolloth, not that – but why?’
Nolloth sighed. Since the rebuilding began after the attack, he had heard the same question from this child’s father; heard it, indeed, more than once. And he knew Meg Stannard well enough to know that she would only be satisfied with a version of the answer he had given her parent.
‘There are new ideas out of the shipyards in Flanders,’ he said. ‘From Antwerp and Flushing. Good ideas. I told your father, and your grandfather too, that they could have one of the first ships in England to take account of these ideas. They concurred with me. They’re always men who want the best for Dunwich.’
Meg nodded. In the distance, she could hear the bell of Saint Peter’s begin to chime noon, followed a little later by John’s, then finally All Saints, high upon the cliff. She thought no more of Jed Nolloth’s words as she skipped home, Tiberius trotting obediently at her heels. Instead, she tried to imagine the number of sovereigns and half-sovereigns it would cost her family to finish this ship, the Alice, and send her to the next summer’s war.
TWENTY-THREE
Autumn was coming on apace, the first gales having come early and shaken the bulk of the leaves from the trees. Even so, the folk of Dunwich were well content. The storms were not yet bad enough to disrupt the sea trades or the fisheries, nor to carry away yet more of the cliff. The harvest had been bountiful, and as yet, there were no further changes in religion to comprehend, despite all the unsettling rumours of the liturgy perhaps changing to English. The king, it was said, was showing no signs of casting off this latest Queen Catherine and seeking a seventh wife; on the contrary, she had apparently wrought the minor miracle of reconciling him to his two daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, the offspring of wives whose very existence it had once been treason to proclaim. Southwold and Walberswick had made no further attempt on the hull of the Alice, rising once again upon the stocks, and for once, they were making few difficulties over harbour dues for ships entering or leaving the Dunwich river. Of Stephen Raker, there was no word. Meanwhile, letters from London and Flanders said that the dauphin’s mighty French army had finally appeared before the walls of Boulogne, but had failed utterly to retake the town. So the armies were readying their winter quarters, and the great ships were being brought into harbour and paid off.
Jack Stannard was in his family’s warehouse on the Old Quay, checking the inventories of the latest cargoes brought over from Flanders, when Meg ran in, red-faced and breathless.
‘Father! Father!’
‘Steady, girl! Slowly, now, slowly. What’s afoot?’
‘A message, Father. A message has come to the house. Joan sent me to fetch you back.’
‘Did she say what it was?’
‘Only that it concerns Master Ryman, Father.’
The name was sufficient to make Jack, in his turn, run across the quay, up into the town by way of the Guilding Gate, and to his front door, with Meg some way behind him, rattling off questions that he barely heard.
Joan Cowper was waiting at the door.
‘What’s this of Ryman, Joan?’
‘A scrap of a lad came to the door,’ she said. ‘Never seen him before. Said he had a message for you from Master Ryman, to meet him at the priory in Blythburgh this day, at dusk-tide. To come alone. A matter of great importance, the boy said.’
‘That was all?’
‘Aye, all. Don’t like the smell of it, Master Jack. Why can’t Master Ryman come here? Why Blythburgh?’
Joan gave voice to Jack’s own thoughts. There had been no word of, or from, Thomas Ryman in months, and now it seemed as though his return was shrouded in as much mystery as his disappearance. It did not feel right.
And yet…
Where had Ryman been, and what had he been doing all this time? Could he have unearthed some great and secret matter which, for whatever reason, meant that he could not enter Dunwich? Had he, perhaps, discovered the truth of Simon Bulbrooke’s dealings with Stephen Raker?
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