Divided Loyalties: An Elizabethan Spy Thriller

by Steven Veerapen

  The snow lay thick on the ground as he made for the lodging house in which the murdering Cole slept. His mind was quite calm. He did not concern himself with footprints. The ground was already a mishmash of them, and it was beginning to turn sleety. It would be dawn soon, and light was starting to shine from around the edges of wooden shutters – the bakers and the servants of fine houses would already be astir. If the tavern wench who kept Cole’s house was up, he would go through her. It did not matter.

  He trudged through the slush outside the flaking, shabby building and forced the door. Cheap. Useless. Inside was empty, even the ale pots still locked away for the night. There was no lock on the inner door. He slipped inside. It was dark, but ambient light always found a way of helping those who wished to see. A knobbly dark shape signified the sleeping form. Acre took a few seconds to judge head from feet. Both emerged from a blanket on the floor. Just where he judged Cole’s neck to be, he plunged the dagger in. It met no resistance. Blood jetted out, soaking the body. There was no scream, only a wet gurgling. It was not satisfying. Again and again, Acre raised and dropped the knife, standing clear of the blood, enjoying every wet thrust of the blade.

  He stood away, letting the floor turn red. It had been a mistake to do it so quickly, so easily. It was not nearly satisfying enough. He had acted rashly, out of passion. He would have to punish himself for that; there was no one, now, to counsel him otherwise.

  Still, there was the wife.

  The diamond league was not dead, even if his brother was. Only he knew of Adam’s fate, and he must carry it abroad. It was his duty to ensure the dead man’s hopes lived on – his dreams of a world in which terror and fear erupted, bringing those that came through it to a state of purity. If she had not already been dispatched in Paris, he would find Mrs Cole, and her death would be more meticulous. More satisfying. He left the lodging house the way he had come.

  9

  The wolf-thing advanced with a strange, lopsided gait. Amy had pushed at the gate to no avail. If she wanted out, she would have to climb over it. Set into its centre was a plate with the painted arms of the Valois, and she put a hand up and gripped it, heedless of the chill it sent through her palm. She chanced a look behind her. The thing was watching. Its head hung down low, but the black eyes glinted upwards, reflecting moonlight. It sat back on its hind legs halfway between her and its house and made a strange, throaty laugh. And then it pounced forward.

  Amy threw herself upwards, bracing one shoe against the solid silver plate of the arms. The back side of it was unpainted: it dimly reflected her own image. Her foot slipped. ‘Shit!’ She tried again, not daring to turn. An animal stench washed over her, musky and wild. The candlestick fell from her hand as she scrambled for purchase. She heard it roll away. Her hands tightened on the bars above the arms. She felt herself lift, up, up, up. Both feet were now on the plate, her head only a few inches from the top of the gate.

  Craaack!

  She tensed, expecting to feel pain flood her. She looked down and saw that the beast had taken the candlestick in its jaws. It had been a thick, ungainly thing. The monster had snapped through it in one bite. It shook its head from side to side, disappointed at the meatless bone. What was it? Her mind raced. A wolf of some kid, but with its spine deformed, making its head curve downwards. The eyes rolled up again to stare at her.

  Amy clung to the gate like a fly, her legs up and braced against it, her skirts still trailing to the ground. The beast lurched forward again, jaws snapping. It caught her dress and she closed her eyes. She would fall into its waiting maw, she knew – there was no hope. After a few seconds, she opened her eyes and twisted her head around. Her lips had begun moving in prayer. The thing had bitten clean through the folds of her dress, like scissors through thin paper. With a start, she realised that the strength of its jaws was too great. It could not pull at her gown, could not pull her with it, without slicing through it. Renewed hope got her moving.

  Ignoring the pain that was beginning to tear through her hands and arms, she hauled herself up further. It was easier going without the weight of the dress, cut cleanly away below the knees. The animal itself could not leap upwards – it had the weight of its own strange clothing. With more strength that she thought she could muster, she began gracelessly pulling, sliding, and jerking herself upwards. One leg higher than the other, she pulled in her knee and used it, too, gaining a foothold on the plate’s upper edge. There she stopped, catching her breath. The animal began its barking laughter again, and this time it raised the chirps and squawks of the parrots that she had thought to be the strangest creatures in the garden. She looked down and saw that it had begun circling its enclosure again, stopping only to stare up at her.

  Amy swung one leg over the top of the fence. The sharp rail heads stabbed at it, but the remnants of her gown cushioned them. She positioned her hands between the points and got the other leg over, leaning on her front and letting her corseted bodice guard against impalement. Once she had both legs over the side, she dropped, letting her body fall whilst her hands clung to the top. She could not will them to let go, and so her body jerked, the stress sending fresh waves of pain through her arms. It was the pain that forced her to release her grip and she dropped in a heap to the ground.

  For some time, she could not move. Instead, she stared through the bars of the gate at the monster that would have killed her. She had heard of the famous wolves of Paris – creatures which stalked the woods of the country and, when plague came, or bad winters brought starvation, entered the city to devour the poor in the streets. This thing, though, was altogether different. It was no half-starved beast, but a sleek, monstrous devil. At length, Amy used the stout stone wall beside the gate to get to her feet, fearful that the creature would snap at her hands if she touched the iron bars – would bite through them as it had the candlestick. On wobbling legs and with tears born of anger and relief, she stumbled towards the gate out of the garden. Thankfully, this one was unlocked – her tormenter had had no need to seal her in with exotic birds. Only with a monster.

  As she trooped back to the palace, she realised that she should say nothing about what had happened until she could speak to Queen Catherine, or even Walsingham again. Yet she could not hold it to herself. Instead, she blurted out, ‘I have just been near-eaten by a wolf, for the love of Christ,’ to the first guard she found. The man looked mystified, and she laughed at the confusion on his face, knowing how insane she must look. She patted his arm, enjoying even the look of surprise – or was it lust? – that appeared when he saw her half-bared legs. The bewildered boy was of a piece with all the guardsmen she had seen about the Louvre and the Tuileries: young, beautiful, blonde, and arrayed with impressive weapons he had no notion of how to use. There were no scarred and battle-worn soldiers to offend the eye in a French royal palace.

  ‘You, guard! Quickly Murder! Murder!’ The shout sounded over both their heads. It came from upstairs – the voice of one of the man’s colleagues. ‘Don’t hang there like a limp prick, man, raise the alarm!’ The guard Amy had spoken to leapt into action, running from her, leaving the palace. Her mind worked slowly. But I am not dead, she thought – I escaped the thing’s jaws. She kept walking towards the apartments, heedless of the cries, halloos, and women’s screams that were erupting around her. Someone has been murdered, she thought, in a detached kind of way. Someone who is not me.

  She pushed her way through guards, through servants, towards her bedchamber. As she got near to it, a woman’s hysterical sobs greeted her. ‘I am sorry, madam, you cannot go in there. There has been an accident,’ said a bearded young guard who was blocking the door to the ladies’ bedchamber.

  ‘Go and fuck yourself,’ she said in English. The guard appeared not to know the words, but he did not misunderstand her tone. Anger flared on his face and then, seeing her dress, torn though it was, he mumbled under his breath and stood aside.

  On entering the room, Amy was greeted by a scene to rival the m
adness of being trapped in a privy garden with a hellhound. Vittoria de Brieux was on her knees, her makeup cracked and flaking, wringing her hands and screeching like a whipped dog. Around the room, the other women – Madame Gondi and her maid, Kat, and a host of new arrivals decked in finery and service weeds – stood with their backs to the wall and hands to their mouths. At the centre of the tableaux, drawing everyone’s attention, lay Brieux’s maidservant. She was prone on her front. Blood pooled around her. From the centre of her back, like a giant, bony finger, protruded the long, swirling unicorn’s horn.

  The shock of it was too much. Amy’s legs, already unsteady, gave way and she fell to the ground in a dead faint.

  ***

  Amy was on her knees before Catherine, who was seated on a chair in her bedchamber – directly beyond the room in which the unfortunate maidservant had been found dead – beneath a freshly-hung cloth of estate.

  ‘It is not a wolf,’ said the queen-mother. ‘It is called a hyena. Out of the blackest heart of the Africas.’

  ‘An African wolf then,’ said Amy, focussing her glare on the thick carpet into which she had partly sunk.

  ‘A wedding gift from the duke of Guise to my son and his bride. A most expensive beast. A female, very wild and furious, the duke tells me, since being parted from its cubs. It shall give us good sport.’

  ‘The duke,’ said Amy, looking up. So it had been his monster.

  ‘He delivered it only yesterday. You stumbled into its presence last night. And then this affair of the girl. The keeper of the gardens pleads his ignorance. He claims his keys were stolen, as my lady Gondi was robbed of the key to the coffer where we keep the great horn. He, though, has not the excuse of age. He will pay with his place. The beast might have escaped and been lost to us.’

  ‘I’m no huntswoman, your Majesty – but give me a bow and I’ll put an arrow between that thing’s eyes, I’ll put my hands in its blood, I’ll–’

  ‘Silence.’ Catherine’s neat, sharp tone allowed for no argument.

  The queen-mother had arrived the morning after Amy’s brush with the thing she now learned was an African hyena. The dead girl, it was discovered, had been strangled from behind. The unicorn horn had then been forced into her back, like a gruesome flagpole proclaiming her departure from the world. The horn itself had been an expensive thing, kept in a specially carved, gold-inlaid strongbox in the ladies’ bedchamber so that the physicians could purify the air with it before any member of the royal family breathed it. Only the elderly Madame Gondi had a key, and she protested in the querulous timbre of old age that anyone might have taken it from her, hoping to cause her trouble. It was found still in the lock. It would be useless now, thought Amy darkly. Anyone who still thought the unicorn horn had magical, protective properties would have a difficult case. It had certainly given the physicians something to jaw over, as they had been doing non-stop since Catherine returned – pausing only to try and cut Amy after insisting that her shameful fainting had slowed her blood and that it must be forced to flow again.

  ‘This note you say was unsigned – do you have it?’

  ‘I … I must have dropped it. When I dropped the candlestick. That wolf likely ate it, as it would have eaten me. The duke of Guise–’

  ‘The duke of Guise is a friend to this court. I cannot – I will not ask him questions at such a time. Nor about such a one as you. You have not seen his man about this place at night again?’

  ‘No, your Majesty.’

  ‘Then, as he says, he is a true and faithful friend. You are unhurt. Keep your mouth shut, if you can.’

  Amy trembled with barely suppressed rage. ‘But this girl …’

  ‘She had no family. It is to be said that she met with an accident. I will not have scandal touching my house at this time.’ Amy could not resist a gasp and Catherine gave her a sharp look. ‘We – all who wear crowns, I mean – are looked on by the public. The public are fickle, and in their numbers they are dangerous. One scandal – the murder of a girl under my charge – it might light a fire that will not soon be put out. The heretics will use it as proof of our corruption. The republican creatures will use it likewise.’

  ‘She deserves justice,’ said Amy, feeling suddenly bad that she did not even know the girl’s name. ‘Madame de Brieux wants justice.’ It was true – the woman had been hysterical, frightening the other ladies and having to be sedated with hippocras, her face cracked and broken as great chunks of white glaze fell from it onto the dead woman’s back.

  ‘That lady wants to remain part of this household more,’ said Catherine, a dark smile raising her lips. ‘I have already provided her a new maid. The dead girl will be buried. Forgotten.’ A chill ran through Amy, making the tiny hairs on her arms rise. It would have been the same had she died and had there been anything left to bury. Gone and forgotten. Would Jack even have been able to find out the truth of what had become of her?

  Catherine rested her chin on her hand, staring over Amy’s head, and sighed. ‘Anyone who lodged under this roof last night might have killed the wretched girl. That is a great many ladies now, and all their servants and attendants. A guard, for that matter, driven mad with evil lusts. They will be discovered.’ The queen-mother, Amy thought, seemed strangely uninterested in the girl’s death, despite the gruesome manner of it and its proximity to her bedchamber. ‘My guards will be ever present from this moment until the new queen takes up residence in the Louvre.’ She nodded slightly towards the door, on either side of which two exquisitely groomed, caparisoned men stood sentinel. ‘And thereafter.’

  ‘Your Majesty,’ said Amy, unable to resist a smug smile. ‘It could not be just any of the new ladies. Whoever killed that poor girl – it must’ve been the same who sent me to the wolf pit. And the same who poisoned me. That was before most of the ladies came here from court. Perhaps this girl knew something – saw too much – and so the person killed her too.’

  Catherine shrugged, noncommittal. ‘I set you the task of unmasking this creature. And this is what you have? That it was someone?’ Amy lowered her head again. ‘I shall not return to this palace until the royal entry. My dearest daughter the queen has fallen into illness again, some malady of the throat or chest. It will be some weeks before she recovers fully. I must be by her side again. The beginning of March is said to be the fairest date for the king’s entry. His wife’s not until after. All say it, the astrologers, the cunning men.’ Amy looked up in alarm. That was over a month away. Two attempts had already been made on her life. Increased guards and a greater number of watchful women or not, she would be lodging with a killer. ‘You may go,’ said Catherine. As Amy rose and began to back away, the old woman said, a glint in her eye, ‘Oh, but I understand you were from the palace when the beast was delivered. Before it struck at you. Where?’

  ‘Giving alms, your Majesty.’

  ‘Is that so? And taking nothing with you to give. An English pursuit, perhaps. Odd habits your people have. Well, have a care, my false lady. I shall not see you for some time. I trust you shall not be slain before then.’

  10

  The woman’s screams brought men and women in the street thundering into the house. As they had at the scene of Mrs Oldroyd’s murder, a couple of alderman were trying to keep order, to force the increasingly heated crowd back. He heard them before he saw them and tethered the horses at a hitching post around the corner before pushing his way through the crowd. It was thick outside Doll’s tavern, despite the early hour, and his heart began racing.

  ‘What news?’ he asked.

  ‘Anootheh muh-dah,’ said a boy, whose smudged face marked him as a ditch digger, or perhaps one of the wretches who dug in the sewage channel for things that might still be sold.

  ‘That’s him!’ screeched a voice he recognised. It was Doll. ‘See, over there?’ She had the grip of an alderman’s sleeve. ‘Brown hair, down over one eye. That’s him!’

  On hearing her, the crowd parted around Jack, as though he had a
n infectious disease. Not knowing what to do, nerves drew a lopsided smile. ‘See,’ cried Doll, ‘smiling like that. An odd duck, I always said it. There’s your murderer. Take him up.’

  Before Jack knew what was happening, he was being grappled to the ground by the crowd who had been driven to distraction by the pent-up anger and fear of months. He heard daggers being drawn and braced himself, only relaxing when he heard the aldermen and officers punching their way into the crowd to form a barrier around him. One of them, a stringy man, took him by the ear and yanked him to his feet. ‘You killed the fellow yonder, lad?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t act the goat with me, boy – your tavern mistress found him, sliced in collops.’

  ‘I … who?’

  ‘He’s an idiot,’ spat the alderman. ‘Anyone know this stranger?’ The crowd only jeered.

  ‘I haven’t killed anyone,’ protested Jack, looking around pleadingly. Unable to sleep, having done so for the majority of the previous day, he had let Polmear take his bed, and went out walking, hoping to find the first ostler to rise that might sell them horses. He had hoped that they might have left York together before the full city had even woken. Suddenly his heart sank. Nausea swept over him.

  ‘Sir, ye’d better come and ‘ear this,’ said a new voice – that of a heavy-set young man who had just left the tavern part of the building. Jack’s captor took his arm none too gently and dragged him along. Together the three went inside, past Doll, who shot Jack a look of disgust and fear mingled. ‘Kept him under my roof,’ he heard her saying, ‘a killer. Fed him too.’