by Peter Tonkin
The Point of Death
Peter Tonkin
© Peter Tonkin 2013
Peter Tonkin has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 2002 by Severn House Publishers.
This edition published in 2018 by Sharpe Books.
For Cham, Guy and Mark.
As always.
Those noblemen who could no longer rely on the safety of armour had to turn to the sword. They needed education in its use, and much of the available education they found unsatisfactory. Pressure from them produced a new race of Masters ...
The History and Art of Personal Combat, Arthur Wise
Table of Contents
Chapter One - The Master of Logic
Chapter Two: The Master of Cyphers
Chapter Three - The Made Men
Chapter Four - Three Deaths
Chapter Five - The Deadly Blade
Chapter Six - The Murder of Mercutio
Chapter Seven - Worms' Meat
Chapter Eight - A Death Re-played
Chapter Nine - Bull Pit and Plague Pit
Chapter Ten - The Mistress of the Game
Chapter Eleven - The Master of the North
Chapter Twelve - The Man Who Murdered Marlowe
Chapter Thirteen - The Bishop's Bailiff
Chapter Fourteen - Dead Man -8 Messages
Chapter Fifteen - Wormwood
Chapter Sixteen - The Mad Room
Chapter Seventeen - The Searcher of Jewry
Chapter Eighteen - The Raid on Bridewell
Chapter Nineteen - Kate
Chapter Twenty - Highmeet
Chapter Twenty-One - Topcliffe
Chapter Twenty-Two - The Golden Hind
Chapter Twenty-Three - The Point of Death
Chapter Twenty-Four - Silence
Author's Note
Chapter One - The Master of Logic
Holland 1587
Tom Musgrave pounded out of the battlefield, running for his very life, wondering distantly: Am I likely to live through this? Or not? Not seemed to be most likely. Another shell exploded close behind him. Splinters and shot spattered the slick earth all around him. A wave of force gathered him up and hurled him forward.
Tom had easily topped the five-foot cross at the Market Gate of Carlisle Castle five years ago when he had first left home, and he stood two full cloth-yards tall today. There were those who called him 'Long Tom' these days, measuring him with speculative eyes. Now he measured his own length in the Flemish mud and skidded forward, all elbows and knees; then he jerked erect again, breathless, desperate and angered, at the heart of a sudden silence, looking away left for Talbot Law, his companion, to see whether he was still alive or not.
Talbot's strong, square figure was staggering erect too, at the far lip of the smoking crater that had so nearly claimed them both, looking at him and desperately waving him on.
Tom pounded forwards. The sudden cold striking into his brain told him he had lost his precious headgear in the blast but there was no going back for it now. On he ran, with desperate determination, up the slope towards the river road, his ears ringing, able to hear nothing of the real world all around him, only the beating gallop of his own racing heart.
The crest of the rise revealed the river. It was sluggish, and of the same red-brown colour as the blood-soaked mud. It rolled roughly westward beneath a russet sky from one fortified bridgehead to the next. Between the tall English soldier and the dull water, at the foot of a cliff the height of a partisan pikestaff reaching down from his very toes, the road ran from Nijmagen on his right, away towards the distant coast. The embattled town stood threateningly close at hand, surrounded by sullen besieging armies and defended by grimly determined men.
Tom looked right and left again, his stomach growling with tension and hunger. The local roads were usually as well stuffed with soldiers as eggs are stuffed with meat, he thought. But, here, today, with the war advancing across the fields above it towards the shell-shattered outskirts of the town, this road was empty and still.
Except for the runaway horse.
Tom and Talbot Law had seen it both together at the same instant five minutes since, away in the far distance, galloping wildly out of the ruins of the Italian lines, past the rough window made by a shell crater in the bank side. Fleeing the dangers of the enemy-infested outskirts, it was following the river road, bound inevitably to come past here. Leaving the gathering battle, they had raced it, striking straight into the curve of its progress. And along this low track, here it came pounding now - Tom and Talbot's quarry; wild, terrified and screaming mad.
It was a big horse, bay beneath the mud and blood, square and solid, swift and very dangerous. Its eyes were rolling like Tom O'Bedlam's and its reins were flying free. Along behind it, one foot wedged in a strong stirrup, the beast dragged its rider. Tom spared not a glance for the battered corpse. His eyes were all for the animal. It meant the first square meal in a month to him and the camp for which he and Talbot were the foragers in chief. Escalopes of equus, he hazarded, continuing the Epicurean theme so close to the hearts of the starving, and turning to his hard-won Latin as he always did when exercising of his wit. Or hotchpotch of hippos. He was reaching for something even more adventurous, again in Greek - centaur pastries - when the mad banquet thundered up towards his boot-toes and he leaped.
Those rolling eyes saw sanely enough, like many a gibbering London beggar turning cutpurse behind an unwary back. The horse shied as Tom leaped, jerking its rein away from his grasping hand and meeting him with a square, muscular shoulder. Tom flew sideways and down like a fairground tumbler, the heaving flank grating past him as he fell, and the saddlebag slapping him in the face like a roaring boy set on a brawl. He anticipated yet more mud and the utter ruination of the last of his decent clothing, but things fell out differently. He landed not on the road at all, but upon the rider.
Tom found himself face to face with the corpse, looking down upon it like a lover. His long legs were caught up in the stirrup, his belly rested on the dead man's chest and his elbows held the shoulders down. Then Tom's added weight caused the horse to stumble. The stumble jerked the straps apart and the horse fell, shedding the saddle and the tangled men, even as Talbot Law, wily as a riever from Tom's own wild Borders, leaped down to wrap its head in his jerkin and bring it swiftly under control.
The four of them lay still for a moment, the two men living, the dead man and his horse. Then another black shell came hurling over the rise and slammed down into the mud nearby, sending up a pillar of earth and water too close for comfort. Half drowned and half deafened once again, they waited as the thunder of its echo rolled against the black walls of Nijmagen and under the shadowed arches of the great stone bridge it defended. Then, into the relative quiet afterwards, Talbot Law delivered a considered speech. 'Yon bastard culverin will be the death of us yet, Tom, unless we move. It's firing wild with a vengeance.'
'Like enough,' said Tom, preoccupied.
'But look here, old Law...' He paused, glancing up and down the quiet road. 'There's something here needs a minute more of thought. Something of the greatest importance.'
Talbot shrugged and set to coaxing the horse to its feet. He and young Tom Musgrave were the strongest men in the English camp but not even they could carry a horse back to the lines. Once the horse was up, the boy was rapt, his eyes and fingers busy about the corpse in the mud. The solid west-countryman grinned with affection. Another explosion signalled the birth of a rolling barrage as all the guns at the Master Gunner's command were f
ired off one by one. The horse jumped and whinnied, but remained quiet under Law's assured and gentle hand. 'We must hurry, Tom, that fusillade has been the signal to prepare attack each forenoon for a week.'
Tom looked up. 'You're right. Time for consideration is at an end. Listen, therefore, as I, the Master of Logic, explain my observations; for much of our future may well hang upon them. This new-made member of the Heavenly choir was singing an earthly song this dawn. That is obvious enough. But his song was an English catch. For, look. His shirt is Kentish wool and weave, and of the finest. His hose may be made of French cloth but they are of the English cut. His jerkin is Spanish leather, true, but it fits ill and has been foraged. It may well be a disguise, for he has come up through the enemy lines, has he not? All his weapons and armour are gone, but he rode well-armed to be thus well preserved for our inspection, since the end, at least, of his ride was so rough.
'But these observations merely lead us on to another question, do they not? A pair of questions; a brace ... Whither this young Englishman, coming through this battlefield? Whither went he and whence came he? He came out of the Italian lines, down by the river gate. I am certain of that. He rode wildly and bravely to his death - death by a bullet from a pistol or dag if the back of his head is anything to go by. Italian pistol, Dutch dag - either one might have done it, even though the Dutch are on the poor boy's side.'
'That Spanish jerkin would have fooled St Michael himself,' observed Law.
'True. And a fitting epitaph. But his good steed - a good English steed, from its tack, and the brand on its shoulder there, ran straight and true to the English lines. But why, old Law, but why?'
'This is good sport to hold two soldiers in a ditch at the onset of a battle, Tom,' growled Law, growing as restless as the horse and seeing no practical point to his friend's uncanny cleverness. 'Master of Logic or no, it'd go hard with us if the Sergeant at Arms's men found us here when they were out after deserters. Not even our Forager's Passes would save our necks for us then.'
'Maybe. But sometimes it is as well for a soldier to use his wits as his weapons. For, y'see, old Law, this was a man with a mission, and he was coming up to our lines from down there, below Nijmagen town, when he died. Quod erat demonstrandum, I believe.
'But we can move a little further, by exercise of a moment more of logic, if not of magic. Look, he wore gloves stout enough to have preserved his hands and what fingers are these, callused and black-nailed, singed and smelling of saltpetre? Are these the hands of a courtier to match the boy's fair face and fine apparel? Of a farmer? Of a soldier?'
'They're never the hands of a common soldier,' conceded Talbot Law, his low brow folding into a frown as he looked down at his own huge fists.
'No,' said Tom, quietly. 'They're an engineer's hands.'
'Ha!' laughed Talbot caught between wonder and revelation. How could he have missed such a simple truth? The sections of the army kept aloof from each other, but the engineers, with their mud and gunpowder stench, were well enough known to the rest.
Tom was pushing on, however, like a schoolmaster expounding on Logic. 'So what lies before us is a young engineer, sent from below Nijmagen up to our lines, in spite of the risks. Not a common hack-outa-trench-and-set-taper-to-your-petard man but a well-dressed youth, fair of face. An ensign, fit to ride to his death like a lusty lad for his commander and his God. A messenger.'
'You should try this at the Bartholomew Fair,' said Law. 'You'll prosper. Till you're taken for a witch.' He looked superstitiously around as though naming evil could summon it too.
'But a messenger supposes a message,' insisted Tom. His hands became busy at the young man's throat, pulling a pouch from beneath the fine Kentish wool of his shirt. 'And a message, in times such as these, carried at such a price, must speak of dreadful danger.' He opened the pouch to reveal a small square, folded and folded. With trembling fingers he unwrapped it and laid it open to the sullen morning. It was no mere piece of paper, but parchment of the highest quality. On its bottom right hand corner it carried a blood-red seal. Beside the seal, there was a ring. Tom looked neither at the seal nor the signet. His eyes were for the message alone:
aaaec. caaae.
cdabe. cdbee.
Chapter Two: The Master of Cyphers
'If any man can read your code, this man can,' repeated Talbot. 'He's a Master of Cyphers if ever I saw one.'
''Tis an unusual thing to find an adept at codes in such a place,' countered Tom. He would fain have unfolded the secret message and studied it again but could not take the risk. He needed both hands to keep hold of his companion as he needed both thighs to stay astride the plunging horse's hips. Talbot Law, firmly in the roughly repaired saddle, thrashed their prospective dinner home across the battlefield, glad to be out of that ditch of a road where the ill-aimed culverins were set to blow them all to atomies. 'They've been common enough on any battlefield I've fought over,' growled Law. 'Spies swarm to wars like flies over corpses.' 'That's as maybe. But none that I've heard of was tented with the pressed and mustered men.'
'He's not a spy. And he's not pressed. He's a gentleman volunteer like us, out to make his fortune.'
'He'll be lucky to see his coat money. Our brave captain may grow fat out of this but no one else in the band is likely to, unless we can come across some fine Dons or Signors to strip and ransom.'
'The Captain won't see much by all accounts. The Colonel and his lieutenants have it all to hand and we can go starve or hang for them. They'll pay the dead before they pay us, though the six-month payment is long due, and not a muster master seen since the autumn gales set in behind us. The Italians are said to be protected by the devil with their fencing magic and their Ferarra blades. And the only Dons I've shook hands with so far are tercio men and likely to yield little more than cold steel, living or dead.'
The English lines were all astir with men donning their battle gear and preparing to fight hand to hand once the artillery had settled matters from a distance. The women and boys of the camp bid farewell to lovers and husbands, fathers and masters. The men who found themselves here alone, saw to each others' harnesses, looked to their own arms, practised their passes of defence, stood thoughtfully; prayed. The Captain's men, under the Sergeant at Arms, were roughly organising the band into the groups that would form the main attack.
The horse plunged into the camp like a band of Spaniards, scattering mud, men and confusion, until Talbot saw his woman. 'Bess,' he bellowed. 'Hold this jade 'gainst my return. Tom and I have business afoot.' No sooner had the solid woman grabbed the reins than Tom and Talbot were sprinting through the encampment. As he ran, Talbot held a series of short bellowed conversations, mostly question and answer. Tom ran at his shoulder, the letters of the code clear before his eyes - as though he held the paper up still. His mind wrestled with their meaning and, more terribly, with their implications. But he got to voice neither until after Talbot had found his quarry.
Talbot Law's Master of Cyphers was a slim man of middle height with a high forehead and fiercely intelligent eyes. Like Law, who hailed from Winchester, he spoke with a west-country burr, much at odds with Tom's flat northern tones. Even as Talbot was trying to explain their mission, the stranger led them into the tent he shared with some half-dozen others. This was deserted at the moment, private and light enough to see in now that the overcast morning was struggling towards the noon.
'Show me,' he ordered quietly, and gestured towards a table top already strewn with closely written papers. Tom took out the parchment and gave it to Talbot's man. Slowly, creaking a little as he moved in his battle gear, he sat. Tom watched narrow eyed as the weight of the man's intelligence focussed down on the piece of parchment. There was silence within the tent that stood in sharp contrast to the commotion with out.
'How is it you have come by a knowledge of codes?' Tom asked without thought.
'As with all other knowledge. A Master imparted it. A Cambridge man at that.'
'He i
s not with you?'
'He is not. He has other heights to storm.' Tom looked down at the stranger as he sat, lost in thought. There was little wonder that Talbot should know the man and Tom should not. It was one of the unacknowledged facts of their relationship. Talbot knew everyone in the camp. Tom knew Talbot. And Bess, a little.
'These are no words, I think,' said the Master of Cyphers.
'Not Latin, nor Greek, nor any I have seen,' agreed Tom. Something in the stranger's tone making the obvious, over-simple observation seem wise and full of import.
The Master glanced up from the cypher. The edges of his eyes crinkled slightly, as though in the slightest of smiles, meeting Tom's open gaze. 'Words do not come naturally five letters at a time,' he explained. 'Poetry can be worked into pentameters, with five beats in a line, but that is measure. And measure, though it lies down with oratory and poetry, is not one with them. Rather it sings with music and dances with harmony. And, as the tree-trunk of oratory is the word and the root of it is the letter, so the body of harmony is mathematics and the limbs of it are numbers. This is what Aristotle and Signor Della Porta believed. And so do I.'
'And I,' said Tom, by no means overawed by such august company. He had never heard of Della Porta nor read his book on codes, De Furtivis Literarum Notis, but he had lived with Aristotle, Caesar, Cato and all the rest since his first day at school. 'But what numbers are concealed within letters?' 'Roman numbers,' said Talbot before either of the others could speak. 'Needs no great scholar or spy down from Cambridge to tell us that!'
Tom's eyes met the stranger's once more and a shiver of shared excitement flashed between them, mixed with no little shared amusement. 'Dare they?' mused the stranger.
' 'Twould be simple enough,' said Tom.
'And effective ...'
The two were sitting side by side poring over the parchment, wasting a good deal of precious paper and ink with their calculations when the Captain's men burst in.
