A Dangerous Trade: An Elizabethan Spy Thriller

by Steven Veerapen

  Jack turned, still unsmiling. In his own way, Tom was a kindly man. He treated him almost like a nephew, and so, of course, that was what Jack had tried to be in return. ‘I … yes. I know what you’re on about.’

  ‘Do you, clever-boy? What I’m on about is saying you should be scrubbing down those brutes and shovelling their shit. Come on now, look sharp.’ He clapped him on the back, half in jest and half to force him up. ‘Go on now and tell that pretty wench of yours that she’s off to serve the queen of Scots, and … wait.’

  Jack turned, reluctant amusement written on his face. It was a rare thing for him to smile at anyone other than Amy. From the moment he had been old enough to work he had smiled on everyone, until eventually the taunts started: that he was a mad moon-man, a grinning simpleton. He had lost his reason to smile at the world. ‘Son … I know old Norfolk meant you to write to her – he didn’t know she was here. But … only, don’t write anything about this business ever, even if you’re ever separated. This thing the duke’s on at you for. Just be careful what you say. To anyone, wife or not. It’s … well you heard what brought the Scotch queen down. Letters. And that’s what you’ll be looking after. If they can clap a queen in irons think what they can do to a stable lad.’

  2

  They had two rooms at Howard House, tiny and mostly empty of things, but a real luxury. You can bet, thought Jack, they wouldn’t get that in Shrewsbury’s employ, no matter how rich the old man was. He entered the first one, done up as a parlour, and took off his dirty jerkin. On the little uneven shelf Amy had put up a few sprigs of holly. He could hear her whistling in the next room, but he didn’t greet her right away. The right way of announcing his acquiescence to a move hadn’t formed in his mind. A button fell off as he wriggled out of the coat and skittered away across the floor. Damn it! He held up the ruined garment to see if it was still serviceable, but the two sides wouldn’t come together. Urgh! In a swift movement he tore the whole thing asunder.

  Instantly, shame crept in, the sudden flare of annoyance gone. It had been a stupid thing to do. Now Amy would have a harder job of mending it, all from a split second of temper. It was a bad sign, the inability to control the temper. He feared it a little. People always said that that kind of madness, sudden and wild, could run in the blood like a poison. He ran a hand through his hair sheepishly before picking up the tattered garment and crossing to the low door and into the next room.

  Amy had her back to him. Her hands were thrust deep into a huge bowl of frothy water, her forearms stained grey. ‘Sweetheart,’ he said. The word still tasted odd. Her whistling stopped, and she half turned, her cheek dimpling, so that she is in profile.

  ‘Husband,’ she said, her voice light but pert. ‘What news?’

  ‘I’ve … I’ve torn my coat.’

  ‘Throw it on the floor there.’ Her skirt jerked as she kicked out at the floor. ‘I’ll have a look later.’

  He did as she said, then smiled. Hers was infectious, and he went to her, circling his hands round her waist. ‘Hey – I’m all grimy, leave off!’ But her voice was full of laughter. When he didn’t let go, she took a handful of the dirty water and threw it around her side at him.

  ‘What have you done today?’

  ‘I’ve taken in some linen, cleaned it, got it out to dry. Mad stuff.’

  ‘Is Parky still at you?’ ‘Parky’ was Mrs Parkin, the duke’s chief laundress and scourge of the female staff. A necessary evil in a widower’s house.

  ‘You wouldn’t believe – see when we’re anywhere near London, she thinks she’s the queen herself. Listen to this…’ He did, as Amy launched into one of her tales of Mrs Parkin’s depredations. He didn’t just nod and smile, but became animated as she spoke, taking her part. That, he had begun to think, was how you knew you were in love. The aimless tales, the daily struggles, the minor woes: no matter how much you heard the same dull stories, you didn’t tire of them. It was the singer you heard, not the song.

  At length, Amy finished, wiping a grubby hand on her skirts. ‘There we are, another one to clean,’ she said, looking down with amused regret before shrugging. ‘What a life. Anyway. I’ve been prattling like a fool. What have you been doing this morning?’

  ‘Ah,’ he said, pulling out a stool and beckoning her to sit. She looked amused again. ‘You’re being awful gentlemanly. I could get used to this.’ Then a furrow creased her brow. ‘You said you tore a shirt – did something happen? Has that old Tom been nagging?’ He sat close by her, on their low bed.

  ‘No, it wasn’t my … never mind the coat,’ he said, a little crisply. He was clearly wearing his shirt, and she knew he never removed it unless it was full dark. ‘Or Tom. It’s … well, the duke was out hunting today, with that Scotch earl. He … afterwards he asked to speak to me himself. Man to man.’ One of her fair eyebrows arched. ‘The thing is, he said he wants us to leave his service.’ He swallowed, unsure what to expect.

  ‘He’s given us the boot?’

  ‘No, no. No – nothing like that. No, he ordered – he’s commanded – that we move to a different household. Shrewsbury, wherever that is.’

  ‘The earl of Shrewsbury?’

  ‘Yes, he’s … he’s giving the earl a horse, a gift. And we’re to go with it. But to stay on, in his service.’

  Amy’s gaze fell to her hands, still wet, and she clasped them as she digested the news. ‘Is that all?’

  ‘Yes. I tried to say we were very happy here, that we didn’t wish to go anywhere, but –’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘Am I what?’

  ‘Happy here.’

  Jack shrugged. ‘I … it’s not bad. I know my job. I know the people.’

  ‘And they know you,’ she said, and he thought he detected an odd note in her voice. ‘And me. So we know people. We’ll get to know people in Shrewsbury. It’s all well away from London anyway, is it not? So what does it matter? We’ll go together, it’s not like he’s tearing us apart, is it? He’ll be a married man, Shrewsbury. I just bet that the wife’s a dragon.’ Something seemed to light up her face – realisation. ‘Hold, he’s married to Bess, isn’t he? Of Hardwick? The woman with many husbands. Oh, Jack – we shall be well enough with them. A mistress, eh? Better than working for a widower.’

  ‘Right,’ said Jack, putting an arm out. She got up off the chair and collapsed on the bed beside him. It sagged even closer to the floor as she folded into his arm.

  ‘Changing service in one big house for another. What does it matter?’

  There was wisdom in her words, Jack felt. Neither of them had any real family left. Being part of service meant you made your own family wherever you fetched up. ‘So, Mr and Mrs Cole go off to join the earl of Shewsbury’s house, from the duke of Norfolk.’ She giggled as he spoke. ‘What?’

  ‘Mr and Mrs Cole,’ she echoed. ‘We sound so old. Proper married, respectable old folk.’ He liked the sound of that, though he had always detested his name. He let the image wash into his mind, as he had often fantasised when lying beside her in bed these past months. Mr and Mrs Cole – a good married couple, hard-working, he fearless and calm and she kind and a little colourful. Preoccupied with children, maybe. A perfect family, devout and well-liked, no secrecy between them and no past behind them. It was what every other family in Christendom seemed to have, save his own.

  ‘We’ll be gentlefolk before you know it – arms, the freedom of any town, you wait and see. Think on that. What would you want on our arms? A kitten for you?’ He touched her nose lightly.

  ‘I don’t think – why a kitten?’

  ‘Well then, what? What would suit me, eh?’

  ‘I … a chameleon.’

  ‘A what? A lizard?’ asked Jack, drawing away from her with a puzzled look. ‘Why a lizard?’

  ‘Well a bird then – I don’t know – this is foolishness.’ Her laughter flattened and died and she changed the subject, a little too quickly, Jack thought. ‘Anyway you know what I’d be happy with.�
� He did. It was Amy’s dream to have enough money one day to leave service and open a little shop somewhere, where she could sew things up and he could sell them. He had claimed to agree wholeheartedly with her that it was an excellent plan. It was what she had wanted to hear. ‘Here. Why the earl of Shrewsbury? Why does the duke want to favour him all of a sudden?’

  ‘I dunno. I couldn’t exactly go asking him that.’

  ‘Mmm. I suppose not. When do we go?’

  ‘He didn’t say. Just to be ready, like. The horse is a new year’s gift. The rich folk always like those in January, new year or not.’

  She nudged her head against his shoulder once and then stood, kneading the small of her back. ‘That soon, eh? Well, that’s plenty of time enough, weeks and weeks yet. How long does it take to get there? Will it be dangerous?’

  ‘I dunno,’ he said, rubbing at the side of his nose. ‘I’ll watch over you, Mrs Cole.’ She smiled at that, and it was a smile free of any kind of mockery. He liked that. He could be anything to Amy; that was what had first attracted him to her when she had arrived as a junior laundress at Arundel. He’d heard whispers about the new girl: that she had altogether too much to say for herself – ‘too broad-mouthed by half, that little mare, but fit for riding’ – but that was good. He liked to listen more than he liked to talk. She knew nothing about him, about what a weak little child he had been. To her he might be a great hero, bold, from a loving family. He could remember the words of courtship he had used to her: ‘whatever you want me to be, Amy Wylmot, I will be that’. He had meant them.

  ***

  A few days before Christmas, on solstice day, the wind that carried frost into the courtyard of Howard House brought with it song and the stench of wine. All over London, wealthy merchants, nobles, and young lawyers were already looking forwards to making merry. The poor, too, were eagerly anticipating downing tools, burning yule logs, and sharing bread with their neighbours. Added cheer, too, came in speculation. ‘Mary Queen of Scots shall have her head chopped off’ sang the religious-minded, their cheeks aglow. The religious-minded of the other persuasion said nothing. It was better that way, especially in London.

  With the news that the fallen Queen Mary was having her fate deliberated by the Queen and her council came wilder tales. More monstrous fish had washed up on the Thames; a two-headed calf had been born somewhere in the north; a woman had given birth to a cat. People were going from house to house crying out that the signs of portent were upon England – although what was portended nobody quite knew. Still, it felt like 1569 was going to be a year of wonders.

  The gossip has reached Howard House too, but the staff said little. The lives and deaths of the great were for their master to chew over, not them. No one liked a servant with an opinion.

  Amy Cole, never much interested in the glossy personal lives of their superiors, had, too, other things on their mind as the house was stocked with Christmas fare and rumours of plague in the outer reaches of London swirled.

  You could fit your whole life in an armful of packages. That is exactly what Amy found when they’d gathered their things together, folded them into sackcloth, and secured them with string. It was no different really, from moving from one great house to another during a sweetening: the faces at the destination might change, but you were still on the road. Amy had put on a travelling cloak with a hood, and fancied that she looked quite dashing and mysterious in it. Jack, however, looked very young in his mended jerkin and outsized gloves. She watched as he tossed his head back, flinging away the fringe that always hung down over one eye. It was a gesture she loved. It was one of the few that she felt was truly his.

  They were gathered in the courtyard, ready to leave the duke of Norfolk’s service. There was no farewell party; everyone had work to be getting on with. Mrs Parkin, though, had given her a sovereign and wished her well. The other girls – the shallow-minded team in which she worked – did likewise but without the money. It was an easy parting. Amy liked them – most of them – but they weren’t her family. Her family had all departed the world, her mother last of all, gifting her a lifetime’s worth of useless platitudes. It was over a year since Nan Wylmot had been sewn into the winding sheet that she’d put together herself, and still she lived on in the little things. They made Amy feel that part of her past still lived.

  Chief amongst the pearls the increasingly eccentric old woman had given Amy was that she ought to marry a man in need of a mother. ‘Be their mother, and they shall never leave you, and you shall never be their slave’, she had said. Amy had never really understood what that meant until she met Jack Cole.

  She looked at him as he stood by the new horse, at his youthful, always-frightened face, and thought she had begun to understand. Her husband, she knew, was a chameleon, his personality still unstamped. He had as much as told her that he would be anyone to her, if she willed it, like a man of clay. He’d reached out to her like a drowning man when she’d arrived at Norfolk’s house with a letter from her aunt protesting what an expert seamstress and washerwoman she was. She didn’t know why at first – she had never been one to stir great emotion in any man in the village, pretty without beauty, she thought – until she realised that he’d been waiting for someone just like her. Fresh from the backside of nowhere-in-particular and looking for advancement, work, and wonder.

  Yes, he was a chameleon – but one who had been found out and shunned for it, the poor fool. That was the thing about living in a great household. Once gained, you wore your reputation like your master’s badge, right there on your chest and back. Once you were known as a man who had nothing to say for himself, and who would give the same fair words to all, you soon found yourself with no one. She had pitied him his awkward attentions. They were endearing, in a way. And in the course of her digging about the household for stories about him, well –

  ‘You ready?’

  ‘Ready,’ she said, sparked out of her memories.

  ‘It’s just the road we take down from the north for part of the way. The earl’s household should be waiting for us by now. The duke’s given me papers.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘Yep,’ he said, patting at the big white stallion he’d be riding. She could see the pride on his face and thought for a moment she was seeing the real him in the boyish excitement.

  ‘Can you control that big beast?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said, giving her a grin. His teeth were all very white. Today he was trying out his cocky, impressive guise – the one she found far less endearing than the lost boy. That was the problem with men. They seemed to think that their most tiresome personas were the ones women found most attractive. Absurdly, a snatch of verse her mother used to recite rang in her head: Why is our life so cruel and dark, that men no longer speak to friend, why does evil so clearly mark, the monstrous government of men? She shook it away.

  ‘A stallion fit for an earl. Or a queen,’ she smiled.

  ‘What? What d’you mean?’

  ‘Just what I say,’ she said primly, enjoying her own chance to be mysterious.

  ‘You … you know what all this is about?’

  ‘I’m not deaf,’ she laughed. ‘Jack, the whole household has been abuzz about where the queen of Scots is likely to fetch up, and it’s not Scotland. Us girls were drawing lots on who would have the charge of her.’

  ‘But … this is the duke’s … I don’t think I was supposed to …’

  ‘Don’t worry, I didn’t say anything much. I played dumb. I bet down that she’d go to the block. I mean, she killed her husband, didn’t she?’

  The question rang out into the morning and was lost in the ringing sound of metalwork and splash of buckets being slopped out. All of London knew that the Scottish queen had killed her husband, been tried for it, and found … well, no one really understood what Queen Elizabeth had decided – which, if the gossip floating around was true, was nothing yet. A decision might be published after Twelfth Night said those who were keeping
their ears to the ground.

  Whether Mary Stuart was guilty or not guilty didn’t really matter to Amy. If one rich woman killed a rich man, what did it matter? She shivered at the thought. Still, it would be an exciting thing to be part of a household with a scandalous woman hidden away in it. It would be interesting enough to see her in the flesh, the famous Mary. If she had to wash her sheets – well, you could learn things from people, especially people reviled as whores, from their sheets.

  ‘Keep your voice down, Amy. Here, let me give you a hand up.’

  Once they were both mounted, they began their trot out of the courtyard, leaving behind the duke of Norfolk’s household. Once outside, the cobblestones gave way to sucking mud, and smoke filled the air. The high walls of Howard House sat cheek to cheek against hovels. Elizabeth’s London was down to their right, thought Amy, glancing that way – and she had never liked what lay within it. Everything was crooked, from the people to the streets to the dwellings. No style matched, and outside the big estates there was no symmetry or prettiness to please the eye. The southern people barely seemed English. They seemed instead Londonish. Coarse. Constantly fighting over scraps and hostile to anyone who didn’t sound like them.

  She took one hand off the bridle to knead the small of her back. It was an old gesture of her mother’s: ‘crack your back; it chases away the agues before they can start’. As she did so her stomach arched forward, small and hard. In a new life she might not be a mother to Jack but might become a mother to his sons, she thought. He had never mentioned children to her, but she assumed that he had married her to get some. Partly, at least. Strange how changes made you think of other changes. But no; one thing at a time. She knew she would have to keep an eye on her husband in this strange new world they were being sent to. Oh, not in the way some women keep hawkish eyes on their men – he was no roving bawd – but in his endless desire to please, to be all things to all men … well, who knew what the servants of the earl of Shrewsbury might be like.