A Dangerous Trade: An Elizabethan Spy Thriller

by Steven Veerapen

  ‘I … yes,’ said Jack. In truth he did not know if he did. Still, he did not regret killing his father. Oh, he wished that he had not done it, not had to do it, if that was what repentance was. But he had, and he had never once wished the man was alive again. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Your wife – does she know what you did?’

  ‘No,’ said Jack, panic rising. ‘She doesn’t. She can’t – I don’t want her to know. You won’t tell her, will you?’

  ‘Of course not. You have confessed freely. I am God’s ambassador here. I intercede only with him. If I opened my mouth to anyone else, it would be me sinning.’ Jack relaxed. It hadn’t felt quite as freeing to reveal his past to someone as he’d hoped, but it was something. ‘But this matter of your penance.’

  ‘I’ll do anything,’ said Jack, nodding the truth of it. ‘Anything you like.’

  ‘It will be a great thing, mate. For something as large as this matter. And the other – the work you have done tonight.’ He paused, putting a hand up to knuckle his temple. ‘I told you we’re at war. I meant that. I said sometimes women are killed in war.’ Jack felt his stomach clench as Amy popped into his mind, her impish smile on her face. ‘The thing is this. There are great plans in train at this moment. Plans to free Queen Mary. You should like to free the queen, would you not?’

  ‘I would. She is a sweet lady.’ Jack let modesty turn his eyes to the floor again. He was sure that lust was a sin – and one he did not want to confess to. ‘It’s not right that she is kept a prisoner. She should be sent home.’

  ‘She should be given this realm,’ said Heydon. ‘It is her birth-right as much as Scotland. The heretic Elizabeth is a bastard, as everyone knows. She sits on England’s throne by trickery – by the false will of her father, who took a sword to law and custom to let his bastard child take his throne. The Holy Father would be rid of her. The kings of France and Spain, of every Catholic country, would be rid of her. All would have Queen Mary given her place. All would have her most Catholic Majesty restore this poor realm to the Pope’s obedience. Only Elizabeth stands in the way. I … I regret I cannot get rid of her myself, being a priest. Not until the Pope gives holy sanction to such an act.

  ‘But you, Jack. If you wish to be truly shriven – if you want your soul cleansed by a Godly act, then you might turn your hand to it.’ Heydon’s voice had shifted from the joviality he usually employed to the stirring eloquence he adopted when he got onto religious matters. ‘Perhaps that’s what this has all been about – your father and this night. God has shown you that you can turn your hand to cleansing the world of wicked folk. I must ask, then, that you make your penance by getting rid of another such one. Kill Elizabeth.’

  Part Three: A Summer Storm

  1

  The walls of Berwick stabbed at the sky. They paused at the sight before Heydon led them in a trot across the bridge that spanned the churning Tweed. Jack kept his eyes fixed ahead, refusing to look down. He knew it was stupid – no barrel was going to bob along with a greying hand jutting from its lid, but still…

  As they drew closer, the mass of grey resolved itself into neat grey blocks, dressed and fitted together. But as they approached one of the gatehouses, the shabbiness of the new-built defences became clearer. The walls stood unfinished, some sections dressed and smooth, rearing twenty-odd feet into the air, and others a jumble of giant dice. Queen Elizabeth, Heydon had told him, had been having them constructed since her reign began. Only this year had she abandoned the effort, leaving her northern subjects to the Scots. All about money, he had said. Money was raised in the north but spent in the south.

  It had been days since they had gained the last hundred miles from Darlington; Heydon seemed in no hurry. He had wanted, he told Jack, to get the mood of the whole north. Jack had been happy enough at that. Privately, he wanted to spin time out, to make it last. It was not that he was enjoying the journey – not after what had happened at Darlington – but rather that if time slowed, he might not have to do what he had promised. What, he reminded himself, the Holy Father and his brotherhood were now relying on him to do.

  Who was Queen Elizabeth anyway? He had asked himself that often during the previous days. A woman he had never seen – a bastard, whatever you believed. Her father had seen to that, divorcing and killing her mother. Yet she had been his sovereign lady since he was a child. He had heard his father talk about her in the old days – about how she would take the throne when the old queen finally went to hell, and thereafter confirm England as a reformed realm. Then he had imagined her as a rampaging monster. That was the only kind of woman he could see his father approving of. As he had grown, though, he had heard little about her. She never came into the duke’s lands, and when the duke went south, he visited her only in her private chambers. Whatever it was that she did – make laws, make friends and enemies with the rest of the world, gather in money – none of that had ever touched him. Would that make it easier or harder to kill her?

  ‘Remember, mate – you’re my man. The passport allows me one man.’

  Jack shook away the cobwebs as they approached the gatehouse. Two soldiers stood sentry, both of them old and scrawny, in a parody of military bearing. ‘Good day,’ saluted Heydon. ‘My man and I are going north into Scotland.’

  ‘Are you now? Your name? You got your papers?’

  Heydon handed them down. ‘I’m Heydon. This is my man, Jack Cole, of the earl of Shrewsbury’s household.’ The first man passed them to the second without a glance. ‘On the secretary’s authority?’ asked the more interested of the two.

  ‘We are that.’

  ‘Not too many of you going north. Most’ve been flying south. To the Scotch queen.’

  ‘We’re not most,’ said Heydon, waving a hand in the air.

  ‘Is it the Scotch regent you’re up for?’

  ‘No,’ said Heydon. Then, ‘yes. Look, it is private business with the queen’s license. Allow us passage, will you?’

  The sentry’s bottom lip jutted, and he seemed to weigh up whether to be difficult or not. Eventually his face smoothed. ‘Aye, well, go on then.’ He held out the paper. Heydon gripped it, and then the man’s own grip tightened. ‘Remember,’ he said, ‘to keep this close. If ye’re attacked in that land, it’ll cause us all aches, so keep yer heads down and yer wits sharp.’

  They passed through the gatehouse and into the town. Before them lay a green, houses bordering it. The road stretched off to their right and Heydon led them. He seemed, thought Jack, to know the way. Not for the first time, he wondered where exactly in the north his friend hailed from. He seemed to know a good many people, all of them secretive and shady, but had never spoken of his family, who they were or what they did. They passed what looked like a communal altar with a stone cross surmounting it. Here and there wives walked with baskets on their arms, marking out the buildings on either side of the road as shops. The smell of fish was strong in the air, a salty nip that forced its way down the back of the throat. But it was a clean, fresh smell. Aided by strong sea air, it washed away the usual stink of middens and outhouses.

  ‘This way,’ said Heydon, drawing short. Two women separated and skirted them, throwing up aggrieved looks as they had to walk closer to the sewage ditches. ‘I know the tapster.’ Of course you do, thought Jack.

  When their horses were stabled, and they had been shown to their chamber, Heydon collapsed on a crate that served as the room’s chair. He let one arm dangle languidly and the other wandered to the crucifix he had taken to wearing on the outside of his clothing. ‘We could probably make Fife in a day or two if we ride hard and don’t stop. Depends on the weather. We’d have a job doing any more today. Don’t like the look of that sky.’

  ‘Where’s Fife?’ asked Jack. He put his pack down and sat cross-legged on the floor. It was a stupid question, probably, but he didn’t know Scotland. He pictured it only as a land of jagged mountains and people living in caves.

  ‘Up the coast.’

 
; ‘Is that in Edinburgh? Is that where Queen Mary lived?’

  ‘Mate, you don’t know your maps,’ smiled Heydon. ‘No, Edinburgh is the town. We’ll go around that. It’s reformer country now. But we’ll have to cross the Forth to get where we’re going.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘The good regent’s house. Queen Mary’s brother. The rumour is that he has that proof of England’s governance of Scotland locked up tight there.’

  Jack shifted position. The bones of his backside were already starting to ache, and he switched to kneeling. A little twinge of disappointment passed through him. He had wanted to see where Mary had lain her head – the palaces and the chambers. He had assumed that her brother had taken them all over. ‘And then what? Do we … do we have to fight our way in?’

  ‘No, mate, no. The earl of Moray is in the north – the wild country. Trying to break the wild men to his will, probably. His house will be empty enough. Just his wife and her attendants.’

  Jack paled. ‘We don’t have to hurt anyone do we? Won’t he have taken the thing with him?’

  ‘No,’ said Heydon. His face hardened, and Jack felt it better not to ask any more stupid questions. ‘Calm yourself down. We won’t hurt women. The papers will be there. They’re in his own private possession, not state papers. Not to be carried about and stolen or lost. We’ll just scurry in like mice, as fine as you like, and scurry back out and away.’ He had been idling with the crucifix, and he lifted it and touched it to his lips. ‘Do you speak their language?’

  ‘Scots? No. Will I need to?’

  ‘Not a word. I get by in it. Latin, French, Italian – I have a bit of it all. You just keep your mouth shut and let me speak for you. Come, sit by me, mate.’

  Jack shuffled on his knees over to Heydon. His friend reached down and took his hand. ‘You’re not worried about the task God’s given you, are you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Don’t lie,’ smiled Heydon. ‘It’s a good thing to worry. Keeps a man sharp. On his toes. You’ll be known to all history. The man who brought a cursed realm back to its proper obedience.’ Jack swallowed.

  ‘When?’

  ‘When things are all in good order. Haste makes waste, and all that. When the north is ready to rise up and free Queen Mary. This year, though. Winter would be good.’

  ‘Why winter?’

  Heydon stood up and turned his back on Jack. He leant against the plastered wall and began to trace a crack with his finger. ‘We have in mind already a course for ridding the world of that woman. But only at the right time. See this wall? I could chip away a little bit and it would still stand. But if I just waited until lightning struck the building, I could find the right place – downstairs – and tear out a keystone. The whole place would fall in fire and smoke. And I could rebuild it. Better, new. You see what I mean?’ Jack didn’t. He nodded. ‘There’ll come a time when the men of the north stop fighting with themselves. Stop arguing about what’s to be done. Stop seeing no further than the end of their noses. When it comes, they’ll need a little push. They want the queen gone, of course they do, but they’re frightened folk. And that’s when we’ll be ready to strike.’

  ‘Strike,’ murmured Jack. He pictured himself stabbing at the queen. He had seen her image on coins, and the duke of Norfolk had a miniature portrait he had treated like a shrine when people visited. In the one she looked like a hawk with swirls at her neck and head. In the other, she looked cold and mannish, overdressed.

  ‘She travels by boat often. From one of her stolen palaces to another. You can’t get at her directly, not without being caught.’ The word ‘caught’ made Jack’s eyes widen. He had tried not to think about the actual doing of the act, still less what might happen afterwards. Did men ever kill great people and get away with it? Yes, he thought. Whoever had murdered Queen Mary’s last husband had done that, blaming her. ‘Don’t worry. You won’t get caught. Not if you follow my direction. We should rent some chamber looking over the river. A lodging house, something like that. That’s easy enough in London. They don’t ask questions. Probably think we’re lovers at some game. But I’ll have got us a gun, mate. A firearm. And you’ll just poke it through a window and when the Welsh harridan’s barge gets close by, you will blow her into hell.’

  Jack could see it. The flash of a gun – not that he knew how to use one – the explosion and smoke and confusion. The boat would rock as men and women jumped from their seats. The queen would collapse, maybe not realising what had happened at first, before she looked down and saw blood spreading on her bodice. They would then carry her ashore, all in a tumult, and she would bleed to death. Men would search the chamber, but all they would find was a spent gun.

  A jolt of reality intervened. ‘But barges – I’ve seen them – they have glass windows. She’ll be inside the little chamber.’

  ‘Bah,’ said Heydon. He had turned, and his back was against the wall, arms folded. ‘A cannon can blast through glass. It’ll be moving slowly. You’ll have time to aim it.’

  ‘But I don’t know how to shoot,’ said Jack, holding up his hands. He realised that he must seemed to be making excuse after excuse. It was cowardly talk – not at all what the Holy Father or the Church would want to hear.

  ‘So? If you miss, you miss. You’ll strike the barge then. A good gun will hit a mark. If it bites into her foolish boat, it will tear a hole in it. The whole thing will sink. If we do it near London bridge, the oarsmen won’t have a chance. Water will pour in and the whole thing will sink into the waves. Freezing waves in winter, mate. And the whole pack of them will be dragged down. You can’t swim when you’re trapped in a cabin and weighted down with stolen jewels. You’ll have her in hell without the bullet touching her.’

  ‘And then what happens?’ Jack wanted to move past the images of death and murder – assassination, he quickly corrected – as fast as possible.

  ‘And then her whole rotten government tumbles. The heretics. The men who’ve tortured the realm to line their own pockets. Cecil and his new men. All of them will stumble around like rats in a sack. Whilst the faithful will free Queen Mary and carry her south. And who’ll there be to resist her? No one. They’ll all be looking to their own heads and their own purses.

  ‘Man alive, it will be beautiful. A realm in chaos. Needing order – crying out for it.’

  ‘Will – will people know it was me? That I did it?’

  ‘Only those you want to know. I can inform the Holy Father and the whole college of cardinals, or no one at all if you like. God will know you did your duty, though. You’ll get your reward for that.’

  Silence fell between them. Jack screwed his eyes shut, trying to make sense of the world. Here he was in an inn he didn’t know in a town on the edge of the world with a priest he had only met months before, plotting to kill England’s queen. Heydon had made everything sound so right – so achievable – so desirable. He wanted to be back in Howard House or Arundel or anywhere where he had his own chamber. A place he could lie with Amy and listen to her talk about her day whilst he stared placidly, his stupid old smile plastered on his face.

  As he opened his eyes, he found Heydon staring into them.

  No, he thought. He was being weak, as weak as he had been as a child. He had killed two men now, and God wanted him to do this … this other thing. It was only his faith that had wobbled for a second, caught in the wind of cowardice.

  He wouldn’t waver again.

  2

  It seemed for a while that Amy wouldn’t need to use the mysterious little vial. Queen Mary appeared to be doing everyone a favour and dying of her own accord.

  Since the messenger had arrived from Scotland and told her she was railed upon as a whore and a murderess, the Scottish queen had seemed to wilt. Each day news came that some old illness had returned. A physician was in constant attendance, and she gave up leaving her chamber entirely. When Amy went in to remove the bedding and bring fresh stuff, the room was shrouded in darkness.
On the occasions Mary went out to walk on the roof leads, she was half-carried, flashing pained smiles at those who held her under her arms. Player, thought Amy: the woman was a stage player. If that were true, though, she had to admit that Mary was a good one.

  What seemed to Amy to have happened was that the Scottish queen had given up on life. That was a thing that suited her well enough. It wasn’t her day to carry out the linens from the royal apartments, but she hovered outside anyway, hoping to see something.

  When the time for morning dinner arrived, she watched, pretending to wipe the dust from a window frame, as a team of the queen’s servants marched in procession past her. Each of them carried wooden trays covered with cloths. At the head of the troupe one had under each arm a series of wooden boards. He placed them by the door before rapping with a gloved hand. After a short time, the door was opened and the whole group went in. What had caught Amy’s attention, though, was the man carrying a silver salt urn. She considered the poison tucked away again in her bodice. If she could somehow get it into the urn, which would be kept locked somewhere in the kitchens, and swirl it around, that might work. It would also mean that the queen’s taster would not be affected; he or she would taste the food, find it uncompromised, and then pass it to Mary. Mary would then feel quite safe salting her own food.

  There were many things wrong with such a plan. Amy knew nothing about the poison. Did salt counteract it? Absorb it? Surely not – or else salt itself would prove a wonderful antidote. At any rate, it did not matter. She had time to refine the idea. No word had come, and none had been whispered, about Elizabeth being attacked. It might be that she would never have to act at all. It was her job now to watch, to listen, and to wait.

  She walked away from the royal apartments, steeling herself for another round of gathering in the servants’ soiled clothes and bedding. It was time for a proper hot wash with soap for the sheets, and a stiff brushing of garments. She looked down at her hands. The pads of her palms were calloused and rough, as they always were. The skin on the back of each was red. Only her nails looked to be in rude health, long and sharp. As sharp as needles, she thought, and for a moment she allowed herself to imagine a life free of queens and earls and countesses – a life in a quiet place where her hands would be soft and the most work she would have to do would be plying a needle when she chose to.