The Crystal Skull

by Manda Scott

  Early, he had mourned the absence of children, and considered the taking of another wife, but none of those who had been offered had matched Ella’s intellect or sharpness of wit and those who he thought might be bearable had invariably chosen greater men, or at least those possessed of greater incomes than anything to which a mere don might aspire. In any case, he had come to realize that he loved his college, which was immortal, more than he might ever love another too-mortal woman. He had set his mind and his soul to serving the stones and structure, the students and staff, and was happier then than he could ever rightly remember.

  There had been whisperings on his elevation to Vice Master to the effect that a man is only half made without a wife to keep home for him, but by now, three years into the post, those who carped had turned their attentions elsewhere and, in the absence of a well-favoured woman of childbearing age to manage the servants and see to the menus, Tythe had reverted to the old practice of taking in students to share his rooms and had found the youthful company more to his liking as his middle years gave grudging way to white-haired old age.

  Even so, he enjoyed the peace of the holidays and his house was hardly difficult to manage. Thus it was that this year, he had given leave to those of his serving staff who wished it to visit relatives for Christ’s Mass, that they might be in the company of their loved ones when they gave thanks to God that the English forces under my Lord Howard and the more famous Drake had this summer so roundly defeated King Philip of Spain’s Armada and thus delivered England from the Duke of Parma’s invading army.

  Tythe had not been called up to arms in defence of the realm. His position as one of the country’s foremost academic physicians, added to his age and the old injury to his left knee, ensured he was not required to strap on the sword he could barely use and stand shoulder to shoulder with others equally unsuited to warfare. His friends, colleagues and students had gone in his stead, to stand in the sweltering heat of the south coast, under-armed and entirely untrained, awaiting the eviscerating energy that was Parma and the brilliantly trained, fully provisioned army with which he had so efficiently laid waste to the Netherlands.

  Archibald Harling had gone, the medical student who had slept for two years in the antechamber to Tythe’s room, and he had taken with him his friend and room-mate, the unfortunate Jethro Missul, whose misformed shoulder had made him the butt of so much talk in his childhood days that he had developed a permanent stutter. His grasp of law, though, was exceptional, and, as his tutor, Tythe had argued hotly against his throwing all that learning away on the smashing blades of Parma’s army.

  That he himself was not a swordsman had not aided the force of his rhetoric and he had been forced to concede, in the end, that law such as they knew and loved it would have no place in a Catholic England ruled from Spain, and young Jethro had limped off, intent on hurling himself before the Spanish wave, if only to delay them for the time it took them to step over his corpse.

  Miraculously, the army had not come, and the pair had returned to Cambridge whole in body, if not entirely of mind, with stories of food poisoning and cholera amongst the ranks, of no food and water for the waiting men and of previously chaste women offering themselves openly in broad daylight, to keep the men from absconding and leaving the coast to the murdering Spaniards, which, reports from the Netherlands suggested, would have been immeasurably worse than mere dysentery.

  They spoke in their sleep of their dread at seeing the vast glittering hulks of the Spanish fleet, sailing together with a majesty never seen in English waters.

  They had seen the size of the Spanish guns and had thought themselves facing certain death, but then the pirate Drake had come, setting his small, weasel-fast boats to harry the lumbering oxen of Medina-Sidonia, and God had sent a blessed wind to aid the English and it seemed as if the new Puritan religion was better served than the mother church of the Catholics because Parma had turned his army round and gone back to murdering the Flemish peasants and the tag-ends of the burned and defeated Armada had sailed all the way up to Scotland, which was said to be all clothed in ice from one year’s end to the next, and had come back down the other side and even when Archie and his friends had ridden to the west coast to repel them, they had not had the grace to land and give him a battle, but had let God’s wind drive them on to the Irish rocks, losing more ships than before.

  Of the one hundred and thirty ships that had left Spain, less than seventy limped back to face the wrath of a monarch whose pride and mother church had been crushed in full view of all Europe.

  Archie and Jethro and their friends had ridden home to celebrate and none spoke too loudly of the English sailors who had not been paid or the men who had died needlessly for lack of provisions.

  Thus had summer given way to a good, rich autumn, full of relief and relaxation, ripe with the air of a term’s end even before the Michaelmas term had fully begun. Little of real worth had been taught or learned but there was no great harm in that, and the holidays had come and the snow had followed soon after and Cambridge had passed quietly into Christ’s Mass, pleased to remember that God loved the Puritans more than the Catholics and, by way of evidence, had left their Queen Elizabeth to blaze in all her glory on the throne.

  Nobody, in all of this, thought greatly of Sir Francis Walsingham, secretary and spymaster to the Queen and very likely, in Barnabas Tythe’s opinion, the true architect of the Spanish defeat.

  Nobody, that is, except Walsingham himself, and his extensive network of spies who worked tirelessly to feed the avaricious spider who wove his intrigue from the centre of their web.

  Nobody knew the full count of those in Walsingham’s pay, and it was well known that his agents were frequently set to spy on one another, which was, in part, what kept them all honest and diligent. The other, greater part of their diligence grew from the fact that they had all seen at least once what happened to men with whom the Queen’s secretary was displeased; no man in his right mind would choose to risk ending his life in the Tower of London, answering unanswerable questions on the rack.

  Which made it unsettling, therefore, to have received a letter in Walsingham’s own hand, demanding action that was, in Tythe’s opinion, impossible to take. It was, in fact, bordering on the insane even to ask it. Three feet of snow combined with the onset of Christmas gave him grace to consider his reply. Tythe had been doing just that for two days, since the letter arrived and the snow first started to fall. He was no closer to finding an answer.

  He leaned forward and threw another log on the fire and read the letter for the fifth, or maybe sixth, time that evening, and drank a sip of good Greek malmsey and shook his head.

  The second knock rattled the door on its hinges. A voice he had not heard for years hissed, ‘Barnabas? Barnabas Tythe. If you would not have us perish on your doorstep of cold and hunger, would you open up and let us in?’

  The malmsey spilled all over the hearth, sending aromatic vapours into the air. The goblet received a dent that would take the town’s silversmith some skill to repair. Tythe paid attention to neither, but stared in shock at the letter lying across his hand and tried to understand how that which had been impossible was rendered otherwise, and how, in God’s name, Sir Francis Walsingham could have known it aforehand.

  He did not like any of the answers that presented themselves, nor his prognostications for the immediate future. The dark shadow of the Tower loomed suddenly darker and stretched the hundred miles north to fall on Cambridge and Bede’s College in particular.

  Some time after the third knock, the Vice Master of the college stood up and hobbled forward to open the door.

  ‘Written this 20th day of December in the year of our Lord et cetera, et cetera … to Sir Barnabas Tythe, from Sir Francis Walsingham, greetings.

  ‘The most momentous year in our history draws to a close. We have fought off the Spanish evil and kept whole the sovereign borders of our land and the rights and sufferance of our most Beloved Queen. He despises
her, does he not know we all know it? But the Papists never rest and nor must we. I have it on good authority – whose? Who could possibly have known you were coming here? – that one Cedric Owen, formerly of your acquaintance, is travelling in the company of a Spaniard and for this alone is to be considered an Enemy of the Realm. Moreover, he is carrying with him certain items of witchcraft which must be taken and held for further examination.

  ‘I believe, due to your former friendship with him – a friendship in which you are blameless – Walsingham holds nobody blameless. He would cut up his own daughter if he thought it would serve his own ends – that he will endeavour to reach you within the closing days of the year. You are to apprehend him with all necessary force and deliver him alive to London with all speed. Should you require assistance in this matter, raise your own banner above your house and those who are our friends in this matter will come to you.

  ‘Deliver him alive to London.’ Barnabas Tythe lowered the letter he had been reading and stared across the top of it to his friend. ‘I would rather die penniless in a leper colony than be delivered alive to Francis Walsingham in London. Whatever you have done to make an enemy of this man, Cedric Owen, you should undo it if such is in your power, or flee England – nay, flee Europe – to escape him.’

  ‘Certainly that’s one option. I would like to think there might be others, though, before we take ourselves back to New Spain to no benefit.’

  The night, which had been strange, was descending rapidly into unreality. The first of the two men standing warming themselves in a steam of damp riding habits by the fire was sixty years old, almost to the day. Barnabas Tythe knew this because he had attended Cedric Owen’s twenty-first birthday celebrations thirty-nine years before. It was a matter of some concern, therefore, that Owen should look so exuberantly, youthfully healthy, when all accounts had laid him dead in a French dock-side tavern thirty years before.

  And he had brought an accomplice, who spoke now, in a soulful not-quite-English. ‘Have I not said already that Walsingham is the agent of the Enemy? You should listen to your swordsman, my friend, for your life is mine to protect, and I scented danger before ever we left Sluis.’

  Manifestly more disconcerting than the presence of a once-friend whose death he still mourned every Twelfth Night was the growing understanding that the light-footed, one-armed man with the astonishingly inappropriate nugget of gold at his left earlobe, and the ostentatious crushed velvet doublet, was both a Spaniard, and Cedric Owen’s friend.

  A Spaniard, which is to say a Papist and a subject of the hell-born Philip of Spain, was thus drinking Tythe’s best mulled wine on the eve of a Christmas in which every one of her Britannic majesty’s subjects was celebrating wholeheartedly the comprehensive defeat of Spain and all it stood for.

  Gangs of youths had burned effigies of Philip at the start of Advent. Later into the month, older men who should have known better had skinned cats alive and crucified them, to send the message back to the Pope that his false religion was doomed. No man in his right mind would contemplate playing host now to a Spaniard, however exuberant his tailoring, however good his command of the English language, however close his association with a man recently returned from the grave.

  And then there was Walsingham’s letter, the implications of which were beginning to set Tythe’s bowels to water. And the one-armed popinjay had just spoken of Sluis. Which was in the Netherlands. Which was, in fact, one of the last of the key strategic trading towns to fall to the besieging army of Alessandro Farnese, Duke of Parma, loyal servant to King Philip II of Spain and the greatest enemy England had ever known.

  And the Spaniard had just defined Sir Francis Walsingham as the Enemy.

  Tythe was neither a weak man nor a coward. Nevertheless, he felt sick in every part of his body and soul. His left knee ached. His chest refused to answer the bellows-call of his diaphragm, and his breathing whistled tightly.

  He had been in the Tower once, and had caught a whiff of the stench of utter despair, which was worse than the charnel house and the abattoir put together. It had made him vomit then, much to his own disgrace, and had haunted him ever since. He smelled it again now, in the comfortable warm-damp of his own room, with the ruined spice of the malmsey still trickling into the fire. Sir Francis Walsingham had been present when he was sick. The man had smiled at the sight of it. It was that smile, and the penetrating eyes above it, that left that solid citizen, Barnabas Tythe, shaking like an agued woman now.

  He said, ‘Cedric, I have loved you like a son, but I ask you now to leave. Please. I beg of you. Go now while the streets are empty and the falling snow will cover your tracks. I will tell no one you were here, I swear to it.’

  He was croaking like a jackdaw. He heard it and bit his lip and swore inwardly.

  ‘Barnabas.’ Cedric Owen folded himself neatly on knees that showed no sign of rheumatics and sat cross-legged on the hearth. He smiled, and Tythe remembered the effervescent student, only five years his junior, who had so enchanted him in the summer-days of his youth. A faint haze of steam arose from the back of Owen’s doublet and a greater one from the bulk of his riding cloak, on which the snow was not quite melted. The room began to take on a launder-house atmosphere.

  ‘Barnabas, it’s Christmas Eve and the snow is falling. We would not be here if there were any danger to you. We can stay safely for two days, I think, before anyone considers it necessary to call on you, and even then, surely you can trust the men of Bede’s?’

  ‘No. That’s just it. You don’t understand. Robert Maplethorpe is Master these past two years. He is Walsingham’s man as much as I. More so, if the truth be told.’

  That was it. In less than five minutes of a dead man’s company, he had said more than he had ever dared to any living soul.

  ‘Barnabas?’ Cedric Owen blinked artlessly at him, as he had used to do when they drank together in the Old Bull on Trinity Street. Tythe thought of Eloise and prayed for fortitude. ‘Can we safely assume that Sir Francis, archest of all arch-Puritans, does not know that you are still a Catholic at heart?’

  There was a choking noise in the quiet that was Barnabas Tythe’s answer. The bejewelled Spaniard said softly, ‘That was not friendly, my friend. Now you have made your other friend sick with fear. He believes himself undone and in the company of witches, or at least of blackmailers.’ He spread his one arm wide with a theatrical flourish. ‘I am a Catholic, señor, if not a very good one; we who are alike know one another. You will find no witchcraft in that. Nor will you find threat. We will not hurt one who has once befriended us.’

  Barnabas Tythe considered pointing out that he had not befriended any man of Spain, but the bejewelled one carried at his hip a plain sword whose very lack of adornment spoke volumes on a man otherwise given to grotesque bad taste. Owen had never been a fighter and yet he had come through the Low Countries alive. His self-appointed swordsman, therefore, was a man to be respected, not offended, and, in any case, Owen had just opened his riding pack, and was unwrapping the spare cloak which, Tythe greatly feared, hid the evidence of all-too-real witchcraft and was therefore of far greater concern.

  He was right. A corner of the cloak fell away and the placid amber light of his fire was warped to a cold ice blue. It was thirty years since he had seen its like and it still haunted his dreams, inspiring yearning and revulsion equally.

  Tythe groaned aloud and thrust himself up from his chair.

  ‘Not the blue heart-stone. Please God, Cedric, in thirty years, have you not had the sense to rid yourself of that? Queen Mary and that idiot Pole may have wanted to burn you for it, but Walsingham will do far, far worse; he will want to use it for his own ends. He may be an avowed Puritan, but he will take a short spoon to sup with the devil if it gets him where he wants to be.’

  ‘Ha!’ The Spaniard had startling grey-blue eyes and hair long and glossy as a girl’s. When he threw his head back and laughed, his teeth were white as the winter’s snow. ‘My friend, your
other friend is right; we should be gone from here. If Walsingham knows where we are, so simple a thing as the birth of Christ will not keep him from us.’

  ‘No, but the snow will. And it gives us time to plan. In any case, I have more wealth than he has.’

  Sir Francis Walsingham was one of the richest men in England. Tythe assumed that Owen was speaking in allegory and was about to recount how the sparkle of a dawn’s sunshine filled his soul with greater riches than anything England’s spymaster could draw to his coffers.

  It was with some surprise, therefore, that he saw the other corner of Cedric Owen’s riding cloak fall back to reveal the spark of a diamond button that did not look in the least allegorical. In fact, when Tythe thrust himself up from his chair to study it more closely, he found himself holding a life-sized mask of a woman’s face cast of gold with a crusting of diamonds at both ears that made the Spaniard look positively restrained in his attire. The item was as thick as his thumb’s first knuckle and was well in excess of five pounds in weight. He attempted to estimate its worth, compared to, say, his annual salary, and abandoned the task; the two were not comparable.

  ‘Cedric?’ Barnabas Tythe found his mouth gone dry. ‘Where did you get this? Does it carry men’s blood?’

  ‘It carries a woman’s blood, certainly. It was cast from the face of a woman for whom I had the highest respect. Her son made it on the occasion of her death, as our leaving gift. I will be sad to see it go, but if anyone can gaze upon Walsingham and cause him ill, it is Najakmul.’

  ‘But why? This would buy you freedom if you used it wisely.’

  Owen tilted a smile. ‘If I sought freedom, and if it were all that I had, I might consider your suggestion. But I seek more than freedom, which makes it fortunate that this is not all that I have.’

  Tythe gaped. ‘There is more?’

  ‘Indeed. Clearly I do not choose to carry it all with me. The rest is largely in gemstones, which are more easily hidden. They are in the false bottoms of barrels of sack, housed in a cellar near the port in Harwich which is owned by a Dutch smuggler who owes me his life. I believe he will not touch that which is mine while he believes that I live. Given that I must die soon, then we must find a way for you to reach it, and then for you to hide it until such time as Walsingham and all like him are gone.’