by Peter Tonkin
‘So his idleness weighs heavily too,’ observed Tom. ‘The tutor at least must rest content – the venerable Doctor Rowley...’
‘Perhaps. He is a hard man to know. He and Master St Just spend much time in their stargazing and their abstruse calculations that lead to obscure predictings. Master Gawdy joins them too, on occasion. He is the Lady Margaret’s secretary, the son of a priest, they say. But none of these men is old, sir. It has been the cause of some comment in the hall and in the neighbourhood that the Lady Margaret surrounds herself and the Baron with new men, so to speak. The Captain has perhaps seen forty summers, but Master St Just had just attained his majority when he was struck down at Portland Bill, so he has yet to see thirty; and Master Rowley may be a Master of Arts and a Doctor of Philosophy, but he is only down from Corpus Christi ten years since and is no great age at all. I suppose Master Gawdy might be of an age with Captain Quin, but he is a slight and quiet man.’
‘Ah,’ said Tom, thoughtfully and almost to himself, ‘but Rowley is a Cambridge man. Corpus was Kit Marlowe’s college. And Robert Poley’s, I believe.’
***
Later still, after James had gone to bed, exhausted by grief if nothing else, and Tom still sat with Talbot and Ben, though a chamber had been prepared for the three of them, Tom still could not rest. Ben rose to start another rushlight from the embers of the fire before the chill and creeping darkness claimed them all. Talbot poured the dregs of the small beer into a wooden tankard and supped, speculatively, his eyes on his young friend’s brooding face.
‘The Secretary has access – one man seeming to serve the Lady and the Baron. Two tutors – a Cambridge man who may be closer to Poley than merely a graduate from the same college. A seaman close to Drake. And to who else? To Raleigh? Lord Howard the Admiral? Possibly to one of the factions at Court. And St Just sounds like a Cornish man like the Master of the Horse, if the name is anything to go by. Like many of the household, brought up from Cotehel to Elfinstone after the death of the servants that died in the great visitation of the Plague on Wormwood House, when James’s parents died with all the others, and all of Lady Margaret’s family except the Lady Margaret herself. Is it of importance now that we know it was not plague that killed them but poison, placed by an ambitious cousin mad to claim the titles and the fortune for himself?’
‘You’d have to wait and see,’ said Talbot. ‘Like all the rest, it’s a matter like the abstruse speculations Rowley, St Just and sometimes Secretary Gawdy pull out of the stars. Only time will tell the truth of them.’
‘Right you are, old Law. Let us return to the matters in hand therefore – the matters and the men. And Captain Quin himself, with his command...Together with the castle staff, young James and John and Master Mann. Death does not automatically make them innocent of watching Lady Margaret. Mann, in fact, was doing so for Poley and the Council.’
‘But,’ said Ben slowly, sleepily, ‘it must at least rule them out of any suspicion that they did murder in themselves – that they hired the footpads, dumped each other in the Fleet, met with the footpads’ leader in the house on Water Lane, then fired the whole beneath us. Dead men could not do all of that.’
‘The boy’s got a point,’ said Talbot.
‘He has,’ admitted Tom. ‘You both have. We must look to the living for our sin-worm and our murderer. We must test our suspicions like St Just’s navigation, in practice not theory. We must follow them to Cotehel if we are to solve the riddle and help Lady Margaret.
‘To bed now, therefore, and off in their footsteps tomorrow – and betimes. We have far to go as well as much to do!’
As he spoke, he reached into his purse and threw across the table the folded piece of paper he had taken from Lady Margaret’s writing desk, with its scratched and corrected list of names, houses and towns.
The long and dangerous road to distant, dangerous Castle Cotehel.
Eleven:The Portsmouth Road
Tom turned over in his bed. It was a huge affair of downy softness with new-fangled pillows like clouds. Although the blankets had an ethereal lightness equalled only by the silken softness of the sheets, his body seemed to burn. That anything so light and fragrant should contain such fearsome heat surprised him, even to the wonder of his sleeping mind.
A susurration of movement.
Tom’s eyes opened fractionally.
A gleam of light. A candle passing outside the closed bedroom door. No. Not passing. Pausing. A breathless squeaking, like a secret mouse. The handle turned. The latch rose. The candle entered.
Above the golden brightness of its steady flame, the Lady Margaret’s face shone like that of a goddess, all gold. Her hair fell free in gilded ringlets down to the shoulders of her simple shift. And that shift, of purest Flemish linen, half-laced and all transparent seemed to reveal more than it could ever conceal; to frame for him; to present to him – perfection in his eyes.
Tom watched, transfixed, as she crossed to his burning bed. With steady hand she raised the silken sheet and such a draught of coldness pierced him as almost made him shout with shock.
Even so, he did not realize that he was dreaming until his silent goddess whispered, ‘I love you, Master Musgrave.’
Then he jumped awake to find himself seated at the servants’ table with quill in hand and papers scattered across the boards. The last of James’s precious candles was burning palely and a cold, grey dawn was washing in like a rising winter’s tide.
It was time to move, he thought.
***
They stopped first at the White Hart in Croydon, hard by the Archbishop’s Palace. They had set out soon after Tom awoke, leaving James in charge of the establishment in Elfinstone with a promise that they would send instructions back from Cotehel at the earliest opportunity. They travelled the thirty miles in little more than four hours, accomplishing what Lady Margaret’s coachmen had done in the first whole day. They were hungry, having yet to break their fast and not well filled by last night’s meagre meal. Even so, they were in a hurry and would have been content to eat in the saddle and go; but they had plans to finalize and information to gather. Therefore it fitted well with Tom’s schemes that they give their horses to a couple of ostlers to walk while they took a private chamber and ordered the fourpenny ordinary.
In spite of the fact that he had not really slept at all, except for the moments when he had dreamed so dazzlingly – so dangerously – Tom was fizzing with energy; and he needed to be. This was a parting of the ways, for Talbot could not afford to take weeks away from his post. Southwark needed its Bailiff, chief law officer of the Archbishop of Winchester, who owned the land between London Bridge and Lambeth Marsh where the playhouses, bear- and bull-baiting, the taverns and the brothels gathered like dangerous barnacles on the keel of that great ship of London.
What Talbot took back with him now would be of crucial importance in the interim until Tom returned home; and, indeed, in determining the welcome he would get on his arrival.
There were letters, therefore, to Ugo Stell, about the School of Defence they ran together, about the portrait and what Tom wanted done with it; to Master Aske the Haberdasher about the premises he rented for the school. There was an urgent addition to this, for Master Aske was not only landlord but churchwarden in Tom’s parish – who would be noting his absence from services during the crucial Holy Week – absence that in theory could put his back at risk of a whipping and his soul at risk of damnation.
There was a letter to Robert Poley detailing the case so far together with suspicions and instructions – neither one particularly well founded, in Tom’s opinion. There was a letter to his closest friend and occasional employer, sometime spy-master Sir Thomas Walsingham, very similar to that he sent to Poley, for transmission to the Lord Hunsdon, the Lord Chamberlain, whose Man he was as associate with Will Shakespeare’s players, in case things turned out badly; and with that there was an enclosure for Mistress Kate Shelton, whose contents were definitely not for transmission
to anyone else at all. Finally, there was a letter whose direction only Ben could add, to his stepfather the bricklayer of Islington, explaining that Ben had not broken his indentures yet again and begging the indulgence of the lad’s company for a month or so in Cornwall.
‘He’ll be glad to see the back of me,’ said Ben, as though the other two would hardly credit this news as truth at all.
‘Indeed,’ said Talbot, deadpan. ‘You surprise me.’ As he spoke, he glanced up from the letter he was writing, for the mail was by no means going all one way. The pair of them would be passing through Winchester, where Talbot’s wife Bess kept the Nag’s Head Inn while he served the Bishop beneath whose cathedral walls the inn stood in His Lordship’s properties in Southwark.
‘To practical matters,’ said Tom, swiftly, before Ben recognized the ironic tone. ‘My letters ask that funds, clothing and other necessaries be despatched in my wake – to Cotehel, if they cannot catch me on the road. I have suggested some stuff of yours be added to my baggage, Ben. Otherwise we wear what’s on our backs until the better part of May.’
‘A fragrant prospect,’ said Talbot, finishing his marital missive with a flourish.
‘But it will do us no harm to seem a little down-at-heel and out-at-elbow as we travel the Portsmouth road and then the Plymouth road beyond it,’ Tom observed. ‘We are well supplied with coin and armed with the Council’s passes – by the blessing of providence, general passes that will get us to Land’s End as well as Elfinstone. Men such as we are ten-a-penny riding southward; and if we can be either minor messengers for some pygmy at court, or men with a naval swagger, bosom friends to Raleigh and Drake when in our cups, then we will pass unnoticed, I am sure. As there are but two of us, though our steel be true, we might not fare so well if we attracted the attention of the upright men, the footpads or the highwaymen who haunt our way.’
‘They say Ratsey is abroad,’ warned Talbot, naming the most notorious of the highway robbers.
‘Then our progress should be the opposite of Lady Margaret’s: secret and swift as shadows.’
Mention of Lady Margaret’s progress brought them on to the next point of their dismounting at Croydon. The White Hart was a large and bustling establishment, but for gentlemen who took private rooms mine host was always available – or his good lady wife was.
‘Or, some say, his toothsome daughters,’ observed Talbot dryly.
‘It is information I want, as you well know,’ said Tom severely, ‘and we have no time for dalliance, even had we the inclination.’
Talbot shrugged and smiled. Ben looked a little crestfallen, however.
The host swept in and proved to be a cheerful man of a garrulous disposition, broad of face and full of belly. His innocent blue eyes twinkled artlessly above cheeks as red as beef.
His smile was near as wide as the frontage of his hostel and Tom trusted him not one small part of an inch. But, with a combination of small-scale bribery, wheedling, fantasy and outright lies, he managed to extract something that seemed close to what he wanted to know.
Lady Margaret and her party had taken the whole of the inn on Monday night last. A servant of hers had come nearly a month earlier and booked the place, with details of numbers and requirements, plans of sleeping arrangements and victuals. For horses, men and women, high-born and low. This was an arrangement of long-standing with the Outram family who had been travelling from Elfinstone to Cotehel and back since the days of mine host’s father’s grandfather, for the inn had been in their family for generations. There were few that could accommodate such numbers, and the Hart had always been the first stop out and the last back. It was so convenient, after all. For most times the family themselves, and the most important household members, would be entertained up at the palace – for even archbishops were happy to invite such infinities of wealth beneath their roofs upon the slightest acquaintance.
So Tom swiftly built up the picture he had been seeking, which had only been half-drawn by the scrawled and scored itinerary he had discovered in Lady Margaret’s desk.
For the better part of a century, one master of horse after another had sent out orders with military precision. They did so under the direction of Lord Outremer – or of Baron Cotehel, if he had not yet attained his majority and his investiture; or, in this case, of Lady Margaret Outram, the young boy-Baron’s mother. And needfully so, for the movement of the household from one castle to another was the equivalent of a considerable military campaign. In the old days, it had only been the family and their immediate servants who had moved, for there had been full staffs in both castles, in Kent and in Cornwall; but, since the terrible death of the last Lord Outremer with all his family, things had clearly changed. They had changed perforce because all of the Elfinstone servants had died with the family in the tragedy at Wormwood in Jewry, and the confusion of events subsequent to that.
Only Lady Margaret and the young Baron had survived, and neither of them had been raised or trained to their great responsibilities. During the last couple of years, therefore, many of the family’s most trusted retainers from Castle Cotehel in Cornwall had simply been moved in dribs and drabs up to Elfinstone in Kent; and now they were all being moved back down again at once, together with newly appointed people whom neither the Lady nor the young Baron could do without.
Indeed, it was not just the household that moved: there were men needed to transport them and protect them – and they needed housing too. The list was considerable. There were Captain Quin’s coachmen, needed to drive the four great coaches; his ostlers to see to the horses as they went – and to act as link-boys lighting the way at dusk if the company was late; and, most importantly, his postillions, four to a coach and armed to the teeth, for it was they who kept such vultures as Ratsey the Highwayman from the soft and golden pickings Lady Margaret must represent.
According to Lady Margaret’s itinerary, the whole army of them moved relentlessly south-westwards along the Portsmouth road – since the Armada, one of the busiest in all the realm. After Croydon, accommodation – at inns and at local country houses – would have been arranged at all the towns on the list, as it had been done each year for generations and centuries: from Elfinstone to Croydon, then Farnham, Winchester, Salisbury, Sherborne, Honiton and Buckfast, down to Castle Cotehel itself. Throughout the whole of Holy Week, to Easter, the end of the old year and the start of the new with the Feast of All Fools.
Attended by all the danger that represented to the intrepid but silent woman in charge of all.
It’s time to move,’ decided Tom.
***
Tom and Ben did not really join the Portsmouth road until they crossed the River Wey at Guildford. They could have ridden south to the shallow ford at Shalford, but they preferred to pay the toll on the Friary Bridge, which had lined the guild’s pockets since they had taken control of the road and the ford itself in the days before Dick Whittington was Mayor of London, and make haste along their way; and, thought Tom, in due course and later on, it was a blessed chance well suited to the holy season that they did.
At the end of the hard-ridden day, as the sun began to set in their tired eyes, they cantered along the crest of the Downs, looking away across the purple-shadowed lowlands to north and south, spurring towards the still-distant village of Farnham and the hope of a bed for the night. The crest of the Downs was high and sharp. It wound, dipped and rose as though a serpent writhed beneath. The countryside around was wild enough, and there was a reputation about the place sinister enough for the local villagers to give a part of it the name of the Devil’s Punch-Bowl, a little to the south of here, in due time.
Woods gathered and gloomed along the narrow way, for all that the ground beneath them lay sky-coloured with bluebells, throwing down great spidery clouds of shadow through the blood-red dusky light, their myriad limbs thickened by the uncontrolled budding of new leaves for the spring. It was a balmy evening, fragrant with early blossom, a-stir with hares and rabbits and a-hum with the mur
muring of early dumbledores. The thudding of their hooves and the jingle of their tack was all but lost beneath the evening cries of nesting birds – so that, as it had been at the beginning of the affair, it was only Tom’s quicksilver-swift acuity and steel-sharp hearing that was able to distinguish the icy clash and slither of sword-steel on sword-steel in the heart of the darkness dead ahead.
Twelve: St Just
Tom pulled a budding branch silently aside and peered across the clearing. He moved the bough with his left hand, for his long, deadly rapier was drawn in his right.
‘What can you see?’ whispered Ben, crouching like a bear behind him, his voice ringing with ill-contained excitement. The master found himself distracted from the view for a moment by the thought that his young apprentice was far too fond of violence.
Tom gestured for silence and narrowed his eyes, focusing his intellect on the matter in hand again. In truth, he could see more than he had expected to see. The clearing before him opened on a shoulder of the Downs that fell away westwards above a wide smoke-grey valley; and so, while he and Ben knelt in darkness here, the men in the midst of the sword-fight were bathed in the last of the light. It was clear at a glance how things stood: one man alone fought three assailants.
The lone man was well dressed; the castaway cloak and straying horse were doubtless his, as well, thought Tom with the ghost of a frown, as the slouch-brimmed hat with its familiar feather. His clothing bespoke some gentility – some grasp of fashion and the funds to support it at the least. He was a master of defence, too, by the look of his technique, though in the traditional English school of old George Silver and his like country-style, fit neither for London nor the fashions of Court, but effective enough for all that.
Tom felt Ben leaning massively forward at his shoulder and allowed the lad a clearer view, and a whisper of education.
