by Peter Tonkin
‘What we have here is a contest at la macchia, as we say – a rough and tumble. Literally – for the Italian means “in the woods”.’ He smiled at the little wordplay that had fallen so neatly. ‘And it is on both sides a sword-and-dagger bout, for see, they are all armed left and right. The lone combatant is a master. Or has been very well taught. But in the old style. There. You see? He used the edge, not the point. Though the counter with the dagger was fine. And the fat opponent bleeds from the breast. Our man’s falchion or bastard cutlass has merely wounded him, where our rapiers would have despatched him there and then.’
‘Is not the cutlass a weapon such as common sailors might use?’ demanded Ben. ‘And sailors would not be so uncommon on the Portsmouth road,’ he added as an afterthought.
‘Indeed,’ allowed Tom, to whom such thoughts came automatically, as though from the masters in the history of logical thinking. ‘But this one, if a sailor, is by no means common. For see, he takes guard again. It is the high ward. And, from the look of it, what Silver would have called a true guardant. He will lead with the edge in a sweeping, downward...There! See! And so the thin opponent staggers back. But once again, blooded. Not killed. Now comes their leader...’
‘Polyphemus,’ observed Ben.
‘A Cyclops indeed,’ agreed Tom, for the third ruffian wore an eye-patch.
‘And a brave one to throw himself in like that,’ suggested Ben.
‘Or a foolhardy,’ decided Tom. ‘For see where our man has recovered from his stroke against the thin man and achieves a molinello, a near full-circle sweep across his face.’
‘But he has missed!’
‘The object was not beheading then. But see, Cyclops has started back to protect his last eye and...Ah. I had not observed the whole...You see? His bulk unsights the fat man, who has gone for a dag...’
No sooner had Tom made his observation than the little hand weapon exploded. The flat report was almost lost amid the confusion it caused, frightening every bird nearby into flapping and screeching panic. The footpad with the eye-patch was blown forward as the ball took him in the shoulder. And there, waiting convenient to his breast was the lone sword-master’s long-bladed main gauche dagger.
Tom saw at once, though, that all was not turning out as might have been expected. ‘Cyclops is armoured as well as armed,’ he spat as the slight figure in its gentlemanly garb was borne back abruptly, clearly taken by surprise. ‘As one might expect a footpad to be.’
The last words were left on the air above Ben’s head as Tom threw himself forward into the unequal combat.
‘And the fat footpad has another dag, primed and ready to fire,’ added Ben, almost to himself, as he too threw himself forward into the attack, suddenly bursting with simple glee.
He had no idea at all that he was howling like one of the fearsome natives of Raleigh’s Virginia colony.
Tom had seen the second sidearm and he threw himself towards the fat footpad with all his considerable strength and speed. At the outer edge of his vision he saw the lone stranger falling backwards beneath the weight of the armoured but wounded Cyclops, dagger broken or gone, the heaviness of the body enhanced by the added pressure of both armour and ball-strike. But Cyclops, stunned by the attack by his own man, out of control of his ancient short-sword and his long poniard alike, presented no immediate threat beyond squassation – or, thought Tom, more accurately peine forte et dure, where the victim was pressed beneath with great weight on his breast.
Behind him, Ben came through the laurel like a bull through a gate, howling like an Irish banshee.
The fat footpad hesitated – whether in the face of Tom’s shadowy speed or Ben’s explosive entrance they would never know. The dag’s short barrel wavered away from its primary target and never found another. Tom’s rapier took the bloodied man exactly at the point where he had been wounded before, and deepened the shallow gash across his upper breast into a lethal well, plumbed by his rapier, reaching straight through his chest and out of his back. Clearly, only the leader of the band could afford any armour, thought Tom as he slid the two-foot length of his dagger into the footpad’s heart and finished the business before disengaging and whirling away. The dag exploded in the dead man’s grip and the ball did more damage to the local crows than to the combatants this time.
Ben had taken the thin man head to head, as though they were bulls in a field. Fortunately the scrawny footpad was much less than a master of his art, so that even the bricklayer’s sword technique reduced him to confusion. No, thought Tom, given an instant’s leisure to observe matters, not Ben’s sword technique. It was Ben’s approach to the battle that unnerved the gawky footpad. For Ben seemed in a very heaven of delight, his face aflame with blood-lust and his eyes agleam with joy. The footpad struck at him almost hesitantly and Ben hit the man’s blade aside with his hand as though forgetting he held a sword at all. The weight of him hit the robber like a ram and blasted him back. He seemed to fly several feet before he hit a bush that was fortunately tall and strong enough to bear him up. Then he simply turned and fled into the shadows. Tom turned also, leaving Ben to huff and puff and shout a bloodcurdling mix of threat and insult.
The man they had come to help lay alone. The Cyclops, like his lesser friend, had vanished during the melee, and it was Tom, as ever, who felt the weight of the matter. His mastery – and his alone – had claimed a life. However good the reason or the effect, he pondered darkly, he had put his hope of Heaven another step further away. How simple to be of the Catholic faith, he thought with a flash of shallow Protestant jealousy, to have confession, penance and forgiveness, to find a priest and obtain a snow-white soul; but then he sheathed his scruples with his rapier, as ever, and turned to the matter in hand.
Ben was crouching beside the man they had rescued, looking down with a frown. In the ruddy glow after sunset his face looked like a thing of brick – like one of the terracotta satyr masks Tom remembered from his years in Italy. Tom approached and knelt, thinking of his old saying – last used over the corpse of the messenger who had started all this: Eyes first...
‘Is he dead?’ demanded Ben almost hopefully, his blood-lust still up.
‘I doubt it.’ Tom’s voice was distant, his intellect engaged.
The man was young – younger than Tom, at least. His clothes were of sober black, but they were fastened with silver buttons cast as nutmegs. He lay on his back on the grass as though abed asleep, with his head turned to the side, revealing, beneath a lock of fashionably lengthy hair, a high forehead, a long, straight, Greek nose that bisected a straight brow like a Pythagorean diagram – a Greek nose with a fine nostril that quivered with breath; and, therefore, with life. A high cheekbone sat above a long, lean cheek that settled into a long, fine jaw, saved from femininity by a square, decided chin. And the face needed some manly determination about it, thought Tom, for it was a pattern of beauty. The mouth was shaped like Cupid’s own bow, and the eyes, when they flickered open, were wide, almond-shaped, framed with dark gold lashes and violet in colour.
Then this young Adonis sat up, believing himself still surrounded by footpads, no doubt, and swift to continue his powerful defence. Ben called out with shock, leaping back in horror, and even Tom’s massive equanimity was shaken; but not at the young man’s threatening action – at what his movements revealed of the left side of his face.
The left side of that beautiful visage was largely missing. Something – a falchion or a cutlass like his own, or some splinter of wood or metal behaving like a blade – had swept down that face, from cheekbone to jaw on the left side. Its edge had taken off the ear and much of the cheek – taken them clean off, revealing red muscle and pallid bone, a flash of white teeth, and, in the shadow beyond, a sinuous suggestion of tongue. And the horror of it was that the wound was by no means new, had not been inflicted in the recent fight.
The young man had been living with this face for some while, and would die with it, in the Lord’s good time.
Tom remembered young James Hammond’s words at Elfinstone last night as he had described the boy-Baron Cotehel’s staff; and he put together the nutmeg buttons with the terrible scar that had taken so long to heal: the great scar earned at Drake’s own shoulder on the deck of Revenge itself.
‘We are friends, Master St Just,’ he said quietly, just preventing another explosion of violent action. ‘Friends to the Lady Margaret, at least.’
The distinction was finely made. For Master St Just was a hard man to befriend, as Tom and Ben learned well before the night was out. Long before disfigurement had come, the young man’s character had been forged into arrogant and uncompromising lines – no doubt by his beauty and the indulgence it had won him from parents and peers alike. He was one of the jeunesse doree, and no Spanish blade or splinter was going to change that, no matter what else it changed.
‘Here’sss arrogance enough,’ he said, starting up. ‘Friendsss to the Lady and to nyself. I do not know you, fellow, and I doubt she does.’
He took it for granted that he himself should be known, and he spoke exclusively to Tom, as though Ben was below his notice entirely. His speech was slow, measured and slurred by his disfigurement. Without a cheek, he could make no ‘m’, ‘p’ or ‘b’ sounds, and unless he took great care, he hissed.
He was fortunate in current fashion at least, thought Tom, equably, watching him stride across the clearing past the gaping Ben to collect his cloak, hat and horse. The long locks made de rigueur by the Earls of Essex and Southampton went a fair way to hiding his wound. A cloak worn high on the shoulder and a hat slouched down over his eyes would disguise it altogether. Tom was hard put not to think of the stranger in the doorway of the long-burned house in Water Lane – disguised in exactly that way.
Yet he had misjudged his man, it seemed. For St Just swept his cloak into a rakish swash down off his left shoulder altogether, and his hat sat on the back of his head. ‘Whichever of you nade this carrion should dury it,’ he said as he swung into his saddle beside the dead footpad. It took even Tom an instant to realize he meant bury it...
‘And you’ll need to discuss natters with the Constatle at Farnham. If you get there defore the foot-tad’s friends arrive to revenge hin.’
Thirteen: Old Harry at Farnham
‘Arrogant puppy,’ huffed Ben, not for the first time, as they picked their way carefully along the last of the road towards the distant lights of Farnham village. They were on foot and taking it slowly, unwilling to risk the Lord Chamberlain’s horses in the dark on unknown ground.
Tom, guiding his horse with the extra care dictated by the dead weight of the late footpad draped over its saddle-bow, spoke at last. ‘Consider, Ben. Surely action is formed of an admixture of character and necessity. We each behave as we do because of what we are what the Good Lord has made us to be – and because of what we are about.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Look at yourself. You were born a vicar’s son, but chance has made you an apprentice bricklayer. Yet you behave like a scholar because you are working your way out of Islington towards Cambridge.
‘I was myself born the son of a blacksmith, but I too worked myself away from my destiny first to Carlisle Grammar School, then university at Glasgow, the battlefields of Flanders and the fencing schools of Siena. So I have become as I am through original design mutated through adventure and experience.’
‘Your meaning?’
‘Imagine if I were a young man forged by unblemished beauty and unalloyed adoration, given God’s stamp to accept universal adulation as my right, climbing upwards to the very shoulder of the country’s greatest hero at that hero’s crowning moment; and, at that very instant, to have it all snatched from me. What changes on my character would the fires of bitter experience bring? Might it not add to my arrogance? Make me flaunt my destruction just as I once allowed my beauty to take every eye? And, were I rescued from a dangerous predicament by a well-intentioned stranger, might I not snap back at the helping hand...?’
‘Like the veriest cur – even so,’ said Ben. But his tone was half-hearted and his voice was thoughtful.
‘Offering enmity in the face of friendship especially were I, this piece of perfection, this sun of universal adulation, doing something secret, something unworthy; something dangerous at the time.’
‘And consequently fearful of discovery.
‘Marry, that’s well thought on. D’ye think it’s likely?’
‘Likely or not, I suspect we’ll get to discuss the matter on further acquaintance,’ said Tom. ‘For we are bound to Cotehel as surely as the man himself; and we are bound to lodge beneath the same roof tonight, for I suspect there is only one inn at Farnham. And this is it.’
The inn was called The Harry, though in honour of which of the eight of that name who had graced the throne so far it was impossible to tell – an early one, judging by its age.
‘We should call it The Old Harry...’ opined Ben, squinting up at the sign by the burning bushel over the door, unconsciously prophetic. ‘Surely the Lady Margaret and her retinue would never have stayed in such a place as this.’
‘I don’t doubt that some would have. ‘Tis big enough to sleep a dozen and feed three. But there’s the castle up the road for Lady Margaret and her kin. I don’t know who owns it, but, like the Archbishop, they’ll not be averse to the friendship of Croesus and his mother.’
They walked shoulder to shoulder into The Harry, stooping under the lintel and stepping down two stone steps on to an ancient earth floor. Tom’s eyes swept over a dozen and more country faces, and St Just’s still mask away over by the fire. The violet eyes met his, then slid away with no hint of recognition, let alone of gratitude.
There were half a dozen wooden tables, scattered with food and drink. Beyond, stood the low, brick-built open fire hung with pots and pans, spiked with spits, belching out welcome odours and a heat that was much less welcome on a warm spring night. Beside it stood the women of the place – mother and daughters by the look of it, full-figured and as fragrant as the chickens roasting on their spits. Beyond the fire, the recessed wall was piled with ale casks and wine butts, fronted with a low bar behind which stood a solid-looking man, his face as still as St Just’s.
Tom met the stolid gaze and made use of the sudden silence occasioned by their entrance to say in his most ringing and commanding tones, ‘Good even, landlord. We need food, drink and lodging for the night. But first, I think, we need the parish constable, for I’ve a dead man draped over my horse outside.’
‘Should I ever turn playwright,’ whispered Ben in the stir of shock the announcement brought, ‘I’ll have learned all I need to know of drama in the last few seconds, I think.’
***
The parish constable was a country cousin to Virgil Grimes; and, because the Farnham gaol was a cage built on to the back of The Harry, he was seated in the bar. There was, between the cage and the stables, an old stone store-room that served the fat footpad as a morgue. ‘I’ll warn the Justice in the morning,’ said the constable, as they pulled the corpus in, allowing an ostler to lead their horses away. ‘But it’s Will Green, who’s wanted along with One-Eyed Jack Sleaford. You’ll only be held up over the matter if you want to wait for the price on his head – or if One-Eyed Jack comes looking for revenge.’
‘How much is the reward?’ demanded Ben.
‘Nobbut a shilling.’
‘Enough to bury him, perhaps,’ said Tom. ‘Ye’d have to ask the sexton that,’ said the constable, closing the door on the dead man as though that was the end of the matter.
But the sexton was also in the bar and by the time that Tom and Ben were settled in the cooler shadows, over a table set with trenchers of chicken and pottage, tarred tankards of good ale and a bottle of sack apiece, the price of a decent burial had been settled at one shilling – and six pence, which Tom laid out at once.
Their standing thus established, Tom and Ben settled to quiet conversation as though they we
re as little acquainted with St Just as he wished to be with them – wisely enough on his part, perhaps, for the constable in his slow way came and went, checking their papers as their faces were unknown, returning with reports and affidavits to sign and witness, establishing their identities and business and recording Tom’s version of the events leading up to Master Green’s demise. A version that mentioned an assault upon a third party, but a man who ran away like his assailants and remained nameless, leaving Tom and Ben to bring the matter to an end.
‘But why?’ demanded Ben in one of their few private moments together, between the comings and goings of the constable and those of the landlord’s wife and daughters with the food and the drink and the promise of so much more. ‘Why not name St Just?’
‘For the Lady Margaret’s sake. I believe she would have me hold my tongue in this.’
‘What makes you believe any such thing? We come close to breaking the law in this – by omission if not by commission. What makes you think a noble lady would have it so?’
‘When you meet her, you will know.’
‘That’s as may be; but if you read the man aright, then your continued kindness to him and this is kindly meant, you cannot deny it will heap more coals of shame upon him and stoke the fire of his resentment against us.’
‘Quite likely. You are swift of study, Ben. We’ll make you master of your Toledo blade in no time. Then, perhaps, we’ll make you master of yourself.’
Ben passed over that, much struck by another thought: ‘And ye need no more enemies on this road, master, for ye’ve made one of this footpad Jack Sleaford...’
‘Who looks a little like the landlord here, for all he has two eyes and is called Churt, not Sleaford.’
‘A second cousin or some such. It’s been known,’ said Ben. ‘They don’t go in much for travel in these parts after all. Well then, master...’
Tom shrugged, but he remained adamant; and so it was done as he commanded.
