The Silent Murder (Master of Defence Book 4)

by Peter Tonkin

  ‘Let’s hope not,’ said St Just, heaving his seemingly drunken charge up on to the last ladder.

  St Just was not the only one to notice Tom’s state. As he came through on to the vertiginously open roofing there was a group of concerned friends there working to make sure that he fell inwards not outwards – if he fell at all; but in fact he did not fall. He staggered a little but remained erect until Lady Margaret, firmly taking charge, led him into the safe and secluded area made by the rear of the nearest gun carriage and sat him there as though upon a throne.

  They still had the dark-lantern with them, and by its light she tore the shoulder off his doublet and shirt, exposing the thick red welt of his wound. Then, oblivious to petty propriety, concerned only about cleanliness and the risk of infection, she pulled up her slattern’s skirts and ripped makeshift bandages off her petticoats. As she bound up his shoulder, Tom looked over at the setting moon.

  ‘Still a while to go,’ he said. ‘Check all the trap-doors and bolt them shut. We want no more surprises here.’ He turned to St Just as the others went off, obeying his orders. ‘I saw young Kit take sail, but he’ll not be back for a brace of hours – always assuming Robert Poley’s awake and ready to go.’

  ‘Is that likely, do you think?’ asked Ben, calling over from the nearest trap-door.

  ‘I cannot be certain sure,’ admitted Tom. ‘It all rests upon the second letter. That Mann had a secret message in the heel of his shoe is possible, for, as Poley said, it was one of the ways Babbington and the others used in their treason with Mary of Scots; but the message was so simple and its transliteration so obvious that I wondered whether Poley showed it to us for some secret reason of his own.’

  ‘Such as?’ enquired Ben, piqued that his hard work be so lightly dismissed.

  ‘To point us in the Spanish direction. To show us how Gawdy might have talked to Spain. To warn us that we should look beyond mere smuggling. It certainly did all of these things; but then again, perhaps it is just that Poley wanted to make assurance double sure. He had seen almost all that was in the thing, but thought perhaps we could tell him more – uncover something he had overlooked. ‘Tis entirely possible either way, given the man. Are all the traps bolted fast? Good. Now, Master St Just, can these culverins be made to fire inwards as well as outwards?’

  ‘Indeed they can. That is why they are on carriages with wheels and trunnions. That is why the top of the keep has been made the way it has.’

  ‘And were we to move the culverins, could you guide us in the loading and the laying?’

  ‘Of course I could. I laid the guns aboard Revenge for Drake. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Were Poley to come to our rescue and ride up Rame Head with the troop of horse we hope for, what would he be faced with?’

  ‘The great gate, portcullis down and full of well-armed tercio men. The great approach would be a killing field.’

  ‘And they would have good reason to slow him down and hold him back because...’

  ‘Because the rest of the raiding party would be taking their hostages down to the galleys,’ answered Ben, used to the Socratic method.

  ‘But if the galleys were no longer available, what then?’

  There was a short silence as they all considered their answer.

  Then Ben, the apprentice bricklayer, whispered, almost breathlessly, ‘Why, master! You have looked with a bricklayer’s eye!’

  ‘I have, apprentice mine. But yours is the craft, so you must explain.’

  ‘The back wall is built upon an overhang. The rear of the powder store – aye and of the church itself – sit out upon a ledge above the bay. If the guns were laid so as to make them fall outwards...’

  St Just, the sailor, took up the theme. ‘If the walls fell on the galleys, then the galleys would no longer be there. Then they would be like the men from the Armada galleys wrecked along the Irish coast: lost and with no retreat.’

  ‘And what did those men do?’ whispered Tom, ever more faintly.

  ‘They gave up. Gave in.’

  ‘Precisely. Then, with Lady Margaret’s permission, and under the Baron’s direction, let us lay the guns.’

  The demi-culverins were heavy even though their barrels were shorter than the full culverins below. The wheels and trunnions on the carriages were by no means free and easy. In the end, everyone except Tom was needed to wedge the gun-pikes into the cracks between the flags and lever the things around. All of them except Tom were needed to shoulder the ropes attached to the fronts of the carriages and pull them across the level plain of the roof. Protesting, creaking and screaming, they went. Fortunately they only needed two in place, but each took the better part of an hour to position – especially as they both needed complex and specialist treatment. The Baron and Lady Margaret joined in with all the others under St Just’s grim tutelage as they learned how to load and lay a demi-culverin. The barrels needed especially careful loading because Tom insisted on overcharging each. Double loads of powder and double loads of cannon-balls were needed, then extra wadding to keep it all in place – and extra wadding rammed in hard on top of that, for the barrels were to be angled sharply downwards. Wedges were hammered under their rear wheels to tilt the great guns downwards at Tom’s suggestion and under St Just’s expert direction.

  Perhaps because they were so few in number, perhaps because there was no way of knowing who they were or where they had gone after the inferno in Lady Margaret’s room, the Spaniards left them alone. Bereft of their English turncoat allies, the invaders had enough to occupy them, and clearly no one amongst them even dreamed of the mayhem the determined little band could cause.

  ‘Grawdy was never down here,’ said St Just grimly as they worked. ‘And even if he had been, there was no way he could have understood these fortifications. If the Spaniards are relying on his information, then they will find themselves sadly misinformed.’

  ‘Will they take the hostages straight down to the galleys, do you think?’ asked Hal, ramming the wadding in with all his strength.

  ‘They’ll do that last of all,’ Tom assured him. ‘They are easier to control where they are in the great hall. And besides, they will do as surety should anything go amiss. They are needed on hand until the last possible moment.’

  Lady Margaret took her son’s shoulder and mouthed to him.

  ‘Galley slaves?’ he asked on her behalf. ‘The Spanish soldiers rowed themselves,’ Tom assured them both.

  ***

  The culverins were laid by moonset, and the last of the light spurred them on. ‘Poley is due with the dawning,’ whispered Tom.

  ‘And that’s not far away,’ whispered St Just. ‘Do we wait for sunrise or attack at once?’

  ‘Attack,’ ordered Tom. ‘As soon as the darkness comes.’

  They didn’t have long to wait. The last of the moon sank down behind Plymouth and the pre-dawn darkness closed down. Even the stars seemed pallid, so that the brightness of the fuse was like a flambard when St Just lit it at the blazing chimney of their dark-lantern. The moment that he did so, a shot rang out and he was thrown backwards just as Tom had been. In the darkness it was impossible to see how badly he was wounded – and clearly, opening the dark-lantern would simply invite further attacks. So Tom grabbed the burning fuse and crawled to the culverin. He had been the one who had suggested the target, though St Just had done the final aiming. He was best placed to fire, therefore. He jammed the fuse into the culverin’s open pan. The powder of the charge caught at once.

  ‘Get dack!’ called St Just weakly but clearly.

  Tom took him at his word and threw himself back at once – and just in time. The gun exploded with the most colossal sound, hurling itself back wildly, like an unbroken stallion. The whole carriage came apart and the barrel reared and fell on its side, smoking and burning.

  What happened on the roof was nothing compared with what happened below. For the culverin had been aimed at the powder store. Two cannon-balls, of cast iron, heated alik
e by the explosion of the powder behind them and by the friction of their flight because of it, smashed through the walls and into the piles of barrels there. They all exploded at once, hurling the roof upwards and the lighter walls inwards. But there was enough power to hurl the heavier walls outwards as well – not just the walls outside the powder store but the sally-port beside it and even the tower of St Michael’s-within-Cotehel. All of the outer walls tumbled off the cliff and fell three hundred feet straight down on to the galleys at the jetty below; and the great bell in the church tower at last got to ring the alarm as it fell, like the wrath of God himself, upon the heads of their enemies.

  ‘Shall we fire the second culverin?’ asked Ben into the great cave of silence that followed this.

  ‘Why not?’ croaked St Just. ‘I doubt there’ll de any other guns tointed our way after that. And we want to welcone Naster Toley when he arrives, do we not?’

  Tom passed the still-burning fuse to his apprentice. ‘Open the gate, Ben,’ he commanded.

  ***

  So it was that, when Robert Poley reported his arrival with a troop of horse in the grey light of dawn next morning to the Council, he wrote that he had found the great gate of Cotehel Castle not only open but blasted wide with shards and splinters littered all down the great approach.

  There were Spaniards still within the castle itself, he wrote, but they were quiescent and willing to negotiate, for their ships had been destroyed and their defences thoroughly demolished – indeed, they were seemingly under the command of the young Baron himself. Certainly, with the exception of his mother, all those who might have been expected to guide and advise him were in a dire state. His tutor was dead, apparently killed in the attack together with his mother’s secretary. The household’s master of horse had been killed in the first Spanish attack. The boy’s tutor in the science of defence and the visiting Master of Defence were both sorely wounded. Various other persons too unimportant to name had lent their help; but it was the young Baron, by all accounts, who had organized the defences and seen the invaders off, except for those his troop of horse had taken into captivity to answer questions at the Council’s leisure; and all this information went off with the swiftest horseman in the first clear light of morning.

  The only other news he had to report was that he was bringing the wounded heroes back to London at once himself, for they were both feverish and in need of the finest treatment.

  So it was that Lady Margaret stood in the morning looking out through the ruins of the great gate at the pair of litters rolling northward surrounded by familiar riders. In the wreckage of the great hall, which – like the gate and the sally-port wall – she would have to repair at once, her portrait stood, repaired by Tom and returned to her. No longer did it make her think of the Earl of Essex, whom she hated, but of her protector, on whom she could always rely – no matter what the danger.

  As she watched the litters wind away out of her sight, she looked down at a piece of paper on which she had written earlier, hoping to pass it to one of the wounded heroes.

  I love you, Thomas Musgrave, it said.

  Clear-eyed and accepting the dictates of fortune for the moment, she folded it and slipped it into her sleeve.

  There would be time enough to give it to him in due course, God willing, she thought.

  Acknowledgements

  On the morning of 23 July 1595, 110 days or so after the story of The Silent Woman closes, four Spanish galleys from the Spanish Netherlands landed in excess of 200 men westward of Mousehole, in Cornwall, and burned the town. Then they came ashore at Newlyn and attacked and burned sections of Penzance. This was the first – and last invasion of the south since 1066 and it caused a great deal of shock in Elizabethan England. It also gave Essex his excuse for attacking Cadiz, which he did as co-commander with Lord Howard, the Lord Admiral, in 1596. I am indebted for this information to the West Penwith Resources website. I am indebted to more traditional sources – to wit, G. M. Trevelyan’s English Social History – for the information that the smuggling of tobacco between the Spanish Netherlands and the south of England was big business by 1597.

  To be fair, there is a slightly shorter list of authorities required than usual this time, for the two major settings – the two castles, of Elfinstone and Cotehel – are purely fictional. Cothele House exists well up the River Tamar, and is one of the best-preserved Tudor country houses in existence. Its interiors inspired those of Castle Cotehel; but there is no castle on Rame Head – only St Michael’s Church, which is much as described.

  The landscapes both in Kent and Cornwall were based on the Ordnance Survey’s relevant Landranger series of maps. The travelling between them was based upon Gamini Salgado’s The Elizabethan Underworld. The households of these two establishments are based upon Juliet Gardiner’s The Edwardian Country House and The Elizabethan Household. The way in which Lady Margaret runs both is based upon Bess of Hardwick, a powerful historical character who moves through various chapters and references in both Antonia Fraser’s The Weaker Vessel and Alison Sim’s The Tudor Housewife. I am also indebted to Elizabeth Burton’s The Elizabethans at Home and John Dover Wilson’s Life in Elizabethan England; to texts as ancient as Cunnington and Cunnington’s Handbook of English Costume in the Seventeenth Century (1955) and as modern as Hart-Davis’s What the Tudors and Stuarts Did For Us (2003). I am happy to thank the librarians at Tunbridge Wells Library and my own librarians at the Wildernesse School who have helped me – yet again – with these authorities, some of which are long out of print and very difficult to get hold of. I must also thank Mike Gray, Head of History at the Wildernesse, who has always been unfailing in his knowledge and advice.

  Ben Jonson is also ‘real’, and as close to ‘historical reality’ as I can manage. He was the son of a clergyman, who died before his birth, leaving his mother to fall back upon the hated brick-maker as stepfather to her brilliant, but bellicose and self-opinionated, son. Ben won a scholarship to Westminster School. He went to the Spanish Netherlands as a gentleman-adventurer, killed his man, a Spaniard, in hand-to-hand combat and stripped him of his armour and sword. Soon after the ‘events’ in our story he may have gone to Cambridge; he certainly married ‘a shrew, but honest’ and settled to a theatrical, literary life, which saw him in and out of jail on a fairly regular basis. Even so, his reputation eventually rivalled that of Shakespeare, whom he was to survive by twenty years or so. He was lucky to do so. In 1598 he killed Gabriel Spencer, the actor, in a brawl and was sentenced to hang. He pleaded benefit of clergy and instead he was branded on the thumb with a letter ‘T’.

  Amongst Ben Jonson’s most successful plays of later years, first produced in 1609, was Epicoene, or The Silent Woman.

  Peter Tonkin,

  Tunbridge Wells

  If you enjoyed The Silent Murder you might be interested in A Midwinter Murder by Peter Tonkin, also published by Endeavour Press.

  Extract from A Midwinter Murder by Peter Tonkin

  One: Eve

  London, 24 December 1594

  As soon as he heard the screams, Tom Musgrave started to run towards them. At his second step his sword hissed out, its blade glimmering like quicksilver. By his fourth step he knew it was the Queen herself who must be screaming. As he ran towards the shocking sound, his mind leaped onward, questing like a well-trained hound along the thorny, twisting paths of logic. But if quick Logic bounded ahead, cool Reason nipped at his heels like a cur, always a step behind.

  Tom tore across the backstage area of the temporary stage that the Lord Chamberlain’s personal company of actors had erected at the end of the Great Hall in White Hall Palace at the direction of Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon and Lord Chamberlain, whose Men they were, against the celebration of Christmas on the morrow with the first performance of Will Shakespeare’s new play. The hall was closed by Lord Henry’s direct order to let them rehearse. In all the kingdom, few enough would dare disobey Lord Henry – and of those few, only one was a woman.

>   The Queen herself, then, reasoned Tom, the Master of Logic, as he ran; but what devil had tempted Her Majesty to peek into the forbidden hall, and what in God’s name had she seen to affright her so?

  At the very point of the question, Tom tore past the heavy curtains that decorated the stage front and hurled himself down on to the floor of the hall; and there indeed, just inside the great door, with her hand to her mouth, her face utterly white and her eyes wide, stood Queen Elizabeth – Gloriana herself. Blade in the variable ward, lowest of the basic defensive positions, he skidded towards her, watching her eyes widen still further.

  With Tom’s great logical mind too far ahead and his good sense too far behind to see what a mire of danger he was sinking into here, his Good Angel took a hand. Before he could take another step towards the startled Queen he lost his footing and crashed to his knees, sliding to a stop before her even as the door behind her was torn open and a tall, slim courtier hurled himself to her aid, also reacting to her screaming; also drawn and en garde. But whereas Tom was supported only by the Chamberlain’s Men – and most of them dressed as fairies – the newcomer was backed up by several familiar, unfriendly faces. And by Her Majesty’s personal guards.

  Tom recognized the newcomer, in spite of the fact that, like the Queen’s, his face was masked in the thick white powder so fashionable at court, and his heart sank. Then, as his wild slide slowed, so he turned a little and became able to see what Her Majesty could see. On the stage past which Tom had just run, in the midst of an enchanted forest, sat young Sly, dressed as the Queen of the Fairies. Behind Sly stood Will himself, costumed as the Fairy King, agape with horror; and, saw Tom, the Master of Logic, all too late to moderate his dangerous reaction, the cause of Her Majesty’s affright knelt between them. It was Will Kempe, the Clown, the greatest and most famous of the players – Kempe in the revealing rags of Bottom the Weaver, bearing on his shoulders the great ass’s head so carefully and realistically fashioned for the magical translation scene.