by Peter Tonkin
The icy point of the familiar courtier’s rapier resting on the pit of his throat turned Tom’s head back, and he tore his gaze away from the stage to look up along the gleaming length of finest Ferrara steel into the steady dark eyes of his greatest enemy.
‘Drawn in the Queen’s presence,’ said Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex, quietly.
‘That means death. Even for a Master of Defence,’ added his nearest, sneering companion, as white-faced as Essex, whom Tom recognized as one de Vaux. Like his master, de Vaux was clearly enjoying the situation hugely.
But Her Majesty was recovered now. ‘Tush, My Lord,’ she said briskly to Essex. ‘The man was running to our aid. These latter years we are not so well supplied with gallants that we can afford to despatch such valiant protectors in such a cavalier fashion. And this is the famous Master of Defence you say?’ she demanded more generally.
‘Thomas Musgrave, Your Majesty.’ Tom was well placed to make his own introduction, needing to do and say almost nothing more, bowing on his knees as he was.
It was then that the door swung wider still and friends joined foes around the person of the Queen. ‘What, My Lord of Essex!’ came the blessedly familiar voice of Lord Henry, the Lord Chamberlain. ‘Drawn in the royal presence. Do you put so little value on your head, sir?’
‘Robin was protecting our royal person, My Lord. We give him leave. And Master Musgrave, come to that. They may stand drawn in the royal presence if occasion demands it. There cannot be two such game cocks in all our kingdom as swift with their steel or as loyal with their hearts.’
‘Protecting you against what, Your Majesty?’ asked Lord Henry softly.
‘Against an actor in an ass’s head, Henry – and good Will Kempe at that, if we are any judge in the matter. We have not been so frighted since we were a girl. By a monster jumping out of the woods! Yourself, like as not, or one of Master Shelton our guardian’s children.’ Her Majesty recalled that long-lost girl in a peal of laughter that might have graced the throat of any child. ‘By an ass’s head forsooth! Walsingham!’
‘Your Majesty?’ came the distant voice of Thomas Walsingham, Tom Musgrave’s closest friend at court.
‘Are the Shelton girls at court within your train?’
‘They are, Your Majesty.’
Tom could have told the Queen the truth of that matter, for Kate, the younger of the Shelton sisters, younger daughter to one of the children who might have played with the youthful Queen, was his mistress; as Audrey, the elder, was Walsingham’s.
‘Good,’ said the Queen, sweeping out of the hall again, with all of the court in tow, ‘then we can expect much amusingly lewd speculation as to whether the ass’s head might be matched by other, more private, parts – and of equal proportion.’ Laughter began to recede – laughter no longer so innocently girlish in its nature.
‘Course they are,’ said Will Kempe, rising as the door closed. ‘What else d’ye think gave Will the idea in the first place? "Give me the head of an ass, Will," said I, "for you know I am hung like a donkey in truth..."‘
As the Chamberlain’s Men joined Kempe in their own peal of laughter, Tom pulled himself erect. He stood a little shakily, and it required two attempts, separated by a deep breath, to slide the long Solingen blade of his sword home again, feeling the sensitive side of his thumb rub against the reassuring roughness of the running-wolf trademark etched into the steel. He would never know whether it was the proximity of majesty, disaster or death that affected him so.
Yet, he thought, grimly turning back towards the rudely interrupted rehearsal of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, given his intimate acquaintance with death and disaster of all sorts, it was the closeness of Her Majesty that seemed most likely to have shaken him so badly.
Or, he came to suspect later, perhaps it was a premonition of what was coming next.
Although Will’s new play was set in a magical forest beside ancient Athens, the actors wore the cast-off finery handed down to them from great houses – not least that of the Lord Chamberlain himself. Their costumes were contemporary, therefore, if slightly old-fashioned; and the swordplay between the lovers Demetrius and Lysander was a dangerously comic exhibition match in the new Italian style of which Tom was the undisputed master.
Tom was putting a final polish to this dazzling piece of comic byplay when Thomas Walsingham returned and called up the length of the great Hall, ‘Tom. There’s a messenger newly arrived from the North. He’s with Lord Henry now.’
‘Indeed, sir,’ answered Tom. He stepped back and sheathed his sword once more. ‘Why do you condescend to bring this news to my notice?’
‘Because,’ said Thomas Walsingham shortly, ‘the message is for you.’
The little reception room was on the east side of the palace and its window looked along the river towards the distant span of the bridge where Tom’s last adventure had come to its bloody end six months since. Lord Henry stood beside the casement, the glorious colour of his court costume sucking life even from the thin grey light of a midwinter’s afternoon – he alone of all the men and women Tom had seen at court this afternoon disdained the rage for powdering his face with arsenic powder – but Tom had eyes for neither the emotive view nor for his dazzling patron. The familiar figure of the messenger turned towards him and he, like the screaming Queen, was put in mind of the most frightful moments of his childhood.
‘Hobbie?’ he said, uncertainly, striding forward. Then the wrinkled, leathery face creased into the ghost of a grin and uncertainty fell away. ‘Hobbie,’ he said with simple certainty and enfolded the wiry old frame to his bosom. Halbert Noble, called ‘Hobbie’ through all the wild Borders, had taught him everything he had known of weaponry and survival until he had entered the Master’s School of Maestro Capo Fero at Siena some half dozen years since. Save for the matter of fighting with foil and rapier in the Italian style, even Capo Fero had been hard put to better Hobbie’s tutelage; and, as his common name implied, he knew the border country as well as one of the sure-footed tireless ponies of the place. Hobbie horses, they were called; creatures that could go, with a rider, into places a man on foot hardly dared venture. There was no track on moss, moor or fell he could not follow, no mark of bird or beast in all the North that Hobbie could not recognize.
‘I’ve come with hard news,’ said Hobbie forthrightly as soon as Tom released him. ‘Heavy tidings.’
‘Are they for me?’
‘Aye.’
‘Then if they are mine, give them to me. Straight, man.’
Hobbie Noble’s eyes met Tom’s, seemingly level for all that one man was wiry and bowed with age while the other stood youthfully tall. ‘It’s your brother, the Blacksmith of Bewcastle,’ he said, adding the unnecessary phrase of his title as a measure of great respect; for Tom had only one brother, John, two years his elder, and Hobbie Noble wasted nothing – certainly not words. ‘He’s dead.’
Tom licked his lips. The news had shocked him though he had been half-expecting some such words since Thomas Walsingham had called him out of the hall. ‘Was it an accident?’ he asked. Smithing was by no means a safe trade, even for men as massive and expert as his brother and father had been.
Hobbie’s head shook in that atom of communication which characterized that man.
‘A raid?’ – which was how his own mother had died, cut down by the red McGregors come reiving across the debatable land when Tom himself was scarce weaned; not killed but crippled then, doomed to linger for sixteen more years before winning her blessed relief. But Hobbie shook his head again.
‘Then what?’ demanded Tom.
Hobbie’s eyes slid away. Tom looked, frowning across at the resplendent Lord Henry, who was, amongst other things, the Lord of the North, Her Majesty’s eyes on the Northern English Borders as they marched by southernmost Scotland.
‘Your uncle, who still signs himself the Lord of the Waste, I note, has written of the inquest he has held into the circumstances,’ said Lord Henry. ‘He
reports that your brother’s body was found in the lower branches of the Great Oak that stands at the head of the Black Lyne. It is a dangerous river in a wild place, as I recall. You know it?’
‘And the tree, My Lord. It has stood there hard by Arthur’s Seat since the beginning of time. It must reach nigh on two hundred feet to the crown. The lowest branches must stand twelve feet above ground.’
‘Nigh on fifteen feet,’ agreed Hobbie.
‘Even so. Your brother was discovered dead on the lower branches, kneeling, looking downwards, frozen like marble.’
‘Frozen?’ echoed Tom. ‘He died of the cold?’
‘No. The Lord of the Waste reports that there is no doubt that he died of fear – of sheer, stark terror.’
Tom laughed out loud at that. ‘There’s nothing in all the world would frighten John to death!’ he said. ‘What makes them think such a ridiculous thing?’
A fifth figure leaned forward at that, a slight, dark-clad, gold-haired stripling lost in the shadows behind Lord Henry until this moment.
‘Something beyond the world,’ said a steady, cool voice. ‘Something came from another, hotter place altogether. Tell him, Hobbie.’
‘All around the trunk, the Great Oak was clawed,’ said Hobbie reluctantly. ‘From the grass, to near the branches themselves. The bark torn off and the live wood splintered, bleeding. Clawed like a great bear can claw a dog at the baiting. But clawed, as you said, for two full fathoms. For twelve sheer feet. And clawed clear to the heartwood beneath the blacksmith’s body.’
‘By a bear?’ said Tom, simply dazed. ‘Did you say a bear?’
‘No, lad. This was never the work of a bear.’
‘Then what? Hobbie, what was it?’
‘It was a hound, Tom. They were the marks of a monstrous hound.’
The stripling youth stood up and closed with Tom then, and with another huge jolt of surprise he recognized her. No youth come south at Hobbie’s heels, but his own sister-in-law Eve – Eve Graham as was, when they had dallied on the heather fifteen summers since, before she had fallen in love with the slow, shy charm of his big brother, and begun the relationship that had driven Tom himself so far away from home. Eve Musgrave now, his brother John’s new-made widow.
Eve’s still grey eyes held his gaze as fathomless as the Kielder water. ‘Don’t you see, Tom?’ she whispered. ‘It was a hound, but a hound such as no man can look on and survive. It was the Barguest, Tom. We know it now for certain, and rumour says he wasn’t the first to die. But he was the first we have found. And so it is certain now. The Barguest is out on the Borders and it has taken your brother’s soul.’
To download the book and continue reading click here.
