by Phil Rickman
I supposed I could find accommodation in some part of London well away from the court and Cecil, but I’d forever be watching my back, and anyone, from a street-seller to a beggar, might be one of Walsingham’s agents.
And why would I take the risk of discovery for something I’d never afford?
I shook my head, Bonner regarding me from his pallet, a pensive forefinger extended along a cheek.
‘What else are you not telling me, John?’
Kept on shaking my head. I’d been drawn into circumstances I’d had no role in shaping. However the matter of Amy’s death and her own marriage was resolved, the Queen would remember that I’d not been here when she had need of my services. And Dudley… Dudley would also remember. If he survived.
… if a messenger was to come knocking on my door now with news that Dudley had been cut down… or shot… or skewered in a crowd…
I saw Cecil’s narrow, long-nosed face and dark, intelligent eyes, flecked, for the first time in my experience of him, with what seemed a most urgent need.
And then he’d said,
Were you to be gone, even for a matter of weeks, that might be sufficient.
For what? Sufficient for circumstances to alter so that Dudley’s marriage to the Queen was no longer a possibility…
… due to his death?
Was I mad to think thus?
‘Dudley, eh?’ Bonner said.
As if he’d tapped into my thoughts. I stared at him, startled.
‘Poor Dudley,’ he said. ‘Exiled from court, compelled to keep his burrowing tool out of the royal garden. Do you see him these days?’
‘I had… a letter from him, in which he told me that his wife may have fallen because her bones were made brittle through a malady in her breast. He’d spoken before of her illness.’
‘Interesting. I was told that the malady related to her humour. An advanced melancholy. Bodily, she appeared in good health… apart from the sallowness and loss of weight symptomatic of such a condition.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘Ah…’ Bonner shrugged. ‘You’d be surprised at the people who come and go from the Marshalsea. However, that’s neither here nor there.’
Something pulsed within me, and I knew what I had to do.
‘Ned, how do you get letters out?’
‘From here? There’s a guard who’ll collect them, for a consideration, and take them to a stable lad who, for another consideration—’
‘Nothing more private than that?’
‘An approach to the stableman himself is usually found safer for those of us allowed out of here. He’s at an inn round the corner. Offers a first-stage post-horse service. You want to send a letter?’
‘If you can spare me paper and ink.’
‘Where to? May I ask?’
‘Not far. Kew.’
‘He’ll do that by mid-afternoon. Paper and quill are in the box under the bookshelf. Sealing wax and ink, too. If it’s gone hard, add a little wine.’
‘Thank you.’
I sat down at the board with paper and quill and ink and kept the message short, asking only for a meeting. Bonner evidently didn’t feel the need to inquire who I was writing to, knowing full well who lived at Kew.
I sanded the ink and sealed the letter it with wax. He may not want to meet me at this time, but at least I would have tried.
‘I assume you know what you’re doing,’ Bonner said.
‘Not really.’
‘I’ll pray for you, then.’
‘Now I know I’m dead.’
But neither of us was laughing as I stowed the letter away in my doublet. Bonner arose and clasped my hand a final time and then brought out from his robe a single key with which he unlocked the door of his cell.
‘You have a key to your own prison?’
‘For reasons which escape me,’ Bonner said, ‘I yet seem to be less than popular in some quarters. It would not help the mood of the Marshalsea were I to be set alight in my own cell.’ He held the door open. ‘Good luck to you, John, in all your quests.’
‘Thank you, Ned.’
‘And should you ever come to possess the stone,’ Bonner said, ‘perchance you might bring it here one day. And we shall see what we shall see.’
I nodded and walked away along a short passage and down the stairs towards the darkness of the day.
XIII
Court Clown
ALREADY, HE WAS saying, her ghost had been seen on those stairs at Cumnor Place. The little stairs, the too-short stairs.
‘All in white,’ Dudley said, ‘but with a grey light around her, like to a… a dusty shroud. Walking off the top step, gazing ahead of her and then… then she vanishes.’
His body stiffening as if to forestall a shiver, and then he was pouring more wine, as though to prove to himself that his hand was not shaking.
‘But never coming to me,’ he said. ‘Why not to me?’
He didn’t drink.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I never see them either.’
The weak sun had begun to fade into the river at the bottom of my mother’s garden. A garden which, like Dudley’s beard, was less tended these days. He looked hard at me, his skin darkening – stretched parchment held too close to a candle, as though the rage in him were burning through the grief.
Was it grief, or was there a suppressed excitement? How could I be sure? But the rage was ever there, and some of it might have been directed inwards.
He must have called for a horse the minute my letter had arrived. Five men had ridden with him to Mortlake – John Forest, his lieutenant, Thomas Blount, his steward and three men armed as though for war. Blount and Forest were in the old scullery, probably reducing my mother’s larder to crumbs, but two armed men were outside and one guarded the door of my private workroom, where Dudley and I now sat.
‘You know about these matters,’ he said. ‘If I murdered her, why’s she not haunting me?’
He spoke roughly, and then sat back, as if ashamed. Both of us silent now. Early evening light cowered in the murky glass behind my finest owl. Through a system of pulleys, this owl could flap his wings and make hoot but now stood like a sentinel in the small window.
‘Your men are all laden with weaponry,’ I said. ‘One with a firearm?’
‘You noticed that.’
Dudley rolled his head wearily, black hair still sweated to his brow from the vigour of the ride. The horses had been taken around the back, to what remained of our stables, but their arrival here would hardly have gone unobserved, and I knew I was imperilled by their very presence.
I said, ‘You’ve had threats to your life?’
‘There’s ever been threats to my life. I’m a Dudley.’
I’d met him just once since our return from Glastonbury. This was before Amy’s death, and he’d displayed a feverish hunger for life. It had seemed no time at all since his father, John Dudley, Earl of Northumberland, had hired me to teach his sons mathematics and astronomy. But, he was right, death and the Dudleys were bedfellows.
Robert Dudley was twenty-eight years old.
Five years younger than me, ten years younger than Sir William Cecil.
And of an age equal to the Queen. To the day, he’d claim. Even to the hour.
Twin souls.
Would he kill his own wife for her?
I’d stared hard at this question, night after night, and my most brutal conclusion was: yes, he might. If he scented destiny. If he saw himself as the only man who could save the country from France and Spain and a Catholic resurgence. If he thought Amy was ill and would not live long. If he—
Dear God, I must needs put this from my mind. I arose and went to the window, standing next to the owl, symbol of Athena, goddess of wisdom, and I’d rarely needed it more.
‘I was taken this morning to Cecil,’ I said.
Watching his fingers curl, the knuckles grown pale as I explained about the heralded visit to me of Blanche Parry and the act o
f near-piracy that had taken me to the Strand. And some of what I’d learned there.
Dudley drained his wineglass.
‘Cecil believes he’s doing what’s best for the Queen, but he’s fighting for his own future. And that, for once, makes him fallible. Vulnerable.’
‘And dangerous,’ I said.
‘You think he scares me?’
‘He should. By God he should.’
Seeing now that both these men were at their most dangerous. Each guessing that only one of them would come through.
‘Cecil’s served and survived, thus far, three monarchs,’ I said. ‘If I were a gambling man my money would not be on you.’
‘John, you don’t have any fucking money.’
I said nothing. The air was still. The first beating of horse-hooves had sent my mother, in a hurry, to the Faldos’ house. At one time she’d been impressed by my friendship with Dudley but now, although she never spoke of it, it was an evident source of trepidation.
‘Is it true,’ I asked him bluntly, ‘that Blanche had been sent to have me choose a date for your wedding to the Queen?’
A rueful smile.
‘Nothing so exact. It was hoped you might find some suggestion from the heavens that one match in particular might be… more propitious than any of the others. And… Yes, all right… that there might be a most suitable time to announce to the people of England a betrothal.’
He toyed with papers on my long board. The rough copy, made in Antwerp, from the writings of Trithemius of Spanheim, lay open next to some notes for my book of the Monas Hieroglyph which would explain in one symbol all I knew about where we lodged with regard to the sun and the moon and the influence of the planets. I’d been working on it, in periods, for nearly three years, knowing it must not be hurried.
I said, ‘Who hoped?’
‘What?’
‘Who hoped I might do these charts?’
Well, obviously, Mistress Blanche Parry would seek my services on behalf of only one person, but I wanted to hear him say it.
He said nothing. He lowered his head into his cupped hands on the boardtop and stayed thus, quite still, for long seconds. A man widely condemned as arrogant, brash, impulsive, never to be trusted… and I supposed I was heartened that he didn’t think to hide the less-certain side of himself from me.
At length, he raised his head, dragged in a long breath. The chamber was dimming fast around us. We might have been in a forest glade, with the owl watching us from the fork of a tree.
‘Very well, John,’ Dudley said. ‘Let’s get this over.’
What the hell had kept us friends? A fighting man and prolific lover who thrived on hunting stags and watching, with an analytical excitement, the baiting of bears by dogs… and a bear-sympathist who hunted only rare books and had lain with only one woman and could not sleep for the longing.
I spun away from the window.
‘You hadn’t seen her… for a whole year.’
‘John—’
‘You self-serving bastard’
Recoiling from myself. I rarely shout at anyone. Dudley bit off his response, sat breathing hard, his hands pushing down on the board.
‘Mercy.’ Holding myself together and banishing an image of Amy Robsart whom I feared I could have loved. ‘Yes, I do fully understand the Queen’s policy on wives at court.’
‘She wanted’ – he didn’t look at me – ‘to see me there every day. Every day.’
‘And every night?’
He was silent.
‘You told me you thought Amy was ill,’ I said. ‘You told me even she thought she’d die soon.’
‘That was what she said, yes.’
‘You brought a doctor to her?’
‘Several.’
‘Robbie… you ever think that was simply to test where your thought lay? See how badly you wanted her soon to be dead and out of the way of your ambition? Do you not think it possible that the only sickness she suffered was a malady of the mind?’
‘For a man of books, you seem to know a surprising amount about the ways of women.’ Dudley turned his head at last towards me. ‘Or was she ill because she was being slowly poisoned? I stayed away because I was having her poisoned and would rather not be there to watch it happening.’ Staring at me now, his eyes ablaze. ‘That’s what you think – I’d have my wife poisoned?’
‘I didn’t say that. You did.’
‘But one way or another I’m behind her death. Jesu, John, even I’d think I was behind it. Who had more to gain?’
‘Or more to lose.’
He said nothing. Would only have talked of twin souls, astrology.
Or all the dangerous marriages, any one of which might be forced on the Queen if she got much older unbetrothed. I was aware of a dark abyss below me.
‘You loved her once. Amy.’
Thinking that if there was any time he might leap up and strike me it was now. I didn’t step away. Would even, God help me, have taken the blow. But he didn’t move, except to lean back a little on the bench.
‘A squire’s daughter. And I was… nobody in particular. Not then. With ambition, of course, but in some ways just glad to be alive. Glad to have survived. We were happy. We were a pair. I… destroyed her.’
I stiffened. He was very still. The air was fogged on the cusp of night, Dudley’s voice toneless.
‘But I didn’t kill her. I didn’t pay anyone to kill her.’
This time I let the silence hang. I wanted to say I believed him, but the words would not quite come.
I could take this matter no further. Went and sat down opposite him and heard him swallow.
‘You know why Bess trusts you, John? Do you?’
I had no answer to this. I knew the Queen believed in me and what I did – she who’d learned eight languages, maybe more, and had once told me how she saw her reign as a magical period, framing a great tapestry of human progress.
‘I’ll tell you,’ Dudley said. ‘It’s because she knows that, for all your extensive knowledge of the vastness of things, you’re a simple soul without political ambition. You want only to buy more books. That so makes her laugh.’
‘I’m so glad,’ I said, ‘to be awarded the much-coveted status of Court Clown.’
‘God’s bollocks, John!’ Dudley bringing down a fist on the board, almost splitting one of its poor pine panels. ‘She has no fears about your fidelity, that’s all I’m saying. And knows she’ll get from you only the unwaxed truth as you see it… and that your vision’s far-reaching. And right now that’s worth a lot.’
So why doesn’t she pay me a lot? Or even anything.
Dudley looked at his empty cup, but I didn’t offer to refill it. Couldn’t anyway – we had no more wine.
‘Now tell me the truth,’ he said. ‘Why precisely did you ask to see me? What am I doing here?’
‘Because I would not have been able to live with myself if I returned to find you’d been—’
‘Returned from where?’ He looked up quickly. ‘Where are you going?’
I saw no reason to avoid the truth. I told him I must needs fulfil a promise to the Queen. In relation to her professed interest in scrying through a shewstone. Spoke aloud, it sounded almost foolish, but he, if anyone, would know that it wasn’t. He was already nodding.
‘She talked of that. She was… enthused.’
‘When was this?’
‘Not long ago.’
Avoiding my eyes, which seemed to confirm a long-held suspicion of mine that there’d been a least one meeting between Dudley and the Queen since Amy’s death. A guarded meeting, no doubt, away from court. Hooded figures in a palace garden, a covered barge on the river.
‘I told the Queen I’d acquired a crystal sphere. And would be working with it. And that I’d report back to her.’
I saw Dudley looking around the darkening workplace.
‘You won’t see one here,’ I said. ‘God knows, I’ve been trying to find one.’
Du
dley began to laugh.
‘You mean one you can afford?’
‘The ones I can afford would probably be useless for my purposes. You’re right, I’m a clown. However…’
Told him, in some detail, about the crystal sphere last heard of in a former abbey in the Welsh borderlands. Finding I had his full attention.
‘So you don’t know if it’s still there and you’re fairly sure you wouldn’t be able to afford it, but you’re planning a long and arduous ride to find out?’
‘Haven’t decided yet. But the fact remains that Cecil wants me out of town for a while.’
‘You mean out of the reach of Blanche Parry. Can’t help wondering if Cecil wasn’t told about the plan to consult you by Mistress Parry herself – his fellow Welshie. Who may also disapprove of Bess’s taste in men. She’s polite to me, is old Blanche, but ever somewhat distant. Uncommon that, for a woman of whatever age.’
‘Robbie, she’s distant from me, and I’m her cousin.’
‘Cousin. Half of Wales is your cousin. Look at that bastard – isn’t he a cousin? The notorious villain, Thomas…’
‘Jones. Thomas Jones.’
‘Who robbed his betters on the road. Almost openly. Is he your cousin?’
‘Betrothed to my cousin, Joanne. And I don’t ask what he did or to whom. He was young then. Reformed now, anyway. A scholar, with a doctorate. And given a royal pardon.’
Dudley snorted.
‘Bess is quite ridiculously tolerant towards the Welsh.’
‘Perhaps because she is Welsh.’
‘She is not Welsh! Her grandfather was Welsh. Partly. So you think Cecil might try and have me slain, do you?’
The sky momentarily was shadowed by a flock of birds going to roost, the dimmed window glass turning Dudley’s fine doublet from its mourning indigo to black.
‘He likes you,’ I said. ‘But he might not shed tears over your corpse.’
His lips tightened, vanishing into his once-proud moustache, now straggled and uneven.
‘I… had a servant die, John. Couple of days ago. A kitchen maid. Spasms of the gut, and dead within an hour. I… ordered all the meat in the house taken out and buried.’
