by Peter Tonkin
'A heavy day all round,' mused Tom, thoughtfully. 'But tell me, Law, who was the second boy? The one who did perform the rape?'
Talbot convulsed, his face working. Tom leaned forward into the cloud of foetid breath reeking from his friend and pressed his ear to Talbot's lips. 'It was Robert Devereux,' whispered Talbot, his voice ghostly already.
And that was lucky, for at the very instant that Talbot spoke, Tom felt a heavy hand clap him on the shoulder. He glanced up to see Robert Poley looking down at him. 'Your friend is fortunate,' said Poley. 'I have managed to find both Señor Villalar and Master Gerard. If it is poison and anything can be done, these are the very men.'
Tom straightened slowly, his eyes on Talbot's, the weight of his friend's confession threatening to stoop his shoulders, but its relevance shining through the darkness of his thoughts like a summer's dawn. Like a man in a trance he walked up the steps out into Clink Street and stood with his back against the wall looking over a low fence, past the water mill and across the river to the Steelyard. He was still standing like a mooncalf when Villalar came up beside him some time later. 'Fear not,' said the Spaniard. 'They were not poisoned. They were purged.' He held up a sodden plant for Tom's inspection. 'Cassia fistula,' he said. 'More powerful than senna pods. It was in the drinking water.'
Tom simply gaped at the Spaniard, wrestling to bring his mind to a sharp focus on this. Of all the questions that came tumbling into his mind, the most urgent was: why? And the answer to that seemed all too plain.
Tom pushed past Villalar and stumbled back down the steps into the reeking place. Poley was there, in frowning conversation with Gerard. Talbot had swung round on the table and was half sitting up. He was looking stronger. His eyes skated away from Tom's gaze and the too-early breaking of his promise to the Earl of Leicester lay between them like a shadow. Tom had no leisure to dispel it now. 'Poley,' he said. 'This was done on purpose and the Bailiff was not its main object. I was. And this has held me here, while some darker business has been toward in Blackfriars, I am certain. Shall we go and look?'
Poley took a deep breath and choked upon it, then he gave a terse, frowning nod.
The four of them went together, crossing from St Mary Overie Stairs to Blackfriars and running up the bustle of Water Street. The little crowd that had gathered outside Master Aske's haberdashery confirmed Tom's worst suspicions. The haberdasher himself was seated on a stool immediately outside his shop door, talking to the City Watch as Mistress Aske mended his broken crown with one of her good Spanish needles and some thread. 'I saw them pushing out of Master Musgrave's door,' he was saying. 'A band of ruffians carrying a half-smothered woman... O Master Musgrave, thank the Lord you are here, sir. Your rooms are robbed, sir, and the lady ravished away. I tried to stop them in the street, sir, and am lucky to be able to tell the tale.'
'Has any been up to look?' demanded Tom, mentally swearing to thank his good neighbour more fully and formally when the opportunity allowed.
'None.'
Tom was in motion at once, shouldering through the crowd and pushing in through the vacant gape of his doorway. Eyes everywhere, wide in the gloom of his stairwell, he ran up the stairs. Poley was hard at his heels and Villalar not far behind. Tom erupted on to the landing and kicked the door to the long room open. The place was a mess - but his mirror stood unscathed. He turned and more gently pushed at the door into Ugo's workroom.
The room seemed empty; stripped. Except for Ugo himself. The Dutchman was seated, lashed securely, on his work stool. Movement was clearly difficult, perhaps impossible. Out before his rigid body stretched his right arm, reaching towards the bench immediately in front of him. Here, his right hand was clamped in his work vice, its fingers spread like the arms of a starfish and his thumb standing rigidly upright. And deeply into the tip of the upright thumb there was plunged a Spanish needle.
Tom thought he was dead. 'Ugo!' he called, his throat tearing.
But the Dutchman's head swivelled round towards him, dragging eyes reluctantly away from the needle. His face was a mess, eyes swollen, nose flattened, ears crusted with blood. 'He has her, Tom,' said Ugo, his voice slurred and his tone dead; defeated. 'He took her half an hour since by the chimes of Paul's bells. And he left a message for you. Señor Domenico Salgado extends his compliments to Master Thomas Musgrave and expresses his keen anticipation at the thought of meeting him blade to blade at Elfinstone. Until that time Señor Salgado salutes Master Musgrave and is happy to inform him that it will be his pleasure to entertain Signora Constanza d'Agostino and Mistress Katherine Shelton, who is currently accompanying him into the country... There was more, in the same flowery vein, but I cannot call it to mind now. The burden of it was that if you try to follow now, and be lucky enough to overtake him on his way, he will simply cut Kate's throat before he lets you take her back ...'
As Ugo was speaking, Tom crossed to the bench and gently loosened the vice, lifting his hand free, as carefully as though it were Venetian glass.
Poley, at the door, observed dryly, 'Now at least we know how they plan to get you to Elfinstone tomorrow, broken arms and certain death or no.' Then he joined Tom in untying Ugo, slipping the ropes off with exquisite care, for the Hollander was swaying with pain and fatigue - at the very least. 'The needle's poisoned,' continued Ugo conversationally as though Poley had not spoken. 'He said it will kill me sometime tonight. He suggests you do not wait to bury me before you start out in the morning.'
'Arrogant puppy! Madre de Dios!' Villalar spat from the doorway, where he had replaced Poley. 'Master Musgrave, bring your friend to myself and Master Gerard here, and we will undo what the poison has done, be it never so venomous. The quickest poisons are the surest. A lingering tincture like this will be more easily overcome. Señor Stell, can you stand? Excellente! Now, can you walk? Hola! We are on the way to making you well again, are we not, Señor Gerard?'
Tom would have gone with them but Poley stopped him. 'Tomorrow morning you must go to Elfinstone. It may be that you will have to go alone, or it may be that Villalar and Gerard will be as good as their word. I will be close at hand but I dare not come into Elfinstone itself – no disguise would hide me from some of the eyes that will be there. It may be that you will be able to rely upon Will Shakespeare and his men if your need becomes great. But the long and the short of the matter is this, and you know it. Only you can stand against Salgado and the men he works for. Only you can free Kate - and Constanza if you wish - from the toils that have them bound down there. And only you can see us clear through to the black heart of this thing.'
'And I can only do that,' concluded Tom, 'for as long as I remain alive.'
'There will be no lessons this afternoon,' said Poley. 'None of your lordly pupils would come pushing past the Watch at your door. I will put up a notice of warning and leave you be while the Master Apothecaries see to Ugo. And you, for the love of God, must practise. Practise to the top of your bent.'
When the rooms were quiet once again, Tom went through into the long room, stripping off his doublet and pulling on his black fencing gloves. He kicked aside the mess on the floor and picked up the wooden dummies marked with all the target areas, using the effort of heaving them back into position to bring fire and suppleness to his muscles. Then, having arranged them in a row alongside the end of the mirror, he cleared a line in front of them so that a glance to the side revealed his reflection. He loosened his sword belt and pulled out the swords. Then, slowly at first, he began to fall into a series of poses. One after another, he rehearsed all Capo Ferro's opening positions, and then added his own favourite variants. Right hand leading, with left curled like the tail of a scorpion; left hand leading with the right held low. From the Posta del Falcone on high, to the Porta di Ferro below. From the fourteen pastas or positions, he began to move into his attacks on the four openings, wounding the wooden opponents more and more fiercely on the right side, left side, right below the belt and left below the belt. And time after time, breaking from
the rigorous inevitability of the chess-like fight sequences, to thrust with all his power, giving the great bellow of, 'Hey!' Knees and hamstrings, thighs, groin, hip, belly, wrist, elbow, shoulder, chest, heart, heart, heart, lung, throat, mouth, nose, cheek, eye, brain, all the targets felt his points repeatedly, unerringly, more and more swiftly, as he slid back and forth along the line of attack, ever glancing at himself in the mirror, coldly noting the perfections of his stance.
Darkness gathered until Tom was little more than a shadow moving in the shadowy mirror like a deadly fish deep in a still pool. The targets began to splinter, gouged into perfect little hollows by the repeated, relentless probing of his unerring point. The cool of the evening stuck the billowing lawn of his shirt to his sweating torso. His hair wound itself into dripping coils and hung burning in his eyes. His mind soared free, like the falcon that gave its name to his first high stance. Refusing to speculate about what might be happening to Ugo, Kate or even Constanza, he let it wander freely looking down at the patterns this active day had shown him. As Poley had asked him to, so seemingly long ago, seeking for the one throat to cut, the one head to lop whose fall might bring the whole coil to an end. It was like a quartering after the hanging and drawing. First the limbs and then the head. First Baines, then Salgado, then who? Who? Who?
Tom had no knowledge that he was shouting the question 'Who?' instead of the fencer's 'Hey!' at the completion of each attack, until Ugo called gently to him, 'Master?' Breaking his terrible concentration just at the moment that Poley brought in the light.
Then all three of them stood staring, simply appalled, at the relentlessly focussed devastation he had visited on the crippled, man shaped targets.
Exhausted on every level, Tom plunged into a sleep every bit as deep as the one Villalar's healing potions induced in Ugo. So that it was Poley, coming down from Hog Lane laden with plans and breakfast, who awoke them in the morning. As they ate and drank, Villalar arrived, fresh from Gerard's apothecary. He carried a black box the size of a church bible. Inside it he revealed and then described some half dozen jars containing remedies to various poisons. 'And this last, it is most sovereign but most dangerous. It is a tincture of aconite, good for treating most poisons, according to the ancients, as fire can cast out fire. But it must only be used in the last extremity, for it is as like to kill as to cure. Here you see a bleeding bowl and surgeon's knife, tourniquet, syringes and a jar of leeches.'
While their guests finished Poley's breakfast, Tom and Ugo both went through what was left in their ransacked rooms. Ugo pulled the snaphaunce revolvers from their hiding places and gathered sufficient gunpowder and lead to load them both, a laborious procedure largely completed lefthanded. Then he looked to some clothing impressive enough, he hoped, to make the legendary chambermaids overlook the ruin of his face and the bandages on his right hand. Tom, meanwhile, saw to the tending, scabbarding and packing of his Solingen blades, then sorted out the best attire his years in the cockpit of Italian fashion could afford.
They set out for Elfinstone mid-morning, starting at the Blackfriars Steps and shooting the Bridge on a falling tide, before they transferred to one of the larger ferries which jostled along the length of Deptford Strand. If Tom suspected that the big house up above them there was the house of Mistress Bull where Kit Marlowe had died bleeding over Poley's hands, he said nothing - beyond giving his directions to the boatmen. The boat dropped them at Greenhithe little more than an hour later and Ugo, narroweyed and practical, hired them four good looking horses. One of was them black as night - a fine gelding entirely suited to the swagger of a Master of Defence called to perform the mysteries of his science before the richest and the noblest in the land. No one argued when Tom took that one.
An hour's leisurely travel, enlivened by the deepest, darkest conference, brought them along the south bank of the river to the village of Gravesend, with its crossing to the grander town of Tilbury to the north. There the Earl of Leicester's last public responsibilities had been accomplished mere days before his death. Then they turned south through the balmy afternoon, into the gentle Kent countryside, following an ancient roadway wandering past tiny hamlets to the crossroads at Higham where they meandered eastwards to the inn at Wainscott. Here they tethered their horses and gathered in the coolness of the tap for a final, almost whispered conference.
The land to the south of them gathered up and fell away, Rochester on the far face of the rise overlooking the River Medway and King Henry's Dockyard at Chatham. Along the eastern stretch of the cliff, well outside the town itself, stood Elfinstone. Had any of them cared to stand up on the old inn's thatched roof, they might have seen its upper battlements from here. At Wainscott, finally, Tom and Ugo invested an hour in gorging themselves with the finest the old inn had to offer. 'For remember,' said Villalar urgently, as they left at last, 'eat nothing. Drink nothing, if you can. Any drop or morsel that passes your lip might be death.'
'Our very bedding might be deadly,' said Ugo lugubriously, half an hour later. 'Clothing can be primed to kill. I am no scholar and master such as you, Tom, but I know well enough the way even mighty Hercules was killed with a poisoned cloak, by his wife Dejanira at the bidding of Nessus the Centaur.'
'My life at least is like to be preserved until the fight after the play tonight,' said Tom. 'My life, if not my limbs.'
This last observation served to take them under the great gate that stood astride the main entrance into the walled grounds of Elfinstone. On this side they were walled, to stop the deer in the park from wandering away, but further east, as the ground settled down to the River Medway, there was no need for walls and the great hunting grounds swept away almost unlimited towards Cliffe and Hoo St Werburgh. To the west, the cliff on which Elfinstone itself sat, gathered into such precipitate wildness that only the most desperate hart or hind would dare attempt it.
The gate stood wide, inviting Tom and Ugo to follow the broad roadway down to the castle, but the pair of them turned aside into the wooded sward on their right hand, preferring to come upon Elfinstone unannounced, from the wild side, having spied out the time and the land. The woodland gathered rapidly and the hillside gathered beneath it until Tom slowed the black gelding to a careful walk. 'There's a cliff edge hidden in the undergrowth nearby,' Tom said quietly. ' 'Tis time to turn and see how we can reach Elfinstone from here.' But the instant that he spoke, the quiet of the summer's afternoon was shattered by the baying of hounds. Away, further right still, at the very cliff edge hidden in the woods, a hunt was in progress. Tom's horse danced uneasily, and Tom himself rose in the stirrups, looking around with a frown. 'There looks to be a pathway down here,' he began, sitting again and nudging his nervous mount forward.
No sooner had he done so, however, than a wild figure hurled out of the undergrowth beneath its very hooves. The gelding reared and Tom fought for a moment to settle it down again. By the time it was still, Ugo was down, had knelt, and was standing again. In his arms he held the slight figure of a woman. She seemed to have fainted or been caught by the plunging horse's hoof. Her hair was a tangle of dark gold badly in need of a wash and comb. Her clothing seemed to consist merely of a solid bodice and the rags of a skirt. As Ugo lifted her higher, Tom saw that she was wearing a thick belt with short-chained manacles designed to hold her hands at her sides. Frowning, he reached down and caught her up out of Ugo's arms. The rags of skirt fell away from long, lean thighs, but Tom's eyes remained entranced by the pattern instead of the nudity. He knew the cloth she was wearing. And he knew her, therefore.
Her eyelids flickered. 'Mistress Margaret,' he said gently. 'Mistress Margaret, I have followed you here from Wormwood House. I bring greetings from Master Seyton ...'
Her eyes opened, as though she had been in the deepest sleep. The bright blue of her gaze swirled around huge black pupils which seemed to gulp him down like the River Styx washing into the deeps of hell. He felt her tense, fighting like a hind indeed to be free of her relentless hunters. 'Margaret
,' he said again, with all the gentleness at his command. And the writhing of her body stilled. A kind of recognition entered those wild eyes. Recognition and a kind of trust. She nestled against him and he saw, in the wild riot of her hair, half covering her naked and abused body, this same girl, seven years earlier in the Earl of Leicester's tent near Nijmagen, falling fainting at the feet of her would-be ravisher, the Baron Cotehel.
The dogs burst out of the undergrowth then, with the huntsmen hard behind them. Surrounded by baying hounds, Tom's gelding simply froze; and much to his relief the Lady Margaret did the same.
So it was that he was able to confront his host, straight-backed and eye to eye. Baron Cotehel reined his mount to a plunging stand as half a dozen wild bucks did the like behind him, and his huntsmen ran forward to whip the dogs away. The two men knew each other at once as though they had been adversaries fighting face to face over the last few deadly days. Over the shrinking form of the shackled, half-naked woman, Tom made his most courtly bow. 'My Lord of Cotehel,' he said quietly. 'May I congratulate you on your accession to the titles, lands and chattels of Outremer, when they come to you tomorrow.'
The sneering boy had grown into a sneering man - aided by the damage Tom had done to his lips. He had lost nothing of the temper or the arrogance Tom remembered so well. His face went purple now as he saw the terrified object of his hunt held safe in Tom's strong arms. The scar upon his forehead burned red like a new brand. He opened his mouth to reveal smashed and blackened teeth.
'Out, you whoreson ...' he began, and two men spurred up to sit beside him. Domenico Salgado sat tall, and every bit as deadly as Tom remembered from his fleeting glimpse at the Rose, though he wore no swords when hunting, of course. On Cotehel's other side sat a tall gallant a year or two older than his friend. He had a long face with high cheekbones and steady brown eyes astride a long nose. The long hair and the wisp of moustache were at the pinnacle of fashion. Beneath the moustache the thin upper lip twisted in a smile that barely stirred the sensuous thickness of the lower and reached nowhere near those steady, chilly, chocolate eyes. 'Come now, Hugh,' drawled Robert Devereux. 'You said whoever caught her could have her. And Master Musgrave has her, never a doubt. It is Thomas Musgrave, Master of Defence, is it not?'
