The Devil's Piper

by Sarah Rayne

  And then he saw what he had not seen before: the coarse brutal-featured man in the loosely girdled robe sitting watching the girl – his girl, the present keeper of Susannah’s music! The small hot eyes were blazing with possessive lust and the girl was struggling to conceal her repulsion.

  The small private bedchamber set aside by the amiable Sir Rodger Cheke for Catherine’s especial use had never seemed so welcoming. Get inside, close the door against any further importunities, and survey this haven gratefully. Yes, and give thanks that the King’s fumblings stopped short of complete love-making.

  She was so busy savouring her deliverance – was that too strong a word? no! – and thanking heaven that she had managed to hide her revulsion, that it was a moment before she realised that someone had been in her room while she was downstairs.

  This should not have been sinister: it certainly should not have caused a cold trickle of fear. Maids and laundresses would presumably come in and out, and the Bishop’s servants were probably not above snooping to see what latest trinket His Majesty had bestowed. And I wouldn’t trust that unctuous Rodger Cheke either! thought Catherine fiercely.

  There was something inexpressibly eerie about the feeling in the room. As if someone had come stealing in, glancing over his shoulder and had concealed himself. Catherine looked about her.

  Her silk-fringed shawl was at the foot of the bed, instead of on the pillow, and she had certainly not left the casement window open. It swung to and fro a little in the night air, tapping against the mellow red brick outside. She leaned out to pull it to.

  The clothes press was ajar, and a long dark cloak was half spilling out. Catherine pushed the door firmly shut. Better. There was an unfamiliar smell in here as well – something old and dry and stale and rather sad. That might be what had made her uneasy. It was an uneasy kind of smell: it made you think of ancient tragedies and lost loves and – what did the priests say? – unhousell’d spirits. Only you did not talk about priests these days, not without first looking round to see who was within hearing. Probably the old, sad smell was nothing more than garden rubbish being burned below her window. She gave a stir to the bowl of lavender on the side table and then threw off her clothes and reached for the ewer of warm water and the geranium-scented soap put out for her. Whatever else Rodger Cheke might be, he was very thorough when it came to guests’ comforts. She sluiced away the feeling of the King’s hands on her body.

  Lovely to slide between the lawn sheets of the tester bed. The room was faintly scented with lavender now. Luxury beyond imagining not to have to pretend pleasure at Henry VIII’s clumsy fumblings and proddings. No wonder he has trouble siring children, thought Catherine, half defiant, half pitying. Imagine discovering that the King of England was so inadequate. It gave her an unexpected feeling of superiority to have seen the King’s precise degree of potency. Hardly even half mast, thought Catherine, smiling sleepily into the pillow. Soft as a feather pillow, in fact. It was a pity it was not the kind of information you could make use of.

  It was at this point that the door opened and Henry himself, still clad only in the fur-trimmed robe, entered the room and crossed to the bed.

  Catherine gasped and shrank back against the pillows, and Henry lumbered on to the bed, his small eyes hot with lust, his hands reaching for her body.

  The fumbling and the prodding was much more urgent and far more insistent than it had been earlier, and Catherine choked back shudders of disgust.

  He pushed aside her thin bedgown impatiently, squeezing her small, high breasts and reaching lower. His hands were strong, the fingers like iron. Murderer’s hands. I’m being raped by a murderer.

  His body was coarser and grosser than it had seemed downstairs. Rolls of fat, thought Catherine, her mind spinning dizzily out of control. Mounds of blubber. And the bandages over that weeping sore. This was worlds and years worse than the half-respectful caressings downstairs: this was blind greedy lust. Clutching hands and hot fetid breath and thrusting groin. It’s repulsive, cried her mind. Revolting.

  In the end it was a heaving, struggling affair of hands and bodies, of stroking and prodding and then of being coaxed to take the flaccid lump of manhood in her hands and rub ceaselessly until her wrist was aflame with cramping agony. And even now, he’s barely standing! thought Catherine, torn between pity and exasperation. I mustn’t let him guess I’m comparing him with anybody. I certainly mustn’t show disgust.

  The really dreadful thing was that the King’s struggling lust was stirring up feelings that she was not supposed to have, feelings she was supposed to have forgotten about. Grandmother had said very sternly that Catherine must put behind her those shameful nights in the Norfolk house when all manner of debauchery had apparently taken place – Her Grace had heard about it all and very unseemly it had all sounded!

  Catherine, in a whirl of delighted gratitude at being brought to Court, had done her best. Part of a slightly regrettable youth. To be put firmly in the past.

  The trouble was that once you had known what it felt like to be made love to – properly and fiercely and satisfyingly – you could not settle for anything else. Catherine, her body stirred by the King’s flimsy love-making, thought angrily: what wouldn’t I give to be in bed with a real man now!

  And then, just as she thought her wrist would explode with pain, the King, red-faced, grunting and sweating, clutched her shoulders painfully and bellowed in triumph.

  ‘Ha, sweetheart! Now you see how a proper man does! Now—’

  The sad sparse drops of love-offerings splashed thinly on to her thighs, and he fell across her, gasping and wheezing.

  ‘You’d get – nothing like that from the – primping boys of the Court!’ gasped Henry.

  ‘No, I am sure not, sire,’ said Catherine obediently, and felt the wet stickiness on her body, and thought rebelliously: no, for that would scarcely fill half a thimble, never mind make a Tudor prince! She lay back, thankful that it was over, Henry still slumped heavily across her, pinning her to the bed.

  It was at that instant that she caught a movement on the other side of the room. She turned her head and saw the door of the clothes press, slowly opening.

  The figure of a tall, dark-haired man with the most beautiful clear grey eyes Catherine had ever seen bounded across the room and dragged the King from the bed with angry contempt, flinging him to the floor. Henry’s head struck the corner of the bedpost and he slid gruntingly into an unconscious heap.

  Catherine had always known that she possessed a good deal of what some people called wantonness in her make-up. All those nights in Grandmother’s house, all those young men—

  She had absolutely no idea who the dark-haired stranger was, but he had dragged the King from her bed and shaken him as if Henry had been no more than a disobedient dog, before flinging him to the floor. There had been blazing anger in his face and in that instant, Catherine had felt a shaft of desire so violent slice through her, that for a moment the room tilted. She forced herself to look to where the King lay. Dead? No, don’t let him be dead! At least not in my bedchamber! She was half horrified, half angry because self-preservation was the last emotion she should be feeling.

  But Henry was not dead. He was certainly unconscious, and rather repulsively so: he was sprawled across the floor in bloated disarray, his legs open and that organ which reportedly had so assiduously tried to quicken four Queens’ wombs was flopping over his left thigh in an ungainly fashion. His face was empurpled and spittle dribbled from his flaccid lips. Horrid! thought Catherine. But at least he’s only stunned. This stranger hasn’t killed him.

  This stranger . . .

  Ahasuerus turned his head towards her and his astonishing eyes seemed to blaze with life and to shine a dazzling, hurting light into the darkest, most secret corners of her mind.

  Catherine felt as if she had been suddenly tossed from a high cliff into a black, boiling sea, and in the same moment there was a flash of something – she was not sure what – but
it was somehow bound up with a brutish, glowering sunset and a tormented figure silhouetted against it, blood-streaked and dying in agony . . .

  Susannah . . . The name spun dizzily about her head, but she had no idea if it had been spoken aloud or if it was part of that churning darkness and that lonely tortured figure . . .

  And then the queer half-vision faded, and Catherine remembered that she was naked in the bed and then thought there was really no point in trying to hide it. It was a pity that the sheets still smelled of the King, but other than that—And Henry would surely be unconscious for a little while yet.

  Because here was the real man, the proper man she had been longing for not ten minutes since. She smiled and said softly, ‘I think you have tried to save me from what you believed to be a rape, sir. And I am very grateful to you indeed.’

  It was the most shameful thing anyone could ever have done anywhere, ever. To have one lover lying in a snorting stupor at the foot of your bed, while the one who had put him there took you into his arms.

  And this time there was no awkward embarrassing coaxing to be done: the man, whoever he was, felt like steel covered in purest silk against her body. Silk entering you, steel firing the embers so clumsily lit earlier. Catherine forgot about her erstwhile Royal partner, and drew him closer, feeling the purest ecstasy she had ever known unfold.

  The fact that he did not undress lent an air of spiralling urgency to what he was doing: the feel of his silk-gloved hands briefly caressing her body and sliding under the lawn bedgown, was the most arousing sensation she had ever known. Like a cat’s velvet paws, but with the hint of cruel claws beneath, ready to unsheath. It was a ridiculous thing to think at such a moment, but Catherine, spinning into ecstasy, did think it.

  Silken claws and pleasure beyond imagining, and violent steely passion. There would never be any feeling in the world to equal this, not if she lived to be eighty, not if she lived for ever . . .

  Ahasuerus moved against her, and the spinning rapture claimed them both.

  Ahasuerus had attacked the grunting, red-faced creature because he had been hurting Susannah. An immense anger had flooded his mind so that he had been across the room and dragging the man off the bed almost before he had realised it. It had been good to feel the flabby creature cringe and struggle: it had been strong soaring joy to see him fall helplessly on the floor. That’s for forcing your repulsive body on to Susannah! he had thought in triumph, and that’s for spewing your seed over her body like an animal!

  The exultant feeling had sent fierce longing through him, and when the girl had held out her arms, he had gone into them. It was the maddest, most dangerous thing ever, but he had always known that a very thin line separated violence from sexual arousal, and that an even thinner one could separate sexual arousal from insanity. As he went into Catherine Howard’s bed, he was distantly aware that he was crossing that line.

  Her body was the sweetest, most ardent thing imaginable. Ahasuerus felt it close about him, and he felt her delighted response. So the old man had managed to warm her a little, had he? Her lips opened under his, the most natural thing in the world, and the culmination, when it broke, shook them both with its force.

  But he dared not allow himself the luxury of lying in her arms. The old man was stirring, making choking gasps where he lay. Ahasuerus moved from the bed towards the door, and in that moment, Henry opened his eyes and saw his attacker.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  The King sat in the apartments set aside for his use and regarded the Bishop of Winchester and Sir Rodger Cheke balefully.

  He had never been so outraged in his entire life. It came to something if a King could not pay an innocent visit to his little protégée, solely for the purpose of bidding her a good night’s repose – solely for that, said Henry, fixing Sir Rodger with so fierce an eye that Sir Rodger blenched – and then find himself set upon by a ruffian hiding in her room. Did the Bishop not give a proper eye to his guests’ safety? demanded Henry, working himself up into a tantrum. Did Cheke himself not have a care to the life of his King? The intruder would certainly have murdered him where he stood, said Henry wrathfully, and even in his own chaotic state of mind, Sir Rodger noted that the King had been careful to say ‘stood’ and not ‘lain’.

  Murdered within call of dozens of people, said Henry furiously; brought within a pig’s whisker of death, and the guards never even hearing until Henry himself had called out for them to come to his aid! Well, the creature who had been hiding in Mistress Howard’s bedchamber was to be taken to the Tower forthwith – forthwith, Sir Rodger was to mind – and there left to rot in chains.

  Rodger Cheke, brought up on the ‘good laws of Edward the Confessor’ and Magna Carta, murmured something about a fair trial before a just punishment but Henry was having none of this. If a King – and a King of England at that! – could not order imprisonment for a creature who had attempted not just plain murder but actual regicide, there was no justice in the world.

  ‘Of course he daren’t let it be known that he was found in Catherine Howard’s bed,’ said the Bishop of Winchester, approached for advice afterwards by the anxious Sir Rodger. ‘We none of us dare let it get out. And the King certainly can’t risk any kind of trial for the man—Who is he by the way, do we know yet?’

  Sir Rodger, who was beginning to wonder if the game was worth the candle, explained that the assailant had been placed under temporary restraint in the Bishop’s own wine cellars but that so far as anyone could tell he spoke no English, nor French nor Spanish.

  ‘Try him in Latin,’ said His Lordship. ‘Explain to him that he’s being taken to the Tower and that he’d better put his soul to rights with God in whatever way he chooses. Oh, and Cheke, if this ever does get out, for the sake of all our reputations make sure it’s never known where we imprisoned the culprit last night. We don’t want to find ourselves a laughing stock.’

  Sir Rodger quite understood all of this. You could not be letting people know that the King of England was having clandestine and adulterous meetings with a chit of a girl thirty years younger; you certainly could not let people know that the Bishop of Winchester had lent his support to such sinful meetings, or that the arrangements made by Sir Rodger had been so inadequate that a murderous foreigner had gone on the rampage. Sir Rodger had been welcomed very pleasantly into the Bishop’s household, and even though his duties had turned out to include acting as pander to Henry, a plump emolument had been offered by way of recompense. It was very important indeed to guard the King’s reputation and the Bishop’s but it was even more important to guard Sir Rodger’s and he did not intend to go down in history as the man who had put Henry VIII’s murderer in a wine cellar.

  They would all keep the secret and Catherine Howard would keep it as well, because the King would tell her she must, and she would be too frightened to disobey him. It was not a secret that would need to be kept for long, because whoever this unknown man was, he would die inside the Tower before he was much older. Even if the cold and the disease and the sparse food did not kill him, Henry would arrange for one of his scuttling sycophants to finish him off. Poison in the food. A clean silent smothering. It would not be the first time that embarrassing prisoners had been discreetly killed inside those grim dungeons; Sir Rodger knew this and the Bishop would know it even better. It was not anything that needed to be put into words.

  But since this foreigner had tried to murder Henry Tudor, death in some wretched dungeon was no more than he deserved and in fact a far kinder death than he had any right to expect.

  Ahasuerus understood that he had been taken prisoner because the man he had attacked was a powerful ruler and everyone was frightened of him. This had been apparent the minute the guards had rushed in to the room at the man’s summoning.

  Fear of a ruler was something Ahasuerus could sympathise with, but the hasty interment in the sour-smelling wine cellar, the furtive scuffling into captivity was not. Were there no trials here, no justice?
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br />   It seemed there were not. Once in the cellar he was chained to the wall and his hands were restrained with iron manacles. The two men brought in to do this were coarse-featured, brutish-natured, and they jeered at his maimed hands, pretending to dodge out of their range as if Ahasuerus was a clawed wild beast. One had a lowering jutting forehead and the other a disfiguring squint. Ahasuerus received the impression of low intelligence in them both and all the old arrogance and rebelliousness surfaced. How dare these unknown people treat him like this! How dare they throw a High Priest into a dark, windowless, underground room, with keepers whose comprehension was that of brute-beasts! He held on to the fury, because it was a strong emotion, and strong emotions helped people survive in times of danger. He would not let these creatures cow him and he would certainly not show them any fear.

  He did not try to talk to them. The greedy-featured man called Cheke had questioned him earlier, speaking in halting, very imprecise Latin. Ahasuerus had understood Cheke’s meaning but he had been wary; he had said only that he was a traveller from the East. He had been unable to tell how this had been received, or even if Cheke had properly understood him.

  The two keepers apparently had sufficient intelligence to follow orders, because several hours after his capture – Ahasuerus had lost all sense of time in the dark cellar, but he thought it might be the next night – they dragged him out of the house and down a short flight of slippery steps to where a small boat was tied to a tiny landing stage, with below it a dark slow river flowing silently past. A low-lying mist wreathed the river’s surface.