Gloriana's Torch

by Patricia Finney

  The following day he went in search of the Dutch mapmaker. First he changed some of his French money into shillings and pennies at Gresham’s Exchange. Then he began with the great carrier’s inns and had gone to all of them when it occurred to him that Van Groenig would want to be near Walsingham but not inside the city so he could move about more easily at night. There were some addresses he had been given of people who rented out rooms to foreign businessmen. Painstakingly he visited each one in turn, claiming to be one of Walsingham’s pursuivants. One of them had turned down a Dutchman wanting a room with too weak a story of what he was doing here. He had sent the Dutchman off to the Strand rents where there were always rooms free because most people disliked sharing them with rats and cockroaches …

  Hurrying there, Edward went from one to another asking for a Dutchman called Van Blauw and found himself looking at the face of the man he had come to kill the fourth time he knocked.

  ‘I’m sorry to trouble you, sir,’ he said, ‘I have a message for a Netherlander.’

  ‘Ja?’ said the man suspiciously, with a jowelly face and heavy pockmarks under his beard. ‘I am Netherlander.’

  ‘Mr Van Blauw?’

  ‘Nein, my name is Van Groenig.’

  Edward felt himself flush, hoped the man would see that as irritation or embarrassment. He muttered apologies and hurried away, remembering just in time to carry on asking at other doors.

  Then he settled down at the alehouse opposite with a quart of mild and some bread and cheese, listened to some desperate lute-playing by a scrawny young man, and watched until Van Groenig went out, presumably for his dinner.

  Then he went back into the rents and up the stairs, took out the lockpicks Lammett had given him. It took a horribly long time to open the simple lock and latch. He had never sweated so much in his life, he was trembling by the time he got the door open and went in and then he had to lock the door again, which took another hour, so it seemed, and he only finished a moment before he heard heavy angry steps on the stairs.

  He stepped behind the door where the Dutchman had hung his cloak. His knees were trembling. This is madness. I’m supposed to be a priest. Why am I here? Why am I doing this? What if I fail?

  He took a deep breath, drew his stiletto from the scabbard at his back, prayed incoherently for strength. Why are you doing this, my son? asked the little voice of the devil deep inside him and he answered it proudly: Ad Maiorem Dei Gloria – to the greater glory of God.

  The door slammed open. Van Groenig stamped in, muttering to himself. Edward reached out to grab his greasy yellow hair, pull him back, left hand over his mouth, as Lammett had shown him, plunge the blade in, felt the thin bone at the back of the eyesocket resist and then crack to his blade like an eggshell …

  It was over. All finished. Van Groenig gulped, snorted, his back arched and Edward let him down gently so as not to make a clatter. He shut the door, then went methodically to the furthest corner of the room and began searching. He found money, he found some heretical books and then … he found two maps. Rolling them up, he slipped them in his doublet, looked around and decided he could make use of the cloak better than Van Groenig. He took it down, swept it round his shoulders. His stiletto still poked out of Van Groenig’s eye, which made him feel sick, so he pulled it out, saw that Van Groenig still breathed. It was sad that he had to die, one of God’s creatures after all, even though he was a heretic. Sadder still that his immortal soul would go to hell.

  Crossing himself, Edward knelt beside the man he had killed and prayed for the repose of his soul, then wiped his stiletto on Van Groenig’s doublet. An impulse slowed him down. Could he? Dare he? Perhaps Parma would require proof he had succeeded in killing the mapmaker? Half embarrassed to be doing it, he used the stiletto’s blade to saw off some of the dirty blond hair, made it neatly into a knot, just as he had the lock of his mother’s hair she gave him when he left home, put it in his pouch. Then he hurried down the stairs. Preoccupied with getting the smear of blood off his hands and the stiletto’s hilt, he was halfway down the street before he looked up and met the eyes of a tall, thin man with sandy hair and grey eyes, watching him from the same alehouse he himself had been sitting in.

  Edward hurried on, still feeling sick, but starting to believe that perhaps he had done it, he had actually managed to kill his first man, he had stopped the Dutch mapmaker from betraying the Duke of Parma. Triumph filled him like wine. He’d done it. If now he could only get aboard ship and away from the shore with the next tide, he would be able to take the purloined maps back to Parma.

  He had succeeded. God be praised.

  He spent the afternoon moving from alehouse to alehouse, drinking only mild ale. In one place, he found a dark corner in a booth and opened up the maps. They both showed a walled city with a citadel, built around a harbour. It looked teasingly familiar but there was no label, no key. One of the maps showed shading in the waters of the harbour, which he thought might be sandbanks or currents. Something about the way it was laid out tickled his memory and he squinted at it, trying to remember.

  There were two men at the serving hatch, asking the man there about another. Edward glanced at them, saw that one was a big, burly, ugly bear of a man, the other the thinner one with sandy hair that had watched him leave Van Groenig’s. They were asking for someone of his description. Edward froze where he sat, then made himself lean back in the booth, pull his hat down over his nose and look as if he was dozing off. Under the hat’s brim, he watched the two pursuivants leave the boozing ken and it took him all the discipline against his natural inclinations that he had learned at Rheims to stay exactly where he was and not bolt. In fact, he decided to stay there until the next day, since he knew it was one place the pursuivants would not search again. And as they would be searching the docks, he decided to stay the night.

  The following evening, he took a boat downriver to the dock where the Fortune of Lubeck was moored, went aboard and showed the Master his letter from Parma.

  The Master sighed and held out his hand for gold, which Edward gave him.

  Starting to relax, he sat in the Master and Commander’s cabin and drank aqua vitae to fortify himself against the seasickness to come.

  While he waited, a lone pursuivant came and asked the sailors if a man answering his description had come aboard, which the sailors, paid in gold, all denied. The pursuivant, the sandy-haired thin man who had been watching Van Groenig’s lodging, said that his name was Becket and at that point, Edward made his decision.

  Parma had said he could do a great work for the cause of goodness and Holy Mother Church if he could manage to kill David Becket, and here was the very man, walking down the gangplank and onto the shadowy quay, full of silent cranes and piles of boxes and coiled rope.

  Before he could have time to feel frightened again, Edward put down his cup, walked swiftly out of the cabin, down the plank, caught up with the man just as he passed by a pile of pulleys and ropes, grabbed him from behind and stabbed him in the eye. It was less neatly done, this time. The man cried out, tried to fight, draw his sword, but then was quiet. Edward stood over him, panting, delighted with himself. Surely God was with him, to be able to kill the formidable David Becket so easily. For his own satisfaction, he cut a lock of Becket’s hair, just as he had of Van Groenig’s, knotted it and put it in his belt-pouch. Then he crossed himself, said a Pater Noster for the repose of Becket’s soul, strode back aboard the ship and advised the Master to leave at once. The sailors looked at him with great respect as he cleaned his stiletto again with a cloth and sharpened and oiled it. He ignored them, feeling light and clean and released from responsibility, comfortable in the proven certainty of God’s favour.

  They warped away from the quay, and then the Master had the longboats out because the tide was not quite turned, so the Fortune of Lubeck was pulled down the Thames towards the sea by the creak and swing of the sailors at the oars of the longboats.

  By the evening, Edward was being mi
serably seasick into a bucket again.

  Merula

  England, Spring 1588

  Look out across the great highway of God, find again the wandering black thread of Merula, step down into time again and there she stops and looks at us, speaks to us. Argues with us?

  With respect, gods, you are quite wrong. Time is not a road, as you hairy ghost gods would have it. Time is not a river either, nor a carpet. Time is a reflection: there when you look, not when you don’t. Times passes only because we are here to see it go.

  Rebecca and Michael found the two-masted San Antonio, as Francis Ames had told them to, and talked to the captain. So San Antonio cut her anchor and sailed out on the ebb tide early in the morning. In the Bay of Biscay where Thundering Jehovah and Suffering Jesus dance and play and wrestle together like the brothers they are, we weathered a storm that carried us north faster than we could ever have hoped and we landed in England at Southampton.

  Then came a long weary time to travel up to London, for Rebecca would not ride – hating horses, she must have a litter – and we walked up the busy road from Southampton to London, ten or fifteen miles a day and so I saw for the first time the strange land of the blue-green English.

  To begin with, it is dark and cold for all the summer days are so long. The reason for your hairy ghost addiction to citadels of cloth became clear to me even before we came to harbour. I shivered and shook in the wind and the rain and the nights froze me. Rebecca was concerned. She gave me a waistcoat to wear under my doublet and two shirts and a thick oily cloak to go over the top and still I was never warm. When the Lion Sun shines in England, he is nothing but a little newborn cub, he hardly roars light across the sky since the clouds blot him out most of the time. Instead of having a Rainy Season for the rain to fall in, like a civilised country, in England the rain falls constantly, summer or winter, weeps from the sky for days and days and everything becomes dank and mournful and colder than ever. When the Cub Sun goes down, there is a long time when it is neither day nor night and the light fades slowly, as if it is too tired to leave the world to follow the Sun into the dreamtime. And the same in the morning, the light creeps up as if it were ashamed, which it should be since it is so feeble.

  And so everything in the land of England is ruled by the feebleness of the sun and the constant rain. To be poor in England is not only to be hungry, as it is everywhere, it is also to be constantly cold. My mistress was not poor, indeed her family was rich, but as I walked behind her slow litter, I looked about and saw poor folk travelling the roads, scrawny and wrapped in rags. Several times men came by, galloping on horses, shouting to us to make way in the name of the Queen, carrying the Queen’s messages.

  I was looking forward to seeing this Queen and her compound and her husbands. Rebecca had spoken of her, how great her palace was and the magnificence of her robes and the sharpness of her tongue. I wondered if she would ask me to go to the dreamtime for her and call in her god to help her, but when I asked, Rebecca only told me to hush.

  Now another thing that is strange about England is that the animals are different. The cows are fat and the sheep very woolly and the pigs are fat and the horses too. They have no lions, nor antelope, nor giraffes nor zebras nor leopards. They have deer and they have wolves but the animals are mostly only for the service of men and this makes them very conceited as to their own importance to the Lady Moon. They believe that all of the world was made to serve them.

  They have forests, true, but not very rich and with strange plants growing there. Nor do they have any of the half-men living in the forest to teach the use of plants.

  Their houses are like ours, only square and often made in baked mud-bricks, and their temples are magnificently built in stone with long pointed towers. The English mainly have their temples plain on the inside, though they have an art to make coloured glass pictures, very fine, and their singing is magnificent, if strangely flat and unrhythmic. Their music weaves around itself like a nest of snakes.

  When they travel, they do not make a fire and camp, the land is too wet and cold. They have great caravanserais all along the road, every twenty miles or so, with a courtyard where the wagons are hitched and a common room where hairy ghost men would stare and stare at me as I ordered my mistress’s food, and fair rooms above with beds that are in themselves tents made of cloth, for to keep out the damp and cold. I slept in Rebecca’s room, on a little bed that was pulled out from under the great tented bed, until she grew tired of listening to my teeth chatter in the night, and called me to come into her bed with her so we could both be warm. It was better so, with my two shirts and waistcoat and the cap she gave me, but ah Lady Leopard, the ugliness of waking in the dawn to light the brazier in the cold morning. So cold a place, no wonder they wish to come to our lands.

  As we came near to the Queen’s city, the gardens stretched out all about us, the fields full of their fat cattle, the roads were crowded with wagons bringing food to feed so many people. Southampton was like the place with the harbour that we had left so long ago, but as we came to London, I was astonished at the people and the houses of stone and brick filling the swamps by the river. And then we came to the bridge over the river and I fell silent for what I had thought was London was only its fringes, and before us lay a great jungle made of wood and stone, a jungle full of hairy ghosts and a bridge made of houses to cross the river tumbling below it.

  Above the gate of the bridge, just as we would do at home, the Queen had put the captured heads of her enemies so that their souls could help to guard her city. At least that made sense, so I was a little comforted by the stinking skulls with their attendance of crows in the midst of the greatness and strangeness of the place.

  By that time my nose was stunned to the stench of the hairy ghosts and I had grown used to the small beer and aqua vitae that we drank, but it meant my godsight was feeble and I could only sometimes see the swirling dreams of the people when I myself dreamed. It frightened me that I should become right-side up again, for what if the Queen should ask me to travel into the dreamtime for her? And so I drank plain water on the evening when we came to London and to the great house of Rebecca’s uncle, Dr Nunez, which immediately gave me a flux to help my sight. Lady Leopard is always quick and clean in the way she brings about what she wants. My head rocked with fever and I must run out to the jakes in the back yard half dozen times a day, but I refused to go to bed or be dosed as Rebecca wanted since I did not want to waste the helpful heat. In so cold a land, I had no Lion Sun to help me climb into the place where the gods live.

  Word went to the Queen, taken by Dr Nunez, word came back from the Queen by means of a letter, sealed with her seal and written with her name. Rebecca showed me it: most fit for a Queen, curling and winding in and about itself, a magnificent pattern.

  We went by boat to the great Palace of Whitehall, vast, stone built, raging with men, hung with woven cloths and all most confusing to the eye since they take such pride in making flat cloth or wood painted with paint seem like reality. I leaped out to help up Rebecca from the boat and found the red-coated Queen’s guard there also, who looked at me once as they might look at another man, and then again, sideways, staring, when they realised I was a woman, and they muttered between each other that this was outrageous and shocking and the Queen would dislike it extremely.

  By this time, I could have had woman’s clothes to wear, and indeed Nunez had bought me some, which I found such agony and made me so ugly, that I had rather have my thighs rubbed by padding and swagger about like their menfolk, than learn to breathe with only half my chest the way their women must do.

  Still, they had been told to bring us to the Queen and so they did. We walked through many beautiful rooms, one which had the Queen’s chair and her canopy just as my King had, and at last out into a little garden all filled with well-disciplined plants I did not know, and some smelled sweet and some savoury so that it was a garden for the nose as well as the eye.

  I was still sick
for all this time, the flux demon raged about my guts and my heart made fire to fight it with. I was thirsty, which made the flux demon strong, so my head spun and swelled and narrowed like the lungs of a dying antelope.

  We stood in the centre of a winding path made of little carved brushes, Rebecca and I and a young man that had guided us, and I swayed in the winds of the dreamtime, waiting with interest to see the Queen and perhaps even her husbands.

  She came at last, briskly along the path. Women walked behind her with three yapping little dogs on leads. The dogs saw me and smelled me and set up a wild barking with their hackles up, until the oldest of the serving women gestured at the two youngest maids to take them within. The girls were finely dressed in white and black and rose and crimson and greens and golds and stared freely at me since they had never seen a true human being before and they went very slowly away, craning their necks for another look.

  Rebecca and I both knelt to the Queen. In my light-headed state, she shocked me too. In my heart, I had expected a strong, proper-coloured woman like myself to rule over the hairy ghosts, but of course she was a hairy ghost as well. Her skin was white and pearly and painted to be more white and pink. Her hair was copper red. I have heard of women-kings and here was one. I have heard of witch-queens and here was one. She walked to us, ghost face under fiery hair, black velvet and white damask to make the walls of the soft house she carried on her back for clothing, like a snail. Her high red leather boots marked the pebbles of the path as she stamped around and about the maze, her face thunderous.

  It was no wonder she was angry, imprisoned in her robes as she was, as much as my own king’s wives are imprisoned by their fat. It is still astonishing to me what the hairy ghosts will put on their bodies. True, they have no gold and copper rings to wear on their necks and arms to show their wealth. So velvet piled on damask piled on taffety and to top it all a high-wired white veil behind her head as if she wore a mist for her crown.