On one side of the fire, which was low in flame but scorching in intensity, they had driven a stake into the ground. At the top there was a deep notch. They lifted Boltfoot and put one end of the ash branch into the notch. The man and one of the women gripped the other end, close to Boltfoot’s head and began to chant as the other woman danced around the fire playing a Jew’s harp.
Boltfoot was breathing more easily now. He felt like laughing out loud at these preposterous people, but he was not at all sure that was wise given his precarious position at their mercy.
Suddenly the woman with the Jew’s harp shuddered, fell to her knees and threw up her gown to display her naked arse, like an animal in rut. It was like a cue at the playhouse for the other two to chant louder and begin to bring Boltfoot around across the fire. They held him there, slung low so that his back was no more than a few inches above the red, fiery heat. Involuntarily he tried to arch his back away from the unbearable burning pain, but to no avail. He was held there for ten seconds that felt like ten minutes, his teeth clenched against the scream that his throat and very being longed to utter.
They moved him on, to the other side of the fire. The fire had caused agony such as he had never felt before. And he knew that it would come again. Nine times across the fire, they had said. Nine times. He exhaled a long, straggling breath. In front of him the woman with the Jew’s harp was on all fours on the ground, her gown clutched up around her waist so that her pink nakedness was exposed. It seemed to him that her grunting and panting was the hunger of a bitch in heat. She was offering herself up, to some unseen presence. Begging to be taken by the devil himself.
Shakespeare was still soaked through when the wherrymen landed him at Greenwich. He wondered, vaguely, whether the involuntary drinking of the putrid Thames water might do for him. For the present, however, he had more pressing concerns.
The races were all done with. If Baines was here, there was no sign of him. As for the Queen and her courtiers, they had long since departed back to the confines of the palace. Only the common folk were still in the park, eating, drinking and enjoying the entertainments in the late afternoon sunshine.
Shakespeare found the Vidame de Chartres near the palace stables. The French nobleman was ensuring that Conquistadora was well looked after for her journey back to the stables at Wanstead, where she was now to be housed. The vidame held up the golden spur he had won for his victory. ‘Given me by your Queen’s own fair hand. I told you the horse was no nag, sir.’
‘I am looking for Doña Ana.’
‘I have not seen her since the race, Monsieur Shakespeare. But I imagine she will be at Essex House this evening. There is to be feasting in honour of a famous victory. Come – and bring my woman with you.’
‘You have heard all I will say on that matter.’
‘Her Majesty the Queen has other ideas. She agrees Monique is my property and has granted me her return.’
‘I believe the courts will not accede to your demands. Certainly, I will not. Slavery is repugnant to God and humanity.’
‘Have you told that to Mr Hawkins, your great slaver?’
Shakespeare said no more. He went to the servants’ quarters at the palace, where he stripped naked so that his clothes could be hung up to dry in front of an open fire. As he waited, he sent a messenger to request a meeting with Sir Robert Cecil.
Chapter 29
THE PRICKLES ROSE on Shakespeare’s neck. He was in Sir Robert Cecil’s richly appointed apartments, at a table with Francis Mills and the kilted Rabbie Bruce. Cecil was cold with anger.
‘How will we beat Spain if we cannot work together?’ he demanded.
‘Blame him,’ Bruce said, jabbing a finger at Shakespeare. ‘He has kept the man Glebe from me. Give Glebe to me and I will twist the truth from his miserable English mouth within the hour.’
‘Is this true, John?’
‘He means he would kill him, Sir Robert. How many more witnesses do you wish to lose?’
‘This is the problem of which I speak. There must be common cause here. It is in no one’s interest for this prince of Scots to remain undiscovered. If he is in England, he has been brought here with but one purpose in mind – to usurp a throne. Now, John, I told you to take Glebe to Newgate, but Mr Bruce says he is not there. So where is he?’
‘Safe, and being questioned, though I believe I have all the information he has to give.’
‘Then speak it here and now to Mr Bruce and Mr Mills. But be clear on your aim. You are to find this Scots prince. The court talks of nothing else and the Queen … well, let us just say that I have never seen her so angry. And I am one of those who saw her tempestuous rage when Ralegh married Bess Throckmorton. It took all my powers of persuasion to get her to the courses this day. The calm that the world saw turned once more to wrath when she returned here. Do I make myself plain?’
Shakespeare and Mills nodded.
‘Good. Then I will leave you, gentlemen. You will sit around this table and devise a plan by which to proceed. I care not what you think of one another – personal difficulties will be set aside.’ He nodded brusquely, then departed before any of them had a chance to speak.
Bruce leant back, feet on the table. ‘He thinks to include me with you two flunkeys. One day, he will be my servant.’
Shakespeare fought to calm himself down. He could see the truth in what Cecil said. This inquiry was proceeding slower than a twenty-year-old mule. He took a deep breath and rested his forearms on the table. ‘Very well, I will detail all that I have uncovered. Firstly, this is nothing to do with Perez. He never had the secret. It all came from the woman, Ana Cabral, the old nurse and, perhaps, Perez’s secretary. But the Cabral woman is now missing. She has slipped us.’
‘The Spanish slattern?’ Bruce said. ‘She may have slipped you, Shakespeare, but not me. You won’t find her because I have her.’
Shakespeare’s calm did not last. He eyed Bruce as if he would happily murder him. ‘What do you mean, Mr Bruce – how can you have Ana Cabral?’
‘I took her. Had her arrested by honest English pursuivants as she left the courses. She now resides with my friend.’
‘Where?’
‘Somewhere safe, Shakespeare. Somewhere you can’t get your tender, milk-fed little hands on her. Unless, of course, you wish to do some sort of trade for Glebe …’
Shakespeare turned to Mills. ‘Do you know about this, Frank?’
Mills shook his head, but a little too slowly.
‘Frank?’
Mills sighed heavily. ‘She is a guest of Topcliffe at Westminster.’
‘Topcliffe! God’s blood, what has Topcliffe to do with any of this? He is more unclean than the lice of Limbo.’
‘Oh aye,’ Bruce put in. ‘He speaks most highly of you, too. Calls you a Papist-swiving, stranger-hugging sheep turd.’
Shakespeare ignored Bruce and looked directly at the thin, spidery figure of Mills, who seemed to sag ever deeper into his bony shoulders. ‘Frank, does Cecil know of this?’
Mills’s eyes swivelled to Bruce and back to Shakespeare. He said nothing.
Shakespeare turned to the Scotsman. ‘Well?’
‘Do you think I give a fishwife’s piss what Robert Cecil knows or doesn’t know? I am answerable to the King of Scots, not to an English cripple.’
‘Mr Bruce, Ana Cabral may hold the key to the riddle of this Scots prince. But she is also a guest of this realm, here with the train of Don Antonio Perez and under the protection of the Vidame de Chartres and his father, all of them envoys from Henri of France. She cannot be lifted off the streets and consigned to Topcliffe’s torture chamber without order of the Privy Council. Do you think Her Majesty would thank us for starting a war with France?’
Bruce leant forward in his chair. The generous cloak of his kilt flopped low across his chest. ‘Well, Shakespeare, you get her out of there – if you can.’
Shakespeare rose from his chair, knocking it to the floor, and strode for the door
.
Mills was up instantly. He grabbed Shakespeare by the arms to hold him back. ‘Wait, John, there are other matters we must talk on. We must work together.’
Shakespeare shrugged off his restraining hands. He was shaking with rage.
Mills unfolded himself to his full height. ‘John, listen to me. Cecil is right: we have a common enemy. We cannot afford this hostility between us.’
‘Do we have a common enemy?’ He jerked his chin in the direction of Rabbie Bruce. ‘He seems like the enemy.’
Bruce was stone-faced. ‘Is that so, Shakespeare? The world blows apart, an assassin stalks my sovereign and you retire to your bedchamber. Should I wait on your pleasure in this?’
Reluctantly, Shakespeare took his seat again. Behind his anger, he knew they had to sort this out. Mills and Cecil were right. Mr Secretary Walsingham had said it so often that his words were imprinted on Shakespeare’s brain like the royal seal: The farm that is riven will fall into disarray, its crops will fail and its beasts sicken and die. We fight a common enemy. We have no time to fight one another.
‘The question we must answer,’ Mills said firmly, ‘is what this conspiracy is about. Topcliffe knows he cannot apply the rack or gyves to the woman, but he can scare her well enough – and that is what he is presently engaged on. Let us see what she reveals.’
Bruce had his dirk in his hands, flipping and spinning it. It was a mean weapon with an eighteen-inch double-sided blade and a hilt of deer horn. To Shakespeare it looked more like a short sword than a dagger. Bruce idly ran his finger along its keen edge and brought forth a thin line of blood, which he put to his mouth. ‘One thing is certain,’ he said. ‘There is a death plot here. She and her conspirators will try to kill King James. His death is the key to both kingdoms.’
‘But there is more than that. There is the powder … the attack on the strangers.’
Mills looked doubtful. ‘I am not certain there is a connection, John.’
‘Of course there is a connection. Cecil accepts it. Glebe is the link. One day he publishes seditious discourses against the strangers, the next he has the tale of the Scots prince. This can be no coincidence. And who is this Laveroke who brought him these tales?’
Bruce suddenly sat up straight. ‘Did you say Laveroke?’
‘Have you heard the name before?’
‘Oh aye, we know Luke Laveroke well enough.’ He thrust his dirk hard into the table. It stood there, embedded and quivering. ‘He is a man I would happily slice to dog meat with my little blade. There was a time he pretended to work for us, but all the time he has worked for the scarlet whore and his friends in Spain. You must know him well, for he has spent much time in England.’
‘I have never heard the name before.’
‘No? How about Baines? Richard Baines. That’s one of his aliases. In Rheims or Rome, they’ll know him as Father Benedictus, ordained priest. Changes his name, changes his appearance. A great player, he is. You never know who he is today, or who he’ll be tomorrow. Most recently, he was the middleman for Errol and Angus, carrying sedition between Edinburgh and Spain. We heard the truth about Laveroke from his servant, under torture. But by then he had gone. So now he’s in England, is he?’
‘Baines tried to kill me not two hours since. I thought he was working for Essex.’ Shakespeare looked at Mills in disbelief. ‘Did you know he was Laveroke?’
Mills seemed as stunned as Shakespeare. He shook his head, his jaw tight shut.
‘Mr Bruce,’ Shakespeare said. ‘Are you certain of this? How is it that the Scots have never mentioned the connection to us before?’
Bruce laughed. ‘Do you tell us all your secrets, Shakespeare?’
‘But Baines has been consistently anti-Papist. He tried to poison the well at Rheims while posing as a Roman Catholic exile. They even slung him in gaol for a twelvemonth.’
‘And did he succeed in poisoning any of the fathers? I think not. A fine ruse that was, then. Take it from me, Shakespeare. Baines is Laveroke and he’s a greased priest.’
‘And he was the one that said Marlowe’s mouth should be stopped. What in the name of God is his connection to Marlowe in all this?’
Bruce gave an indifferent shrug of his shoulders. ‘I know nothing of that, nor care. What I want to know is where he is now. Glebe must know. Take me to him and you can have the woman.’
Suddenly, Shakespeare remembered something – the stench of Baines when he arrived at Gaynes Park following his ride from London. That had been no ordinary stink of sweat and dirt, but the smell of rotting cabbage – the smell of brimstone, otherwise known as sulfur, an ingredient of gunpowder.
The door to the room opened. Sir Robert Cecil had returned. A slight, dark presence. He nodded to the three men assembled around the table. ‘Gentlemen, do we have progress? Can I tell Her Majesty that this pretender will be found, seized and brought to trial as an impostor without delay?’
‘Baines is Laveroke, the man who brought the stories to Glebe,’ Shakespeare said. ‘The Scots know him as a Papist spy.’
‘Well, that is news, but I am not sure that it surprises me.’ Cecil’s expression did not alter. ‘My father had doubts about Baines before, said he had never been certain of his loyalties. We were considering bringing him to Star Chamber for questioning on certain matters – letters passed to Spain through the French embassy which the code-breaker believed might have been in his hand. But he was under Essex’s protection – and then he wrote that denunciation of Marlowe and that seemed to prove his trustworthiness. I fear we took our eye off him.’ Cecil turned to Rabbie Bruce. ‘I suggest you bring him in, Mr Bruce. Have we any idea where he might be?’
‘Essex House, perchance?’ Mills suggested.
‘He just tried to kill me, on the river.’ Shakespeare ran a hand across the swelling on the crown of his head.
Cecil smiled thinly. ‘Well, I am pleased to see he failed. Let us pray he fails at all else he attempts.’ He paused a moment. ‘But I bring you back to the main point. Put this talk of a Scots prince to rest. That is your task. Your only task.’
‘We were discussing whether there might be a link with the powder outrages. And the name Baines must bring us back to Marlowe …’
‘Mr Shakespeare, you are like a hound with a dead fox. You have done enough. Unclench your teeth. There is no link to Marlowe.’
‘You seem very certain, Sir Robert.’
‘I am. I grant you, however, that a connection to the powder conspiracy is most likely. It has all the bitter tang of Spanish intrigue. I am told that Knagg, the powder-master of Three Mills, is still missing. As is five thousand pounds or more of powder. What I would like to know is what they are planning to do – an attack with such an amount placed well could cause much consternation. Have you heard yet from Mr Cooper?’
The name chilled Shakespeare like an icicle sliding down the neck of his shirt. He had been so preoccupied with thoughts of Catherine, he had scarce given a thought to his faithful assistant. Shakespeare looked at Cecil blankly, but said nothing.
‘John, there is something I believe I should now tell you about William Sarjent, the man sent to accompany your man. He is not quite what he seems.’
The cold began to freeze the blood in Shakespeare’s veins.
‘He is not a common Tower powder-master but an intelligencer in my father’s service. I did not tell you before now, for you know that I would only ever reveal one of my spies as a last resort. But I think it only fair to set your mind at rest by telling you that he has served us for many years, both here and in the Low Countries, keeping a close watch on the movements of gunpowder. He is a good man. Mr Cooper could not be aligned to a better.’
A pistol shot rent the air. Boltfoot opened his eyes. He lay by the fire in desperate pain. His back and arms had been scorched by the flames like meat on a spit. The hair on the back of his head was singed away. He had been passed nine times across the fire. Each time had been more agonising than the last, searing int
o his flesh and turning his clothes to blackened shreds.
He looked up. So did the two women and the man who held him prisoner. They had been copulating shamelessly before him, like wild animals, squealing and screaming, calling on the devil to join them. Now, of a sudden, they were silent.
Boltfoot twisted his body to try to see where the shot had come from. He managed to turn and edge further away from the fire. William Sarjent was standing there, smoking wheel-lock in hand. His nose was bruised and swollen and his eyes yellow-blue from Boltfoot’s vicious head-butt at the Three Mills powder plant. Sarjent thrust the pistol into his belt and removed another gun, which he pointed at the three rutting Scots. What were they, Boltfoot had found himself wondering as he drifted in and out of consciousness, satanists, anabaptists, witches, what? They had been singing or chanting. Strange words that held no meaning for him: ‘Kimmer, go before, kimmer go. If you will not go before, kimmer let me …’
The three froze at the discharge of the gun. They looked like startled hares. Their black gowns were up about their waists and they were naked below, in rude obscenity. As if suddenly realising their shameful discovery, they disengaged their parts from one another and began scrabbling away, first on all fours in the dust and grass, gathering their skirts about them, then up and running, running, running, sliding down a bank of dusty earth through the copse until he could see them no more.
Boltfoot heard William Sarjent laugh. Unhurriedly, he sauntered over to Boltfoot, put down his gun, took a dagger from his belt and began to saw through the ropes that bound the prisoner.
‘I think it fair to say I gave them the devil of a scare, Mr Cooper,’ he said. ‘The devil of a scare!’ He roared with laughter at his own jest. ‘Now then, sir, let me have a look at you.’ As he freed Boltfoot from the ropes and sat him up, he shook his head. ‘You are in a mighty poor way, Mr Cooper. I think I arrived just in time to save your hide, for you do seem cooked to a turn.’
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