Another Yeoman came forward with a pair of shoes and helped him put them on, then gave him a cloak and hat.
“Where are we going?” he asked Munday, who shook his head.
“Put your hands out.”
Becket’s heart almost stopped with fear and misery. The third Yeoman was carrying chains, manacles. For a moment he was unable to move at all.
“If . . . if I am to be executed, may I have a l . . . little time to prepare myself?” he heard himself whisper.
Munday stared at him coolly for a moment.
“We would give you such time, Ralph,” he said. “Do as we ask.”
He delayed, crossing his arms and hiding his hands under his armpits, hoping they could not see him shaking. Drops of sweat tickled his nose. He had backed from them as far as he could, his calves pressed against his bed-frame.
Ramme made a short noise of impatience and contempt, and that pricked Becket where he was rawest. Anger steadied him. With enormous effort, he put out his hands as directed and managed to watch impassively as the yeoman locked the manacles in place. His wrists were still bandaged, so the iron did not chafe but it felt bruisingly heavy. His hands began to tingle and burn again.
All five men surrounded him as they passed through the door, Ramme on his right gripping his arm. He saw the spiral stairs for the first time and found they had been worn by feet, so he missed his footing several times and must be supported by Ramme. The nails on their boots clattered like an army.
Out of the door and into the dusk before dawn, with a further two men waiting for them, carrying lanterns that made the soft rain into clouds of golden stars. Becket looked about at the looming towers and crowded buildings, sniffed the smell of wood-smoke from chimneys, lifted his face to see the dim clouds and fell the wetness of the icy rain. It delighted him. As suddenly as he had been terrified by the order to put out his hands, he was lifted by being out of doors at last.
They matched paces as men do when walking close-packed together and tramped across the cobbles, frightening a broad black shape from their way, which flapped and cawed. A gust of wind brought the smell of carrion from somewhere eastwards.
Down through a gate and past the stench of animals in cages – men or lesser beasts, it was impossible to say, until something large made a coughing roar as they passed which no humans could have made. Their boots boomed on the boat-landing.
A wherry was waiting with two rowers staring into space, boatmen’s cloaks over the Queen’s livery of scarlet. Ramme jumped in lightly and Munday nodded that Becket should follow him.
For a second he was undecided, thinking perhaps to jump into the murky sewer of a river and take his chances with the current, but the manacles promised only death for such boldness, and besides, where would he go after, and in what state?
Munday understood his hesitation and his eyes narrowed but at the same time Becket decided against jumping and stepped across into the boat, sat down hastily before he fell. Munday sat beside him and put his dagger point against Becket’s side.
“If you wish a clean, quick death,” he said quietly as the guards clambered in and the lantern in the prow was lit, “you have only to call out or make any sudden move.”
“May I speak?”
“No.”
One of the yeomen was busy with yet more chains.
“Put your foot out, Ralph,” said Munday.
“Is this necessary . . .” he began and felt the sharp prick of the poignard against his skin. Ramme leaned over, took a handful of his doublet-front and pulled him nose to nose.
“We’ll not warn you again, scum,” he hissed. “Put your foot out.”
Beckett licked his lips in fear as he saw the man’s anger and did as he was told. They chained his ankle to a ring-bolt in the bottom of the boat where a little water washed and glittered in the lantern-light. Ramme let go slowly but his eyes never left Becket’s face. Becket wanted to look away, found pressure in the stare and fury again within himself at his womanish cravenness. Why are they angry? he wondered like a child about his parents. Then it came to him, as if someone had spoken in his ear, that perhaps they were angry because of something entirely unconnected with him. He already knew there was no point in trying to placate them. If they wanted to hurt him again, then they could and they would, no matter what he did. So he could at least try and act as if he were a man and not the empty broken thing he knew he was. He crushed the urge to swallow, managed to stare back levelly at Ramme. To his satisfaction, at last Ramme looked away, and he had to hide a small victorious smile.
Feeling better, he held his bundle tight and rested his hands in his lap to take the weight of the metal. Then he looked about, screwing up his eyes against the needles of rain.
Somewhere inside him, a door opened and some knowledge trickled out. They were rowing on the Thames, upstream but with the tide – perhaps to see the Queen at her palace at Whitehall. He was afraid of that idea, very much afraid of seeing the Queen, whom it seemed he had offended grievously, although he had no idea how. They would pass . . . Images of familiar buildings passed processed before his mind’s eye: Baynard’s Castle, the Temple, the palaces on the Strand . . . And the door shut once more.
Becket looked again at Munday, who was also watching him intently. His poignard was gripped in his hand and the blade still pricked Becket between two of his ribs. He drew back from it a little and the blade followed the same couple of inches. Munday did not seem a wantonly cruel man as Mr Ramme was, but he was determined and looked like one who could kill when he said he would, and for no further reason. His expression seemed more interested than angry. Becket tried smiling at him to show he knew his mind, but it manifested as more of a death’s-head grin and revealed his fear.
It came to him again then that to be afraid all the time was a new thing for him. Once he had felt other emotions and fear had come and gone as the world suggested. Now it was riding permanently on his back, sucking at his strength. He sighed. Even if all his memories should fly back to their old roosting places, surely he could never again be the man pictured therein.
The thought dismayed him and he gulped hard, focussed for distraction on the careful rowing of the boatmen as they bent their backs into the oars. The wind caught at his hat and, without thinking, he tried to put one hand up to catch it, jerking his wrists cruelly. He could not keep from gasping but the poignard forbore to stab him. The guard in front of him caught his hat and gave it to him, and Becket nodded his thanks and sat holding it as well as he could. What if the boat sank? Was drowning a better death than execution for treason?
Ugly butcher’s images rose out of the black waters of his mind and this time he shrank from them too, inwardly, staying still and silent as Munday had ordered. It all depends, he thought, it all depends on whether the executioner had been ordered to cut me down alive or dead.
He wished, longed to ask them what the executioner had been told, but could not because his throat was too swollen with fright. He could not even swallow now. The black mountain of terror inside him seemed to swell and grow and tremble like Mount Etna, until he was astonished that the pursuivants could not see it and ashamed that it made him shake.
They are taking me to Tyburn, to Tyburn, where Campion died, he thought, and the ghostly smell of blood filled his nostrils until he thought he would puke.
And then something broke or changed inside him, as if the pregnant volcano had at last given birth to fire. It seemed to him that dying was no bad thing if it mean release from such fear, even a traitor’s death was better than his loneliness and emptiness and the branded-in memory of hanging from the pillar in the White Tower.
It occurred to him that he might well end in Hell for the sinfulness of his life, but then he thought that as he could remember nothing of it he had nothing to repent and surely God would grant him special circumstances? From his reading of the Bible he felt sure that Jesus Christ was a more merciful man than Davison, and might well be persuadable and would at le
ast give him a fair hearing, which was all he asked.
Upon which his trembling faded a little. To occupy his mind with more than future pain, he looked about him at the night, at the blurred earthly stars of occasional lanterns marking water-stairs on the Thames banks, at the rhythmic shadows of the boatmen and the creak of oars and the scrape and gutter of icy water under the boat’s keel. In honesty it was a filthy night, but still better than his dry empty cell, and he smiled up at it.
The cheap black felt of the hat they had given him was dewed with water, there was wind and sleet in his hair. He liked it. If he was going to his death . . . well, at least he could bid farewell to the sky and the river.
XXXVIII
THE QUEEN’S SECRETARY SITS at his desk and takes a pen, examines it, takes his penknife and trims a tiny sliver from the nib. Before him his desk is neat as a chessboard, with piles of paper squared off and held down with books, his sander placed just so by his ink-pot and not a single splatter of ink to mar the smooth polished wood.
He has a triple candle-stick to give him light, with wax candles bought thriftily by his wife from clerks at Court with rights to old candle-ends, and remelted in her own moulds. Every book on the shelf is straight, the floor swept as clean and clear as a Dutchman’s with a fire of Newcastle coals burning soberly in the grate.
To Mr Davison a pile of papers slightly off true gives pain. A speck of dust on the floor shouts at him like the voice of doom. When one of his sons commits the blasphemy of leaving a toy horse on wheels in the middle of the floor, Mr Davison does not lose his temper and shout and bang about as some might: his face tightens and tightens and the child is summoned from bed and made to put the abandoned horse, personally, on the fire and watch it burn.
His children are also very neat.
The pen perfected to his satisfaction, he dips and begins to write, slowly and hesitantly, unused to the exercise he now imposes on himself.
Sunday 22nd January 1587
I, William Davison, in the 36th year of my life, have resolved to keep a daily record of the progress of my soul to salvation, hoping that Almighty G-D shall vouchsafe to me the power to write only His Truth in this pages, and so make better known to me wherein I have sinned and wherein I have pleased Him. It shall be like a mirror for me between myself and G-D.
All that I do is in the service of G-D and all that I do has prospered thanks to His merciful aid, until now. To reprise the matter which seems so far beyond belief, two days before Christmas my men broke in upon a nest of Papists while they were at their blasphemous mumming of Christ’s sacrifice. It seems the raid had been ill-prepared and the hall was well-defended against them so that they captured only women and servants and one gentleman that had been commanding the defence which gave the Jesuit traitor and the others time to escape.
It being for the safety and quietness of the Commonwealth and further likely to benefit his soul, in that a foretaste of Hell may often prompt a man to repent him of his sins before he suffer the true Eternal Fire, this man was put to the question, to wit, the manacles, our usual engine of instruction, in the Tower of London.
Being as we thought obdurate in his sin and treason, he was questioned thus twice. At last, in extremity, we found that he thought us to be Spaniards, Papists, which tormented him to abjure the true Protestant religion and that he had in very truth lost his memory as he claimed (and as we had not believed).
In error, he cursed me for a Papist and an idolator with such defiance and courage as makes me proud to be of one religion with him. The man that we had thought was only a blasphemer of Christ, a worshipper at the altar of the Beast of Rome, was rather, in a strange manner, a noble Protestant martyr.
Being himself upon a mission of intelligence against the Papists, the blow Mr Ramme gave him on his head to pacify him had driven out his memory but not his wits nor his manly bravery. Unable to tell us, who were rightfully his friends, what service he was about for the True Religion, knowing not where he was nor why he was in the manacles, he had taken us for priests of the Inquisition and cursed us.
Never before has such a miserable chance happened. Never before has a foul and loathsome devil of Popery turned so strangely and sadly to a fair angel of the True Religion.
Mr Davison pauses, dips his pen, pauses and dips again.
I have sworn that I shall write truly as I feel, that this record may be a true mirror.
I own I am at a stand. If I were a heathen philosopher I might take this for a cruel jest of the gods, a demonstration of their power and the power of Fate.
Being rather, as I thought, A partaker in salvation, a Christian man of the ancient and Pure Religion, then there is a question I cannot keep myself from asking, blasphemous though it be.
Wherefore did G-D permit such a thing? And wherefore was I, who am his stoutest and staunchest servant, used in so black a twist? G-D may indeed permit his creatures to be tried unto their uttermost, that they gain Heaven thereafter, as we have seen with poor sailors taken by the Inquisition in Spain that witnessed so stoutly to the truth before their burning.
But I am concerned with cleansing the realm of Papist wickedness, and protecting the Queen from the evil machinations of her enemies. Wherefore should I have been used as G-D’s tool herein? Surely it was a sin to torment a man witnessing to the True Religion? Wherefore then should I have been cozened into such a sin?
Again he pauses, for his last question shakes him.
If I were less certain of my soul’s salvation through G-D’s Grace, I would wonder . . .
Very unusually, Davison’s pen catches on a fibre in the paper and spatters a few drops of ink. He stops, looks down at it, sands it and blows off the sand, then sets the paper aside. Deliberately he blinks, takes a new sheet.
This evening I went to visit my master, Sir Francis Walsingham. He is sick again of the stone, very grievously, and has given into my hands all the business of defending the realm from the Jesuits. Which I pray G-D to give me the strength and wisdom to do as it should be done. I brought him papers and warrants to sign and had meant to apprise him of the moves against us by others of the Queen’s Councillors. However, when I saw how diminished he was by pain and how discoloured his skin, I felt it better not to trouble him therewith and only brought the papers.
Our business being finished, I asked him of the documents that I had marked to be missing, judging from the sequencing of code-numbers, and relating especially to Sir Philip Sidney while he was in the Netherlands and also to the Jesuit that had given us the slip in summer while we were busy about the Babington plot.
He must needs consider for a while but then he gave me the key to his privy office in Seething Lane where he lay, being too sick to remove to Barn Elms, and also the cipher sheets.
After I had taken my leave of him, I went forthwith to his privy office and there, in the space of a few hours, had the full correspondence with Sidney that gave something of our noble Protestant’s mission.
To be brief, an informer at the Rheims Seminary (or nest of devilish vipers) had sent us some strange information. In the summer of 1586, Father Thomas Hart SJ had taken the confession of a witch in London. He had given us the slip but as soon as he reported to his master, the Duke of Parma, every Spanish or Papist agent in London was ordered to search the secondhand book-sellers and pawnbrokers for a thing they termed the Book of the Unicorn – presumably some libel against the Queen. We did not know what it might be, though we knew it could be to no good purpose and therefore attempted to find it ourselves. Alas, after much effort, both we and the Papists drew a blank.
After that, long silence upon the subject of the Book of the Unicorn until we thought it had been merely a chimera to distract us. At last a letter came in cipher from Sir Philip Sidney at Arnhem, praying Sir Francis to protect Sir Philip’s faithful servant, Mr David Becket, that was now working as an informer among the Papists if he should ever chance to be arrested and promising further information upon the matter of the Book of
the Unicorn, by a later letter.
This Becket, it seems sure, is our poor prisoner who gabbled of the same book while under pains.
Alas, now I cannot ask him of his service to Sir Philip. For there are enemies of True Religion at Court, that connive with the poor feeble womanly cowardice of the Queen who will not stamp out the enemies of G-D.
Once more the ink sprays on the paper, once more Mr Davison pauses and put it aside, then stops again, takes both sheets and locked them in a secret drawer of his desk. He kneels in prayer, stiff and straight as if at audience with the Queen, struggling to turn his mind from the angry memory of his last meeting with Lord Burghley.
XXXIX
BURGHLEY HAD BEEN AT his most infuriatingly bland.
“The Fleet is not safe enough for the keeping of a traitor,” Davison had protested angrily. “The place is crawling with recusants and debtors . . .”
“But Mr Davison,” Burghley had answered mildly, “this prisoner of yours is plainly not a traitor since he has professed himself of the True Religion. Do you tell me that you were mistaken, that he lied on oath and that he is in fact a Catholic?”
“No, but he is hiding a secret of great importance.”
“And what is this secret?”
That Davison had not been able to answer. “If I knew that, I would not need to keep hold of him,” he said though his teeth. “I do not know his secrets, only of its existence.”
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