Prophecy (2011)

by S. J. Parris

  Chapter Seventeen

  City of London

  3rd October, Year of Our Lord 1583

  Back in my own room, my shirt laced, I grow increasingly troubled by the thought of that letter from Henry Howard, which Courcelles and Marie are reading even now. He will not have told them anything like the truth, but if I were to second guess him, I would expect him to have concocted some story about having discovered my betrayal of them all, some reason why they should keep me within their sight until he finds another chance to remove the threat that he fears I pose for him.

  I would give almost anything at this moment for the chance to see Sidney, to have him make light of my predicament by punching me in my painful shoulder, then draw his sword in my defence. But Sidney is miles away in Barn Elms, and with Howard’s men on the lookout for me, I would not wager much on my chances of reaching Walsingham’s house in one piece. Wind buffets the window frames, making them rattle like teeth, and through the panes I can see only churning grey clouds. At this moment my heart feels constricted and I cannot escape the thought that England has been a mistake. I thought it would bring me freedom from persecution, but since I landed on this friendless island it seems I have done nothing but put myself on the wrong side of Catholics who want to kill me. I could have stayed in Naples for that, I think, gloomily, though I know the fault is my own; no one forced me to accept Walsingham’s offer of a place in his network of informers. I chose it because I found him to be a man I respected, and because, as I had told Fowler, I believed that the freedoms Queen Elizabeth had established here were worth defending against the tyranny of Rome. And - let me not fool myself - because I knew that to serve Elizabeth and her Principal Secretary in this way was likely to bring me reward and patronage of a kind no writer can advance without. Now, as I pace the confines of my room, I fear my life will be in danger if I leave the embassy or if I stay here.

  But I am not altogether friendless in London; in the absence of Sidney, there is one person a little nearer with whom I can share a confidence. If I can get as far as St Andrew’s Hill and reach Fowler without being attacked, I could at least stick close to him; I would be less vulnerable in company. I picture again poor Dumas grabbed as he passes the mouth of an alleyway down at the wharf, the cord pulled tight around his throat before he can draw breath to scream, his frantic struggle for life unseen even as his limbs give their last few spasms and fall to stillness, before his body is dumped like a sack of refuse in the river. If I can avoid that fate for long enough to find Fowler, I can solicit his opinion on my unfinished theory, formed in my restless half-sleep this morning: that Marie, prompted by the Duke of Guise, was behind the plot to poison Elizabeth on Accession Day. She paid Dumas to steal the ring, while Courcelles, with his winning face, was drafted in to seduce Cecily and provide her with the means to kill; for whatever reason, Cecily lost her nerve and had to be silenced. Perhaps the graphic display pointing to a Catholic threat was meant to turn the court’s attention to the known English Catholic sympathisers in its ranks. Either way, the one element missing from this equation is who actually carried out the murders. I don’t doubt that Marie could be ruthless enough to take a life, but she would lack the physical strength; besides, she would regard butchery as servants’ work. Courcelles has always struck me as the sort of man who would pass out if he cut his finger on his dinner knife, but perhaps he is a better performer than I have given him credit for. Even if that were true, both Marie and Courcelles were standing beside me at the concert when Abigail Morley was murdered, so who was their accomplice, their third man?

  I snatch up my doublet in a moment of decisiveness; I will not stay here pacing this room waiting for Howard’s thugs to come and find me. I pull on a cloak over my doublet and then remember that I have left my leather riding boots at Arundel House; I will have to wear the shoes I keep for finer weather, though the recent rain will have left the streets in a mire. Before I leave, I prise up the loose floorboard beneath my bed where I keep the chest with the money I receive from Walsingham. It is not a fortune - not compared with the risks I run for him - but it does at least allow me a standard of living in London that King Henri’s sporadic stipend would not provide. I will need to have new boots made - no one can survive a London winter without them, I have been told. Perhaps I can persuade Fowler to accompany me. In any case, I will retrieve my dagger from Castelnau’s study on my way out and take my chances in the city streets; that at least is better than cowering in my room with endless theories multiplying in my head and no solid evidence to prove or disprove them.

  Only the ambassador’s butler sees me slip out through the front door, my cloak pulled up around my head. He can tell Marie and Courcelles that I have left if he pleases; I have decided that if I keep to the main thoroughfares and stay among crowds there is less chance of meeting the same end as Dumas. On the other hand, it is easier to stick a knife in a man’s ribs and disappear in a crowd. I keep the bone-handled knife at my belt, one hand on its hilt, my eyes raking the street to either side.

  At the Fleet Bridge, I hear footsteps at my back and whip around so fast that my pursuer will not have time either to hide or to pounce, but the only person I see is a skinny boy who freezes, gaping at me nervously. His eyes flicker to the hand beneath my cloak, and I recognise him as the kitchen boy Jem from Whitehall Palace, the one who had brought the fateful message to Abigail Morley that lured her to her death. I let go of the dagger and step towards him, trying to make my expression less forbidding. He draws a paper out from his jerkin.

  ‘Jem? How long have you been following me?’

  ‘From Salisbury Court, please you, sir. She told me to wait outside and catch you whenever you came out. She said I was not to be seen.’

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘I am to give you this, sir,’ he says, holding out the paper.

  I glance at the seal, but it means nothing. Quickly I tear the paper open and find, to my surprise, a summons from Lady Seaton, the queen’s Lady of the Bedchamber. She is visiting friends at Crosby Hall in Bishopsgate Street and has something to impart to me; I am to find her there by knocking at the trade entrance and asking for her manservant. In any other circumstances, the imperious tone of this note would tempt me to ball it in my fist and throw it aside, but I suspected when I spoke to Lady Seaton that night at Richmond Palace, after the murder of Cecily Ashe, that she knew more than she was willing to say. Why she has suddenly decided to speak to me now, I do not know; neither do I discount the possibility that it might be a trap. The boy hovers uncertainly, unsure as to whether his duty is dispatched.

  ‘Thank you, Jem. When were you sent with this?’

  ‘Only this morning, sir. After breakfast.’

  ‘I wonder you have the stomach to carry any more messages.’

  He looks at me with a pained expression.

  ‘I must eat, sir.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  I squint up at the sky; in this thin light it is impossible to guess at the position of the sun, but the hour must be already past three. She will be awaiting me now, if the note is really from her. I wonder briefly about giving the boy a shilling to accompany me through the city but decide against it; anyone who wants to attack me would not think twice about getting the boy out of the way, and I cannot risk any further violence to anyone on my account. I reach into the purse inside my doublet and find a groat; he pockets it gratefully and runs back westwards along Fleet Street, slipping easily among the people and carts. I scan the street uneasily after he has dis appeared, but the Londoners walking towards the Lud Gate press on, heads down, wrapped in cloaks against the wind, passing me by without remark. No one is watching, yet I feel the city’s eyes on me, from doorways and side streets and blank windows, as exposed as surely as if I were walking through the streets naked.

  With Lady Seaton’s letter in my hand, I turn and continue towards the gatehouse ahead, its turrets jutting above the high city wall, but my nerves are wound as tight as Dumas’s were
on our last journey together; I start like a hare at the slightest movement at the edge of sight. I cast my mind back to the night of the concert at Whitehall, to the hushed conference in Burghley’s room when the boy Jem told his story. He did not seem to me bright enough to be anything other than honest, but there is an outside chance that he knowingly delivered a false message to Abigail to trap her, and that he might now have been used by the same person to draw me. The man in the hat - who was he? Marie and Courcelles’s unknown third man? But if Jem was lying, the man in the hat may not even exist; he might have been given his errand by someone he knew from the court and would not name.

  My thoughts preoccupied in this way, I pass under the Lud Gate, squeezing my way through a flock of sorry-looking sheep and trying not to glance up at the rotten hunk of human meat spiked over the central arch, a reminder to the citizens of the price of treason. Instead of heading down to St Andrew’s Hill, I make my way along Cheapside, the wide stone-paved thoroughfare that bisects the City east to west. Here I grow certain that I am being followed, though each time I turn I fear I am just too slow to catch him, and I have seen nothing to give flesh to my fears, except glimpses of a cloak whisked into a doorway which might have been imagined. It is more that I sense him, his movements shadowing mine, his eyes on my back as I walk. Between the ornate fronts of the goldsmiths’ workshops, their colourful signs creaking and swaying like banners overhead, the alleyways offer ample opportunity to hide, but if I keep to the centre of the road, avoiding those on horseback and the pedlars’ carts, I hope to give myself time and space to react if anyone draws too close.

  At the eastern end of Cheapside, where the Stocks Market and the Great Conduit stand, I turn north along Three Needle Street, past the grand facade of the Royal Exchange, the Flemish-designed building that looks as if it has been lifted straight from the Low Countries and dropped in the middle of London. Immediately you see that this is the part of the City where wealth gathers; merchants in expensive furs and feathered caps hurry up and down the steps of the Royal Exchange and the large houses set back from the road behind their walls are either newly built with lavish windows or converted from grand monastic buildings refurbished after the queen’s father had them closed down. Even so, where money gathers so does desperation; beggars with only the merest covering of rags between them and the October damp hover near about the steps, plaintively calling for alms from well-fed, fur-swaddled traders. At least here, with more wealth visible, people also seem to be more vigilant; outside the Exchange are liveried guards with pikestaffs, and some of the well-dressed citizens go about flanked by menservants. If whoever is pursuing me has come this far - and some instinct tells me he is near at hand - he will need to move cautiously.

  I find Crosby Hall at the southern end of Bishopsgate Street, a fine new house with a gabled front of red brick and pale stone trim. A narrow alley runs alongside the garden wall and I guess that the trade entrance is to be found here; as I turn the corner, a wave of cold fear washes over me and I draw my dagger, expecting that if the assault is to come, it will be now, away from passers-by. A door clicks; I brace myself ready to lunge, the knife held before me as a young woman with a covered basket emerges from a small gate in the wall and screams with as much vigour as if I had actually stabbed her.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I say, sheathing the knife as I scramble to help her pick up her fallen laundry, but she backs up against the wall and continues shrieking as if all the legions of hell were at her heels. I conclude that my accent is not helping. A large balding man in a smeared kitchen apron sticks his head out of the gate, his fists clenched.

  ‘What’s all this?’

  ‘Forgive me - misunderstanding - I am here to see Lady Seaton? My name is Giordano Bruno.’

  ‘I don’t give two shits for your foreign name, ain’t no Lady Seaton lives here. Now get away before I kick you out on your dirty Spanish arse.’

  ‘He’s got a knife,’ the girl says, pointing, as she tucks herself behind his meaty shoulder.

  I hold my hands up.

  ‘Lady Seaton is a guest of your master today, I believe. I am told she has an urgent message for me. If you would be so kind as to enquire? I can wait here.’

  ‘You will wait here and all. You’re not coming in with a knife. Get back in there, Meg, till we sort this one out.’ He holds the gate for the girl and she scuttles back inside. The man gives me a last glare.

  ‘Say your name again. Slow, like.’

  ‘Bruno. Tell her, Bruno.’

  He nods, and the gate shuts behind him. The alley remains silent. I lean against the wall, swivelling my head from one side to the other, convinced now that I have been tricked, that I am standing in this mud-churned lane quite probably awaiting my execution. Well, I think - I have looked death in the face more than once and I have learned a bit about putting up a fight from my years as a fugitive in Italy. If I have been summoned here to die, I will not make it easy for them.

  Time drips past, so that I have given up trying to count the minutes. A gust of wind drives flurries of dead leaves up the length of the alley; some cling to my legs before whirling onward. When the gate opens again I leap against the far wall, hand to my belt. A grey-haired man in a smart black doublet and starched ruff appears in the entrance and looks me up and down.

  ‘You are Bruno? Lady Seaton’s messenger?’

  ‘Er - I am.’ I allow my breath to slide out slowly; he does not seem about to run me through. Was the letter genuine after all?

  ‘Step inside. I am steward to Sir John Spencer.’ He ushers me through the gate into a small courtyard at the rear of the house. Several chickens scratch around the yard, perhaps looking for grain spilled from the sacks waiting to be loaded into storehouses. ‘Wait here. But I’m afraid I must ask you to hand over your weapon while you are inside our walls.’ He reaches out apologetically.

  Still I hesitate, but as I glance over his shoulder I see, with a flood of relief so great that my legs almost buckle, the prim figure of Lady Seaton appearing around the corner of the house.

  ‘Oh, there you are, Bruno - I need you to take a message to the palace for me urgently,’ she calls in that same peremptory tone as before. This is clearly some cover she has devised for having someone of low birth visit her at her friends’; her acting is deplorable, but it seems to have the desired effect. I produce a sweeping bow; the steward glances at me curiously, then does the same and retreats back into the house without demanding my knife. A servant pauses to stare in the course of hefting a wooden pallet across the yard, but returns to his work at one stony look from Lady Seaton.

  She offers a vinegary little smile.

  ‘They have still not caught the brute who killed my girls,’ she begins, with an air of accusation. ‘Sir Edward Bellamy was released without charge after Abigail Morley was found, though you may imagine the whispering at court when he showed his face again, poor man. The stink of accusation takes a long time to clear. People wanted it to be him, you know, so they could sleep easy in their beds. But the court must hold its breath in fear once more, and some of my girls are near hysterical. And the queen grows impatient.’

  ‘They are hopeful of finding him soon, I believe.’

  ‘Pah.’ Her mouth shows what she thinks of this claim. ‘They do not know what I know.’

  ‘What?’

  She beckons me over to a corner in the shelter of a low brick storehouse.

  ‘They released Cecily Ashe’s body to her father for burial last week. The rest of her family came down from Nottinghamshire. There was a service in the Chapel Royal. I took the opportunity to speak to her younger sister.’

  I nod to her to continue, aware that I am holding my breath.

  ‘Of course, the father won’t allow that poor girl anywhere near the court after what happened to Cecily and you can’t blame him, although I dare say it won’t make much odds to her marriage chances - it was Cecily had all the looks in that family, more’s the pity.’ She sniffs. ‘But y
ou know how sisters are with confidences.’

  I did not, but I nod in any case, anxious not to interrupt.

  ‘I got the girl away from her parents and pressed her on what Cecily had written of this beau of hers.’

  ‘The one you assured me did not exist?’

  She purses her lips.

  ‘Never mind that. Apparently Cecily had been writing to her sister every week - the maids’ letters are supposed to go through me, of course, but they find ways and means to smuggle them out. She was not keen to tell me, but I can be extremely persuasive.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it.’

  She nods, as if appeased.

  ‘Well - this beau. Cecily had written to her sister that she was soon to become a countess.’

  ‘So he was an earl?’ My blood quickens again; in my excitement I clutch at her sleeve.

  ‘Unhand me please, Bruno.’ She smooths the silk down, but when she deigns to glance at me I see her eyes are bright with the relish of her tale. ‘So he said. I had to prise it out of the girl with threats in the end. Told her if she didn’t give me the name and any more girls died, I would tell the queen in person that she was responsible for hiding the murderer. That put the fear of God in her, I can tell you. They’re stubborn creatures at fifteen.’

  ‘I can well imagine.’ I picture the terrified sister cowering before Lady Seaton’s waspish tongue. ‘She gave you a name?’

  ‘Not a name, but a title. She claims Cecily never told her his name. She confided only that he called himself the Earl of Ormond.’ She leaves a dramatic pause for me to digest this. I shrug to indicate my ignorance.