Raleigh's Page

by Alan Armstrong

  Andrew’s face was as hot as Charles’s must have been.

  “How did Mr. Raleigh know?” he gasped.

  “The sailors came and told him.”

  Andrew didn’t sleep well that night. He dreamed about the boy who’d been sent away.

  He was never homesick when he boarded at Tremayne’s school. Now a hot ball of feeling rode high in his chest.

  8

  ANDREW’S FIRST DAY AT DURHAM HOUSE

  The bells at dawn awakened him before the others. For a moment he imagined the morning starting at Stillwell Farm; then he gritted his teeth to keep from thinking about what he missed. He got up and bathed and made his way to where they’d eaten dinner. No one was around. He heard voices at the front door, where James, the doorman who’d greeted him yesterday, stood outside in the Strand making notes as tradesmen came in—bakers with fragrant hot loaves, a carter with milk, another with vegetables. A giant of a man staggered under the butchered half of a cow across his back.

  “You hungry, boy?” James called in a friendly voice when he saw him. Andrew nodded. “Then come with me and let’s see what the cooks can do for us. I’m hungry too!”

  He pulled the door, bolted it, and led Andrew down to the kitchens. Already there were good cooking smells and much activity. James got them mugs of hot milk and hunks of the new brown bread. He dipped his bread—“To ease my teeth,” he said, making a face. “Going out on me fast!”

  Later, at regular breakfast, Mr. Harriot came and sat beside Andrew. There was no order to the seating at breakfast, but no one sat at Mr. Raleigh’s high table. Monsieur Pena joined them.

  “By your leave, Monsieur,” Mr. Harriot said, “I have an hour’s bit of business at Court this morning. May I take Andrew with me to give him a quick look and then return him to you?”

  The Frenchman nodded. “You show him the flowers at Court, then I’ll show him what we grow here. Be off soon, though—it looks like rain, and Court colors run.”

  Andrew half-trotted to keep up with Mr. Harriot’s long strides as they walked the Strand from Durham House to Whitehall Palace. They held to the center of the street to stay clear of the slops—and worse—folks tossed from upper windows. They dodged carts, women hawking cockles and oysters from baskets around their necks, the salt man making deliveries from the box strapped to his back.

  “What’s your business there?” Andrew panted.

  “Solving a small problem in mathematics for the upcoming lottery,” Mr. Harriot replied. “The government expects to sell thousands of tickets across the nation. For the last one, they sold four hundred thousand, but there were problems sharing out the returns. The counting went slow, and some complained they never got their due. I’ve worked up a better counter—a sheet of cloth the pay agents can lay on the counting table to work out the divisions by shuffling tokens. Mr. Raleigh put me to it.”

  The road they walked ran right through Whitehall, a village unto itself, where palace men swarmed like gaudy butterflies in silks and gloves and feathered hats, for all the morning was warm. They seemed to walk small as they made large gestures and wagged their heads. Andrew didn’t see any women about.

  “Is today special?” he asked. “This is grander than Lord Mayor’s Day back home at Plymouth.”

  “No,” muttered Mr. Harriot as they turned down a corridor. “Just an ordinary Monday in spring with the gallants out flaunting.”

  “What is their work?” Andrew asked.

  “Showing off to each other and begging favors from the Queen,” Mr. Harriot laughed. “They own land. Their tenants keep them in finery.”

  They entered a room marked “Lottery Office.” Andrew watched close as Mr. Harriot talked numbers and shuffled the pieces, explaining to the officer how the new counting cloth and tokens would make division easy. The man’s eyes glazed over.

  “So, clear enough?” Mr. Harriot asked at last.

  The lottery officer scrunched up his mouth and nodded weakly.

  “Good. You’ll demonstrate it to the lord commissioners and send word to Mr. Raleigh. He waits to hear.

  “They’ll have me back,” Mr. Harriot laughed as they walked out. “That poor fellow can’t count beyond his fingers—like most of them,” he said, gesturing at the fops around. “They look down on tradesmen and merchants who soil their hands with money, but if you handle money or try following a mapped course, you learn how to count quick enough.”

  Hurrying back to Durham House, they passed the great yard where men in armor trained for combat on horses, spearing and dodging bright-colored tethered balls the size of a man’s head. Andrew thought he recognized Peter. He waved; the other didn’t.

  The bells hadn’t struck ten when he joined Pena in the garden. The Frenchman was mixing something in his wheelbarrow.

  “You’ve heard about men who mix strange things together to make gold, yes? Well, we gardeners do alchemy too,” he said, pointing. “In this bin we have ground limestone; in that one, wood ash; there, seaweed. The others are washed sea sand, peat, oak leaf mulch, cow dung well rotted. In the farthest ones, the stinks—fish meal and chicken droppings. We work to make the right soils for the Spanish seedlings.

  “I’ve divided the plants among a dozen plots: one sweet with lime, ash, peat, and fish meal; one sour with oak mulch and dung; some sections sandy, some loose with seaweed. The farthest one is simple London clay and river muck. Your first job every morning will be to mark the progress of each plot. Once we see where the seedlings thrive and where they fail, we’ll move them around.

  “Then to the work every gardener knows: on your knees for the battle against weeds! Always we have weeds. They come like Spanish spies in the night, hiding until they make themselves secure and deep-rooted, and then they rise and prove tough to pull. So now I show you what is weed and what is worthy. It is easier with plants than with people, and there is this difference: if you pull up something you want to keep, you can always replant it. With a dead man, no.”

  He handed the boy a triangle blade on a pole.

  “You loosen around…”

  Andrew showed what he knew. He’d weeded in his father’s beds since he could walk. It was the same thing when Pena demonstrated how to prune: Andrew knew the art.

  Every few feet there were shallow dishes, some with small gray bodies floating. “Slugs,” Pena explained. “We trap them with beer. The other pests we pick and pinch. As for crows—stone them!”

  When the noon bells rang, Pena led Andrew to a large shed filled with pots and tools. “Here we put away,” he said. “We wipe the blades clean and sharpen what we’ve dulled. They are precious, these edge tools—French, the best.” Andrew felt a pang: the shed’s smell reminded him of the one at home, and Pena’s words about caring for the tools—they were like what Andrew’s father always said when they finished work together.

  Dinner was served when the bells struck one. All the Durham House folk took their places for the main meal of the day: slices of roast beef, as much as anyone could eat, dark bread, and warm ale. Many then went off to sleep.

  Although drowsy himself from the heavy food, Andrew slogged up to Mr. Raleigh’s turret and began work writing a summary of the Spaniard’s book of American plants. Knowing what he did of his master’s interest in drugs, he concentrated on those plants with medicinal properties. In the best hand he could manage he began an extract of what Señor Monardes wrote about tobacco: “A medicine leaf chewed or smoked that strengthens the heart as it stirs up the blood….”

  His head was heavy. The air was still. He put the pen aside and laid his head on his arm. Suddenly he heard Mr. Raleigh on the stairs. As he struggled to look alert at his work, Mr. Raleigh’s eyes took him in. Andrew was sure the man knew he’d been sleeping. Mr. Raleigh nodded and said nothing.

  9

  HOMESICK!

  His third night at Durham House, Andrew called out in his sleep. Peter heard. “The baby cries and whimpers ‘Mamma’ in the dark,” he taunted as they dressed t
he next morning. “Perhaps Mamma’s precious should go home.”

  Andrew clenched his teeth and made fists as he struggled not to cry and not to fight. His father had warned him against brawling.

  “You called out other names too,” William told him later, when they were alone. “Nothing I could make out before I shook you quiet.”

  Pena guessed something was wrong when Andrew came to work. “It is hard at the beginning,” the Frenchman said, looking into the boy’s eyes and nodding slowly.

  Andrew bit his lip as Pena put a sweaty arm around him. “Courage!” he said. “I know. I had to leave home too.

  “But look here!” said Pena, pointing to a new plot he’d staked out. “You will make this your own garden,” he said, picking up his tools. The knot in Andrew’s chest loosened.

  Pena sang a silly verse he made up as they worked the ground together:

  I’m a man of the dirt,

  Which does no man hurt,

  As it feeds him and clothes him

  And saves him from Sin.

  The pretty ones hurry to wash it away,

  But without it they wouldn’t be here today.

  They think it low to dig and delve,

  But it was dirt that fed the Twelve.

  Hey!

  Hey!

  Andrew began to smile as Pena sang loud, clowning and pretending to plow:

  Adam’s delving, so they say,

  Helped him work his Sin away;

  We do the same, every day,

  So we have no Sin to pay.

  Hey!

  Hey!

  As he finished with an elaborate bow, sweeping his leather apron to one side, Andrew grinned and clapped. He felt better than he had in days.

  “Ma foi!” Pena exclaimed. “They are too serious here. With them it is all work and no laughing, with this for the Court and that for the fortune. Even their play is work. This evening I take you into the streets for play! We’ll be safe together.”

  “I’d like that!” Andrew cried. “I’ve been once to Court but never to town.”

  “Good!” said Pena, beaming. Then he looked hard at the boy. “Your color is bad. Are you well in your gut?”

  Andrew looked down and shook his head.

  “Ah!” the man exclaimed. “Your guts grip because you eat no salads as they do in France. Come! I keep a bed for greens! Every morning now when you come to me you will eat leaves from my patch. All that meat, all that bread,” he said. “No Frenchman from the South, no Florentine, not even a Spanish peasant suffers in the gut like you English. And do you know why? Because you do not eat fresh leaves like the other animals.”

  He made Andrew eat a fistful of salad leaves. Some were bitter.

  After supper Andrew walked close beside Pena as they joined the slow tide of people out for pleasure—gaudy-dressed women, groups of sailors laughing and talking in their own tongues, country lads like Andrew looking around with new eyes. They drifted past musicians playing for a coin, acrobats in orange-and-green costumes, mimes with chalked faces. A hushed crowd watched a man pick his way over an alley on a rope stretched high. Every time the ropewalker teetered, Andrew felt the bottom go out of his stomach. He hated heights and tight dark places. The man twisted and danced and swayed for what seemed a long time before he slid down to get their money in his hat, a red felt cone with a ring of large orange spots at the crown.

  “Who is he?” Andrew asked.

  “A Turk,” Pena said. “The Queen allows them the run of the city because they fight the Spanish. ‘When in danger from one country, play the other against it’ is her policy.”

  The next moment, they passed a man reciting a ballad he was selling about the recent capture and torture of a priest named Campion. Andrew drew close to hear—Rebecca had spoken of this priest. At the top of the paper there was a smeared picture of the man’s last agony. The boy’s stomach lurched as his knees went weak.

  “Ha’penny, lad,” the hawker called, handing over a copy. “See the dead Jesuit!”

  “No!” Pena exclaimed, pulling Andrew away. “You’ve no business with any of that.”

  At the corner a fruitier and his stout wife offered dark red cherries in twists of scrap paper. “Kentish cherries, my lovely!” the jolly lady called to Andrew as she flourished a cone. “Take one of my cherries, darling! First of the season, here and nowhere else! Sweet, sweet, my sweet!”

  Pena bought a twist. They walked silent together, chewing and spitting pits. “Sweet they are, but not as good as what I sent the Queen ten days ago!” Pena laughed, wiping his chin. Andrew was amazed. They were huge compared to the cherries they grew at Stillwell.

  As they approached Durham House in the dark, a whoosh of fire erupted from a barge on the river as a rocket sizzled up, flaming silver. Andrew threw his arms over his head.

  “No fear! It’s just Mr. Harriot at his tricks,” Pena cried. “He practices to amuse the Queen. Fireworks are her favorite toys. That man uses gunpowder the way cooks use flour,” he continued as they got to the door. “He gave Mr. Raleigh a snake to surprise her. When she touched its tail with a spark, it spat fire from the front. She jumped. She ordered a dozen more to scare the ambassadors.”

  Just then Mr. Harriot came running up, holding his hands. They were blistering red and his cheek was smudged. “You saw my fire show?” he cried, trying to smile. “I got singed. One of my rockets,” he said, grimacing.

  “Cold water! Cold water!” Pena yelled as James opened the door. “Andrew—bring leaves from the Spanish plant we study this morning.”

  Andrew hurried down to the garden. It was hard to see in the dark. He felt among the plants in the special bed for the fleshy spike-leaved one Pena called aloe. He tried breaking off a leaf. It bent but wouldn’t break, so he stripped off his jacket, dug carefully, and carried up the whole plant.

  Mr. Harriot spoke between his teeth as Pena smeared jelly-like sap on his hurts.

  “Tomorrow night,” Mr. Harriot panted, “the Queen progresses downriver sitting in the glass box atop her royal barge. She wants a show with drums and trumpets for people on the riverbank. Mr. Raleigh will give her that and more: ten floats like the one we just tested, spaced out along her route. A hundred rockets…”

  “And if one of those singes her,” Pena laughed, “you’ll send for Andrew and his Spanish remedy, yes?”

  10

  ANOTHER TEST

  Andrew had been at Durham House a week when he was summoned from the garden. Mr. Raleigh told him to go to a geographer he knew to borrow a map.

  “Take in the man,” Mr. Raleigh said. “Doctor Dee draws maps according to his angels.”

  The boy’s eyes widened. “He draws according to angels?”

  “Yes,” said Mr. Raleigh, nodding. “He will tell you he speaks with angels through his magic glass—a ball of smoky crystal made in the Orient long ago.

  “Men come upon strangeness traveling in dreams,” he continued. “Doctor Dee is a dream traveler.”

  Angels? Dream travelers? Is the man joking with me? Andrew wondered.

  Mr. Raleigh’s face was serious as he went on. “A remarkable thing about his maps is what he leaves off. Most maps show the rumored islands of the ancients. The doctor strips away to what is known.

  “Yesterday,” Mr. Raleigh continued, “one of the Queen’s agents came to me with a new map taken at Lisbon. There was a strange island marked in waters I know well.

  “‘What’s this?’ I asked the spy.

  “He told me he’d asked the same of the man who’d drawn it.

  “The drawer told him it was called Wife’s Island because, while he drew the map, his wife sitting by asked him to put in a dot of land for her so that she, in imagination, might have an island of her own.”

  Mr. Raleigh paused to study Andrew’s face. Andrew’s eyes were fixed on his.

  “I need to see the doctor’s new map,” Mr. Raleigh said, narrowing his eyes. “No Wife’s Island on it, I think.”

 
He leaned close.

  “In our work we must be able to persuade others to do our will even if it is not theirs. If you ask him right, he may lend it.

  “They have told you about the page you replaced?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You understand there are ways of asking?”

  Andrew nodded.

  “Good. The doctor is the Queen’s fortune-teller. She pays him little to keep him hungry. She reckons a fat astrologer would sleep; she wants her man gnawed by hunger as he tracks her future.

  “He knows medicines and poisons,” Mr. Raleigh went on as he paced the turret. “He’s given me things that kill in an instant, things that kill in a week, rings with points to carry venom, tainted salts and balms, a liquid to induce stupor. Above all, he’s our best mapmaker.

  “I want to see his new chart, but he’s a quarrelsome man. If I asked he would put me off, saying he needed time to make it more perfect. I need it now.

  “You will go first thing tomorrow in your country clothes.”

  Andrew was to tell no one who had sent him. If stopped for any reason, he was to swallow the message he carried, a bit of paper smaller than his hand sealed with a clot of red wax. The boy gagged at the thought of eating it.

  Mr. Raleigh instructed him carefully: “Catch your boat at London Bridge and return there,” he said. “Do not use my gate. The river men study everything. For a while at least I’d like to keep them unsure of our connection.”

  He gave Andrew a fourpence coin, a groat.

  “Twopence up, twopence down, with tips in the bargain, so don’t let the first charge you more or the second complain.”

  The next morning, a ferryman rowed Andrew up the river to Mortlake, where the doctor lived. From the boy’s halting answers, the ferryman took him for a bumpkin seeking a relation.

  Riding on water made Andrew queasy. He was sorry he’d eaten breakfast. He’d heard from William it was the same with Mr. Raleigh: to save his stomach he’d go down to London Bridge to cross the river rather than go by water.