Clarenceux sat up in the darkness. Feeling cold, he got off the bed and went to the window. The shutters were still open. Looking out, he could just make out the faint start of the dawn, a lightening of the darkness. The stars were beginning to fade.
He went to his clothes chest and rummaged, feeling for an extra garment. He found another doublet and put it over his shoulders. Rather than go back to bed, however, he leaned over the window ledge, watching the dawn seep into the landscape. From here he could see across the roofs of neighbors’ houses, all dim in this early dawn light. He breathed in the cold morning air and heard a seagull call, disturbed from its rest.
Eleven miles to the south, Awdrey and his daughters were asleep. Did thoughts and prayers pass through the night? Perhaps if he thought of her, and Annie and Mildred, he might enter their dreams. Who could ever know? Only God, he reflected. Unto Whom all desires were known and from Whom no secrets were hidden. And Rebecca-did God see her heart? Of course. Then why did He not return her here? Clarenceux shook his head; it was more than he could understand.
A cat screeched in a fight in a yard not far away. He could see the Thames and the outline of the houses on the great bridge. Here and there were the masts of stationary boats moored on both banks. In the still-dim light, he thought he saw one move. That would have been against the ordinances and laws of the city. There were more than two thousand boats on the river; it was the easiest way of crossing the city quickly. Perhaps, if it was a boat moving, it was James Emery fleeing from the city? Tiredness is leading you to speculate wildly. Get some sleep while you still can.
But still he did not move. The whole world seemed beautifully at peace. So quiet, and yet all nature was living and breathing. Cats were prowling the night, birds stirring from their rest. Men and women snoring. And every night it was like this: a perfect peace upon the whole world, with no light but the flickering of a candle before the dawn. That peace is like God. No one sees Him, no one notices. He is like a nighttime to us, coming among us when our eyes are closed, calming us, soothing us. In His world of night we need no food; we barely stir. We see nothing of Him and yet He is unholy real.
Clarenceux remained standing at his window until he could see the whole landscape of boats and houses. Later, he heard the shouts of fathers to their sons to be up and ready for school. He heard a woman scold a girl and people shouting orders at their servants as the first glimmer of sunlight neared in the east.
He would call on Emery again.
21
It was dawn. Harry Gurney looked up and stopped playing the pipe that Raw Carew had plucked from the sea a day and a half earlier. “Now God be praised for sending an angel to bugger the Devil and all his plans,” he declared in an excited voice.
“At last,” said Carew quietly, pausing in his oar stroke to look across the water. It was calm now. He looked at the raft they had made, hardly able to believe it had held together. They had taken the masts, with the ropes still attached to them, and lashed them across the two skiffs. They had tied as many planks as they could on top of the masts. About half of the fifty-seven survivors were crammed into the skiffs; the remainder were lying on the planks. The ropes gave a little and the whole raft creaked with every wave. Several times in the night Carew had feared it would break up, but it had proved strong enough.
“You’re a bloody angel, Raw,” said Alice. She was a corpulent, plain woman with a determined jaw, thick fleshy arms, dirty brown hair, and a strong West Country accent. Her eyes were her only beautiful feature, but they were buried deep in a face that was so much jowl that few people actually saw them.
Hugh Dean rose to his feet. He pulled out a pistol, which he tried to discharge into the dawn sky. It did not fire, but his enthusiasm was undiminished. “Let’s hear some cheers for Captain Carew,” he roared across the masts and planks. “Let us applaud him-a man who can navigate for two nights and a day without stars, without a map, without a compass, and without a ship!”
Fifty-one men and four women responded with shouts of approval, despite their exhaustion and the cold. A young woman called Charity Pool was sitting with her arms wrapped around herself. “I never want to come to sea again,” she said. “There are too many ghosts out here.”
“There always were,” replied Raw Carew.
“It is different now. I know their names.”
Everyone was chilled to the bone and worn out. They knew that the men and women whom they could not see they would never see again. They had either gone down with the ship or fallen off the raft and drifted away in the night.
“The Nightingale was an ugly ship,” said Carew, trying to stop himself shivering. “We are better off without her.”
“No more water dripping all night from the deck,” said Luke.
“No more deck,” agreed John Devenish, pulling on an oar. “All that’s left are the masts.”
“I’ve seen a ship without masts many a time but never masts without a ship,” said Skinner.
Carew was pleased to see that Devenish still had his Moorish blade strapped to his side. “We will not be long without a ship,” he said. “Alice, tell us: in what sort of vessel shall we sail out of Southampton? One with a big, fat hold? Or something sleeker, with all her firepower up top?”
“We’ll have plenty of time to take our pick,” she replied. “One thing I know: we won’t be leaving Southampton until every sailor here has ridden every whore in the town, both those with big holds and all the muzzle you could fancy!”
Three or four cheers followed this exclamation.
“What about you, Raw?” Alice continued. “Can you see that Amy yet? Is she waving to you?”
Skinner looked up. “Truth is, as soon as we are home, we’ll be asleep. We won’t be able to lift a leg to put one foot in front of another, let alone get a leg over.”
“Hark at you,” replied Alice. “Show me a strong young lad, stiff as a cannon, and you’ll see if I sleep or not.”
“You’ll be snoring along with the rest of us.”
“Won’t stop him though, will it? I can sleep and fuck at the same time. Good thing for some of you that I can.”
A wave slapped against the side of the boat and a little spray hit those sitting there. “Alice is right,” said Carew, putting his arm around Kahlu’s shoulder. “No matter how tired you are, you will want to eat and sing and dance and revel in being alive.”
He looked at the shape of the land. It was growing clearer. That was indeed the Isle of Wight and the opening to Southampton Water. There were two large ships visible. Was one a naval vessel? Perhaps he had rescued his crew only for them to be arrested and hanged. And supposing they made it to Calshot, how would James Parkinson, the captain of Calshot Fort, treat him this time? Carew had once fought a duel with him over his right to sail unimpeded up and down Southampton Water. On another occasion Parkinson had wounded him in the hand. But it would be worth fighting him again-to eat beef and spend a night in a dry bed with a sweet woman and a flagon of wine.
Soon color started to fill the outline of the horizon. Carew shouted to Hugh Dean, “We’ll land to the west of the fort and cut the masts loose there. We’ll take the skiffs past Calshot-and damn Parkinson. He’s probably still asleep anyway. Those we set ashore will walk to town, but we’ll all dine at the Swans this evening.”
22
Clarenceux hammered on the door of James Emery’s house for the third time. It was still early. If Emery had left already, with servants too, that was indeed unusual. He knocked again and looked up at the gathering clouds.
The door opened. A boy looked out, holding it only just ajar.
“Good day to you,” said Clarenceux. “I presume that your master is away?”
The boy looked nervous. “Sir, he has not been home since late last night.”
“And his servant, Adam? The man who normally attends to callers?”
“He is also absent, sir. He traveled yesterday. I do not know where he was going.”
“He told you to tell me that?”
The boy hesitated. He did not know what to say. Clarenceux just waited until eventually he received the answer. “Yes, sir.”
He nodded. “Thank you. You have been most helpful. Good day.”
He walked slowly along the uneven mud of the street into Huggin Lane. There he stopped and looked back, not at Emery’s house but at Mrs. Barker’s, on the corner where Huggin Alley met Little Trinity Lane. He wondered whether he should call. He did not know the woman; he had never met her or any of her servants. He pondered further, tapping one of his boots against the other. It would be a last resort-if everything else failed-to seek her help finding Rebecca. The chances are that Mrs. Barker has never heard of me. She might see it as her role to protect Rebecca from everyone she does not know.
He began to walk north, deciding he would next go to Robert Lowe’s house, adjacent to the wall near Cripplegate. He crossed Old Fish Street, turned into Bread Street, and marched past Gerrard’s Hall into the parish of St. Mary le Bow. Lines of tiled roofs greeted him: two-story houses, three-story houses, with shops at ground floor and leaning upper structures. Old houses and new, glazed houses and those just with shutters. At Cheapside there were crowds dawdling around the market stalls and looking in the unshuttered shop fronts along the street. Some people were queuing at the conduit; others had stopped to watch a street juggler. Clarenceux crossed straight into Wood Street, his mind fixed on Robert Lowe.
When he arrived at the blacksmith’s house, he glanced up at the windows. They were all closed. It was not a good sign. Still, he knocked and waited for a full minute before walking down the side of the house to try the gate through to the backyard and the forge, where Lowe worked. This too was locked.
He looked back along the street. He knew he could climb over and into the yard, but that would not necessarily give him the information he needed. It was suspicious that Lowe was not at home on the same day that Emery had stayed away overnight. Had Emery spoken to Lowe?
It did not matter. There was one person left who might be able to answer his questions: Nicholas Hill, in St. Dionis Backchurch.
23
In the parlor of his house, Walsingham rubbed his hands to warm them and sat down again at the table. It was covered in papers. These in turn were covered in black ink: symbols, lists, and calculations. It now seemed certain that the cipher was alphabetic, not numeric, so that it was the shapes that represented the actual letters, not their numerical value.
A knock came at the door.
“Go away,” shouted Walsingham, loath to look up from his notes. The door opened. He glanced up to see who it was.
A well-dressed man in his early twenties entered and bowed. “Mr. Walsingham, if you will permit me, I have some suggestions.”
“Master Richards. You have discovered something?”
“I think so, sir. The message is a cipher, written in English. May I show you?”
Walsingham beckoned him forward. The young man placed a sheaf of papers on the table. He shuffled one to the top.
“This is the message as received. You remarked on the recurrence of the sequence DCC-. As you know, it is not at first clear whether this is a code or a cipher. Also, if it is a cipher, then we need to know if DCC- represents one, two, three, or four letters. I tried all the common three-letter words and none of them worked, so I set about trying all the common four-letter words with a double letter. That proved false too. The French solution did not work either. There are very few double letters in Latin. That set me thinking. Why did we think the three-letter solution false? It was because of the commas. If you recall, we found instances of a pause or a comma followed by two letters and then another comma, and so we concluded that the two letters had to represent a single letter-A or I-but that did not work elsewhere in the message. But what if the commas themselves were part of the cipher? That way of thinking is more productive. In fact, the message starts to work.”
“Show me.”
John Richards placed a second piece of paper in front of Walsingham. “I went back to our first theory-that DCC- stands for a common three-letter word, such as ‘and’ or ‘the.’ Taking the latter possibility, the D would be a cipher for t, CC for h and — for e. Identifying the th is important because it shows where the word that is most likely to occur, and that reveals the important cipher for a second vowel, A, which turns out to be a V. If you look at the message, you find a comma followed by the letters ththat. For this reason we initially ruled out the possibility that DCC- could mean ‘the.’ But if the comma is part of the cipher, then it makes sense. The section in question reads ‘the MMMeIe, ththat’ or, spaced properly, with the deciphered letters underlined, ‘theMMMeIe,th that.’ Obviously a triple letter MMM is impossible, so that must be a cipher either for a single letter or a diphthong. But, look at the comma in that passage: there are very few words that end with the four letters e-something-th. Even allowing for phonetic spellings, that pause can only represent a d, an n, or an r.
“Now, there is a long sequence repeated toward the end. I’ve underlined the letters already hypothesized from the words ‘the’ and ‘that.’” He placed a third sheet over the top of the second. It had just a section of the text:
TCCCICCCCCCCCE+CCCCEMMME,
TATXIEMMMMMMCCEIIXMMMMMMEAIELCCCC
CCCMM, /, AT/AII,, THEMMMEIE,
THTHATIIECCCACIIIEMMMICCCCECIIIXMMMMMMME,
/CICCCCCCCCE+CCCCEMMME, TATXIEMMMTH
“What jumps out is the deciphered sequence of letters ‘tat.’ It appears twice-and both times they are preceded by the letters ‘CICCCCCCCCE+CCCCEMMME,’ and followed by ‘XIEMMM.’ But the interesting thing is that the first time they are followed by two ‘MMM’s and the second by only one. As one cannot have a triple letter, ‘MMM’ is probably a single letter. Now, going back to the section we identified earlier”-Richards pointed back at the second sheet-“the ‘MMM’ in ‘MMMEIE,TH’ must also be a single letter. There is only one seven-letter word that fits that pattern: ‘seventh.’ And finally”-he placed his last sheet of paper on the table-“if you test this hypothesis, the message does start to read more coherently, because that repeated long word that I mentioned becomes decipherable: ‘VCCCCCCCCE+CCCCESENTATXVEST.’ You can see the word ‘representatives’ so ‘CCCC’ must be an R and X is the cipher for I.”
Walsingham looked at the last page, which Richards now placed before him. It read:
RI›HTHICCCIIIMMCIIE‹CCCCCCEN/VSTCVRMMA/
CSHIPIIEHAVERE‹EIVE/CVRINSTRV‹TINSLR
CCCSIRPER‹IIAMMAN/THEIII/IIISIIIMMMMIN›T/
IIHATSCCE‹ANTRESTRETHE‹ATHMMI‹TREASVRET
VSSTHATCVAN/IIET›ETHERCCCI›HTELLE‹
TITSTRVTHSHEIIIMMMMIIIE/ESPAT‹HE/IIICSHIPINTHE‹
CCCPANCLRIIIERTMMIIELRCCCMMN/NTSAN/
III‹HAN/THERE‹ HAN›E/TAVESSEMMIIIVN/L
RS‹TMMAN/IIHEREVPNSHEIIIMMMM‹
NLICCCCCCCHERARRIVAMMIIITCCC
VRREPRESENTATIVESSHEIIIMMMMMMEAVELR
CCCMMN/NAT/AIIN
NTHESEVENTHTHATIIECCCACIIIESVREC
IIIIMMMMSEN/CVRREPRESENTATIVESTHMMCCCCC\/
IIEIIIE›CVSEN/IIR/IIICTHISSACCCECCCESSEN›ER› /
SPEE/CVRMMA/CSHIPCVR/EVTE/SERVANTSPER‹CRC
“I can see the word ‘treasure,’” said Walsingham. “I can also see ‘servants’…yes, and I can see the word ‘instructions’-look, that diagonal line must be an O.”
“And the first word is ‘right,’” declared Richards, reading over his shoulder.
“Which means that ‘essenger’ appears near the end, so ‘CCC’ is an ‘m.’ This is excellent, Richards.” Walsingham nodded at his protégé approvingly. “Sir William will be very pleased.”
24
Clarenceux’s stride grew faster as he walked along Lombard Street. He was angry. He looked up at the tower of St. Mary Woolnoth and frowned, despite the pleasant blue sky, patched with white
clouds. Hours were passing and he had nothing to show for the day. His enemies had betrayed him and now they were stealing his time as well. Minute by minute he was losing the chance to trace Rebecca.
He walked across wide Gracechurch Street and stepped over a pile of dung. Refusing to wait for a stream of carts to pass, he dodged between two of them and walked on swiftly past St. Benet’s until he could see St. Dionis Backchurch on his left. Here the city shrank in scale. There were tiny alleys barely wide enough to walk along two abreast and places where houses’ first-floor jetties were so low you could bash your head if you were not careful. There were paths so intertwined and twisting that you could easily get lost, especially when the London fog descended. Old sites had been divided at every rebuilding, each old messuage turned into three or four merchants’ houses. Half of those had been turned into single-room tenements, so that a merchants’ house of six chambers might now be home to twenty people. The other half had been pulled down and were ugly one- and two-story cheap wooden tenements put up by unscrupulous merchant landlords, who did not care that their tenants lived in close proximity to a communal cesspit and had to walk all the way to the conduit at the corner of Gracechurch Street and Cheapside to fetch a bucket of water.
In these gloomy alleys-more like paths through a forest than streets in a city-the wardens and parish officers did not walk alone but only in twos and threes. The fetid mud stank of feces and urine, and the water dripping from the overhanging eaves gave the whole area a dismal feeling. The smoke from the wood of the cooking fires was a blessing; it was the only wholesome thing about the place. Clarenceux worked his way through the maze of houses by the occasional patch of sunlight on the lanes and the church towers and spires. He knew if he continued walking north from the parish church he would come to a narrow alley on his left that split into two, one side wider than the other. The wider one had a two-story building on the right with scallop shells above the door.
The Roots of Betrayal c-2 Page 9
