The Roots of Betrayal c-2

by James Forrester

  “You did not bring me to Southampton. Your natural father’s brother did-and not out of kindness, I might add. He had orders to take me to London-and to sink the Davy rather than let me go.”

  Carew took a moment to comprehend what Clarenceux had just said. He swung his legs around and sat on the bed, biting his lip with the pain. “You mean, Sir Peter Carew sank the Davy because of you? Not because of me?”

  “I am sorry if it injures your pride but yes, that is the fact.”

  “All those men died just because you wanted to find that woman?”

  “Oh, for pity’s sake.”

  Carew suddenly became solemn. “No, no, Mr. Clarenceux. You misunderstand me. You may think me godless-and I am, thankfully-but we are allies, as you once said. Your enemy is my enemy. Whoever wanted to arrest you killed my men.”

  “We came here to find Rebecca Machyn. Now we are here, will you still help me? Avenge those deaths?”

  Carew stood. Clarenceux heard him and turned to watch him. Blood started to run through the dressing and down his leg.

  “Amy!” Carew shouted. “Amy!” She came quickly, almost in a panic. She looked at his wound, but Carew was not calling her because of the blood. “That woman who came on the Davy-Swift George told me that she and the man with her got into a small boat that day with John Prouze. Where did Prouze take her?”

  She was astonished to see him on his feet. “Have a mercy, Raw, what are you standing up for?”

  “Just tell me. Where did he take her?”

  “I don’t know. The fort, I suppose.”

  “Which fort?”

  “Calshot. Prouze serves Captain Parkinson at Calshot.”

  Clarenceux was curious. “What did he say to you?”

  Amy gently pushed Carew back onto the bed and grabbed a towel to wipe the blood away. “He said the Catholic Treasure was going to arrive that day. But it was late. That is why he stayed with me that night.”

  “This man, Prouze, knew in advance?” asked Clarenceux. “Not after she arrived? And he used the words ‘Catholic Treasure’?”

  “Does that make a difference?” asked Carew.

  Clarenceux turned to him. “Of course it makes a difference. The Catholic Treasure is the document that was stolen from me. If he was expecting her to bring it, then he had been forewarned by someone else.”

  “The treasure is your document?” asked Carew, forlorn. “Hell’s breath, I thought it would be gold.”

  Clarenceux started pacing across the room. “If Nicholas Denisot not only paid for her to come to Southampton, he probably arranged for her to be received here too. It was either him or someone who was privy to the same information as him. Either way, Denisot hijacked the Knights’ plot. ‘Percy Roy’ he called himself-just as they did in their letter. He was pretending to be them.”

  “There was a man with her when she came too,” said Amy, wiping the blood off the floor. “A tough-looking man.”

  “Robert Lowe,” said Clarenceux. “Her brother. He was mentioned in the secret message that Cecil showed me. No doubt it was through him that Denisot learned about the Knights’ plot. He and Denisot spirited Rebecca Machyn away from London and brought her here, far from Scotland and the reach of the Knights.” He looked at Carew and then at Amy. “But why would they have sent a message to John Prouze?”

  Amy stopped wiping. “They didn’t. It was sent to Captain Parkinson.”

  “Parkinson is corrupt,” added Carew, “but he is loyal; he would not lift a finger against the queen. He knows he only controls this port because he is trusted in Westminster-but he would hide anyone in that fort at the end of the spit, if you paid him well enough. If Denisot could afford to pay two hundred pounds for the woman and her brother to come here, then it sounds to me as if money was freely available.”

  Clarenceux scratched his beard. “But why? Why bring her here?”

  Carew picked up a pair of breeches from the floor and started to put them on. “Because from here the document could be taken anywhere in the world.”

  “Then how do we set about finding it?”

  “We go to Calshot Fort,” replied Carew, struggling to get his right leg into his breeches. He grimaced as he tried to bend it.

  “Raw, don’t be stupid,” gasped Amy as the dressing partly came away and more blood flowed down his leg.

  “Shut up, woman-kind though you are,” replied Carew. “It’s just a deep cut. It’s not going to slow me down, still less is it going to stop me getting dressed. Or taking this gentleman to see Captain Parkinson.”

  63

  Clarenceux lay under a blanket on the rushes on the floor of the hall. He slept for short periods, drowsing more than sleeping, as he had been accustomed to since finding himself on board a ship. When he heard footsteps coming down the stairs in the darkness, not having a knife, he felt vulnerable. Tensing his muscles, he listened to the movements as whoever it was felt their way around.

  “Mr. Clarenceux?” whispered a woman’s voice.

  “Who is it?”

  “Ursula.” He heard her moving in his direction. She felt where he lay and knelt down beside him.

  “Mr. Carew has asked me to offer you a bed for the night,” she whispered. “He wishes to assure you it is more comfortable than the hall floor.”

  “A bed?” Clarenceux sensed her crouching down close to him. “Is that all?”

  “A bed and anything else you might want. He has a great deal of respect for you.”

  “How much is he paying you?”

  “Sir, he is good to us. The last time he was here he gave me and my sister twenty pounds each, so we could help her little boy get well and look after each other. That was after he had left-he did not ask for anything in exchange. I am not expecting you to do anything you do not wish to do, and nor is he. I am simply offering some small kindness, which is a mark of his respect for you and mine for him.”

  Clarenceux raised himself onto one elbow. He clasped her shoulder. “You humble me. I was too quick to judge. Carew confuses me-callous one minute, kind the next. Confrontational then respectful. He seems to act selfishly while quietly being generous. Most men are the opposite: they pretend to be more generous than they really are. He shows me my faults. I am too proud.”

  She touched his face, running her finger over his cheek and down over his beard. “Come up to my bed. There you can be as proud as you want. Or as humble as you want. It is up to you. I will not think the worse of you either way.”

  64

  Saturday, May 20

  Next morning Clarenceux was able to bathe at the Two Swans and eat another meal. Once Pieter and Marie Gervys realized that their guest was not only a friend of Raw Carew but a gentleman and the bearer of a royal commission, they went out of their way to help him. They even provided him with a clean set of clothes, which, if they were not of the finest quality, nevertheless gave the impression that he was far from being a pauper. Gervys lent him his own cloak. Ursula trimmed his hair and beard. As she reminded him, there was no point going to see Captain Parkinson and expecting him to part with valuable information if he looked like a shipwrecked sailor. She kissed him and pressed into his hand a small dagger. “For luck,” she said. “In case it turns out to be bad.”

  Amy had arranged for them to borrow a sloop. Carew shook off her assistance, determined to walk to the quay as normally as possible, even though the wound caused him to flinch. He admired the sloop: the fore-and-aft rigged sails were new and the rudder freshly greased, and without waiting to be helped he climbed down into the boat. Clarenceux followed.

  It was a bright but blustery morning, with clouds scudding across the blue sky. Carew took charge of the sailing, forbidding Clarenceux to touch a single rope. The herald was happy to watch the man in his most natural state: judging the wind and the currents, looking out for the patterns in the water. It was like watching a man have a silent conversation with the elements. At one point he wondered whether Carew in old age would be like those who fi
nd it easier to move on water than on land. He had heard of such instances: kings and dukes who wanted only to travel by water in their advanced years, even sedan chairs being too much for them. But then he put the thought out of his mind. Raw Carew was not a man destined to grow old.

  “How did you escape from Sir Peter Carew’s ship?” Clarenceux asked, when they were about a mile from Southampton.

  Carew loosened the sheet and let the twisted hemp run through his fingers, still concentrating on the wind. “I jumped when the mast was leaning over at its greatest angle. Everyone would have expected me to swim to shore. So I swam underwater and hid beneath the sterncastle. No one could see me there-not from the gunwales, not even from the top of the sterncastle itself, because that projects out beyond the hull. When I had got my breath back, I swam as far as I could underwater, surfaced, and swam again. Not many people could hit a man’s head in a heaving sea like that, so when I was five hundred yards out I started to swim around the ship in a wide arc and came ashore near where we are heading to-Calshot.”

  Clarenceux was impressed. “But that must have been more than six miles-did you not worry about your leg?”

  Carew continued to look at the horizon. “I reckoned that if I was going to bleed to death, no one would ever have found me. I would have passed into legend, into stories. Otherwise-well, I did not have anything else to do. So I just swam.”

  Clarenceux felt humbled again. “It was God’s will-you know that. It might not have been a miracle, but it was the will of God that you survived.”

  Carew shook his head. “You’re aboard my ship, Mr. Clarenceux. No religion. Otherwise you’ll be the one doing the swimming.”

  “One day I will talk to you about God. One day when we are not on a ship.”

  “You’ll be wasting your time. All that stuff about saints, holy bones and holy water, spirits and souls-you know it’s all just ghost droppings.”

  “What?”

  “Ghost droppings. The excrement of phantasms.”

  Clarenceux was sickened by the blasphemy. He looked down the water toward the keep of Calshot Fort, four miles further on.

  “Look,” Carew told him. “I have sailed further than most people, further than God too it would appear, because I have been to places in Africa where the people have not heard of God. They have their own gods. And you will tell me that their gods are not real-and they would say the same about yours. In the end, all we can do is make up our own minds. I see no sign of God, I hear no word of God, I feel no hand of God-not your god nor any others. I do not smell the odor of divine sanctity, and if I did I would not trust it.”

  “Just because you do not see something does not mean it isn’t there.”

  Carew untied a sheet and hauled it in tighter. “And what, exactly, is that supposed to mean?”

  Clarenceux looked across the water, wondering whether some divine vision would appear to help him make this God-denying man understand. None appeared. “The other morning I was looking out from my window and could not see my wife but I knew she was there, over the hills to the south. God is like that. Or like a night that the waking man does not see. God brings blessings and we do not see them but that does not mean they do not happen. It is like the sightedness of a blind man-”

  “Let us ask God to steer this boat. We will end up where the current takes us, not at Calshot.”

  “The sightedness of a blind man,” repeated Clarenceux. “Imagine you are in a room in a house, looking at something, like a plate or a book. As the light fades in the evening you see less and less-until you can see nothing at all. Then what do you see?”

  Carew did not even look at him.

  “What do you see?” insisted Clarenceux. “You see nothing. It is not that there is nothing there. Our inability to see God is like that darkness.” Carew stood up, adjusting the sheet he had just fastened. “You are not listening to me,” Clarenceux sighed.

  Carew tied a knot. “Ghost droppings. You’ve got more important things to be worrying about.”

  “What could possibly be more important than a man’s salvation?”

  “His survival.”

  Clarenceux looked away.

  The wind caught the sail at the wrong angle and it started flapping. Carew made a small adjustment to calm it. “I don’t think you’ve properly thought this through,” he said. “You are going to go in there empty-handed. You have nothing to offer Parkinson, except your head.”

  “You’re not accompanying me?”

  “No. I pick my fights carefully.”

  Clarenceux felt the breeze chill on his face. “It is something I have to do. Regardless of the danger.”

  “I know that. But if the Catholic plotters did send word of Widow Machyn’s arrival to Calshot then it stands to reason: Captain Parkinson is no friend of yours. He may have stolen the document from her on arrival, killed her, and then taken her body out to sea. He is the sort of man who would do that. Calshot is a good place to get rid of corpses.”

  Clarenceux looked up at the clouds, which were darker now. There was a colder edge in the air, as if it might start to rain at any moment.

  “My friend,” Carew said after a few minutes, “we might not agree on religion. Nor on the pleasures of loving. But you have to agree with me on this: you need an offer. And you need some form of escape.”

  “You sound like my mother.”

  “Your mother wouldn’t deliver you to your executioner.”

  Half a mile short of Calshot, Carew steered the sloop toward the western side of Southampton Water, aiming for a secluded bit of beach. There was an inlet here, and a couple of sturdy posts used by shipbuilders. The woodland stretched along to the spit of shingle that led out to the fort. “Best to alight here,” he said.

  “Why not nearer?” asked Clarenceux, gesturing to the fort. There were two boats tied to a wooden jetty there, and another two pulled up on the shingle bank nearby.

  “Look on the roof: there’s someone on guard. Parkinson would recognize me.” Carew fastened a sheet around one of the shipbuilders’ posts. He held the sloop steady and gestured for Clarenceux to disembark. “I’ll be watching out. Come to this point and wave when you have spoken to Parkinson. But remember, you are on your own. I don’t have the men to rescue you if you fail to reappear.”

  Clarenceux stepped over the side of the boat and down into the shallow water. He nodded at Carew but said nothing as he reached the dry shingle above the seaweed.

  “Don’t trust him,” called Carew as he pushed against the post, sending the sloop back into the water. “Don’t believe his promises.”

  Clarenceux began to make his way along the stones toward the outcrop fortress at the mouth of the estuary.

  65

  Calshot Fort was a modern building. It had been designed to house guns to guard the approach to Southampton Water during an invasion scare about twenty-five years earlier. There had been several such forts along the south coast, finely built of stone. Each one was set low, making it difficult to attack with cannon. This one had a circular central tower of three stories on an octagonal plinth and a circular perimeter wall with embrasures for guns. It had been built on the end of the spit that projected out into Southampton Water, in order to look out in all directions and to fire across the maximum area of open sea, guarding the long approach to the port and town. Being relatively small, it did not look formidable so much as bleak. But that bleakness was striking even from a distance. On the desolate shingle, with the waves crashing below its walls and the wind howling over its forty-foot battlements, it was like an island, the last outpost of Christendom.

  The spit on which the fort was built was about half a mile long and narrow, no more than thirty yards wide. Clarenceux paused on the edge of the wood. From this point on he would be exposed, with no shelter at all. Apart from two cottages, situated about eighty yards from the fort, the spit was home to nothing but a few tussocks of grass. The low wooden jetty he had seen from the estuary was about twenty yards
from the cottages. He looked up at the dark gray clouds; it felt as if it should have started raining already. The waves pounded on the shore to his right. Beyond them, across the other side of a wide channel, he could see the hills of the Isle of Wight. On his left there was the long expanse of Southampton Water, leading up to the town in the distance. The waves here lapped gently at the shingle. Between these two sections of water, the spit stretched away to the fort.

  Clarenceux started to walk. A track had been made across the shingle where earth had been packed down. He noted a man on the battlements at the top of the central tower, a black figure against the sky. On one side of the tower he could see the muzzle of a cannon protruding, looking out to sea. On the opposite side, in the outer wall, was a gatehouse, a small two-story structure built of the same light-gray stone. Two long oak beams protruded from it at first-floor level; these were the supports for the drawbridge.

  Clarenceux felt the spatter of a large wave and drew Gervys’s cloak close around him. The drawbridge was down, as to be expected in peacetime, but the gate itself was shut. The cottages near the fort were small and old. Seashore plants had started to grow in the thatch on the nearside cottage, which looked abandoned. There were two linen shirts or smocks hanging on a line near the other. The shutters downstairs were closed.

  He approached the fort, bent down, and picked up a rock from the path. Then he walked across the drawbridge, the hard stone of the gatehouse looming above him. Without hesitation he knocked hard on the studded oak gate. A voice came ten seconds later. “Who calls?”

  “William Harley, Clarenceux King of Arms. To see Captain Parkinson.”

  Clarenceux waited. He looked to his left, back up the estuary. Carew’s boat was no longer to be seen-it had become one of the dozen or so indistinguishable vessels in Southampton Water. Minutes passed. Eventually he heard footsteps, and the snap of two bolts. The gate opened; a man of about thirty appeared. He was clean shaven and had a fleshy face, blue eyes, and light brown hair. His voice was quite soft but his words were clipped, and his tone not at all friendly. “This way.”