Three Livornese scullers came rowing against the tide towards the corn mills, but something close by caught Thomas’s eye.
‘Giovanni!’ he said. ‘Look!’ He pointed through the meal floor’s dust cloud at a figure whose violent haste said he had as little corn to grind as they. ‘Bramble!’ They watched their betrayer clatter against a bolting-hutch, then rush to the water’s edge to look out over the Pool.
‘Alora, we’ll take him with us for a tongue,’ said Basadonna. ‘He’ll tell us what he knows in the hold.’
Nat emerged from a cloud of dust and flour onto the sunlit jetty. He looked out over the Pool. There were no Alderman’s or Sheriff’s barges in the Pool, nor any search parties scouring the riverside. On Tower Wharf, way over on the other side of the river, the Lord Lieutenant of the Tower stood with a few Yeoman Warders. Too far to halloo. Sir Thomas Sherley had got away! The Buontalenti let down her topsails like a great white sigh of relief. Nat’s eyes welled with bitter tears. He was never to have justice. He worked his jaw and mouth trying not to cry.
A knuckle-studded punch in the gut doubled him over. A gloved hand lifted his head by the hair.
‘What cheer, Master Bramble?’
Thomas and Basadonna stood before him covered in chaff. Two white angels of death. Basadonna picked up a length of baling twine from the jetty, leaving an eel of black oak in the flour dust. He lashed Nat’s wrists together in front of him. The bound captive looked down at the whitewater whirlpool under the mill wheels.
‘Swim for it, Bramble,’ mocked Thomas. ‘It’s your only chance.’
The scullers threw out the sternfast and let the current turn the boat about face. Basadonna hitched the boat to the jetty, and hopped aboard.
Thomas shoved Nat into the launch. Standing in the well of the boat, Nat braced his legs against its rocking. The six oars in the sky made a floating stockade of the launch. He heard Basadonna mutter some Livornese to the scullers, after which they all scowled venomously at the prisoner standing in the boat.
‘They’re hard-faced,’ thought Nat, ‘not because they believe I deserve my captivity, but because they know I don’t. At Horsleydown stairs they were three innocent rowers, and now at London Bridge they are accomplices in a heinous crime. That’s why they look daggers at me.’
Thomas jumped onto the sternboard. Nat listened to the last flick-flacks of rope being unhitched from the mooring post and readied himself for the sudden lurch the launch was about to make. He wriggled his wrists but the knots were tight. There was no way to pull his hands out of the baling twine that lashed them together.
The water under the corn mills churned so violently, that the scullers in the Buontalenti’s launch kept all six oars on the vertical, not daring to dip a blade.
‘Attenzione!’ shouted the front sculler as Thomas cast off.
The launch did not swoop downriver, but swung to one side and crashed against the slimy wall of Borough Shore Lock. Nat wobbled as the launch swung back into the midstream, and began to surge downriver.
Then came one of those moments when the body is way ahead of the mind, when action is quicker than thought. Before he even knew what he was doing, Nat stepped onto the gunwale, and stamped a vertical oar flat. The oar slammed on the corn mill jetty with a bang. He ran along the oar to the jetty and was free. Without his weight upon the oar, the current dragged its blade from the jetty, and swept the rocking launch downstream to the Pool.
Nat sprinted across the landing stage to the waterwheel. He lay on his belly and held his fetters out to the waterwheel’s edge blades. Ten times, twelve times the edge of a paddle nicked but did not sever the twine binding his wrists. He looked behind him. The launch was back! Standing on the sternpost, Sir Thomas grabbed hold of the mooring post and vaulted onto the jetty.
Nat thrust his wrists further into the waterwheel than he had dared before. A paddle’s edge blade caught his fetters dead centre and dragged him forwards on his belly. The waterwheel had him in its cast-iron jaws and was diving down into the deep. Nat sawed twine against paddle as he sped across the jetty on his front. Snap. His hands came free. He watched a strand of snapped twine, still stuck to the cast-iron edge wheel, disappear through the soggy wooden casement and down into the whirlpool. That might have been him!
He looked over his shoulder. Thomas Sherley was running over the wooden boards towards him. Nat jumped up, ran into the meal floor and just had time to crawl under a bolting hutch before Thomas flew into the mill and up the stairs.
Thomas hunted Nat through the revolving runner stones. He manhandled one dusty miller after another, each time sure that the next man he spun round by the shoulder would be Bramble. He tripped over a grindstone and a shelf of grain fell from the brim of his leather hat. He ran back downstairs and hurled flour sacks this way and that.
Hiding under the bolting-hutch, the smell of singed grist in his nostrils, Nat saw Thomas’s boots approach. The mill house clanked so loudly that it was impossible to hear footsteps or even shouts. No way for Nat to know when it was safe to make a dash for the river. That’s what he would do, he decided. He’d swim for it after all. He slithered out from under the meal bin and ran for the jetty, and ran right into Basadonna, sword in hand. Nat turned tail. From the dust cloud came Thomas, rapier drawn, covered in flour from head to toe.
Basadonna and Thomas closed in on him. Another step and they’d both be a sword’s length away. They would kill him here. A savage glint shone in Thomas’s eyes. He would strike first.
There came that sound more shocking than noise on silence: silence on noise. Thomas and Basadonna stopped dead in their tracks. The corn mill seemed to hold its breath, until a single sharp note chimed:
Chink!
Chains began ringing, and then, as the drum wheel on the wall trundled, the clicking of the chain links became a rattle.
Of the three men, only Nat knew what was coming next. He ran for the tarpaulin sling full of flour sacks. Before he could reach it, the tarpaulin began to shoot up with a whoosh. It was at eye-level and rising when he leapt and turned a high somersault. The sling snatched him in midair like a hawk its meat, hoisted him upside down among flour sacks up through the ceiling. Chains ran all around him. The immemorial force of the River Thames shot Nat three floors to street level. Covered in white flour, he clambered from the tarpaulin sling and ran out of the corn mills onto Bridge Street.
‘Hoy! You there!’ yelled the Bridge Estates warden, raising his staff to block the sprinting spectre’s path.
Nat dodged him, ran into the Chapel grocers, down the stairs and out the old crypt’s undercroft onto Chapel Pier. He slipped and slid through the reeking seaweed slime of Chapel Lock, and out onto the stone bulwarks of the upriver mooring.
The breeze hulled the flour from his clothes as he hunted for a boat to steal. What he needed was a fast skiff or sail foist to whisk him to Tower Wharf where he could alert the Yeoman Warders before the traitor went aboard the Buontalenti. Instead, the only boat was a turnip barge. A pair of twenty-five foot paddles lay on the turnips.
He cursed his luck and untied the mooring rope. Though full to the gunwales with turnips, the boat rocked unsteadily as he stepped onboard. This was no flat-bottomed barge but a long skiff, heavy, but faster than she looked. As he rowed parallel to the Bridge he began to hope that he might be able to head off Thomas Sherley after all. Through Little Lock arch, he saw him on the launch, already halfway to the Buontalenti. Too late now to head him off or even to alert the Yeomen.
Nat turned the boat around. Standing up, he slung his whole body into every push and pull of the oars, like a man trying to uproot church railings. He grunted and howled with every stroke. Above Long Entry, a voice whispered in his head that he was charging in the way a wounded beast charges the hunters, hurling himself at death. He ignored the voice, shipped the long oars and let the boat’s nose swing downstream.
Tunk! The heavy chain suspended across the approach to Long Entry cut into the turnip
mound and stopped the boat dead. Chain against turnip blocked his way. There was not enough slack in the chain to lift it more than an inch.
The ton load made the boat sit lower in the water than the chain. Low enough to slide under if he threw the turnips overboard. Except if he did that then the boat would rise, and he’d still be stuck behind the chain! He couldn’t throw the turnips overboard, but he could redistribute them within the boat. He started lobbing turnips, two at a time, from the middle to the front.
Leaning out of windows on the Bridge, people shouted urgent warnings:
‘That’s Long Entry! Pull away. Pull away, save yourself!’
‘He’s mad. He’s sawing the log he sits upon!’
Nat heard a wet slap on the water right beside his boat. Rope. He looked upriver. Two watermen in a double-sculled wherry had thrown him a line. The waterman had rowed as close as they dared, but even twenty yards away they had to strain at the oars to keep their wherry from being sucked down into Long Entry.
‘Grab the rope!’ they were shouting. ‘Forget the load! Save yourself! Take hold of the line, we daren’t come nearer. You can’t survive. It’s self-slaughter! Grab the rope!’
The towrope floated on the surface beside his boat for a few seconds, and then slowly sank. Nat knew their words were true enough, yet somehow they didn’t ring as true as the iron chain squeaking as it swung - a little more with each armful of turnips he lobbed - nor as true as the whitewater roaring in Long Entry below. A few more turnips would do it.
A woman up in a third floor casement window screamed. She could see what he could not. The turnip boat was slipping under the chain and into the cataract. The first Nat knew about it was when the chain tripped his ankles. He tumbled sideways as the boat slid completely under the chain. The boat then tipped down at a forty-five degree angle into the steep rapids. White water boomed and hissed under Long Entry’s fan vaulting. It was a waterfall trapped in a crypt. Turnips rolled and bounced and smashed against the wall, while he clung to the tiller. The tiller jerked him around like a glove puppet. The boat was foundering. The sawmill was chopping it up. Only woodchip, turnip mash and a pulped corpse would be spat out into the Pool. A blizzard of white water filled his ears, eyes, nose and mouth.
And then the boat accelerated. Only when he plummeted into the oil well had he known such terrible velocity. The sudden acceleration left his stomach behind. No pebble ever skidded over an icy lake faster than the turnip boat ripped out of Long Entry, and sped across the Pool.
Nat’s arms and thighs scorched with the effort of keeping the tiller pressed to his side. The boat carved a crescent through the Pool, casting up a white wall of water. By fluke he missed a merchantman, a sail-foist and a wherry, and then, clear before him in the open Pool was Thomas. The turnip barge’s course would bring him close enough to swing the twenty-five foot oar. He’d poleaxe Thomas, knock him off the raised dais of the sternboard, and into the river.
Thomas turned to see a giant swan’s wing of water speeding across the Pool. His first thought was that one of those cantilevered extensions had fallen off the back of a tall house on the bridge and made a great splash. Except the risen spray stayed risen, the white water rose sheer from the river as it sped ever nearer. From out the swan’s wing emerged a runaway boat.
Hanging on to its tiller was Bramble! The swan’s wing vanished back into the water as the turnip boat came out of its curve, and headed straight for the Buontalenti’s launch.
Thomas pulled the pistol from his belt. He untied the twists of his dusty cloak and let the heavy black broadcloth fall into the well of the launch. He felt limber. Every faculty was alert. He pitied the uselessness of the long oar Bramble brandished, like an ancient Briton waving a cudgel at a Roman general. Was this the best that London could throw at him? After all Lord Cecil’s spies? After all Customer Hythe’s bribes and plots? Was this hectic, on his doomed last charge, really the best that London could do?
He watched Bramble push the tiller in panic, trying - too late - to steer the barge out of pistol range. The torque was too strong. The skink could no more change the boat’s curve than avert the destiny written in the lines of his palm. He was set upon a course. The boat would come within six feet of the pistol point. Thomas didn’t miss from that range. He cocked the pistol and took aim at the scar on Bramble’s forehead.
The river flashed beneath Nat. He saw Thomas take aim with the pistol. In frenzy he pushed against the tiller with all his might, but it wouldn’t budge. If he couldn’t veer from the pistol range then he‘d ram the launch and throw Thomas off balance so that his shot missed. A collision would encumber the launch, and stop Thomas escaping so easily. An angry metal mosquito buzzed his ear.
Nat yanked the tiller with all his might and unleashed a thunderstorm.
The speeding barge swerved with twenty times its speed. He knew by its violent lurch that he was the sorcerer whose spell accidentally summons a hurricane.
With a thunderclap the two boats clashed. A cannonball would not have exploded the launch into smaller pieces. The barge’s prow ploughed a brown surf of wood chip, splintered planks and snapped oar.
As Nat was catapulted through this wooden blizzard, a sharp object pierced his gut. The pistol’s ball had found him in all this wooden fog! He spun in the air and fell into the dark cold river.
The cork bobbed up from the black river. He broke surface, among the floating wreckage of the Buontalenti’s launch. The pain in his side from the bullet wound grew by the second. He struck out for the barge which was still intact as a battering ram. He swam through the bobbing noggins of a turnip shoal and hauled himself aboard. Blood oozed from his waist. If the pistol ball had entered his gut then his life was over.
He ripped at his clothes to see where he was hit. Tearing open his blood-drenched shalwar kameez, he found not a bullet wound but a shard of wood - simple wood – protruding from his belly. He plucked it out, and then lay on his back among the turnips laughing the helpless sobs of reprieve.
Back when Nat’s turnip barge was still stuck behind Long Entry’s chain, Lord Lieutenant of the Tower of London Sir William Wade was anxiously pacing Tower Wharf. Six o’clock and no sign of Sir Thomas Sherley. Secretary of State Cecil’s note clearly stated that Sir Thomas would be arrested at Old Swan at five o’clock, and be rowed in a King’s Messenger barge to Tower Wharf, where Wade was ordered to keep him close prisoner.
‘He is to be met at Tower Stairs by you, Sir William, you will then escort him to the White Tower.
The jabbing forefinger of that ‘you, Sir William, you’ betrayed Cecil’s nerves. Never a light thing to arrest a King’s favourite, one whom Wade had seen at court cutting such a fine figure in the latest fashions. Worse still would be the bungled arrest of a King’s favourite. But no blame could be laid at Wade’s door, he was sure about that. He was where he was supposed to be at the time he was supposed to be there.
Suddenly his Yeoman Warders ran to the edge of the wharf, all jostling for a better look at the Pool. A runaway barge - full of turnips by the looks of it - had fallen through Long Entry. A man was trapped on board. The turnip bargeman climbed to his feet in the stern holding a single oar in both hands like a club. He was dressed in Tamburlaine’s iridescent baggy breeches and a Biblical shepherd’s fur-lined jerkin.
Something in the way this Turnip Tamburlaine stared so fixedly ahead made Wade and Warders follow his stare to a foreign launch with six oars flashing and dipping in and out of the water. Standing on the little stage of the launch’s sternboard, a tall figure with a silver plumed hat sloughed off a dusty cloak to reveal shimmering satins and silks.
‘Sir Thomas Sherley!’ cried Wade. ‘There’s Sir Thomas! Arrest him! To the barges, men! To the barges!’
Not a single Yeoman Warder moved. They were no more able than Wade to tear their eyes from what was happening on the river. Light flashed off the chased silver metalwork of the pistol that Sir Thomas Sherley had levelled at the Turnipman. A
puff of smoke appeared. Then the shot was heard.
And then with a jerk of the tiller and a swerve like a shark, and a sound like a house falling down, the turnip barge drilled through the launch. Sir Thomas Sherley and his Italians were thrown into the air as if by a mine or mortar, and the Yeoman and Wade were all running to the river steps.
Thomas swam to Tower Stairs, where a Yeoman Warder pulled him out of the water, took his arm and helped him up the steps.
‘My heartfelt thanks for your aid,’ said Thomas, his ears ringing and a little dazed. On Tower Wharf, excited Yeoman Warders crowded round. ‘Now, lads,’ he asked them, ‘who’s seen my pistol and sword?’
‘In the river, sir,’ answered a Yeoman.
‘A purse of gold to the man among you who fishes ’em out! Ah, my Lord Wade! The Pool’s become a tiltyard this day, has it not, my lord?’ No reply. That Yeoman Warder, meanwhile, still had hold of his arm. ‘I shall need no handing from here, thank-you.’
‘Yes, sir,’ replied the Yeoman, but did not relax his grip.
‘Why does he still attend me?’ Thomas wondered. ‘Am I cut and bleeding worse than I know?’
As he inspected himself for blood, a second Yeoman Warder clamped his other arm between elbow and shoulder. Thomas looked at the hands upon him, and stopped in his tracks.
‘No, good fellows,’ he said. ‘Oh no, not one step further, no. Here’s a Tower too many. I’m just out of the Turks’ Seven Towers, you see, and cannot enter here. Wade! Let me send a note to King James. A note from me might save your house and title, Wade. Unhand me, lads.’
‘Yes, Sir Thomas,’ said a Yeoman, ‘once we have you safe within.’
The iron vice tightened on Thomas’s skull. His eyes bulged out of his head. He bucked and writhed and fought free of both Yeoman Warders. More came running, until nine or ten Warders surrounded him. Thomas kicked and punched in all directions. Once again, as on the island of Kea, he found himself surrounded and fighting for his life. They would have to kill him first. He found himself possessed by an overplus of strength, speed and guile. As he threw punches left and right, one Yeoman Warder after another fell to the ground. His knuckle-studded gloves sweetly dropped two more Yeomen, but then he tripped over a fallen Yeoman and was down. Hands grabbed all his limbs at once and lifted him off the ground. As they carried him up the wharf towards the Tower, he shouted:
The Trade Secret Page 31
