[David Becket and Simon Ames 01] - Firedrake's Eye

by Patricia Finney

  Within the glamour of the Tilts, sweating under his layers of armour and leather padding and linen and in desperate fear of rain, Philip Sidney had made a punning sermon to the Queen in which he, the Child of Desire, and all his fellows, were beaten back and owned themselves laid low by the exceeding purity and power of Her Majesty’s Virginity. Which is to say that she should not marry the foul frogling Duc d’Alençon, the least of the whelps of the she-wolf Catherine de Medici, she who massacred the Protestants upon St Bartholomew’s Day.

  There was daring in so preaching, no matter how scented the means, for the Queen had borne herself most sweetly towards the French prince, in despite of his face scoured like a siegeworks with pockmarks, his nose a rotten testament to his pillicock and his stature a head shorter than the Queen’s, who hath a very proper size for a woman. The Prince’s envoy Simier, that she termed her Monkey, was a fairer sight and a prettier gentleman who made her laugh, but it was not him she would have bedded, and no better if she had for he killed his first wife.

  None of which was Her Majesty willing to hear of anyone. A printer by name Stubbs exhorted her in print to have no truck with Papistical Frenchmen, and had his hand chopped off by the common hangman. Being His Honour, Sir Francis Walsingham’s prospective son-in-law, Philip Sidney was not like to lose his hand nor any other member, but there is always the Tower and the tedium of disfavour.

  So there was impudence in this speech of symbols, and also danger. Sir Francis agreed with the sentiment and supported it though silently. In the end, the Queen heard and saw the parable and smiled and was gracious. Who knows if it was Sidney’s elegant argument of coursers and canvas scenery that defeated the onrush of her intention. Or was it the Queen Moon that put her finger in the pie? Was it perhaps that the courses of women which had been stuttering in the earthly Queen for the years when she had been so pressed with strange haste to marry, so contrary to her earlier ways, was it that her monthly courses stopped at last? Did she see then that all she had she would lose and gain not even a child in payment, and so she drew back from the brink. Alençon was paid off at last in fish barrels of gold in a quantity that spoke loudly of the Queen’s embarrassment.

  Who would dare ask her? The Courtier laughs and turns the ring in his ear, but I know that Sidney was much pleased by his pretty conceit at the tilting, to speak of policy in a poetry of silk and armour and speeches. He wrote to his friend Henri Estienne in Vienna, a letter that lies within Walsingham’s fine oak chest, and likewise a copy turned to Spanish in one of the many chests of papers belonging to the King of Spain. So harmless, so kindly, and yet was this the letter that laid the serpent’s egg, this bore the thought that caused a dragon to be bom in London, even in the Queen’s own capital, the dragon that breathed fire and fear and sorrow upon me.

  IV

  Autumn 1583

  Up five flights of stairs that Becket must climb sideways for their narrow' ness, and through a low door at the top, and into a cold and musty darkness, smelling of foul linen and fouler hose, ancient rushes, rats and damp. As always, Becket ducked his head too late and rammed his head on the ceiling. Cursing mechanically, he dropped his burden in a heap on the rushes while he searched for the tinderbox. Once he had a stub of tallow dip grudgingly lit and giving off clouds of black rancid smoke, he remembered there was no wood since he had not the money to pay for it.

  A movement behind him made him turn to see the man he had rescued, now on his knees, fists planted, head hanging down and bleeding a steady drip drip from his nose. No doubt the fleas were delighted, being more used to having to jump in search of their meal than have it drop like manna from the sky. Behind the plaster came the familiar rustling of rats. One large black brute trotted out onto the chest and looked up expectantly at Becket.

  ‘Here now,’ he said, smiling and reaching inside his shirt for the hambone he had filched. ‘When have I ever failed you, eh?’ The rat’s family came out to share the largesse while Becket picked up the bowl of water on the chest and dug out the ragged remnants of a shirt.

  ‘Ndo, I need do help…’

  ‘Shut your mouth,’ said Becket, hoisted the man onto the edge of the bed and began cleaning blood and vomit off the bony pale face. ‘I have forgot your name, sir, though I recall you are a friend of Mr Ellerton. Is it Ames?’

  ‘Abes.’ came the answer after a pause for thought, ‘Sibod Abes, hodoured to dow you, sir.’

  ‘Then hold still Mr Ames.’

  By the time the man’s particoloured face could be seen clear in the rushlight, the water was darkened to a soup not even the rat would touch, so Becket opened the shutter and tossed it into the distant street. Then he waved the rat off the lid of his chest and dug in the depths to find the last of his aqua vitae. Mr Ames’ earth-coloured velvet gown with its murrey silk piping might never recover from the blood and the onion peelings, but Becket did it honour nevertheless.

  ‘Put the bottle neck into your mouth, he advised kindly, else the spirits will sting you.’

  Simon Ames coughed and gagged but held the drink down.

  ‘I rebeber you, Mr Becket,’ he said. ‘You would have bed brute beasts leavened by a divide spark, and I say they are corrupted by dividity misunderstood…Pox od this blood, is by dose broked?’

  ‘No doubt,’ said Becket, ‘I can recommend you a good barber surgeon for its setting, if you wish.’

  ‘Do, thanking you. By uncle will see to it.’ Ames was feeling for his purse and Becket flourished out the packet he had found by Bonecrack Smith. Ames frowned at it. ‘But this is dot my…Hm. I thank you, sir. Did you see ady of the bed who attacked me?’

  ‘Other than Bonecrack who is dead now, God rot his soul, no,’ said Becket. ‘Have you lost much?’

  ‘Ah. You saw dode of the others.’

  Becket spread his hands. ‘It was dark. I marked one of them, though. How much were you carrying?’

  ‘Some shillings and a gold half crown…’

  ‘Christ, what possessed you to carry so much in Whitefriars?’

  ‘I was…playing cards earlier.’

  ‘Cards?’ Light dawned on Becket’s face. ‘Oh, Tyrrel’s game?’

  Ames nodded once, uncertainly. Becket made a sour face and spat into the comer, missing the misshapen target carved on the rotten plaster.

  ‘Jesu, you are a lamb without his dam, how came you ever to full growth? Do you not know the only game is Pickering’s? And having won a full purse from Tyrrel, you came and argued philosophy at the Gatehouse in a nest full of wasps that could smell your honey gold at three miles distance, and addled your brains. Christ’s bowels, if I had known that…’ He let the sentence dangle and turned back to his nearly empty chest to hide his disgust. Better not to offend one so rich and stupid. While he dug in the festering depths for his remaining spare blanket, his brain spun glittering plans for separating a particular fool and his money. ‘There’s no returning to the City at this hour with the gates shut and no boats for Christians neither with the watermen all going home, so you may have this and sleep on the…’

  He stopped. Ames had toppled onto his side, dumped his mud-caked pattens on the bed, hunched his narrow shoulders deeper into his gown, and passed out of this world into the continent of dreams.

  For a moment, Becket wondered would he play the part of the two old Greeks in the story who gave Apollo their bed and themselves slept on the floor.

  ‘My arse,’ he muttered, went over, lifted Ames’ light body up by a fistful of ruined velvet and deposited him on the floor where the rushes were thickest. The blanket he dropped on top, doused the light and got into bed as he was, bar his own boots. The rat came to whisker him goodnight, and settled down companionably to sleep on his chest.

  V

  December 1582

  The coming of a firedrake to his full strength and baneful beauty is a complex matter and in his beginning is only a breath of thought, as with all the works of man. Sir Philip Sidney has a sunny nature and all are agreed he
is a most pleasant fellow, a most perfectly complected gentleman. Even his handwriting shows the glimmer of sunlight, reason and charm in every bend and curve. Mine own hand, I know, is a galloping farrago, swooping from Secretary to Italic to its own device, curling and running before itself as if my pen were a runagate beetle. It was near a miracle I could write at all with the angels bothering me, but Mr Sidney (as he then was) wrote easily, copiously and freely, smiling at his own wit as he shook sand in punctuation upon the turning of pages.

  Now the Queen Moon hath ever delighted in little things, the better to show her power, and it was a small thing that the Huguenot M. Estienne had asked his friend Sidney to write in English, that he gain practice in reading this our little-known, half-barbarian tongue. Mr Sidney had laughed, protested that the French was better apt to a civilised pen, and given way with his usual grace.

  Thus he wrote his letter and it being signed and folded and sealed, he stood and stretched and thought he would prefer to use his legs than shout for a man to take it for him.

  And so he walked down the back stairs and through the passage leading behind the kitchen of Sir Francis Walsingham’s house in Seething Lane, that gives onto the stable yard. There he saluted his favourite horse, paused for a grave conference with a groom upon the subject of a dog, and then peered into the little office by the tackroom, piled high with canvas bags.

  ‘Mr Hunnicutt?’ bellowed Sidney, his head poked between the two large canvas sacks on either side of the door, that held the incoming harvest of letters and reports. ‘Are you there, Mr Hunni…Oh, good day to you, Mr Hunnicutt.’

  Beside neat rows of dispatch bags, each one marked with its destination and date of sending and the rider that was to take it, stood Hunnicutt like a monk in a scriptorium. His rotund smile answered Sidney’s great beam, two dimples pecked into his two pink cheeks, and he sheathed his pen in an inkwell.

  ‘Mr Sidney, how may I serve you, sir?’

  ‘No great urgency,’ smiled Sidney, as if he were not Sir Francis’ prospective son-in-law, could the Queen be got to agree which she would eventually. ‘If you have a man bound for Vienna with not too full a bag…’ and he waved his letter vaguely.

  Mr Hunnicutt blinked and turned to a list of names pricked and marked with destination, load, horse and expenses.

  ‘Pellew will be going to the Empire this day, if that will serve.’

  ‘Excellent,’ said Sidney, his hand in his purse, ‘Give him a little drink-money in recompense for his trouble, if you will, Mr Hunnicutt…’

  Two bright sixpences peeked over the top of the scrivener’s desk beside Mr Hunnicutt and rolled downhill into his own purse. Hunnicutt, though a man of the cloth in addition to his talents at despatching, bowed and smiled and brushed self-deprecatingly at the buttons of his new doublet, fluttering untruths about his willingness to serve to which Sidney replied with a cheerful wag of his finger. While Hunnicutt bustled the letter into its particular canvas bag, Sidney went on his way to see a hunting dog with a septic paw, stepping gravely over the game of jacks Hunnicutt’s silent page was playing by the door.

  What good is paper if it move not? In written words hideth a great magic, bearing gold or death or lust as meetly as a laundry list or a receipt for comfits, all pinned upon paper and no one word weighing more than another its own length, if it could be prised from the paper and its scratching of ink weighed. Being static and preserved as rose petals in sugar, then the words may be carried. Like water in a millrace, the power of the World of Paper, the Mundus Papyri, to move our own Globe cometh purely of its motion.

  Pellew was a long leathery man in worn hose and a buff coat, hard to tell from all the other lean weary men that gather about the stable blocks and kitchens of Whitehall and Theobalds and Bam Elms. They fill the air with talk of horses and their many ailments and a vast range of proven remedies, complaints of foul roads to Dover and fouler Channel packet-boats, the corruption of salt-tax gatherers in France and the miserable lack of good inns in Germany, all interspersed with stirring tedious tales of how they crossed the Alps last winter, sick of the flux, on a horse with three legs lame and beset by robbers on the way.

  Pellow rode out of the Seething Lane stable yard at a pace that brought him to the river for the turn of the tide, whence he took a horse-ferry down to Tilbury to find his berth upon the Swan of London. Behind him a lesser messenger trotted from the house to give a piece of paper to the ballad singer doing fine trade by the gate.

  A courier that knows his business will take a steady pace in preference to a hectic one and needs a stoic’s resignation to bear him company while he waits for the right weather to cross England’s moat.

  With the water once behind him the roads and foul ways of Europe stretch before him. It is work for a philosopher, a great jogging tedium upon ways Roman or clerical or purely theoretical, upon barges and ferries, here fording unbridged rivers, there paying toll to some petty nobleman’s steward with no legality in it save the swords of his men-at-arms.

  Pellew passed quietly behind armies and Spanish agents, a mere one of many upon the roads, keeping company with common carriers wherever he could. Once in Catholic parts, he was marked as an Englishman and caused to cool his heels at the gate whilst his bags were inspected for any contraband of English Protestant polemic or unLatined Bibles. Strange how long the searching of a mere dispatch bag might take: it was dawn before he could continue to Vienna and the house of an English merchant. He had slept upon a bench at the guardhouse trusting that anything in need of secrecy would be double-locked behind walls of cipher and if it was not, to be sure, he could do nothing about it.

  Those letters seeming to be of import had been copied by hollow-eyed clerks and in a little while, an accumulation of them set forth across Christendom once again, behind the saddle of another lean weary man that might have been Pellew’s twin save for the trifling distinction of language, before fetching up in the Netherlands, in the office of the Spanish Governor’s secretary.

  This clerk had a tame Englishman to help him riddle out his work, a Catholic, a long thin man with a fair freckled skin and ginger hair, and his mother’s pale grey eyes hardened by certainty. Also he had a little scar at the comer of his mouth that I myself made with my fist when I was twelve and he was eight, in a desperate rivalry for a box of sugared plums. It is not given to all of us to boast a brother working for the Spaniards.

  To the Spanish secretary, Sidney’s letter to Henri Estienne was a minor matter, of interest only in that it was in a new hand and unciphered nor with any hidden writing upon it (as reported by the clerks). My brother Adam translated it faithfully to Spanish and as he did so, his face became faraway and his eyes smeared with memory. When it came to finding a man who would carry the packet to Spain in the dangerous waters of March Biscay, he raised his voice to the task when all about him were silent. The Secretary entrusted the journey to him, being short of couriers as always, and not requiring to know why he had a fancy to visit Spain at last.

  Through which complexity came this following part of the letter under the eyes of His Majesty, King Philip II of Spain.

  '…And now with the poor Dutch Protestants backed to the wall again, Fulke Greville and I have purposed that our poetical jousting next year shall touch upon the danger of Spain and the wise use of all of us who hold to the pure religion. We have hit upon the figure of a Red Dragon that was Her Majesty’s grandfather’s badge when he threw down the foul usurper Richard Plantagenet. It is also a Dragon of Discord, that none but Her Majesty’s brilliant eye and beauty can tame. Then once being submitted to his rightful Queen, the Dragon shall turn upon the Beast of the Apocalypse (I mean, Rome) and fight in her behalf as her most loyal champion and utterly overthrow the Beast and its rider, Philip of Spain. Greville and I drew straws for which should be Philip and which should ride the Dragon Discord, and he took the short straw. Poor man, he cannot tell whether to be delighted that the expense will be less for a Beast, or disgusted that the mob
will hiss and clamour against him, but he is making a hymn even now in cod Latin for his attending monks and nuns to sing…’

  To make soldiers to grow from a ploughed field, the Greeks will have it that you must first sow dragon’s teeth. To gain dragons, must you sow soldiers’ teeth?

  VI

  October 1583

  Having fought his Provost’s Prize in a brief time of ill-gotten wealth the year before, David Becket was now allowed by the Four Ancient Masters of Defence to teach the use of arms. This included the longsword, the two-hand and bastard swords, backsword, sword-and-buckler, sword-and-dagger, dagger alone, and the right wielding of polearms, namely pike, half-pike, halberd, quarterstaff and battleaxe.

  The school he began had foundered in unpaid debts, quarrelling and drink, but still with a couple of veney sticks and a pupil he could begin again, be the pupil never so small, spindly of limb and unhandy. So Becket laid his plans for Simon Ames, full of hopes. First, he thought, a visit to an apothecary, then to wherever he lived and on in gentle sequence to the payment of 40 shillings, being half the fee for a set of lessons in swordplay.

  Ames, when he woke, was deep sunk in misery and should have been easy meat. Evil humours from Goodwife Alys’ brewing infected his brain with headaches and sickness, his body was covered with bruises and grazes and fleabites from Becket’s noisome rushes, his face was too stiff to move, his eyes blackened and his nose swollen up like a man with the French pox.