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

by Patricia Finney

  Simon’s elder brother Jacob is agent to his father in Lisbon; another, Benjamin, at risk of his life, sends dispatches from Terceira to Sir Francis Walsingham, and yet another, William, is also a soldier at present with his uncle in Youghal. That Simon lodges at Seething Lane and keeps Sabbath with his maternal uncle Hector Nunez is by reason of a great and bitter quarrel that he had with his father over the financing of the Portuguese Pretender three years gone.

  Unlike William or indeed his father, Simon is neither large nor well-built nor robust nor graceful, though his hands can be deft enough. Becket once watched in amazement as he made a pen from its pristine feather from stripping to curing in a sand bath to fitting of the reservoir, all in a couple of minutes and that while talking of something else.

  In this roaring world of gold and steel and sugar plate deception, he is, to his sorrow and knowledge, a babe in arms. His tailor, hatter, cobbler, all cheat him, for he longs to cut a good figure at Court, though he draws the line at padding his meagre calves. By the strenuous efforts of his Aunt Leonora Nunez, a Jewish girl of a good Bristol family was brought to London to see if she would consent to be betrothed to him. At the meeting, Simon sat and flushed and paled by turns, while the girl gravely questioned him and he could think of nothing to ask her.

  At length she pointed from under her veil at his chain of office, slim but gold that he had worn proudly to show her, and asked if it were not a chain that bound him to the Queen. When he answered lightly that perhaps it was, and that he was honoured to be held captive by such a Queen – a very courtierlike speech – she dropped her veil haughtily. Alas, she said to him in Portuguese, she would not and could not light two candles on the Sabbath with a man that was bound to another woman, nor yet the Queen. And so the girl, Rebecca Anriques, returned to her family and Aunt Leonora tutted, sighed and continued to speak darkly of the dangers for a man, being unmarried, in such work as his and such a place as London.

  He is a poor coney in this world, to his father’s fury, and yet, although his father will not see it, Simon Ames is a very panther of the Mundus Papyri. It is neither pity nor magnanimity nor a desire for Dunstan Ames’s friendship that causes Sir Francis Walsingham to keep Simon so closely by him. Nor is it only his family’s connections and conduits to the secret sea of money that is ruled by the Italians and the Flemings, who swim its tides and harvest its little gold and silver fish in their great ships, the banks. It is that Simon has a nose for pattern, an eye for corruption, and like a dolphin swims the swells of little signs in ink, an Arabic cabbala that destroys here and resurrects there, by pouring money on gold-droughted soils, from Genoa to Amsterdam to the Exchange in the City of London and thence to the New World and back again.

  Wherefore came Dr Nunez’s packet of letters from Isaac Pardo in Rouen, who took pleasure in corresponding with a cousin he had never met, that never asked foolish questions nor misunderstood his complexities.

  Once being carried to Simon’s cubbyhole in Sir Francis’ house at Seething Lane, it was a couple of hours’ work to unfold the letter’s meaning couched in a numerical cipher.

  At the end of it, he held in his hands a list of all those who had cashed bills of exchange upon the bankers at Rouen. And here also was an intricate argument of Isaac’s that traced some of the bills to the Spanish king’s credit in Antwerp and others through the Medicis to the Vatican. Some of those nourished by the trickles of gold were known to Simon: an agent of Father Parsons’ and Charles Paget, the Queen of Scot’s man in France. He had been in England in September, while Walsingham was futilely busy in Scotland, but slipped away again before he could be caught. Now it seemed he was whiling away the time in northern France, with a steady and considerable need for cash. Simon made due note of the fact.

  And then, among all the usual offenders was one that might have been passed by if old Cousin Isaac had not loved his work so well. It was a bill of exchange drawn upon a small Amsterdam bank of perfectly Protestant religion, but it was backed by a bill drawn upon an Antwerp bank that in turn was backed by gold at a Florentine bank.

  Simon breathed deeply and smiled as he read. Here was the name of the man that drew the money, one Mr A. Semple, and here again was Mr Semple upon a list of passengers to Dover that he dug out of a chest, one of the accounts that was regularly supplied by the tunnage and poundage men in exchange for a little blindness on Walsingham’s part.

  Simon began writing his report in his swift clear Italic and when it was done he sifted it to the top of a pile of further papers and locked it in his chest. In his mind the shape of something was forming itself from the brute chaos of number and conjecture and again he smiled.

  He prays morning and night, he keeps the Sabbath when he can, and Passover and the Feast of Esther and the Day of Atonement always. He eats no pork and discourses gravely with his uncle and his Dutch Rabbi and yet, if you would flense him to his soul, there would be found not indeed the God of Abraham, but another austere and demanding and lesser god of Number. All about him is a shifting unsolid world full of heated seekers after gold and power, which leaves him often breathless and bewildered, but beyond them and beyond also that Platonic shadow of a shadow, the Mundus Papyri, is the purity and clarity of number which thrills his heart. He had rather read Euclid and Pythagoras and Maimonides than the Torah. In this strange idolatry, if the numbers tell him a thing is so, then in his mind, it is so. And if numbers cannot be attached to it, then is he in severe danger of believing a thing not to exist at all. This sin he shares with Philip of Spain.

  His meditation upon Isaac’s information was broken by a hesitant rap on the door.

  ‘Enter,’ said Simon irritably, glaring at the small scrawny man hitching at the back of his worn canions and shifting from foot to foot in the doorway.

  ‘I am John Holder of Sir Christopher Hatton’s household,’ said the man. ‘I heard your honour was giving silver for any tales of one called David Becket.’

  ‘I am,’ said Simon, hesitating only a moment, ‘if it is the man I seek.’

  ‘Two yards high, a yard broad, black-haired, given to drink and melancholy…’

  ‘Shall we talk over some beer?’ Simon asked.

  At the Green Man in Beer Lane, John Holder sucked at his drink and muttered his tale in a resentful drone, blinking at a bottle of miraculous bones hanging on a far wall.

  By some means as misty and marshy as the lands of Holland themselves, John Holder had gone to fight the Spanish in the mid-Seventies, one of Prince William of Orange’s many unsuccessful armies. Somehow he had mislaid himself and fetched up among a small band of deserters and dispossessed Dutch farmers roaming about the country near Haarlem. Becket was their captain, a younger, lighter man, pleasant enough to Holder at first finding. Becket had given Holder drink and food when he might have starved with his brother and fellow-deserter amongst the bleak gutted fields.

  ‘It was all sham,’ he said, glowering into his beer. ‘There he was, well set up, he could have lived comfortable enough if he chose with the men he had and the weapons, but no, he had to go stirring up trouble, the treacherous bastard.’

  ‘How could he have been comfortable?’

  ‘Take a village under his protection, live off their tribute and keep away any others that came to take it. How else can a man live in a God-forsaken wilderness? There were troops Robin and I could have fallen in with and had a girl each and no troubles with the Spaniards to make us move on.’

  ‘Were you not there to fight the Spaniard?’

  Holder spat on the sawdust. ‘Only fools or officers think that and even them not for long. Some captains take Spanish service for three months, or as long as the fat-arses in San Lorenzo take to send their pay and then go off to Prince William to do the same to him. Or they did. But that’s the hard way.’

  ‘Why?’

  Holder rolled his eyes. ‘Because they might hang you for desertion if they catch you. Jesu, where were you bom?’

  ‘But one can also go a
nd live with villagers?’

  ‘Live off them. That’s the best way if you have enough men and arms and powder. After all, what are they for?’

  Simon nodded agreeably and ordered more beer.

  The tale wound interminably on, chiefly composed of complaints that Becket insisted on daily training, moans that any man who took any girl unwillingly was flogged for his first offence and unmanned at his second…. ‘He only did it once, to show he would, did it himself too, the bloody bastard. Hicks died of it… .’ Becket, it seemed was a tyrant, particularly when drunk, who made his men run about and build fortifications to no purpose merely for amusing of the Spaniards and worse. Then there was the final and crowning indignity.

  ‘He stole a gunpowder mill?’

  ‘Well, not stole, you could hardly run away with it, being the size of a village and the mill itself worked by wind. But we took it in the dark of a spring night in the mist and slit all but two of the Spaniards’ throats that we kept for their advice and then we all must dress up as Spaniards with Hapsburg red sashes and all, we were working harder than Indians, turning out more gunpowder.’

  ‘For the Spaniards?’

  ‘There were two kinds. One was first grade, fine meal, and that went off north by boat. The rest was tenth grade at best, too much charcoal and sulphur, not enough saltpetre, the kind of stuff that gives a filthy stench and smoke but no power at all to drive a cannon ball.’

  ‘For the Spaniards?’ Simon breathed.

  ‘Ay, in exchange for the saltpetre and sulphur and charcoal they were sending by barge, we sent them back bargeloads of shit.’

  Simon laughed.

  ‘What’s funny about it?’ demanded Holder indignantly. ‘The work could kill you with no fires and soft slippers day and night and the dust getting into your food. I cannot look at a hard-boiled egg now.’

  The tale floundered deeper into the marshy tracts of Holder’s brain, culminating in Becket’s hanging of a man for dagger-fighting in the magazine.

  ‘It was a matter of honour,’ said Honour. ‘Baynes had every right to…’

  ‘But surely metal in a gunpowder store…?’

  ‘Honour!’ shouted Holder, banging the table with his fist. ‘It was a matter of honour. ’

  Here the tale descended to a bitter mumble into Holder’s beer.

  ‘There was a mutiny?’ Simon asked, to clarify a little. ‘Becket was thrown down from his office by the men for his tyranny and then…’

  ‘Ay, the bastard. Treacherous, murdering…’ Tears were forming in Holder’s eyes. ‘Sweet as pie by daylight, swore to abide by our soldiers’ council, offered to talk to the Spaniards for us since he spoke the language, repented him of driving us so hard… Sweet as a maiden, opened up his private store of wine to us, even got us Akvavit from one of the villagers and then…the cunt…the…the…’

  Holder was snortling tears back up his nose to hide them.

  ‘He what?’ asked Simon, leaning closer to hear. ‘He left a slowmatch whereV

  ‘He blew us up!’ shouted Holder, spraying Simon with beer and spittle. ‘Sky high. Lit the sky for miles around, brought the Spaniards down on us, and poor Robin and Simkin and Gateside and Bill all in bloody rags and bits…. Only I was having a piss, so I was…. Oh God. ’

  Thoughtfully Simon left the inn, leaving John Holder to pay the reckoning out of his generous two crowns payment, since he seemed well towards passing out there. It was about two in the afternoon and Simon’s head was swimming with beer and the closeness of the inn and Holder’s foul breath. After a moment’s hesitation at the lateness of the hour, he set forth across Tower Street, cut through St Dunstan’s Hill onto Thames Street and thence past the fair square tower of St Magnus onto New Fish Street, and so to London Bridge where the watermen gather upon the inward side to pick up those who prefer not to shoot the bridge. There Simon found a boat to take him upriver to the Temple Steps.

  XII

  Who would breathe easier must travel out beyond the walls where London wears thin upon the countryside, where women may launder their linen and dry the shirts upon hedges, and the city milch cows are kept and the windmills are and the market gardens to feed the milling folk within the walls. Beyond Temple gate and over the filth and noise of Fleet Street it is only a little walk up the dusty ruts of Chancery Lane, past the old house for Convertite Jews where the Lord Chancellor now is, and so to Holborn where in summer an eastern wind will bear a heavy burden of roses from Sir Christopher Hatton’s garden at Ely Place. All about are gardens and sheep runs and for the work of another five minutes’ walk there lies Gray’s Inn, a far northern outpost of London, where rich men’s sons go to learn the law and some salting of courtesy. Walsingham himself spent four years there, debating points of law after dinner in their new hall. But most of the would-be men of law in the place take no pleasure in their Arcadia of gardens and orchards and sheep and moan constantly that they might as well be with the peasants in Islington for the distances they are from any place of interest, meaning Cheapside, Smithfield, Westminster and the stews of Southwark. For indeed so did I once bewail my lot and further the price of good tailoring and half-decent ale, for none of us know when we are happy until the time has gone. There I once shared a chamber with Becket, and neither of us learnt much law for I was too addicted to poetry and he to fighting to spend time arguing points in bastard Norman French.

  And here came Simon, entering humbly by the small gate onto Gray’s Inn Lane, so all who even saw him supposed him a mere clerk bearing a message. He had a seal of Walsingham’s as his authority, which he bore with him always, but first he walked about quietly in the fading winter light until the candles were a-lighting in the hall. Then he went back to the gate and asked for the Keeper of the Rolls and so smiling all the while, a nervous hesitant smile, was brought into the great man’s presence in his inner office where the records were kept. Simon took his hat off.

  Master Dawkins expanded a little, a large heavyset man with a good stomach and two chins weighing down his ruff.

  ‘Ah well, it depends,’ he said when he had listened to Simon’s request. ‘How far back would your master have you go, Mr Ames? We have had good records here only in the past 15 years and…’

  ‘Not so far, Mr Dawkins, a little way only. Twelve years. If I may see the rolls for 1572, I would be…’ A small purse containing silver was taken from Simon’s belt and set down quietly upon a table, seemingly forgotten by him. Mr Dawkins smiled. ‘For Sir Francis, Mr Ames, nothing is too much trouble and always a pleasure to serve him. These are the rolls for 1572 and if I may enlarge upon them, you have only to say…Will you take a pipe of tobacco?’

  Not to be discourteous, Simon took a drink of the smoke and gagged on it. No matter how he tried, he could not take to his uncle’s medicine. In his own room was a new clay pipe and four varieties of tobacco bought at hideous expense and not one but made him feel ill.

  Through the tears in his eyes he spelled out David Becket’s name and noted the names of all who began their studies in that year.

  ‘He is the man I am interested in,’ Simon said at venture. ‘Would you remember a Mr Becket?’

  ‘No, I fear not, Mr Ames.’

  Simon looked at the little purse still on the table and raised his brows. Mr Dawkins laughed. ‘I see so many young sprigs. Could you describe him to me? Well, sir, I wish I had a penny for every tall broad hard-drinking swordschool wastrel I have seen. Went to fight in the Netherlands about ’73. Ah. Yes. Becket.’ Dawkins stroked his beard. ‘He began the fashion, I believe, of climbing upon the walls and pissing upon passers-by. They could never get in by the gate fast enough to catch him, save one man that climbed the wall directly and fought him upon it. He had a fine skill with the sword and I saw him take his Free Scholar’s prize. Never had any money. Hm. What has he done?’

  Simon smiled and spread his inky hands. ‘To my knowledge, he has done nothing, I am merely sent to ask. Is he a Catholic perhaps?’

 
‘No, he came to chapel with the rest when he must and went to pose about St Paul’s Walk when he need not. I never heard him have any thought upon religion at all save what manner of sword it was that Peter cut off the Roman’s ear with.’

  ‘Or one of his friends…?’

  ‘Hm…. The Strangways boys were recusants but no one thought much of it then, the laws being lighter and the times less straitened. We would not admit them to the inn now. But then there was Anthony Fant and Nicholas Sunningdale and Pericles Howard and the rest, all steady enough for the true religion. Even Howard was, being of a collateral and Protestant branch.’

  ‘And what became of them?’

  ‘The Strangways boys? One went abroad, the other went to Court which is all I know. Fant I think came back from Holland made a bad marriage and inherited his father’s estate. I have seen Sunningdale since then, for he came to buy me a quart of beer a few years ago when he was at Westminster Hall in a dispute over a parcel of land his grandfather borrowed from an abbot who had no business lending it. The suit is still continuing.’

  ‘Do you know why Becket turned soldier?’

  Dawkins laughed and patted his dagger. ‘Why does any man? He was no lawyer, that’s sure. For the stink of the moneylenders’ breath on his heels, why else, not wishing to end in the Clink. Mind it was Becket’s fault he had no money, he spent every penny he had on swordschool lessons, drink and gambling and if he had no pretty little punk in some Southwark stew, it was only for lack of time to go seek her. One of them was used to write poetry that was better than the common run, not Becket, but another of his cronies. I forget which it was, but he would climb a tree and declaim from it when the drink took him that way.’ Dawkins was filling another pipe and Simon began gathering up his pens and inkbottle and scraps of paper.