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

by Patricia Finney

  ‘From Blackfriars?’

  ‘Gray’s Inn.’

  Seeing the country mud on my feet he grunted and let go my arm, leaving his prints upon it.

  ‘If I find you have lied…’

  ‘No, David,’ said Simon Ames, speaking like a sleepwalker and not moving from where he sat still shivering by the lasts. ‘I saw an arrowhead caught in a beam and by it an open wineskin. Would Tom have the wit to throw painter’s spirit or turpentine on a roof and then fire flames into it?’

  ‘Christ, no,’ said Becket, rubbing his blood-rimmed eyes with grubby knuckles. ‘No, he would never do that. Why did you not say before?’

  ‘I did not wish to speak before the Watch. I fear I have brought you into mortal danger again, David, for which I am heartily sorry. What was it wakened you in time?’

  ‘My little rat dancing on my chest and nipping at my nose. If it were not for him we would be as crisp fried as Latymer and Ridley now and no crown of martyrdom for payment. He ran into the wall and away, or I would have brought him out with us. Jesu, I pray the poor little rat is not burned saving his family, I have not seen him yet.’ And he rubbed at his scorched eyes again and looked as sorrowful as if he had lost a dog.

  XXVI

  When he had stopped shivering and eaten bread and cheese, Simon had the cobbler’s wife brush the worse of the soot off his gown and then went down to a shop on Cheapside to buy a new shirt and ruff on credit, before going straight to the Tower. There Throgmorton’s servant with the broken teeth and the lump on his head was the dish preserved for the day. Throgmorton’s friend had died of his wound in the meantime.

  The serving man was scarcely an oyster, for he opened at once and after a great deal of dross with nary a pearl, confirmed all that Simon and Walsingham’s other followers had found out since they first began to study Throgmorton. Indeed he was so anxious to be agreeable it was hard to tell dross from gold and gem from glass in any of what he said. Some of Throgmorton’s more mysterious wanderings were explained, at least, Simon found. He had been gambling and was lucky as well, according to his servant, although it was never a passion with him as it was with some at Court.

  By the end of speaking to him, Simon’s head was throbbing with evil humours and his poor nose like a beacon upon a headland. He spent some time with a glowing dish-of-coals, carefully heating Throgmorton’s papers one by one, even a few stray balladsheets, to find if they had writing in milk or orange juice on them and that made his head worse. At last he put the final paper aside in disgust and walked out, with a curt nod at Mall to come with him as a bodyguard, and the sour catching smell of burning still clinging to his clothes.

  In Fetter Lane he found the unroofed house with builders’ men poking about the rafters to see if they could take a roof upon them again or must they come down to be made anew? Mrs Carfax was sorting her belongings out of the ground floor and crying over the hangings and clothes that were spoilt and asking of her neighbour how she would ever find money to pay for the house to be roofed again and now that big black bastard Becket, who had no doubt set the fire himself, had gone and vanished like smoke with three weeks’ rent unpaid. This money Simon paid to her, to her considerable shock, and then he walked down Fleet Street to the Gatehouse.

  At that place Goodwife Alys was friendly enough to him, but none of the company had seen Becket nor heard of him since the morning, nor knew where he might be, which caused some suspicion to Simon, rightly surprised at such agreement in such a company as the Gatehouse’s regulars. He ate the ordinary and left the place saying he was sorry to have missed Mr Becket, but must return to the Tower now, and so left them congratulating each other on having coneycatched him.

  Now upon Fleet Street he stood while Mall waited patiently, his square face graven in stone, and Simon thought hard on how he could find Beqket in that forest of London.

  Seeing the conduit with its little lantern over it, he was reminded of me and Tom, and also knew where we at least might be found. Beckoning Mall to follow he stopped on over Fleet Bridge, up Fleet Hill to Ludgate and through the old gate just as the watch were a shutting of it, and then round the wall and down to Blackfriars. All the way he walked unknowing past packs of city wolves who were daunted by Mall and his size and his half-hidden blackjack.

  Ames found me at length, rapt in contemplation of a window of God, a fragment of the old church that they pulled down for to build houses thereof, and it was a head and crucified shoulders of Christ bound in a rough-hewn new window. The face was fine drawn and the hair and thorns a pain of blood to look upon and weeping angels upon either side of it. A whore had saved it out of the ruin and put it up in her window- space for its beauty. Tom likes to look upon it and so do I, for I think never was a man’s agony better and kindlier made in glass and lead. Simon saw it too, for it was the whore’s habit to put a wax candle by it, and he stood to look awhile. Mall loitered against a wall, paring his nails and muttering of idolatry.

  ‘It is well-done,’ he said to me, after a while.

  ‘It is,’ I said to him. ‘What shall it profit a man to gain the world if thereby he loseth his soul?’

  He stiffened as if I had shot him with a dart, and looked alongside at me.

  ‘Why do you say that?’ he asked.

  ‘You were thinking it,’ I told him, and regretted it for he paled. The gifts of angels always made men afraid.

  ‘How did you know?’

  I shrugged and ruffled my hair back and forth with my hands. Ames gestured at the grief-lined face. ‘It was done by one who knew the face of pain,’ he said, and then ‘What kind of religion is it, that centres about a man tortured to death?’

  ‘Is it better for the centre to be triumph and glory and the destruction of enemies?’ I asked, with Tom’s favourite angel nodding upon my shoulder.

  ‘To glorify suffering, and make it a prize to be desired,’ he muttered, not speaking to me, rather to himself. ‘And then force its creation upon others who do the will of the martyrs and suffer also, although they are cursed. ’

  ‘Bitter speech.’ I said. ‘If you like it not, do not do it.’

  ‘But it must be done,’ he said, ‘And I think I do it better, and cause less suffering. What burned us out this morning were more of the same, worms infecting the Commonwealth, that will gnaw it to death if they are not cauterised.’

  ‘What is it you do?’ I asked, although of course I knew.

  ‘I break men open,’ he answered bleakly, ‘so they give me the secrets hoarded in their hearts. Most are silly, dirty little things, these secrets, but from time to time, we have one who has a vital part of a greater secret and knows it not. Or knows it and revels in it. What must I do? Be merciful, avoid the rack, shun the screws, put no pains upon him and so risk the destruction of this realm and the death of men, women and children in foreign war or civil strife? Or shall I lay on like Topcliffe and perhaps damn my soul to eternity for the finding of the secret as Christians believe, but save the realm? Walsingham suffers none of these doubts, nor Thomas Norton, nor any of them. I wish I could see as clear. ’

  ‘Is there not a worthy part for a goat,’ I said, to comfort him. ‘Even a goat to have sins weighed upon him and be driven out and killed and so the sins gone also.’

  ‘That is the Redeemer’s part, I believe,’ he said. ‘To speak Christianly, I am the one that kills the goat. If you like, Tom, I am Pontius Pilate that wash my hands.’

  He spoke low, hardly to me or Tom at all, his voice from far beyond the grim river. I could not answer him, nor could the angels, for they are not permitted to say whether Pilate screams in Hell or loves Christ now in Heaven. I squatted down instead and began making patterns of the dragon in the dirt by the cloister wall. Mall stamped his cold feet and sighed as he changed hands on the torch.

  Ames put back his little flask of aqua vitae, blew his red nose and squinted blearily at me.

  ‘So Tom,’ he said heavily, ‘have you seen Becket? I must speak with him-’r />
  ‘I have seen him with a piece of cheese in his hand, shouting and calling for the rat that saved your lives,’ I said.

  ‘When?’

  ‘This morning.’

  ‘Where is he now?’

  I lifted up my shoulders and waved my arms and flapped my mouth like a fish to show him I knew nothing. He shook me and shouted at me but that told me no more and so I could tell him no more and in the en4 he cursed in Portuguese and walked away.

  XXVII

  It was the churchwarden of St Dunstan’s in the West that found Becket, sitting in a pew which was not his at the back of the church, dead drunk and weeping. Knowing the man and having more sense than to go near him when he was in that state, the churchwarden stood worrying his pockmarked lower lip for a while before he crossed over Fleet Street and spoke to a woman that kept a second-hand linen shop, by name Eliza Fumey. She was a friend to Becket the churchwarden knew, for he had seen them conversing after the service on a Sunday. She listened to his tale frowning, left the shop in the care of her boy and came bustling over with her apron still on.

  She found him still stinking of smoke and now of booze, with tears running in channels down the half-wiped grime of his face.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘Is it the fire?’

  Becket shook his head and hiccupped, mumbling incoherently.

  ‘Is someone dead?’

  Becket nodded.

  ‘Who is it? Tom? A girl?’ Becket shook his head, heaved a great sigh. ‘You will laugh,’ he said thickly.

  ‘No, never.’

  Becket’s fist opened to show a crushed piece of cheese.

  ‘Poor little soul,’ he whispered. ‘Poor creature, burned to death.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Saved my life and the Jew’s. Did you know? We would have burned had he not woken me. See here? He nipped my nose. I tried to take him with me but he would go back for his family.’

  ‘Who do you mean? A dog?’

  Becket shook his head again. ‘My rat.’

  ‘Rat?’

  ‘Ay, rat. Better friend to me than most of humankind, by Christ.’

  ‘No doubt,’ said Eliza drily, ‘but have you seen his body?’

  ‘No, but he comes not when I call and would never…’

  ‘Well then, he is afraid because of the fire and has removed to a safer place. I would count no man dead until 1 had seen his corpse, and how much more with a beast that can creep between walls and hide under roofs. ’

  ‘He would come to my call. He always has.’

  ‘Ay, but he is a rat, David. A better creature than many men I grant you, but for all that he has no reason.’ Eliza looked up at the church beams for inspiration, shook her head fiercely at the churchwarden who was hopping from foot to foot in the throes of curiosity. ‘He may have run so far from the fire he cannot hear you.’

  Becket’s shoulders shook and he started weeping afresh. ‘Then I’ll see him no more…’

  ‘Better that than thinking him dead.’

  ‘He was my friend.’

  ‘So he was if he braved the fear of fire to waken you…’

  ‘Even when I had no meat for him, he was pleased to see me, I could tell and each night he would come and…’

  ‘Jesu,’ said Eliza under her breath. ‘David, I will lay you good odds he lives yet and has but gone too far away to hear. Now come with me and wash your face.’

  It took a little more coaxing, but by the time the rain had cleared to cold greyness, she had him out of the church and washing his face in the conduit, which was not enough to keep him upright, so she brought him back to her house and up the stairs to her bed. There she stripped him and covered him up and took the grey remnants of his linen to give to the rag and bone man.

  Becket snored out the day there. At sunset Mrs Fumey sent her maid up to lay and light a fire for him. An hour later she went up herself with a posset and a mess of eggs and Becket’s newly brushed and mended hose over her arm. She found him sitting on a stool poking the fire with the coverlet wrapped round his nakedness, Roman fashion. He winced when she shut the door, though she shut it gently.

  ‘Oh Christ, why do women bring you food when your head is like to fall off?’ he grumbled ungraciously.

  ‘Because it is good for you. Drink. ’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Poison.’

  ‘Oh ay, some sovereign bloody cure for a man being distempered of drink no doubt, owl shite dissolved in horse piss with a seasoning of nigHtshade or some such…’

  ‘Wine, hot water and spices and citron, now drink it.’

  He did, meekly. She left the mess of eggs by where he could smell it while she rummaged a clean shirt for him out of her chest.

  ‘Was it you came to me in the church?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And thinking me half a Bedlamite to be crying for a… .’

  ‘I think no less of you, David, that you mourn for a friend, even if the friend had fur and a tail. Besides, I wept more salt for my little tabby cat than I did for my babes that died, and so if that is madness, I am afflicted too.’

  Becket had discovered the eggs and was throwing them into his mouth absent-mindedly. When Eliza found a shirt that she thought wide enough, she brought it to him and measured it to his shoulders.

  ‘I shall go to Pickering tonight,’ Becket said with his mouth full. ‘Laurence the King? Why? I thought you swore to have no more to do with…’

  ‘I can think of none else can help me.’

  ‘He was sorry when you left him, I heard.’

  ‘Was he angry?’

  ‘No, he knew your reasons, and you did it gentlemanlike, but even so…. You swore you would not go back.’

  Becket shrugged.

  ‘Is it in behalf of the Court Jew you have been teaching swordplay?’

  ‘Somewhat. Someone is trying hard to kill him in a matter that touches his Court work and this morning they near as a whisker succeeded. ’ His attention wandered, remembering the squeaking and biting upon his chest and his struggling out of the beer fumes into the blindness of smoke and heat.

  ‘You were not so hot for revenge after you were wounded.’

  Becket stretched forth his leg from his toga and looked at the purple scar. ‘No, for that was done in the way of business when I was guarding Mr Ames. Last night… Why bum my lodgings? They could have waited in ambush for Ames when he left in the morning. No, they wanted to kill me too…. Which annoys me. If a man wants my death he should come and get it openly, if he can. I cannot pay you for the shirt, Eliza…’

  She tapped him on the cheek. ‘Hush. Did I ask for money? Besides, I paid nothing for it myself.’

  Becket grinned and kissed her on the mouth, and then under the ear. She shut her eyes.

  ‘I must be respectable, David,’ she said. ‘The goodwives watch me for any slip, any hint of…’

  ‘Pfft to respectability,’ said Becket, kissing her other ear.

  ‘But what if…’

  ‘We may all die of plague next week. Pickering may have me slit like a fish tonight.’

  ‘But the sin… .’

  Becket kissed her on the mouth again, laughed a little as she swayed her hips away from his hands, though she did not push him off. ‘Sin be damned,’ he whispered. ‘If you will not pity me, must I go to some Winchester goose who will?’

  She cuffed his ear half-heartedly, then sighed and caught his head and twined her fingers in his hair. Becket was making heavy weather of the lacing of her bodice, tried main force but was defeated by stout canvas and whalebone and must wait meekly while she unarmoured herself one-handed, unbuttoned her smock.

  ‘Ah Eliza,’he said, happily muffled,‘you have such beautiful tits…’ Well, well, there is a sudden desperate hurry which takes some men before they go into the valley of the shadow of death, to play the game of the two-backed beast, to foin something before they die, and for this reason is much rapine committed by soldiers. After all, Lauren
ce Pickering was unguessable and not known for his kindness to those who left his employ. Others by fear are struck with a sorrow that drives all power from their privy parts like witchcraft, but Becket was not one of these.

  I myself find that the company of angels has gentled my animal nature and kept me from impure thoughts, though at night sometimes am I troubled by the she-devil known as Succubus whom I must battle until I am rescued by an angel or by dawn.

  In the warm afterglow of their sin, Becket left Eliza to lace her stays and refasten her bodice again, and picked the clean shirt she had brought him from off the rushes by the fire.

  ‘When was you whipped?’ Eliza asked, of mere womanly curiosity while he was brushing meadowsweet flowers from it. ‘Was it in the Low Countries?’

  ‘Yes. When I was a young lad with no sense and too much love of dice.’

  ‘For dicing?’

  Becket laughed uneasily. ‘No, for rioting and drunkenness and destroying of a tavern.’

  ‘Lucky not to be hanged.’

  ‘True. I think I was bom to be drowned.’

  ‘And the second time?’

  This time Becket’s face went blank. ‘There was only the once. ’ Which was a lie, as she could see clearly, but she nodded and made herself busy with retying her bumroll.

  ‘And you, were you ever whipped?’ Becket asked as she disappeared under her petticoat.

  ‘Oh twice, in the old days. But I paid the man and he hardly marked me at all. The goodwives were sorry for it.’

  ‘That you were whipped?’

  ‘No,’ Eliza laughed. ‘That there was no blood. There now, you look a proper man again. Why do you always wear your shirts until they rot and fall off your back.’

  ‘Idleness and the company of wicked women.’

  Dressed and with her cap primly fastened on her head, she went downstairs and fetched his doublet that she had mended and steamed and sponged and lastly aired with a stick of burning perfume so it was as well as ever it was likely to be. Her two children sat eating bread and milk and apples in the kitchen and watched her wide-eyed while the maid said nothing at all.