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

by Patricia Finney

  Never before had I done this though it would have been easy enough. I had found the house by a chance glimpse of Agnes’ husband, whom I knew well once, when I followed him home. I had watched my sister coming and going, marshalling the packhorses and carts to traverse back to their home in the country, riding at their head with her steward, back and forth she went, pursuing her husband’s interest at law through the courts in Westminster Hall. Aunt Catherine had generally drooped behind her, riding pillion with a groom and fingering her beads covertly. Once there was a wet nurse as well with a babe puling and puking behind that. But never had I dared come so close nor speak to one of my family, for fear they would hale me back to Bedlam.

  Now Aunt Catherine had one hand to her throat, her other crossing herself wildly. I thought there might be a demon choking her and so rose to my feet and went smiling towards her, holding out my hands to help strike it from her throat. She shuddered, threw the other stone she had in her hand, then swept backwards with a swirling of her skirts and slammed the door. I stared upon it and went up close.

  ‘Tell Cain I forgive him Bedlam.’ I roared through the wood, and to be sure they must have heard me in Fleet Street. ‘Tell him Mr Secretary’s men will come, he is in danger.’

  There was a shriek of voices within and a scuffle of nails on flagstones, a low growling bark. I backed from the door and as it opened wide enough to let out a dog, I skipped backwards like a hart and was down the lane and through the gate into Paul’s Yard again, his teeth snapping at my heels.

  Oh it was hard to run with my eyes full of water and a stone stuck in my breast. Tom was dashing tears away as he came to Ludgate and ran through, while an angel asked in amusement why I was weeping. What did I think would come of it? Aunt Catherine had mourned me dead in Bedlam of plague years gone by and no doubt had quietly thanked God for a merciful release. My sister had surely forgotten me entirely. Who would welcome a ghost in rags and tatters, a man of shadows and angels breaking out of his reported death and forgetfulness, the brother who had brought shame to their name with his wildness and turning of the Queen’s banquet upside down? Adam would never do such things.

  No doubt it was hunger that brought on the new fit of angels. Another afternoon went missing to join the flock of my lost days in the locked belfry of my mind. When I conquered Tom once more I was by the whore’s beautiful Christ-window again, with Simon Ames shaking me and Henderson holding up a torch to light him from behind.

  ‘It is like talking to water and wind to get sense of you, Tom, I know not why I came back. Nor will I come again if there is no fruit to this, and so you may tell Mr Becket, if it was he that sent you.’

  He was tired and unwell, his face gone thinner and black circles under his eyes, and a cold sore under his nose where he dabbed at it too much.

  His guardian Henderson was backed to the wet wall, the patience of a saint carved on his face. Behind his face ran his thoughts, and he and his fellows all thought Simon Ames was next for Bedlam and the begging bowl, with these purported assassination attempts, besides playing in dangerous waters with David Becket.

  On which thought, like the Devil spoken of, came Becket himself, at first nothing but a looming of black at the gullet of an alley running into the whore’s little yard, beyond the grasp of Henderson’s torch, but with his own torch on one side of his width and a large bundle in his other hand. As he came closer so the bundle became a man, much battered about his pocked clever face and his arm broken from the way it hung useless.

  ‘What is this, Mr Becket?’ Simon demanded while Henderson straightened up and dropped his hand to his veney-stick.

  Becket swung his arm and the man crashed against the wall and slid down to a moaning heap. Crumpled sheets of paper fell out of his doublet.

  ‘There,’ said Becket, breathing hard, ‘that one works for the man that paid to bum us out.’

  ‘Hm.’

  ‘Tell him your tale, bastard, or I’ll piss in your mouth.’

  The ballad seller crawled to his knees and began to babble at venture, that it was nothing to do with him and he worked only for those who paid him and he asked no questions and knew nothing at all of nothing. This last caused Simon to narrow his eyes. He crouched down to the man, trailing his gown in the mud.

  ‘What were you paid to do?’ he asked quite gently.

  The ballad seller’s eyes rolled at Becket who was lowering over him with a dagger in his fist.

  ‘Put your knife away, sir,’ Ames said curtly. Becket did so. ‘Now tell me what you were paid to do?’

  ‘Follow you, your honour, follow and mark where you lay, no more I swear it on

  ‘His pack stinks of turpentine,’ said Becket. ‘And he has a small crossbow also, a fowling piece. And I have marked him speaking to one of Tyrrel’s men upon the Bridge in time past.’

  Ames gazed at him a long while. The ballad seller shivered, his head and shoulders were wet and stank of a gutter which no doubt was where Becket had half-drowned him, but under the skin of his face which was so twisted with fear and humility, still he was thinking and planning.

  ‘Have you been upon Tyburn?’ asked Ames in a grey neutral voice, ‘when they execute traitors? Did you see Campion die? Did you see how they hanged him but a little time and then cut him down quick and still breathing and slit open his bowels? There was a song made of his treason and men such as yourself selling it to the crowd, singing it also. Were you there?’

  Here again was Ames all clothed in his protective armour of ice, intent upon his prey, while Becket stood still and Henderson also, caught by the magic of fear he was weaving upon the ballad seller. He nodded once to Simon’s question.

  ‘You were there. So you saw them strip out his guts in his sight, like butchers making sausages? You saw them take his manstones and throw them on the fire? I think he did not cease shrieking until they cut him in four. It is wonderful, is it not, how much it takes to kill a man, so it be done right?’

  Edmund Dun nodded once. He was a man of as long lineage in singing and travelling as Richard Broom was in power and killing, his dark skin and eyes came not from Egyptians but from Languedoc in the days of heresy. Alas for a lineage long decayed and brought to poverty by printing, and a bitter burden of pride in the man that none now valued his skill at holding hundreds of complete ballads in his brain.

  ‘Speaking for myself, I was glad when he was dead, Fr Campion.’ Ames continued, ‘I pitied him. It is a death I would wish on no man, no matter what his crime. And yet 1 think he preferred it to life after we had finished with him, in the Tower.’

  Here was a long breath, like a sigh, from Becket, but only I heard it.

  ‘Tell me where Mr Semple lodges.’ Ames said quietly, coaxingly, ‘It is all I desire to know.’

  The ballad seller closed his eyes. After a long moment, he whispered and when Ames bent closer to listen, he shouted, ‘The house with the elephant over the door, in Old Change.’ Now came many things, all crammed into the same heartbeats. First the blood drained down from Becket’s cheeks as Simon stood up straight again, removing the signet ring from his finger.

  ‘You heard that, Mr Henderson,’ he said crisply. ‘Go at once to Mr Recorder Fleetwood, show him this ring and bid him meet me at Paul’s churchyard south gate with a good force of men immediately.’

  But as he spoke, a Romish devil was whispering in Dun’s ear, and he lurched to his feet and charged his shoulder into Ames’ side, knocking him into a puddle. He ran down the alley clumsily, his feet in their tattered shoes and chipped broken pattens turning sideways on themselves, slipping in dog turd, barking his broken arm on the wall and mewling in pain.

  ‘Stop him!’ shouted Ames. Becket seemed to awaken, ducked his head, put his hand to his neck and threw narrow-eyed. The singer of songs went down on his face with a smooth-handled well-weighted little knife sticking from his back. By the time they reached him, he had vomited blood and died.

  Ames stood a little apart whilst Becket set
his boot against the man’s ribs and twisted out his knife. He wiped it carefully on the ballad seller’s hair to clean and grease it before sliding it again into its nest under his own ringlets.

  ‘I had not meant him to die,’ Simon said after a moment.

  ‘No?’ said Becket while Henderson looked among the man’s many papers.

  ‘Nothing but ballads here,’ said Henderson.

  ‘Put him in the Thames then,’ said Ames, shaking himself a little, stepped over the ballad seller like a cat and began leading them towards Water Lane. Henderson departed to find Mr Recorder Fleetwood, whilst Becket and I took up the body and followed down to the river where he slipped sadly into the water with hardly a splash.

  Ames watched, warming his hands in the sleeves of his gown.

  ‘Will you come with me, Mr Becket?’ he asked civilly, ‘since you have worked so well on my behalf.’

  Now David Becket need not have obeyed. He could have melted into the night and never clapped eyes on Simon Ames again, with a little care. But he did not. And yet he knew as well as I did what he had done.

  I am afraid of Becket when he kills for an ugly mood comes down on him. He was full of danger and indifference spilling out of the dark places in his soul. Men are strange how they will take vengeance upon themselves.

  He turned to me and lifted his hands as if asking my forgiveness.

  ‘At least bless me for a good shot, Tom,’ he said.

  What could I say? 1 was crouched against a wall, my hands holding back Tom’s ravings in my mouth.

  ‘You may come if you wish, Tom,’ said Ames, ignorantly.

  I laughed at him. In the choice between darkness and ice to numb me, I chose neither of them. Instead I went out and up and walked about among the stars, leaving my animal part to rave below, while I trod the dark gritty clouds of London, the star daemon in my soul conversing pleasantly with the Queen Moon and the Seven Governors of the Sky.

  XXXI

  They treated my sister with all courtesy, seeing she was a woman and seeing she was great with child and near her time. They permitted her to dress herself and wait in her hall with all her servants gathered, while Simon Ames and Recorder Fleetwood and their men went through her house like an army in a sacked city. One by one Ames spoke with the servants, privily in a little solar behind the hall, and also with Catherine Nisbet who wept and cried that they all had been betrayed by the zany. And the loud-voiced cook swore and cursed that none among them would ever tell him anything, no, nothing and besides Mr Semple had gone away, gone for good, sweet Jesu be praised for it.

  He waited upon Mistress Fant last of all. She sat in her husband’s carved chair to receive him, her long wax-white fingers folded upon the dome of her belly, her chin rested on the white folds of her ruff, her gown an old green velvet one in the loose English style for her stays were put away now until she was delivered of her burden. So she seemed as it were something from before the King’s Great Matter, a few vagrant wisps of red hair as always escaping to startle the black velvet of her French hood, and her linen cap beneath it as lacking colour as her face.

  She had not studied to put Simon at disadvantage, but did so by instinct only, by the operation of ancient blood which goes about its business subtly. For my father’s lineage was too new and fine to be very old, being indebted to the Queen’s grandfather for his gentility, whereas my mother’s could stretch with neither effort nor boasting back to one of William the Bastard’s ruffians.

  When Ames entered she had but one candle by her on a table, a breviary laid near it, the fire low and the fresh rushes still smelling sweetly under his boots.

  She looked at him and waited for him to speak, saying nothing that would put him at ease. When he spoke that was itself in the way of a small skirmish lost in a new and deadly war.

  ‘Madam, I must tell you that we have found Mass things and Agnus Deis within your hiding place by the stairs.’

  She inclined her head a little, kept silent.

  ‘Who was the man calling himself Semple that has been staying in this-house these past weeks?’

  ‘My brother.’

  ‘Did you know he is a Papist, one that works for the Duke of Alva?’

  ‘I know he is a Catholic,’ said my sister quietly, ‘as I am myself.’

  ‘Did you know he is a traitor?’ asked Simon. Again silence, for she folded her lips like the shutting of a book. ‘Where is he now?’ Still nothing. Simon took a piece of paper he had found and shown at venture to all the household, held it out to her. ‘Who sold this ballad to you?’ Agnes glanced at it. ‘It is the ballad of Tom O’Bedlam,’ she said. ‘If you will arrest every household that has a copy, you have a busy night before you, sir.’

  ‘From whom did you buy it?’

  ‘To be sure, I bought it not. Ask of the kitchen girls or one of the grooms perhaps.’

  ‘Madam I must press you on the matter of your brother. ’

  She shut her eyes momentarily. ‘That I am as you term it, a Papist, a believer in the Faith of my father and grandfather and great-grandfather, that I freely admit,’ she said. ‘I keep the Mass things and have heard Mass, that too I admit.’

  ‘Which is against the law.’

  ‘Yes, it is. But that is all. Besides the matter of religion, I am Her Majesty’s liegewoman and as true loving subject as any minister’s wife. I am no traitor, nor any in my house.’

  ‘Seeing that God made the world, what is there that can be beside the matter of religion, madam?’

  Agnes smiled. ‘Whatsoever the Queen wishes, surely.’

  ‘Then what think you of the Bishop of Rome’s Bull of Excommunication upon Her Majesty? If Alva came with his army, which would you pray for, the Queen or the Spaniard?’

  ‘Ah. The bloody question. I would pray for all English men and women, sir, indifferent, as I do now.’

  Simon was silent himself a moment. ‘Where is your husband?’ he asked.

  ‘My husband knows nothing of my brother’s sojourn, nor of the Mass things, being lodged at Tilbury this past six months. He goes to church every Sunday and pays my fines out of love for me.’

  ‘Then you are a most evil wife to him,’ Simon said coldly. Agnes bowed her head.

  ‘Yes, I am,’ she said, ‘but he knows nothing. He is at Tilbury overseeing the building of a ship for the exploration of the north-west passage and the lading and unlading of his cargoes for Muscovy and the Hansa. I scarcely ever see him save in winter when the seas are closed. I am in London upon business of a lawsuit.’

  Simon went to the fire and laid his hands upon the mantel to warm them a little.

  ‘Madam, I have already sent to Tilbury for the taking of your husband. In addition, although I am loath to do so, I fear I must bring you to the Tower. Would you prefer a horse litter or to travel by boat? Speak your desire and 1 will arrange it.’

  Agnes smiled and steepled her fingers, no tremor in them.

  ‘I desire not to go to the Tower at all,’ she said. ‘As you can see, I am not like to run away from you. I was about to take my chamber and wait for my hour.’

  Simon inclined his head. ‘Nevertheless I must require it of you.’

  ‘A pretty thing, a woman brought to bed of her babe in the Tower.’

  ‘You will not be the first, madam,’ said Simon, ‘nor the last, I doubt. I shall see to it that there is a midwife to attend upon you.’

  ‘If you are hoping that my brother will come back to this house tonight, I may tell you now sir, you will be disappointed. He shall not return.’ As this was indeed one of Simon’s hopes, he did not answer.

  ‘I will wait upon you when we have the horse litter ready,’ he ended as he turned by the door, while Agnes looked into space, eyes hooded. As he crossed the threshold, she lifted her chin and called out to him in a rush.

  ‘Be gentle with my husband sir, I pray you, he is choleric and not well and he knows nothing of my foolishness…

  Simon bowed. She did not return the cou
rtesy and the eyes of all her people bored into him like awls as he passed by them to speak to James Ramme, that moment come from the Queen’s household and still gnawing on a baked goose leg.

  XXXII

  Two of Mr Recorder Fleetwood’s priest hunters were measuring the passageway as he wandered into the kitchen. There he found Becket building up the fire. Two pokers rested in the embers, two tankards sat on a bench waiting to be mulled.

  Simon came to a halt and stood watching as Becket busied himself, nervously hitching up his gown on his shoulders and scratching at the sore place made by his ruff under his chin. Becket turned and grinned at him, at which Simon near turned and fled because he saw the man was drunk.

  ‘Come, friend, drink with me,’ said Becket flourishing a poker before he mulled the ale with it. Simon sat down gingerly on a bench, listening to the ale hissing and bubbling and smelling the spices. He took the tankard, forebearing to remark that it was not Becket’s kitchen for all he was making himself at home, and sipped carefully. Becket sat down next to him, causing the bench to creak in protest, cradled the tankard, and elbowed him in the ribs.

  ‘It was gold I brought you, with the balladmonger, eh?’

  ‘Indeed,’ Simon agreed peacably, ‘though alas, we came a little late.’

  ‘Tell me the tale.’

  Here was the smell of old sweat, old smoke, booze and fear so strong that Simon coughed. He blew his nose again on his handkerchief, all the time pinned to the bench by David Becket’s over-bright eyes. He thought it might be better to talk a little.

  ‘The man we seek came into England under the name of Semple, but his true name is Adam Strangways, for he is Mistress Fant’s brother. ’

  Becket spat into the fire, drank some more.

  ‘He is known to be a friend of Charles Paget, that is the Queen of Scot’s man in Paris, who was here himself in September but slipped away before we could lay hands on him. Strangways we know was given private audience with the Spanish King early this summer.’