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

by Patricia Finney

  ‘Hmf.’

  ‘You said you would help me find the man.’

  ‘Ay, I did. But it is not so easy to unstopper a tale I have never told before.’

  ‘Perhaps we might go to my office.’

  With Kinsley and Fant’s assigned Yeoman standing guard at the door, and bread and cheese and small beer divided between them within, Fant ate in morose silence, drank, then sat back and glared at his one hand resting on his thigh. Ames was too wrought up with tension to eat more than a bite of bread, and found the beer to be sour.

  ‘Were you among those who went out to Flushing with Captain Morgan in 1572?’ he prodded gently.

  ‘Walter Morgan reported on it for my lord Burghley, did he not?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He boasted he was doing so. Have you read it?’

  ‘Indeed, yes.’

  ‘He is the Captain’s cousin, but not quite as great a fool. Well, if you have read it you know more than I do about the expedition.’

  ‘It seems you were not altogether successful…’

  ‘Successful?’ Anthony Fant laughed nastily. ‘Christ, it was a Godforsaken joke, a pack of gentlemen wastrels and ne’er-do-wells prancing over to Holland to save the poor Dutch burghers from the stupid Spanish, sack a few rich cities and prance back again by Christmas, well weighted with gold.’

  Simon held his peace.

  ‘Upon the journey to Flushing I know one young fool that was brought to tears by seasickness and the fact that the seawater spoiled his new velvet suit and so he would not cut quite so fine a figure when he landed. ’ Fant blinked at the frost damascening the window behind Simon’s head. ‘To this day, I cannot eat stockfish.’

  ‘Stockfish?’ asked Simon.

  ‘Flushing, or Flissingen as the butter-eaters call it, is a fishing port and there they make stockfish to ship into England and down the Rhine into France. The whole town stinks with fish, every yard is decked with fish and littered with salt barrels, and what they cannot sell, they eat. Nine or ten months we spent there, God help us, no pay, notes to buy food and never anything to buy but fish, and the damned French in all the best billets. When the news of St Bartholomew’s eve came we cheered, God forgive us, for the French that were in Flushing were Huguenots. Becket got his stripes then, from Roger Williams.’

  ‘Oh?’ asked Simon in neutral tone.

  ‘He began some drunken brawl in one of the few inns that would still serve Englishmen, was well beaten and so he set light to the place in revenge. Williams made an example of him. At the time I was shocked to see a gentleman flogged.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Now? I would have hanged him and saved much grief. But then I muttered of mutiny myself along with his other cronies, until the Frenchmen left and the Spaniards came.

  Simon held silent. Fant banged his hand on his knee, turned on him. ‘You know what became of us, if you read Morgan’s account. You know the fine show we put up against the Spanish tercios.’

  ‘Why, think you, did they win?’

  ‘Oh count the reasons, Mr Ames. Imprimis, they were veterans, we were raw. Item, they knew how to load and shoot their arquebuses and we did not. Item, they knew how to hold their pikes and we did not. Item, they knew which end of a cannon the ball comes out, we did non Item, they had commanders accustomed to command and impose discipline, and we had Gilbert and Morgan that quarrelled with each other from dawn to dusk and then drank from dusk to dawn.’

  ‘But surely the English are the finest fighters upon the sea,’ said Simon, more naively than he was.

  ‘Oh to be sure, Mr Ames, upon the sea. But put us upon the land in some muddy little pack of hovels…. We were well enough when we raided them, when we went out to kill the Spaniards in their beds and amuse them a little, but set us up against a tercio in battle array, pikes levelled, artillery firing and we broke and ran. Gilbert went home with his tail between his legs and most of his martial men with him. ’

  ‘Not you?’

  ‘No, I was too great a fool. Becket gave me the notion for it, damn him: he said he would go to fight for the Prince of Orange in Sassenheim because he could not leave the Dutch to think that all an Englishman can do is shit his breeches, turn tail and flee. I agreed with him. About one hundred of us went to the Prince.’

  ‘Did you not know that Becket was hiding from his creditors?’

  Fant looked down his nose. ‘Of a certainty I knew, I was the one that told him Tyrrel had taken out a writ against him for his debts.’ He smiled. ‘I advised him to go home, confess all to his father and ask for his mercy and help.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘As I understood it from Becket, his father gave his third son an unscriptural beating, broke his nose for him, booted him out of his house and Becket stole his favourite horse to bear him back to London.’ Simon hid a smile.

  Fant sighed. ‘We chose a fine time to join the Prince. That was the year when the Spaniards were running through the rebel provinces toppling our towns like a boy breaking mud forts with his feet. Then…where was it? Naarden tried to come to terms but the Capitano del Campo, Julian Romero, he got into the city under a flag of truce and they massacred all the people in their own church.’

  Fant passed his hand over his eyes.

  ‘What do you know of Haarlem, Mr Ames?’

  ‘Little enough,’ said Simon untruthfully. ‘A town parallel to Amsterdam and controlling the westerly routes to Holland.’

  ‘No one thought it could hold, not even the Prince who hoped it might. The walls were too high and thin, no earthworks to speak of, a port on the Haarlemmermeer. They say it was a fair city and it was rich. ’ Simon poured him some more of the beer to wet his throat.

  ‘Jesu, why make an Iliad of it. The Spanish found it a tougher nut to crack than they thought, but they took the city in the end.’

  ‘Were you there?’

  ‘Yes, Becket, Strangways, Balfour that was at least an honest bastard in his perfidy. At the end he convinced the Spaniards, Christ knows how, that if they let him live he would contrive to kill William of Orange.’

  ‘He did not, though.’

  ‘No, no, when they let him go he went straight to the Prince and told him of it and dined out on the tale for years after. Now Balfour was a cunning man, a Scot. He got us into Haarlem and to be fair he told us clear that it was a foolish thing and likely to lead to our deaths. There were above thirty thousand Spaniards round about the town, but with the lake frozen and winter mists so thick, they could not stop the supplies coming in. We ran one hundred and seventy sledges loaded with food and gunpowder into Haarlem right under Julian Romero’s nose, it was a famous deed.’

  He fell silent and Simon coughed again. ‘What happened after?’

  ‘It was a siege. The Spaniards dug their siegeworks, we raided them for food, we worked like peasants to keep the walls buttressed against their artillery. They mined us, we countermined them and set off their petards, and they beat the Prince’s relief forces again and again. And in time we learnt of new things to eat such as horse and dog and rat and that tulip bulbs may be eaten if well soaked and salted first to take out the bitterness. By the end there was but a quarter pound of bread per diem for the men and that mostly sawdust. It was a vision of death, Mr Ames, to see a city with no children in the streets and the few that lived gone into old age in a few months. There was one I knew — she was the daughter of a woman that Becket and I were billeted upon, a wealthy woman she had been once, but her husband died in the Christmas attack Don Fadrique made on the Gate of the Cross. She had lost her other children before, this was the last. When Becket was laid up with a sword slash on the leg, little Anna taught him Dutch.’ Fant shook his head. ‘This was her plot. She desired to teach Becket her tongue to further his suit to the widow her mother, since she liked him better than she liked me.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘You would scarcely credit it, but Becket and I were nearly at daggers drawn over that Dutchwoman. I think h
e might have won her, but… Coma the spring when the ice melted and the Spaniards got control of the Haarlemmermeer, Use put Anna to bed and Becket would spend hours reading her tales from the Bible – Genesis, Jonah and the Whale, Tobit.

  ‘Then Balfour asked him to take a message to Sassenheim, begging the Prince to try again to relieve the city. Balfour knew he spoke Dutch, you see, and could pass as a Fleming with a little luck. Becket agreed to it, and we made another attack for horses to eat, and he slipped away during the fighting.’

  This time Fant was silent for a long time, and Simon heard the shouts and clash of halberds as the Privy Councillors came in by the Watergate.

  ‘And?’ he asked at last.

  ‘He never came back. Anna took a fever and died. When Count Batenburg came with his puny raw army, Romero knew the day and smogged out our signal fires with green woodsmoke, he knew the direction and laid ambushes and cut them to pieces as they blundered about in the smoke. We watched from the walls.

  ‘Well, Orange told us by pigeon to surrender. But the Haarlemites would not, they swore that since they must die as the townsfolk at Naarden and Zutphen had died, they would rather die fighting and fire the town behind them. In the end, Duke Alva was so puzzled he made a merciful treaty: he would kill only the garrison, the officers, the Protestant pastors, the town council and all who led the fight against their lawful King. The rest might live and he would not sack the city although he had spent nearly a year in taking it.’

  ‘But you — were you not one of the garrison? How did you survive?’

  ‘It was in the treaty, that all the garrison must give themselves up or the Spaniards would sack the town. I would have surrendered and been put to the sword or drowned, but I had taken an arquebus bullet in my arm in the attack that gave Becket his chance. The wound sickened and the night before the surrender Use brought a barber surgeon to cut it off. When the soldiers came, she convinced them that I was her. husband, shot upon the walls. I know not how she did it since I was near death at the time.’

  ‘But…how did Romero know when the relieving force was to come?’

  ‘Must I spell it out for you like a tutor? Adam Strangways had turned his coat months before, when he disappeared after one of our sorties and went to serve Romero – he was a Papist and liked not our jests with Mass things and idolatrous images that they think so sacred. Julian Romero kept him by to serve him and advise him. And when Becket came back from Prince William, he met Strangways and betrayed the date and direction of the relief force to him. ’

  Simon let out a breath. ‘Becket turned his coat as well?’

  Fant shrugged. ‘How else did he live after the Spaniards caught him?’

  ‘But… I heard Becket fought the Spaniards later, he raided them, he took a gunpowder mill from them, I have had letters from informers in the Netherlands that say the Spanish feared him.’

  ‘So he turned it back. Once done it is easy to do again. Roger Williams did the same, only less foully.’

  ‘No, but I…Well. And you? How did you fare after the siege ended?’

  Fant smiled, a warmer smile. ‘I married the Dutchwoman, when 1 was well of my arm, since it had pleased God to spare me to her. We planted lime saplings in her street to replace the trees that withered and died when we ate their bark. I had no notion that my elder brother was dead of sweating sickness or I would have returned, and my father thought me dead. As I told you, Use was wealthy, she was a burgher’s wife and although she had fought with the women’s troop, the Spaniards let her keep her property. She was a good match and… we were fond enough. ’ His face became bleak again. ‘I would be living there now, only she died miscarrying our child and I inherited her wealth. Which was as well when I sold up and came back to England and found what state my father had brought our lands to. With both his sons dead, as he thought, he had no stomach to business. Thank God he lived to see me return.’

  ‘Mr Fant,’ said Simon, ‘I am indebted to you for this account, but I must be clear upon one thing. You say that Becket betrayed the relief force to Strangways and Strangways passed the intelligence on to Julian Romero. How do you know?’

  ‘Balfour told me.’

  ‘He could have lied.’

  ‘Ay, but David Becket told me so himself, years later. He came to me at home one night, drunk, dressed as a beggar, wanting money of me, and I would have shot him if I could have found a bow or an arquebus. I asked him then if he could deny what Balfour said, and he did not, so I gave him a shilling and had my reeve throw him out.’

  Simon chewed the skin of his chapped lips and blinked down at his chapped fingers, then drew on his gloves.

  ‘Sir, I must hurry and wait upon my lords Burghley and Leicester and my master. I will tell them that you have helped and will continue to help “me and that I think there is no need for you to be brought before them, but will rather save time by rendering a report in writing. Your wife however must be seen by them.’

  Fant looked away. ‘She is no longer my wife.’

  ‘Have you told her this tale?’

  ‘No. I had no wish to distress her. She loved her brother greatly as a child.’

  ‘Might she not have refused Strangways shelter if she had known.’ Fant’s round pleasant face was cold. ‘As my wife I expected her to obey.’

  Simon said nothing, but made his bow and left.

  XXXVI

  It was one of the better rooms in the Wakefield Tower, hung with old moth-eaten tapestries brought out of storage in Coldharbour where they had been put since their fashion was of the Queen’s grandfather’s time, with wooden ugly men and snakelike sinuous women with white pudding faces and complex foolish plants. The fire burned brightly, heaped up to make attempt at warming the Councillors. The crystal sunshine breaking through the window made a mockery of these poor attempts and the room looked better in the shadows where Simon’s desk was placed, though he had need of a candle. Sir Francis was seated at a heavy old table reading a report, when Ames entered and bowed.

  ‘If I may speak with you a moment, my lord…?’ he said timidly. Sir Francis looked up and raised his brows. Simon rushed on. ‘This capture was achieved with the aid of information from a…person by name Laurence Pickering.’

  ‘Ah. The King of London, no less. ’

  ‘Yes my lord.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He begs the favour of an audience with you, sir. I have promised only that I will convey his petition.’

  ‘Hm. And the place?’

  ‘At your pleasure, sir.’

  ‘Then he may come to me at Seething Lane upon this Saturday evening, if he will, Mr Ames, and may bring with him one attendant in tribute to his…ahem…rank.’

  ‘I will see he is informed, sir.’

  As my lord the Earl of Leicester entered and my lord Burghley, Simon withdrew silently into his shadows and stood throughout the morning, seeing them as it were a second tapestry placed upon the old ones, the woman alone before the full weight of the Privy Council.

  They began by speaking kindly of her natural foolishness as a woman, inviting her to unburden herself of her guilt by a clear and open exposition of her brother’s doings, and ended with my lord of Leicester pacing the room like the lion at the Tower roaring that her silence was as guilty as sin, and showed her a plain and pustulant traitor and they would have her on the rack by God.

  At which she raised her head for the first time and spoke with anger crackling in her voice.

  ‘I know no crime that the babe within me has wrought, my lord. Even women that are convict of murder may plead their belly to the noose.’

  ‘Are you playing for time, madam?’ asked Sir Francis coldly.

  ‘Yes, my lord. Once the babe is born, you may do as you will with me and indeed no doubt you shall. In the meantime, I pray you, my lords, do not demean yourselves with this unseemly behaviour.’

  The Earl of Leicester’s mouth fell open and he fairly gobbled with rage. Simon bent his head as he dipped hi
s pen, to hide his smile. They got no further answer of her and in the end Kinsley led her from the room, where she promptly fainted upon the stair.

  ‘Pray God it has brought on that damned babe,’ said the Earl coarsely as he drank his goblet of sack. ‘Christ preserve me from her kind, though no doubt she is more pleasing when not heavy with child. How may a man reason with such a creature?’

  Once dismissed, Simon hurried first to see that Mistress Fant was recovered in her cell, where Catherine Nisbet had put her straight to bed with her feet higher than her heart and was bubbling a posset upon the little fire.

  ‘Mr Ames, I must require a dish-of-coals of you, how may I tend to her with nothing to cook upon? And I must have wine to calm her nerves also and ginger and galingale and a little, a very little, pennyroyal mint and…’

  ‘Please mistress, write me a list and I shall see to it. Is she well enough to . '

  ‘No, sir, she is not, she has been kept standing this five hours and more and I must rub her legs and so I will thank you to draw the bed curtains and shut the door as you leave.’

  The day was gone into the afternoon before he could win back to Anthony Fant once more, waiting patiently in his own tower room. He was far too proud to ask how his wife had fared before the Privy Councillors but smiled a little when Simon told him anyway.

  ‘Did they think to overawe her?’ he wondered. ‘She has been in Westminster Hall often enough in pursuance of my lawsuits and she is a most tenacious woman, that I know well. You will get nothing of her that way, but Mr Ames, I have been considering and I believe I may show you other hidden places your searchers may have missed.’

  ‘We are very thorough…’

  ‘Nonetheless.’

  With a shrug Simon made the necessary arrangements and they walked, discreetly escorted, through the city to Old Change. There Anthony Fant only blinked a little at the wreckage Simon’s men had made of his house, and led the way to a place that had been one of the first to be found.