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

by Patricia Finney

  ‘Jesu.’

  We walked a little further, and at Fleet Bridge I ventured, ‘Have you nowhere to go, Adam?’

  He laughed a little. ‘Is it so manifest?’

  ‘You may lodge with me. It is only a little hole in the Blackfriars priory, but it hardly leaks and it is within the liberties. No one will mark you and none will ask questions if you come there.’

  He laughed again, happily, and clapped me on the shoulder so 1 nearly stumbled.

  ‘Right gladly, Ralph, if you will show me the way.’

  Now the heat of anger was draining from my heart as I led him up beyond Old Bailey to the rookery of Amen Corner and through the motheaten old wall into the city. All the boozing kens were full of singing, some of it tunable indeed, and there were winestains about a conduit that had been paid for by a merchant to run with wine. Among the men at their shouting and the women at their singing, sorrow rose up in me that I was betraying him and yet I felt I must. An angel broke through and waggled a finger at me and then another nodded and I perceived that my angels were as much at a loss as I. He was faithless, but I was not. I had never betrayed anyone but myself…. Alas, for are not the betrayers mainly those who are rich…?

  It is easy enough for angels who see directly God’s will. If they were perplexed, so was I, as Agnes had been. It would be justice to betray the betrayer, but justice was not my province and once he was my little brother that I fought and rode with upon our proud new ponies and who tended my sparrowhawk all the time I had smallpox….

  We were coming near the cloisters. ‘Did you receive my ballad that I sent you, Tom O’Bedlam?’ I asked him fondly.

  ‘Some outpouring of madness came to me that rhymed well-enough. Was it you sent it?’

  Oh he had struck a dagger in my heart. ‘Yes, and I made it too. It was to give you a taste of my distraction.’

  ‘I have published it.’

  ‘I know,’ I said and my heart began to boil and scald again that he should boast of what he had done with my poem. But still he was my brother…. I began to sing it quite loudly and the tears were running down my face. He was still my brother….

  ‘Run Adam,’ I said. ‘Becket is waiting for you here, run…’

  In the starlight I saw his face change, not to fear nor sorrow but to a cold stark fury. There was a little flash in his hand, he caught my shoulder, yanked me close and I was puzzled and thought he meant to embrace me. Embrace me he did but as he did, there was a thump about my midriff and a kind of broken coldness and a great wash of blood that was cold and then galloping in a long time later, a huge yawning chasm of pain that broke my breath to a rattle and poisoned my legs so I must fold up against the cloister wall and choke slowly, while the tear in me worked and yawned and the cold blood flowed.

  ‘God damn you,’ said Becket’s voice. ‘You shite, he warned you…’ If my voice had not slid out of me with my blood I would have warned Becket not to waste time talking, but he was angry and in that moment, Adam leapt the cloister rail into the courtyard and threw a chicken coop at Becket. Surely Becket was blinded by rage for he chased Adam across the courtyard and when Adam seemed to cower against a wall, struck with his sword cross-handed for Adam’s neck. It is an old trick: Adam dropped at the last minute and Becket’s blade hit the wall and broke in pieces and his right hand was numbed by the shock, and Adam had tumbled against his legs and brought him down.

  They ruined Simple Neddy’s garden as they fought across it, dagger to dagger, a silent vicious fight that could not compete with the rowdy noises of drinking and laughing from the hundred boozing kens all about the place. Nobody came to watch or lay bets or give assistance as they struggled. They were evenly matched for all Becket’s weight and strength, because Becket was in a red rage of grief and guilt and Adam had the reach on him and was moreover clear-headed. And the beer and tobacco were telling against Becket’s wind.

  Becket yielded first blood to a well-judged slash by Adam for his eyes, which scored his cheek and made him yet angrier as he broke away and rolled to his feet. His dagger flashed in the air as he switched from his bruised right hand to his left and Adam jumped him when the blade was still in flight. Becket slammed against the wall, Adam beating his dagger hand on the stone. Then Becket headbutted him and kicked him off.

  The stars and the moon gave clear sight of them as they circled and breathed hard and Becket’s stinging face cleared his mind a little of the fog of anger. Adam nearly tripped on Simple Neddy’s spade under its canvas cover. He threw the canvas at Becket, trying to entangle him, swept up the spade and chopped left-handed with it to crowd Becket onto his blade. But Becket had plucked the flung canvas out of the air, took the blow from the spade on his shoulder, closed in and trapped Adam’s knife with the stout cloth. Then he threw his full weight onto Adam, though the knife blade razored through to his side, and stabbed Adam in the guts and then again, viciously, in the throat. My brother arched his back, laughed blood and died.

  Becket rested there a moment, then climbed to his feet crowing for breath. He stood gazing down at Adam, watching for movement, until his breathing had eased and the full pain of his wounds crowded in on him. Even through the canvas Adam’s dagger point had scored his side cruelly, his right arm hung down uselessly from the damage the spade had done to his shoulder, and he could not move his hand. The blood from his cheek was soaking his new ruff and his face was swelling and burning. From sheer force of habit, he cleaned his dagger blade on Adam’s jerkin, sheathed it and then stumbled over to me with his left hand gripped to his side.

  As for me – it had seemed to me while they fought, that a cold tide of blood was rippling about my feet and rising to engulf my knees and my hands and my elbows and my hips, and a tearing agony blazing in my stomach. My breath walked on thornbushes each time 1 breathed and so I breathed less and less and at last, as the cold tide reached my heart, I had no more need for air.

  Now all my pain was gone. Becket found me, found the black blood and the hole whence it had come and saw my eyes so shining and starstruck that they had no more use for their lids and so they closed not at all. He sat down wearily beside me on a stone and wept.

  LV

  It was Simple Neddy that found him half dead of cold and loss of blood in the morning, and Adam’s body and mine also, and had the sense to run and find Eliza Fumey.

  Between them they brought him staggering into her house, and then dared to send her son for Dr Nunez. When the good doctor came, he brought Henderson and Kinsley with him, who hurried to Blackfriars to collect up the bodies there. Becket had passed out by then, and so they put him on a horselitter against all Mrs Fumey’s protests that she could nurse him where he was, and brought him through the city to Poor Jewry.

  There Becket was surgeoned by Snr Eraso again, who strapped up his shoulder and hand and put honey and rosewater in his sliced cheek and side, before letting him a little blood against infection. In another room Simon lay propped high on pillows, fever blazing in his cheeks and eyes as he raved reedily in Portuguese and English mixed, and struggled to breathe against the ill-omened humour filling up his ribcage.

  The first time Becket opened his heavy eyes he thought he must be feverish also, for there stood the Queen’s Moor, a pillar of black velvet and white linen, his face graven with concern. Words were spoken, he thought he heard Dr Nunez enquire about Throgmorton and heard Walsingham’s answer clear through his weakness.

  ‘He broke when we showed him the rack and told him the date. He had hoped that the Accession Day fireworks were the first shots of the civil war he had plotted to bring us to, and was sorely disappointed. Think you that Mr Becket can understand me?’

  Nunez shook his head. ‘A pity,’ said Walsingham. ‘I had wished to thank him in the matter of the papers from Tyrrel’s house that have come to me. And also in this. Is he like to die?’

  Nunez chuckled a little. ‘I doubt it, sir. Unless one of his wounds sickens, he will do well enough with rest and good feedi
ng, and I have no doubt he has lived through worse than this.’

  ‘Will his swordarm be well again?’

  Nunez shrugged. ‘I think you should speak to Snr Eraso concerning that, for it depends upon how well his collarbone heals.’

  ‘And your nephew, doctor? What of him?’

  Nunez sighed. ‘Sir, he is in the hands of the Almighty, blessed be He.’

  Sir Francis nodded. ‘It would grieve me to lose such a man, for he hath proved himself right worthy in this matter, both quick of brain and dauntless of heart.’ Nunez looked at the ground.

  ‘We must trust in the Most High.’

  A little awkwardly, Sir Francis reached out and touched his arm.

  ‘Doctor, would it offend you if Christians prayed for his deliverance?’

  Nunez almost smiled. ‘Sir, how could I be offended?’

  ‘Then we will pray for him twice daily at Seething Lane.’

  ‘Yet we are all subject to the Lord’s will and so must abide.’

  Sir Francis bent his head a little and left him standing there. Becket could no longer keep open his eyes with their weight of lashes, and so plunged once more into darkness and sleep.

  The dragon was taken away and stored in Whitehall, ready to be brought out for another entertainment. Master Richard Broom died a few nights later of the carpenter’s canker in his lungs, in great bitterness and sorrow, knowing that his daughter would have him buried in the Protestant rite and there would be no Masses said for his soul.

  Still no man knew what had passed between Simon and John Hunnicutt, who continued at his work in Seething Lane and mouthed prayers with the others for Mr Ames’s safe deliverance under the Will of God.

  Simon burned and raved in his fever, his scrawny body overwhelmed with pillows and counterpane, and infusions coaxed between his battered lips occasionally by his grim-faced Aunt Leonora. Other shadows alternated between a likeness of his father and that of his mother. He wished to reassure them all, but found he had no breath to do it.

  Washed up by the tide of number and geometry he found himself once again climbing amongst the pillars and piles of a vast bridge, a very mouse on God’s masonry. Below him roared the river, but here it was a river of flame that rose up toward him, snatching for him with golden and crimson hands, and then ebbed again. Something hard and heavy gripped his chest, weighing him down.

  The face of the goddess that he crawled upon became flesh, and she spoke to him, taunting and commanding.

  ‘If you would rise, serve me.’ she whispered.

  He had reached such a pitch of delirium that it had turned to clarity, and he looked at her gravely.

  ‘I think I have served you enough.’ he said, took off the gold chain about his neck and threw it away. The goddess became white marble again and he felt light and cool.

  He climbed on up towards the distant sky.

  LVI

  The messenger came to Seething Lane from Poor Jewry a little before dawn, as Walsingham was preparing to lead his household in prayer. Receiving him within the hall of the house, with all his folk awaiting, Walsingham took the piece of paper, unfolded and read it, and bowed his head and sighed. He led the morning prayers in as firm a voice as always, in the voice, did he but know it, with which he also invariably addressed the Queen - that of a faithful servant who will be heard. At the end he paused.

  ‘I have sorrowful news to impart,’ he said. ‘We have been praying these past few days for the life of a man of this household, Mr Simon Ames. Alas, he hath no more need of our prayers, for he died of his sickness this morning at the turn of the tide. “. . . The glory of Israel is slain upon the high places . . . .’”

  Immediately afterwards, he went to the Nunez house, which was shuttered and quiet, to be met by Dr Nunez and another well-dressed middle- aged man whom he knew slightly as Dunstan Ames, the Queen’s Grocer, Simon’s father. His words of condolence were interrupted and he was brought swiftly into the house and up the stairs to the end of a passageway. There he paused at the threshold of a door to find Simon white as linen, lying propped up on his bed, but breathing and moving his head to look.

  Hereat you may see Walsingham’s true worth, for he throttled back his instant rage at the lie which had grieved him more than he wished to admit. He merely stepped forward to seat himself upon a stool beside the bed, where he put his hands on his knee, raised one eyebrow and said nothing. Dr Nunez and Simon’s father withdrew.

  Before Simon was more than halfway through his whispered discourse, Walsingham was pacing about the room, white with anger, the hotter and drier for being unexpressed.

  He was like a man who has ridden a horse merrily home one night and then returns in the day to find he was riding at the very edge of a sheer cliff. Hunnicutt’s treason had caught him and his family neatly in its coils, and he could bring no arguments against it for which Simon had not an answer.

  The worst of it was not that he had paid for the dragon which was to be the engine to kill the Queen his mistress, nor that there had been a channel of the Devil directly into the heart of his household and service. It was that his intelligence could scry further into it than Simon, and there see that Hunnicutt must have been using his daughter against him as well. There were parts of the riddle for which it was the only resolution. There was the report of Simon’s drawing attention to Strangways’ arrival in England as Semple, which never reached him. There was also the scant warning Throgmorton got of his arrest. Hunnicutt must have found a lever to shift her from her filial duty, possibly the scandalous means by which she had brought the Queen to allow her marriage with Sir Philip Sidney. To have his gentle daughter used so brought Walsingham to a shaking pitch of fury and yet he must calm himself and consider. As Ames pointed out in his weakening breathless voice, if Hunnicutt were arrested it would be a fearful blow to the Queen and her trust in him, at the best. At worst his enemies in the Court would bring him down in a fever of suspicion, he might even find himself standing trial with Hunnicutt for treason. He had no lack of enemies to see the opportunity and seize it.

  He stilled his pacing, his busy mind weaving possibility to probability, and stared at Ames appalled.

  ‘I have thought ... on this and spoken with . . . my father . . . .’ said Simon almost inaudibly, . . and I see no . . . cause why Hunnicutt . . . must be arrested. ’ Simon paused for breath, licked his swollen lips.

  A little awkwardly, Sir Francis brought him a silver cup of rosewater that stood near the bed and helped him to drink.

  ‘It seemed to me ... sir . . .’ breathed Simon, . . that Mr Hunnicutt must wish me . . . dead and if he . . . believed I were . . . dead ... he would think himself secure . . . and would continue his work . . . . ’

  Sir Francis stood completely still. He began to smile.

  ‘With a little care . . .’ Simon creaked, but Walsingham held up his hand.

  ‘I am with you, Mr Ames. With a little care, some duplication and expense we may have them know in San Lorenzo whatsoever we wish them to know . . . .’ The smile became wolfish. ‘Yes, I think we may make shift. Mr Ames, sir, I am greatly in your debt, though I am grieved to see that I must lose you after all. Unless . . . ?’

  ‘My uncle says my health will not permit of it.’ said Simon quickly, all on one breath. ‘I must . . . regretfully . . . leave your service, Sir Francis.’

  ‘It will be a sorry loss to me.’ said Walsingham, ‘I must say I am loath to be without your advice and subtlety, Mr Ames, though I see why it must be so. Will you require any . . . assistance?’

  Simon smiled a little, his eyes half-shut with weariness.

  ‘I think my family . . . can accomplish it . . . My funeral shall . . . be a quiet affair . . . .’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sir Francis, feeling a small shiver at his spine and not knowing why Simon should be so merry. ‘Quite so. Well. If ever you have need of me, Mr Ames, know that I am your friend.’

  Thus it was that every sheet of paper pertaining to the Accession Day
Tilts and the firedrake found its way into the bread oven at Seething Lane where it was burned and raked and burned again. For here is the great weakness of the Mundus Papyri, which is the wide creation of so many minds. Within the real world a city may be destroyed only with great hardship and labour and expenditure of gold, but within the Paper World a little fire suffices.

  Hearing of my deeds from Becket, Sir Francis also paid for my funeral, which was most respectable, with eight paid mourners and two black horses to pull the hearse, and Becket and Anthony Fant leading the procession. So there was no need for my little gold plate with fishes on it, that was once wrought to bear Christ’s Body upon it. Simple Neddy found that where he had marked me burying it and sold it for a quarter its worth to a Cheapside goldsmith to buy new plants for his wrecked garden. The goldsmith liked not the old-fashioned style of it and so prised out the stones and melted it down.

  Adam had him a pauper’s grave, which was more than he deserved, and should have been left on a midden for the dogs and the pigs as he left my boy Ralph. But little Ralph will not have it so, and Agnes neither, and I will not quarrel with them now I have no more need for lunacy. And it is true, as she said, there is joy shining through all the world like the rising of the Sun.

  With a heart of furious fancies,

  Whereof I am commander,

  With a burning spear and a horse of air,

  To the wilderness I wander.

  By a knight of ghosts and shadows I summoned am to tourney Ten leagues beyond the wide world’s end - Methinks it is no journey.

  * * *

  THE END

  Historical Note

  This book is set in late October and early November of the year 1583, five years before the Spanish Armada of 1588.

  Elizabeth I had reigned since 1558 and was at the height of her popularity in England. Her mother Anne Boleyn had been the catalyst for the English Reformation. In order to divorce his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, and marry Anne, Henry VIII broke from the Roman Catholic Church and made himself Head of the Church in England. Henry wanted a son and Elizabeth’s birth on 7th September 1533 was a terrible disappointment. When he tired of Anne because she could not give him the son and heir he needed, Henry had Anne executed on a trumped up charge of adultery.