The Queen's Men

by Oliver Clements

  Of course they could.

  The clerk of city works has sent Walsingham list after list of unpronounceable names—none of them Henk Poos or Jan Saelminck—though that means nothing, of course—and the clerk of the sewers has likewise been in touch, and neither he nor any of his men have had sight of the man.

  And meanwhile the Queen is on progress, in Hampshire this week, at the house of God knows whom, a vast snaking army of porters and carters and every other profession under the sun. Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester is with her, and sends word that it is all as secure as possible, but there is no doubting it is not as secure as having her locked in Windsor.

  Walsingham catches the smell of kitchen fires already thickening the heavy summer air. London is bad this time of year, and he doesn’t blame the Queen for wishing to be elsewhere. He gets up without waking Ursula or the children, and he pads naked to the next-door room to rub himself down and get himself dressed. In his study he finds the messages that have come overnight: one from Brussels, encrypted; one from Malta, encrypted; one from Cádiz, encrypted; one from the French ambassador’s house in London, encrypted. But there is nothing so far—again, still—of Beale or Ness Overbury.

  Beale is clever, of course, and he must know that Hatton will be after him, but Walsingham still wonders why he has not sent further word. Does he believe Walsingham has already cut him off? He tries to think what Beale would do, but each theory is dissolved into nothing by the condition that Beale is with Ness Overbury, and that Ness Overbury is with child. They must be like Joseph and Mary, he supposes, plodding from town to town with an ever-dwindling supply of money and options.

  He sets to work decrypting the messages, discovering nothing he wishes to know, until a fresh slew of messages is brought up to him midway through the morning, including one from Cecil in Whitehall, that bears just a single word: naft.

  My God, he thinks. It is here. Finally. The rest of the naft.

  He gets up, slowly, and finds his doublet, and summons his servants to walk with him through the city back down to the river, where he expects to see a trireme with a lateen sail and woodwork painted vivid crimson, but finds only just another battered merchantman standing out in the river while the tide turns.

  Master Jenkinson is there already, still in his alien clothes, come, perhaps, to meet his contact, and to see that he is not even at this late stage cut out of the deal.

  Walsingham offers to shake his hand, but Jenkinson will not allow it.

  “It didn’t hurt!” Walsingham reminds him.

  The sun beats down, shadows are short, and Walsingham sweats, even in his linens. The merchantman is swinging with the tide now and will be alongside the quay shortly. Walsingham looks across at the ship’s crew, some of whom line the gunwale, staring across the dipping, dingy waters of the Thames at the Tower. What do they make of it, these men from the Levant? He turns to look at it himself. Impressive, surely, he thinks. It has withstood hundreds of years and will withstand many more, so long as Dr. Dee is kept away from the match fuse. The repair to the hole he blew in the wall is still visible as a patchwork of dark mortar and stone.

  Upriver, Cecil’s barge comes sliding through an arch under the bridge, oars folded back, and then tacks toward Tower Quay. When it abuts the quay, Cecil defies his age and nearly leaps out. He is like a child promised a treat and he comes scurrying down the gangplank and along the quay, patting his little soft hands together in gleeful anticipation. And sure enough, the Constable of the Tower comes, as does the Master of the Board of Ordnance.

  “Is it really here?”

  “This is it,” Cecil beams.

  The ship is warped to the quay and tied off to the bollards, her sailors staring down at them with dark eyes from dark faces, and each man has on his head a turban of grubby linen, and soon a crowd is gathered all around and high above, on the Tower’s battlements, where men line the walkways, there to see the Saracens.

  “Let them gawp, Francis, let them gawp! Let them spread the word! The sooner the Spanish ambassador hears we have taken delivery of the naft, the sooner King Philip will know, and the sooner he will draw in his horns.”

  “But we still don’t know the price,” Walsingham reminds him.

  Cecil sighs.

  “I have been going through the lists of the Queen’s jewels,” Cecil tells him. “There is a ruby, as big as my knuckle, and flawless, but I am buggered if I can discern heaven’s sacred cipher in any of its facets, and nor is it so famous your man Sokollu will have heard of it. Have you had word of him from any of your men in Constantinople?”

  “Only background stuff: that he was born in the Balkans and was forced to convert to Islam as a boy, but now he lacks for nothing and has a harem to rival that of the sultan.”

  Cecil whistles.

  “Lacks for nothing eh? Bloody hell.”

  “But he holds the English nation in high esteem.”

  “Well, that is something, I suppose.”

  “And keeps a painting of Her Majesty that some merchant gave him on his wall.”

  Cecil is no longer listening. A gangplank has been lowered, and after a moment, four men in very finely worked silver breastplates and helmets from which hang long plumes of horsehair, cautiously step out and down onto English soil. Each carries a blade like a halberd, and a sword, and they are dressed as Jenkinson was the day they nearly racked him.

  “Perhaps this little chap will be able to tell us something,” Cecil says.

  At the top of the plank, paused for a moment to survey the scene, stands a man clothed in plush velvets and silks that are each a variation on the color of an apricot, or a peach. He has extravagantly puffed breeches and something red without obvious purpose on top of his voluminous turban that might signify great rank, or not.

  A boy unrolls a carpet before him and he steps very cautiously out onto the gangplank in pointed leather slippers.

  “Can this be Sokollu Mehmet?” Cecil asks Jenkinson. It is the first time he has acknowledged his presence.

  Jenkinson jeers at his ignorance.

  “Of course not. Sokollu Mehmet Pasha would not come like this. Christ, he is a greater man than you have ever even glimpsed! When he rides out, no one is permitted to look his way, and he rides with such a troop of cavalry that the earth quakes and the dust does not settle for a day.”

  Cecil makes a dismissive little hoot.

  “Well, who is this then?” he asks.

  “His name is Mustafa Beg. He is a dragoman of Constantinople, sent by Sokollu Mehmet Pasha to secure the payment to which you have agreed.”

  Cecil mumbles that he has agreed to nothing. Jenkinson can scarcely control his trembling rage. It seems he has much at stake. Beg is followed down the gangplank by five or six men who are almost as equally colorfully dressed as he.

  “Thank the Lord that Hatton isn’t here to see this lot,” Cecil murmurs. “He’d be off to his tailors before the sun is set. Still, let us be polite.”

  Jenkinson bows very low, almost to the ground, before Mustafa Beg, but Cecil is not so limber and manages only a long nod of the head. Walsingham follows Cecil’s example, and many words are spoken but none are understood.

  “Just ask him where the naft is,” Cecil instructs Jenkinson.

  “You have not grasped the situation, Cecil,” Jenkinson tells him. “You can’t just dismiss him like that. Mustafa Beg represents Sokollu Mehmet Pasha. For all intents and purposes, he is Sokollu Mehmet Pasha.”

  “Not just some merchantman, then?”

  “No. For the here and now he is the grand vizier of the Ottomans. Ordinary men and women are forbidden to look at him on pain of having their eyes put out.”

  “Well, why does he wear such bright colors then? He should follow Master Walsingham’s example here and wear black.”

  Cecil knows how to be very irritating.

  “So what rank is he? Can’t call him King Beg. Lord Beg? Sir Mustafa? Doesn’t sound right. Doesn’t sound Christian.”r />
  “Call him Vizier,” Jenkinson suggests. Meanwhile Vizier Beg is disconcerted by something.

  “Which of you is Lord Walsingham?” he asks in halting Latin.

  It takes a moment to realize what he is asking.

  “Lord Walsingham?” Cecil wonders, turning to Walsingham.

  Walsingham flushes.

  “I may have exaggerated my status in my letter,” he admits. “Jenkinson said he would never deal with a mere master, or even a sir.”

  “Quite right. What else did you put in it? I do not believe I saw a copy.”

  Walsingham says nothing. He put in all sorts of grand nonsense, now that he thinks about it, all at Jenkinson’s suggestion. He almost made out that he was King of England.

  “And where is your Queen?” Vizier Beg asks.

  Cecil is taken aback.

  “Why?”

  “She should be here. If she is not here, I am not here. We are not here.”

  He gestures around them, meaning, Walsingham believes, him, his followers, and England. There is consternation among the men behind him. They are craning their necks about looking for something. As if expecting something. Can it be Her Majesty? Are they expecting the Queen?

  “What are they saying, Jenkinson?” Cecil asks.

  “They are saying they will not show us the naft until they have seen the Queen.”

  “I suppose he has come all this way.”

  “But she is on progress!” Cecil reminds them. “She’ll not be back for two weeks or more. Then again, it will give us time to raise the money or find the jewel or whatever the bloody hell it is he wants. But what shall we do with him, in the meantime? I was expecting someone in the line of—I don’t know—a guildsman. Do we need to put him up in a gentleman’s house?”

  “He will stay aboard his ship,” Jenkinson says. “And he asks only for fresh water, and supplies of lamb meat, onions, and peppers.”

  “Seriously?” Walsingham asks.

  “Also: charcoal.”

  “I think we can run to that,” Cecil supposes. “Make it so, will you, Lord Walsingham? I will put you in charge of entertainment and so forth. Keep him occupied, won’t you? Show him the bear pits perhaps?”

  Walsingham is about to tell him that he has no time, that he must find Beale and Ness Overbury, but Cecil is looking stubborn.

  “And find out what exactly he wants for the naft.”

  Oh Christ, that accursed verse.

  * * *

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  South of Ely, Huntingdonshire, August 1578

  It is August now, and Robert Beale and Ness have stayed away as long as possible, living almost as vagrants in the house of an old friend from his student days, set back from the road, outside a village a few miles north of Cambridge. Now, though, Ness’s time is come, and they must leave it, and return to Nigel Vernier’s household on Cat Lane in Ely, to the care of Ness’s sister, Claire, who will know of a midwife, and of a nurse, and of a priest to baptize the baby when… if…, God willing, it is born.

  And so Beale has used the very last of Ness’s gold to hire a carriage and they are grinding slowly over the sunbaked road, heading north.

  “I never want to see that house ever again,” Ness tells him. “Do you hear?”

  He does, and he agrees, for these last few weeks have been a species of torment, a penance for their sins, with the sun beating down unforgivingly all day, drying up the well, trapping him and Ness within a house that even through the pitilessly short nights has remained so hot that resin oozed from its timbers. Ness’s body has burned just as hot, hotter yet perhaps, and Beale has spent his days and nights drawing bucket after bucket of water up from the river half a mile away and bringing it back to pour over her and sometimes he would swear the water hisses when it touches her.

  But now, with her labor pains racking her womb, they are at last on their way to Ely, and it comes as a blessed long-sought-after relief. It is only ten miles, but it feels like a hundred, and with every jolt of the wheels on the road Beale believes it will be proven they have left it too late, and that somehow the baby will be shaken loose, and that he will have to deliver it himself.

  “Some women,” Ness tells him again, “go into confinement… months before the baby… is due.”

  He reminds her that he would have taken her to her sister’s earlier, if only she would have been prepared to spend a moment longer under Nigel Vernier’s roof than needs be.

  “Oh Christ,” she says, “I should rather birth in a ditch like a ewe than be beholden to that man.”

  Beale has no idea what will come next. He has put that out of his mind until after the baby is born. That is what she has told him to do.

  “Who knows if I will live through it anyway,” she has told him.

  And she’s right, of course: it is safer for a man to go into battle than for a woman to childbed.

  “All will be well, Ness,” he has told her, and he tells her again.

  That is easy for you to say, she need not say.

  When they arrive at Cat Lane, Vernier is there, in the shop, looking through the bolts of linen with another man of a similar ilk.

  “If he says one thing,” Beale tells Ness, “I will run him through.”

  She grips his arm as another contraction grips her.

  “I do not… think… there will be time… for you… to run him through.”

  He says nothing, but hurries her into the house, into the room at the back where it is at least blessedly cool. The simpleton is in a dress, playing with a doll. Claire comes from the garden, flushed, with a great pile of linen dried stiff as boards. She gives up a great cry and hands Beale the boards and shouts for the maid to set the water to boil and to fetch the cunning woman.

  “You: out,” she tells Beale, and he leaves, out into the garden, where chickens are crouching in the dust under the apple tree and he joins them in the shade and wonders what in the name of God to do now.

  While he stands there the simpleton emerges, eyes the color of the sky, skin the color of dust, and passes him a message that has perhaps lain in the house for a month, dirty with finger marks. It is from Master Walsingham. Just a few terse words, unlarded by love or even friendship.

  Do not come home. SCH seeks N through all of England.

  It is unsigned.

  “When did this come?”

  The simpleton cannot say, of course, and just then the air is rent with the first agonizing cry of what will turn out to be a long day and an even longer night.

  * * *

  Beale sleeps as best he is able under the apple tree and is woken well before dawn by a cockerel crowing from perhaps a yard away. The lamps have been on in the house all night, and Ness’s cries have become like those of a wolf. Beale rises and shakes himself and retreats to the privy and beyond, where the cries can torment him no longer.

  At last, just before noon, it is over.

  Claire Vernier comes to the door. She has in her arms a bundle of something, and though she looks worn to the bone, and somber as ever, she carries the bundle in the way women do, and he knows he has a child.

  He comes running.

  “A boy!” Mistress Vernier says.

  “And Ness?” he asks first. “Is she—”

  Mistress Vernier nods.

  “Oh yes,” she says, as if it was not even that bad a labor.

  Ness is lying on the maid’s straw mattress in the middle of the kitchen. She is covered in sheets of linen and looks pale and vague and exhausted but alive and happy, with her hair wrapped in linen, and an old lady is bustling about gathering more linen that is steeped in blooms of rose-red blood. Beale kneels next to Ness and takes her hand, which is, at last, cool to the touch.

  “A boy,” she says.

  He cannot stop himself smiling.

  They have discussed names all summer long and have chosen John.

  At that moment there is a disturbance at the front of the house. A raised voice. Mistress Vernier, stil
l carrying the baby for them, stiffens. Ness’s fingers clench his.

  “What is it?”

  The voice, from the front of the house, in the shop: she knows it.

  “Where is she? I know she is here!”

  Every face tilts to the light.

  It is John Overbury, back from the wars to find his house empty and his wife with another man, now come to bring hell. He stumps through the shop, bringing with him a lingering stink of sulfur and rotting flesh. He has a terrible wound to the face and has lost an eye, a powder burn from an exploding arquebus. His other eye is mad and wild.

  Behind him scuttles Vernier.

  “A woman should be with her husband,” he bleats.

  Beale draws his sword, the last thing of value he owns, and he steps between Overbury and his wife.

  “There you fucking well are!” Overbury cries and he lunges at Beale with a short blade that Beale very nearly does not see in time. He feels the blade burn his ribs as he leaps aside. He lashes across Overbury’s face with his own blade but Overbury has been killing men, women, and children in Munster for a year, and despite his wound, and his age, he is as quick as a snake. He ducks the blow and turns and slashes at the back of Beale’s leg. Beale dips his knee and feels the blade in the flesh of his thigh. Christ! He is going to lose this fight. He throws himself back as Overbury’s left fist catches him above the ear.

  He has to keep him at sword’s length but Overbury is relentless. Beale dances back, away. He knows not to look at his own blood.

  “Stay back!” he shouts.

  “Fuck you pipsqueak little fuck!”

  Overbury storms at him again. Beale is forced farther back. He trips over a bucket of blood by Ness’s feet and goes sprawling. He keeps hold of his blade and scrabbles back. And now the worst thing: at the door, Mistress Vernier, carrying Beale’s son, whom he has not yet even held, steps forward, between them, and faces Overbury down.

  “Don’t you dare,” she growls at him. “Don’t you dare bring your foul hatred into my house, into my kitchen.”

  But it is too late for that. Foul hatred is already here. It always clung to John Overbury, like a stink, but John Overbury is recently come from Munster, where men dash babies’ heads on cold hearthstones before raping their mothers, and with his recent pain and humiliation, his hatred and his foulness have only intensified, and what he sees here in Mistress Vernier’s arms—his wife’s child by another man—is the quintessence of all that he hates in the world and so it is nothing to him—nothing—to dash the bundle of cloth-wrapped flesh from his sister-in-law’s arms and set about her with his fists, she whom he has always hated for the bloodless way she has been superior to him all the time she has known him, while Ness screams in helpless, hapless horror.