Shadow of the Axe (The Queen's Intelligencer Book 1)

by Peter Tonkin

  ‘Nor would I,’ agreed Cuffe. ‘No more than if I sought to use the Persian King Xerexes’ name to gain passage past Leonidas and his Spartans at Thermopylae.’

  ‘I would hardly compare Wotton with Leonidas nor your companions with three hundred Spartans, but the point is well made,’ said Poley. He went to shrug his burning shoulders, only to gasp with agony as he realised that Sir Francis’ point about him needing the services of Dr Wendy for the immediate future was also well made. It soon struck Poley, however, that his sessions with Dr Wendy so far had focussed on the back of his head. Now that the attention was shifted to the front of his head, to wit, his face, it was as though he was meeting the good Doctor for the first time.

  Dr Wendy, the son of King Henry’s court physician, was a slim, middle-aged man with tinning white hair and a grey beard. He also had piercing blue eyes that seemed to look deep inside the intelligencer, apparently obviating the need for a lengthy consultation or a detailed examination. But in fact he gently stripped off Poley’s doublet and shirt, cleaned and tended his battered face then carefully manipulated the damaged shoulders, tutting and shaking his head. ‘Your face will mend swiftly enough, as the back of your skull seems to be doing. But these shoulders will take a time to heal,’ he warned. ‘And are likely to get worse before they get better. You will have to be careful how you use them or the damage might become permanent. In any case it will be painful. I have distillations of willow bark and poppy that will ease the discomfort…’

  ‘Aye,’ said Poley shortly. ‘And cloud my mind into the bargain. I thank you, doctor, but I’ll live with my hurt and keep my wits sharp for a while yet.’

  Dr Wendy looked at his reluctant patient for a moment. Then he nodded. ‘From what I have observed,’ he said, ‘that is likely to be the wisest decision. In the short run at least.’

  So they agreed, and parted. For the time-being.

  *

  Sir Francis Bacon’s interruption of Poley’s torture succeeded in alienating him from most of the inmates of Essex House, who joined those at Court and those on London’s streets in their unanimous dislike and distrust of him. Fortunately, the Queen’s mood seemed to be becoming more forgiving, as far as Poley understood the situation. Sir Henry Wotton, Lady Lettice and Sir Christopher as well as Lady Frances all still trusted the Queen’s Counsellor. Southampton remained inscrutable in the matter of who he trusted and who he did not. But, on the other hand, everyone associated with the Earl and his promised return held Sir Antony Bacon in such high regard that it bordered on fear. So, when Sir Francis began arranging for his sickly elder brother and his near-crippled associate to be moved upstream to Twickenham, nobody threw too many hurdles in his way, much to Poley’s increasing relief as Dr Wendy’s warning became prophetic and his shoulders almost entirely seized up.

  During the next few days, Essex House steps became an unusually busy part of the establishment. Only the Earl of Southampton, his Lady and their retinue departed along the Strand, heading for Southampton House via Chancery Lane and Holborn, an easy journey of half an hour or so. They took with them a number of Essex’s supporters who planned to return to the war in Ireland, where accommodation and food could be guaranteed, if not pay. Though even that had become more reliable under the efficient generalship of Mountjoy. This group included St Lawrence and Gerard noted Poley.

  Barn Elms was upriver Westward Ho like Twickenham – and like Twickenham most easily accessed from the Thames. It was, in fact, half way between Essex House and Twickenham, on the south bank. Even the twin properties of Wanstead Hall and Stonegate were accessible via the Thames from two of its northern tributaries, the River Lea or the River Rodding, but to access those Lady Lettice and her party had to go eastward and shoot the Bridge downriver. Then they needed to pass the Isle of Dogs and Greenwich before turning north. The Lea, the nearer of the two convenient streams, would get them as far Hackney before it vanished into the marshes and they had to take to the road.

  Both women, capable and used to commanding households, set everything in motion at once. Mistress Fitzgerald, with Tom in tow, was sent to Barn Elms to negotiate with the servants there and prepare the house for the influx while Fitzgerald oversaw the packing and physical movement of Lady Francis’ necessities. Lady Lettice sent Sir Christopher himself to Wanstead and only the damage to his face and shoulders excused Poley from accompanying his aristocratic relative.

  Almost everyone obeying the orders to vacate Essex House did so down the steps to the river, therefore, one group at a time, depending on leadership, destination and the state of the tide which reached upriver all the way to Teddington. The weather did little to support their efforts. The clouds stayed low, the rain persistent, the wind both forceful and northerly while the temperature rose only a degree or two above freezing.

  Lady Lettice was hesitant to leave under these conditions, especially with the river running so high. She wanted to hear from Sir Christopher that everything at Wanstead was prepared and she further needed to be careful of the tide. Lady Lettice more than any of them needed to watch the water, because shooting the Bridge was a dangerous undertaking under perfect circumstances and the current ones were far from that. Lady Francis left first, therefore, the household overseen by Fitzgerald and the roisterers by Gelly Meyrick. It took several sizeable ferries to move them and everything they needed to take with them up to Barn Elms. It promised to be a slow and weary passage against the overfull stream, reckoned Poley, even though they waited for help from the incoming tide.

  Once Lady Frances had gone and with Lady Lettice still hesitant, it was time to move the Bacon brothers. Henry Cuffe and Nick Skeres remained behind to help, planning to be dropped off at Barn Elms on the way to Twickenham. And their help was needed. Apart from Dr Wendy, there was no-one from the Bacon household here. The servants from Greys Inn had been sent straight to Twickenham with orders to open the house and Sir Francis had not thought to order any to attend on him here as they went. So Lady Lettice’s servants aided by Cuffe and Skeres did most of the heavy work. And it was Cuffe and Skeres who finally supported the ailing Sir Anthony as circumstances forced him to walk the length of the garden and hobble down the steps into the boat, where Dr Wendy was waiting for him in a dry area under the waxed awning.

  *

  The river was running high and rough. The wooden steps were wet and slippery. Poley, who had only managed to get aboard with the utmost difficulty, watched as the three men approached. Sir Francis, beside him, was fussing over the trunk containing his books, fearing that the water would get in at them while Dr Wendy worked on making the small and shrinking dry area as comfortable for his approaching patient as possible. The boatman and his boy were working at holding their vessel still against the landing below the bottom step, their attention all on their mooring lines. So it was only the intelligencer who saw what happened next.

  Sir Anthony slipped. He was wearing his nightgown and slippers, wrapped in blankets with a corner of one folded over his head like a hood to protect him against the sleety drizzle; a hooded cloak thrown over the whole ensemble and clutched as close to being closed as possible by one shaking hand. Sir Anthony’s escorts were holding his arms but only through the thickness of the woollen cocoon he was swathed in. When he slipped off the bottom step, they lost their grip at once. The invalid pitched forward onto the landing, his slippers flying one way and another, leaving his cloak and blankets in the hands of his would-be helpers. He took one step across the wet boards and was lost. A wave caught the boat at that same moment and pulled it out into the river so that a black-throated gap opened in front of the falling man.

  Without thinking, Poley was up and reaching for Sir Anthony. His muscles gave a warning twinge as he stood but the situation was moving forward too fast for him to pay any attention to the stiffness and the pain. It was only as their hands met and the full weight came onto his shoulders that Poley realised what he had done. He shouted with anguish, but held on grimly as their combined w
eight pulled the side of the vessel hard up against the landing once more while Essex’s spymaster came tumbling aboard. Poley’s bellow galvanised Sir Francis and Dr Wendy. A moment later Sir Anthony was safe, shaken but unhurt. A moment later still, Cuffe and Skeres were aboard as well, still carrying the blankets and the cloak. The elder Bacon brother was tucked in the dry space beneath the boat’s awning, wrapped against wind in his blankets and against the spray by the cloak once again with his physician crouching protectively over him. Poley sat in the stern as they pulled away, shaking, pale and sick from the re-ignited agony blazing in his shoulders. The pain consumed him to such an extent that he remained oblivious to the increasing downpour and the intensifying cold. In fact it was only when Dr Wendy approached him that his mind returned to his current situation. ‘Sir Anthony wishes to thank you for saving him,’ said the doctor. ‘Can you move closer to him?’

  Poley tensed himself to get up once more and froze, his face pale with shock. ‘Ah,’ said Wendy sympathetically. ‘I see the rescue has come at a price. Stay where you are. I will inform Sir Anthony. He will have ample opportunity to show his gratitude when we arrive at Twickenham. We are likely to be stranded there for some considerable time.’

  The weather eased and the river settled so that by the time they reached the Barn Elms landing, Cuffe and Skeres were able to go ashore quite easily. Cuffe was at his planned destination, for Sir Henry Wotton and the rest of the secretariat were with Lady Frances at this house. Skeres still had some way to go – and in the opposite direction – if he was going to get to Wanstead as he planned. As Poley watched him leave, it occurred to the ever-suspicious intelligencer that Skeres would be alone and unobserved on his long journey. Much of it through London if he went by horse via the Horseferry or over the Bridge. So Skeres could easily contact a range of powers involved in this situation under the convenient cover of having come so far out of his way to help an old friend.

  Poley was still turning such cynical thoughts over in his mind when the boat finally arrived at Twickenham. At Doctor Wendy’s cheery, ‘Here we are,’ he looked up. Away to his right, standing magnificently on the north shore, was Richmond Palace – a favourite of the Queen’s by all accounts, as Hampton Court had been a favourite of her father’s. The south bank, towards which they were drawing, was lightly wooded. A park, thought Poley; and a pleasant one by the look of things. Though walking through it to reach the house would be a labour worthy of Hercules, with his shoulders the way they were.

  But he need not have worried. There was a rivulet leading up towards the house itself that opened from the River’s south bank. It was wide enough to allow the ferry easy access through the trees and between the lawns to a convenient landing only a matter of yards from the garden door. The exterior of the place was in very good order indeed and seemed recently decorated. As Dr Wendy helped Poley into the arms of a couple of stout servants, the intelligencer recalled that the Queen herself had come visiting here not long ago.

  The inside of the house also betrayed touches added in expectation of a royal visitation; and that was all to the good. Every part of the place where the royal foot might have trod – or been expected to tread – was even more impressive and comfortable than Essex House itself. Certainly the servants’ quarters through which Poley was half conducted, half supported, seemed to have no dark and sinister low-ceilinged chambers suitable for torturing suspected spies. Inevitably, the rooms were smaller than those in Essex House, but Poley found himself deposited in a homely chamber warmed by a fire and enlivened by a view of the tree-lined park, the river beyond and Richmond Palace in the distance. He was looking a little woefully down at his trappings and wondering how he would unpack without the use of his arms when Sir Francis arrived. ‘I have given orders that the servants pay particular attention to you,’ he said. ‘Of course they will unpack your bags and put everything away. In the meantime, if it would not inconvenience you too much, Master Poley, my brother is settled in his usual room and is desirous of having a private conversation with you.’

  6

  ‘I have to thank you,’ said Sir Anthony Bacon with little sign that he meant what he said. His manner was brusque and his expression almost petulant; his voice rough and a little breathless as though he was still shocked by the near-disaster. He appeared to the injured intelligencer to have been forced into this gesture against his will, immediately after having been bundled into the warm security of his sick bed in Twickenham Lodge. Probably either by his brother or his doctor. Which might explain the lack of attendants to hear his humiliation as he expressed his grudging gratitude to a man he neither liked nor trusted.

  ‘It was nothing,’ said Poley. ‘Anyone would have done the same for anyone in your position’

  ‘I am certainly not just anyone, Master Poley,’ he observed icily. But then his tone thawed. ‘And neither are you. Especially in the condition of your shoulders. Dr Wendy says he cannot conceive how you were able to act so swiftly and effectively under the circumstances.’

  ‘Well…’ Poley would have ventured a modest shrug but the movement was out of the question.

  Sir Anthony held up a hand that commanded silence even though it trembled like a leaf in a gale. Even though, thought Poley, it was hard for a bed-ridden ghost of a creature peering out from beneath a pile of blankets to command anyone. Except, perhaps, for a man currently without the use of his arms.

  The shaking hand gestured towards a chair that had been placed nearby. Poley sat, and was grateful to do so. The atmosphere was stultifying. The window, which overlooked the gardens down to the River, was tightly closed. A fire burned in a wide grate and a brazier glowed like the eye of a devil in the nearest corner. The topmost foot of air beneath the ceiling was clouded thickly with woodsmoke and the rest of the atmosphere was fragrant with it. ‘Nor can the doctor calculate how much more suffering you will face because of what you did,’ Sir Anthony wheezed. ‘Nor, indeed, how much further into the future you have set the date of your eventual recovery.’

  ‘He does not suspect, then, that I have been attempting to deceive you about the seriousness of my hurts only to be fooled into revealing the truth by my unthinking actions as you stumbled?’ Poley leaned back in the chair as though able to take his ease.

  The commanding hand fell. The expression changed; a flicker of wry amusement came and went. Sir Anthony regarded Poley for a heartbeat as though he was seeing him in a new light. That of a duellist, perhaps, measuring a surprisingly able opponent. ‘I had indeed wondered,’ Sir Antony admitted. ‘But the doctor assures me that your hurts are real enough and you have made them worse by doing me good service.’

  ‘And you trust him to make that judgement? It is crucial after all, is it not? As a test of my veracity if as nothing more.’ Poley leaned further back, eyebrows raised, trying not to wince at the sudden stab of pain.

  ‘And as a test of whatever is likely to transpire in the relationship that circumstances and propriety have now forced upon us? Yes indeed. But consider. Dr Wendy is my personal physician and any man who cannot trust his own doctor is lost, is he not? Especially one as unwell as I am. Furthermore, Dr Wendy is only my personal doctor because he has an unrivalled reputation. I poached him from the Queen herself, an act she has yet to forgive. His father, after all, tended her father towards the end and she covets him in consequence. He would have spent the winter visiting my Lord of Essex with all her other doctors had I not spirited him away.’

  ‘Though that might have been to your benefit…’ Poley observed and then could have bitten his tongue. Just because Dr Wendy himself was not at Essex’s bedside did not mean that he could not converse with colleagues who were; all of them were free to come and go as they pleased. A most potent conduit for information of all sorts heading one way and another, therefore. And one that Sir Anthony would be less than happy to find a man he did not yet trust suspected might exist. And, now it struck him, it might quite possibly be the manner in which letters had been smuggled
into and out of York House – for he had little doubt that the convalescent Essex had been back in contact with Southampton amongst others of his friends and fellow plotters.

  *

  Sir Anthony apparently didn’t register the slip of the tongue. ‘Indeed,’ he continued, a man who was not used to being interrupted, ‘the good doctor informs me that had a man in my condition actually been pitched into the river, as I so nearly was, death would have followed almost immediately. Either in the water or soon after any rescue that was achieved.’ He paused. Gave a sigh that rattled somewhere deep in his chest. ‘In short, you have saved my life at considerable damage to yourself. And I thank you. You may call upon myself or Sir Francis my brother in any matter at any time and of course you must remain here under Dr Wendy’s care until you are fully recovered.’

  ‘You are most gracious, Sir Anthony,’ Poley answered formally. ‘I will try not to impose upon you and Sir Francis to any great degree. Indeed, if you agree, I will try to search out ways in which I can be of service to you both. Though I recognise of course that I have not yet earned your trust.’

  ‘Well, we will see. Your offer is appreciated. As is your understanding.’

  ‘My position and level of trust within the Secretariat at Essex House has been made plain to me both in the quantity and quality of correspondence I have been asked to undertake. But that aspect of my employment must stop, of course; for the time-being at least. A man who can hardly move his arms is not best suited to the writing of letters.’

  ‘Indeed,’ allowed Sir Anthony. ‘But I would judge that you will be capable of carrying messages, if not of transcribing them, as soon as you are well enough to travel between here, Barn Elms, Gray’s Inn and Wanstead. We must, sadly, leave Denmark aside for the moment.’ The skin at the eye-corners crinkled in a fleeting smile at his little jest, though there was little movement of his lips.