The Queen's Men Page 20

  In the Constable’s lodgings, they find Cecil is already gathered around the table with the Master of the Board of Ordnance and the Constable of the Tower, and the atmosphere in the room, with applewood on the fire and warm wine in the good silver jug, is more convivial than might be expected for an inquiry the outcome of which might be the racking of a man. It is the verse, Walsingham supposes, and the prospect of taking receipt of the naft.

  “We are discussing storage of the naft,” Cecil cheerfully proves him right. “The Constable here fears its incendiary properties and is not keen to have it kept in the vaults of Her Majesty’s Tower.”

  “The masons are just today finishing up the repair to the damage Dr. Dee inflicted last time he was here,” the Constable appeals to Walsingham. “Listen.”

  And sure enough, through the window they can hear the tap-tap-tapping of the hammers as the masons shape the final stones to fit the hole Dee blew in the wall.

  “And that was before he had the naft!” the Master of the Board of Ordnance adds. “What in all of Christendom will he do with it when he has that?”

  There is some gentle laughter.

  The Master of the Board of Ordnance is a pleasant, innocuous little fellow, appointed by Cecil to be immune to too much bribery.

  “But we are counting our chickens,” Walsingham reminds them. “It may be that Jenkinson is as much in the dark as to what is required as we are.”

  Copies of the verse are brought out and shown around.

  “Well, Sir Christopher? Any thoughts?”

  Hatton is hesitant. He blushes and stammers and then talks of the love that the writer must feel for a prince.

  “A prince? You think this is a woman writing?”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “There are no wrong answers, Sir Christopher,” Cecil soothes. “We are all of us in the dark here.”

  “Well, there are wrong answers,” Walsingham points out. “If we come up with them, someone else will get the naft. Most likely the Spanish.”

  Hatton tells them he likes the last line. Cecil’s gaze flicks to Walsingham. See? he says without saying it.

  “Let’s get Jenkinson in here,” Walsingham says.

  Word is sent to the Bell Tower, where Jenkinson has passed a comfortable night. Though when he comes to the Constable’s room, you would not know it.

  “Do not touch me!” he shouts. “Do not so much as lay a fucking glove on me!”

  He is addressing a six-foot Yeoman of the Queen’s Guard, one-third his age perhaps, who carries at least three weapons with which he might eviscerate Jenkinson. More than that he has two other Yeomen of the Guard with him. That is nine ways, right there, in which Jenkinson might die.

  “Master Jenkinson,” Cecil tries to soothe, “please, sit, join us. No one is going to touch you. Unless you want them to.”

  “What do you mean by that, you godless old fuck?”

  Cecil rolls his eyes. Jenkinson is not dressed quite so strangely as when they rode to see him in Market Harborough this last year, but still wears a turban of white silk over a loose hood and a tunic of the same material that falls from his shoulders to the ground. He wears gloves the color of grass in May, and a black cloak of what must be the finest wool ever spun.

  “Are you not content with wasting three years of my life, Cecil, you now want a week more? Is that it? You have me dragged from my own bed by these men who would shame a camel with their habits, who make me sleep in manacles and share their foul food.”

  Cecil’s patience snaps.

  “Oh pipe down, Jenkinson,” he rumbles. “Or I will have you gagged.”

  Jenkinson—face stained darker than needs be, and with charcoal lining his eyes—sits.

  “Now we’ve got your terms here”—Cecil prods the verse on the table—“but can make neither hide nor hair of them. So you tell us now: What is it your man wants? And speak plain, man. None of your… heathen oddness.”

  Jenkinson, tired from his long journey perhaps, or intimidated by being in the Tower, now makes a fatal misjudgment. He laughs. It is a sneering sort of laugh, as if he pities Cecil, as if pities them all. He pities them for the crude clumsiness of their dress; their ugly shoes; their warm wine in dumpy pewter cups; their ruddy red, winter-bitten faces; their gloves that fit like shoes; their ignorance; their insularity; their lack of sophistication. He pities their pretensions. He laughs as if there is nothing they have that he wants, that their power is beneath him, and they cannot touch him.

  It is interesting, Walsingham thinks, to see how men react to this: Hatton sees the situation through Jenkinson’s eyes, and is mortified and ashamed of himself and his pretensions, which now seem not quite enough, as if he is playing dress-up as a grown-up, while Cecil swells as does a bull before it charges. Had Hatton been the senior figure here, then Jenkinson might have carried the day, but Hatton must defer to Cecil. This is Cecil’s meeting, and so it is Cecil who bellows.

  “Topcliffe! Topcliffe there! Send for Master Topcliffe!”

  Topcliffe has been waiting. He bustles in, a young man with slack, drinker’s cheeks, and a face that you’d not guess would belong to a man who pulled other men apart and raped their wives and daughters as they stood forced to watch while balanced on a beam with their arms chained to the wall behind their backs. His assistants, though, my God, you would not wish to meet, not just on a dark night, but ever. Two of them: one enormously stupid, and slow, but hugely muscled, like a circus giant on whose forehead a third eye is usually painted; the second a skinny, sniggering weed with ratty teeth and a boneyard pallor. The big one, hands the size of plates, clamps Jenkinson in an undeniable grip and though Jenkinson flails, he is like a child in the giant’s paws and can do nothing but kick his legs in the air and shout and scream “Habeas corpus!” as he is bundled out of the Constable’s lodgings.

  Walsingham laughs.

  “Habeas corpus,” he repeats, but Cecil is still inflamed.

  “I will tell you what is not right. Him. Laughing at us. Well, you saw! You saw, didn’t you? We gave him every chance. We met him as a gentleman, here in your chambers, Constable. Not in some dungeon. What gives him the right to be so high-and-mighty, to scorn us! Merely because he has been to Persia? Those Persians were right to have nothing to do with him! I wish to God we had not either!”

  Being in a room with someone who has recently behaved so impetuously, Walsingham thinks, is like being drunk in the company of a drunker drunk: it sobers you up. He wonders what it might be like to go to Persia. It might make him laugh at men such as Cecil, too.

  “Well,” he says. “Let us see if we can at least save his life.”

  He takes up the draft of the poem, and he follows the still-shouting Jenkinson across the inner ward—where it has begun snowing again, very fine flakes from a pewter sky that needs a polish—and up the steps of the White Tower and then down, again, into the lower dungeon where the rack is kept. The atmosphere is instantly repelling and can be felt like a miasma, a definite presence, and Walsingham finds himself holding his breath.

  In the room, where lamps burn sickly in sconces, he finds he does not want to even look at the instrument itself, where Jenkinson shouts and kicks within the frame, pressed down into its embrace by the giant while Topcliffe and the rat-toothed assistant tie his wrists and ankles with strong rope.

  There are drifts of straw across the floor to help soak up any fluids, and a coffer, on which lie such tools as would horrify a farrier.

  When they are done with the knots, Jenkinson lies spread star-shaped on the floor, his wrists tied fast to one end of the bulky oak frame, his ankles to a winch at the other end, and the giant turns the winch, and Jenkinson is straightened, though his back still rests on the floor. Walsingham signals him to leave it at that for the moment.

  Jenkinson is red-faced and breathing very hard.

  “Master Jenkinson,” Walsingham says, “I am sorry it has come to this. I expect you are, too. All we want is some information.” />
  He imagines such words have often been spoken here, but this does feel like a situation that has bolted beyond control, and that if they might just sit down, and discuss what is, after all, only a verse, then any further unpleasantness—let alone a man having his arms torn from his shoulders, his legs from his hips—might be avoided.

  “I know nothing of it,” Jenkinson tells him.

  “Nothing at all? Nothing about the imagery and so forth? We don’t care about meter or rhyme, Master Jenkinson. We are brutes, as you say. All we want to know is what it means.”

  “You will have to ask the man who wrote it,” Jenkinson mutters.

  “Ah! Now that is interesting. Who did write it?”

  Jenkinson says nothing. He seems to regret having suggested this line of inquiry.

  “It is a bit late to be thinking of protecting your contacts, Master Jenkinson.”

  Master Topcliffe stands by, ready for Walsingham’s nod. Walsingham nods. He turns the winch handle and the ropes creak. He stops it off with a wedge. Master Jenkinson is not yet off the floor. It is hardly a comfortable position for an old man, but not too bad.

  “Give us a name to go on, Master Jenkinson. We will not cut you out of the deal. You will get whatever is coming to you.”

  The rat-toothed assistant laughs.

  “Get what’s coming to you,” he repeats, reversing its meaning.

  “Can you get him out?” Walsingham asks Topcliffe. The man looks distraught, but goes clumping up the steps.

  “So who is it, Master Jenkinson? Who is the poet?”

  It is a curious thing about the rack, Walsingham thinks. Some men spill their secrets merely knowing it exists, and these are the men Walsingham as often as not has admired most: clever men who have considered their strengths, and come to terms with their weaknesses; imaginative men who can foresee what being pulled apart might be like. Others believe they will be able to resist the pain, or feel they are strong enough to hold themselves together, and as often as not these men have their minds broken before their bodies. A third kind he is yet to meet: those who die without word or regret.

  “Oww,” Jenkinson says.

  It is comical.

  “Come on, Master Jenkinson. This is stupid. You are enduring this for what? Some money? You already have enough. Surely the amount you hope to make from this cannot be so very great. Or is it… what? The chance to humiliate Cecil? Is that worth it?”

  He gives the signal. The winch and rope creak. Jenkinson hisses. Topcliffe frowns. He mouths to Walsingham that Jenkinson is still not yet off the floor.

  “Master Jenkinson,” Walsingham tells him. “You have endured about as much as most men can in one session. You have shown great courage, but surely now is the time to give up the name. I do not believe the poet—whoever he may be—would expect you to endure so much for so little.”

  Jenkinson thrusts his jaw out. He can still take some more.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Walsingham steps into the frame and slaps Jenkinson’s cheek, hard enough to sting. “Tell me his fucking name, you fool!”

  He makes to slap him again.

  “All right! All right! I will!”

  * * *

  Back in the Constable’s lodgings, Cecil is now shamefaced.

  “Well?” he asks.

  “Sokollu Mehmet Pasha.”

  Cecil throws his pen down and sits back, incredulous. Both the Constable and the Master of the Board of Ordnance are at a loss. Hatton is gone, off to see the Queen, to organize his party.

  “What is that?” the Constable asks.

  “He is the grand vizier of the Ottomans,” Walsingham tells them. “The most powerful man in the empire, after the sultan.”

  There is a long silence.

  “What in God’s name does that mean?”

  Walsingham says nothing. He paces the floor and then stops to stare out of the window. The masons are still there, silent about their business, as if the atmosphere of the Tower has cowed them, and their usual whistles and chat is all dried up. My God, he thinks, what does it mean? The grand vizier of the Ottomans? He feels he has taken hold of what he believed to be a snake only to discover it is the tail of a tiger. Far from playing this Turkish merchant of Jenkinson, he knows now that he—and England—are the plaything.

  “This will require some thought,” he says.

  “Well, well,” Cecil says. “That explains why the verse does not ask for gold. The grand vizier can have no need of that.”

  “But Jenkinson knows nothing more? He cannot tell you what the unflawed gem actually is?”

  Walsingham shakes his head.

  “He was only ever trying to keep his commission,” he tells them.

  “But Sokollu is an Ottoman? What was all the business with Persia?” Cecil wonders.

  “Jenkinson was just trying to bump the price up. Apparently, there is naft enough in Ottoman lands, in the south, as he told me, around a city called Basra.”

  “Crafty little devil,” Cecil says. It is a compliment.

  “He was trying to get his three wasted years back,” Walsingham supposes.

  “And is he left alive?” the Master asks.

  “Oh yes. He’s fine. Scarcely quarter of an inch taller than when he arrived.”

  Cecil laughs his quiet hissing laugh.

  “Bloody hell,” he says. “Bloody hell.”

  “So what next?”

  “We open up our own lines of communication with Sokollu,” Walsingham tells them. “I cannot promise the same speed as Jenkinson, but I have three men in Constantinople, and now we know who he is, we can find out just what it is he really wants. What that infernal verse means.”

  He feels a huge weight lifted from his shoulders and wonders what it was. Uncertainty, he thinks, that was it. Now he knows whom he is dealing with, he can see a clear path.

  “I will tell him: yes, he can have whatever he wants. Some damned unflawed gem.”

  The meeting ends, and Walsingham walks with Cecil and the Constable through the inner ward under snow like falling feathers, and Cecil congratulates the Constable for getting his masons to work in winter.

  “Mine downed tools in November and buggered off home to Holland.”

  Walsingham thinks of Jenkinson and of the road he will have to take home to Market Harborough, and he thinks with pleasure of the few steps he will have to take before he is by his own fire in his house in the Papey.

  * * *

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Sulgrave Manor, Northamptonshire,

  second week of March 1578

  “A bit small,” Robert Beale apologizes.

  He and John Dee are in Sulgrave, a hamlet to the southwest of the town of Northampton, and staring at the hall Beale has rented for their purposes, through the offices of Her Majesty’s private secretary, which is as grand as his off-the-books budget can encompass.

  “It will do very nicely,” Dee supposes, because so long as it has bench and table, and a peg on which to hang the girl’s hornbook, then he will be able to teach this Ness Overbury just as much as he ever taught Bess Tudor. Well, enough to get by, in most events, anyway. Elsewhere there will be stables and kennels and a mews for the hawks, he supposes, and if Ness cannot yet pull a bow as well as Her Majesty, then God willing there will be time and space enough for that, too.

  “What do you make of it, Mistress Frommond?”

  “It is like my father’s house,” she tells them. “Though we had no arms above the door.”

  She indicates those of Her Majesty: the English lion and Welsh dragon attending the quartered leopards and fleur-de-lis that someone has had embossed into the stone that looks gray in this light but will probably be golden in the sunlight. Dee smiles.

  “Semper Eadem,” he reads. “Always the same.”

  “Or not, in this case,” Frommond comments with a laugh.

  Frommond has ridden with them from London, having sworn never to travel by carriage again, and on the road a little di
stance behind come two carts, laden with the books and clothes and furniture they believe they will need to complete their task.

  “Quickly then,” Beale says, and he kicks on and leads them into the small courtyard.

  The owner of the house comes out. No servants.

  “Master Travis,” he greets Beale.

  He is a bony, spare old fellow, with bad teeth and a head like a horse.

  Beale swings out of his saddle and shakes his hand.

  “Master Washington,” Beale says, “these are my servants. Master Perkins and Mistress Drummond.”

  “Right,” Washington says, but he shakes Dee’s hand with a horny palm the size of a malt shovel, and he removes his cap in respect to Frommond, who looks nothing like any kind of servant he can have ever seen.

  “Stables are around the back.”

  A thin rain starts to fall. The carters unload their baggage into the buttery and are gone with enough time to reach Northampton by curfew. Washington leaves them to their business. The house is old-fashioned, with two chambers above the hall, and a bed in one of them.

  “Ness had best have that,” Beale says.

  There is no glass in the windows, only shutters on ropes.

  “I will sleep by the fire, if no one objects,” Dee tells them.

  Frommond likewise.

  “And me,” Beale says.

  The house has not been occupied over the winter and it needs warming.

  “When does Ness come?” Dee asks again.

  “I will ride to fetch her in two days.”

  “And what have you done with Overbury himself?”

  “It was hinted that a knighthood was in the offing if he volunteered to help Henry Sydney massacre the Munstermen in Ireland. Which should take him a year or more at the very least.”

  “If he doesn’t get killed himself.”