The Queen's Men Read online

  And that is when Beale is on his feet and the blade in his hand is suddenly true and purposeful and with a quick step and a thrust, it is through the devil Overbury’s windpipe and out of the back of his neck, and for a moment, blood seems to float in the air, lingering in droplets, a pink mist in the beam of light that falls from an aperture. All movement ceases. Overbury is stilled, pinned in midair by the blade in his throat, until Beale withdraws it, and then Overbury slumps to the ground, with a great loose sigh, like an old horse’s fart, as if his soul is finally relieved to be free of his cankerous fleshly body.

  Beale drops his sword. He stares down at the body as dark blood slicks across the flagstones in jerky rushes.

  After a moment he turns away, to Ness, who has picked up her baby, and has it clutched to her, wrapped in his sheet, and she is hunched over it, shuddering, and Beale bends to crouch by her and he tries to take her in his arms, but she is locked stiff, unyielding to his care, though that is all he wants to be able to give.

  “Ness,” he whispers. “Ness. All is well. He is gone. He is dead. He can harm you no more.”

  But she is shaking still and will not raise her head. She is closed to him.

  He glances up at Mistress Vernier, seeking her help, but he sees she has her hands to her face and is staring down in horror not at the devil Overbury’s sprawling corpse, but at Ness, and the boy in her arms, and when Beale looks down again he sees it: the blood. A badge of it dabbed across the sheet that is stretched across the crown of his son’s head. He feels a stab of alarm. He tries to prise Ness’s fingers from the boy, but her hands are like claws, clutching him to her, and it is only when Beale attempts to force her that her silent howl finds its voice in a desperate, tearing screech.

  “By God, Ness! Let me!”

  But it is too late for that. Something has happened. When Beale finally wrests him free of the grief-maddened mother, the boy’s body hangs broken in his hands. A break. A fracture. The boy is dislocated. Limp. Broken.

  He is dead.

  How do you live after that? Beale will never be able to explain, other than to say he did not die. Time passed. The screaming stopped, for a bit, at length, and he was faced with a series of very urgent practical problems that required solving there and then. He must get up. He must take his son with him, and he must take Ness, and they must be gone from the house, from Ely, before the hue and cry is raised and the whole town is turned out to find him.

  He picks up his son, first, gathering him in his sodden birthing sheet that is now become his winding sheet, and he puts him in the bucket nestled with the bloody clouts and rags from his birth. He covers the bucket with a cloth as you might a pail of milk to keep away the summer flies. Then he wipes his sword on a piece of the devil Overbury that is not covered with blood from his torn-open throat, and then he resheathes the blade. He straightens his doublet, takes a deep breath, and turns to Ness. She has slipped back into the same blank fog as before, when she saw Arthur Gregory throttling that poor constable to death. Beale is glad. It means, he hopes, that she is in some way isolated from the pain of what has just happened.

  Mistress Vernier is still kneeling. Her head hangs, her hands hang. She might be saying her prayers before putting her neck on the block. Beale puts a hand under her arm and tries to lift her but she is a dead weight, and he lets her be.

  He turns back to Ness.

  “Ness,” he says. “Ness. We must go. We cannot stay. The hue and cry. It will come any moment.”

  She understands not a word.

  “Help me,” he tells the simpleton, but the child turns and runs out into the garden where the chickens are. The midwife, or cunning woman, or whatever she is, or was, is long gone, as has Vernier.

  Beale gathers Ness’s clothes where he sees them and sits her up. She is startlingly light, as if the effort of giving birth has burned away all her heft and weight, and she is no more substantial than a bundle of hot twigs wrapped in linen. He places another shirt over her first and then a smock. He has not much time for niceties.

  “Come, Ness, come,” he whispers.

  His ears are cocked for the hue and cry.

  “You cannot!” Mistress Vernier whispers from behind. “You cannot take her.”

  “I must,” he says. “I must. She will die if she stays.”

  “She will die if she goes.”

  Beale pauses, and looks at Ness, the woman whom he has ruined. He thinks about her on a pyre.

  “I must,” he repeats. “I must or she will be burned alive.”

  Mistress Vernier says no more. He turns to see what she is doing. Nothing. Only staring at him as if he were no better than the devil Overbury. Perhaps she is right. Perhaps he is no better.

  He turns back to Ness. All strength is gone in her. She is too weak to move, but it means she cannot resist. At length she is dressed. She can just about stand, though by God she is weak. He puts her in the settle by the sweet-smelling fire and then gathers up all that he can: Overbury’s heavy purse, the bucket containing his son, and he then stoops to lift Ness to her feet. He believes if he can get her out of Ely, he… they… stand a chance.

  Outside in the lane it is very bright, but deserted save for a very fine horse, laden with a saddlebag, tethered to the post of the overhang. It can only have been Overbury’s. Beale approaches as gently as he can but the horse is nervy and has been treated badly. Beale must soothe it before he can help Ness up onto its saddle. He needs her to hold the bucket before he can swing up onto the saddle behind her. She does so, blankly. He swings up. The horse backs and shudders. It is not going to be a comfortable ride. He hopes he will be able to find a carriage on the London Road.

  “Come on then,” he says and they plod slowly out of town, still deserted, and out on to the Cambridge Road. Tears fill his eyes. Ness is keening. The weight of his son is nothing, in the bucket. South. Or north. It hardly matters. He must just be gone. He looks around and remembers when he was once horsewhipped by his father. He’d wanted to plunge his buttocks in a trough as he ran just to get away from the pain. It is like that now. He runs without running. He looks without seeing. Water, perhaps? A river? The Great Ouse. It will take them northward, to King’s Lynn.

  But then he sees the four men coming riding toward him, and he knows there is nothing he can do to stop them. This is where it must end. He can make no more amends.

  “Christ, Ness,” he tells her, “I am sorry.”

  He should kill her, of course. That is what Walsingham would suggest. It would end any contagion of the conspiracy and save her much pain later on at the hands of men such as Richard Topcliffe, but he knows his heart is too faint for such a thing. He is too human, too weak. He reins in the horse, very gently, and diverts himself with making sure Ness is as comfortable as she might be, though what is the point, really?

  The men sweep along the road toward him, cloaks flying, dust pluming. They know who he is, he is sure of it. The slow their horses to a trot and come to a stop before him. They are wearing masks against the dust of the road. One of them peels his down.

  “Beale!” he says.

  Beale feels his legs give way.

  By Christ, it is Arthur Gregory.

  * * *

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Hampton Court Palace, Hampton, west of London,

  August 1578

  Jane Frommond stands at the window of one of the privy apartments at Hampton Court Palace and watches Master Walsingham lead a company of men up from the river, some of whom are so exotically dressed she can only believe they are players come for a masque, yet they carry themselves with a wonderful serene dignity, and it is Walsingham and his small party of secretaries and guards who look flustered and discomfited.

  “What is it, dear?” Mistress Parry asks.

  She tells her.

  “What on earth is he doing here? He must know Her Majesty is on progress?”

  “Perhaps we will find out?”

  Mistress Parry gives her an ar
ch look over her embroidery frame.

  “Sorry,” Frommond mutters.

  Blanche Parry sighs.

  “No,” she says. “I am sorry. It is good of you to stay to keep me company. I know you would rather be with Her Majesty.”

  Before Frommond can deny it again, Mistress Parry launches into a description of some of the adventures she had on past progresses, when she was younger—and not ill, which she is now—which Frommond has heard before, but is happy to hear again, because she likes Mistress Parry, who is, she knows, a cousin of Dr. John Dee, of whom she has been thinking a great deal recently.

  Where is he? she wonders. Having been in his company for so long, she misses him and wonders why he has not sent word to her or come to see her. She has not been to see him, true, but that would not be proper, and she only did it once before because Master Walsingham and Lord Burghley were planning to arrest him again.

  “Perhaps I will go and see what they are up to.”

  “You do that.” Mistress Parry smiles.

  She does, and Master Walsingham is pleased to see her.

  “I did not know you remained behind.”

  She explains what she is doing there, and Walsingham explains what he is doing.

  “The dragoman does not seem overly impressed?” she asks.

  “No,” Walsingham admits. “I understand Constantinople is rather grander in scale. Anyway, this makes a change from the bear gardens.”

  He gestures at the palace.

  “But what are they even doing here in England?” she asks.

  Walsingham looks evasive. He is ashamed of himself, she thinks. What for? Not having mastery, that is it. But then he seems to come to a decision.

  “Mistress Frommond,” he says, “perhaps you are the one to help.”

  She cocks her own eyebrow this time, not just because he sounds so costive.

  “I admit I am loath to commit,” she tells him. “The last time you and Master Beale asked my help it was merely to teach a girl how to accept a curtsy and that ended in a bloodbath.”

  “Yes,” Walsingham admits. “That.”

  They walk in silence for a while, he with his hands behind his back, footsteps on the gravel. It is another warm day.

  “Go on then,” she says.

  He blows air through his nostrils.

  “Thank you, Mistress Frommond,” he says. “Can I ask how are you with verse?”

  “Verse?”

  “Its meaning?”

  She understands words, she tells him, yes. He fumbles for his bag, and then within.

  “Where is it? Ah. Here we are.”

  He shows her a verse. She reads it. She thinks it somewhat cold and formal and cannot quite understand what it is meant to be. Is the poet in love with something or someone perhaps, that he—it is definitely a he—believes should be passed to him like a shared bowl of wine?

  “Perhaps some context would help,” Walsingham supposes.

  He tells her about the naft that Dr. Dee requires for the Greek fire.

  “This verse describes the price they are willing to accept for it.”

  “Is that ordinary?” she wonders.

  “Nothing about this is ordinary,” Walsingham admits with a sigh.

  “Have you asked him? The dragoman?”

  “Of course. He merely smiles enigmatically and laughs and I am left feeling a fool. Perhaps I am a fool?”

  She ignores his fishing for praise and concentrates on the verse.

  “Twice-sceptered is an odd thing, isn’t it? What is it to be twice-sceptered?”

  “The very question I asked myself.”

  “I mean, what is a scepter?” she wonders aloud.

  “A staff,” he tells her. “A king’s symbol of sovereignty.”

  “Or a queen’s,” she reminds him.

  “Yes, yes,” he agrees with a slight edge of impatience.

  She reads on, looking for something else to catch her attention.

  “The lion and the dragon,” she says, and she thinks of her time walking with John Dee in the yard at Sulgrave Manor, and of how they had stood that first time and looked up at the eaves under which the owners had painted the arms of Her Majesty, including on the left a lion, and on the right, a dragon.

  “Semper Eadem,” she says. “Always the same. Never changing.”

  He frowns and looks at her and then at the verse where her fingers are pointing.

  “Staying the course?” he asks.

  “Why not? And look. Twice-sceptered. It does not mean England’s jewel has been twice sceptered—whatever that means—it means England’s jewel has two scepters.”

  “But what is England’s jewel?” Walsingham asks. He is frustrated. Frommond cannot stop herself laughing at him.

  “Don’t you see? England’s jewel has two scepters means that England’s jewel has two kingdoms.”

  Walsingham closes his eyes and tries to think what that might mean.

  “Is it some metaphor I do not get?”

  “No. It is literal. She has two kingdoms. England and France.”

  “She?”

  “Her Majesty always refers to herself as a prince, doesn’t she?”

  Walsingham agrees. It is something on which the Queen insists.

  “She… is… a… prince,” Frommond continues. “She is the prince.”

  She slaps the piece of paper with the back of her fingertips.

  “And she does have two kingdoms, doesn’t she?” Walsingham muses. “England and France.”

  “So the poet says being in love is like being a prisoner of a prince, and his heart has been captured by a jewel—by which he cannot mean a ruby or a sapphire, but a woman, surely?—who has two kingdoms and rules over them by Divine Right—heaven’s sacred cipher—with the lion and the dragon being her arms, never changing—Semper Eadem is her motto—despite the perils she faces from abroad.”

  Walsingham is looking sick. He claps his head as if to drive out pain and knocks his cap off, down his back to the ground.

  “He wants Her Majesty? That is his price?”

  “So it would seem,” she says. “Yes, look. I am not sure what Hoca is—a person perhaps?—but the poet seems to say that everyone envies him, or is in awe of him, but he is secretly sad, and the only way to cure his secret sadness is with… with Her Majesty crossing the sea to— Well, I do not know anything about constellations, you would have to ask Dr. Dee about that—but to complete the Pleiades—perhaps he has a collection of stars or something that is incomplete?—and then it will be his turn to drink from the wine bowl, and that the wine will be delicious.”

  She finds she is blushing, but Walsingham stands aghast.

  “Christ,” he says. “Christ. Christ. Christ.”

  He starts running back toward the barge.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I must see Cecil this moment.”

  “I wanted to ask you about Dr. Dee!”

  But he is gone.

  * * *

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Ludgate Gaol, City of London,

  last week of August 1578

  No one ever believes prisoners’ stories, particularly when they are so farfetched as his, but John Dee’s persistence finally pays off and he is taken up the stairs to see one of the wardens of the gaol.

  “I know the fellow you mean,” the warden tells him, “but there ain’t nothing I can do about it, because he is gone.”

  “Gone? He is on the leads.”

  “Was on the leads. He has paid off his debts it seems, or someone has paid them off for him, and he has left this very morning. Shame. He was an agreeable fellow, and never did no one no harm, from what it seems?”

  “He shot at the Queen and murdered one of her ladies of honor.”

  “Did he now?”

  Blank stare. It is none of his business.

  “What about the other men? Those others with whom he always sat?”

  “Them Dutchies? They have all likewise paid t
heir ways out this very day! One after the other they came in. I was joking with them that perhaps they had all placed a wager that had come good!”

  It is not much of a joke.

  “Listen, you have to let me out of here, today.”

  The warden’s eyes seemed to twinkle in their folds of flesh.

  “Hoohoo! Dr. Dee, you are a one!”

  “I mean it. That man—he told you his name is Jens Blenk—his real name, or one of them, is Jan Saelminck, and he is here to kill the Queen. Francis Walsingham has been combing all of Christendom looking for him and his men, whom you have just this morning let go.”

  The warden has to admire their ingenuity.

  “What a place to hide! Right under their noses!”

  “Yes, yes. That’s not the point. The point is that I need to get out.”

  “Why don’t I just toddle down to Whitehall or wherever Master Walsingham works and tell him myself? Claim a nice fat reward, go and live in Kent and farm cats or some such?”

  “Because he would never listen to you.”

  “And he’d listen to you?”

  “We don’t have time for this, Warden! Saelminck may be planning to try to kill the Queen even now!”

  The warden throws up his hands.

  “I am not going to let you out, Dr. Dee, and that is final. I will send word through the usual channels that you suspect that a man of interest to Master Walsingham was here, but now, owing to your arrival and identification of him, he and his—accomplices, shall I call them? Yes—he and his accomplices are left the gaol having paid their debts and are no longer—”