The Queen's Men Page 7

  Today, though, the carpet is pushed off, and it lies shed like an adder’s skin at the back of the box, and there are scrapes in the thick dust on the lid where someone has scrabbled at it to get it open. Probably in the last day or so. Strange, Frommond thinks. Why should anyone do that? A servant perhaps? She will have to ask.

  She lifts the coffer lid. It is made of some dark wood against moth, and within are a few of Alice’s personal items: a comb with all its teeth; a silver hairpin as long and sharp as an Italian dagger; a slim hank of wool dyed vivid green; a fan (broken); and a small embroidery frame in which is stretched just a blank piece of linen. There is an out-of-favor partlet, an earthenware pot of some salve that smells of clove, and a nicely bound, not-much-thumbed copy of the Common Prayer Book, given to her—Frommond checks—by her father on her departure for the Queen’s court before the summer the year previously. There are also some laces—grubby in lengths—and a few crumbs left of what might once have been a block of marzipan.

  But there are no letters, nor other papers of any kind. This is strange. Frommond knows that Alice’s father used to write from home in Lincolnshire, usually with news of her little brother, to whom she was close, and her dog, and with short descriptions of his hunting forays: who came; what they rode; what was caught; and among whom the venery was diced at day’s end. Alice wrote to him, and not only to borrow money—though that, too: for cloth and new playing cards, which she was always losing; once a pair of needlework scissors she wanted to buy from the Royal Exchange—but because her mother had died birthing her brother, and her father had never remarried, and they remained close, and she wished him to know everything that she did. Frommond was certain she used to keep the letters in the coffer, as… well, where else would she keep them? But there is no sign of them here.

  Perhaps she took them with her to Hatfield. In one of her bags? Frommond wonders what has become of them, since Alice must have had at least three, and Jane resolves to find them before—if—they are sent back to Alice’s father with her coffin.

  She restores the coffer to order and makes space for the clothes in the press that she and Alice also used to share: some linens; a pair of sleeves; a single dress the color of dried sage; and some hanging petticoats. Socks. Another pair of gloves. From the cloth rises the smell of Alice’s scent, a distillation of lime flowers, but of the perfume itself there is no sign.

  She takes out Alice’s clothes and folds them atop one another in the coffer, and that is when she feels a tiny irregularity between the look and weight of one of her petticoats. There is a nodule there, some hidden thing within the length of the material, like a knot in wood, a seed within its pod, and she cannot get at it instantly. She must pluck away the cloth to find the opening. It is something stitched into the skirt’s turned hem. The stitching is a simple blanket stitch, but broken a little along, so she must tease the weight of the thing toward the break and out into the palm of her hand.

  It is a lozenge of dark gold, which, when turned over, reveals a picture of a young man, just his head and shoulders, before a sky-blue background. She takes the limning to the window. He is perhaps twenty, with reddish hair under what must be a velvet cap—a deeper red—on which is pinned some sort of gold badge, a very faint beard over a high but simple collar and a dark doublet. He stares back up at her with a sharp, challenging look.

  Frommond does not recognize him at all, but she knows it can only be the father of the child. She feels warm with relief. Her cheeks flush as if she has been out in the sun all day. It is a love token. A token of love. So—Alice was a fornicator, yes, and deceitful and unchaste and unworthy, but she is dead now; she has paid a high price for her sins, and can this limning not prove that she at least loved, and that she was in her turn beloved? Can it not mean that she might have been betrothed to this man? Can it not have been the beginning of a happy story that went wrong? Can it not mean that her child was conceived in love? Is that too much to hope? Too much to load upon this simple little lozenge of gold, vellum, and paint?

  She is still for a moment, the limning cupped in her hand. Tiny gold letters show that the painting was made last year: Anno Dm 1576. She wonders if the father of the child carries a similar portrait of Alice, done by the same hand, two for the price of one perhaps. Painted separately and slipped into a hand during a round of galliard, or during some other entertainment put on while they were on progress through the south this summer. Watching fireworks perhaps, or at a tilt. Or those acrobats, or the juggling clowns with their dancing dogs.

  She compares the limning in her hand to the one she carries of the Queen on her belt, given to her along with a covered cup this last New Year. There are similarities in size, form, and color, but while the Queen is a wavering presence within her oval disk—as if she were copied from another painting perhaps, commissioned by the score to be distributed to Her Majesty’s lesser courtiers—the image of this man, this boy, is pin sharp and pulses with life. He tilts his chin up, and he looks, what? Hard, she thinks. Driven. Certain. That is it. He knows what he wants, and it looks as if what he wants is something perhaps beyond the ordinary run of things. It is not a horse, for example, or a doublet inlaid with gold thread, or an income of more than forty pounds a year. Or perhaps she is wrong. Perhaps she is being fanciful.

  She wonders how he will come to hear of what has happened to Alice, if he does at all, and how he will react when or if he does. Will she have already told him she was carrying their child? Much of Frommond wishes to believe that the boy knew Alice was pregnant, and that he will be heartbroken to learn of her death, but a sharper, harder part of her imagines he will feel some relief. He will not now ever have to pay for his great sin. Alice could never have been expected to hold her tongue in the Tower, could she? A day in its confines, even in the better apartments, would surely have broken her spirits. Or her father would have come to remonstrate, bringing her brother and her dog perhaps.

  Then again, Frommond had always believed Alice a fragile little thing, yet she refused to divulge the father’s name despite the full weight of the Queen and her ladies of the bedchamber. That must have taken great courage. And she looked them all in the eye as she took her place alone in the Queen’s carriage in Waltham Cross. Alice might have carried her child to term and given birth, all in stoical silence, and then what would the Queen have done? Quietly let her go? Or held her until she was an old woman, her child fully grown, and no one quite sure who they were?

  So who is the man?

  She should show it to Mistress Parry, of course, and she is just turning to do so when the boy comes for Alice’s coffer. He’s twelve maybe, miserable and whippet thin. He takes off his cap and stands gripping it in both scrawny arms while Frommond hurriedly finishes packing it, pressing the clothes flat and closing the lid before wondering what to do with the scrap of Turkey carpet. This is when it strikes her very forcibly, very suddenly, that the carpet’s removal and the traces of fingers in the dust must have been left by someone hurriedly going through Alice’s possessions recently. Someone looking for something. Her few coins? Unlikely. The letters from her father and brother, equally so, but what about the limning? Could they be looking to retrieve that?

  On impulse she shows it to the boy.

  “Do you know this fellow?” she asks.

  The boy pauses for a long moment before shaking his head quickly.

  “Sorry, mistress, no one I know.”

  He is blushing, she sees, and supposes him shy.

  “Not someone you have seen about the palace? Or on your travels? Did you go with the Queen on progress this summer?”

  “I did, mistress, but—”

  He shakes his head. He is anxious to take the chest and be gone. She slides the limning into her sleeve.

  “Mind you,” he says, “they all do look the same, them sort.”

  He means the gentles, rather than the commons.

  “Where are you taking it?” she asks, nodding at the coffer.

&nb
sp; “Stables, mistress, to be with her other bags and her… her.”

  He flushes deeper crimson at his clumsiness.

  “I will come with you,” Frommond says. She sets down the Turkey carpet. The boy cannot say no, and she opens the door wider for him to pass through before she follows him panting down some stairs she has never taken before, through the servants’ passages and the salt house and the butteries and sculleries and so on, out into a cobbled courtyard in the center of which stands a dray horse having her rear shoe replaced by a bent-backed farrier.

  “This way, mistress,” the boy calls, and he leads her over the cobbles to a door as broad as a gate.

  “If you wouldn’t mind?”

  She lifts a latch on a smaller door set into the larger door and stands aside to let the boy pass. A moment later the larger door swings open on oiled hinges: within are kept just a few of the Queen’s carriages. Frommond’s gaze is drawn instantly to the shadowy shape of the Queen’s principal carriage, shrouded against the pigeons that roost on the beams above, but in the uncertain light let in through the archway behind, she can make out the holes blasted in its side.

  She approaches slowly, as to a tomb, for this is where Alice died, but she stops before she is close enough to touch the punctured sides. She cannot bring herself to look inside. Her mind fills with disjointed, chaotic memories of the night it happened; of being the first to open the carriage door; of finding Alice mewling in spreading scrapes of her own blood; of volunteering to sit and hold her while they forced their way past the hay wain; of still doing so half an hour later, when she died, just as Sir John Jeffers had said she would.

  Hearing the boy’s final grunt of effort behind, she turns to see him slide Alice’s coffer up onto the bed of another cart, and with a start she sees that Alice’s coffin is already loaded aboard. She hesitates to approach this, too. It is not the first time she has seen a coffin, of course. Her own mother and father are both called to God, and her little sister, too, with the sweats, and so the length and bulk of the thing comes as no shock. But still though. She is within a handbreadth of Alice’s cold flesh, and she cannot help but shiver.

  Then she sees what she has come looking for: Alice’s bags that she had taken to Hatfield, and the things she had with her when she died. She unties the points of the smaller of the three bags. Alice was not overtidy, but nor would she have stuffed her possessions into her bag like this, all jumbled up with no care. Someone has been through it, Frommond thinks, for certain, and not a casual thief, either, because, look, here is Alice’s mirror. It was her prize possession. A thief would take that. And in one of the other bags she finds Alice’s much-prized stomacher, stitched with pearls the size of a baby’s teeth, and here is a glove, just one of her favorite pair, dyed as crimson as Christmas, to which a ring of silver is stitched against loss, but it has become separated from its twin, of which there is no sign.

  “Has anyone come to look through the bags?” she asks the boy.

  The boy shrugs and looks around to see if there is anyone to ask. There is none.

  “Where is everybody?” Frommond asks.

  “At the wake,” the boy says with a catch in his throat.

  “The wake? Whose?”

  And then she realizes: the coachman. There was another that died that night, forgotten by men such as Walsingham, by women such as her.

  “Was he—” She doesn’t know what to ask. Was he much liked? A popular fellow? Did he sing with a true voice? Or did he beat his wife?

  “My da,” the boy says.

  He hangs his head.

  She gasps.

  “You are not going to his wake?”

  “I was. Mistress Parry caught me and asked me to do your bidding. Perhaps she did not know he was my da.”

  She tells him she is sorry for his loss, but he must go now and be with his family, and she gives him a coin, but he hesitates to take it.

  “Go on,” she says. He yields, but he is strangely reluctant.

  “Thank you, Mistress Frommond,” he says. “And I will keep a look out for your gent.”

  And he is off to the inn, leaving Frommond alone in the stables with the shattered carriage and the body of her friend in her coffin. She stands for a long moment, thinking, and then places her hand on the wood of the coffin, and she feels solemn and self-conscious at the same time.

  “I will find him, Alice,” she murmurs. “And I will offer comfort if I believe it deserved, but if I find he has used you, then I shall damn him to hell.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Tower of London,

  fourth week of November 1577

  A week has passed since Dr. Dee was brought to the Tower, and today is the sort in which London now seems to specialize: damp gray skies stained with coal smoke and an east wind blown straight in from Moscow. Dee stands on the south wall of the Well Tower, wishing for a fur cap—of any animal, a cat, a rat, he’d mind not which—and a lined cloak such as the Constable is wearing as he watches from a safe distance in the teeth of the Lanthorn Tower above. Still, with God’s blessing, and a little luck, soon they should all be plenty warm enough.

  “Ready when you are, Doctor!” Roger Cooke calls from his position on the bellows. He’s standing about fifteen paces away, wearing a smith’s apron of greased leather, and a steel helmet, with a visor, that he has borrowed from the armory. Even so, he is discernibly anxious, and as well he might be, Dee supposes, for this is their first large-scale effort in what has so far been a very hit-and-miss series of experiments to rediscover the secret of Greek fire. Between them, they have, for example, broken every one of Cornelius de Lannoy’s beautiful glass flasks, and many more objects besides, including an oak table—burned to its feet—and two glass windows, reduced to slivers.

  The Constable, a decent man, has been good about it, and Dee is grateful. His previous stints in the Tower have passed under lock and key and have been if not extremely uncomfortable, then not exactly a pleasure. Now, though, so long as he does not try to escape the broad confines of the Tower’s curtain wall, he is at liberty to wander the grounds and the arcades of the bailey, following in the illustrious footsteps of the many men and women of honor who have in years gone by been afforded all the comforts of a royal palace, rather than its dungeons. Though they, too, give off their odor, and Dee finds himself avoiding the yard outside the chapel, where he knows the Queen’s mother, among many others, met her end.

  “Thank you, Master Cooke, yes, please, when you’ve a moment,” Dee instructs.

  Cooke starts his pumping. The bellows are of Dee’s own design and require a great deal of effort; they make as much noise perhaps as ten swans lifting off from choppy water, but they are—to Dee’s mind—extremely efficient. They force a great quantity of air along a stitched leather hose and down into a leather bladder that is placed within a double-butted firkin that is filled with their latest, and hopefully last, attempt at Greek fire. The firkin is otherwise sealed save for another hose that runs off the top for ten yards along the Tower’s outer wall, and it is strapped to the battlement walkway by two hoops of iron that are themselves bolted to the floor of the walkway. As the bladder expands within the firkin, the liquid is forced up and along this second hose, which after a run of a few feet is raised up through a battlement and out along a bracket that Dee has had constructed from the stand for an arquebus, so that it stands proud of the castle walls, in case the liquid should dribble, rather than shoot out, and scorch them. At the end of the hose is a constricting nozzle that he imagines will need a tweak in future versions so as to control the liquid’s flow, and below, thirty feet away on the other side of the moat, between it and the river, is a large pile of sand on which rests a broken bucket and a dead dog.

  Cooke pumps away. There is much more thundering and batting of the leather, and then swooshing and gurgling, and the firkin judders in its constraints, and the second hose stiffens somewhat, and Dee, carrying a lamplighter’s pole on which is fix
ed a lit match fuse, extends it from the battlements toward the nozzle whence the liquid he is already calling Greek fire now bursts in a wild ejaculation.

  The fumes catch fire with a canine woof and for a moment flames dance in the air, and then the liquid itself goes up with a bellow. A spurt of roiling fire leaps across the moat to land very near the sand and the dead dog. It continues to burn on the water and it continues to burn as it splashes onto the stones of quay between moat and river. It continues to burn in the air as it shoots out from the castle walls in a smoking yellow line that reminds all men watching of the first time they ever pissed off a wall on a cold day, and Dee can hear cheering from all those gathered to watch, because, by Christ, it is quite a sight.

  But then the flame goes back on itself, and the second hose catches fire, and the flames move almost impossibly quickly back toward the firkin of liquid in its iron hoops, and Cooke sees it at the same time Dee sees it, and both throw down whatever it is they are carrying and they turn and sprint along the walkway, one going east, the other west. Dee reaches the turn of the walkway and ducks inside just as the flames reach the main reservoir of the liquid left in the firkin. Cooke is not so lucky. The explosion is astonishingly loud in the damp air, like the Crack of Doom as the Constable will later claim, as the contents of the barrel and its iron hoops explode in a small, astonishingly powerful blast that is heard across Christendom and maybe even beyond. Every pigeon in the country takes flight as shards of wood and iron slice through the air. Cooke, with farther to run, and weighed down by the helmet and, it turns out, two smiths’ aprons—one on the front, one on his back—is sent sprawling on the walkway before he can reach the cover of the Cradle Tower. Flames spread all over the wall, and every splash thrown by the blast lingers burning on everything it touches.