His Dark Lady (44 page)

Will took a hurried step towards her but stopped, finding Goodluck barring his way. For a moment she thought Will would attack Goodluck, and wondered feverishly where her dagger was. No one would attack her guardian again, not while she still drew breath. Then he stepped back and sighed.

‘I’m sorry. It was wrong of me not to tell you of my marriage when we first met again at Whitehall. But I could not help myself. I knew you would never consent even to speak with me if you knew that I was married. Nor was I lying when I said I was in love with you.’

‘You called me Anne before. Is your wife’s name Anne?’ she asked doggedly.

‘Yes,’ he agreed dully.

‘You have children by her?’

‘Two daughters and a son.’

‘Oh, three children! He has a wife and three children at home!’ She gave a cracked laugh. ‘How foolish of me to think I could at least bear you an illegitimate heir. Instead, I merely bear a fourth to add to your tally.’

Will stared at her like a fool.

‘I am with child!’ she shouted, tears of pure fury in her eyes, and saw Goodluck turn to her in horrified disbelief.

Her nerve broke at the sight of his expression. She could have faced Will’s coldness a thousand times, met his wife in the street and
had
her hair pulled or her face slapped by that rightly offended woman, but to have Goodluck look at her like that …

Lucy turned and ran from the house, still in her stockings and without shoes, her hair unbound. The sun had gone down and a smoky dusk was falling through the city. Men in tavern doorways turned to shout and stare at her running figure, but Lucy paid them no heed. She did not know where she was going, but knew she could not stay under that roof a moment longer. The river, she thought. The river. And let her feet take her downhill, slapping through the muddy stink of the open ditches, running helter-skelter for the rolling Thames.

She had not gone further than the new Angel tavern on the corner when her path was blocked by a cart turning slowly up the narrow street. The horses reared up as she came running out of the twilight, and the driver swore at her for ‘a fool of a whore’.

She fell backwards into one of the ditches, and lay there in the filthy water, in the shadow of the overhanging houses.

When she looked up, a man had descended from the cart and was holding out his hand. It was Sir Francis Walsingham, his face troubled as he bent towards her.

‘Come,’ he insisted. ‘You are hurt and must let me help you home, Mistress Morgan.’

‘I have no home,’ she managed hoarsely.

Sir Francis helped Lucy to her feet. His brows were raised, yet he made no comment about her wild and unkempt appearance. ‘Then I shall continue on foot alone and you must return to my house in Seething Lane in the care of my man.’ Walsingham seemed preoccupied, indicating that she should climb up into the cart next to his secretary. She did so, too much in despair to bother that her skirts were badly stained or to take offence at the disapproving look on his secretary’s face. Let the man think what he liked. She was past caring. ‘I would escort you there myself. But I must speak to Master Goodluck on an urgent matter that cannot wait.’

Walsingham gave the driver his instructions, smiling reassuringly up at Lucy.

‘Don’t look so sad, Lucy,’ he told her. ‘I have worked hard on your behalf and the Queen has agreed to grant you a place at court again, if your voice is still as sweet as it was.’

Eighteen

The woods near Uxendon Hall, Middlesex, August 1586

‘HOW MANY MEN
are there, would you say, and how long have they been in there?’ Goodluck asked, turning to the boy who had led them silently and unerringly through the woods. They were crouched now behind the ancient, fallen trunk of an oak, its bark mossed and crawling with flies in the summer heat. He wished he was still in London, but when Walsingham cracked the whip, he had no choice but to run. And this time it seemed he had run straight back into the arms of his former conspirators. Well, their time on this earth was nearly done. And then he could return and see that his ward was properly cared for.

His blood was up as soon as he thought of Lucy. Don’t dwell on it, he told himself. Lucy is a distraction. A weakness. You will not help her by getting yourself killed today.

‘Five, sir,’ the boy offered. He scratched his head, the lice in his short yellow hair clearly visible. ‘Three days now, belike. The cloaked one comes and goes, the other four remain.’

‘He brings food?’

‘Aye, sir, and walnuts.’

The boy laughed, as though this was a great jest.

Goodluck frowned. ‘Walnuts?’

‘For the juice, sir. It stains th’ hands and face, so’s gentlemen may pass as country folk.’

‘Where does this “cloaked one” find food hereabouts? We must be five miles from the nearest town.’

Tentatively, the boy held out his scab-covered palm. ‘I … I forget, sir.’

Goodluck placed another shilling in his hand. ‘He must have friends nearby. Where?’

The coin disappeared under the boy’s ragged jerkin. ‘Uxendon Hall, two mile east. They keep the old ways there.’

‘Catholics, you mean?’

The boy shrugged and spat on to the leafy floor. Either he had come to the end of his knowledge, or the word ‘Catholic’ was enough to strike dumb fear into him. Probably the latter, Goodluck thought. With farmers back to being hanged in the marketplace again for saying the wrong prayers on a Sunday, they knew when to fall silent, these close-mouthed country folk.

‘I see.’ Goodluck glanced at the captain and four guardsmen who had accompanied them through the dense woodland. ‘Well, it appears we outnumber them, which is good news. But only by one man.’

‘We have a musket, though,’ the captain pointed out, ‘and enough shot for them all, if Ned can reload quickly enough.’

‘What, deprive all London of a public execution?’ Goodluck said drily. ‘No, better let me go in first. Then threaten to shoot if they run. But only shoot over their heads to scare them into surrendering. My orders are to have none killed who could have been taken alive and brought to trial.’

The captain seemed astonished. ‘You are going in alone? If they suspect you, they’ll kill you.’

‘Let’s hope it will not come to that, then. I have a good story to spin, and they may trust me enough to tell me where the others are. No, I am determined.’

Much to the amusement of the boy, his mouth agape and eyes wide, Goodluck took up a handful of dirt from the woodland floor and rubbed it well into his hands and face, then smeared his shirt with it too, wincing when he inadvertently brushed against the tender flesh below. For good measure, he ran his sleeves along the rough green-mossed trunk of the oak and casually ruined them.

‘There,’ he said, pushing his hands through his hair to dishevel it.
‘Now
I could pass as a fugitive too. Five traitors holed up here in the woods, but as many yet unaccounted for this side of London. Sir Francis Walsingham has charged me with finding them all, and what I need more than dead men is information.’

‘Yes, sir.’ A note of respect in his voice, the captain fell back. ‘You heard the man. We wait for the signal as arranged, and no discharging your muskets except over their heads.’

The captain sent two of his men round to the back of the narrow glade where the traitors had been camping, then nodded to Goodluck.

Crouching slightly to protect his injuries, Goodluck slipped between the creeper-thick trunks as soundlessly as he could, loosening the dagger at his belt as he crept nearer the men’s hiding-place. It was nearly two weeks since his arrest at Pooley’s house. He had a story ready to explain his escape from the Tower. He had been beaten by Walsingham’s men for information, then released when nothing could be proved. As stories went, it was far from convincing. But these were men on the run for their lives. Any story would be suspect, however sound, and he only had to keep their company an hour or less.

It was a hot August afternoon, a breeze occasionally stirring the leaves above the long dried-up bed of the old stream. A young fox cub foraging in the heaped detritus of leaves under a giant beech stopped to turn a curious eye on him, then vanished quickly into its hole in the bank. Birds sang clear-throated in the branches overhead.

He thought uncomfortably again of Lucy, his own songbird. It hurt that she was no longer innocent, but unmarried and with child. He had failed her as a guardian. He had failed her as a man. Now he could not even be there to help her through her confinement. Walsingham had reassured him that she would be kept safe at his house in Seething Lane, but he could not help his dark thoughts when he considered how Lucy had been used and abandoned by that good-for-nothing whelp of a player, Will Shakespeare. Though his feelings about John Twist’s personal betrayal were even more violent. One day that bastard would pay for what he had tried to do to Lucy.

Through the trees ahead, an invisible bird repeated a single sharp note of warning, its call breaking the silence.

Goodluck paused to listen to the bird then put all thoughts of Lucy aside as he identified it as a man.

Lifting his boot over a briar patch, Goodluck moved more carefully. Within another moment he saw the rough lean-to of leafy branches and sticks they had constructed for shelter. The ground was scuffed before its narrow entrance. A fire had been lit there recently, then hurriedly disguised with earth and leaves.

Goodluck cupped his hands to his mouth and gave the low wood-pigeon coo they used to recognize each other: three haunting calls, then a pause, then two more, followed by a single note.

Suddenly, Anthony Babington was there.

Tousle-haired, his clothes dishevelled and torn in places as though ripped by briars, Babington crouched in the entrance to the makeshift shelter. A dagger in his hand, he stared up at Goodluck as though he could not believe his eyes.

‘Brother Weatherley,’ he managed at last, his voice hoarse. ‘Are you alone?’

Goodluck nodded, but did not move any nearer. It was vital he did not frighten these men, who must already be at their wits’ ends.

Babington crawled out of the shelter on his hands and knees, followed by Robert Gage and Henry Dunne, two other conspirators who had occasionally frequented Babington’s house while Goodluck was there. All three stood and looked at him suspiciously, then Babington nodded to Gage, who searched him with deliberately rough hands, so that Goodluck had to bite his lip not to cry out in pain. The burns Master Topcliffe had inflicted were barely scabbed over and still agonizing when touched.

There was nothing on his person to alert them to any danger. Goodluck had seen to that.

Gage shrugged, turning back to the others with Goodluck’s dagger. ‘Only this.’

‘Give it back to him.’ Babington’s eyes narrowed on Goodluck’s face. ‘You will forgive us if we are impolite, Brother Weatherley, but our necks are at risk now because we have trusted too simply in the past. There can be no other explanation for our arrests than that one of our number betrayed us to Walsingham. I’m glad to see you at least escaped from the Tower, though. Are Ballard and Pooley still there?’

‘Pooley has been freed without charge. Ballard remains under lock and key.’

‘Then God have mercy on his soul.’ Babington crossed himself. ‘But both you and Pooley free? How did you manage such a feat? We heard you were taken straight to Master Topcliffe.’ Warily, Babington looked Goodluck up and down. ‘Even the strongest of men would find it hard to walk away from an interrogation by that vicious bastard.’

‘And how did you find us here in the woods, so far from London?’ demanded Gage abruptly, handing back his dagger with a reluctant expression. The man would much rather, Goodluck guessed, have plunged the blade in his heart. ‘Is there a sign out on the road, saying “Fugitives here”?’

‘There is no mystery, my friends, I assure you. I have been walking for days to find your camp. Pooley and I left London together, hoping to meet up with you. We traced you from Westminster to St John’s Woods, and then kept walking. But Pooley got himself arrested again in Harrow while I was asking directions in a wayside tavern. I hid, and since then I have been alone. Asking only at those places where I knew there to be staunch Catholics, I followed your trail from Harrow to this idyllic spot.’

Goodluck indicated his bruised face, then dragged open his shirt to show the still raw, oozing wounds on his chest and belly. The conspirators recoiled. Now for the story he had prepared. Luckily most of it was true. It was always easier when the lie was half-truth.

‘And I did not walk away from the Tower so much as was carried on a cart. I almost died that night. I was questioned for hours, and put to the rack and the hot irons, but nothing could be proved and they let me go.’

Was that the best he could come up with? Even to his ears it sounded thin.

Babington hesitated. ‘You were lucky, then.’

Was that suspicion in the traitor’s face? Goodluck turned the tables on him as a distraction, his eyes narrowed. ‘If I had been lucky, friend, I would have escaped capture altogether. As you appear to have done.’