Shakespeare's Rebel (30 page)

‘By God, sir, you are right, sir.’ Essex rose again, lifting off the hole as he spoke. ‘To return now is not only the necessary choice for myself. It is right for the Queen. It is right for England.’ His eyes misted. ‘By all the saints, it is my duty and I will not shirk it.’

The noble sound of the declaration was lessened by the sight – his lordship with his clothes snagged about his ankles, his shirt hanging to his naked thighs. John went and stood behind him, bent and lifted doublet and hose together. As Essex shrugged into them, Southampton spoke again. ‘Then let us gather the army, or the vanguard of it. A thousand brave knights riding under your banner? England would flock to it as it once did to Bolingbroke’s standard. We will march on the capital . . . and spike the traitor Cecil’s head on London Bridge.’

All there cheered – save John. He had stepped around to help Essex with such buttons as had survived, and was alarmed to see a familiar gleam in his eyes. He had seen it before – at Zutphen, at Cadiz – and it always heralded some mad act, some charge against the odds. Also, this was the very thing Cecil had feared the most, warned him against. He was already tainted with the title: Essex’s man. Now he was his newest knight banneret, a title that could readily see him hung, drawn and quartered. For this was treason being spoken here, no question, and labelled with a usurper’s name. ‘My lord,’ he said softly, holding him by his lapels, his own eyes seeking to secure a gaze already fixed on future glory, ‘do not do this. If you return to England thus, they will cry you traitor. Word will precede you that you come to make war upon the realm.’

‘No! Only upon Cecil and his cabal.’

‘But Cecil controls what people think,’ John continued urgently, more loudly, to top the murmurs of protest building behind him. ‘You say that he turns the Queen against you. What will he say to her when you march through the land at the head of an army?’

‘He will not be able to say anything with a spike through his skull.’ As he spoke, Southampton stepped close, reaching to John’s hands where they grasped near the earl’s neck, trying to pull them away. ‘Unhand, sirrah!’

But John would not be budged by a mayfly – and he was thinking fast. He knew the rash man he held, and that gleam, well enough to know he would not now be dissuaded. Yet he was ever malleable – perhaps he could be moulded into a more pleasing shape. ‘Think, Robbie,’ he whispered, at last trapping the earl’s shifting eyes with this rare personal address. ‘If you go with an army, you needs must go slowly. Your enemy will be forewarned and make preparations. Perhaps it will come to a pass of arms with all its hazards. At the least, London will be turned into an armed camp against your coming. And then the venomous toad will have all the time he needs to drip that poison into the ear of your sweet Bess. But if you were to arrive before he even knows you have left’ – he let a smile come – ‘well, good my lord, you will be there swiftly enough, and in your beloved person, to provide the antidote.’

The earl’s watery gaze finally settled upon him. ‘What is it you suggest, Johnnie?’

Ignoring Southampton’s continuing tugs and protests, John replied, ‘This. I have just made the journey from London in five days, and you are twice the horseman I will ever be. So ride, with only your closest companions. Ride for Whitehall, make straight for the Queen. Your words, your presence. She will listen to you, heed your grievances, see your truth.’ He leaned nearer. ‘And then she will dispatch your enemies.’

He had no idea if what he said was true. Having spoken to the Queen twice now, and knowing the cunning of Cecil, he suspected not. Yet he had been in enough of his friend’s plays to understand a little of the horrors of the civil war Essex’s armed return would bring. This alternative was better – for England, for Essex . . . and for himself. A proclaimed traitor would never win Tess back. Ned would never rise as a traitor’s son; while the players would never let such a one share a platform with them. They will have enough problem with a knight, he thought, flushing cold, something he had not yet considered.

He released Essex’s lapels, stepped away. Southampton and the other lords swarmed in, countering his arguments. But though his ears were full of other earls’ words, Essex’s eyes were still on John Lawley. ‘Let be!’ he bellowed, loud enough to command a silence. He took a step towards his new knight, nodded once, then turned back. ‘Sir John is right. I will to the Queen, by the swiftest of routes and with only you, my choicest brothers in arms.’ He raised a hand against the clamour that came. ‘Should it be necessary, do you not believe that we alone will be swords enough for Cecil’s paltry crew? But I do not think such extremity will be necessary – for I will neither sleep nor rest till I am once again all alone with my sweet Bess. Then I will provide’ – he glanced at John, and smiled – ‘an antidote to poison.’ He turned back, raised his arms high. ‘Gentlemen,’ he cried, ‘we ride for London!’

XXIII

Nonsuch Palace

It was the cobbles that woke him, the sudden clatter of them under his mount’s shod hooves. He jerked upright in his saddle, looked around him, bleary eyes confirming what his ears had already told him – they had at long last left the unending countryside behind. They had reached the City.

Or at least Westminster. The abbey’s unmistakable spire was directly ahead of them. They were riding towards it.

The thought made him swivel. If they were heading towards the abbey, they were heading away from the palace. Away from the goal that had sustained them through the four days and nights of hard riding. Away from the Queen. Had they already failed? While he nodded on his horse’s neck, had Essex lost his gamble? And were they now making for Westminster to seek sanctuary in its cloisters from her majesty’s wrath?

‘She’s not there,’ came a voice from beside him. It had an Irish lilt to it, and John glanced sharp right. Captain Christopher St Lawrence, six foot six of Hibernian braggadocio, was riding stirrup to stirrup with him. He’d known him a little in the Netherlands. A good and loyal soldier, one of the few he’d at least been happy to see in Dublin. The man smiled. ‘I thought you might slip off. So I was here to catch you.’

‘Much obliged.’ Sleeping men
had
slipped off their horses in the hurly-burly dash across the realm. Most had survived with bruises. One knight had broken his arm and been abandoned on the roadside. There was to be barely a pause in their journey, only the briefest of halts to commandeer fresh horses at country inns, plunder their larders, sleep for a scant few hours in their barns and ride on. John thought he had made the journey to Dublin in a record time of five days. Essex’s return had taken only four.

He yawned widely, stared at the man beside him. Even the big Irishman, with all the vigour of youth on his side, was looking exhausted. What had he just said? Why were they making for Westminster?

His confused looks must have been question enough. An answer came. ‘She’s at Nonsuch Palace,’ the captain said. ‘We enquired for her at Whitehall and were told so.’

Nonsuch. John’s sigh melded into another vast yawn. It was ten miles south of the city, nothing when compared to all the miles they’d cantered – from the valleys of north Wales, through the vales of Evesham and the White Horse, over the hills of the Cotswolds and the Chilterns. However, like most journeys, the last part seemed endless. He remembered how interminable the Channel had appeared after two and a half years away with Drake.

For mercy’s sake, could he not just sleep?

The party clattered on to the dock at the Lambeth ferry. On the opposite bank, Lollards’ Tower thrust up from the Archbishop’s Palace. It had been but two weeks since he had been a prisoner within its black stones, had that audience with the Queen and her secretary. Now, perhaps, he was to see them both again.

Men were dismounting, and he did the same. There was an ordinary near the dock and its proprietors were being kicked awake and commanded to produce a meal of last night’s stew, stale bread and ale. The ferry was across on the Surrey shore but was even now under way, moving towards them. John leaned against his mount’s warm flank, and glanced downriver, east. It was lightening there, and though he could not see around the river’s bend, he knew that the rising sun would already be gilding the tower of St Mary Overies, Southwark. Close by beneath it, Tess and Ned would still be sleeping, ignoring the toll that came, as Lambeth’s now did, to summon them to another day’s endeavours. The thought of curling around either of them, feeling that horsehair mattress beneath him, inhaling the warm night sweetness of their forms? Ah! It was a vision of heaven and he found himself seeking a wherry at the dock. There were several fellows asleep in their craft, any one of whom would happily awaken at the jangle of the coins in John Lawley’s purse. He still had several that the Master Secretary had given him for his mission. He would have traded every one of them for a swift conveyance to his Bankside paradise.

A shout followed by laughter drew his eyes back. The Earl of Essex stood close to the water’s edge, in the forefront as ever. Someone had brought him a tankard and he held it aloft, beer foam frothing over its lip, pledging. John heard the familiar words: ‘A health to her majesty and damnation to the toad!’ It, and other such oaths, had sustained them in their journey. And when any flagged, they’d find Robert Devereux at their elbow, cheering them on, inspiring them with his fervour, the damn-near-holiness of their mission. No longer were they chasing Irish wraiths through the rain-sodden bogs, trying to close with an enemy who would not fight in any honourable manner. No longer were their shoulders hunched against the sudden ball and flung spear of ambuscado. They were riding unthreatened through England’s fair lanes, and on a mission they could understand: to free the Queen from her treasonous counsellors. To save the realm from disaster.

And they were riding for him. John shook his head, as Essex bellowed again and quaffed and men cheered. For all his mad arrogance, he was again a leader to inspire. The sorry fellow voiding his bowels in Dublin Castle’s jakes had gone. He was once more a commander of men, leading them to glory. No matter that what awaited could be a Queen’s cold fury, and a traitor’s cell for all of them. Each man there, as most did in the land, played at dice; each this day sought the hazard in the earl’s rash roll.

Essex, a head taller than all save for the hulking St Lawrence, espied him above the crowd. ‘Sir Knight,’ he shouted, ‘join us.’ As John came near, he continued, ‘Marry, Johnnie, I have never known a fellow could sleep so soundly on a horse’s back. You scarce woke up from Carnarvon to Slough. How do you do it?’

‘’Tis the purity of my life, good my lord. It gives me nothing but sweet dreams and easy rest.’

Hoots greeted this, the loudest coming from Essex. ‘It must have been your pure life that helped your bare arse pump up and down so vigorously in that Cadiz señora’s house,’ the earl countered, then thrust his leather tankard out. ‘Here, let’s drink to the ladies of Spain.’

‘The ladies of Spain!’ came the cry, and John pledged, drank, looking over the rim at the men around him. Each had sagged over their mount’s neck in the previous few days – Southampton, Wooton, Danvers and the rest – but all looked now as if they had been revived by their leader’s fire, eyes and cheeks glowing with it. They could see the destination ahead, believed certainly in their triumph. With such a captain, how could they fail? And even John, who knew him better than most, began to doubt his own doubt. After all, no one in recent years had had more sway over the ageing Queen than handsome young Essex. And if he was no longer quite the gilded youth of yore, if dissipation, the flux and Irish compromise had all taken a toll of him, he was still the Queen’s champion, Earl Marshal of England – and perhaps yet her sweet Robin?

John thought again of the handkerchief she’d entrusted to him, still folded within his doublet. In the four-day pell-mell ride, he’d found few solitary moments to pass it over. And when one brief one came . . . he’d hesitated, and the chance passed. He had not sought another. The Queen, after all, had forbidden Essex’s return unless he came wearing the laurel wreath of victory, this token woven into it. Besides, John knew the earl well. He could carry a day with his blood hot – as he had at Zutphen, at Cadiz. Righteous anger might keep it so – but not, John suspected, the uncertainties of a queen’s love.

John looked again downriver . . . and visions of a soft bed passed. He would see this through. For better or worse he was Essex’s man – at least on this day. And if the earl triumphed – well, Sir John Lawley might not be such a bad title to be taking back to Southwark. Especially with a certain fat knight still guarding a lonely beach in Erin.

The ferry bumped into the dock. The ferryman was calling something and the Irish captain went to talk with him. He returned, his black-browed face further darkened with a frown. ‘The Toad may be forewarned,’ he rasped. ‘The ferryman tells me he only just dropped a fellow on the south bank. ’Twas that scoundrel Grey.’

A collective hiss. All knew that Lord Grey was the earl’s enemy, all the more bitter because he had once been his friend. Essex had knighted him on the Cadiz expedition. Grey had repaid him by siding with Cecil.

‘Traitorous dog! Would he pre-empt me with her majesty? God’s wounds!’

Amidst the hubbub, one voice rose. ‘Let me ride and overtake him,’ said one Sir Thomas Gerard. ‘We are related, through my wife, and he was wont to call me cousin. Let me persuade him to a pause at least.’

It was agreed. The Essex party crowded the gunnels of the ferry, all the more tight-packed for the one horse – Gerard’s. The rest of the mounts would be brought across on the next trip.

The ferryman heaved on the rope, aided no doubt by the leaning of the whole group, yearning for the Surrey side. As soon as the ferry ground into the dock there, Gerard mounted and took off at a gallop. The rest disembarked . . . and a shout came immediately. ‘Whose mounts are these?’ yelled Essex.

John looked to a copse of oak. Beneath their branches, fifteen horses stood. Two grooms attended them, staring open-mouthed at the new arrivals. When Essex strode forward, the lads fell to their knees. He repeated the question and one of the grooms stammered the reply. ‘They . . . they . . . they belongs to my ma-master, your worship. Squire Martyn of Cheam, come last night to do business in the t-town.’