Silent Court (17 page)

His hand dropped from Marlowe’s and he joined it to the other, holding Helene’s hand, keeping her warm. Because when she was completely cold, men would come to encase her in oak and bury her and he wasn’t ready for that yet. He would never be ready, but he would allow it.

‘Goodbye, Kit. Safe journey to you all.’

‘I’ll see you again,’ Marlowe said, ‘and I will show you Helene’s immortality.’

‘When you have time.’

‘Yes. When I have time.’

The camp had been made late and lazy. There were no fires and the Egyptians were sleeping tumbled together in the wagons, wrapped up in their cloaks and each other to beat the chill. They had not bothered to erect the yurt; time was pressing, they were tired and the death of Helene and the arrest of Rose had plunged them all into a low mood. Marlowe found himself sharing the wagon not just with the various livestock from his first night, but also Simon, who took up more than his fair share of room and had a tendency to mutter in his sleep. At least the parrot was quiet once it had a cloth over its wicker cage. The monkey, at the furthest extent of its leash, was pressed up against Marlowe’s back, where he exuded enough warmth to pay for the inconvenience of the fleas and the smell.

At the edge of the huddle of wagons, the horses stood quietly, too cold to toss their manes, just intent on huddling together for as much warmth as they could muster. The blankets over their backs were something, but the frost coloured their breath silver as they waited for dawn. The dogs had slunk into the wagons one by one and were twitching in their sleep amongst the children.

Only one pair of eyes was watching the road from Ely, watching for followers, flannel-footed and evil. There was no reason to believe that all the trouble had been left behind the doors of Dee’s grieving house and it was not possible to be too careful. But the soft hoof-beats which finally broke the silence of the night came from the other way, from the Fens and the coast and the heaving North Sea. The rider was not making an effort to be quiet, he was almost asleep in the saddle and the horse had settled into an uneven walk, with one loose shoe giving a double clip to every clop.

The watcher in the hedge peered closer in the starlight and drew back as the rider came closer. It was Trumpy Joe Fludd, on his way back to Cambridge, empty-handed and despondent. His head lolled and every fourth nod woke him sufficiently to stop him falling from the saddle. His empty purse was at his belt and his empty future as Constable reached ahead of him on the curve of the frosty road. He didn’t look to left or right and so he never saw his quarry sleeping on the other side of the hedge. So, like two galliasses passing in thick fog, oars muffled and sails hanging slack, the Egyptians and Joseph Fludd met and parted for one final time.

‘Who are these people, Hern?’ Bracket wanted to know as the Egyptian caravanserai rattled into the little seaside town.

‘Fishing folk.’ Hern turned to the boy on the wagon beside him. ‘Ship-men who cross to Holland and France. I expect… what? Ten purses from you and Tomaso. Twelve would be better.’

‘Why twelve, Hern?’

‘You’ll need that many to match one taken in London. They’re poor. Take Starshine with you. Get her to limp a little, turn in her feet. And only go for couples. The men won’t soften like their wives and the wives won’t be carrying any money.’

The smoke drifted lazily up from the chimneys of Lynn, made the King’s since Lord Harry’s day.

‘Drums!’ called Hern. ‘Music!’

And the sleepy, stunned caravanserai thumped into life, the women shrilling and the children cartwheeling in the road, streaming their bright ribbons into the sky.

NINE

J
oseph Fludd stood over the little mound of earth that marked Ann Harris’s grave. Beside him stood his under-constables, Nathaniel Hawkins and Jabez Hazel. The winter ground was like iron, the ice lying in rivulets in the ruts of the road. A single posy of dead flowers lay at the grave’s head below a small wooden cross.

‘Who put that there?’ the Constable wanted to know. He still ached from his hours on the road and had barely had time to kiss his Allys and the children before he had returned the horse to Hobson’s stables and made his way in the raw morning to Trumpington churchyard, in the care of St Mary and St Michael.

‘The Reverend Mildmay,’ Hazel told him. ‘We were all here, along with half of the village.’

‘Nobody from the town, though,’ Hawkins mumbled. ‘Bastards.’

Fludd nodded. ‘They’re urban, squat and packed with guile,’ he said. ‘What did you expect?’

Nat Hawkins knew Trumpy Joe Fludd of old. They’d grown up together, learned their letters from the same schoolmaster. Except that Nat hadn’t learned that many. Still, some things needed to be said. ‘I expected you to come back with an Egyptian or two,’ he blurted out. ‘To pay for this.’

Fludd turned to the man. For a second, he contemplated flattening him, then he relented. ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘The Egyptians had nothing to do with this.’

Hawkins looked at Hazel. Had Trumpy Joe gone mad? It
had
to be the Egyptians.

‘Know what I think?’ Hazel crossed to the others. ‘It went something like this. One of ’em, the moon children I mean, would have got her talking, old Gammer Harris, telling her fortune, filling her head with all sorts of nonsense. Then, another one, one of the kids I reckon, would have been ransacking the house. She heard ’em, did old Gammer, and would have set off a-shouting, like she did. You must remember, Joe, when we were children and scared to death of Gammer Harris and her tongue.’

The Constable nodded. She’d certainly had a pair of lungs on her, had Gammer Harris.

‘So,’ Hazel said, looking solemnly into Fludd’s face, ‘she had to be silenced.’

‘Where was Jem while all this fortune-telling, shouting and stealing was going on?’ the Constable asked. ‘Where was her husband?’

‘In the Lammas Field,’ Hawkins told him. ‘Hedging. Like what they pay him for.’

‘Who told you that?’ Fludd wanted to know.

‘Everybody,’ Hawkins said.

‘Did everybody see him?’ Fludd asked.

‘Er… Well, he’s always there.’ Hawkins held his ground. ‘There or not far away. The Lammas field has got a lot of hedges. No sooner’s he got round it once, it’s time to start again, more nor less.’

‘Did anybody see him?’ Fludd repeated, slowly and deliberately. There was no answer this time. Least of all from Gammer Harris.

A cold rain thudded into the thatch of Jem Harris’s hovel that night. He and the Constable sat in front of a roaring fire, one of the few benefits of being a hedger. The trimmings had to be burned anyway, so why not on his fire?

‘So –’ Jem was sipping an ale he kept for special visitors – ‘you saw him hanged, then?’

‘With my own eyes,’ Fludd lied. ‘After he’d confessed, of course.’

Jem looked at him, eyes bright in the firelight. ‘Why did he do it? Did he say? Did he tell you why he killed my Ann?’

‘You know these Egyptians.’ Fludd shrugged, though clearly Jem Harris didn’t. ‘Moon-driven. Mad as corn hares in harvest time. I expect you miss your Ann, Jem?’

‘Oh, I do, I do,’ the old man said, helping himself to another draught from the pitcher.

‘Her nagging.’

‘Yes.’

‘Some women.’ Fludd laughed. ‘My Allys is the one. Got a mouth on her like Hell in those old mystery plays. Remember them?’

‘I do,’ the old hedger crowed. ‘I miss all that, you know. The good old days.’

‘Yes.’ Fludd was in full flow now. ‘Still, you won’t really miss old Ann’s whine, will you? There are some days I could take hold of Allys and beat her backside raw. It’s “Joe, have you done this? Joe, where’s that? Joe, when are you going to get round to the other?” Drives you mad, doesn’t it?’

‘It does,’ Harris enthused. ‘It does.’

‘Is that why you did it, Jem?’ Fludd was suddenly quiet, staring at the man sharing the fire with him. ‘That morning? Had she nagged you once too often? Is that why you took your billhook to her head?’

Harris blinked, then swigged from the pitcher. ‘What about the Egyptian?’ he whispered.

‘There was no Egyptian, Jem,’ Fludd told him. ‘There never was. Why should an Egyptian set foot here? Man, there’s nothing to steal but a flagon of ale and some firewood. Those people live by their wits. They don’t need to kill. Especially some harmless old woman like your Ann.’

‘Harmless?’ Jem exploded. ‘Harmless? Are we talking about the same Ann Harris? Nag, nag. She never shut up. I’d flogged her, beaten her. Even had her put in the scold’s bridle once – before your time, young Fludd. You’re ma would remember, God rest her soul. I just… just lost my temper, that’s all. The red mist just came up and then, when it was over, I pulled the billhook out of her head and went hedging. It’s quiet in Lammas Field, you know, Joe. Peaceful. No nagging.’

There was a silence and the two men looked at each other.

‘What happens now?’ Harris hardly dared ask.

Fludd stood up. ‘Now, you’ll come with me, Jeremiah Harris,’ he said, ‘on a charge of murder.’ He patted the man’s bony shoulder. ‘And we’ll find you somewhere quiet.’

The servants were used to it, of course; the master ambling around the knot gardens on his grey old mule. His robes hauled up over the saddle and his feet almost touching the ground, he was usually to be found letting the animal wander while he had his nose in a book. Cicero from the saddle. He meandered in the scent of box, rosemary and thyme, depending on the taste of the mule that particular day. The animal’s browsing defined the flavour of the air.

This morning was a little different. The hoar frost lay thick on the low, trained hedges and jewelled the spiders’ webs with a sparkling faerie dust. The master was wrapped up against the cold, a huge woollen cloak trailing the ground as he rode, the capacious hood over his head, shading his face. Beside him strode Sir Francis Walsingham, who would rather cut off his own arm than ride a beast of burden such as this. He had rather hoped to have this conversation in the man’s library, warming his arse before a roaring fire and borrowing a book, or in his study or even his private chapel –
anywhere
with walls and a roof. But this was William Cecil, Lord Burghley, the right hand of the Queen and no one, not even Francis Walsingham, called the tune in his presence. So the pair plodded their way past the sharp, red brick of the North Front, the frost sparkling on the broad steps in a band where the sun had not reached.

‘So, it’s treason then, you’re sure?’ Burghley asked, looking at the ice thick on the carp pond and his breath snaking out from under his hood into the morning air.

‘We have Throckmorton’s confession. I felt a little sorry for him in the end.’

Burghley halted the mule with a sharp tug on the rein. He leaned back in the saddle so that he could look into Walsingham’s eyes without giving up the warmth of his hood. ‘You won’t lose sight of the point of all this, Francis, will you?’

‘My Lord?’ the spymaster frowned.

‘The bigger picture,’ Burghley told him. ‘The continued safety of Her Majesty and the peace of her realm.’

‘My every waking thought,’ Walsingham said and he meant it, even if it did mean trudging through a frosty morning in air that froze the blood. ‘Shelley and the other conspirators in Sussex are under lock and key, awaiting the Queen’s pleasure.’

‘Kill them.’ said Burghley. ‘We’re not playing games here, Francis. We must cut out the canker in this country’s heart. I don’t care whether it is Catholic or Puritan. I’ll draw up a Bond of Association.’

‘A bloody process, my Lord,’ Walsingham observed.

Burghley nudged the mule on again. ‘What news from Delft?’ he asked. ‘Nothing gets to me here at Hatfield. I must get back to Whitehall.’

‘By some miracle, my Lord, the attempt on the life of the Statholder failed.’

‘Miracle, Francis?’ Burghley didn’t look at him. ‘What do you and I know of that?’

‘I know that a wheel-lock pistol fired at point blank range should have blown the head off William of Nassau, but it didn’t. The man yet lives.’

‘By a hair’s breadth, I heard.’

‘True, but his wife nurses him day and night.’

Burghley smiled. ‘They’re good like that, wives,’ he said, smiling up at the leaded panes of the east wing where Lady Burghley, his Mildred, still lay wrapped in her eiderdown. ‘So what should we do?’

Walsingham found himself chuckling. ‘My Lord, it is not for me to dictate the policy of the state…’

‘Policy of the state, my arse,’ grunted Burghley. ‘Walsingham, we
are
the state. One slip from us, one wrong judgement and we may as well kneel before the Bishop of Rome and pay court to any Catholic Johnny-Come-Lately who doffs his cap at the Queen.’

It was Walsingham’s turn to stop and he turned to face the Chief Secretary. ‘But surely, the Queen won’t…’

‘Succumb to marriage?’ Burghley reined in the mule again and eased his backside from the leather, letting his frozen toes touch the ground. ‘I gave up on that one long ago. I leave predictions to wizards like John Dee, men who read the weather and the stars and the way bones fall. I deal – as do you, dear Francis – in reality. And the reality is that the Queen is the most eligible ruler in Europe if you discount Philip of Spain.’ He looked into Walsingham’s eyes. ‘And we all
do
discount Philip of Spain, don’t we?’

Walsingham smiled and walked on. ‘If William survives?’ he asked.

‘If the Statholder survives and lives to take on Philip and Parma and the whole Godless tribe of them, I for one will be amazed. If he doesn’t and if the Low Countries should fall to Spain…’

‘Then we’re next,’ Walsingham said, finishing the Chief Secretary’s sentence for him, even without the prescience of the Queen’s magus.

‘There’ll be other attempts,’ Burghley said. ‘Other Juan Jaureguys to break through the cordon of the Statholder. And William the Silent will be silent for ever.’

‘I have a man for that,’ Walsingham said, ‘to watch his back.’

‘Oh? Who?’

‘A new face. Name of Marlowe. It was he who closed the Shelley business. You’ll have read my dispatch.’

‘Of course.’ Realization dawned on the Chief Secretary. ‘Is he sound? One of us? Can he stand on his own two feet?’