The Roots of Betrayal (9 page)

Clarenceux hammered on the door of James Emery's house for the third time. It was still early. If Emery had left already, with servants too, that was indeed unusual. He knocked again and looked up at the gathering clouds.

The door opened. A boy looked out, holding it only just ajar.

“Good day to you,” said Clarenceux. “I presume that your master is away?”

The boy looked nervous. “Sir, he has not been home since late last night.”

“And his servant, Adam? The man who normally attends to callers?”

“He is also absent, sir. He traveled yesterday. I do not know where he was going.”

“He told you to tell me that?”

The boy hesitated. He did not know what to say. Clarenceux just waited until eventually he received the answer. “Yes, sir.”

He nodded. “Thank you. You have been most helpful. Good day.”

He walked slowly along the uneven mud of the street into Huggin Lane. There he stopped and looked back, not at Emery's house but at Mrs. Barker's, on the corner where Huggin Alley met Little Trinity Lane. He wondered whether he should call. He did not know the woman; he had never met her or any of her servants. He pondered further, tapping one of his boots against the other. It would be a last resort—if everything else failed—to seek her help finding Rebecca.
The
chances
are
that
Mrs. Barker has never heard of me. She might see it as her role to protect Rebecca from everyone she does not know
.

He began to walk north, deciding he would next go to Robert Lowe's house, adjacent to the wall near Cripplegate. He crossed Old Fish Street, turned into Bread Street, and marched past Gerrard's Hall into the parish of St. Mary le Bow. Lines of tiled roofs greeted him: two-story houses, three-story houses, with shops at ground floor and leaning upper structures. Old houses and new, glazed houses and those just with shutters. At Cheapside there were crowds dawdling around the market stalls and looking in the unshuttered shop fronts along the street. Some people were queuing at the conduit; others had stopped to watch a street juggler. Clarenceux crossed straight into Wood Street, his mind fixed on Robert Lowe.

When he arrived at the blacksmith's house, he glanced up at the windows. They were all closed. It was not a good sign. Still, he knocked and waited for a full minute before walking down the side of the house to try the gate through to the backyard and the forge, where Lowe worked. This too was locked.

He looked back along the street. He knew he could climb over and into the yard, but that would not necessarily give him the information he needed. It was suspicious that Lowe was not at home on the same day that Emery had stayed away overnight. Had Emery spoken to Lowe?

It did not matter. There was one person left who might be able to answer his questions: Nicholas Hill, in St. Dionis Backchurch.

In the parlor of his house, Walsingham rubbed his hands to warm them and sat down again at the table. It was covered in papers. These in turn were covered in black ink: symbols, lists, and calculations. It now seemed certain that the cipher was alphabetic, not numeric, so that it was the shapes that represented the actual letters, not their numerical value.

A knock came at the door.

“Go away,” shouted Walsingham, loath to look up from his notes. The door opened. He glanced up to see who it was.

A well-dressed man in his early twenties entered and bowed. “Mr. Walsingham, if you will permit me, I have some suggestions.”

“Master Richards. You have discovered something?”

“I think so, sir. The message is a cipher, written in English. May I show you?”

Walsingham beckoned him forward. The young man placed a sheaf of papers on the table. He shuffled one to the top.

“This is the message as received. You remarked on the recurrence of the sequence DCC-. As you know, it is not at first clear whether this is a code or a cipher. Also, if it is a cipher, then we need to know if DCC- represents one, two, three, or four letters. I tried all the common three-letter words and none of them worked, so I set about trying all the common four-letter words with a double letter. That proved false too. The French solution did not work either. There are very few double letters in Latin. That set me thinking. Why did we think the three-letter solution false? It was because of the commas. If you recall, we found instances of a pause or a comma followed by two letters and then another comma, and so we concluded that the two letters had to represent a single letter—A or I—but that did not work elsewhere in the message. But what if the commas themselves were part of the cipher? That way of thinking is more productive. In fact, the message starts to work.”

“Show me.”

John Richards placed a second piece of paper in front of Walsingham. “I went back to our first theory—that DCC- stands for a common three-letter word, such as ‘and' or ‘the.' Taking the latter possibility, the D would be a cipher for
t
, CC for
h
and - for
e
. Identifying the
th
is important because it shows where the word
that
is most likely to occur, and that reveals the important cipher for a second vowel,
A
, which turns out to be a
V
. If you look at the message, you find a comma followed by the letters
ththat
. For this reason we initially ruled out the possibility that DCC- could mean ‘the.' But if the comma is part of the cipher, then it makes sense. The section in question reads ‘the MMMeIe, ththat' or, spaced properly, with the deciphered letters underlined, ‘
the
MMM
e
I
e
,
th
that.' Obviously a triple letter MMM is impossible, so that must be a cipher either for a single letter or a diphthong. But, look at the comma in that passage: there are very few words that end with the four letters e–something–th. Even allowing for phonetic spellings, that pause can only represent a
d
, an
n
, or an
r
.

“Now, there is a long sequence repeated toward the end. I've underlined the letters already hypothesized from the words ‘the' and ‘that.'” He placed a third sheet over the top of the second. It had just a section of the text:

T
CCC\ICCCCCCCC
E
+CCCC
E
MMM
E
,

TAT
XI
E
MMMMMMCC
E
IIXMMMMMM
EA
I
E
LCCCC\

CCCMM\, /\,
AT
/
A
II,\,
THE
MMM
E
I
E
,

THTHAT
II
E
CCC
A
CIII
E
MMMICCCC
E
C\IIIXMMMMMMM
E
,

/C\ICCCCCCCC
E
+CCCC
E
MMM
E
,
TAT
XI
E
MMM
T
\
H\

“What jumps out is the deciphered sequence of letters ‘tat.' It appears twice—and both times they are preceded by the letters ‘CICCCCCCCC
E
+CCCC
E
MMM
E
,' and followed by ‘XI
E
MMM.' But the interesting thing is that the first time they are followed by two ‘MMM's and the second by only one. As one cannot have a triple letter, ‘MMM' is probably a single letter. Now, going back to the section we identified earlier”—Richards pointed back at the second sheet—“the ‘MMM' in ‘MMM
E
I
E
,
TH
' must also be a single letter. There is only one seven-letter word that fits that pattern: ‘seventh.' And finally”—he placed his last sheet of paper on the table—“if you test this hypothesis, the message does start to read more coherently, because that repeated long word that I mentioned becomes decipherable: ‘\
V
CCCCCCCC
E
+CCCC
ESENTAT
X
VEST
.' You can see the word ‘representatives' so ‘CCCC' must be an R and X is the cipher for I.”

Walsingham looked at the last page, which Richards now placed before him. It read:

RI
>
HTHI
CCCIIIMMCII
E
<\CCCCCC
EN
/
VST
\C\
VR
MM
A
/

C
SHIP
II
EHAVERE
<
EIVE
/C\
VRINSTRV
<
TI
\
NS
L
R
\

CCC
SIRPER
<
I
I
A
MM
AN
/
THE
II
I
/\II
IS
II
I
MMMM
IN
>
T
\/\

II
HATS
CC
E
<
ANT
\
REST
\
RETHE
<
ATH
\MM
I
<
TREASVRET
\

VSS
\
THAT
C\
VAN
/II
ET
\>
ETHER
CCC
I
>
HTE
LL
E
<

TITSTRVTHSHE
II
I
MMMMIII
E
/
ESPAT
<
HE
/IIIC
SHIPINTHE
<\

CCC
PAN
C\L
R
\III
ERT
MM\II
E
L
R
\CCCMM\
N
/\
NT
\
SAN
/

II
I
<
HAN
/
THERE
<
HAN
>
E
/T\
AVESSE
MMIII\
VN
/L\

RS
<\
T
MM
AN
/II
HEREVP
\
NSHE
II
I
MMMM<\

N
L
I
CCCCCCC
HERARRIVA
MMII
IT
CCC\

VRREPRESENTATIVESSHE
II
I
MMMMMM
EAVE
L
R
\

CCCMM\
N
/\
NAT
/
A
II
N
\

NTHESEVENTHTHAT
II
E
CCC
A
CIII
ESVRE
C\

III
I
MMMM
SEN
/C\
VRREPRESENTATIVEST
\
H
\MMCCCCC\\/

II
E
III
E
>C\
VSEN
/II\
R
/IIIC
THISSA
CCC
E
CCC
ESSEN
>
ER
>\ /

SPEE
/C\
VR
MM
A
/C
SHIP
C\
VR
/
EV
\
TE
/
SERVANTSPER
R
\C

“I can see the word ‘treasure,'” said Walsingham. “I can also see ‘servants'…yes, and I can see the word ‘instructions'—look, that diagonal line must be an O.”

“And the first word is ‘right,'” declared Richards, reading over his shoulder.

“Which means that ‘essenger' appears near the end, so ‘CCC' is an ‘m.' This is excellent, Richards.” Walsingham nodded at his protégé approvingly. “Sir William will be very pleased.”

Clarenceux's stride grew faster as he walked along Lombard Street. He was angry. He looked up at the tower of St. Mary Woolnoth and frowned, despite the pleasant blue sky, patched with white clouds. Hours were passing and he had nothing to show for the day. His enemies had betrayed him and now they were stealing his time as well. Minute by minute he was losing the chance to trace Rebecca.

He walked across wide Gracechurch Street and stepped over a pile of dung. Refusing to wait for a stream of carts to pass, he dodged between two of them and walked on swiftly past St. Benet's until he could see St. Dionis Backchurch on his left. Here the city shrank in scale. There were tiny alleys barely wide enough to walk along two abreast and places where houses' first-floor jetties were so low you could bash your head if you were not careful. There were paths so intertwined and twisting that you could easily get lost, especially when the London fog descended. Old sites had been divided at every rebuilding, each old messuage turned into three or four merchants' houses. Half of those had been turned into single-room tenements, so that a merchants' house of six chambers might now be home to twenty people. The other half had been pulled down and were ugly one- and two-story cheap wooden tenements put up by unscrupulous merchant landlords, who did not care that their tenants lived in close proximity to a communal cesspit and had to walk all the way to the conduit at the corner of Gracechurch Street and Cheapside to fetch a bucket of water.

In these gloomy alleys—more like paths through a forest than streets in a city—the wardens and parish officers did not walk alone but only in twos and threes. The fetid mud stank of feces and urine, and the water dripping from the overhanging eaves gave the whole area a dismal feeling. The smoke from the wood of the cooking fires was a blessing; it was the only wholesome thing about the place. Clarenceux worked his way through the maze of houses by the occasional patch of sunlight on the lanes and the church towers and spires. He knew if he continued walking north from the parish church he would come to a narrow alley on his left that split into two, one side wider than the other. The wider one had a two-story building on the right with scallop shells above the door.

Five minutes later, there it was. The piece of carved wood covering the lintel was coming away and hanging down slightly, and there was no doorframe. But the four irregularly spaced scallop shells, nailed above the door and green with age, were clear enough.

Clarenceux drew his knife and hammered on the door. It opened: a woman in her late twenties with her hair tied up in a dirty white scarf answered. She looked shocked to see Clarenceux. The door swung open into a dimly lit living space with a stone fireplace and old baskets hanging from the ceiling. A small cooking fire was on the hearth, with a chafing dish set into the ashes on one side and a small cauldron suspended above the flames. Nicholas Hill was standing beside the stairs, unshaven, his belly proud before him, his jerkin loose over his shirt. He was dressed in the same fawn doublet he had been wearing when Clarenceux had first met him last December.

Clarenceux walked straight in. “Did you think the Knights of the Round Table could just take that document and that I would do nothing about it?” he demanded. “Well—did you?” Without thinking or pausing to check his rage, Clarenceux found himself aiming a fist straight at Hill's jaw. Hill, however, saw the punch coming, and stepped to one side, leaving Clarenceux to lurch off-balance.

“You should not have come here, Clarenceux. You should have proclaimed that marriage agreement while you had the chance.”

“I was charged to look after that document with my life.”

“Then you value your life more highly than the True Faith,” said Hill. “And that is bad. But not as bad as the fact that you betrayed us.”

“I did not betray you. I saved you from Walsingham. You would still be in his prison if—”

“You led Walsingham's men to our doors! You stood by and waited for us all to be arrested. For what? So you could keep that document as if it's an heirloom, a grant of arms or some historical treasure. Shame on you, Clarenceux, shame on you! You did not act as Henry Machyn told you to. You withheld us from our purpose.”

Clarenceux glared at Hill. “Where is Rebecca Machyn? Where is the marriage agreement?”

Hill leaned forward, as if taunting Clarenceux. “My…lips…are…sealed.”

Clarenceux lashed out again. This time he was faster than Hill and his fist connected with the man's nose. Hill staggered backward, turned, and reached for a sword that hung on the wall. He swept around with it, drawing it from its scabbard, and moved to stab Clarenceux, but as he came forward, Clarenceux leaped aside and drew his own blade.

Hill's terrified wife let out a scream.

Clarenceux shouted, “How is it that your father has died and you are still here in this slum? Did he write you out of his will—for being a fool?”

“How dare you speak of my father!”

“He had more sense than you. He advised you to give up the document.” As he spoke, Hill thrust. Clarenceux easily parried the blow. “To whom did he leave his house in St. Mary Woolnoth? Not to you, clearly. Is that what disturbs you?”

Hill's wife moved to the stairs. “Stop it, Nicholas,” she cried. “You can't kill him. He's a gentleman. They'll hang you if they catch you.”

“They won't. No one knows he is here. No one is waiting for him—he acts alone. At least he does now, since Rebecca Machyn chose to side with us.”

Clarenceux knew how to use a weapon better than Hill. He had been trained. He could play with the man. He swept the blade across Hill's line of vision, then darted forward and cut him in the shoulder, drawing blood. He then drew the point back across Hill's face as the latter winced with the pain, moving forward and catching the wrist of the man's sword hand. “Drop it!” he commanded, holding the point of his sword at Hill's throat. “Drop it or I'll fight you in earnest.”

Hill stopped. But he did not drop the sword.

“When did your father die?” Clarenceux demanded. “Was it in February?”

“He did not leave me his house because it was not his,” Hill said. “He rented it. It was his way out of these alleys. I always hoped that religious change would be mine.”

Clarenceux reached forward and took the sword from Hill's hand. He gave it to the man's wife, not taking his eyes off him. “Put it away somewhere safe until I have gone. I do not want to harm your husband but he is dangerous. I would sooner run him through than have him do the same to me.”

Hill's wife took the blade and ran upstairs, the wooden soles of her shoes sounding loud on the steps.

“Does she know what this is about?” Clarenceux asked.

Hill nodded.

“And your children?”

“What children?”

Clarenceux paused. “None of you have children. You do not, nor does James Emery, nor Rebecca Machyn—all three of hers died. Henry Machyn's only son has turned into a drunkard and Robert Lowe has no children. Maybe if you had children you would be more mindful of the future and the necessity of protecting your offspring, not feeding them to religious fires.”

Hill looked like an animal about to pounce. Clarenceux kept his distance, taking no chances. “Now tell me—when did your father die?” he repeated.

“February the sixteenth.”

“So who is Sir Percival?”

“I do not know.”

“Yes, you do. Mr. Emery told me four of you are left. None of you would trust William Draper. Lancelot Heath's whereabouts are unknown. Daniel Gyttens and your father are both dead. That leaves Lowe, Emery, yourself, and Sir Percival. Who is he?” Clarenceux looked Hill in the eye and lifted his sword to his throat, holding the point about two inches away. “I know Sir Percival brings and sends messages to and from Lady Percy. But who is he?”

“I will not tell.”

Clarenceux darted upward with the blade and slashed Hill's cheek, surprised at how easily the sharp point sliced into his skin. Blood rushed to the surface and ran down his chin.

“I asked: who is he?”

Hill felt the blood with his fingers. “He is a holier man than you.”

“Who is he?” Clarenceux insisted. “Where can I find him?”

“You will never find him. None of us knows his name, do you not remember?”

“But you have met him. And he knows who you are. How can I find him?”

“So you can chase after Goodwife Machyn?” the man sneered. “She has gone, Clarenceux, gone. And so too has the marriage agreement.”

There was a single knock at the door. Hill stepped back and opened it: two men stood outside, in rough working clothes, both as muscular and grim looking as Hill himself. Both were openly wearing side-swords.

Hill looked back at Clarenceux. “Go, herald. Either go now, peacefully, or fight us three. I may not be able to match your swordsmanship alone, but I have more friends than you, and together we are stronger.”

Hill's wife slowly descended the stairs. He continued, “When you live this close to so many, you can just knock on a wall to summon help. The rich and the poor all have their friends. Only those in the middle are alone. Which is where you are, Mr. Clarenceux.”

Clarenceux stayed calm. “Stand away from the door. I will leave in peace if you give me space.”

Hill gestured to his friends. Clarenceux slowly walked toward the door, his sword still at the ready, his left hand on the hilt of his dagger. The two men drew away, backing into the street. Clarenceux looked at Hill once more, then turned and marched back the way he had come, listening carefully in case he was followed.