To the Tower Born - Robin Maxwell (32 page)

They were startled therefore to hear voices coming from
upriver. Soon a country barge was approaching the dock. Nell heard a gravelly male voice calling, “Poppet?”

’Twas them! “Poppet” was her father’s pet name for Nell as a small child. Thank Christ! She and John moved out of the boathouse shadows and helped the hands tie up the barge. There were six of them, two boatmen, a large stocky man who even in the moonlight Nell recognized as Edward Brampton. Three other men under his direction worked quickly without lanterns, to prevent drawing attention to the operation. 
With the briefest greeting to Nell, Brampton gestured for John to help his men unload two good-size and rather heavy crates. Another man heaved a sack over his shoulder, and when all conspirators and equipment had been set upon land, Brampton ordered the bargemen to continue downriver.

“How will we escape if they leave us?” Nell asked him. “The tide is against them returning.”

“They’re only polling out of sight of the manor. They’ll tie up near that copse of trees.” Brampton pointed downriver a hundred yards. Nell could make out a shadowy cluster of fo-liage. “It would be easier to load the boys from dock to barge, but if there is even the slightest suspicion of our activity, the river will be the first place they will look.”

“Of course,” she agreed. Before he turned away, Nell placed her hand on his muscular arm. “Thank you, Master Brampton. I thank you with all my heart.”

“There is no need. ’Tis a sacred duty. These children are England’s soul, its future. Any Englishman”—he acknowledged her with a smile—“or -woman worth their salt would do the same. But come now, this part is the most dangerous—moving unseen from the dock to the manor. What is your man’s name?”

“John. He’s there.” She pointed to the pair of men carrying the heavier of the two crates. “He will tell you where we can gain entrance.”

Brampton hurried ahead, and Nell caught up with the young man toting the sack. He was quiet, and simply acknowledged her with a nod. “Did you all travel upriver in a coach?” she whispered.

“Aye,” he answered.

Nell had wrongly assumed from her father’s terse instructions that they would be sailing upriver from London. “At which town did you acquire the barge?”

The young man stopped in his tracks, reached up, and quite 
suddenly pulled off his cap. In the moonlight a great mass of golden hair fell down about his shoulders.

“Good heavens!” Nell was riveted to the spot.

The “young man” turned. It was Bessie, an impish grin crinkling her pretty face. “Oh, Nell!” Bessie dropped the sack and the girls embraced fervently and forgivingly. “You found them, you found them,” Bessie murmured gratefully.

“How on earth did you escape sanctuary?” Nell asked.

“I changed clothes with Mistress Lily,” Bessie replied, very pleased with herself. “I wish you could have seen my mother’s face, realizing she’d be entertaining a streetwalker for the next three days.”

“Ladies!” Brampton hissed back at them. “We must hurry!” Nell grabbed the sack and slung it over her shoulder. “I’m wearing breeches too, under my skirts,” she said as they followed the others into the manor’s moon shadow. “You would not believe how pleasant they make riding a horse.” Nell’s description of the old Roman dungeons had elicited from John the possibility of an outside entrance to Barkley’s subterranean world. When found, it was no more than a large rusty grate in the ground, the wooden plank covering it half eaten away by rot. It was a strange artifact he had briefly taken notice of, then quickly forgotten, whilst leading a team round the manor’s east—and least used—entrance.

The small party attempted perfect quiet near the house, but the four men carrying the two heavy crates could not help grunting with their exertions. The boxes were set down and all the men, including Brampton, helped in lifting the grate, which, whilst unlocked, was made of such thick metal that moving it took monumental effort. Finally it was set aside, and only then were lanterns removed from one of the crates and, by Brampton’s orders, lit.

With him and Nell in the lead, the crates and men following, and Bessie bringing up the rear, they descended a rock stairway similar to the one Nell had taken down from Lady Margaret’s offices. This had clearly been abandoned for hundreds of years, perhaps a millennium.

There were rows of Corinthian columns on either side of a long corridor, remnants of its frescoed walls visible, its floor under the filth revealing a colorful mosaic design. They entered, in wonder, a grand, high-ceilinged chamber where even their whispers were magnified, and echoed down the two corridors radiating out from the room. If this followed the design of most Roman villas, thought Nell, those two corridors would soon angle off in a perpendicular fashion, all surrounding a central courtyard.

“Which way to the dungeons?” Brampton asked Nell.

She conferred with John, explaining precisely how she had found the original staircase but that, by her memory, she had climbed many more steps down to reach the dungeon than their party had done to find this chamber.

John took one of the lanterns, then squatted on his haunches.

In the thick film of dust he began diagramming Barkley Manor.

All stood round him, listening as he reasoned out where the original stairs Nell found would be, where the rescue party stood now, and in which direction they would need to move to reach the dungeons.

Nell could hear in John’s voice great confidence and command, and she knew how proud he felt to be part of this operation.

“My guess is another level exists below,” he said. “By Nell’s reckoning, I would say we move down the western corridor, looking for a second staircase down.”

They reassembled and passed through the hallway leading west from the great chamber, off of which were small rooms,

clearly bedchambers. Nell’s urge to explore this capsule of a lost age, a culture whose language she had studied for so long, was made almost unbearable by inscriptions in Latin painted in the frescoes—perhaps names of the individuals whose portraits graced the halls, a family motto. Who had these Romans been, living in splendor so far from their home on the farthest, wildest outposts of the empire?

But there was no time to waste exploring. Somewhere below were two scared boys— pray God there were still two living— who needed a swift rescue.

Now, in the west wing of the villa, it became clear why the Romans had abandoned it. The corridors were, in places, piled so high with river silt that the party was forced to climb over great drifts of it. The Thames, in centuries past, had overflowed its banks and inundated the southern shore one time too many.

“Here!” cried John.

It was a stairway down, and Brampton, wasting no time, urged the party on. Wall torches in their sconces and matching columns joined by a carven stone arch, much like the first she had found, cheered Nell immensely. They could not be far now.

She and Bessie, hands tightly clutching, took the treacherous stairs down, bracing each other for safety. A tiny slip now could be disastrous.

But indeed, a small disaster lay at the bottom of the curved stairs. Below the final pair of columns and its arch the doorway had been walled up. It was a dead end, and Nell’s heart sank.

But Brampton had come prepared. He was gesturing for his men to pry open one of the boxes. Out came picks and sledgehammers, enough for each man to be armed. Without another word, they began smashing at the stone and mortar. It was gru-eling work, but their hearts and souls were behind their efforts.

“The sound is enough to wake the dead,” said Bessie.

“It may,” Brampton said. “If the cook and the steward find us out, we shall kill them.”

The words were spoken with a matter-of-factness born of necessity, and Nell surprised herself with the lack of sympathy for the boys’ jailers. They were human beings. Knew right from wrong. And Margaret Beaufort was no queen to be obeyed un-challenged. Still, Nell prayed that their operation might be completed with success and no bloodshed.

“Ha!” One of the wall smashers had finally broken through.

With renewed efforts, the others, with violent swings of their sledgehammers, widened the hole and one by one the rescuers stepped through, carrying with them their equipment crates.

The basement tunnels were lined with doorways leading to storage and workrooms, servants’ quarters, and even a kitchen, eerie with its hearth and oven, smoke staining its upper arch, evoking in Nell the strangest feeling of communion with those who had once dwelt here, whose baking bread had forever seared its mark into stone.

“Nell!” It was John calling to her. “Could this be it?” It was a doorway, through which she passed and found herself standing at the base of the circular stone stairway from Margaret’s offices. Holding the torch aloft, she saw the dungeon corridor stretching out before her. They’d found it!

But peering into the dark, she saw no crack of light in the door at the far end of the row of grisly cells.

Were they too late?

“ ’Tis the place,” she said in a hushed voice.

“How could she?” she heard Bessie whisper. “They’re innocent children.”

“She is a Lancaster,” Nell heard Edward Brampton answer.

“To Margaret Beaufort, they are nothing but a threat to her 
great plan. A true King of England, no matter his age, is never an innocent.”

Nell had taken the lead. The quiet was terrible, and though she knew the boys might be sleeping, all she could see were Edward’s sunken cheeks, the terror in Dickon’s eyes. The pleading that she not leave them. There was no light within. Jesus help us, she heard herself pray. How easily it suddenly came to ask for God’s grace.

The key was absent from its nail. Nell tried the door latch. It was locked.

Still there was silence within.

“Stand aside, Nell. Princess.”

Again sledgehammers were produced. A few moments later the heavy wood door was splintering, the lock shattered.

Brampton pulled it open and stepped back. He looked to Nell and Bessie.

Bessie was trembling violently. She clutched her friend’s arm for strength, and together they entered the dungeon cell.

Edward, stretched on his pallet, was lying still, but moaning piteously.

Dickon sat in a heap on the floor near his head, perhaps where he had stayed whispering words of hope and encouragement to his brother. He was babbling incoherently, singing snatches of nursery tunes, unaware that the door had been smashed in or that his sister and Nell Caxton were standing over him.

Bessie knelt beside Dickon, who neither acknowledged nor spoke to her. She felt for a pulse at Edward’s neck. “ ’Tis a weak force”—Bessie’s voice cracked—“but his heart beats still.” Now she leaned and placed her lips near Dickon’s ear. “ ’Tis Bessie.

We’ve come for you, baby brother,” she crooned gently.

“Come for me come for me baby brother come for me come come come.” Dickon chanted the words, a mad song.

“You must step aside now, ladies.” Behind them, Brampton was all business. “Outside, if you please.” Nell and Bessie did as they were directed, and as they exited the cell, they saw the second of the two crates pried open by the men who had accompanied Brampton. Nell, till now unflap-pable and efficient, found herself astonished and unaccountably horrified to see the men lift two stiff corpses from the crate.

They were fair-haired children, close in size and age to the Princes of England.

“What is this?” Nell asked.

Bessie, who observed the switching with a surprisingly sanguine expression, answered. “We acquired the poor blessed boys from a Southwark hospital. Brothers.” She paused, suddenly losing her composure. “They drowned when a cart pinned them down on a flooded street.”

As Bessie and Nell watched, John and Brampton gently carried Edward and Dickon from their foul prison whilst the servants carried the two cadavers in to take their places. The princes were laid carefully side by side in the crate from which the dead children had been taken, and now Brampton’s men turned their attention to the tool crate. From within, they pulled several buckets, revealed to be pitch. This, they began dabbing round the boys’ cell, down the long hall, and inside the barred dungeons. They returned and smeared the rest on the heavy wooden door.

“What is the meaning of this!” The voice Nell recognized as the steward’s echoed down the tunnel. Brampton held up his lantern, and the figure of a man could be seen in nightclothes, holding a torch on the bottom of the stair.

Nell stopped breathing, for the steward was approaching their party quite boldly. In a moment she would surely see him run through by Edward Brampton.

“What have you done here?” said the man, yet unable to see into the crates.

Brampton stepped forward and Nell came to stand by his side.

“We’ve rescued Edward and Richard of York,” she announced proudly. She could feel Brampton bristling next to her.

Very subtly she sensed his hand reaching inside his belt for his smallsword.

“Thank Christ!” cried the steward. Even in the torchlight Nell thought she saw sincere relief flooding his face. “God has answered my prayers. Did you come from the riverside?”

“Yes,” Brampton answered. “A barge waits a hundred yards downriver.”

“You must have come in through the old grate,” said the steward. He eyed the splintered door. “Broken through the wall. I know an easier way out.”

“Is the cook—?” Nell began.

“The cook will burn in hell,” he said. “I may too, for my cow-ardice in this affair. But Lady Margaret has threatened my family should I not comply with her wishes.”