Firedrake's Eye, page 1
This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.
FIREDRAKE'S EYE
First edition. April 30, 2020.
Copyright © 2020 Patricia Finney.
ISBN: 978-1909172548
Written by Patricia Finney.
FIREDRAKE’S EYE
By Patricia Finney
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Tom O’Bedlam’s Song
From the hag and hungry goblin
That into rags would rend ye,
And the spirit that stands by the naked man
In the book of moons, defend ye.
That of your five sound senses
You never be forsaken
Nor wander from yourselves with Tom
Abroad to beg your bacon.
While I do sing, ‘Any food, any feeding,
Feeding, drink or clothing?
Come dame or maid
Be not afraid
Poor Tom will injure nothing.’
With a heart of furious fancies
Whereof I am commander,
With a burning spear and a horse of air
To the wilderness I wander.
By a knight of ghosts and shadows
I summoned am to tourney
Ten leagues beyond the wide world’s end
– Methinks it is no journey.
While I do sing, ‘Any food, any feeding,
Feeding, drink or clothing?
Come dame or maid
Be not afraid
Poor Tom will injure nothing.
[The full version is at the end of the book.]
Chapter I – David Becket
October 1583, Whitefriars
One beginning of this tale took place in a London alley, in the old liberty of Whitefriars, lit only by a rushlight in a paned window. That window was surely a waste of time and money since the sun never shines on Noon Alley, save on midsummer day, although the rain falls there in plenty.
Which beginning was in itself begun in the bubbling marshes of Goodwife Alys Flick’s brewing vats.
There are women who can draw sweet nectar from base malted barley and water and there are women who can turn the makings of Jove’s own ambrosia into horse piss and pig dung. The Gatehouse Inn’s lady, Goodwife Alys, had magic of the second kind: give her wine from the grapes of Dionysus himself and she would stretch it out with sloe berries and vinegar and sugar, because the times were bad and she must have her return on the outlay.
Which makes it all the stranger that David Becket had drunk enough to cause him to fall out of the doorway of the Gatehouse and trip over the foothills of the midden that blocks Fleet Street there. He belched, waited in suspense to see if anything might follow the belch, and when it did not, picked up his hat and lurched with his bellyful of muddy beer down towards his lodgings on Fetter Lane. He had unbuttoned the front of his doublet to give his gut room to breathe; no need for peascod padding in his clothes, he grew his own and saved a fortune in bombast.
For a moment he stopped under a dripping overhang on the corner of Crocker’s Lane, one hand on the wall, and wished the alehouses nearer home would still give him credit so he would have less far to walk. Furthermore, the ways were muddy and dark and infested with vermin, small and large.
Meanwhile, so Dr Nunez says, beer cannot be transformed into blood as can meat, so must it be turned to piss and removed from the body’s economy. Hiccupping faintly, Becket fumbled at his codpiece and pissed into the gutter, watering the sad shape of a dead dog. Tears pricked his eyes: poor dog, cast out to roam and never know his old home again, foraging for what he could - better a life in the Bear Gardens than that. He would go back. They still needed fighting men in the Netherlands, by Christ, and if the pay was bad, at least they mainly did not hang you for stealing . . .
As he made a third attempt to refasten his points, muttering that a man was in a pretty state when his own codpiece defeated him, at last the sounds of scuffling, of soft thumps and gasps, battled their way past the fumes stopping his ears.
He straightened and blinked. The noise of a fight was coming from Noon Alley, off Crocker’s Lane. For a moment he swayed: some fights were better left alone…
Out of pure-hearted and disinterested curiosity, and a vague flickering optimism that some fights were like rainbows in that gold was at the bottom of them, Becket slid crabwise along the wall of the corner house, buttoning up his doublet and old buff coat as he went. He peered around the corner into the murk and shadow-devils clustering about the whore’s brave pale rushlight.
A hand shoved a sagging bundle up against the wall, the other hand busy inside its clothes. Blindly the bundle swung at the footpad and got his head rammed against the stone for his trouble; thus brought into the glimmer of light, Becket could recognise the face despite its mask of blood.
Which was all he needed as excuse for the pleasure of a fight to round off his evening. While the man fell heavily sideways and the footpad cursed and prodded the soupy blackness with his knife, Becket drew his own dagger and slipped towards the tangle of men, left hand outstretched until it closed on a coarse jerkin. He found the neck, lifted it up to the green glimmer to be sure it was the footpad and not his victim and then, as Bonecrack Smith shrieked and waved his arms, Becket did the hangman out of a fee and split his backbone.
Too slow. Booze is not so easily conquered. Someone charged into him low from the side and he felt, rather than saw, the cudgel swinging down on his head. He roared with anger that there should turn out to be more of them, took the blow on the thick muscles of his back and bellowed like a bull in spring when he felt someone trying to get a grip round his neck from behind.
He lurched upright, the footpad clinging like a monkey, and slammed backwards two steps into the opposite wall of Noon Alley, where it is still stone from the old abbey, and scraped the man from his perch. He turned, catching a little flash of light upon metal, and stabbed at venture, feeling a warm spurt of blood on his hand, but not knowing what he had hit, though it screamed. Then there was the sound of scurrying and sliding, and in the new silence came the rhythmic thumping of the whore’s truckle-bed against her wall.
He wiped his dagger blade and sticky hand on his back, under the leather of his coat where it would not show, sweeping up the packet that had fallen from Smith’s hand and putting it away absent-mindedly. The melancholic black velvet of his doublet and paned trunk hose was browned and splattered with grease and mud and gravy, but still it had the effect hoped for but never approached upon its original owner, who had lost it at primero. It made a fat man look taller. Becket is two yards high and at least a yard broad, a square man run to lard with black ringlets and a square face thatched with a badly trimmed black beard, and an ugly thing to meet in an alley on a dark night.
Having caught his breath and cleaned his dagger, Becket remembered the man he had rescued. He found him by touch, lying on his face in a pile of slimy onion peelings. He picked him up under the arms and carried him out of the alley, into the Gatehouse’s lantern light.
The smaller man’s head lolled, draped and shiny with blood and snot: Becket tutted sympathetically at the glazed eyes, patted a bruised cheek.
The man began to wake, muttered and essayed a punch at Becket. Becket caught the fist in his great hand and pushed his own face very close, speaking very clearly and distinctly.
“I am Master David Becket, Provost of Swordplay,” he said. “We were arguing earlier. About the divine essence of man and its nature. Remember?”
The other man frowned cross-eyed, bent forward and puked on Becket’s boots. Becket sighed. “Christ, who would play the Samaritan,” he said, but charitably did not dump the man’s face in it. Scraping the worst off his feet, he hoisted up the footpad’s leavings with one unresisting arm over his shoulder and carried him on towards Fetter Lane. Though in strict truth this was less for the teachings of our Lord God and more for the beckonings of our Lady Silver, who peeked shyly from between the thick velvet folds of the man’s gown and the expensive supple Spanish leather of the man’s boots.
Chapter II – Tom O’Bedlam
It was I that saw most and have said least in the matter of the firedrake and the nightcrow, the soldier of God and the hunting of that fair white hind, the Queen of England. There has been a plague of silence upon it, made by Sir Francis Walsingham, the Queen’s Moor, darker than the blackest flurry of wings over a dunghill. But Tom of Bedlam is mad and unaccountable, being a Bedlam beggar, and since I wear his poor scratched hide and stare out of his poor mazed eyes which make my prison windows, so I will tell the tale. And all of it will be the truth.
But first, I must ask forgiveness, that this has somewhat of madness colouring it. For my poor skullmate Tom was always at my side and would often elbow past me and the Courtier to bow to the Queen Moon, and dance and discourse with angels and cower from his devils which were suddenly both
And yet Poor Tom had his uses, for his angels made him windows in men’s heads to see their souls. So I beg you, forgive his yammerings and do not put all of them aside. Perhaps it is only the weight of the infinite that made him rave. So here also is Tom’s madness, woven like gold thread into a good cloth of sense, although who would put gold into a shroud unless it were for a prince?
Which it is not: it is a Turkey rug of windings and diverging and turnings and folding, all in a dance of spiral upon counter-spiral, star upon star, swirl upon movement upon unquietness, all woven by the Queen Moon that sits above us in a silver damask petticoat and smiles. And puts her silver finger with its nail of scarlet upon this knot and that: here was the tale’s genesis, here . . . and there, and there . . .
Chapter III – Philip Sidney
Autumn 1582, London
And there was the firedrake also, coming slowly to full growth behind secure walls of brick and lies. It was an egg laid a year before, the progeny of a solemn and light-hearted allegory that marked the Queen’s Accession Day Tilts of 17 November Anno Domini 1582. The young bucks and hinds of the Court had arrayed themselves sumptuously in gilded armour and embroidered silk, presenting themselves as the Children of Desire, beseeching entrance at the Castle of Virginity. Which rare and prized thing is as much sought for at Court as a unicorn, and as seldom found (save in the Queen’s Grace Herself).
Within the glamour of the Tilts, sweating under his layers of armour and leather padding and linen and in desperate fear of rain, Philip Sidney had made a punning sermon to the Queen in which he, the Child of Desire, and all his fellows, were beaten back and owned themselves laid low by the exceeding purity and power of Her Majesty’s Virginity.
Which is to say that she should not marry the foul frogling Duc d’Alencon, the least of the whelps of the she-wolf of France, Catherine de Medici, she who massacred the Protestants upon St Bartholomew’s Day.
There was daring in so preaching, no matter how scented the means, for the Queen had borne herself most sweetly towards the French prince, in despite of his face scoured like a siegeworks with pockmarks, his nose a rotten testament to his prick and his stature a head shorter than the Queen’s, who hath a very proper size for a woman. The Prince’s envoy Simier, that she termed her Monkey, was a fairer sight and a prettier gentleman who made her laugh, but it was not him she would have bedded, and no better if she had, for he killed his first wife.
None of which was Her Majesty willing to hear of anyone. A printer, by name Stubbs, exhorted her in print that she was too old to have any truck with Papistical Frenchmen, and had his hand chopped off by the common hangman.
Being his Honour, Sir Francis Walsingham’s prospective son-in-law, Philip Sidney was not likely to lose his hand nor any other member, but there is always the Tower and the tedium of disfavour.
So there was impudence in this speech of symbols, and also danger. Sir Francis agreed with the sentiment and supported it, though silently. In the end, the Queen heard and saw the parable and smiled and was gracious. Who knows if it was Sidney’s elegant argument of coursers and canvas scenery that defeated the onrush of her intention? Or was it the Queen Moon that put her finger in the pie? Was it perhaps that the courses of women which had been stuttering in the earthly Queen for the years when she had been so pressed with strange haste to marry, so contrary to her earlier ways, was it that her monthly courses stopped at last? Did she see then that all she had she would lose and gain not even a child in payment, and so she drew back from the brink?
Alençon was paid off at last in fish barrels of gold in a quantity that spoke loudly of the Queen’s embarrassment. The gold stank of fish afterwards.
Who would dare ask her? The Courtier laughs and turns the ring in his ear, but I know that Sidney was much pleased by his pretty conceit at the tilting, to speak of policy in a poetry of silk and armour and speeches. He wrote to his friend Henri Estienne in Vienna, a letter that lies within Walsingham’s fine oak chest, and likewise a copy turned to Spanish in one of the many chests of papers belonging to the King of Spain. So harmless, so kindly, and yet this was the letter that laid the serpent’s egg; this bore the thought that caused a dragon to be born in London, even in the Queen’s own capital, the dragon that breathed fire and fear and sorrow upon me.
Chapter IV – David Becket
October 1583, Whitefriars
Up five flights of stairs that Becket must climb sideways for their narrowness, and through a low door at the top, and into a cold and musty darkness, smelling of foul linen and fouler hose, ancient rushes, rats and damp. As always, Becket ducked his head too late and rammed his head on the ceiling. Cursing mechanically, he dropped his burden in a heap on the rushes while he searched for the tinderbox. Once he had a stub of tallow dip grudgingly lit and giving off clouds of black rancid smoke, he remembered there was no wood since he had not the money to pay for it.
A movement behind him made him turn to see the man he had rescued, now on his knees, fists planted, head hanging down and bleeding a steady drip, drip, from his nose. No doubt the fleas were delighted, being more used to having to jump in search of their meal than have it drop like manna from the sky. Behind the plaster came the familiar rustling of rats. One large black brute trotted out on to the chest and looked up expectantly at Becket.
“Here now,” he said, smiling and reaching inside his shirt for the hambone he had filched. “When have I ever failed you, eh?” The rat’s family came out to share in the largesse while Becket picked up the bowl of water on the chest and dug out the ragged remnants of a shirt.
“Ndo, I deed do help . . .”
“Shut your mouth,” said Becket, hoisted the man on to the edge of the bed and began cleaning blood and vomit off the bony pale face. “I have forgot your name, sir, although I recall you are a friend of Mr Ellerton. Is it Mr Arnes?”
“Abes,” came the answer after a pause for thought, “Sibod Abes, hodoured to dow you, sir.”
“Then hold still, Mr Ames.”
By the time the man’s parti-coloured face could be seen clear in the rushlight, the water was darkened to a soup not even the rat would touch, so Becket opened the shutter and tossed it into the distant street. Then he waved the rat off the lid of his chest and dug in the depths to find the last of his aqua vitae. Mr Ames’s earth-coloured velvet gown with its murrey silk piping might never recover from the blood and the onion peelings, but Becket did it honour nevertheless. “Put the bottle neck into your mouth,” he advised kindly, “else the spirits will sting you.” Simon Ames coughed and gagged but held the drink down.
“I rebeber you, Mr Becket,” he said. “You would have bed brute beasts leavened by a divide spark, and I say they are corrupted by dividity misunderstood . . . Pox od this blood, is by dose broked?”
“No doubt,” said Becket. “I can recommend you a good barber surgeon for its setting, if you wish.”
“Do, thanking you. By uncle will see to it.” Ames was feeling for his purse and Becket flourished out the packet he had found by Bonecrack Smith. Ames frowned at it. “But this is dot my . . . Hm. I thank you, sir. Did you see ady of the bed who attacked me?”
“Other than Bonecrack who is dead now, God rot his soul, no,” said Becket. “Have you lost much?”
“Ah. You saw dode of the others.”
Becket spread his hands. “It was dark. I marked one of them, though. How much were you carrying?”
“Some shillings and a gold angel . . .”
“Christ, what possessed you to carry so much in Whitefriars?”
“I was . . . playing cards earlier.”
“Cards?” Light dawned on Becket’s face. “Oh, Tyrrel’s game?”
Ames nodded once, uncertainly. Becket made a sour face and spat into the corner, missing the misshapen target carved on the rotten plaster.
