Firedrake's Eye, page 13
Ames coughed and dabbed at his nose with his third sodden handkerchief. Mall went ahead with the lantern and put it out when they returned to daylight.
“Mr Norton is in the Wakefield Tower and wishes to see you, sir,” he said. “It seems someone was missed in the search.”
Chapter XXIII – David Becket
The boy had woken under the bed, his mouth like parchment with thirst. The papers still crackled against his skin and the cat had moved to the warmest spot by his stomach. She mewed indignantly when he rolled over and crawled cautiously: although sunlight was still falling through the broken shutters, he cared nothing for that, he must find food and water and be rid of the terrible papers.
He went to the window and peered out, avoiding the trapdoor hole in the floor. A man was walking about in the courtyard. He opened the casement, climbed on to the roof and half-slid, half-crawled down the slope and up the next one. No-one saw him go, nor did anyone remark on his dusty face and hair and suit, for boys will be boys and attract dirt to themselves. He had the sense to walk once he reached the ground: he knew it was important to walk when carrying papers, he had had that principle beaten into him. And he knew the house he must go to, which in his fear he named to himself as the House where the Men Speak Strangely. It was in Southwark and he crossed the Thames by the bridge. He dared not think of the place truly as the Spanish embassy. Even he knew what that must mean and why Senor Mendoza welcomed him.
About the time that the serving man opened the kitchen door to find the white-faced English boy outside, a second pack of searchers saw the place when he had been reborn and the fresh piss in the chamber pot and the place where he had slept. Simon Ames arrived an hour later as the sun set and inspected the place with his face set in a cold fury.
“A small man, a woman or a boy,” he said to James Ramme, who nodded.
“No doubt of it but it was a fine hiding place,” Ramme said, excusing both of them, then fell silent at the ugliness of Ames’s eyes.
“Next time we will have every floorboard up,” was all Ames said as he stalked out.
Once in the square, he stood for a moment at a loss, ignoring the singing in the midst of the crowd that had gathered to watch the sport. Over by the red lattice of the alehouse on the other side he saw a broad familiar shape at ease on a bench, a wooden trencher laden with stew and bread on one knee, a jack full of beer in his fist and a long clay pipe in his mouth. Becket waved him over, and cross-eyed with tiredness and hungry as he was, he walked over and sat down.
“Christ, Ames,” said Becket, “you look like a ghost. Where have you been? Was it you at the notable storming of a Papist’s nest? Did he get away after all then?”
Ames nodded. “Someone did. We know not when nor who it was.”
“You will never catch him then. Have you eaten this day? No? Here, boy, the ordinary and a pint of best.”
Becket in possession of money was a fine expansive sight, which confirmed Ames’s suspicion that his uncle had rewarded his saviour in gold. He took the plate of stew and had eaten half before the unfamiliar salty taste won through to his mazed mind. “What is this?” he asked Becket.
“Bacon, peas and carrots,” said Becket, making eyetalk with a handsome, pigeon-breasted young shopwife. “Why, do you not like it? Then give it here, it tastes well enough to me.”
Ames drank beer to quell his queasiness. His head was singing and his eyes kept shutting of their own will. He thought of going down to the river again and finding a boat to take him back to Seething Lane, but he could not find the strength of will to do it. Instead he sat there and drank some tobacco smoke with Becket, and sipped his beer and watched the scurrying of the booksellers’ men as they finished the lading of a ship ready to catch the tide. Idle notions rose to the surface of his thoughts like scum.
“What is the best way to find . . . to be sure of finding anyone hidden in a house?” he asked Becket once.
“Set fire to it,” Becket answered, and he nodded in agreement that this was certainly the surest way.
They walked through Ludgate just as the Watch were shutting the gates and the curfew bell rang, heading in the wrong direction towards Becket’s favourite haunts along Fleet Street, where he was once more welcome now he had paid his debts. It was plain foolishness to play dice with Becket at the Green Lion and then again at the Cock and once more at the Globe tavern in a slow progress of taverns and boozing kens. Once a woman apparently named Sweet-bush Julia told him he could have her at double the price since he was so bony and some other time Becket rose up like a mountain from a bench and leaned over a boy who had almost knocked Ames spinning.
He fell asleep twice with his head resting on sticky tables and was drunk enough to mutter assent when Becket told him that he might as well pass out on a bed as on the floor. Once in Fetter Lane, Becket whispered that Sweet-bush Julia was as poxed as any Winchester goose and besides Ames had lost all his money to her, what he had on him, and so there was no money left for an inn. They propelled each other up Mrs Carfax’s stairs and this time, like a true gentleman, Becket gave Ames the bed and himself took the floor. As he let go his grip on the world, Ames wished feebly for a way to kill the snoring creature nearby, and then remembered that he might not have slept so well on his clean linen at Sir Francis’s house. Here at least there was no unspeaking presence of Throgmorton and all his plots, no Christian prayers to end the day, no business unfulfilled nagging him from his chest of papers. The words of his usual prayers floated unconnected before him and the whirling of his head was . . .
Chapter XXIV – Tom O’Bedlam
All this day I was in the midst of a great fit of angels that took Tom over half of London, I think, and brought in a few shillings’ bribery for Tom to cease declaiming of dragons in one place and begin again in another. I dare not take my usual begging place by Temple Bar for the reason that it was so close to the firedrake’s spawning place, and further my song of madness was being sung by ballad sellers there which struck to my heart every time I heard it. The chorus was not mine, but every other part was, and each verse held the seeds of my trouble, being ripe with the dreams that plague me. Wherefore not, when I wrote it? And Cain it was who had taken it and abused it. Above me the sky broke open continually to show that shadow-drake of treason and anarchy taking shape in his mirror-egg of stars.
I awoke in a field hours before sunrise, cold and stiff and wetted through with rain, though the Queen Moon had given me some covering of bracken and leaves. Four cows wearing the bear-brand of my lord of Leicester were blinking at me kindly from under an oak. I climbed to me feet and reeled from hunger, my belly clenched up under my breastbone and aching with it, my head pounding from it. The Queen Moon laughed at my plight from behind her veil of rainclouds and told me the answer and so I went to the cows. While she gentled each one, I milked their teats into my begging bowl and so filled my emptiness with warm sweet milk. They lowed at me, thanking me for easing their udders a little. With luck the cowherds would blame hedgehogs or Robin Goodfellow for the smaller yield.
The Queen Moon pointed and nodded at the way I should go: I climbed a gate and squelched south down Gray’s Inn Lane towards Holborn. Here was a true time of angels, in the silence and cold of the dark raining pool of night where the sun hides his head before his awakening, yet was I now as cold and lucid as a Secretary to the Queen. The walls of Gray’s Inn gardens gleamed in the drizzle clear and sharp where the lantern light fell, and every sound cut through the air like a knife.
It was still an hour before dawn when I came at last to Fetter Lane by a short cut behind Rolls House and Clifford’s Inn. There was a clattering and a roaring and crying out in the lane and shouting for water. I peered from behind the garden wall and there was a house afire, smoke rolling from the thatch and flame licking and cracking the windows. Down in the street milled men in shirts shouting at each other and Mistress Carfax in her night rail and cap and cloak, beating her breast and weeping. Some of the men had formed a long bucket-chain from the conduit in Fleet Street, no mean distance, while others were working the well behind Rolls House as fast as they could.
Tom loves a fire and he laughed and cheered the devils dancing in the sparks on the roof and swinging merrily from one rafter to another. There were two particular devils, one large and broad, the other thinner and smaller and less nimble, both black-faced, that had clambered through a small window in the attic and were clinging to a ledge. Their neighbours in the street were using the long fire hooks to pull out the thatch, while urchins darted among them cheering the two devils, cutting purses and shouting advice.
The two on the ledge inched their way along to the gateway that constricts Fetter Lane a little way along. There the larger devil stepped down on to the upper part of the arch, clinging to some headless carvings of saints, hung by his fingers from a moulding and dropped the last few feet into a soft midden heap. He was followed in a scramble by the lesser devil, who plumped down upon his bum and coughed his guts up there and then. The greater devil stood with his hands on his hips, coughing sometimes, watching the burning roof intently and an ugly look under the soot and sweat blackening his face.
God sent the rain to come down harder and so between the buckets and the sky the fire guttered and smoked and fell at last to a sullen smouldering, leaving the house unroofed but still standing and Mistress weeping and sniffing upon a gossip’s bosom.
The cobbler across the way had invited Becket and Ames into his house where there was a crowd drinking beer and talking loudly about the good fortune of the rain and the notable bravery of Jemmy Burford who pulled down the worst piece of burning thatch himself, and the right way – much disputed – of forming bucket-chains. Someone brought Becket the sword and cloak that he had tossed down into the street from the window, but Ames had lost his second sword in a week. On the other hand, Becket had lost all he had that was not in pawn, save what he wore. His black ringlets were plastered to his neck by heat and rain and fear. As the grey daylight seeped its way out of the east, his face grew uglier, even after he had washed it in an ewer of water brought by the cobbler’s wife. He and Ames coughed by fits and turns like a madrigal of crows, but Ames seemed to have lost the power of speech and sat in a corner by a heap of calfskins and some labelled lasts, holding his elbows together and blinking at his singed boots.
When the Watch at last come tottering in and quavered out their questions, it was Becket answered them one word at a time, miserly between coughing.
No, the fire in the grate had not been burning, for the reason he had nothing to feed it with and had not got around to buying any more. No, he had not gone to sleep with a taper still lit. He knew not how the fire came about, being asleep at the time and his friend too, and no, neither of them had been the worse for drink, both of them God-fearing men.
Then Becket caught sight of me, eating half a sausage. He stepped away from the folk asking questions and took me by the elbow, backed me into a corner by some half-finished roses and pompoms and leaned his face fiercely towards mine. I could see his tongue darting behind the gap left by a long-ago loss of one of his eyeteeth.
“What do you know of this, Tom?”
“Nothing,” I said, trembling. “Nothing, I have been dancing with angels and . . .”
“I know that,” he snarled. “You came prating to me yesterday of some man you had seen that you took to be Lucifer, and more nonsense of a firedrake. What do you know of this?”
“Nothing. Is it a mystery?” I asked, trying to unscramble my thinking and recover the beautiful clarity of the cows’ milk. “Could angels have done it? No. Angels never set fire.”
“Ah, but you Tom have set fires to my certain knowledge for you set light to an awning with a torch once when you said a devil was hiding in it . . . Well?”
“Not this,” I said. “No, not this. Your own angel would have stopped me.”
“Pfft,” he said in disgust. “And you saw nothing in the lane neither?”
“I was not there. I came when I heard the noise.”
“From Blackfriars?”
“Grays Inn.”
Seeing the country mud on my feet he grunted and let go my arm, leaving his prints upon it.
“If I find you have lied . . .”
“No, David,” said Simon Ames, speaking like a sleepwalker and not moving from where he sat still shivering by the lasts. “I saw an arrowhead caught in a beam and by it an open wineskin. Would Tom have the wit to throw painter’s spirit or turpentine on a roof and then fire flames into it?”
“Christ, no,” said Becket, rubbing his blood-rimmed eyes with grubby knuckles. “No, he would never do that. Why did you not say before?”
“I did not wish to speak before the Watch. I fear I have brought you into mortal danger again, David, for which I am heartily sorry. What was it wakened you in time?”
“My little rat dancing on my chest and nipping at my nose. If it were not for him we would be as crisp fried as Latymer and Ridley now and no crown of martyrdom for payment. He ran into the wall and away, or I would have brought him out with us. Jesu, I pray the poor little rat is not burned saving his family, I have not seen him yet.” And he rubbed at his scorched eyes again and looked as sorrowful as if he had lost a dog.
Chapter XXV – Simon Ames
When he had stopped shivering and eaten bread and cheese, Ames had the cobbler’s wife brush the worst of the soot off his gown and then went down to a shop on Cheapside to buy a new shirt and ruff on credit, before going straight to the Tower. There Throgmorton’s servant with the broken teeth and the lump on his head was the dish preserved for the day. Throgmorton’s friend had died of his wound in the meantime.
The serving man was scarcely an oyster, for he opened at once and after a great deal of dross with nary a pearl, confirmed all that Ames and Walsingham’s other followers had found out since they first began to study Throgmorton. Indeed he was so anxious to be agreeable it was hard to tell dross from gold and gem from glass in any of what he said. Some of Throgmorton’s more mysterious wanderings were explained, at least, Ames found. He had been gambling and was lucky as well, according to his servant, although it was never a passion with him as it was with some at Court.
By the end of speaking to him, Ames’s head was throbbing with evil humours and his poor nose like a beacon upon a headland. He spent some time with a glowing dish-of-coals, carefully heating Throgmorton’s papers one by one, even a few stray balladsheeets, to find if they had writing in milk or orange juice on them and that made his head worse. At last he put the final paper aside in disgust and walked out, with a curt nod at Mall to come with him as a bodyguard, and the sour catching smell of burning still clinging to his clothes.
In Fetter Lane he found the unroofed house with builders’ men poking about the rafters to see if they could take a roof upon them again or must they come down to be made anew? Mrs Carfax was sorting her belongings out of the ground floor and crying over the hangings and clothes that were spoilt and asking of her neighbour how she would ever find money to pay for the house to be roofed again and now that big bastard Becket, who had no doubt set the fire himself, had gone and vanished like smoke with three weeks’ rent unpaid. This money Ames paid to her, to her considerable shock, and then he walked down Fleet Street to the Gatehouse.
At that place Goodwife Alys was friendly enough to him, but none of the company had seen Becket nor heard of him since the morning nor knew where he might be, which caused some suspicion to Ames, rightly surprised at such agreement in such a company as the Gatehouse’s regulars. He ate the ordinary and left the place saying he was sorry to have missed Mr Becket, but must return to the Tower now, and so left them congratulating each other on having coney-catched him.
Now upon Fleet Street he stood while Mall waited patiently, his square face graven in stone, and Ames thought hard on how he could find Becket in that forest of London.
Seeing the conduit with its little lantern over it, he was reminded of me and Tom, and also knew where we at least might be found. Beckoning Mall to follow he stepped on over Fleet Bridge, up Fleet Hill to Ludgate and through the old gate just as the Watch were a shutting of it, and then round the wall and down to Blackfriars. All the way he walked unknowing past packs of city wolves who were daunted by Mall and his size and his half-hidden blackjack.
Ames found me at length, rapt in contemplation of a window of God, a fragment of the old church that they pulled down for to build houses thereof, and it was a head and crucified shoulders of Christ bound in a rough-hewn new window. The face was fine drawn and the hair and thorns a pain of blood to look upon and weeping angels upon either side of it. A whore had saved it out of the ruin and put it up in her window-space for its beauty. Tom likes to look upon it and so do I, for I think never was a man’s agony better and kindlier made in glass and lead. Ames saw it too, for it was the whore’s habit to put a wax candle by it, and he stood to look awhile. Mall loitered against a wall, paring his nails and muttering of idolatry.
“It is well-done,” he said to me, after a while.
“It is,” I said to him. “What shall it profit a man to gain the world if thereby he loseth his soul?”
He stiffened as if I had shot him with a dart and looked alongside at me.
“Why do you say that?” he asked.
“You were thinking it,” I told him, and regretted it for he paled. The gifts of angels always made men afraid.
“How did you know?”
