A Murder of Crows: A Sir Robert Carey Mystery (32 page)

“What about him? I shall offer him my full hospitality, whether he likes it or not, until you come back with the women. We shall discuss many things. Off you go, Sergeant. Please conduct the raid as you see fit.”

***

It was pitch black night as the two gigs slid away from the ship and across the inky Thames. Even with the tide behind them again, they would have to row hard to get past the roaring leaping water at the bridge and into the relatively more peaceful upper part of the Thames. Going with Mr. Trevasker in the lead gig was the heavily bribed Thames waterman who had left his badge behind so as not to be blamed. Dodd took no part in it since he had no skill at boats at all, apart from the occasional fishing expedition in the Solway. They had no lanterns, relying on their nightsight and the fact that so long after sunset there would hardly be many boats ferrying across the river.

Even the lights in the city were gone out now, and their way only lit by starlight. The moon was at the quarter and not very bright. It was a harvest moon you needed for a good raid, silver-yellow light that turned the world to faery.

Dodd was sitting wishing very much for his comfy old clothes and jack and helmet. It seemed all wrong to be going into a fight wearing his fancy tight clothes, no smell of oiled leather and steel. At least he had his sword back. Perhaps he should have bought that poinard dagger after all. Briscoe was in the other boat. They had no guns since there was very little point in trying to keep the thing secret if they were going to be firing them—although their opponents might well have guns and would certainly shoot. The worst of guns was the notice they gave with the hissing and light of matches in the dark—and the
Judith
had no guns with snaphaunce or wheel locks because they hadn’t penetrated to Cornwall yet. Their only real hope was surprise.

Enys was next to Dodd at the back of the boat and Dodd looked him over cautiously. He kept licking his lips but other than that, seemed steady enough. Still, you never knew with a man until you’d seen him fight and even then, you still never knew. Please God he was better at it than his extraordinary sister.

Enys claimed to know a small muddy beach where there was a path that led to Topcliffe’s house—it couldn’t be helped but they had to use the path as the house was on a small knoll in the middle of the Lambeth marshes.

They were at the Bridge, the slender pointed gigs pointing straight into what seemed a vast pile of foam where the tide and the river current came to blows. The White Tower gleamed a little in grey starlight. There were some incomprehensible shouts from boat to boat. They slowed, steadied, took aim and then the men started leaning into the stroke while Mr. Trevasker and one of the second mates, Ted Gunn, called the time.

With the creak of oars in the rollocks and the bellowing of the waters, Dodd found himself ducking down as low as he could to avoid the spray. The turbulence was appalling where incoming tide met the river flow, slow as it was from the summer. For a moment they held, trembling on the foam, the oars moving rhythmically. Even Dodd could tell that if the Cornish weakened or made a mistake in their rowing, the gigs would be turned sideways by the pounding waters and probably turn over and wreck. It was a ridiculous thing to do, as ridiculous as the salmon swimming upstream. Could they do it? Would they all die of drowning? Dodd knew he was holding his breath in fear of the boat sinking.

The vast wet starlings were moving, passing by as the oars speeded their rhythm. Gradually they seemed almost to climb up a mountain of water, battered one way and the other, under the arches with their echoing roar, under the bracing beams, and then out into the quiet of the broad reach of the Thames where the turbulence was less. Dodd heard the rasping of the men’s breath as they eased their stroke. They had to keep rowing or the current would take them down under the bridge again but they were panting like men who had been in battle—which they had been. Without the tide behind them, the thing would have been impossible, and they still had three miles to go.

They settled into a steady rhythm after they had caught their breath and Dodd felt guilty for not helping—but this was no time for apprentices at rowing.

“How far do we go fra the river’s edge to the house?” Dodd asked.

“Half a mile perhaps,” said Enys. “The path is muddy but passable. It’s narrow though. If they have anyone watching it, they might warn the house and they could lock the place up or even cut some throats.”

“Ay,” said Dodd, “We need to catch them unawares. Two men to go up the path on the quiet and cut any guards’ throats…”

Enys coughed meaningfully.

“Oh ay, ehm…Capture them or something. About five more behind to get into the house and the rest to follow on if there’s trouble. Are there stables?”

“Yes, at the back. But there was only me and everyone was asleep, so when I got in I just passed as one of them, taking the priest off for more interrogation.”

“Why did ye kill him, really? It wasnae the coney-catching, was it?”

Enys said nothing.

“Hm,” There was something Enys had said earlier that was niggling Dodd. He tried to track down what was worrying him. “Ye had the password, did ye?”

“Yes. And it worked. I must say, I was surprised.”

“Cecil gave it ye?”

“Yes.”

“And the men slept through?”

“Well neither Heneage nor Topcliffe was there, but yes…”

Dodd sniffed. “Ay well then, Cecil’s got a man there and he drugged their beer.”

Enys was silent and Dodd saw his teeth flash in a rueful grin. “And there was I congratulating myself on how cunning I had been.”

No, it was still all wrong. It felt wrong. You took on a job to fetch a man out of imprisonment and then straight away you stabbed him in the back and heaved him in the river? It made no sense. Far better and far less effort to just stab him where he was in the prison and leave in a hurry. If that was your intent, of course. Perhaps Enys had intended to rescue him after all. But why had Cecil organised his escape in any case? Why couldn’t Cecil simply ask his father Lord Burghley to order Heneage to release him. From what Carey said, Burghley might have been old, but he was the chief man of the kingdom and the most trusted of all by the Queen…

Had Cecil ordered the killing then? But why didn’t Enys say so? And if Cecil had ordered it, why did Enys feel he must run? And why use Enys at all instead of whoever it was he had working for him inside the house? Why make it so complicated?

Dodd stared into the darkness, sucked his teeth, and listened to the steady rhythm of the oars as the powerful Cornishmen shoved the boat upriver against the flow. What was he getting into? Was that where they would have taken the women? How did Lady Hunsdon know for sure? What about Pickering?

“Did ye know Jackson well?” Dodd asked, fishing for some kind of clue, somewhere.

“No, I didn’t. Only by correspondance.” Enys’s answer was curt.

“Ah thocht ye came from a Papist family?”

“I do. I was in the Netherlands in the Eighties.”

It was there, just out of reach, somewhere in the darkness. If he’d been paid to kill Jackson, why would he have broken him out of jail first? Had he been paid at all…?

Dodd stopped breathing for a moment. Enys had certainly been paid in advance—he’d had money to gamble with at Pickering’s game who never allowed any kind of credit. Or…he had been given money at any rate, perhaps with the promise of more. Then he had been given careful instructions and he had followed them and successfully freed his man. And then, while in the boat on the Thames, no doubt heading for the Pool of London to take ship and escape, seemingly on a whim, Enys had put a knife in the back of the man he had just rescued at considerable risk and dumped him over the side with his feet still in chains to weight him down.

Dodd tried to imagine doing that kind of a job and what might make him put a knife in someone at the end of it. After all, you never really wanted to do it, did you? Killing someone in cold blood like that? No matter how many men you might have killed in battle or a fight or even on somebody else’s instructions, you never wanted to do something like that at such close quarters, especially not in a boat. He might spot what you were doing and certainly would resist, you might fall in or be stabbed yourself. Unconsciously, Dodd shook his head. You wouldn’t do it just because the man had coneycatched a lot of people, though you might disapprove of it. And you certainly wouldn’t do it if the son of the most powerful man in the kingdom had just paid you to help the prisoner escape.

In Dodd’s mind there was only one reason why he might put a knife in someone he had just rescued like that. He cleared his throat to ask Enys if that was the reason, then paused. All right. The only way the thing would work is if you realised that the man you had just rescued was going to try and kill you. Then it would make sense to put your knife in him first.

Why? Why would a priest who had just been rescued by Enys on behalf of…probably Cecil, possibly someone else…for what reason might he want to kill his rescuer? Well, they were alone in the boat apart from the boatman who had been well-bribed. One man goes upriver in a boat. A prisoner disappears from a safe-house. One man comes back, gets on a ship, and leaves England using the same name. And one man who knows too much about the scheme ends at the bottom of the Thames with a hole in him.

But you wouldn’t expect a priest to behave like that, even a Jesuit. Also, how did Enys know for sure? His own voice came to him. “You were from a Papist family.” Fr. Jackson was also a Papist—but what if Enys knew he wasn’t what he claimed? Didn’t all the Papists in a place tend to know each other?

Once again the backs of Dodd’s legs went cold. Even the sounds of the oars faded to nothing as his mind slewed round to the new idea. Good God. Maybe? Perhaps little Mrs. Briscoe had been right and the corpse really had been her brother Harry Dowling, always in trouble, greedy for money. Perhaps the stern-looking Catholic lady who was not called Mrs. Sophia Merry was also right and the corpse was Fr. Jackson SJ. Perhaps they were the same man? In fact, thinking about what Ellie Briscoe had said of her brother and how he had refused to know her when she saw him in London, perhaps Harry Dowling was more of a coney-catcher than a priest. Perhaps he was working all the time for someone else…Such as Heneage? Or maybe Sir Robert Cecil? And both Harry Dowling and James Enys had been in the Netherlands where Englishmen tended to bunch together in places like Flushing or under the same captains. It was more than likely Enys and Dowling/Jackson had met.

So when he finally saw the man, Enys must have realised Jackson wasn’t a priest at all. In fact, Cecil’s involvement made it almost certain he was someone who had been spying for Cecil’s steadily growing secret service. Cecil’s involvement in helping him escape also suggested that he was someone who was valuable and knew too much to be left in Heneage’s hands for too long. Enys had worked this out quickly because he knew the priest was lying, realised he himself knew too much to be allowed to live, and that the most likely way of getting rid of him was in the middle of a rescue.

But it had gone wrong for Cecil. Enys had fought in the Netherlands and he had struck first. The so-called Fr. Jackson went into the Thames still breathing and drowned—a nasty death, probably worse than the one Richard Tregian had suffered since Tregian had been hanged until he was dead. And Richard Tregian had died because Heneage assumed he was Cecil’s man, so took him and put him to death publicly as a warning to Cecil. Enys had to lie low with what he had been given as a downpayment and being what he was had tried to gamble it into a nest egg and lost the lot. So he couldn’t even pay his passage out of the country.

What had he done next? Gone to Cecil? Hardly, the man had tried to have him killed. Gone to…Well, obviously he had gone to Heneage who was the other side of the war he had stumbled into. He had gone to Heneage, spilled everything he knew. Probably he was trying to broker some kind of deal but of course Heneage had realised how that gave him a weapon. The taking of Briscoe’s wife had been a side-game and a tidying up of loose ends in order to take Pickering’s game. Heneage had arrested Portia Morgan to keep James Enys obedient and Portia Morgan would also be the bait that would draw the chivalrous and impulsive Carey into a trap, and alongside him that thorn in Heneage’s side, Sergeant Henry Dodd. Enys was the stone that would kill two birds at once. You could hardly blame Heneage for not resisting the temptation. He had overegged the pudding when he ransacked Pickering’s gaming chamber, but that was his habit as well.

However Carey had run to Court to speak to the Queen so he conveniently wasn’t here to stick his neck in another noose.

What had Enys said …“it was all a lie to coney catch great men at court.”

Dodd’s own voice came back to him. “Ye know nowt,” he had said to Carey about another ambush. “Ye’ve been told.”

Two boats? Sergeant Dodd as advisor, in command with Mr. Trevasker? Did Lady Hunsdon suspect something? He realised that he had sweat trickling down his back under his shirt, his stomach was crunched up, hiding under his ribs. This was far more frightening than a mere battle. He had been sixteen the last time he was this frightened. He looked across at the other boat which might as well have been on the other bank for all the talking he dared do. He couldn’t even signal with a lantern for fear of being seen, and he certainly couldn’t shout.

All right then. So they took Portia Morgan and had taken Briscoe’s wife to make sure of Briscoe’s help. It was provocative, an invitation to an attack. If there was to be an ambush there would be an alluring trail. And there was. Enys right there on the
Judith
where Carey would likely go to keep his father out of it, with the story of the house in the marshes, how he knew the path, how he had the key…