E
lizabeth had invited Francis Drake to that night’s Privy Plot Council meeting, for, after the most recent attack, his fate seemed mingled with hers again. She felt a bond with
him and admitted she needed all the help she could find to ferret out her—perhaps their—enemy. Both of them had hostile, powerful male cousins they wanted to rely on but could not, cousins who held grudges and might be dangerous, each in his own way.
As they sat around the table, it was deathly silent in her presence chamber, which had finally emptied of courtiers after a late supper and dancing in the great hall. Even Cecil didn’t shuffle papers but gripped his hands before him on the table. She had excused Meg Milligrew, for the boy Piers had a sour stomach, evidently from eating too many of the sweets they’d bought him in Fareham. She’d sent Meg and Ned there to discover all they could about Hern the Hunter and the Hooded Hawk and to ask if there had been men passing through town to the mansion who were not local inhabitants.
Both Jenks and her yeoman Clifford looked jumpy, but then she knew that, like Cecil, her longtime loyal guards wanted her to abandon this summer’s progress and return forthwith to Whitehall Palace in London. Lady Rosie was the only other woman in the room, and she had been driving the queen to distraction lately, sticking to her like a burr indoors as if she could protect her from flying missiles from each corner or turn of the hall.
“Tomorrow morning I am going to visit Captain Drake’s ship,” Elizabeth announced. “It is but a mile away, and I shall take a full escort of guards and several of my closest courtiers.”
“Wearing Drake’s armor under your cloak,” Cecil put in.
“Yes, which I shall remove once on board. The captain assures me,” she went on, with a glance at Drake, “that there are no sites for a bowman to hide within shooting range of the ship, and he will have men aloft in the shrouds.”
“In the shrouds,” Ned echoed. “Strange name for something people are usually buried in.”
“If you cannot speak more to the point or simply stick to your report without dark and pointless puns,” Elizabeth told him, “I shall ask you, as difficult as it is, to keep quiet, Master Topside. We are all on edge here.”
“Yes, Your Grace,” he said, shifting in his chair as if properly
chastised. “Shall I recount what I learned in Fareham about Hern the Hunter and the Hooded Hawk legend that may be connected to the shootings?”
“Do so. Meg has already told me you learned of no strange men coming to the manor, though I don’t know whom to trust anyway. It seems the people hereabouts are more concerned with figments of their imaginations than with reality. Say on, but—Yes, Captain?” she said, as Drake gasped, then lifted an index finger to speak.
“This Hooded Hawk—it’s a nickname for a myth of sorts, is that right? But—connected with the shootings at you, possibly at us? I only ask because of this—and this.”
To Elizabeth’s surprise, he placed a shiny gold sovereign on the table, then withdrew a letter from his doublet. He opened the parchment with shaking hands and laid it before her on the table next to the coin.
“The coin—with others—arrived in my absence as pay for the crew.”
“From your cousin Hawkins?” she asked, picking it up.
“Yes, Your Grace. This brief epistle was waiting for me in my captain’s cabin today, from the same.”
“A bold seaman,” Cecil put in, “so I hope to heaven he’s not behind these attacks—though, forgive me, Drake, I’d rather have you be the target than the queen.”
“I understand, my lord,” Drake said. “By my faith, I, too.”
“Sometimes,” Cecil went on, as Elizabeth bent over the epistle, “I think Hawkins’s many merchant ships are the closest thing we have to an adjunct navy, and that includes your ship, too, Drake. That’s why I think it’s important that, despite certain risks of late, Her Majesty make a great show of visiting your vessel on the morrow. And that note, Your Grace?” he said, and left the question dangling as Elizabeth read the epistle—twice.
“It is carefully worded and can be read either way,” she said, and handed it to Cecil. “‘Take care of’ could mean for good or ill, though it is clear here Hawkins wants for himself whatever glory he thinks you are basking in, Captain. After all, he is the senior man, as he notes here, and you are yet employed by him.
How interesting that he must have been in London for some reason,” she added, and spun the sovereign on its edge. “Or else someone in London sent him such coins.”
“But his insignia in the wax by his signature …” Drake said.
“What?” she cried. With Cecil, she bent over it as Drake moved the lantern at the end of the table closer to them. Yes, she hadn’t seen that at first, as she hadn’t clearly seen too much of late. No wonder Drake had suddenly looked so shaken.
“I understand what you were thinking and fearing when we mentioned the Hooded Hawk,” she said. “It is hard to make out the lines clearly in the wax imprint of his signet ring, but I do see.” As she looked up, her wide gaze met first Cecil’s, then Drake’s.
“Yes,” Cecil observed, “this hawk could be a pun on Hawkins’s name, and so harmless enough, even as the note could be read in a guiltless way. And the hawk is in no way hooded.”
“I rather thought,” she said, as Cecil passed the note to Lady Rosie, “that the hawk’s head is nearly shrouded by the sails of the ship and so could be considered hooded in that regard.”
“Yes, a bit far-fetched, but I guess that could be,” Drake said. Both Cecil and Rosie nodded.
“At any rate,” Elizabeth plunged on, “it would align with the theory that your cousin Hawkins—through a hireling—could be behind these attacks, which then would be focused on you. But since the bolt and the arrow missed you, does that mean Hawkins thinks I would send you away because you are some sort of target? More like he should worry I would find out and have him hanged for endangering my life—and he needs my goodwill!”
“Perhaps, Your Grace,” Drake said, “he means in a way to reenact the battle of San Juan d’Ulua. He taunts or dares me to flee as I—I did during that battle.”
“Too devious for a blunt, straightforward man like Hawkins,” she insisted. “It’s a trait of you west country seafarers, I warrant. Though that wax seal could represent a hooded hawk.”
“But he’s oft at sea,” Drake insisted, “so how could he know
to take advantage of a myth local to this spot? I doubt if he’d hear of it either in London, where the note came from, nor when he was in our home port of Plymouth to the west, where he’s ordered me to go.”
“Ned,” she said, “tell everyone what you reported to me about Hern the Hunter and this Hooded Hawk legend, and without another clever wordplay on shrouds or hoods, either.”
“Yes, Your Grace. Meg and I learned Hern’s a real man,” he began, “maybe almost in his ninth decade of life now, and lives in the forest east of town.”
“Which could be the forest we came through,” Jenks said, “the one where we found the finger tab after the arrow was shot. But a man of nearly ninety years could hardly shoot so well anymore.”
“Yes, I warrant it’s the same forest,” Ned went on, “but closer to Fareham than in the heart of the forest from whence that last attack came. Anyway, Hern used to be an excellent bowman, a longbowman even, but in the last forty years or so, before he got too weak or his eyes went bad, a shopkeeper told me, he was a bowyer and a fine one.”
Clifford, who seldom spoke at these meetings, put in, “Not many make quality bows and arrows anymore, not for battle e’en if for hunting. That’s why poor Tom Naseby’s death back in Guildford dealt a double blow.”
“So this Hern has bad eyes,” Cecil said. “Then it’s hardly been Hern placing that bolt and that arrow so precisely—if it was precisely, and he didn’t actually miss his target.”
“I also learned” Ned said, “that longbowmen have powerful shoulder muscles, and I warrant that old man hardly does.”
“So,” the queen said, “can we link this Hern in any way to the legend of the Hooded Hawk?”
“A legend he may be,” Ned said, “but many folk hereabouts seem to believe he either was or is real—reborn or some such nonsense. A fine marksman, they say, both with the crossbow and longbow, but he seems to have a mean, destructive streak of late.”
“How late?” Cecil asked. “Someone’s seen him recently?”
“Seen his cruel handiwork, at least, off and on this summer.
He’s rumored to be the one who shot and killed a few sheep for fun, poached deer from Southampton’s forest, and put flaming arrows into a thatched roof or two.”
The queen’s gaze snagged Drake’s again. “Like fire arrows,” she said, “shot at a ship in battle, a Spanish trick. So,” she added, turning to Ned again, “the reasons we should find this Hern are to see if he could name someone who might still shoot a longbow in these parts and to inquire what he knows about the so-called rebirth of the Hooded Hawk.”
“My thoughts, too, Your Grace,” Ned said with a little bow as if his part were finished and he awaited his usual accolades.
“I’m desperate enough to want to visit him myself,” she vowed, “for all else seems to lead to dead ends, and that is not a pun.”
She jumped as someone rapped on the door to the room. “Why,” she said, lowering her voice, “each time we sit down for a privy meeting, must we be interrupted? And who, this late, would know?”
“A message could have come from London,” Cecil said. “I’ve kept Justin Keenan here for now and put him in charge of the couriers. I told him if something key came up—namely anything from my man who is watching the Spanish ambassador de Spes—to fetch me. I’ll see to it,” he added, and started to get up.
“Let Rosie go,” Elizabeth ordered. “If it isn’t Keenan, I don’t need someone else knowing that anyone but her is with me at this late hour.”
As Rosie went to the door, the queen said to Cecil in nearly a whisper, “I think we could use Keenan on this covert council. He’s back and forth, here and there. I know you repeat things to us from your intelligence, but he’s observant and, I wager, closemouthed, which is exactly what we need.”
“Your Grace, I really can’t spare him, if you mean to have him work directly for you, but …”
He let his voice trail off as Rosie opened the door and stepped out into the hall, then came back in. She closed the door behind her, walked a few steps in and said, “Master Secretary Cecil’s right, Your Grace. It’s his man Keenan with a letter
in his hand for the master secretary only about—about what you said, my lord.”
“Cecil,” Elizabeth said, “I will not gainsay your wishes on this to allow him entrance, if you don’t trust the man, but you have shown that you do, and therefore I do, too.”
“Very well,” he said. “I will need to retain him in my employ, but I believe he should be able to report directly to this group, if there is some need.”
Rosie nodded and went back to the door to escort him in. Elizabeth could tell that Keenan, however stiff-faced Cecil’s aides had learned to be, was surprised to see the mix of servants and their betters sitting with the queen. For one moment, he nearly lost his poise and gripped the letter he held in his hand so hard that he bent it. He started to bow to Cecil, then realized he must bow first to the queen, which he managed a bit jerkily.
“My correspondence from London and other parts of the realm is always sealed,” Cecil said, “but I know full well the men I pay to pass it on to me through relays sometimes pass on what they know man to man. Right, Keenan?”
“Yes, my lord,” he said as he hastily advanced and laid the letter before his master. “I am to speak straight and fully here?”
“You’d best or your queen will have your head, man. Say on.”
Keenan cleared his throat and backed a few steps away from the table again, facing Cecil and the queen before he spoke. “The man you have in London, my lord, that is, the one who watches the new Spanish ambassador, de Spes, has discovered—in a way—the whereabouts of the crossbowman recently arrived from Madrid.”
“In a way?” Elizabeth repeated. “Explain.”
“That letter may have more complete details, Your Majesty,” Keenan said, as Cecil broke its seal, “but I hear that the bowman was sent out of London almost as soon as he arrived, with an escort who can speak good king’s—ah, queen’s English.”
“Sent where?” Cecil demanded, as he unfolded the letter.
“Sent south, that’s all your man could learn. South, not only with his weapon but with an ornate leather quiver full of Spanish-made missiles called something like
quadros.
”
“Quadrellos,”
Drake spoke up, “not shot from a crossbow
but from a longbow, if you want sticking power and good distance a shortbow cannot give.”
“A longbow?” Keenan said. “So he could be skilled at both crossbow and longbow? But no one shoots the latter anymore, Captain Drake, though I saw it demonstrated once when I was young.”
“You’ve done well, Keenan,” Cecil said, “but you may keep childhood memories to yourself, as well as all you have said, seen, and heard here. Is that understood?”
“Perfectly,” he said with a smooth bow that showed he had fully recovered his composure. “Secrecy and quickness are, after all, my lord, thanks to you, my stock-in-trade.”