He and his bailiff, sturdy Will Rooker, mounted up in the yard. Will had some old long beaten sword that might have seen service in the Wars of the Roses a century ago, and along with his sword, Nicholas carried a hunting crossbow across his back, and half a dozen bolts.
He felt the familiar excitement arise, all his good resolutions about sober duty and the quiet life already forgotten. One thing fighting the Turk had taught him: never negotiate, never surrender. And if he could face the Grand Turk, he could certainly face a band of impertinent Border bandits. They would have to fight. He had no choice. And assuming a band of twenty or so, they would have to attack with all aggression, hope to put a dent in one or two, and send the rest fleeing in confusion before they could put a knife to Hodge’s throat.
The night was growing dark, the moon too thin to give much light. They tied up their horses three fields away, downwind, and spoke to them to calm them and allay their fears, their harrumphs and whickers. Nicholas winched up the crossbow and loaded a bolt, and then they crept along the field’s edge under the darkness of the high old hedge, moving slow, until they came to Hound Wood. They crouched.
Nicholas glanced sourly at Will. Sneered in the dark. The fools of bandits had actually lit a fire to warm themselves and to cook whatever game they’d poached from his woods. Rank amateurs.
They went as silently as they could, knowing the bandits would see nothing, gazing sottishly into the orange heart of the fire, awaiting their ransom money. Patience was all. At last Nicholas was up behind a broad old oak not twenty feet off, crossbow readied, feet positioned carefully on soft ground free of twigs. He could have chuckled to himself. There were two of them. Two bandits. Hulking brutes, to be sure, from the hunched back of the one sitting, but no great number – the second of them lay wrapped in his cloak on the ground, probably dead drunk already. Hodge himself sat opposite, staring into the fire with an expression so untroubled Nicholas could have laughed again.
He lined up his crossbow and took aim at the head of the brute sitting on the log. Head the size of a cannonball from an Ottoman siege gun. At this distance it was too easy. Like potting apples at a May fair. He lowered the bow a little and aimed to take out his right arm. Hesitated. Something about the shape of the fellow …
He felt a presence just behind him, and then something cold at his throat. The touch of bright steel. He kept very, very still.
And then the brute at the fireside spoke, without turning round. A deep, rumbling, bearlike voice as if out of a cave.
‘Greetings, Master Ingoldsby. Fine hospitality you show us.’
The cold steel was removed from his throat and he lowered his bow to the ground, speechless with astonishment. He turned and there beside him stood a giant of a man with a broad, ruddy face and a mop of tow-coloured hair. For the first time he noticed another very serious sword indeed hanging in its scabbard from a nearby branch.
‘Ned Stanley! John Smith!’ he gasped. ‘If I knew any blasphemies I’d swear them now!’
‘Rubbish ambuscade of yours there, young Ingoldsby,’ said Stanley. ‘Brother Smith here said he smelt your horses coming ten minutes ago.’
‘And this hare’s tough too,’ grumbled Smith.
Hodge stood. ‘That’s because you’ve over-roasted it,’ he said. ‘You never could cook, you.’
After effusive greetings and embraces, Nicholas stood back, trying to make sense of their presence. Sir John Smith and Sir Edward Stanley, Knights Commander of the Order of St John, both old enough to be his father, both in their fifth decades, yet as he knew from fighting alongside them, as tough and as dangerous as any soldiers under the sun. They were the elite. The Turks called them the Mad Dogs of Christendom.
Nicholas grinned. Things always happened when these two appeared. Sir John Smith, a bear of a man with black hair and beard now increasingly grizzled, his deep rumbling voice, his eyes red and bloodshot when angered, like an enraged bull. He could knock any man senseless with a single, casual blow, and was seemingly indestructible. When he stripped to bathe, his tree-trunk torso had more scars than skin. And he took a grim delight in always predicting the worst.
And Sir Edward Stanley, of an old English family, of similar build to Smith but even taller, like a Norse giant, with tousled fair hair, ruddy cheeks, dancing blue eyes and laughing disposition. As Nicholas knew, he always seemed most cheerful when facing desperate odds, in the heat of a battle, with death staring him in the face. He was never happier.
And the pair were certainly in great danger in Protestant England, as well as being feared and hated throughout the Mohammedan world, just as much as the Knights Templar had ever been. Now the Knights Templar were destroyed, by corrupt kings without and their own corruption within. But the Knights of St John fought on, the greatest warriors of Christendom, against a Mohammedan tide that was once more sweeping westwards. Palestine was again in the hands of the Caliphate, and that old medieval dream of a Christian Holy Land seemed more distant than ever.
The Knights of St John had been driven from Rhodes, and finally besieged on their island home of Malta: an Ottoman siege that went spectacularly wrong, and became one of Christendom’s most heroic victories. And he had been there. Even now he could hardly believe it. All four of them had been there, comrades-in-arms; even the home-loving Hodge.
Nicholas waved at the two knights and explained to Will Rooker as best he could, ‘Old friends of mine. I can say no more. On your life, Will, mention this to no one.’
‘Not till Doomsday, sire,’ said Rooker stoutly.
Nicholas told him to head back to the house. He would return presently.
‘Last time we came direct to your door,’ said Stanley, solemn again, ‘tragedy ensued, and your father lost his life. As you well know. We needed to come and find you, but without risk of discovery or household tittle-tattle.’ He looked after the departing Rooker. ‘Less risk, at any rate.’
‘Rooker’s a good man.’ Nicholas looked them over. Two Catholic knights, travelling
sub rosa
and under cover of night in Elizabeth’s Protestant England. The danger was immense.
He said, ‘If you’re caught, you’ll be beheaded within a day. And Hodge and I will probably be racked till we stretch from here to Shrewsbury.’
Stanley looked evasive. ‘Our being here is not without risk, it is true. But we do carry a letter of
passe-par-tout
, a sealed letter direct to Elizabeth’s secretary from our Grand Master, and new information of great value to London. Tidings from the East, you might say. Though not exactly glad tidings.’
‘But the Pope, your Holy Father, has virtually ordered her assassination. Four years ago he declared her excommunicated and a heretic – which is as good as ordering her removal from the English throne.’
‘Is the Pope not your Holy Father too?’ said Smith sharply.
Nicholas hesitated. ‘My Catholic faith is blurring with the years. This new Church of England is a broad church. Our parson here still has a crucifix on the wall, still reads the Psalms in Latin. And no, I most certainly have no interest in assassinating my Queen. Have you? Why are you here?’
Smith and Stanley exchanged glances. They would not be telling their old comrade Ingoldsby everything tonight. It was not possible. But they needed him. Stanley said, ‘We want access that you can get us. How is your account of your travels to Malta and the Battle of Lepanto that you were writing for the Court? Is the Queen not impatient for it? It will be excellent foreign intelligence for her and her secretary Lord Cecil.’
‘How do you know …?’ Then Nicholas shook his head. The spy network of the Knights of St John was legendary. It spread across all of Christendom and well beyond, to the court of Constantinople, to Persia even …
‘Nearly done,’ he said. ‘I will go to London later this summer.’
‘Finish it in three days.’
He snorted. ‘Out of the question, Stanley. It’s a busy time of year, seed to sow, animals to get out into the fields, endless accounts …’
‘Three days,’ said Stanley. ‘We need to move by then.’
‘Brazen cheek,’ muttered Nicholas. ‘Every time I encounter you afresh, I know there’s going to be trouble. It’s out of the question.’
It was with ink still on his fingers and bleared eyes that Nicholas rode out at the head of the four along the London road, three days later. There was much to do on the estate – not least the late lambing – but he had promised good reward to Will Rooker and his brother for managing it all while he was gone, and they were sound men. He would only be gone a short while, he said, just a few weeks. Back before May Day at the latest.
Hodge looked gloomy at his words. He felt a terrible foreboding that they would be gone a lot, lot longer.
They slept one night in the melancholy shadows of a ruined monastery, without any fire to warm their bones or cheer their hearts. Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang. Was it possible – Nicholas lay awake wondering, the dew settling on his face towards dawn – was it possible that only four decades ago, when his father was a boy, this was one of the great monasteries of England, a place of prayer and worship, unspeakably beautiful choirs of heavenly voices? Rest and hospitality for any pilgrim that asked, healing for any sick that came? Surely when that oaf Henry destroyed the monasteries he destroyed part of England’s own soul.
And now his Protestant daughter sat on the throne. Nicholas’s Queen, whom he now served, now rode to London for. He rolled on his side. Truly the world was out of joint.
They found rooms at an unwholesome inn at Wapping, the Mermaid. Hodge squinted up at the worm-eaten sign-board of the fair fish-maiden. ‘Looks like she’s got a bad dose of the clap.’
The first thing the landlord said was it was sixpence for half an hour upstairs with his daughter, or a shilling for a quarter ounce of this new nicotiana. ‘Fresh from the Americas.’
They politely declined both.
Leaving his comrades to talk over old times in a private chamber, Nicholas rode over to Whitehall Palace to lodge his account of his travels with an uninterested clerk. Smudged and hurriedly written as it was, it would have to do. He stressed that it was commanded expressly by Her Majesty some three years ago. The clerk, sickly and pockmarked, seemed even more uninterested. He went back the next day to see if there was any response. Nothing. Dealing with government was often trying.
In the meantime they waited at Wapping and kept low. Smith and Stanley felt it was too risky to stay with Nicholas and Hodge and found lodgings somewhere else unspecified. ‘A safe house,’ said Stanley vaguely. Old Catholic families still abounded. Yet Nicholas already feared they were being watched. The landlord eyed them suspiciously from the start. No one could help but notice the two knights’ deep un-English colour, cheeks burned brown by the Mediterranean sun, and yet their gentlemanly demeanour, and their aura of martial power.
At night the Mermaid was filled with mariners of the roughest sort, all flashing gold earrings and ribbons in their pigtails and gleaming daggers at their belts, and some very tall tales indeed. They disbursed their hard-won earnings as fast as they could drink them, as did their brazen shouting whores.
Hodge and Nicholas tried to keep inconspicuous and drank small beer as long as they could. The noise and stench grew worse and the fetid reek of this new-fangled tobacco in every mariner’s clay pipebowl made the eyes sting and the stomach sicken. It would never catch on. Then a drunken whore fell across their table quite bare-breasted and eyed them with a stupid, feigned lasciviousness, before rolling onto the sawdust floor and lying there half asleep. Feeling rather ridiculous, Nicholas leaned down and covered her modesty with a kerchief.
‘Quite the gentleman,’ said Hodge. ‘What’s this inn’s name again, The Devil’s Whore?’
Nicholas grinned. The reechy stew of humanity in all its rumbustious shamelessness. He checked the dagger at his waist. Might be needed before this night was out. Yet he felt the thrill of it all as well, the hum of the great capital. Though he loved his native countryside with a love too deep for words, there was another kind of pleasure here. But please God, let him not be tempted tonight by a whore. Another blowsy wench was pouting at them across the room, though sitting in a mariner’s lap. One night with Venus, a lifetime with Mercury. One onion-breathed kiss on the lips, and a month later, a body of welted sores. Or the mariner’s own jealous dagger in your back, for that matter.
All was talk of foreign voyages and ventures. Even in darkest Shropshire they had eventually heard tell of Sir Francis Drake’s extraordinary voyage to the Indies, the looted Spanish treasures he brought back with him.
‘Four thousand seven hundred per cent!’ murmured an older man, more sober suited. A maritime investor, perhaps, listening for tips. ‘Four thousand seven hundred per cent on every guinea invested.’
‘What’s that in plain English?’ said a blear-eyed sailor, leaning towards him.
‘Invest a guinea,’ said the older man, ‘and you’ll get back forty-seven.’
The sailor gaped.
‘If Drake’s not shot, hanged, drowned, burned or devoured by cannibals on his next voyage!’ said another.
There was talk of other great travellers, of Giles Fletcher, of Anthony Jenkinson and his marvellous map of the East, and this new Empire of the Russias. A mariner sunburnt and muscled sat beside them, jovial and well soused, and showed them a bangle squeezed round his powerful wrist.
‘Pure gold,’ he said. He had a Devon accent, like Drake himself. ‘Pure African gold. Got from a woman there for a mere bit of cloth. And the women there,’ he waved his hands sinuously, ‘got rumps on ’em good enough to eat.’
‘’Pon my faith,’ said Nicholas politely.
‘Now I like to think there’s half a dozen pied coloured bastards o’ mine running about the jungle, naked as Adam!’ He roared with laughter. ‘Look. This bangle here. African gold.’ Why did drunkards always repeat themselves? ‘Come from the ancient kingdoms inland. Come by camel across the desert. Remarkable beasts. They call it the Gold Coast, ’tis so common.’
‘That’s nothing,’ said another mariner. ‘There are isles in the southern seas, about the Portugal islands and the East Indies, where gold is so common they reckon it worthless entirely.’
‘That’s lies,’ said the first.
Daggers would be out soon. A drunken mariner would quarrel with his own shadow. Nicholas had his dagger loosened in its sheath, Hodge likewise, but that hefty three-legged stool there might prove more useful if things should get lively.
The world travellers and gold connoisseurs talked of lands beyond the equinoctial sun where the natives were burnt quite black but gold was as common as clay, and though they were only naked and unchristened savages they dined off trenchers of pure gold. Gold knives, gold beds, everything. Gold gold gold. Nicholas began to sicken of the word.
‘You mean,’ he said, ‘you could sail back with a dozen shiploads of gold?’
‘Aye, lad, just so. For a few fardels of Hampshire kersey. Nice bit of cloth but not worth that much. And jacinths, rubies, emeralds …’
Hodge nudged Nicholas sharply under the table but he pressed on. ‘But then wouldn’t gold be worth less in England? If you came back with hundreds of tons of it? Like it is in these fabled islands of yours?’
The mariner snapped, ‘Gold is gold, you fool. Gold is precious wherever it is.’
‘But you just said it wasn’t. In these fabled islands. Because there’s so much of it. It’s only precious where it’s rare.’
‘You call me a liar?’
‘No, I just question your grasp of economics.’
‘Oh bloody hell,’ sighed Hodge.
‘Don’t get smart with me, Master Wordy Quickwits,’ snapped the mariner, ‘or I’ll kick your arse down Wapping Stairs and give you a bellyful of sweet Thames water to sup on.’
A fight was a gnat’s breath away, but Nicholas just grinned broadly and gave the mariner a mighty slap on the back and ordered him up another mug of ale. ‘Here’s a man after my own heart, Hodge. Do you have a ship or work one?’
The mariner scowled. ‘Not I. My captain does.’
‘We might need to take ship soon. We have a journey to go.’
‘Aye,’ said Hodge. ‘Back to Shropshire. By horse.’
Nicholas said, a little heady, musing, ‘I feel there’s something in the air.’ Thoughts of returning home by May Day were already receding. The world was so rich, so wide …
‘You got an estate to run,’ said Hodge. ‘The lambing, spring crops to sort. And abroad’s a bloody awful place anyhow. I know, I’ve been there. Full of people who want to rob you or kill you or both.’
Nicholas gazed into the middle distance. ‘Something with the taste of far-off adventure …’
‘Don’t you dare. I don’t have a sense of adventure.’
‘It’ll come back to you,’ said Nicholas.
‘I’m not going up to Hull again and that coast,’ said the mariner. ‘Grim old coast, that is.’
‘Not Hull,’ said Nicholas. ‘Possibly further. Possibly Constantinople.’
The mariner laughed. ‘Go and visit the Turk? Now who’s the teller of tall tales?’
Hodge gripped Nicholas’s shoulder. ‘What else have those devious knights been telling you?’
Nicholas looked evasive. Then he said in a low, serious tone, ‘They admitted to me when we were on the road that the Order has intercepted a message from the heart of the Sublime Porte itself. One of their trusted agents came back to Malta with a letter in fearsome code, but marked from the Sultan’s own secretariat. The agent said that two men had already been murdered for possession of the letter, and he only narrowly escaped with his own life. After poring over it many days, the Knights understood it to read,
The Black Sea is flooding north, through summer meadows
.’
‘Very pretty. What the devil does that mean?’
‘They’re not sure. But if two men died for it, it must matter.’
‘Tell me what they
think
it means.’ Hodge was exasperated. ‘For the love of God, Nick, have I ever betrayed you?’
Of course he had not. For all that they were still officially master and man, they were two equals in every other respect. ‘It may mean,’ he said quietly, ‘that the Ottoman Empire is about to march north and attack Russia. To wipe it off the map.’