Treachery (35 page)

‘Savile, perhaps?’

‘Might have been. He was always complaining about someone. Robert felt life had not given him his dues. That’s what he said to me. He said he had no one else to talk to. His wife never listened.’

They never do, these wives.

‘Did he ever mention a man called John Doughty?’

She gives me a quizzical look. ‘No. But there’s a Master Doughty who’s been coming to the House of Vesta the last few months. I heard Mistress Grace address him so as she was showing him into her private rooms. He even came to me on occasion,’ she adds, with a hint of regret.

There is a silence, filled by the screeching of gulls. ‘Eve,’ I say eventually, ‘given that you were …’ I pause, considering how to put this delicately. ‘Given that you entertained a number of men at the House of Vesta, how can you be so sure the child is Robert Dunne’s?’

She looks at me as if I am stupid. ‘Because Robert was the only one I loved,’ she says firmly. ‘And there must be love, to conceive a child.’ Clearly she believes this brooks no argument. I wonder who has put such fantasies in her head, and how she has sustained them against all the evidence that living in a whorehouse must have provided. I decide to change tack.

‘Did Robert ever explain this business that he had to finish in Plymouth?’

‘No. Only …’ she hesitates and falls silent, twisting the handkerchief between her fingers.

‘Please, Eve. Anything Robert told you might help to find out who killed him.’ I lower my voice. ‘If we can’t find out, he will be buried as a suicide, and all his goods will be taken. If that happens, we will never know if he left provision for your child in his last testament.’

Hope flickers in her eyes. ‘Do you think he did?’

‘I suppose it is possible. If he meant to take care of you.’ I feel low for deceiving her, though it is no more than Dunne himself had done. ‘But it will do him no good for you to protect his secrets now, if he shared any.’ I nod encouragement; she opens out the handkerchief, smooths it on her lap, weighing up the idea.

‘He had grown troubled in the last few weeks,’ she says, eventually. ‘I was only brought here a fortnight ago, when Mistress Grace discovered about the child. I’d been faking my courses the past two times with pig’s blood from the kitchen, but she caught me.’

‘Resourceful of you.’

‘It’s an old trick.’ She sounds scornful. ‘But before that Robert still came to the House of Vesta as often as he could. He talked about God and Hell a lot. Asked me if I thought it could ever be right to take a life.’

‘Did he? And what did you answer?’ I make my voice as gentle as I can. I sense I am nearing something important and I must tread carefully, as one would approaching a deer on a hunt; softly, softly, lest she take fright and bolt.

‘I said in a war, if someone was going to kill you otherwise, I was sure God would not punish a man who killed to protect himself or his kin.’

‘And what did Robert say to that?’

‘He seemed pleased. I think it’s what he wanted to hear.’

I nod slowly, and wait. There must be more.

‘Another time,’ she says, in a reflective tone, ‘he asked if I thought a man could be forgiven for betraying a friend, if it was to save a life. I said I could not see how such a situation could come about and he said I was probably right.’

‘He didn’t elaborate?’

‘No.’ She rubs her nose with the handkerchief. ‘But he often used to ask me what I thought it was like in Hell. Would it be burning flames or cold like a sea of ice? For some say one and some the other. I would tell him not to think of such things, and he would answer that he was afraid his soul was already damned.’ She shudders. ‘I hated it when he talked like that. I tried to change the subject, to make him talk about the home we would have with the baby when we were married, and he said it would have to be far away from England.’

There is more I would ask her, but we are interrupted by a scrabbling on the other side of the wall as Sam’s mop of hair appears over the top. ‘The old woman’s coming,’ he yells, with as much urgency as if he were announcing the sighting of a Spanish fleet off the coast. ‘She’s at the top of the street.’

I push myself to my feet, wincing, and brush the grass off my breeches. ‘One more thing, Eve. Robert had lodgings in town – do you know where they were?’

She purses her lips. ‘Rag Street, he said. By the sign of the Bear. I never went there.’ She holds the handkerchief out to me.

‘Keep it.’

She shakes her head. ‘I cannot, sir. She’ll know it’s not mine.’

‘Take this instead, then.’ I find a penny from the purse inside my doublet. Whatever I lay out now will be Drake’s to reimburse. I move to the tree.

‘One more thing, sir – I’ve just recalled.’

‘Yes?’ I wait, my hand resting against the trunk.

‘The last week or so that I saw him, before I came here, he was very pleased about something. It was to do with the ship, the
Elizabeth
.’ She stands up, shaking out her skirts. ‘He said he’d found out something about one of the people on board, someone he was to sail with.’

‘And …?’ I try not to show my impatience.

‘He said he’d learned that someone on that ship had a wicked secret, one that was going to cost them dear. And he rubbed his hands together like this.’ She demonstrates, looking like the figure of Avarice in a morality play.

I think of the purse hidden inside the prayer book, fat with five gold angels. Was Dunne blackmailing one of his fellow sailors?

‘Did he tell you a name?’ I ask. The hairs on the back of my hands and arms are prickling with anticipation. ‘Or any details?’

She frowns. ‘I am trying to remember.’

Suddenly there is a cry from the girl keeping watch by the cottage; I jerk my head up to see the back door opening and a bulky figure filling the doorway.

‘Quick!’ I hiss, grabbing the lowest branch of the tree and hauling myself up.

A shout comes from the far side of the garden; some crude English oath. Eve cries out; I hear a sharp whistling and a thud as the bolt of a crossbow buries itself in the tree trunk where my leg had been a moment earlier. I scramble along the branch as far as the wall; one quick glance shows me the man is striding across the grass towards us, reloading as he goes. I yell to Sam to get down. Just as I swing myself down to the other side, I hear the scrape of iron on brick as a second bolt narrowly misses, striking the wall and showering us with fragments of mortar.

Sam has already started running towards the street; I call him back and instead drag him up the bank behind the houses, into a scrubby clump of trees. ‘He will chase us out into the street if we go that way, it is too exposed,’ I explain. Without argument, he slips his hand into mine and allows me to lead him through untended gardens and along unfamiliar streets, glancing over our shoulders at every turn, until I am sure the man with the crossbow must have given up.

‘Can you get us back from here?’ I ask Sam, when we finally stop to rest by a drinking trough at the junction of three streets. The ground is higher here and I have a view over both the Sound and the estuary below us; the great ships sit stately as castles in the distance. He nods and we trudge back towards Plymouth together, footsore and weary. As we walk, I look down at him and consider what it might be like to have a son; exhausting, is my conclusion. For all the tenderness of this small hand clinging to mine, there is something terrifying about the enormity of a child’s trust, their faith in your power to make the world right. Since I fled from San Domenico – and even before that – I have had enough to do keeping myself out of trouble; the prospect of taking responsibility for another person’s welfare seems beyond my capabilities. But perhaps every man feels that before he becomes a father. Not that this is an immediate problem; I have no means to raise a child, nor any woman to carry it, yet.

Lost in these thoughts, I am not paying attention to Sam’s chatter. We have taken the path along the headland and he is pointing out to sea, yapping around my feet like a small dog, something about tunnels.

‘What tunnels?’

‘In the cliffs,’ he says, still pointing. I follow the direction of his finger across the flat grey water to the small rocky island that sits in the centre of the Sound like a sentry-post. ‘People call it Drake’s Island now,’ he says proudly. ‘All through the cliffs, my uncle says, there are old tunnels made years ago for hiding places.’

‘Smugglers, I suppose.’ I squint out towards the island. It looks an ideal staging post for dropping off illegal shipments from larger ships, any goods you might want to bypass the customs men; hide them in the tunnels and ferry them back to the mainland under cover of darkness. ‘Is it manned now, the fort?’

Sam doesn’t know. I peer harder, but it is impossible to see at this distance if there is any human activity. What a miracle it would be, I have often thought, if someone could devise a lens, such as the kind old men use for reading fine print, that would enable you to see distant objects closer. My friend John Dee had experimented with such a device, combining convex and concave lenses in various arrangements, but with no great success. It is the kind of instrument I feel certain the Arabs must have invented; perhaps there might have been some record of such a device, if Christendom had not been so arrogantly blind to science and destroyed so much of their great knowledge. In all its history, I wonder, has the Christian church ever brought anything but strife and bloodshed, either to those who embraced it or those who refused it? The thought leads me back to the brittle manuscript locked away in Drake’s cabin.

‘Are we going to see any more whores today?’ Sam asks, jolting me back to more prosaic matters as we reach the end of Castle Street.

‘No, Sam – I think I am done for the day.’

‘Where shall we go instead then, sir?’ he persists, valiantly trying to disguise his own tiredness.

‘I am going to the Star to rest. And you should go home to your mother. Here. You have been a great help to me today.’ I fish out the penny he has been waiting for. He looks disappointed at being sent on his way, and hovers at my side until I reach the entrance to the inn.

‘I could help more, sir,’ he says, beaming up at me. ‘I know my way all around Plymouth.’

‘I don’t doubt it. But I have no more need of help today.’

‘Tomorrow, then?’ He is tenacious, I will give him that.

‘Maybe. There is one thing you could do for me, Sam.’

‘Yes, sir?’

‘Keep a lookout for a man who dresses all in black. He has no ears, a pocked face and very blue eyes. He will probably be wearing a hat to hide his lack of ears, but you are clever enough to spot him.’

‘Are you going to kill him?’ Sam asks, interested.

‘Of course not.’ Not unless he tries to kill me. ‘I just want to know where he is lodging.’ But I recall what the girl Eve told me of the questions haunting Robert Dunne: can a man be damned if he kills another to save his own life? I must hope for my own sake that the answer is no. Though, as Sidney likes to point out, the charges against my soul are weighty enough already; one more murder would hardly tip the scales.

The entrance hall of the Star is bustling as usual; guests in fine clothes milling about, wanting to be noticed, while porters heft trunks and bags into service corridors as Mistress Judith sails here and there like a mighty barge, greeting paying customers in honeyed tones and berating servants like a banshee, often in the space of the same breath. At the foot of the great staircase is a little knot of ladies I cannot avoid: Lady Drake, Lady Arden and Mistress Dunne, with the chaplain Pettifer in attendance, red-faced and fretting. Lady Arden casts a long, cool look in my direction, but her face gives away nothing. A flicker of amusement relieves the solemnity of Mistress Dunne’s expression.

‘Did you have a profitable day, sir?’ She turns to the other ladies. ‘Doctor Bruno has been visiting whores since dinner time.’

‘I hear it is one of his preferred pastimes,’ Lady Arden says drily, ‘though by the state of him I cannot think it is good for his health. Your sleeve is torn, Doctor Bruno.’

So that is why she is so frosty with me today; she must have heard about our expedition last night. But how? A serving girl edges past us carrying a large pitcher of water; immediately I think of Hetty. Nothing is private in this inn. I glance at my sleeve with a soft curse; there is a tear almost a foot long in the seam.

‘Perhaps I should leave off climbing apple trees at my age,’ I say, poking a finger through the material. Lady Arden shakes her head and turns away to hide a smile.

‘Sir Philip will be glad to see you,’ says Lady Drake; already I detect a warmth in her tone when she mentions his name. The sooner I can get Sidney out of temptation’s way, the safer he will be. ‘He has been stamping about here this past hour looking for you. I believe he went to wait in the tap-room.’

‘Perhaps I had better go and find him,’ I say, bowing as I back away to make my exit.

‘We are all in a state of great excitement,’ Lady Drake continues, then remembers herself and casts an anxious glance at Mistress Dunne. ‘Saving your presence, mistress. Sir Francis has had a message to say that Dom Antonio travels with a French merchantman that is about to dock in the Sound, and will be with us before sundown. My husband will hold a supper here tonight to welcome him.’

Mistress Dunne makes a contemptuous noise. Lady Drake turns, her cheeks colouring. ‘We are all most sorry for your loss, madam,’ she says, sounding anything but. ‘However, Dom Antonio of Portugal is a royal visitor, expected these past weeks, and Her Majesty expects us to show him a fitting welcome.’

Mistress Dunne looks away, her mouth tight. ‘I ask you how you would take it, my lady, if your husband had been murdered and his fellow officers were out carousing while he lay unburied?’

‘Is my husband to neglect his duties because yours put a rope around his own neck? Do you not think his death has caused my husband enough trouble already?’

Lady Drake has raised her voice more than she meant to; other guests have stopped to listen. Lady Arden lays a hand on her cousin’s arm to restrain her. Mistress Dunne turns pale; her lips are compressed so hard they disappear into a white line. For a moment I think she might slap Lady Drake, but in the next instant her legs appear to buckle and she flails a hand, looking for support; the maid Agnes steps silently out of the shadows and helps her to a bench by the wall. A space clears around her. Into this shocked silence ambles Savile, fresh from the tap-room, whistling a catch.