I watched him lower himself from the window, gripping the ivy, his feet kicking against the wall until he could jump to the ground. Watched him leading his horse to the opening of the mews without looking up. Listened to the hooves as they gathered pace.
I’d never felt so alone, so useless. Twisted by contempt for myself and what drove me – a thirst for secret wisdom disguised as love for queen and country. I thought I might never unwrap the stone again.
The stone I’d thought to deliver to the Queen, with the promise of angelic advice on how best to exalt her majesty. The stone which might procure knowledge of which islands remained to be discovered beyond the known world, which unknown natural forces might be harnessed to the Queen’s cause.
What had led me to think that a man who could not see might walk in celestial light? The only man in the Faldos’ hall who’d caught no glimpse of even the boneman’s ghost, if such it was.
And worse, how could I have brought Dudley into this? A man with more enemies than he could name in a year. No matter that he’d leapt at it like a dog in a butcher’s shop, I was the one who’d laid the scented trail.
Hear his voice from that moment of engagement:
We’ll make a good bargain with this man, in the noble cause of expanding the Queen’s vision.
It had come too easy. The bargain was a black bargain, founded upon threats, and no good could come of it.
I gazed, without hope, at the shrouded stone. My Christian cabalism, that shield against the demonic, had been compromised by the means of its acquisition.
To begin with, how had John Smart known of my desire for it? As I’d not mentioned it in my own letter to my cousin Meredith, it surely could only have been through the whore, who’d learned of it from Dudley. The whore whose fishmonger, as we say in London, was Smart. I wondered how many bawdy houses in Presteigne were owned by this man, whose shrill laughter I could almost hear.
Go on… take the stone… for all the good it will do you.
Tainted.
I flung myself on the floor by the truckle, my teeming head buried in my quivering hands. Filled with dread, now, over Dudley who, in pursuit of my own ends, I’d left alone in a town full of hostile strangers. Where might I even begin to search for him?
Friendship apart, the thought of returning to London without him made me cold to the spine. I’d tell the Queen almost everything – for how could I not? – and be lucky to escape with my head, let alone my occasional place at court. For even though she’d ever dithered over his suitability as a husband, Dudley, beyond all doubt, was the only man she’d ever loved.
Maybe the angels could tell me where to find him. I stared at the black-wrapped stone and began to laugh, in a crazed way which could only break asunder into weeping, and then I was down on my knees in a vault of moonlight, praying for inspiration to a God who seemed this night to be very far away.
And then the King made God smaller.
Not the first time that Goodwife Faldo’s words in Mortlake church had come back to me.
XLIII
Graveyard Mist
NO MEMORY OF falling back across the truckle, but that was where I lay until the moon, having shed all its cloud, awoke me with its brilliance. Or maybe it was the whispers rising like hissing steam from the mews.
The light was so bright that I sprang unsteadily to my feet, at first thinking in panic that morning was come. Slowly realising, as the moon’s position in the window was unchanged, that I could only have slept – thank Christ – for an hour or so. There was a pain in my chest from how I’d lain as I leaned out into the chill night and took breath after long breath, hanging over the sill, my hair fallen over my face and eyes.
‘John, boy…’
‘Huh?’
Raking away my hair, as he came out of shadow and stood looking up at me, removing his green, small-brimmed hat and holding it in both hands at waist level.
Thomas Jones.
Twm Siôn Cati. Plump, very Welsh, ever half-amused.
‘The inn’s all locked up. What kind of bloody inn’s all locked up before midnight?’
‘What the hell are you doing here? Time is it?’
‘Maybe not yet midnight, maybe just after. You mean you didn’t get my message?’
Oh God, it all came back, the note he’d left for me with the ostler. Seemed like weeks ago.
‘I… left very early this morning.’
‘You should know I’m not a man to waste paper, John.’
‘Beg mercy. Listen… my friend… Dudley…’ No point at all in maintaining the Master Roberts conceit. ‘You seen him this night? Or earlier?’
‘You mean he’s not here?’
‘Missing.’
‘Since when?’
‘Not sure.’
He was silent for a moment. I looked over to the stables; we must surely have disturbed the night ostler in his loft.
‘All right,’ Thomas Jones said. ‘As you seem to be wearing your day apparel, if I were you, I’d come down.’
‘From the window?’
‘Unless you want to rouse everyone. We can’t talk like this, people will think we’re lovers.’
I raised myself up in the window, threw a tentative leg over the sill and then slid back into the bedchamber and grabbed the shewstone from the board. Stowed it away in my jerkin, and then, before I could think too hard about it, was out into the night, holding to the ivy.
Which came away in my hands, halfway down, and I tumbled to the cobbles, stifling a cry.
Thomas Jones stood looking down at me, not assisting.
‘Not used to this, are you, John?’
‘Not broken into as many houses as you.’
Picking myself up, hoping the moon would not expose my swollen eyes or any other evidence of how close I’d been to parting with my mind.
‘Fetch your horse,’ Thomas Jones said. ‘Quietly.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘To begin with, somewhere we can talk in normal voices.’
‘In relation to Dudley?’
I must have sounded like a child.
‘Who knows, boy? I fear we’re close to the heart of something quite unpleasant.’
We had disturbed the night ostler, but half the money in my purse secured, I hoped, his silence. He helped me saddle up and we went out to where Thomas Jones’s horse was tethered at the entrance to the mews. Riding out of Presteigne on a moon-barred road that now was become all too familiar to me.
‘Would’ve told you this the other night,’ Thomas Jones said, as we dismounted a mile from town. ‘But not in front of that cocky scut.’ He sniffed. ‘Even if he’s dead, I might not take that back.’
‘Dead?’
‘I don’t say that he’s dead, but these are not the kindest of men.’
‘Who?’
He made no reply, leading his horse along the side of the road. Without too much reference to Dudley’s private and public troubles, I’d explained to him why we’d come here. His only reaction had been a slow nodding of his head.
Could I trust this man, you might ask. Well… he was betrothed to my cousin and had been pardoned by the Queen. There were those I’d trust less.
‘Men?’ I said. ‘Not the kindest?’
‘I’ll get to it.’
If you’re wondering about the true nature of his knavery, I know little, preferring the legend of a Welsh Robin Hood who, for a brief period, would prey upon the Norman dynasties holding the best farmland in the far west of Wales. All of it stolen, Thomas Jones would allege, and who was I to argue? Wales was, they said, a land ruled at every level by brigands. Some of them in London now.