Cautiously he dipped his finger into the ooze and then on into his mouth. The taste elicited another cry of surprise. Ned shot to his feet and walked briskly towards the door. A call from a startled Gryne had him half turn and call over his shoulder. “Keep as much of that as you need and send the four men over. If there are any more, I’ll pay triple so long as they arrive before Vespers chimes.”
Ned had to get back to the Ruyter as soon as possible. He had too much to organise before tonight. The delay and distraction of the Black siblings for one!
As Ned paced rapidly through the crowded street, he couldn’t help but growl out a string of curses. What an act of red handed ruthlessness. Typical. He should have put the clues together before this. It had been staring him in the face for the past week and he’d been too stupid and narrow focused to step back and see it.
One of his masters at the college once had come up with a surprisingly wise axiom. A man is only the sum of his experiences, and how a man acts is the result of what he is taught and what he sees.
Sir Thomas More saw the successful suppression of the Evil May Day Riots catapult him into Royal service and prominence. This time it could do it again, but with a callous twist. It was the cannons in the tower that quelled the last disturbance. Now, with a savage irony, they would start the next one. More was planning a bombardment of the city tonight or tomorrow to pre-empt the signing of the King’s Great Petition. That levelling of the city was paid for by Imperial gold, orchestrated by a bitter queen and the family of an executed traitor.
And just how did he know all this from just a single taste? It was Rob really who he had to thank for that lesson. The tang wasn’t that of a tart orange. It was of saltpetre with an overlay of sulphur, while the black of the pulp was from charcoal. As Ned had found in the last week, the only place in London with oranges, all the ingredient of Gonne powder and a hefty, iron shod strong box was the office of Sir Welkin Blackford, Master of the King’s Ordinance at the Tower of London, aficionado of oranges and a relation to Lady Stafford
And the man who controlled all the great city smashing Gonnes in the country!
***
Chapter 30. Treachery at Tower Wharf, Riverside Night-time, 10th June
The echo of the blow ricocheted off the wooden walls of the flanking warehouses. Ned would have collapsed in a crumpled heap however his captors had thoughtfully supplied him with three hefty men in monk’s robes. If they’d ever been in Holy Orders, then his bet would be on something violent and bloody like the Knights of St John, who hacked off the heads of Moors and Turks as a devout avocation. He’d gone through this sort of questioning the other day, and less than an hour ago it was going so well. This whole situation was so damn unfair. Lady Fortuna, so gracious with her gifts earlier in the day, and now? She was often described as capricious, whimsical, as flighty as a will-o’-the-whisp… Muzzily Ned tried to recall the, oh so recent, past, and sort out just where that fickle hearted lady had deserted him.
Ned had planned for all foreseeable eventualities. He’d even gone over his preparations with Tam Bourke, and if any man in London understood the vagaries of traps and ambushes, it was the second in command of Gryne’s men. It should have been perfect, gliding elegantly through each stage like the ticking of the great clock at St Paul’s, as one part of the scheme set the next into play.
It had begun smoothly. He had convinced Rob that the two punks, Lizzie and Mary, knew the whereabouts of the powder sorters lair, and that it was crucial to organise a raid as soon as darkness fell. He had leant upon the suggestion that Meg Black should be as far away as possible, looking after the remnants of the Orange Watch. Since the fracas this morning such provocation was going to be easy. He reckoned he’d figured out the motivations of Meg Black, well was much as any man could. The lass couldn’t resist the temptation to flout another of his commands.
Ned had considered the problems of having both Meg and Mary in the same location again. Flame and powder was a good comparison-well, one just had to take some chances. For this part, Ned felt he had hit upon a cunning lure. He’d quietly told Rob that he believed Ben Robinson was being held captive there. That lie, or prevarication as his daemon insisted on naming it, made him feel rather like a base traitor, but it was, at least, a good possibility. Those two so-called powder sorters needed someone to organise the cutting of the illicit powder, a skill Ned was sure that they didn’t possess. In all of London, Master Robinson was the only one apart from the Doutch Gonne artificers, who knew how to do it without expiring suddenly and dramatically.
That was not the real reason for the raid or the deliberate misdirection of the rest of the company. That owed inspiration from a darker motive. Since his meeting with Dr Caerleon Ned now believed he knew what chaos the Queen’s Oranges were set to unleash. Nothing short of the destruction of London’s east!
Once all the pieces of the plot had been assembled, it was really rather simple. First the friars that infested the city preached that the Lord’s wrath of fire and destruction would fall upon those who supported the King’s Petition. Next the messages in the oranges warned those caught up in the plot to start agitating, stirring up riots, and other discontent.
Normally it shouldn’t have been so easy. However the clever bit was the careful use of More’s pursuivants. They had been setting the scene for the last month with strikes all across the city, supposedly looking for ‘heretics’, building up a climate of suspicion and threat. All so that the friars and the oranges holders would have a fertile field of fear to sow.
And then the final part. Ned thought himself quite brilliant to have worked this out. It all came back to the King’s Gonne powder and that weasel, Welkin. The Master of Ordinance was being paid in gold to vastly over order hundreds of barrels of the volatile powder. So simple. The one person in the kingdom who everyone expected to have the most regulated and checked armaments and here he was stacking it up for another use. It was those two powder sorters who’d given the game away, played up by their greed and ready access to the stores.
It was the information from the riverside punks that helped to solve the final piece of this conundrum. It was the old monastery in Petty Wales. Ned recalled the decayed set of buildings. He was surprised they hadn’t already collapsed, though usefully, the crumbling collection sprawled for almost a block. If one were too perhaps stack them full to the brim with hundreds of barrels of powder and pitch, and then say, fire a couple of shots from the Tower Gonnes, all of east London would go up in one great conflagration.
No doubt the other great ordinance would do its part in spreading destruction, but according to the Doutch brothers, there were drawbacks to using them. They took a great deal of time to load, so between each salvo of shot you would have a considerable gap and the quantities of powder were well above the voracious appetites of those city smashers.
From that convenient spot the two powder sorters had figured out their own scheme for enrichment. They’d want to get as much gold as possible before tomorrow, for on Sunday Petty Wales would be lit up. It was the only option left, and it wasn’t as if they were planning to lay siege to the city. That was just impossible.
It was in its essence a very ruthless and evil plan-the casual and arrogant bloodiness of slaying thousands just to further the ambitions of a bitter Queen. Just another ploy in the game of princes. It was an act of utter barbarity that Ned found difficult to encompass. However his reading of the histories revealed that the great were none too scrupulous about the shedding of common blood in the pursuit of their aspirations.