‘And to you, too, Ensign Vyves,’ Ned replies. ‘’Aven’t seen you in ’ere before. It’s late, but you’re welcome, all the same.’
‘We drinks usually in the Turk’s Head,’ Vyves says, looking around in admiration at the new – if not exactly pristine – interior of the tavern. ‘But we thought we’d give the new Jackdaw a try. And very nice it is too, if I may make so bold. What say you, Master Strollot?’
‘Very nice indeed,’ agrees the other man, taking off his thimble-hat as though he was in church.
‘Master Ned, meet my friend, Gideon Strollot,’ Vyves says expansively.
Strollot gives Ned a treacly smile. ‘Junior clerk to the alderman of Cornhill Ward.’
Ned’s eyes are drawn to a belly straining at the seams of a grey broadcloth doublet. ‘You’re welcome, both,’ he says, thinking Strollot a little old to be a junior anything. He must be at least forty. ‘At the Jackdaw we asks only that if you must curse, you do so inventively; and call no man a liar unless you can prove it. ’Part from that, if your coin is ’onest, we’ll take it.’
‘I still say he would have made a very fine pikeman,’ Vyves says to his companion as Ned pours a jug of stitch-back from the cask.
‘He’s big enough to fill in for ten,’ Strollot says appreciatively.
From in front of the cask, Ned says over his shoulder, ‘I’ve put my fightin’ days behind me. I ’ave no quarrel with any man, let alone one in Ireland.’
‘But they’re rebels,’ says Vyves. ‘Wasn’t that long ago they held the Pope himself to be their master. And besides, what if the Spanish make a landing, to assist them in their sedition?’
‘Well, the Dons ’aven’t managed it yet, ’ave they?’ Ned points out. ‘Your average Don is about as good at armada-rin’ as Ned Monkton is at dancin’ a galliard. Neither of us floats very well.’
He fetches two tankards from the shelf and sets them beside the jug of ale.
‘We’ll need three, if it’s no trouble,’ says Vyves. ‘We’s expecting company.’
Ned brings the extra tankard. ‘One ’a’penny, if it pleases.’
Vyves hands over the coin. ‘But aren’t you outraged at the cruelties the rebels are inflicting upon our innocent settlers over there: infants dashed against walls, men’s heads cut off an’ used as footballs?’
‘I look at it like this,’ explains Ned, scratching his great auburn beard. ‘Anyone who decides ’e’d rather make his ’ome in a wasps’ nest, in pref’rence to the one he’s already got, can’t complain much if ’e gets stung, can ’e? Why go? There’s land enough in England, isn’t there?’
‘They go in order to bring God’s light to a heathen country,’ suggests Strollot sternly. ‘To civilize it, and bring it to an understanding of Christian law and good custom.’
‘An’ ’ow’s that goin’ at the moment, would you reckon?’ Ned asks, leaning across the counter in a conversational manner.
Vyves lifts the jug of ale. His one eye gleams knowingly. ‘If the queen sends the Earl of Essex at the head of a proper army, like they say she’s going to, we won’t hear another squeak out of the Irish from now until the crack of doom – Spaniards or no Spaniards. You mark my words.’ And with that, he takes his tankard and heads for a nearby empty bench, Strollot trailing him like an inquisitive sow.
In the far corner the players are getting to their feet, their voices rising, their gestures becoming more theatrical. Ned goes over to calm them down. He calls Timothy to fetch them more knockdown. Then he goes back to his tallying until the street door opens again.
Laying aside his quill, he watches the newcomer stop just inside the door and look around, obviously searching for someone he knows. Lanky, not yet out of his teens, he looks strangely familiar. His eyes alight on Vyves and Strollot, sitting at their ale. At once he takes on a deferential shortening of the body – the way a servant might if he was about to make a guilty confession to an unpredictable master.
Now Ned recognizes him: he’s the young fellow from the muster file at the Southwark Fair, the one who exchanged a few words with Master Nicholas. He can hear in his head the boy’s answer to Nicholas’s question:
To Ireland, if it please Your Honour – to kill the papist rebels…
His curiosity pricked, Ned watches the lad slide onto the bench in front of Ensign Vyves, who lifts the ale jug and fills the third tankard, then pushes it towards the newcomer. But the lad ignores it. His shoulders stoop, his back bends, his head twists sideways a little. The abasement seems limitless. He is saying something that, at this distance, and with the noise coming from the actors’ table, Ned is unable to hear. But presumably it’s a request for money. Because Strollot pulls a purse from his jerkin, rummages in it, then puts his fist into the lad’s suddenly grasping palm. And with that, the fellow jumps up and leaves, without even lingering long enough to take a single sip from the tankard of stitch-back.
That alone is enough to rouse Ned Monkton’s suspicions. He thinks: whoever heard of a soldier passing up a free drink in a tavern – especially a newly mustered green-pate facing the imminent prospect of losing his head to a rebel’s knife?
But what is he doing still on Bankside? The muster marched away almost three weeks ago. He should be in Ireland by now. He has obviously not deserted, although Ned wouldn’t blame him if he had. A deserter wouldn’t go within a league of the man who mustered him, unless he wanted to end up with a length of stout rope for a scarf. There must be some other reason he’s still in England.
Ned runs through the possibilities. The cod’s-head must have dropped a heavy pike on his foot. Or he’s inadvertently stabbed himself while sharpening a poleaxe. And now that he’s recovered sufficiently, he’s come back to collect his pay. That would explain the coin Strollot handed him. What does it matter anyway? Ned asks himself. What concern is it of mine?
He goes back to his Ned-hand.
But for some reason that he cannot explain there is an itch in his mind that demands scratching. His pen gets barely as far as making the mark that assigns a jug of cardinal’s courage and a plate of brawn to the account of John Dromley, the wherryman, before another thought strikes him.
Why was it Strollot who paid him, and not Vyves?
Strollot is an alderman’s clerk. He’s not a military man. He has nothing to do with the muster. What business does he have paying a soldier?
In his memory, Ned tries to repaint the picture he’s just seen. This time he gives Vyves the purse. Perhaps that’s what actually happened, he thinks, making a pout that fails to move a single strand of his great red beard. Perhaps I remembered it wrong.
The actors are getting raucous again. Ned decides it’s time to have another word.
And so he forgets all about what he’s just seen. He puts it out of his mind. The itch subsides. Within a minute or two it has gone entirely, as if the gangly lad who should be in Ireland had never walked through the door.
8
Kilcolman Castle glowers over the fertile valley like a keep guarding a disputed border. It is a flinty grey tower house, dour and forbidding, set between the pine-clad slopes of the Ballyhoura Mountains and a wide, marshy lake. Now that the rain clouds have gone, the lake is a mirror glass in the afternoon sunshine.
According to Piers Gardener, Edmund Spenser has owned the estate for a decade. The valley itself looks well tended and profitable. Someone must have been keeping watch from the tower, because the owner of Kilcolman is waiting for them at the gate in the outer wall. In his middle forties, Spenser has the appearance of a scholar or a chaplain. Nicholas can picture him in the cloisters at Cambridge, discussing theology with his students. Yet while his hair is now receding at the temples, the neatly trimmed moustache flicked up at the ends and the small wedge of beard suggest he likes to keep abreast of fashion, even in remote Munster.