Deeds of Men (7 page)

“I can’t give you that,” Deven said, astonished.

“
He
can.” Mungle jerked his twisted thumb again, this time at Antony.

The young man blinked. “You want…bread.”

“I’ll explain later,” Deven said. “For now—you have my word, Mungle, as Prince of the Stone, that a loaf of bread will be yours, in exchange for your services here. Investigate that house—find out all you can of who dwells there, who visits, what purpose Henry might have had in coming here—then, having done so, return to us here before the hour is out, to guide us back to ways we know, and tell us what you have learned.” He had to be specific, or the goblin would find some way to twist it. Nothing serious—a jape was not worth bringing the Queen’s anger down upon him—but Deven had no patience for it, however small. Not today.

Mungle sighed, gave a very bad approximation of a bow, and vanished.

Quite literally: the bogle whisked off his tattered cloak, whirled it around, and when the motion settled he was nowhere to be seen.

“What the
devil?
” Antony blurted, as he had once before.

Deven settled his back against the filthy wall, the better to watch their surroundings, and said, “A charm against seeing. ’Tis a weak thing—there are ways to break it—but enough to serve.”

Antony shook his head, still staring at where the goblin had been. “Had you told me a week ago…I never would have believed any of this. Faeries beneath London, and I among them, seeking out the truth of my brother’s death.”

For once, his confusion and amazement blunted the hard edge of grieving anger. Considering it for the first time, Deven realised, with some little startlement, that he liked Antony Ware. Henry’s dismissive account of him had always made Deven envisage a plodding stone, but Antony was more than that; phlegmatic he might be, especially when compared with his brother, but it gave him a foundation to stand upon when confronted with unexpected strangeness.

Then Deven considered
that
thought—and the words Antony had just spoken. “But—”

The young man tilted his head. “But what?”

Coldharbour might not be the place to ask it, but Deven’s curiosity was too strong to be denied. “But Henry had told you of the Onyx Court, at least in part. Did you think him simply a madman?”

“I…” Uncharacteristically, Antony stuttered, lost for a reply. “That is—”

Deven straightened. “How much had he told you?”
Wrong question.
“How
little?
”

“H-he told me—”

“Nothing.” Deven could hardly believe the word, even as it came out of his own mouth. “You had no idea. Of any of it.”

The dropping of Antony’s gaze answered him clearly enough.

Deven thought back frantically. What had Antony said, accosting him that day in Westminster? “What world did you think I brought him into, if not the Onyx Hall?”

“It wasn’t you,” Antony said to his mud-caked shoes. “I figured that out, in time. Henry never said who. I just assumed—you were one of his great friends in Westminster, he spoke often of you—and you have been in the King’s service for years.”

He could not possibly have meant James’ court; Sir Robert Ware was the one who sent Henry into that world, buying him a commission in the Gentlemen Pensioners. “What in God’s name did you think I’d done?”

Antony’s shoulders went back—young shoulders, not yet to their full breadth, but he would be a solidly-built man by the time he was done, and he stood with all that future solidity, meeting Deven’s eyes even though his cheeks burned with shame. “I thought you had made him your catamite.”

In sixty-two years on God’s earth, surely there had been a time when Deven was as hard-pressed for words as he was now—but he could not remember any. Henry, his
catamite?

James’ court was so reputed, as a sink of drunkenness and sodomy. The drunkenness was true, and as for the other…

It was the sin not named by Christians, at least in principle. In practice, the sodomite gentleman was a stock figure of satires, mincing down the lane with his smooth-cheeked boy in tow. Was that how Antony had seen Deven? Old as he was—Christ above, it was like the whispers no one dared speak aloud, of how Pembroke and the Archbishop had flung the fair-faced George Villiers into the path of the King, hoping to oust the previous royal favourite. Now that pretty young gentleman was Duke of Buckingham, and more dear to James than ever his late wife was.

Henry had been no girlish ganymede. Neither could Deven reconcile him with the appalling figure of Christian fear, violating the very foundations of God’s order for the world, brother to the heretic and the sorcerer—but there were sodomites among the fae, for they paid little heed to the laws of the Almighty. Deven’s years in the Onyx Court had therefore worn the edges off that fear, leaving him less horrified than a priest would wish him to be. He knew sodomy happened among mortals, though few if any thought of it by that terrible name.

But Henry had. This—not his faerie association—was the sin the young man had confessed to his brother.

Deven was saved from having to find some reply by the return of Mungle. The bogle appeared out of thin air, made even more hideous than usual by his wide grin. “Ha! Some filthy foreigner rents a room there—a Spaniard, by the name of Quijada.” The bogle butchered the pronunciation, and Deven winced.

“Who?” Antony asked, looking equally grateful for the distraction. “Was that who Henry had followed?”

Nithen would have noticed if the gentleman in question had been a Spaniard. And since he had not—

“Antony,” Deven said, the words leaping from his mind to his mouth without pause for consideration, “when you accosted me in Whitehall—you thought Henry’s death came about because of me. Why?”

Embarrassed, the young man repeated, “It wasn’t you.”

“I know that. But why did you think his death was connected? Divine punishment for his sin, or some more tangible reason?”

Mungle was doing a terrible job of hiding his curiosity. But Antony had clearly forgotten the bogle’s presence, caught up in the pursuit of Deven’s idea. “He—I thought to persuade him to forswear his…friend. And he told me it was already done, because his friend kept far too dangerous company, and he did not like their games.”

A gentleman, neither old nor young, in Coldharbour. Visiting a Spaniard.

Dangerous company. A friend whose name Henry feared to confess.

“Robert Penshaw,” Deven said, and Antony’s eyes widened. Like a consort of ill musicians slowly coming into tune, the strands of this murder were sorting themselves into order. Not all of them, yet. Deven had not the slightest clue what business Penshaw meant with Quijada—though he’d heard that name before, in some report Sir Adenant had made to Lune. Henry had thought their games dangerous enough to avoid.

But not entirely.

Deven smiled past the pain in his heart. “It seems I may indeed have gotten Henry killed—but not in the manner either of us thought.”

“I do not understand,” Antony said. Despite Deven’s words, the hostility he had carried all this time was gone, leaving only confusion in its wake. Confusion, tempered with a readiness for action.

I taught Henry too much…and not nearly enough.
“Mungle,” Deven said. “You have earned your bread, and may yet earn more. Keep you a watch over this house, and follow Quijada if he leaves. Master Ware—you and I must see the Queen.”

The Onyx Hall, London: 17 January, 1625

Henry stood like a schoolboy reciting his lessons, but no schoolboy ever had such a fervent gleam in his eye—at least not in any school Deven had ever attended. “If the Dutch lose Breda, Spain will be free to put the soldiers they have there to other uses, and the money used to maintain them, too. Would that not aid the Habsburgs?”

“It would,” Deven agreed. “But for James to send a force to relieve the Dutch would be an act of war against the King of Spain.”

“But France has asked it of us! Aren’t we allied now, with the marriage to Henrietta Maria all but secured? And the fastest route for Mansfield’s expedition to the Palatinate would be to go from France through the Spanish Netherlands, but if James is so afraid of angering the Spaniards he will never allow that, and besides which Louis is so upset over Breda that now he says Mansfield can’t land in France at all, and you know all of this already, don’t you.” Henry’s rapid speech, whirling like a spinning top, suddenly wound down and fell over.

Deven admitted it with a nod. Political difficulties with the Cour du Lys meant Lune received no voluntary information from the French fae, but she had a spy of her own on the other side of the Channel—not to mention ears at the keyholes of Buckingham and the King. “But I wanted to hear what
you
knew.”

“That is almost the sum of it.” Henry dropped abruptly into a chair. “Except that there’s also the Huguenots at La Rochelle, and at court they say James will help Louis put them down, even though they’re Protestants.”

They were rebels against their anointed sovereign; to James, that mattered before religion. Letting a smile quirk one corner of his mouth, Deven said, “The Devil himself could not make a worse mess of Europe than mortal men have done these past few years, but you have grasped it well. Tell me—which lady in Lune’s train did you seduce to gain this information?”

Henry flushed far redder than the words merited. Was he truly so shy of such questions? Not Carline; she had her own mortal in tow, still hoping for the chance to produce the next Prince of the Stone. Nianna? Far too brainless, that one; she paid attention to politics only insofar as complete ignorance was displeasing to her Queen. Ailis? Yfaen?

“Who says I must learn it from a faerie?” Henry asked, his tone halfway between plaintive and demanding. “There are mortals who care about these things too, you know.”

A desire for James to open hostilities against Spain, and a concern for the Protestants at La Rochelle. “Robin Penshaw?”

Another flush. “You needn’t say his name with such surprise.”

Deven wasn’t surprised; he was disappointed. Penshaw might care about these things, but his vision was far too narrow. He had proven that at Christmas-time, when the Gentlemen Pensioners assembled to attend upon the King: one drunken rant after another, all upon the twin themes of Spain and Catholicism. “Let me guess. He would prefer James to sail to the support of La Rochelle—even if that cost us Henrietta Maria.”

“Well, what use is a French princess, if neither James nor Louis will commit to war?”

“They
will
commit—but not if La Rochelle flares into full rebellion. Does Penshaw know Louis has plans to fight the Spanish in northern Italy? No, I thought not. But no king is foolish enough to send his soldiers away if they might be needed at home. The Habsburgs would like nothing better than for the English and the French to be at each others’ throats over those Huguenots. And that is exactly what Penshaw would have us charge into.”

Henry’s sources for information might still be too limited, but despite that, Deven was pleased. The young man who had sworn the Gentlemen Pensioners’ oath would not have known a tenth of what Henry just recited to him. His progress was encouraging.

Without warning, Henry asked, “How do you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Keep all these things in mind, all these factors and complications. James does one thing regarding the French in La Rochelle, and it means something else happens for the Spanish in northern Italy. When you told me England was your concern, I thought to myself, I understand that. But it isn’t just England, is it? France, and Spain, and Holland, and the Germanies, and onward without end.”

Honest bewilderment tinged his voice. “Not without end,” Deven said, trying to make light of it. “We have no dealings with Cathay.”

“Perhaps I should go there, then,” Henry said, with a melancholy sort of violence.

Deven crossed the chamber and laid his hand on the young man’s shoulder. “’Tis not always so fraught. Ten years ago, Europe was a calmer place, and no doubt in ten more years it will be so again.”

“But one cannot always depend upon calm.”

“No, one cannot.” Deven sighed, and pressed his fingers into his own brow. “In truth, I think Lune spreads her net too far. She makes no attempt to affect events in those other lands—”
Mostly.
“But she tries to understand what goes on in them, and it
is
too much. James follows it all, but he has ministers for such things: the lords of his council, and all their gentlemen and agents and so on. He does not do it alone, or with a bare handful to aid.”

Henry straightened from his slump. “What happens in France, though, or Spain, or all the rest, can affect what happens here. How can she ignore it, if she wishes to keep England stable?”

A dry chuckle escaped Deven. “You have just parroted her own words, when I tried to persuade her to a less ambitious course.”

“And what did you tell her then?”

“That she might be the first to answer the question of whether a faerie can work herself to death.”

It both delighted and alarmed the young man. “To say such a thing to a Queen! But if it deters her from answering that question, then so much the better, for all of us.”