Her Last Assassin (35 page)

The Queen gestured Goodluck to stand. ‘Get you gone, Master Goodluck, and in future you will take your findings to Sir Robert Cecil there.’ She indicated Cecil, deliberately snubbing Essex by favouring his rival. ‘Is that clear?’

Goodluck said nothing, but bowed his head. Lucy saw the hard flush in Essex’s cheeks, and thought she had never seen him look so humbled and ashamed.

The Earl of Southampton started forward with a cry. ‘Your Majesty, do not put this shame on Lord Essex. He does not deserve such a burden. Nor does this creature,’ and he pointed forcefully at Master Goodluck, ‘deserve your mercy. For he has not failed through Lord Essex’s fault, but through his own hardened lust for one of your own ladies, whom he has bedded on many occasions, here in this very palace.’

Lucy could hardly breathe. She stared from him to Goodluck, and then, terribly, turned her head to face the Queen.

The Queen had frozen where she stood. ‘If this is a lie, my lord Southampton—’

‘It is the truth, I swear it.’

‘And which of my ladies has Master Goodluck been bedding? Or do you lack the courage to name her openly?’

‘I lack no courage, Your Majesty, and will name her in front of the whole court, if need be.’

To her horror, Henry Wriothesley swivelled on his heel, ignoring Goodluck’s instinctive movement to protect her, then looked directly at Lucy. The earl seemed almost to be smiling, his eyes narrowed in malice, the jerk of his head contemptuous.

‘The woman he has been panting after is none other than that black slut, Lucy Morgan. Her serving maid, Catherine Belton, will swear to it, for she has several times followed Mistress Morgan on my instructions and seen her enter the spy’s room … not to emerge again until dawn.’

Rigid with outrage, the Queen beckoned Lucy forward, and watched with stony eyes as she knelt before her. ‘Speak, is this true? Have you lain wantonly with this man?’ Then she held up a hand. ‘Wait, is this some poor jest on the earl’s part, or else some error? Goodluck is your guardian, is he not?’

‘He was, Your Majesty,’ Lucy agreed, trembling.

‘And now?’

She could lie to save them from punishment and imprisonment. She could claim they had spent the night together chastely, as guardian and ward reunited. She could tell them that Cathy was lying, that her old friend wished her harm, though she did not know why.

Lucy looked at Goodluck. He returned her gaze for a long moment, then nodded. It was time, he seemed to be urging her. Let the dice roll.

‘Now he is my lover, Your Majesty.’

As soon as the tide was favourable the next morning, they were escorted to the Tower on separate barges. Goodluck had been bound hand and foot in case he attempted to escape. Yet his look had been proud as he was pushed aboard, her last glimpse of him standing between the guards’ raised pikes, not cowed by his punishment at the Queen’s hands but fierce with longing as he gazed back at her.

‘It will not be for ever, Lucy,’ he had called to her over the water as the barge danced on the spring tide. ‘Keep patience, my love.’

One of the guards struck him, harshly bidding him, ‘Be silent!’, but Goodluck did not fall. He straightened stiffly after the blow and looked ahead to their destination, the grey ribbon of the Thames leading them to London, just as though he were sailing for the New World and their liberty, not under guard to the Tower.

Lucy herself was taken aboard her prison-bound barge with gentler hands, though some of the guards eyed her sideways. She had forgotten how discomfiting such lewd stares could be from a stranger, it had been so many years since she had returned to court and the protection afforded by its rules of etiquette, where a courtier might look but not touch, and a servant must keep his head bowed when a lady passed. Behind closed doors, sinful outrages might take place, and often did, but never publicly. So to find herself suddenly at the mercy of these common men, the youngest cupping his crotch in a suggestive way when she glanced in his direction, was not an easy thing to face.

Her hands mercifully unbound, she gripped the rail all the way down the river. It was a long and chilly journey, for the sun was behind clouds that morning and the river breeze was cold, snatching at her hood and cloak. Her fingers were soon numb, but it seemed pointless to dwell on such a trifle. After her arrest for unchaste behaviour, a serving woman had been sent scurrying away with the order to ‘Pack a bag for Mistress Morgan,’ and to fetch her travelling clothes. It seemed her gloves had been forgotten in the woman’s haste.

She did not wish to consider Cathy’s terrible betrayal, nor how Goodluck had looked at her with such fortitude when the Queen pronounced their fate: ‘To the Tower with both of them, and let Master Goodluck be flogged until he is bloodied!’ All she could think of was how to obtain Goodluck’s release.

Even if she herself must agree to live and die within the Tower’s confines, Goodluck must be freed. She owed him that for all the times he had helped her when he was her guardian. Lucy smiled, remembering his words of comfort. ‘It will not be for ever.’ Brave to the end. She could face any torment if Goodluck was at liberty, living out his days peacefully on his brother’s farm.

By the time the barge drew alongside the high, forbidding walls of the Tower, bobbing uneasily at the watergate while the men secured it with ropes, she felt sick and frightened. But she refused to show it.

Taken ashore, suddenly dizzy after the constant movement of the boat, she stumbled and fell in the damp, breezy space before the steps. The stones hurt her hands and knees. When she looked down at them, both palms were bleeding.

The young guard beside her grinned, dragging Lucy back to her feet. ‘You’re to enjoy a show before they take you to your cell. Your lover is to get his shirt and then his skin stripped off his back.’ He pretended to shiver, glancing up at the clouds. ‘A sharp day for it, but the whip will soon warm him up.’

Sure enough, as she entered the Tower confines and began to ascend the steep slope to where the guard had said she would be housed, she looked ahead with trepidation and saw a low wooden platform on the green. Standing on it with his legs set wide apart, bare-chested and bare-headed, his hands bound to a wooden post, was Goodluck. Behind him stood a man with a sturdy leather whip, his face impassive as he waited for the signal to begin.

Goodluck saw her in the assembled crowd before the platform. He made no comment this time, but his eyes tried to reassure her.

‘I’ve seen women faint and strong men weep like girls under that whip,’ the guard remarked, looking at her sideways. ‘It’s no disgrace. They say the pain is more than flesh and blood can bear once the skin is cut.’

She gripped her hands together, acutely aware now of how foolish and reckless they had been, loving each other in breach of the Queen’s command. Some of the others in the crowd had turned now, staring openly at her, and she forced herself to watch without flinching. This flogging would be hard enough for Goodluck to bear; she would not disgrace him further by crying out. To watch her lover being flogged was part of her punishment, and it was only thanks to the Queen’s great mercy that she too had not been sentenced to a flogging. Though she would gladly have changed places with Goodluck now, given the agony he was about to endure as his reward for lying with her out of wedlock.

Silence fell. One of the gentlemen on the platform lifted his hand in a signal. The man with the whip raised his fearful burden, then brought it down hard between Goodluck’s shoulders, and she saw him jerk in response.

After that first stroke, Goodluck’s face set hard. He stared directly ahead at nothing, as though determined not to break. But his stoicism could not last, and after twelve strokes he gave a muffled cry, and closed his eyes. His back was already a mass of ugly red stripes.

A few strokes later, his knees sagged, and one of the guards stepped forward to dash a bucket of water into his face. He revived at once, gasping and spluttering, and the flogging began again. This time Goodluck cried out in pain after each stroke. Lucy wanted to hide her face in her hands, but she made herself keep watching, though she could hardly bear to see him suffer so cruel a punishment. By the time it was over, he was clinging to the post like a dying man to a raft, his back bloodied from the terrible welter of shallow cuts.

Goodluck was cut loose and fell to his knees, groaning and bowing his forehead to the wooden platform.

The guard steered her away from the green, handing her into the care of a well-dressed gentleman who examined the papers that had come with her from Richmond, then asked her a few questions. He spoke in a friendly enough way, assuring her that she would not be molested while in his charge, but Lucy could not bring herself to reply, merely staring at him blankly.

A stern-looking woman in a coarse black gown appeared at his side. Her new jailor, she guessed. This woman led the way up a winding stair in one of the towers and into a small, low-ceilinged room which smelt as though bats had nested there. It held one rough-looking stool, one table and a straw pallet for a bed. But it was not a horrid dark little room, as she had feared, and from one narrow side window Lucy could even look down to the boats on the greyish-green river.

‘My name is Mistress Hall, and these will be your quarters here,’ the woman declared coldly, ‘until Her Majesty sends further orders.’

Quietly, Lucy asked if she was allowed ink, quill and paper. The woman agreed that she was, albeit with obvious reluctance, and swept away to procure some.

As soon as the writing materials had arrived and she was alone in her prison cell, Lucy sat down at the uneven table and began to draft the most difficult letter of her life.

To his noble lordship
, she began,
the Earl of Essex
…

Seven

W
ILL OPENED HIS
eyes and stared up at the fine embriodered silk hangings of the bed in which he was lying. The curtains had been drawn against the coming dawn while it was still dark, but he could tell it was morning now. And a fine June morning, by the sound of it. Outside the high windows of the earl’s London residence he could hear the watermen at their work below, calling for trade and shouting to each other as they ferried goods and passengers across the broad grey flood of the Thames. Servants were moving about in the old palace in the same way; he could hear voices in the antechamber, kept low for fear of disturbing their master, and the rumble of cartwheels in one of the back courtyards as a delivery arrived. Everyone was awake, it seemed, except his lordship himself.

Rolling over, Will stared into the young man’s face. Sleeping, Henry Wriothesley resembled one of the solemn-faced cherubs from the pages of Will’s grandmother’s old Catholic Bible. A somewhat dissolute cherub, to judge by the amount of wine they had consumed the night before, and the delicious sins they had committed together before the fire. Yet charmingly innocent, almost childlike, in his sleep.

Kit Marlowe came into his head unbidden. He was sleeping now. He would sleep until Doomsday. What a waste of a great talent. He had not quite believed it when he heard of the playwright’s death. Or murder, rather. Some brawl in Deptford that had brought about his end.

He reached out, tentatively brushing the curly hair back from his lover’s forehead.

‘My lord?’

The earl stirred, then opened his eyes. For a moment they stared at each other and the world stopped moving, the globe still and silent as it waited for one of them to speak.

‘Will.’

Henry smiled drowsily, and the world moved on. The cries of the watermen came again under their window, and now Will could hear the lapping of the tide against the wooden spars below.

‘So I did not dream last night’s pleasure. And this time you did not melt away with the dark but stayed to keep me company.’ Henry pinched Will’s shoulder. ‘Solid.’

‘Where would I have gone?’

‘You had all of London to wander. A hundred worlds to describe in your plays. Yet you chose to sleep beside me, docile as a lamb.’ Will made a bleating noise, and Henry laughed. ‘I sometimes forget you are a countryman.’

‘I am your servant.’

‘Hardly.’ Henry trailed a hand down Will’s bare chest to his groin. Their eyes met, and heat flared between them. ‘I served
you
last night. Did you like it?’

Will found he could not speak, but nodded dumbly, staring as he remembered Henry’s mouth working skilfully between his thighs, his lips and tongue more knowing than any woman’s. He had held on for as long as he could, then spent into the earl’s mouth, the intense pleasure almost painful. They had dozed together for a while in the warmth of the firelight before kissing and caressing each other again, and then Will had performed the same act for his lordship.

Thinking back on what they done last night, first on the floor and then, later, in this very bed, Will could not conceive of anything more marvellous – or forbidden – between two men.

Henry leaned forward to kiss him. ‘I am glad you are not still angry with me,’ he murmured against his mouth, ‘for failing to save that woman and her lover from the Tower. I knew you could not hate me for ever. Besides, they are where they belong.’