Raleigh's Page (2 page)

3

E
NCLOSURE
M
EN

“What does Mr. Raleigh look like?” Andrew asked the next morning as they set out.

“I don’t know,” his father answered. “I haven’t seen him since we were boys. Beyond his looks, though, it’s his mind that draws the Queen. ‘One man with a head on his shoulders is worth a dozen without,’ she says.”

“Has he friends?” the boy asked.

“Many claim him; he claims few. He stands alone, watchful. He and the Queen have that in common. ‘See everything, say nothing’ is her motto. It could be his.”

“Does he have a lot of enemies?”

“Ha!” his father cried. “More than friends. Those who envy his closeness with the Queen and what she’s given him wait to pluck his feathers. He won’t grow fat and sleep in silk; he’ll die lean with everything risked.”

Andrew opened his eyes wide. “Mr. Raleigh? I thought he was rich.”

“He wants glory more than fortune,” his father said. “To win it he’ll settle for a soldier’s ration. ‘Hope for England’ is what Mr. Raleigh lives for.”

A thrill shot through Andrew. Tremayne had talked about “Hope for England.” That was America!

For a while they didn’t talk, lulled by the noise and rhythm of riding, the damp sweetness of the new morning, the horses’ comforting smells. Sheep dotted the velvet fields like clouds drifting across a green sky.

“When Mr. Raleigh was a boy,” Andrew’s father said suddenly, “his situation was like yours, only harder, because no one at home had a friend at Court to send him to. There was nothing to stay for, so he went to the wars, first in France, then Ireland. He took what courage offered and learned to swallow fear. He’ll test you. He fought his way to London; you’re riding in on a hired horse. He weighs such things.”

“How will he test me?” Andrew asked.

His father shrugged. “I don’t know. He has ways.”

Andrew clenched the reins. He didn’t like tests.

His father guessed what he was thinking. “There’s a story going around,” he said, “that soon after the Queen first noticed Mr. Raleigh, they met in a gallery of the palace. As he knelt before her, he pointed to what he’d just scratched on a pane of glass: ‘Fain would I climb, yet fear I to fall.’

“She took the diamond he’d written with and wrote below, ‘If thy heart fail thee, climb not at all.’ As she turned away, she pocketed the jewel.”

His father twisted around in his saddle and smiled. “You’ll climb, all right! You have a strong heart!”

That made Andrew warm inside. His father wasn’t one to praise.

The road was yellow clay, sticking and heavy after the night’s rain. It was rough underfoot, overhung with trees and brush. It was drowsily quiet save for the steady noise of the horses’ walking and the creaking of their saddles. No wind stirred. The sky was blue and cloudless.

Suddenly Andrew’s mount shied and nearly tossed him as two men leapt without a sound from the brush on his father’s side, one waving a heavy stick, the older one an ax. As the ax man swung, Andrew’s father’s horse reared, neighing and flailing its hoofs. The swing went wild; the ax man staggered and fell.

At that moment, a boy jumped from the ditch on Andrew’s side, thwacking at him with a club as he grabbed for the saddlebags. A blow landed hard on Andrew’s knee.

His horse jumped and kicked. The strap the scrawny boy was tugging at loosened and tangled his arm. He screeched as his head slammed like a bell clapper against the pitching saddle. It was all Andrew could do to hang on.

Then the strap broke and the boy fell free. He and Andrew caught eyes. His were wide with pain, his mouth an “O” of fear. He scrabbled into the brush like an injured animal as Andrew’s father drew close, yelling, “Go! Go!”

A mile on in an open place, they slowed the sweating horses. Andrew was pale.

“Who were they?” he asked between clenched teeth. His knee was throbbing.

“Enclosure men,” his father muttered as he dismounted. His face was tight. “Too weak and poorly armed to be regular robbers. Did he hit you?”

“My knee,” the boy said.

“Can you move it?”

Andrew tried not to wince as he lifted his foot from the stirrup. It hurt, but he wanted to be brave for his father.

“Can you ride?”

“Yes.”

Concentrating on riding took his mind off the pain.

They rode side by side, silent until Andrew asked, “What are enclosure men?”

“Folk forced by landlords off their fields and out of their cottages so the land can be enclosed for sheep,” his father growled. His face was dark. “Necessity makes men dangerous,” he added as if he were talking to himself.

Where they stopped that evening, the large cheerful mistress of the place noticed the boy’s limp.

“What’s the matter, lad?” she asked kindly.

He shrugged. “Nothing, ma’am. I fell.”

As they sat at supper, she came by with a small jar and tucked it beside him. “Balm for bruises and sore joints,” she said quietly. “I make it myself. Use what you need.”

The men at the long table talked loud, but the boy hardly heard as he gorged on fat mutton, chicken, and heavy bread to fill an emptiness that wasn’t hunger.

He went up to bed in the attic dormitory. He smeared some of the woman’s balm on his leg. It burned. It had a strong odor. As he lay sleepless in the dank room, he saw the dragged boy again, his mouth twisted in terror. A chill went over him, but at last he slept, dreamless.

The balm helped. By morning his knee was better. As they left, his father handed the woman her jar with a coin.

“No,” she laughed, pushing away the money. “I’ve got a boy. Boys is always off to tricks and getting hurt like that.”

4

M
R
. R
ALEIGH’S
C
OLLEGE OF THE
N
EW
W
ORLD

“Durham House will be your college,” Andrew’s father announced as they set out on their last morning together. “With Mr. Raleigh and his people you’ll learn mathematics and geography, even some of the new medicine. If you’re lucky, you’ll get your wish to travel.”

It was early afternoon when they approached the London wall. Andrew smelled the ditch outside before he saw it—a dump for rubbish and dead dogs. Going through the gate, they passed into a noisy warren of close-packed houses built out over narrow twisting lanes. They approached a square where there was a crowd. At its center a slight figure floated in a space apart, white and sparkling in an apple green gown. She had red hair.

“The Queen!” Andrew’s father called. “Touching folks for the King’s Evil.”

“What’s that?” the boy asked.

“Scrofula it’s called, an awful hardening and lumping in the neck that pains and scars. It’s thought to be cured by the touch of royalty.”

Suddenly a great cheer went up: “God save Your Majesty! God save Your Majesty!” As she turned and waved, the crowd stilled.

“God bless you all, my good people!” she said. Her voice carried like music.

The people cheered again as she returned to her work, touching the scarred ones.

Andrew was amazed that one so fine would touch those filthy people. He watched as the Queen caressed their sores boldly, seeming to grow more splendid as she moved through the crowd, her parsons chanting their prayers as loud as they could. A steward walked behind, giving each of the touched ones a small gold coin—the coin they called an angel.

“Is her touch a cure?” Andrew asked when his father drew close.

“Faith makes it so,” he said. “Whatever the cure, believing in it makes it more powerful.”

Andrew wondered what Mr. Raleigh would make of that. From what he’d heard, faith and believing counted for little to the man he was going to serve. To Mr. Raleigh, cold proof was all.

They rode on slowly, struggling to stay together as they dodged rushing people, lurching carts, cows and sheep being driven to slaughter, clerks and children dashing on errands. Smokes and smells came in waves, at one moment bread baking, then stenches of tanneries, fat renderings, waste, garbage. The din was like the crash of wind and water in a thunderstorm. Bells rang. The boy had never heard so many clanging and clattering together. He held tight to the saddle; he felt dizzy.

They stabled their horses. As they stepped out from the stable’s darkness into the bright street, Andrew’s father whispered, “Beware of pickpockets.” The boy’s scalp prickled.

Durham House was plain compared to others on the Strand. Behind the white columns out front it was dark gray stone with towers, battlements, and turrets.

A sturdy, broad-bearded man in livery admitted them, “WR” embroidered large in red silk on his jacket. His beard was well brushed, the color of steel, wide as a spade and pointed like one. He wore a blade at his belt.

“I am John Saintleger,” Andrew’s father said. “I’m here with my son Andrew to see Mr. Raleigh.”

“Yes, sir,” the man replied, nodding so deep his whiskers touched his chest. “You are expected.” He looked at Andrew and winked. “Welcome, lad.” The boy tried to smile, but his mouth was tight.

The grim outside of Durham House misled. Andrew caught his breath as they walked in. He’d never been in such a grand place! Gleaming furniture was set about on floors of polished oak with Turkey rugs. The windows were large, some set with colored panes like church windows. The walls were oiled walnut panels with mirrors and rich tapestries. Patterns were worked in white plaster in the ceilings. It smelled of spice and lavender.

They were led across a large hall, up a broad carpeted staircase, then to a far corner and a spiral of stone stairs.

At the top there was a landing and an oval door of thick oak planks with heavy iron fittings.

Their guide knocked.

“Yes!” came a voice, not deep.

“James, sir,” the man bellowed. “Come with those as you said was coming.”

“Yes!”

James pushed open the door and stood back.

Andrew’s father went in first. Mr. Raleigh leapt up, arms out in greeting.

He cocked his head when he saw Andrew. “I was expecting a boy,” he said with a smile. “You’ve brought a lad. More better.” He had a small voice and the broad accent of Devon.

Andrew studied him as he spoke with his father. He was tall and quick, with dark skin and curling brown hair. His face was long, the forehead high. His beard turned up at the point. His eyes were small and heavy-lidded. He had a fighter’s nose, scarred, wide, and flat. The fit of his jacket and hose revealed the toughness of the man within. His shoes were of soft felt, black.

His smell was sweet, a scent like hyacinth. It seemed to come from the man himself. Tremayne had said Alexander the Great smelled sweet: it was in his sweat, he’d said, a clue to his influence over men. Knowingly or not, everyone responded to it. People of evil odor made Andrew wary, not for their power but for their weakness.

“So, now, Andrew,” said Mr. Raleigh, taking up the letter Andrew’s father had sent proposing the boy for service. “‘He can read and speak English, Latin, and French. He knows numbers and writes a fair hand,’” he read aloud.

As Andrew caught his breath and glanced at his father, Mr. Raleigh tossed the paper aside and addressed the boy in French.

Andrew answered. Again Mr. Raleigh spoke to him in that language. Again the boy replied in his slow, sure way.

“Bien,”
said Mr. Raleigh, narrowing his eyes and picking up a sheet with a column of numbers. “Add them,” he ordered.

Still standing, Andrew did so. He checked his work twice, then handed back the scrap.

Mr. Raleigh glanced at the sum. “Right!” he said with a grin. “Sit down.” He cleared a space on the narrow plank that was his desk. “Let’s see the ‘fair hand’ your father says you write.”

Andrew wiped his face on his sleeve. He was sweating but his hands were freezing.

Mr. Raleigh gave him a page to copy, then turned to his father.

Andrew worked carefully but suddenly his quill snagged on a lump in the sheet. There was an ugly blot.

That’s it,
he figured. He sighed a shuddering breath and was about to quit when he remembered Tremayne’s farewell: “No matter what, don’t give up!”

So he finished. He wrote the last part clean and easy, free of all awkwardness.

He stood up when he was done. Mr. Raleigh was showing his father the model of a new ship he’d designed. The boy looked around. The room was like a ship cabin, everything compact, built-in. From the two narrow windows, Andrew saw sails colored white, tan, and red, mast tops, horses, carts, people on the wharves, the river coursing like a huge pulse.

Mr. Raleigh broke his marveling with a call and a sudden motion.

“Hi, Andrew! What’s this?”

He tossed a rock studded with square yellow cubes that looked like metal.

“Gold?” Andrew stammered as he stumbled to catch it, his face flaming.

“Bah! Fool’s gold!” Mr. Raleigh barked. “Pyrites brought to the Queen, worthless except as ballast. Better they freight with sassafras.

“Do you know sassafras?” he snapped as he glanced at the blotted sheet.

Andrew nodded, too scared to answer.

“Speak!”

“My teacher spoke of it, sir.”

Mr. Raleigh handed the boy a withered root.

“Smell!”

He could already. It was unlike anything he’d ever smelled before.

“The drug sellers work it into pastes and tonics for the dread Spanish disease of the privy parts,” Mr. Raleigh said in a mocking voice. “They give equal weight in silver for it. Because the leaf is shaped like the groin, by their doctrine of signatures it heals the ills of that place. Physicians’ logic: if this leaf looks like a lung, it must heal afflictions of the lung. Do you believe that?” he asked.

Andrew stood dumb like a pig poisoned. It was what his mother’s book said. She collected plants for medicines according to that principle.

“Have you no tongue?” Mr. Raleigh growled.

“I…If the physicians do, I believe it, sir,” Andrew stammered.

“Yes!” said Mr. Raleigh grimly. “So they would have it. I’ll teach you to question! Our doctors study ancient texts, but they don’t look inside the body to figure how it works and the ways of illness. I do! Against the law, we dissect the dead. How else to learn the secrets of living?

“I know medicine,” Mr. Raleigh continued as he paced. “I use leeches to let blood, maggots to eat corrupted flesh, rhubarb for stoppage of the bowel, honey and tar water for cough, lemons for scurvy. Those cures work by experience,” he went on as he snatched down jars and vials from his shelves.

“I give you nothing for these, costly though they be—this one, say, a potion of ground pearl, or this of powdered mummy, or this,” he said, handing Andrew a corked jar, “the most precious drug in my collection and the most worthless! Unicorn’s horn. Perhaps if you believe in the beast you’ll believe in the cure.”

He was scowling, standing close.

“Some physicians advise their patients to suck emeralds. Better you suck soft eggs. Most doctors can only say whether you will die of what ails you; the cure is beyond them. What say you to that?”

Andrew stepped back, almost falling.

“I don’t know, sir.” The boy’s face was hot. He looked to his father for help.

Mr. Raleigh nodded. His face was smooth again.

“You will once I’ve taught you,” he said with a thin smile.

“You blush,” he went on. “You may hide your thoughts but your color gives you away. Better you hide your feelings than your thoughts. Folks will remember your color long after they’ve forgotten what provoked it.

“Listen,” he said, bending close, “make as to laugh when you feel shame. It will throw off your opponent and keep your blood down.”

Raleigh turned to his desk and picked up what Andrew had written. “This will do,” he said. “You got better as you went on. Try warming your hands before you write. Our scientific man here, Mr. Harriot, can’t write anything one can read because his hands stay cold and stiff.

“Now! James!” he yelled. “The drink!”

The liveried man came in with cups of something Andrew had never smelled before.

“Cacao,” Mr. Raleigh said. “
Chocolate
to the Spaniards. They learned from the Indians in New Spain to drink it for a tonic. I got this supply from one of their ships we captured, a prize just brought in. This drink is a fruit of piracy,” he said with a smile.

A bitter one,
the boy thought. The drink was mud brown. He drank what he could get down. Moments later his blood began to pound.

Raleigh had turned away to show Andrew’s father his globe of the world. The book on his chair was open to the image of a plant. Andrew looked closely. It was not familiar. His mother had taught him plants.

Mr. Raleigh’s eyes followed Andrew’s. “Monardes’s
Joyful News of the New Found World,
” he announced. “A Spaniard curious about medicine plants found in America. Are you interested in plants?”

“Yes, sir!” the boy said firmly. He had command of his voice again.

Mr. Raleigh smiled and nodded. “Then you will make a summary of that book for me and we’ll see how your mind works. You like plants? Come!”

He led them to his gardens above the river. The tide was dropping fast. The water made a hushing noise like wind, flickering where the light caught it. It was dark and silty. There were things floating in it.

“My gardener is a Frenchman,” Mr. Raleigh announced. “Do you know why he’s here?”

“No, sir.”

“Because he’s a Protestant, one of those they call Huguenots. We persecute our Catholics, they persecute their Protestants—all under the sign of the cross. He was a tree-grafter for a nobleman before they smoked out his faith. He fled with his green knowledge and a clutch of cherry cuttings. Fortune comes in many coats. What that man knows about plants has made his.

“Monsieur Pena!” he called.

A square man with hair the color of iron appeared in rough clothes and a stained leather apron that fell below his knees. He was older than Andrew’s father. His skin was olive tan.

“Sir,” he said with a slight bow.

“Monsieur, this is Andrew and his father. Beginning tomorrow you’ll be the boy’s tutor,” he said, seizing Andrew’s right hand and holding it out palm up. “Tough enough, you see. No need to be gentle with him.”

As the Frenchman nodded, he gave Andrew a smile that lifted the boy’s heart.

Mr. Raleigh turned and pointed to rows of new shoots in a series of neatly groomed beds.

“Those plants were taken off the Spanish ship we captured with the cacao. The priest on board was carrying a leather case of seeds and roots. In the sea fight he went overboard. Monsieur Pena will raise his plants if anyone can, but I wish they’d spared that Jesuit. Judging from his things, he knew more than prayers.

“May be some good things for you there, John,” Mr. Raleigh called to Andrew’s father. “Anything promising we’ll make sure you’re the first in Devon to have!”