The Point of Death (21 page)

Ugo
and Margaret were both waiting for Tom in his chamber and while one filled his ears the other filled his eyes. 'I've discovered a clear path for our retreat and escape if needed,' said Ugo. 'It was no easy task for I've been dogged every inch of my way. Whether you noticed or not, you have been yourself, Tom. It seems to me that every enemy we've crossed swords with during the last few days is here. I keep expecting to find Nick o' Darkmans lurking, or Topcliffe in the cellarage. Are you listening?'

'Aye,'
said Tom. Constanza had put Margaret in one of her old dresses but the green gold brocade suited her colouring well. The servant-girl had washed her breast, face and arms at least, and Constanza had lent shoes, so that she sat demurely, a high bodice pinned in place across a snowy cleavage and tiny golden toe-tips peeping from under her hem. They had not washed her hair but they had combed and brushed it until it sprang out into a riot of curls that swept over her shoulders and halfway down her back. A little white arsenic to pale her cheeks and a little rouge to redden her lips. There had been no need for belladonna to deepen the fathomless sparkle of her eyes. 'Even so,' persisted Ugo grimly, 'we'll be hard put to walk away from this, even had we just ourselves to care for. Your duel is to the death.'

'To
the death,' nodded Tom. Slowly at first, then with gathering decision and energy as they talked, Tom began to wash and change.

'Then
when you kill Salgado this Baron Cotehel's likely to call his people down on us, and even apart from Baines, there's a good number of well-armed guards about. Even if I didn't already have good reason to be nervous, I'd be extremely nervous stuck in this place tonight. There's evil afoot. Evil at the least of it. Have you sounded out Will and the others?'

'Will?'
said Tom, pulling off his doublet and laying it, wrapped around the will, beside her on the bed.

'Can
we count on him? What did he say?' 'He quoted Machiavel at me.
Il
Principe
.
'
He stripped off his shirt and crossed to the ewer of scented water Constanza had left behind.

'God's
death, the spy's bible. What did he mean by that?'

'He
meant to tell me he was the Earl of Southampton's man, and that his life depended upon it.' He dashed a handful of water, violets and lavender flowers into his face. Rinsed his mouth and spat. He straightened, frowning, and crossed to Villalar's box of potions. He lifted out the last vial, the sovereign remedy, and put a drop on his finger, tasted it and spat again. The vial, tightly stoppered, went into the purse at his belt. Then he spoke, slowly, thinking through the implications of Will's words. 'He meant that, like me, he's so deep in the toils of this thing that his life's worth nothing any more. And that only Southampton stands between him and the fate I can expect to meet before the stroke of midnight.' He caught up his doublet again and pulled out the will. 'Therefore I want you to take this through your escape route and bring it to Robert Poley at the Wainscott Inn with all the speed you may. Guard it with your life, and remember, even if Cotehel's plans for me run true, this will shall bring him down at my hand after all; though I be as dead as Will's Mercutio in the play, or poor Kit Marlowe down in Deptford.'

Tom
took Lady Margaret down with him when he went to the Great Hall on the next stage of his march towards death. All he had to do was touch her and she seemed to become his puppet. She swept under Lord Outremer's coat of arms and into the glittering bustle like a queen, however, and for a moment her presence stilled every tongue and captured every eye. A lesser man might have hoped the sudden silence was a tribute to his black velvet doublet picked with silver and slashed with rose silk almost as dark as the rubies in his ears. Or the way his twin swords swaggered astride his black galligaskins above his Spanish kid boots. But Tom knew when he was bested - and he wryly hoped that this was the only time that he would be bested tonight.

He
sat her at his side on the high table where, with Cotehel and his circle, he sat above the salt. But, having been placed - at the expense of some shuffling to allow the extra guest, right at the end of the table - neither Tom nor Margaret could be tempted by the feast.

The
servants labouring in from the kitchens through the Lesser Door laden with course after course for the main tables and the long removes beneath the galleries could not catch their attention. The servants standing solicitously behind each one of them offering to pile their trenchers with food they could not reach, to fill their glasses with drink of every sort, got no reply to their enquiries and soon stood silently themselves. They joined politely in with the applause accorded to the Master Cook when he came in with his masterpieces, but nothing he had prepared passed down their throats.

Not
the peacocks, swans and cockpheasants brought in from Elfinstone Park, stuffed, roasted and served in their full plumage on plates of beaten gold could tempt either of them. Not the pike, eel and dolphin culled from the river below and swimming in lakes of herb sauce and butter on massive silver chafing dishes heated from below. Not the woodcocks and partridges baked in pies. Not the great sallets of parsley, sage, shallotts, leeks, borage, mint, purslain, fennel, cress and rosemary. Not the huge green sturgeon, boiled and sliced steaming at the table. Not the crane served with every feather in place and standing on one leg with a trout in its beak, nor the broiled baby herons served with it. Not the haunches of venison, hart and hind, roasted, boiled and baked. No jellies, potages, dates in compost. No lech of sugar, wine and spices, no damask sweet of sugared rose leaves, no suttletie, tart or fritter of strawberries or almonds could make them open their mouths. No salmon served in gold foil, no roast boar filligreed in silver and stuffed with piglets and rabbits, no dragon made of marchpane, no conger, lamprey or red herring passed their lips.

No
wine of Egypt, Greece, Cyprus, Madeira, Italy, France, Portugal or Spain, chilled, mulled, syruped, sweetened, savoured or salted with dissolving pearls, could tempt their palettes. No mead or ale or beer or even water. If they talked to each other or the company, then none heard. If they laughed at the antics of the jester, the jugglers, the clowns, stilt walkers, acrobats, bears or apes, then none saw it. If they listened above the bustling hubbub to the pavanes of Peter Phillips, or the airs of Thomas Tallis or the boy who sang 'Greensleeves', then no one knew it. They did not eat, they did not drink, they did not talk, they did not laugh, they did not dance. Even under the questioning eyes of the laughing Constanza measuring a galliard, then leaping into a volte with Salgado as the music of Phillips was replaced by that of Dowland.

Tom
sat moodily watching the great lords upon their elevated seats eating, drinking and laughing, then stepping down to dance - ever and anon glancing back down at him seeming to share some secret, sinister jest. Lady Margaret sat staring silently but fixedly at the beautiful little blue-eyed, golden boy who served the Earl of Essex as his page; but the boy was assiduous to his task and did not see the lady watching him. They did not move until it was time for
Romeo
.

For
Romeo
the room was rearranged. The tables that had made a great horse-shoe around three walls were carried away through the Great Door to be cleared else where. The seats were arranged before the newly positioned stage. The lords and earls remained upon their raised dais. Their servants and the page boy remained standing at their shoulders. The rest of the company was put into long rows across the hall. The candles, lit long ago to illuminate the dancing, were darkened at the east end so that Lord Outremer's gilded arms burned dimly in the shadows and the stage stood under the light.

It
was strange, thought Tom grimly, how the contrast between the light and darkness seemed to change the atmosphere. The Great Hall became a place of sinister whispering and shadowed scurrying even before Ned Alleyn heaved himself up on to the creaking boards and intoned the prologue to the play. Tom found himself torn. His eyes were keen to be exploring what was going on here, the increasingly worrying comings and goings; the thronging of the shadows with men who carried things that, like Lord Outremer's arms, occasionally gleamed amid the dullness. On the other hand, in spite of all the rehearsals he had attended and all the action he had staged, he had never seen the play. Even on a night such as this - in danger such as he stood in, with friends lost and enemies gathering and his death ticking nearer with every moment passing – he found he could become gripped by the simple power of the drama unfolding in Will Shakespeare's Verona.

At
last he sat enraptured, lost to everything except the terrible dilemma of Juliet and her vial of poison as she prepared to drink it and fall into apparent death - fearing all the while that she might awake in her tomb and run mad before Romeo could rescue her.

'Is it not likely that I,

So
early waking, what with loathsome smells

And
shrieks like mandrakes torn out of the earth,

That
living mortals hearing them run mad-

Oh
if I wake, shall I not be distraught,

And
madly play with my forefathers' joints

And
pluck the mangled Tybalt from his shroud ...'

And even as the words were spoken, at the very instant Juliet uttered them on stage, a flash of light caught the corner of Tom's eye. No one else seemed to see it for he was positioned right at the end of the front row with no one beyond him except those sinister, shuffling shadows. With the poor girl's desperate words ringing in his ears, he looked across at the light. And there, just for a second, there and gone as a door into another, brighter, room swung open and closed upon her, there was Kate.

Kate
was dressed in the very same costume as the boy playing Juliet - though she filled it more naturally. And she wore a gag of cloth across her mouth, above which her eyes rolled with a desperation close to madness indeed. For like Juliet in her nightmare vision, Kate was chained to a dead man. She crouched and he lay, green and mouldering like Juliet's slaughtered cousin might do in his tomb. Into Tom's mind flashed the vision of the open tomb he had passed in the grounds. The tomb he could see from his chamber window. The tomb in all probability he was destined to share with these two, if Cotehel's plans ran true.

For
a moment Tom thought the corpse was Ugo Stell and all was lost indeed. But then he realised. It was the late Julius Morton. Morton taken up from the Plague Pit so that he was gone when Poley came to look for him. Morton brought to Elfinstone as Cotehel's punishment for Kate, his contact. And punishment indeed, punishment beyond mere death, for Morton the intelligencer who had died trying to warn her with his dying breath. He tore himself half erect, but a hand crashed down upon his shoulder, pinning him relentlessly into his seat. There was a smell of oil and garlic lightened with a mouthful or two of sweet basil. Stunned and shaking, Tom looked back at the stage, thinking that the Lady Margaret sitting silently beside him, straining for a sight of the boy with the Earl of Essex, was probably the sanest person there.

As
the applause died away, the stage was cleared and the actors joined the people thronging the shadows behind the rows of chairs and the raised dais at their centre. Between the dais and the stage stood an area of granite floor. It was perhaps ten feet wide and stretched the width of the room. Here, at the feet of Baron Cotehel and the Earls of Essex and Southampton, their assembled friends, acolytes and hangers-on, Tom at last stood face to face with Domenico Salgado. The silence in the room was massive, a thing of weight, as though the air had been transformed to stone. A black shape stepped out of the shadows to second the Spaniard and Tom recognised the knowing, brutal leer of the murderous Baines. The Englishman helped the Spaniard shrug off his doublet and prepare for the bout as one of Cotehel's courtiers stepped forward to referee the match.

Tom
turned, alone, and tore off his doublet, pretending not to notice the stir as everyone realised he was without a second. Carelessly he wadded up the expensive velvet and threw it away to his left, up on to the stage. Then, after a moment, he followed it with the white lawn of his shirt. Naked to the waist, he unbuckled his sword belt and laid that on the warm pile of his clothes, then he eased the second belt that held his galligaskins and secured his money-pouch and dagger, tightening the black gloves that matched his kid boots so well. Pulling all his concentration in within himself, he eased his arms and shoulders, stretched his back, then tested the long muscles of his legs, ensuring his clothing did not hinder his movements and the grip of his boots on the granite floor was sure.

When
Tom pulled out his rapiers the whole room seemed to sigh and he turned to face Salgado, realising that chance had made the Spaniard unsheath his weapons at exactly the same moment. They faced each other in silence until the Spaniard turned abruptly to salute Cotehel and Essex. Tom turned with a grim smile and saluted Constanza who sat beside Salgado's empty chair on the dais, behind a table laden with piles of fruit and sweetmeats; bottles, bowls and glasses of wine. Her eyes were wide and almost as dark as Lady Margaret's, to whom Tom addressed his second and final salute. When Tom turned back, Salgado was awaiting him, already
en
garde
. Baines was standing clear, behind him, and the referee was tapping impatiently with the staff he would use to control the bout. Salgado had chosen the Falcon, his right shoulder leading, rapier high, left rearing upward like a scorpion's tail. Tom, the slightly taller of the two, fell into the same pose, also leading with his right. The cane tapped the ground and vanished. Tom threw himself into the attack. Along the straight line of his progress he hurled his right blade. Down it swooped into the upper area of Salgado's breast, hissing in towards his collarbone. But the Spaniard riposted, securing the tip of Tom's sword with the solid base of his own and spitting it aside as his own deadly tip flashed in towards Tom's eye. Tom's right rapier was committed beyond recall and so he brought the left down, knocking Salgado's aside dangerously with the more flexible tip, knowing that Salgado too had another blade as yet uncommitted. And here it came, stabbing straight for his throat. Twisting his right rapier across his face, Tom caught the counter-stroke on his guard and stopped it short. There was an instant of stasis.