The Silver Skull (7 page)

"I would prefer Kit."

"Marlowe is your good friend and true, but he wrestles with his own demons and they will be the end of him. We need a steady course in this matter."

Will could see Walsingham's mind would not be changed. He turned to Dee and asked,

"Have you developed any new tricks that might aid me?"

"Tricks, you say!" Dee's eyes flared, but he maintained his temper. "I have a parcel of powder which explodes in a flash of light and heat and smoke when exposed to the air. A new cipher that even the Enemy could not break. And a few other things that will make your life more interesting. I will present them to you once I have apprised Lord Walsingham of my findings in Bohemia."

Briefly, Will wondered what matter Dee could be involved in that was as pressing as the search for the Silver Skull. But the thought passed quickly; the burden he had been given was large enough and it would take all his abilities to shoulder it.

"There are many questions here," Will said. "Who took the prisoner from the Enemy and why? Were they truly rogues, or were they Spanish spies, and the Silver Skull is now in the hands of a different enemy?"

"And can we possibly find one man in a teeming city before the Enemy reaches him first?" Mayhew added sourly.

"Let us hear no more talk like that, Master Mayhew," Will said. "Time is short and we all have a part to play." As Mayhew grunted and lurched to his feet, Will turned to Walsingham.

"Fearful that their hard-won prize might slip through their fingers, the Enemy will be at their most dangerous at this time."

The log in the hearth cracked and flared into life, casting a ruddy glow across Walsingham's face. "The next few hours will decide if we march towards hell or remain triumphant," he replied. "Let nothing stand in your way, Master Swyfte. God speed."

((CHAPTER 6

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SPECIAL_IMAGE-00037.jpg-REPLACE_ME

SPECIAL_IMAGE-00090.jpg-REPLACE_ME rapped in a heavy woollen cloak against the chill, Grace Seldon waited in the shadowy courtyard outside the Black Gallery. Whatever danger lay nearby, it would not deter her; it would never deter her. Surely Will understood that by now.

Beside her, Nathaniel shifted anxiously. "You will have me whipped and my wages docked for this, Grace. Go back to your room before you are seen."

Easing off her hood, she tied back her chestnut ringlets with a blue ribbon, but her fumbling fingers only emphasised her irritation. "Because I have a slender frame and a face that does not curdle cream, every man treats me like a delicate treasure to be protected at all times."

"Will is only concerned-"

"Will is always concerned for me!" she snapped. "We have both seen our fair share of tragedy and are stronger for it. I will not swoon at the first sign of threat."

Nathaniel continued to look uncomfortable at her refusal to comply with the order he had been given.

"Besides," she continued, "you know as well as I that Will would no more punish you than hurt a dog."

"I thank you for putting me on a level with a cur, Mistress Seldon," Nat said tartly, "but if I am not whipped, I will have to endure a day of his lectures and I do not know which I prefer."

"You are right there," she muttered to herself, adding, "If he sent you to ensure I was well cared for, then it is because there is great danger."

"Yes, that is the nature of his business." Nathaniel sighed. "You make my work very difficult, Grace."

Will emerged from the Black Gallery alongside a man who lurched drunkenly. Nathaniel made to restrain her, but she dodged past him. Half stumbling in her haste, her hands went to Will's chest, and he caught her at the waist.

"Grace." His eyes flickered towards Nathaniel, who pretended to scrub a spot from his shirt.

"You would deny me the opportunity to wish you well as you embark on one of your dangerous missions?" she said sharply.

"This is not the time for one of our lively debates, Grace."

"Did you think I would lock myself away because you told me to?"

He sighed. "No, Grace. You would never do anything I told you to do. I know that."

"What, then?"

"These are dangerous times. I would see you safe, that is all."

"From whom?"

"From yourself, mostly," he said with exasperation. "Your capacity for recklessness exceeds that of any other person I know."

"You say reckless. I say fearless. I am not afraid. Of anything."

"As always, this conversation goes nowhere, and I have urgent matters that require my attention-"

Calming herself, she chose the words she knew would stop him walking away. "I could not say farewell to jenny and I have regretted it ever since. I will not be denied this by you."

He hesitated, softened. "I am not your sister."

In the subtle attenuation of his smile, she recognised the ghost of his true feelings. "You wear your masks well," she said quietly, so no one else could hear, "but I know the true you, as you know me. You are not my sister. Because you live still, and jenny is dead-"

The blaze in his eyes scared her a little.

"Dead, Will. I spent long months yearning for answers, like you, but I have slowly come to an accommodation. I still need to know who took her, and why, and then I can rest. Then we both can. On that warm, starlit night in Arden, by the churchyard, with the owls hooting and the bats flitting, you told me you had been given the tools to discover the truth, and you vowed to me that the answers we both sought would be forthcoming. I ask now, though you always say one thing with your mouth and another with your eyes: is this mission the one that will allow us to find peace?"

"No." A moment, then: "Perhaps." Frustration laced his words. "Jenny is in my every thought and every deed, Grace, but these things are not as easy as you would believe. Now-"

She caught his arm to stop him leaving, and though he feigned irritation, she could see his affection, though whether it was for her alone or for her long-gone sister she did not know. The drunken man watched their encounter intently, and then, out of embarrassment or boredom, dragged open the carriage door and lurched inside.

"Let me accompany you," she pleaded.

"And do what?" he said incredulously. "Carry my sword? Distract the enemy so I could more easily strike the killing blow?" His mockery was faint, but her cheeks still reddened. "No, Grace," he continued, softening, "you must stay safe from harm's way."

"You wish to protect me because you could not protect my sister," she said defiantly.

"I could say the same of you." He gave a confident smile, a slight bow, and walked towards the carriage.

"A fine pair we are," she called after him, flushed with the heat of her frustration. "Both trapped in a dead woman's snare and neither able to release us."

As Will climbed into the carriage without looking back, Nathaniel hurried over. "Make haste back to your room, Grace-I must depart with Will. These times are too dangerous to be abroad at night, even in the Palace of Whitehall."

Nathaniel hurried to the carriage and soon the iron-clad wheels were rattling across the cobbles. Grace watched it leave with mounting defiance. She would never go as jenny went. Nor would she lose Will the same way, if it was in her power to prevent it.

((CHAPTER 7

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SPECIAL_IMAGE-00017.jpg-REPLACE_ME

SPECIAL_IMAGE-00098.jpg-REPLACE_ME o some, it was a monument to the globe-spanning power of the Spanish empire. Others saw a tribute to the power of God, a tomb, a menacing fortress, one man's grand folly. San Lorenzo de El Escorial, twentyeight miles northwest of the Spanish capital of Madrid, was all of them. Within the vast mountain of worked stone, its vertiginous walls punctuated by more than twelve thousand windows, seven towers reaching to the heavens, lay both a palace and a monastery, temporal and ecclesiastical power in perfect union.

Cold, empty, echoing, the sprawling complex was a perfectly sombre reflection of the man who directed its construction: King Philip II. At a cost of three and a half million ducats, it took twenty-one years to build, with a floor plan that also had a secret face. Many believed its design was chosen in honour of its patron, Saint Lawrence, but the truth was that it had been constructed to echo the Temple of Solomon, as described by the historian Flavius Josephus.

Now Philip retreated behind its forbidding walls, cutting himself off from advisors and family so that his relationship with his God could be so much more potent. A distant, deeply introspective man who rarely spoke, Philip preferred to dress in black to show his contempt for material things. Always extremely devout, as the years passed he had become hardened, listening so intently for God's voice that he was ripe for direction from much closer quarters than heaven.

Inside the monastic palace, Spain's riches from the New World and the Indies provided great works of art-statues, paintings, and frescoes-the finest furniture, the most lavish building materials-coral, marble, jasper, alabaster. Yet the long corridors and lofty halls rang with an abiding silence that was only intermittently interrupted by the soft, steady step of cowled monks or the deliberate murmur of priests. No hands of friends touched Philip, no warm words eased his frozen thoughts.

He lived, and died slowly, for his religion. His extensive library, which could have held the greatest literature of civilisation, contained only religious works. In the great church at the heart of the complex, second only to Saint Peter's in Rome, were seven thousand relics of saints in the reliquary in the Royal Basilica, not just shards of bone, but heads and entire bodies, magic symbols designed to ward off the evils of the world and point the way along the road to salvation.

As dawn broke across the mountains, Philip could be found where he spent a good deal of his day, kneeling in prayer before the altar. Lean, with a soft, gentle face, his dark eyes revealed only lonely depths. At sixty-one, his arthritic joints ached, but he forced himself to continue his devotions before struggling to the secret door beside the altar that led to his private rooms.

The sound of no other feet echoed here. It was Philip's sanctuary away from the rigours of the world, austere, chill, dominated by an office with a table before a blank wall where he spent the rest of each day and much of the night, signing the constant stream of papers from his government and planning the great enterprise that had dominated so much of his thoughts in recent times. The suite was silent and still and empty.

Padding across the cold flags before the fire blazing in the hearth, he smelled her before he saw her: the unusual heady aroma of sharp lime and perfumed cardamom, with a hint of Moorish spice just beneath. Heat rose instantly in his belly. He felt embarrassed by his body's earthy passion, which suggested troubling unexplored depths of his mind that he always thought well sealed. How did she do that to him, when nothing else in the world could stimulate him?

"Come out," he whispered.

As he turned slowly, he caught a flash of a reflection in the ornate mirror she had installed on the wall: a hollow-cheeked, bone white face with redrimmed eyes glaring at him with such malignancy he was overcome with terror. But it was gone in the blink of an eye, an illusion caused by his troubled mind.

Light shimmering off the glass blinded him, and when his eyes cleared, she stood before him, ageless, a beauty that burned like the sun and was as mysterious as the moon, dark brown hair cascading over bare shoulders, her eyes filled with a sexual promise that made his breath catch in his throat. She wore only a thin dress tied just above the curve of her breasts, clinging to her hips, her thighs, as she moved, barefoot, towards him.

"Malantha," he said. "I would not wish for you to be found here. It would not be seemly."

"No one will ever find me here. I am yours alone." Her unblinking eyes held him in her gravity.

When her cool fingers touched his cheek, he jolted as if burned. She continued up into his hair, and then down the nape of his neck, her eyes never leaving his, never blinking. Deep inside, at that moment lost to all conscious thought, he hated what she did to him, but could not get enough of it. Later he would be filled with so much revulsion he would vomit.

"You do not want me here?" she asked, knowing the answer.

"You know that I do. Since you came into my life, you have haunted my every waking hour, my every dream. I hear your honeyed words when you are not around. I feel your hand in mine when you are not at my side. How could I not want you with me?"

She appeared to sense the furious competition of desire and loathing, but all it brought was the faintest smile. She leaned in closely, her warm breath playing against his ear. "The Enterprise of England. How goes it?"

"The monetary cost is high, but I have support for my God-given endeavour from across Europe. Emperor Rudolf has agreed to send troops, but no coin. The Doge stands beside us, though may not say so publicly. The English continue with their peace negotiations, blind to our true intentions."

"And the Armada?"

Philip smiled. "Formidable. Our success is assured. One hundred and thirty ships. Thirty thousand men. Near three thousand cannon."

"And England will be defeated?"

"Broken on the rack of Spanish might. The English will attack our ships no more, nor steal our gold and silver, and the true religion will return to that land. It did not have to be this way. If Mary had not been executed. If Elizabeth had married me-"

Malantha pressed a finger to his lips. "If Elizabeth had married you, you would not be here with me."

"Yes ... yes ..." he stuttered. Her scent, her beauty, filled his senses, speaking of other lands far from Spain.

"The English are devils," she breathed in his ear. "They cannot be trusted. They think themselves higher than all others, but there are things that are higher by far."

"Yes. God."

She smiled.

"I will do all in my power to break the English."

He was happy that his words pleased her. Releasing the tie on her dress, she let it fall from her, presenting her body to him for a moment before pushing him back to a divan and climbing astride him. Her skin was luminous, her scent heady. Pressing her breasts against his chest, she kissed him on the lips in a way that no one else had kissed him, deep and slow, with the subtle probing of her tongue. Her groin gently rubbed against his, up and down, up and down. Every sensation was so potent, his thoughts broke up and he was cast adrift in the moment.