Traitor's Storm (11 page)

Meux and Dillington exchanged glances. George Carey was insufferable at the best of times, and never more so than when he was playing soldiers. They both sat to attention and raised their hands to their hats. Carey smiled. He was a stickler for protocol.

‘Where’s Matthew Compton?’ the governor asked. ‘I specifically requested his presence today.’

Matthew Compton was buckling on his sword and looking for his hat as Bet Carey lay back on the bed, tired but happy and glowing after the hectic round of the last few minutes. She watched him rummage in a chest for his wheel-lock and waited while he opened a window and yelled at his man to saddle his horse.

‘Why don’t you drink smoke, Matt?’ she asked him, looking around for a pipe and tobacco in case he had taken up the habit.

‘Can’t abide the stuff, Bet,’ he said, checking his sash in the mirror.

‘Pity,’ she said. ‘It’s very relaxing at times like these.’ Her smile vanished. If there was anything she liked more than writhing on a bed with Matthew Compton, it was teasing him. ‘I think he knows,’ she said.

Compton turned to face her. ‘Who?’ he said. ‘Knows what?’

‘George, of course,’ she smiled. ‘Knows about us.’

For a moment, Matthew Compton’s heart stopped beating. He was standing at the end of a long, dark tunnel. There was no sound, just the quiet drip of his own blood hitting the ground, seeping from the wound made by George Carey’s sword.

‘Nonsense!’ he said, shaking himself free of it. ‘How could he?’

Bet Carey slid off the bed, still naked, and crossed to the window. ‘This is George’s island, Matt,’ she said. ‘That’s Holyrood Street down there. And every single one of its inhabitants acknowledges him as their lord. And some of them,’ she tapped his codpiece playfully, ‘are observant and very loyal to him.’

‘Are they?’ he snapped. ‘Well, that’s where you’re wrong.’ He sounded like a petulant child as he grabbed his hat. ‘I happen to know that George Carey is the most hated man in the Wight. And anyway,’ he turned to her, now kitted out like the centoner he was today, ‘no one knows you come here.’ He looked her up and down and let his temper show. ‘And, for God’s sake, cover yourself up!’

She stepped back from the window but didn’t make a move to cover herself. She stood there, displaying herself to him, one hip thrust out and a hand brushing her nipples. She smiled and said, ‘While we are on the subject of no one knowing I come here, perhaps you could call my maid as you pass your kitchen boy’s door. He has more stamina than you and keeps her in bed betimes.’

The door slammed behind him and he did not hear her laughing as he clattered down the stairs, aiming a vicious kick at the little door into the kitchens as he went. The front door shuddered on its hinges and Matthew Compton was gone.

‘Have a care!’ George Carey roared and three hundred pikemen extended their right hands and rested their left fists on their hips. ‘No thumbs!’ he bellowed. ‘The swine array of Spain won’t be impressed by a bunch of catamites, however patriotic you may be.’

A few furtive thumbs hooked inside clenched fists.

‘Porte your pike!’

The pikes came up to the vertical and everyone waited. Apart from the snorting of the horses, there was silence on St George’s Down.

‘Handle your pike!’

The pikes fell to the diagonal, men leaning in and gripping their staves with both hands.

‘Advance your pike!’

The pikes probed forward, like a bristling hedgehog.

‘And … have a care!’

The pikes came up and everyone relaxed.

‘Well, Henry?’ Carey turned to the man beside him. ‘What do you think?’

‘You’re the expert, George,’ Meux said. ‘I’d say it needs work.’

‘Robert?’ Carey looked across to Dillington.

‘It’s good to see our local lads aren’t much slower than the Essex boys,’ he said. ‘But all in all …’

‘Yes, I know.’ Carey was irritated. For weeks now he had been working with pikemen, demilancers, calivermen and musketeers. The Essex lads were sloppy, but the Hampshire boys two weeks ago were no better. His eyes blazed as he looked around the field, the drummers waiting for the word of command. His eyes fell on his nephew a hundred times removed.

‘Remind me again, Martin,’ he said. ‘You are here because …?’

‘It’s a tedious job, George,’ the man said, as much under his breath as possible. ‘But somebody has to count the pennies. In a minute you’re going to have artillery practice, aren’t you? Get the Shott moving?’

‘Of course,’ Carey said. ‘Can’t have a field day without guns.’

‘Well, guns cost, George,’ Martin said. ‘And so does roundshot. I have to keep accounts.’

Martin Carey had had a special saddle made, one with a wooden lectern that swung across the pommel. It had an inkwell, a quill and a ledger. George Carey knew he should be impressed. But he was not. He sighed. ‘You’re a sad, sad man,’ he said. ‘Ah.’ He caught sight of a horseman galloping across the front of the Essex Bands. ‘Watch carefully in the next few minutes, gentlemen. I believe I have some entertainment for you – Martin, you brought the candles?’

‘Yes,’ the comptroller said. ‘Here in my saddlebag; but I don’t see …’

‘No, of course not.’ Carey beamed. ‘That’s why I’m Governor and Captain-General of the Wight and you are an accountant. Master Compton,’ he called to the rider, ‘good of you to call.’

Compton reined in his lathered horse and saluted. ‘Sorry, Sir George,’ he said, ‘I got a little delayed, I’m afraid.’ He suddenly smelled the Governor’s wife on him, the scent of civet, and turned a little pale. Looking down, he saw a long dark hair on his cuff and felt his breath catch in his throat. He dropped his hands and held the reins low, hiding the tell-tale filament.

‘You see, gentlemen,’ Carey beamed, returning Compton’s salute, ‘a centoner who knows how to behave. Splendid.’ His smile suddenly vanished and he scanned the line of his levy standing at ease behind the band. ‘Sergeant Wilson, if you please.’

Three men broke from the ranks, their pikes passed to others and they stood to attention before the Governor.

‘Dismount, sir,’ Carey said to Compton.

The man was a little surprised by the order but he obeyed and someone took the animal’s bridle, leading it away. Carey eased himself in the saddle. For all his martial bearing, his thigh boots were agony and his gorget much too tight. ‘Tell me about yourself, Matthew,’ he said, as though conducting an interview.

‘Sir George?’ Compton frowned. Had the man gone mad? Meux and Dillington were equally confused and even Martin Carey had no idea where this was going.

‘Humour me.’ Carey smiled.

‘Er … well, I was born in the County of Middlesex and attended John Lyon’s new school in Harrow …’

‘And then?’

‘Well, I am of private means, Sir George. A gentleman.’

Carey snorted. ‘You may be of private means, sir, but you are no gentleman.’

Compton wanted the ground to swallow him up. Bet had been right. George Carey
did
know and now he was to have his revenge in the most public and humiliating way possible. He felt the long, dark hair stream from his cuff in the wind on the Down’s top, flying like a pennon, like a lady’s favour.

The Governor leaned forward over his horse’s neck. ‘You are a lawyer, sir,’ he said as though the words were choking him. ‘Specifically, a Bencher of Lincoln’s Inn.’ He sat upright again and looked down his nose at the man before him. ‘My views on lawyers are well known,’ he shouted. ‘I will not tolerate a lawyer on my Island. They are crawlers, hypocrites, liars and parasites.’ He looked at the speechless Compton. ‘Did you think you could fool me, sir? Gentlemen!’

The two pikemen dashed forward and pinioned Compton’s arms. The sergeant whipped the man’s sword from his scabbard and broke it over his knee. Martin Carey shook his head. That weapon would have paid for two dozen calivers and the matches to go with them.

Compton found his voice, the one he used, not in bed with Bet Carey, but across the floor of a London courtroom. ‘This is an outrage!’ he shouted.

‘It is,’ Carey agreed, ‘but I have the solution.’ He clicked his fingers and the sergeant collected six candles from the Governor’s comptroller. He quickly cut the loops of Compton’s Venetians and tied their dangling ends to the wicks. Then he collected a small bell from a pikeman’s satchel and hung it on a rope around the lawyer’s neck.

‘Ready, sir,’ he said.

Carey was smirking. So were most of the men in the ranks and the musicians. The Governor spoke to them. ‘For the rest of the day, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘you will run a foot race, in full pack, to test your mettle. You will accompany this … gentleman … to the quay. And there you will put him on a boat. If the boat takes him to the mainland, all well and good. He can practise his black arts over there. If not, and he drifts with the tide … who knows but that he can offer his services to the Armada of Spain.’

There were hoots of laughter and the sergeant lit the tapers that smouldered and spat, dripping hot wax on to Compton’s boots. Carey leaned to the man as the pikemen held him fast. ‘Bell, book and candle, Master Lawyer,’ he hissed, ‘the way we drive out evil hereabouts. The bell will tinkle round your neck all the way into the Solent. The candles will roast your balls if you’re not careful. And as for the book; I’ve just thrown it at you!’

The band struck up a merry tune and the sergeant led the way, the smouldering, clanging Compton being dragged behind him. All the way to the quay, dogs barked and children spat. This was better than a holiday and all thanks to good old George Carey.

When he had ridden away to make sure his orders were carried out and the field day had descended into a leaping, laughing rabble on a picnic, Henry Meux still sat his horse alongside Robert Dillington. They watched a bewildered Martin Carey trot after his kinsman. ‘Something will have to be done about George, Robert,’ Meux said.

‘You don’t like lawyers any more than he does,’ Dillington reminded him.

‘That has nothing to do with it. The man thinks he’s God rather than the Queen’s servant as we all are. Today, it’s Compton. Tomorrow, who knows? You? Me? Something will have to be done.’

‘Well, it isn’t likely to be me,’ Dillington said, rather on his dignity.

‘How can you be so sure?’ Meux asked.

‘I am neither a lawyer nor am I making him wear the horns.’

Meux turned in the saddle and stared at the man. ‘You mean … Compton and Bet?’

‘Has Carey another wife?’ Dillington asked archly. The man could gossip for England. And often did.

‘No … but …
Compton
?’ Meux was scandalized.

Dillington looked after the laughing mob that was accompanying Compton on his long journey to the quay. ‘I would say the women find him attractive enough,’ he said. ‘He seems to be quite well set up, as far as a man can judge.’

Meux was lost in thought.

Dillington, that most perspicacious and tenacious of gossips, being a man, sensed a story in the air. ‘So,’ he probed. ‘Tomorrow, as you say. It could be you or me.’

Meux tapped his heels on his horse’s flanks and rode away.

Dillington watched him go through lidded eyes, still as a lizard on a wall. This might come in useful. He would bide his time.

‘You must tell me all about Christopher Marlowe.’ Cecily Meux was at her drawn-thread work but her mind was not on the job in hand. She was known for her delicate reticella lace and the rumour ran that the Queen herself wore Cecily’s trimmings on her nightgown, but she could never do her best work when Bet Carey was visiting – her stories were not conducive to accurate weaving.

‘Well, you’ve danced with him, Cecily.’ Bet Carey’s fingers flew over the cloth. Her work was simpler than Cecily’s, whipping some edging to something filmy that Cecily would not even recognize, let alone wear.

‘Well,’ Cecily’s eyes shone brightly. ‘He cuts quite a dash, doesn’t he?
And
he has the legs for it.’ She blushed, as Cecily always did when more risqué ideas entered her otherwise empty head.

‘I’m more interested in codpieces,’ Bet said, smiling wide-eyed as though discussing the weather.

‘Bet Carey!’ Cecily scolded her, but a little shiver ran up her back. Her Henry had long ago lost all interest in that sort of thing and she hardly liked to bother him, what with the cares of running Kingston and now this wretched Spanish business. After all, he
was
a centoner in the Militia and a man could not be everywhere at once. But Bet, now … Bet was different. She and George went to the court – in London, that is – and they knew
everybody
. The last time Bet had been, she had danced with the gorgeous Henry Wriothesley, the second Earl of Southampton, and he had whispered things in her ear that even Bet could not repeat. Not even to Cecily.

‘And the man’s a poet. They say he was called Machiavel at Cambridge and has had dark dealings with Dr Dee.’

‘Yes,’ Bet mused, staring for a while into the middle distance. ‘I would imagine Master Marlowe has many dark dealings.’ She winked at her friend. ‘One to watch.’

‘And talking of watching.’ Cecily, feather-headed as ever, had changed tack. ‘What is the mystery of Walter Hunnybun?’

Bet’s face hardened. ‘There’s no mystery, Cecily; he’s dead.’

‘Yes, of course,’ her friend gabbled. ‘But murdered, they say. Did you have a look at him?’

‘A look at him?’ Bet looked askance. She would rather remember the man when he was alive, riding her in the bedroom of his farmhouse. What he lacked in elegant technique he made up for in stamina and enthusiasm. She had no interest in death. Unless of course …

‘Well,’ Cecily went on, ‘I mean, he was laid out in your chapel, wasn’t he? Who could have done such a terrible thing?’

But Bet had no time to speculate because the dogs were suddenly barking and there was the clatter of hoofs in the courtyard outside. Servants were scurrying in all directions.

‘That’ll be Henry.’ Cecily put her needlework down. ‘He’s been out at his war games all day, Bet, with that husband of yours. I warn you, he’ll be in a foul mood.’

T
om Sledd was sitting on the wall of Master Sackerson’s Bear Pit, throwing his breakfast leftovers to the great animal, who lay on his back, all four paws in the air. Were it not for the lack of an enormous ball of wool, he could have been a kitten lying there. A stale bread roll hit him on the nose and suddenly, there was no kitten, just a moth-eaten old bear with one tooth clinging resolutely in its gum. The growl was low in his throat and shook the wall, vibrating up Tom’s leg and into his bowel.