“My father wants me to find out what’s going on, in case my mother hasn’t told him everything. Meanwhile my mother wants me to find out how Richard Tregian was swapped for a priest and what happened to the priest-although I think we know-and how. And in all of it I must ask questions, but if I don’t know what they’re up to, how can I be sure to ask the right questions and still protect them?”
“Ay.”
“So that’s it. I’m not doing any more. I think I’ll go hawking tomorrow.”
Carey smiled tightly and finally, thanks be to God, headed for the door. He paused.
“We’ll probably be on the road north in a day or two,” he said.
It was while Dodd was fighting his way out of his suit that he found it. A piece of paper which had been slipped into the little pocket in his sleeve. When he opened it, he found a short and imperious note.
“Please be so good as to meet me in the main courtyard at dawn.”
The thing was signed with Lady Hunsdon’s initials. Dodd groaned aloud. Dawn? It was past midnight now. He’d get hardly any sleep at all.
Feeling hard-used, he shucked the rest of his stupid clothes, dumped them on the chest, and climbed into bed, closing the curtains around him against the foul ague-producing airs of the Thames.
Friday 15th September 1592, dawn
Dawn found the courtyard full of horses. It seemed that when Carey went hawking near London, he couldn’t possibly do it the way he did near Carlisle, which was to ride out with only Dodd or another man of the castle guard and a tercel falcon on his fist, a couple of dogs at the heels of his horse. That was fun.
This kind of hawking involved the dog-boy and the Master of the Kennels plus two or three dogs including the lugubrious lymer that had hurt his paw but was much better now, half a dozen mounted servingmen, the Baron’s Falconer, and at least five birds with their hoods on and a couple of boys to climb trees for the falcons in case they didn’t come back. Dodd saw Marlowe for the first time in days: he was looking out of a second-storey window smoking a long clay pipe while everyone mounted up and lengthened stirrup leathers and argued. They were seemingly headed for Farringdon Fields.
Carey raised his hand in salute to Dodd as the whole cavalcade clenched and gathered itself around him and waited for the main gate to be opened to let them pass.
“Off we go now,” said a firm voice at Dodd’s elbow, and he looked down to see Lady Hunsdon in a respectable but ordinary tawny woollen kirtle, holding a walking stick and wearing a very determined expression.
“Ah…” Dodd began.
“We’ll take a boat and you can explain it all to me,” she said. Dodd looked about for her normal gang of Cornish wreckers and found only the wide and freckled Captain Trevasker standing behind her, looking highly amused.
“Ay m’lady,” said Dodd, since there was evidently no help for it.
They walked down through the gardens with their polite boxtree knot designs and orchard at the end, hedged with raspberry and gooseberry bushes and a row of hazels. Lady Hunsdon didn’t lean much on her walking stick since she had her hand laced into the crook of Dodd’s elbow, not quite a jailer. They got to the boatlanding, where Dodd found that Captain Trevasker had already hopped into the smaller of the two Hunsdon boats, and handed Lady Hunsdon down to the cushioned seat at the end. The rowers were waiting there in their headache-producing black and yellow stripes. Once Lady Hunsdon was settled and had nodded to the chief of them, they set off.
In the middle of the river, Lady Hunsdon leaned over and tapped him on the knee.
“Now then, Sergeant Dodd,” she said, and her eyes had a roguish twinkle in them which went some way to explaining why the bastard son of Henry VIII had married a West Country maiden with only a small dowry. “Let’s find out what that scallywag son of mine has been up to. Tell me everything you’ve been doing.”
Dodd coughed, thought hard and then decided that the unvarnished truth was easier to remember than any improvement of the story. He started at the beginning, went through the middle, and ended with Pickering. He left out his discussion with Carey the night before.
“Hmm,” said Lady Hunsdon. “Well then, let’s go and see that young lawyer, shall we?”
It was only a little way along the Thames bank to Temple steps where Trevasker hopped out first and handed the Lady up while Dodd helped make fast and jumped out onto the small boatlanding.
A group of lawyers in their sinister black robes were clattering down the steps and tried to get into the Hunsdon boat. Trevasker moved in front of them and growled that it was a private craft. One of them had the grace to bow in apology for the mistake to Lady Hunsdon while the others started bellowing “Oars!” None of the Thames boatmen seemed in a hurry to take them anywhere, probably because they were students at one of the Inns and law students were notoriously almost as bad as apprentices for not paying tips and being sick in the back of the boat on the way home.
Lady Hunsdon climbed the steps and then headed in the direction of the Temple. Dodd led the way to the ramshackle buildings where Enys had his chambers. Lady Hunsdon looked narrow-eyed at the steep uneven stairs and sat herself down on a nearby pile of flagstones.
“Ask Mr. Enys if he will come down to meet an old lady,” she said. “I doubt my poor old knees will take me to the top of that lot. Off you go Sergeant. Captain Trevasker shall bear me company.”
Dodd headed up the stairs. Halfway there he heard shouting and speeded up, taking them two at a time until he came out on to the landing where the pieces of Enys’s door were stacked in a corner, the new raw wood of its replacement wide open and two men standing facing each other in the still half-wrecked sitting room. There was a curtain across the gap to the second room.
One was Enys pale-faced and furious, the other was Shakespeare, hat off, bald head gleaming in the light from the small window, and a certain smug look on his face. They had obviously stopped their quarrel when they heard Dodd’s boots on the stairs.
Shakespeare peered out of the window and smiled. “I see my lady has come to see you as well,” he murmured. “I shall leave you to consider matters.”
With a bow to Dodd he left and trotted down to the courtyard, humming some ditty to himself. Dodd glared after him. If they had been on the Borders, he would have been certain the man was putting the bite on for protection…Mr. Ritchie Graham of Brackenhill is willing to protect your barn from burning while it has such a wonderful quantity of hay in it, but will need his expenses paying…That kind of thing. It was the expression on the face. That smugness. Dodd scowled. Having once felt sorry for Shakespeare for being a poet, he no longer did. The man was nothing but trouble.
“Sergeant,” said Enys, sounding tense again, “Can I help you?”
“That poet,” said Dodd, “what did he want?”
Enys paused, frowned, took breath, then let it out again and smiled cynically. “Nothing good, you may be sure. However, it is confidential.”
“Ay,” said Dodd, being rather tired of the word and the general atmosphere in London of people not telling other people things they needed to be told. “Milady Hunsdon wants tae know if ye’ll be kind enough to come down to her…”
“Of course,” said Enys, putting on his hat.
Down in the shade of an old almond tree perhaps planted by one of the Knights Templar, Lady Hunsdon looked Enys sharply up and down. “What did that poet want?”
Enys bowed. “Unfortunately,” he said, “I am not at liberty…”