Sopping leaves and twigs scraped at my exposed hands and face. This branch might have been good enough for a boy to sit astride but it was too slight a place to give me much ease or concealment. A little further up and over I made out a more substantial perch. I scrambled to one side, pressing the wet, knubbly bark with face and chest, gripping tight with one hand while the other searched for purchase. In the end I manoevered myself across a great, motherly branch that would have held me and many another. Once there, I slumped forward, head on my arms, my feet locked in a tight embrace about the branch. Beneath me the water dripped to the forest floor. Lightning flashed, but now at a distance; thunder, having played its part, rumbled rather than roared.
I must have slept, if you could call it sleep. Slept and woken. Slept and woken.
The short remainder of that night was split into hundreds of little portions of time and those portions split into yet more portions, and in each and every one I spent some moments anxious and alert, and passed other moments when I would not have been able to say who or where I was. Call it sleep.
At one point something dropped on my back and scuttled off down one leg. I gripped tighter on my branch.
At one point I thought how this was the third time within a few days that I had concealed myself in a tree. How I had spied on my knight and his lady in the garden. How, before that, I had climbed the pear tree and been on the verge of abandoning the chase when my eyes lighted on the carved initials WS. I wondered what Adrian had meant when he talked about another, a man off-stage who was directing their actions.
At another point I was woken by an animal cough. An eerie half light fell from above. The rain had stopped, but the air seemed to be saturated with moisture and strange, tiny, cloudy patches. I was cold and clammy. A finely-antlered deer was making his stately progress through the trees. Wisps of mist covered him up to his haunches so that he appeared as fabulous as a unicorn, a boat-like creature navigating the wood. A few yellow leaves spiralled down and vanished into the carpet of mist beside him.
Later I woke shaking. There was a stronger but still pale yellow light to one side of me, the right. Now, like a lode-stone, I could tell in which direction I pointed. I was facing to the north.
Later still I woke and saw what had been concealed by night and the thick air. I was on the edge of a clear area of the forest and ahead of me was a vista like a picture in a book. The slanting sun struck at the towers and domes of a city and glinted off a river. Above, the sky was the clearest azure, promising a fresh day and forgiveness to us all. A solitary star, still visible in the west, was soon to be outshone.
I almost wept with joy.
We had not travelled so far after all. The direction we’d taken in the wagon had been south, across the river and then through Southwark, as I had suspected. I was up a beech tree in a forest on the gentle, sloping heights south of our city. I squinted and tried to make out the shape of the Globe theatre but in the rising sun everything danced and dazzled so much that it was impossible to discern particular buildings, however large.
At that instant, for me, London might have been the new Jerusalem, a city of gold and crystal. I felt I might leap from my perch and race across the fields and plains until I reached it. I had survived a night of terror, with nothing worse than bruises and scratches. I had outwitted and escaped from three wicked men who unlawfully sought my life.
I was alive.
There was a cough underneath my branch.
The deer, of course. An innocent creature of the forest.
But this was no deer, no simple beast. It was a human cough, it was Adrian the false steward standing beneath the tree.
At first I hadn’t recognised him. From my position lying along the branch I looked straight down on the top and brim of his hat. This hat was so broad that it almost concealed the figure beneath. His breath plumed out into the cold morning air. Then he coughed again and shuffled a couple of paces forward.
My heart was thudding and my mouth was dry. I kept still. With luck he should move off. I assumed his two companions were within calling distance. When he went away I would jump down from the tree and run for my life, run for my city. It was just a matter of being patient — and still.
I continued to look at Adrian, at his back covered by the black mantle, at the hat which sat on him like a sooty chimney. But there is a strange sense in us, or in some of us, that says we are being watched even when we cannot see the watcher. Perhaps the poets are right when they poeticise about the threads of gold which connect them to their lover’s eyes or the daggers which kill when she looks on them unfavourably.
Or perhaps I simply made a noise or Adrian was brushed by a falling leaf. For whatever reason he turned to look and I knew even as his head began to move round that he was aware that something was behind and above him.
I didn’t take the time to think. If I had, various pictures would probably have flashed across my mind’s eye to do with Adrian calling out for help and the other two joining him, and then all three trapping me up the tree, like dogs with a cat. And, if I had spent time thinking it out, that is probably what would have happened.
Instead I acted by instinct.
Before Adrian’s head and upper body had completed a full turn I launched myself from the branch like a thunderbolt, like a dart of lightning. ‘Fell’ might be more precise than ‘launched’. I struck him somewhere about the middle before landing heavily and clumsily on top of him. He crumpled up and broke my fall. I did not pause to see what damage I had done to him. Frightened that he would call and bring on the others, I lashed out almost as soon as we had arrived on the ground in a tangle of limbs. I struck him about the face, I pummeled his back and shoulders. His hat had fallen off so I seized him by the hair and banged his head on the earth.
After a time I clambered upright. The red mist of anger that dropped before my eyes in the hut had returned and, through it, I cast around for a log or a stone, anything to strike at this man and crush him like a beetle. I found a fallen branch and swung it at his unmoving head like an axe. The branch must have been half-rotten — or my blows very forceful — because it snapped after ten or a dozen swings and I almost fell on top of him, carried by the force of my blows. That brought me to my senses and I staggered back against the trunk of the tree which had sheltered me and felt my gorge rise and I puked and was ashamed. Nub and Ralph were elsewhere in the forest. If anyone had been near they would have been alerted by the sounds of the fight and my gasping breath.
Nevertheless I had no time to lose. I knew what I had to do. Adrian was lying on his front, his legs in a strange, frog-like position. Blood covered the side of his face and was matted in his hair. The leaves and grass surrounding him were spattered with it. It was on my own clothing too as well as on my hands and, no doubt, face. I picked up his tall hat from where it had rolled into the undergrowth. Averting my gaze I plucked the black mantle from around his shoulders. He did not move. I was not sure that he would ever move again.
I had no time to be sorry. I scooped up Adrian’s cloak and hat in my arms and, taking a deep breath, I set my face in the direction of London. The early morning mist had nearly burnt up in the heat of the rising sun. Ahead lay the city, not quite so bright and gleaming as when I had first glimpsed it from up the beech tree. The pure azure sky was streaked with cloud.