I sat up abruptly, hugging my knees, staring uneasily into the darkness, now rent with groans and moans as the suppertime stew began working on people’s guts, giving them bad dreams, mounting them on the Night Mare. I remembered Albany’s assurance, frequently repeated, that he would be king, no matter what Fate, in the guise of the Scottish Council and the Duke of Gloucester as King Edward’s representative, decided. Why was he so confident? What exactly was he planning?
All my earlier doubts and suspicions regarding his true relationship with the late Earl of Mar’s servants began to worry me yet again. Looking back over the past two months, since leaving London, the conviction grew that I had been gulled. Albany’s fear that one of the five was in the employ of King James, with instructions to murder him, seemed increasingly threadbare the more I thought seriously about it. Once more I recollected the many occasions on which the duke had been content to dispense with my services, laying himself open, with apparent carelessness, to attack from any one of them.
I recalled the times when his life seemed genuinely to have been under threat and reluctantly arrived at the conclusion that those times could have been staged without much difficulty. The horse nearly throwing him in the courtyard of Fotheringay castle could as easily have been in response to a spur, cruelly applied by the duke himself, as to a cut on its flank delivered by someone else. And then there was the incident at York when an attempt had apparently been made to stab Albany to death in his bed, and only the fact that the duke had been bending over the night-stool, with me in attendance, had prevented a very nasty murder. I remembered how he had retched and retched, but without any resulting vomit. And while Albany had been claiming my attention with his feigned sickness, someone could have entered the room and planted the knife in among the bedclothes. Davey, perhaps? The page, too, had pleaded illness in order to account for his seeming absence.
But all this — what was now assuming the proportions of a certainty in my mind — provoked the question: why? The obvious answer was to convince me that Albany’s life really was in danger and to keep me from defecting, either by going directly to the Duke of Gloucester and telling him of my doubts or by simply running away and making my way home to Bristol. But there again, that also raised the question: why? Why was Albany so desperate to keep me by his side? It was possible, I conceded, that he might really have feared assassination by one of his English allies, but I failed to see how my presence provided him with any greater protection than his own retinue could have supplied …
The more I thought about it, the more my head began to spin. I felt reasonably certain now that I had been duped and lied to by Albany, but could see no rhyme or reason for it. Why was it so essential that I should accompany him on this invasion of his native country? Our previous acquaintance had been brief. On the first occasion, I had helped him to escape from England to Ireland (from whence he had fled to France and the protection of King Louis) but our relationship had been no more than that of passing strangers. The second time, I had, at his request, been granted a short audience with him at Westminster Palace when he was the guest of King Edward there two years ago — and when, no doubt, past differences reconciled, they had been plotting this present action against the Scots. But, rack my brains as I would, I could come up with no explanation for his urgent request that I should be made his special bodyguard; so urgent, in fact, that it had made me the subject of a royal command.
I became conscious of a dull, throbbing ache behind my eyes to which the airlessness of the hall and my own uneasy thoughts contributed. I glanced around for any kindred soul also unable to sleep and was suddenly aware that neither the two squires nor the page had yet returned. This was far longer than any night-time piss could possibly warrant, and I had started to heave myself to my feet with the intention of going in search of them when I felt someone tap me on the arm. It was James Petrie, awake and leaning forward to offer me a leather flask which he had produced from somewhere about his person.
He grunted a word which could have been interpreted as, ‘Drink?’ But whatever it was, the message was clear.
I thought of the wind and drizzling rain outside, and after the briefest of hesitations, accepted his offer in the spirit in which it was apparently meant.
‘Thanks.’ I took a generous swig from the flask only to realize too late that it was the damned ‘water of life’ that the Scots seemed so keen on. It caught me in the back of the throat and I began to splutter and cough, my eyes streaming with tears, so that I thought I must choke to death there and then. My convulsions were so extreme that several of my neighbours who, until now, had appeared oblivious to any sound, including, I suspected, the Last Trump, woke up and started to throw things at me. Two or three pairs of shoes and a belt, whose buckle scratched my face, all found their mark before I was at last able to breathe freely again. I handed the flask back to James Petrie, who, even in the dark, I could see was shaking with silent laughter. ‘I’m going to look for the other three,’ I told him huskily and with what dignity I could muster. ‘They’ve been gone too long.’ I noticed that I suddenly sounded tipsy.
And that was the last thing I remembered saying …
I was standing outside Mistress Callender’s house, looking in through one of the open ground floor windows, a sheep and a cow staring back at me. Next, without being aware that I had moved, I was floating effortlessly up the outside staircase, my feet not touching the treads. Mistress Callender was seated on a stool at the top and I could see that she was trying to tell me something. Her lips were moving but I could hear no sound, and in one hand, she held what looked like a bunch of herbs which she kept waving at me. I called out to her to speak louder, but my words, too, drifted away into silence. I touched down on the small stone landing at the top of the flight of steps, but the widow had vanished. I glanced around frantically in an effort to find her, convinced that her message was of vital importance, but she was nowhere to be seen. Instead, I was lying on the bed in Aline Sinclair’s bedchamber, the coverlet’s Green Man medallion underneath me.
To my horror, I could feel the embroidered tendrils and shoots that wreathed the Green Man’s head and coiled in and out of his mouth, begin to come alive, snaking around my limbs and body, holding me in a slowly tightening and evermore deadly embrace. Living in a port like Bristol, I had heard plenty of sailors’ tales of the weird and wonderful creatures to be found in foreign lands; and I recalled one of a snake that could crush a man to death. I’m not sure that I believed the story at the time, but it came back to me now in my dream as the foliage engulfed me.
I yelled, but, as before, could make no sound.
Maria Beton was standing beside the bed, gazing down at me, and beside her was the gaoler’s son from the castle, the young boy who had apparently taken her a message from Master Sinclair. In one hand the housekeeper was holding a fruit which, after a moment, I recognized as a quince, and in the other several leaves of parchment tied together with two knots of red ribbon. The missing diary! I sat up, struggling to free myself from the clutches of the Green Man …
It was morning. A pale sun lit the windows of the common hall and all around me was the bustle of a new day, men hauling themselves to their feet after an unsatisfactory night’s sleep, searching for lost shoes, belts, even tunics that had been discarded due to the heat. I felt like death, as though I had been kicked in the back of the head by a mule. The rags of that hideous dream still hung around me, making me tremble.