The town wall of Rye was coming into sight, and on the steep approach up to the gatehouse, I slowed Hector. Andrew was not far behind, pulling up knee to knee with me and laughing.
‘That was a fine race, Master Alvarez. You are good enough on a horse to be a trooper.’
‘I have a very fine horse.’
‘Aye. I thought poorly of him when we first left London, but he’s a very Bucephalus.’
‘He is indeed. Now, do you have the captain’s pass?’
A sleepy gatekeeper shot back the bolts for us and, grumbling, let us through.
‘He’ll no sooner be back in bed than he’ll be turned out again,’ said Andrew.
‘I hope so. I hope they believe us.’
When we reached the inn, Andrew offered to see to both horses while I went to wake Phelippes and the captain. I think perhaps he did not relish the thought of that task. Certainly it was still well before dawn and they would not welcome the summons any more than the gatekeeper had.
‘I will come and care for Hector when I have explained all,’ I said. I could not neglect him after such a ride.
Once inside the inn I found a servant asleep in a chair and shook him awake. He was reluctant to rouse two such important guests from their beds, but when I told him it was on the Queen’s business, he lit a candle and went stumbling away to find them, still half asleep. I sat down in the chair he had vacated and found that my legs were trembling. I also noticed that there was a great gash in my right leg, where I must have collided with something sharp behind that cottage in the dark. I put my hand up to the side of my head, for I realised that it was still throbbing painfully. My fingers came away sticky with blood.
Phelippes and the captain of the guard came down the stairs together just as I was wiping my head with my handkerchief.
‘Kit!’ Phelippes’s voice was sharp with alarm. ‘You are injured! Have you been attacked?’
‘No, no,’ I said hastily. ‘I fell over something sharp, metal, in the dark. It was stupid of me, because they heard me.’
‘Who heard you? Did you see anything in that village?’
Wrapped in a loose gown of dull grey, Phelippes looked somehow younger and less intimidating than usual. The captain had pulled on breeches but his night shift poked out from the neck of his doublet, which was buttoned awry.
‘They have brought two men in,’ I said, ‘using that boat I noticed, the larger one. I think they must be the two men you were expecting, but they heard me fall. I’m afraid it will have alerted them. You must make haste if you want to catch them.’
‘Did you see them well enough to describe them?’
‘I only caught a glimpse.’
I described the two men as best I could from that brief moment when the light from the house door had shone on them.
‘Hmm,’ Phelippes said. ‘One of them sounds like Ballard, but he has a passport, so why should he enter the country this way? Unless he wants us to think he is still abroad. The other isn’t Maud, though. Maud is a much smaller man than you describe. What has happened to Maud?’
There was no answer for that.
‘Where is Andrew?’ the captain said. He had noticed me looking at his doublet and was buttoning it up again.
‘Seeing to the horses. We rode back as if the Devil himself was after us. The horses will be tired.’
‘I’ll rouse the rest of my men. Do you want us to go after them and arrest them?’ He turned to Phelippes, who was tapping his teeth with his thumbnail.
‘No. I want Ballard to run free for the moment. The other one – I’m not sure who he can be. What I’d like you to do, captain, is to use a few of your men, perhaps only two, to follow them at a discreet distance and see where they go. Do you think you can do that? Without them realising?’
He nodded. ‘I have two who can follow without being noticed. I’ll speak to them now. What would you like the rest of us to do?’
‘I think we will spend a quiet day today, rather than be seen rushing back to London. If we are watching them, they may well be watching us. Let them think we had nothing to do with the noise Kit made. Perhaps it was rival smugglers from another village! We will do a little more investigating in the neighbourhood, a little more questioning. That way it will seem that we have discovered nothing so far. We’ll go in the opposite direction, over to the Marsh. I know we were told that it would not be safe for a stranger to land there, but who’s to know we were told? We’ll ride over to Tenterden and the Isle of Oxney, and make a nuisance of ourselves there, well away from your men tracking Ballard and his companion.’
The captain turned and went back upstairs. Phelippes looked at me with his lips pursed.
‘You had better clean up that blood, Kit, then get some rest for what is left of the night.’
‘Thank you, sir. But I’ll just see that Hector is settled first.’
‘Hector?’
‘My horse, sir.’
He shook his head and smiled at the idea that something as functional as a horse might have a name. For Phelippes a horse was nothing more than a means of transport. Then he too went back upstairs.
On my way to the inn stable, I went through the dining parlour and filched two more apples. I reckoned Andrew’s horse deserved one too.
By the time I reached them, Andrew had both horses rubbed down and fed, but they welcomed the apples greedily.
‘What a night!’ His eyes gleamed in the light from the stable lantern. ‘More excitement than a month of being a trooper.’
I grinned back at him. ‘I could have done without the shock when I fell over whatever that was behind the cottage.’
‘It scared me too. Your head is bleeding. You’d best have it seen to.’
‘I’ll see to it myself. When I’m not working for Phelippes, I am a doctor at St Bartholomew’s’
He whistled softly, causing Hector’s ears to swivel toward us.
‘And you ride like a trooper.’
‘My grandfather bred horses. I could ride almost before I could walk.’
‘Well, between us we’ve managed to spice up a dull mission. What did the great men say?’
‘Phelippes and your captain? They are sending two of your men to follow the strangers and see where they go, but not to arrest them yet. Phelippes thinks he knows who one of them is.’
‘And the rest of us?’
‘The rest of us are going to create a diversion, making a nuisance of ourselves over in Kent, round the Isle of Oxney, so it looks as though we have discovered nothing.’
He laughed. ‘Clever!’
‘Oh, Phelippes is a very clever man. Now we’d best get to our beds for what’s left of the night. Thank you, Andrew, for your help tonight. If you had not dragged me away from that cottage, I hate to think what might have happened to me.’
As I spoke I had a sudden clear picture of what would have happened. Those ruffians would have captured me, and when they discovered I was a girl – what then? I shuddered.
‘All in a night’s work,’ he said cheerfully.
Compared with the excitement of the night, the next day was exceedingly dull. After breaking our fast late because of our lack of sleep, we set out for Tenterden. In the town and then round the villages on and near the Isle of Oxney, we rode about asking questions doggedly and calling the greatest possible attention to ourselves. It was strange country. The Isle was no longer quite an island, but it was easy to see that once it had been, before this part of the marsh had been drained. Even now the whole area was crisscrossed with ditches and streams, and even where the road ran along a raised embankment, it felt temporary and unstable.