‘Yes, a little after the bellman passed on his rounds. A stern word or two is in store for that fellow, I’ll warrant. He failed to notice.’
‘Then if Spenser was murdered, he must have known his killer,’ Nicholas observes.
‘There may be duplicate keys.’
‘Spenser told me a while ago that the Earl of Essex was paying for these lodgings while he was here in London.’
The restlessness Nicholas senses in Cecil, as he considers this, seems to need a larger stage than the narrow confines of the little house. Cecil waits until they are out in the street before replying. The clouds have torn a little. A low moon drips fleeting puddles of grey light over the silent gatehouse that guards the way into Whitehall.
‘I keep asking myself if it might be conceivable that Devereux had him killed,’ he says softly. ‘He may have learned of Spenser’s communications with the Spanish peace faction – decided to cut it off at the first branch, rather than risk the delay of arraignment and trial. Perhaps he was concerned that if the approach by Don Rodriquez were to become known, others on the Privy Council – perhaps even the queen herself – might consider it favourably. Without Spain to hate, Devereux would be a much smaller man.’
‘I would be lying to you, Sir Robert, if I were to tell you with conviction that Edmund Spenser had been murdered. I cannot say so without cutting him open,’ Nicholas restates plainly, wondering if Cecil needs even his air laden with conspiracy before he can breathe it. ‘I’m sorry if that is not what you want to hear, but you didn’t bring me here for anything other than my professional opinion.’
Cecil leads him towards one of a pair of pedestrian gateways flanking the main arch of the King’s Street gatehouse. With barely a sound, the tall wooden doors swing open. Nicholas assumes Mr Secretary’s approach has been expected, observed through some spyhole. But it would be easy, he thinks, to believe that they have sprung wide solely at the command of this crooked little man’s immense will.
‘You’re mistaken,’ Cecil says, his voice echoing in the archway as they pass through.
‘About Spenser?’ Nicholas asks, as he senses rather than sees the guards step aside to allow them entry to the inner courtyard. Ahead he can just make out the façade of King Henry’s great hall against the deeper darkness.
‘No,’ says Cecil, with the finality of a lawyer about to demolish an alibi. ‘About your professional opinion being the only reason you’re here.’
23
They have spent a full fortnight in the cellar owned by a family that Cachorra now knows to be Anglo-Irish, a concept that at first took a little explaining to her. She had previously assumed there were only two types of folk in Ireland: Irish or English.
They have allowed her and Constanza to join them for Mass. This takes place in their modest single-storey house of stone, capped by a turf roof. It is always a packed affair, attended not just by the family, but also by others from around the little valley. The celebration is given by a priest who, when not clad in his threadbare vestments, looks like a mountain shepherd, all beard and sinews. Constanza insists on sitting at the front and receiving the Eucharist before anyone else. In the fourteen days she has been here she has not addressed anyone in English. When it is over and the spirit of God has again suffused their souls, the shepherd-priest hides his regalia in an old wooden box, which he reburies behind the cow byre. It is an inconvenient resurrection, but necessary. Cachorra has been told that if soldiers from Dublin or Cork were to find it, or to stumble across the house while the Mass was in progress, they might well hang everyone in the valley. To avoid this, the children are sent to the high places around the house to keep watch. The health of their immortal souls can wait for later.
Last night, for the first time in a long while, Cachorra was able to make confession of her sins. She asked the priest if it was a sin to wish to be desired by a man.
Not if he is your husband, the priest had told her.
‘But what if it was my master?’ she had replied.
‘Then it is lust, and indeed a sin,’ was the answer. A double sin, in fact, if the man desires in return.
But despite what the priest told her, Cachorra is unconvinced that the dead can sin. Because in the weeks and months since the shipwreck she has accepted reality: that Don Rodriquez is dead and is in heaven.
Today she and Constanza are to be moved again; another step in the laborious journey into Ulster and – if God wills it – to the court of Hugh O’Neill, the Earl of Tyrone. In anticipation, Cachorra has woken early, before cockcrow. It is pitch dark in the cellar. Beside her, Constanza is dreaming whatever vapid dreams Cachorra supposes flit through her mind like shadows in an empty room.
Cachorra does not hear the petulant wheeze of Constanza’s snoring. She is in a place far removed both in time and distance from the pile of musky sheepskin on which she lies, her eyes closed even though it is pitch black in the cellar. She is lost in memories of a time before Constanza, and what she can hear is the crashing of white surf against a golden shore, and the screeching of the cuca birds in the palm trees. She is six years old – and sitting hunched in a bamboo cage like a turkey waiting for the pot. The cage is but one in a line. The others are full of everything that was worth looting from her village. There are no other humans in the cages, and for all Cachorra knows, none left alive in all of Hispaniola, because the men standing in conversation nearby are Ciguayo raiders and their knives are still crimson from the slaughter.
However much it pains Cachorra to admit it, the Ciguayo must have deserved their victory. Because otherwise why else would they be standing on the beach in conversation with the gods?
Cachorra has no doubt at all that these other creatures are gods, though they look similar to all the other mortal men she has encountered in her six years. Though their colour and their faces are different from any Carib, they possess human heads, arms and legs. But they are indeed gods; no question about it. Because no mortal would possess detachable iron skin, or arrive in a great longhouse that floats upon the water and belches fire and thunder from its windows.
Cachorra watches, wild-eyed, as one of the gods points at her crate. He is as magnificent as she would expect a god to be, though not nearly so old. He has a sharp, angular face and a mane of gleaming black ringlets. She hears him utter the word caníbal.
Or at least she imagines now that she hears him utter it. Because at the time she could not possibly have understood the meaning of that Spanish word. At the time she had yet to hear the word Hispaniola. It was not a place known to her. Even her own name, Cachorra, was knowledge she had yet to acquire. All this would come later, when she had learned the language of the man who rescued her from the Ciguayo for the price of a single, gleaming gold coin. But at the time she had understood the meaning behind the word caníbal at once, because one of the raiders had made play of munching on his own wrist, which the gods seemed to find hugely amusing.
For Cachorra, this had been an insult too far. Her people were not caníbales, they were honest fisherfolk. True, the important men of the village might carry around with them a desiccated relic of a revered forebear – a wizened black hand or a foot perhaps – but these were freighted with solemn sanctity. She would no sooner eat a person than she would a toadfish. So when this god with the iron skin and the black ringlets had cut through the cords keeping the lid of the crate shut and reached in to pull her out, the jewelled rings on his ringers blazing like stars fallen to earth, she responded with the outraged fury of a wildcat, even though – inside – she was terrified halfway to death.