“Time you learned… meddling idiot!” Pendelshape growled. He started to crawl around on the ground, cursing angrily and desperately searching for his weapon.
Suddenly, there were voices. Angus shouted, “Help! Over here, we’re in the clearing.”
A second later, Tony, Gordon and several other royal guardsmen tumbled into sight.
“Over there!” Angus pointed at Pendelshape who was still scrambling around desperately trying to find his gun.
Tony called out to him, “It’s over Pendelshape.”
Pendelshape screamed back, “That’s what you think… VIGIL is about to be crushed.”
“Stand still — or we’ll shoot,” Gordon shouted.
But Pendelshape was having none of it. He stood up, put his head down, dropped his shoulder and charged directly into the perimeter hedge. Instantly, Tony and Gordon let loose a volley of shots. For a second all was quiet. Suddenly, there was a flash of incandescent white light and for a moment the sky above them was as bright as day. Tony and Gordon rushed over to the hedge through which Pendelshape had escaped.
Tony cursed under his breath. “He’s gone. Time signal… this means trouble… we need to get to the safehouse.” He turned back to the guards. “You men — take the queen and Lady Sarah back to the palace immediately. We will go ahead and track down the intruder. When you get back to the palace, get Walsingham to send help and search the surrounding area. Now go!”
Tony peered down at Jack. “Are you okay?”
Jack was starting to come round. His head was spinning; he felt like he’d been hit by a bus.
“Hurts like hell… what happened?”
“You just saved the queen’s life.”
Jack just about had the wherewithal to reply, “But not Lady Sarah’s?”
Tony grimaced. “Don’t know — she’s in a bad way…”
“We’ve got to go…” Gordon said urgently. “We don’t know what Pendelshape is going to do. We need to act while this time signal lasts. We’ve got a couple of hours at most… come on!”
The guardsmen were already escorting the queen away from the clearing. But as they prepared to leave, she walked over to where they stood. Her voice trembled with emotion.
“Sir, you have saved my life. I must now return to the palace for protection until the area is secured. Report to us tomorrow and you shall be rewarded.”
“Your Majesty — we must give chase… the intruder,” Tony pressed.
“Yes — you must go.” Then, quite spontaneously, she slipped a ring from her finger and pressed it firmly into Jack’s hand. “Take this as a token of our thanks. Now Godspeed…” She paused before adding grimly, “And when you find the assassin — kill him — and bring me his head.”
Day of Deliverance
It took them fifteen minutes to reach what Tony called the ‘safehouse’ — a hunting lodge that they had already commandeered in the middle of the deer park about a couple of kilometres from the palace. Jack’s head was still throbbing from Pendelshape’s punch — and in the dark he had to be supported by Angus and Gordon as Tony led the way through the woodland at a lung-bursting pace. When they entered the lodge, Jack and Angus were surprised to find a third member of VIGIL waiting for them — Theo Joplin.
“We’ve got a problem,” Tony said.
“I noticed: the time signal,” Joplin replied.
“Yes, it all went according to plan, except for one thing — Pendelshape has escaped. He could be anywhere.”
Angus was not listening. Instead, he was looking at an array of bags and equipment that were stacked up against one wall of the room. “What is all that stuff?”
“Weaponry of various sorts. Provisions. When Joplin came back to reinforce us, VIGIL supplied what we needed to defeat Pendelshape. Don’t worry about it just now,” Tony said.
Jack’s head was spinning. “I need to sit down.”
“Sorry, Jack — sit there.” Tony pulled out a chair. “Gordon — get the lad an ice pack and break out some of the emergency provisions. We’ll all need our blood sugar up. We haven’t got much time but let’s get ourselves properly organised. What we do next… well, it’s life or death now.”
Soon they were all sitting round the table inside the main room of the lodge. Joplin had warmed up some tomato soup and they were working their way through bread, cheese and chocolate bars. Jack held the ice pack to his head. Despite the throbbing he was listening intently as the VIGIL team quickly pieced together the events of the last few days to work out their next move.
“So the Taurus transfer went wrong?” Angus said.
“It dumped us in some godforsaken bog north of London. At that point we had no idea where you two were — you could have been dead for all we knew,” Tony replied. “We had to lie low and wait for the next signal. To begin with, we froze our butts off in some shack, but then we reckoned we should head to London, because if you or the Revisionists were going to be anywhere it had to be there.”
Gordon added, “And finally, we got a time signal. VIGIL located the time phones and identified where you were and where we were — and they told us where we could find you. They also sent Joplin back to help us. Luckily, going to London was the right move — it hasn’t taken us long to find you…”
“The torture chamber in that big house?”
“Yes. But we got there too late. We must have arrived after Pendelshape took you away. The letter from Marlowe was our first piece of luck. Pendelshape made a mistake. In his rush to take all those time phones and take you prisoner, he just left it there, lying on a table.”
Jack nodded. “You’re right, now I think about it, I remember him saying he’d lost it… but I don’t think he knew he’d left it behind.”
“What did it actually say?” Angus asked.
“Well, now you know,” Joplin replied. “It explained the Spanish plot in detail. One of the plotters, Christo, who was already a member of the Henslowe Players, would use the cover of the players’ visit to Hampton Court to assassinate the queen. The rest of the letter had details of how various other plotters would encourage sympathetic Catholic aristocrats around the country to rise up on news of the queen’s death and provoke a civil war.”
Tony continued, “We disguised ourselves as loyalists who had stumbled across the plot and immediately went to Walsingham.”
“Ironic — that was just what Marlowe had asked us to do with Fanshawe,” Jack said.
“Walsingham already knew that something was afoot — he was suspicious of Marlowe, who had written the letter and was torn as to whether or not he should send it. Then you turned up. The letter was the last piece of the puzzle. Walsingham moved quickly and decided to set a trap for the plotters at Hampton Court on the opening day of the play.”
“The plan worked well,” Tony said. “Although, Angus, what you did was a surprise. Gordon was about to take out Christo, but you were just too quick.”
“So… who was that other queen — you know, Lady Sarah?” Jack paused, his voice quiet. “Will she die?”
“I don’t know. I’m afraid it is likely. She was incredibly brave to act as the queen’s double,” Tony replied. “She looks quite like the queen… and dressed up in all that garb and in character presiding over the play, how on earth was Christo to know any different? It’s not as if he’d ever seen a photo of the queen. In the wilderness it also confused Pendelshape — probably bought us some time.”
“And the crossbow men?”
“Royal guards, disguised as courtiers. The entire thing was a set up — the whole audience — the queen’s double, everything. We hadn’t much time, but it came together on the night.”
“You knew that Whitsun and Gift would be there?”
“We were pretty sure, and we hoped Pendelshape would be there as well, together with any other Revisionists, so we could get them all at the same time. The Revisionist plan was to piggyback on the existing Spanish plot. They want their interventions to be as ‘light touch’ as possible — saves them work and makes it all
