cleared, a face appeared. It was clean-shaven, as pale as a carved marble bust, and it was peering hard toward them. After the initial shock, the oarsmen and Diego clustered around Matt, lifting him off the Vice Admiral’s lap and laying him down in the bottom of the boat where they could tend to him. Drake immediately took control of the situation. Boltfoot scrambled out of the boat, dragging himself through the water to the steps, which at this high tide, were below the river’s surface.
Boltfoot pulled himself up the steps onto the quay, his clothes dripping wet. Crowds were now milling around, trying to see what had happened in the cockboat. After a moment standing on the quay getting his bearings, he pushed his way through the throng and looked across to the window he had seen. The face was no longer there. He started to stride toward the building. He was surprisingly quick, despite his clubfoot. His cutlass was now drawn and hanging loose in his hand at his side. The chandlery where he had seen the face at the window was sixty to seventy yards away. There was a man at the doorway now. He was bearded and looked for all the world like a casual onlooker. Another man appeared beside him. He was clean-shaven, like the face at the window. It was the face at the window. Boltfoot’s pace quickened.
Herrick’s eye caught Boltfoot’s as soon as he stepped out from the doorway. He recognized him instantly as the piratical figure sitting beside Drake in the cockboat. His cutlass was drawn and he was coming straight toward him in a difficult, loping stride, one leg dragging as if it were injured. Had the sailor been hurt in the melee when Drake was hit? Herrick switched plans; he would not go to the waterfront. This man was coming for him. Swiftly, Herrick turned right and ducked down an alley, barging past a waterseller, knocking the great conical butt from his shoulders to the ground. The butt was well hooped for strength and did not shatter, but the water flowed forth. The water-bearer cursed, but Herrick was already gone.
Boltfoot appeared in the alley as the water-bearer was lifting his ungainly butt back onto his shoulders.
“Where did he go?”
The water-bearer, a gray-haired man with a stoop, pointed down the alley and indicated that the fugitive had turned right at the end. “And give the whoreson a bloody nose from me!”
Boltfoot had unslung his caliver and was priming it. He loped on. At the end of the alley he turned right and saw the back of the intruder, perhaps thirty yards ahead of him. It was an impossible shot, but Boltfoot knew he would never catch the man on foot. He stopped, knelt, held the wheel-lock gun in his right hand, resting on his left forearm, took aim as well as his heaving lungs would allow, and fired.
Herrick felt a searing pain in his side, just below his left armpit, and arced forward. But he did not falter. His right hand clutched at the wound. His fingers were wet with blood but the wound would not stop him. At most, he reckoned, the ball had torn a bit of flesh and skin but had ricocheted off his ribs. He was lucky. He ran on.
The alleys were dense and mazelike, with jettied overhangs from the crowded buildings. Many of the buildings were in some way connected to the sea trade that was the essence of this town: sailors’ lodgings, alehouses, stews, chandlers. Herrick pushed on, loping like the wolf evading a shepherd whose lambs it has just slaughtered. He was fit but his chest and lungs hurt. At last he came out of the main part of Deptford. He ran across a dirt road, then another, narrowly avoiding a horseman who had to rein in sharply. Ahead he saw the stable and slowed to a walk. One of the ostlers was just leading his mount out into the cobbled yard.
“Good morrow, Mr. van Leiden. Fine timing, sir. Your mount is ready for your morning ride.”
Herrick caught his breath. He took the reins from the groom and accepted his cupped hands as a step-up, then swung himself onto the horse. Slow down now, he told himself. Slow down. Don’t arouse more suspicion. He managed to smile at the ostler and found a coin for him in his purse.
“Thank you, sir.” Then, “It seems you have hurt yourself, Mr. van Leiden.”
“I fell and caught my side on a piece of iron. I think it was an old spoke from a carter’s wheel.”
“Too much of the falling-down juice, is it, sir?”
Herrick laughed. “Something like that.” Over the groom’s shoulder he saw, in the distance, the advancing figure of the limping gunman who had just shot him; his awkward running style was unmistakable. Herrick dug his heels into the horse’s flank, shook the reins, wheeled around, and was gone.
Chapter 23
The muffled beat of drums hung in the air like the distant thunder of war. All roads through the city of London were blocked to traffic. Every street was thronged with somber crowds, come to honor their valiant knight and poet, Sir Philip Sidney.
He had died of the black rot following a shot in the thigh when he and his troops were ambushed by the Duke of Parma’s Spanish forces at Zutphen in the lowlands the previous October. His body had been embalmed and brought back to England in a ship with black sails, and for months he had lain in state at the Minories, close to the Tower, awaiting England’s first ever state funeral for a nonroyal.
Now the day had arrived. Sir Philip had been Walsingham’s son-in-law, and Mr. Secretary was paying for the extravagant procession with funds he could scarce afford. It was an occasion of symbolism: the laying to rest of a champion of the Protestant Reformation. Seven hundred official mourners followed the cortege as it wove slowly through the streets of London from Aldgate to St. Paul’s. At the head of the procession, dominating all, was the catafalque, laid over with velvet and flags and surrounded by close members of the Sidney and Walsingham families. The great of the land were there, including Sir Philip’s uncle, the Earl of Leicester, looking tired and wan as though the fight had left him, and Leicester’s stepson, the Earl of Essex, new-blooded hero of the lowlands war. Of the ruling elite, only the Queen herself was missing; still raging over the execution of Mary Stuart, it was said, in her privy chamber at Greenwich Palace.
The crowd applauded the funeral cortege with tears rolling down their cheeks, their emotions heightened by the recent news of the attempt on the life of their other great hero, Drake. Many called out tributes for Sidney, this most loved son of England; others called for vengeance on Parma, King Philip, and Spain.
John Shakespeare watched awhile. The sight of Topcliffe, up with the vanguard of mourners, was too much for him. Their eyes met. Topcliffe seemed to smirk through his brown teeth, bared like fangs. Shakespeare turned away; there was work to be done. He needed to see Catherine Marvell and Thomas Woode again, and he had to travel to Deptford to talk with those who had encountered the man who’d tried to shoot Drake. He had another task at Deptford, too: to try to talk once more with Lord Admiral Howard when he returned from the funeral. There must be more he could learn from him about Lady Blanche. As Shakespeare walked toward Dowgate, the scent of hot chestnuts roasting in a brazier enticed him and he bought a few, then strode on, peeling and eating the chestnuts as he went. The muffled drums, all draped in black, beat out their deathly march, fading slowly into the haze behind him.
Catherine was at home but Woode was not. She did not seem pleased to see Shakespeare. “I am surprised you are not at St. Paul’s mourning the heroic Sir Philip,” she said. “Everyone else in London seems to be.”
“Do you not think him heroic, Mistress Marvell?”
“Oh, indeed I do, sir. He was a very perfect, gentle knight. It is the timing of his funeral that interests me, however. The day was chosen by your own Mr. Secretary Walsingham, I do believe. How curious that it should come so close after the dispatching of the Queen of Scots…”
Shakespeare had, of course, heard the scurrilous mutterings about the choice of dates. In fact he had wondered about it himself, for this great funeral of Sir Philip Sidney was indeed a most convenient way of deflecting public interest from the execution of Mary of Scots. It was one thing to have such thoughts; however, quite another to voice them openly as this Catherine Marvell was doing. “You should beware your tongue, Mistress Marvell, lest it attract unwanted attention to this household.”
“Have they passed a law now making it a capital offense to call myself Catholic?”
Shakespeare bridled. “You may call yourself what you wish, so long as you attend your parish church and do not harbor priests come here from abroad. For you must know that it is a treasonable crime for a Popish priest to enter England.”
“Well then, Mr. Shakespeare, I must take care not to harbor any Popish priests.”
“As for the Scots Queen, I am surprised you have tears to spare for her. Was she not an adulteress? Did she not kill a husband in cold blood? Do you doubt she meant to murder the Queen of England?”
“I will let God be the judge of that, yet I do believe she died a Christian.”
