Boltfoot took in the scene with sweeping glances. Behind him, the woman gasped and buckled at the legs.
There was blood everywhere. Boltfoot slipped and slid in the gore as he hurled himself at the doorway where the figure had disappeared. He found himself in a large storeroom with grain and beans and other foodstuffs. A beplumed turkey cock hung by its neck from a hook. Not far from the bird was a thick hempen rope with a hangman’s noose at its end, hanging from a high rafter, swaying in the light breeze from the open back door.
Boltfoot pushed through the back door, his caliver tightly gripped in his right hand. He looked both ways down the narrow alleyway, but could see no one. The figure had gone.
He returned to the scene of carnage. The woman cowered in a corner, trying to shield her eyes from the body of Davy Kerk lying across the table. The twitching of arms and legs had all but ceased. The injuries that caused the death were evident. His head was half severed, the left side of his neck slashed with a downward sweep of a sharp blade, and there was a bloody gash to the belly.
Boltfoot put down his caliver and lifted the body from the table. The head flopped pitifully. With great effort, he laid the corpse on the floor at the edge of the room, away from the woman. He brought a blanket from the storeroom and covered the carcass as best he could. Then he picked up his weapon again.
Of a sudden, the woman stood up and dashed for the door. Boltfoot moved fast to hold her. Even in his weakened state, he held her firm.
He turned her around so that she had to face him. “I need answers. Who are you?”
“There is no time. He will kill me, and you, too.”
“Who are you?”
“You know who I am.”
“Eleanor Dare?”
She nodded frantically. “Now, please, I cannot stay here. You see what he did to Davy. He will do the same to you and he will hang me.”
The noose in the storeroom. She had not even seen it, yet she knew that she was to be hanged.
She tried again to break free. Her terror was giving way to fury. “You led him here! You brought him to us.”
Boltfoot ignored her, slung the caliver over his back, and pulled the woman into the storeroom, binding her around the waist with a length of thick-knotted cord. She looked at him with a curious mixture of resignation and contempt.
“You think you can beat him, don’t you, Mr. Cooper? No one can. You are wasting your time.”
He wrapped the other end of the cord around his own left wrist. He used sailors’ knots. There was no more than eighteen inches of cord between them. It was not going to come loose.
He pushed the woman from the front door and out into the dusty street. She stumbled and almost fell, but he held her up by her elbow, then marched her a quarter of a mile eastward, past the Clink prison. She cried out for help to an apprentice, but he laughed.
“You got your hands full there, mister,” he called back to Boltfoot. “I’d trade her in if I were you. Plenty of willing whores hereabouts.”
A couple of women sitting on the doorstep of a bawdy house, scratching their sores, cackled with laughter as he pushed Eleanor ever onward. They reached the water-stairs at St. Mary Overy. The only people there were two stern-looking wives, who glanced disapprovingly at the heavily armed Boltfoot and the woman with him, now covered in dust and grime, her fair hair awry like a hedge of twigs.
Boltfoot hailed a tilt-boat and hauled his captive into the back. The boat rocked violently as she struggled against him. One of the watermen eyed the pair suspiciously.
“He is holding me against my will.”
“I am taking the dirty callet home to feed the children and stop her whoring,” Boltfoot said.
“I’d leave her on the game if I were you. Nice-looking lass like that will earn a groat or two, put good English beef on your table.”
The watermen chuckled and set to rowing across the river to Dowgate. Boltfoot sat back in the boat, beneath the canopy. He was exhausted. The woman beside him said nothing more, but sat defeated, looking eastward down the river as if there might be some succor or escape along there.
Boltfoot had but one thing in mind. To get to his wife, Jane, and keep her safe until their child was born, healthy and sound. First, though, he had to fetch this woman Eleanor Dare-this so-called lost colonist-to Essex House in the Strand and deliver her into the hands of those who had commissioned the search for her, the Earl of Essex himself, or his agent Charlie McGunn.
And the body of Davy Kerk in the house at Bank End? Master Shakespeare would know how to deal with that.
Chapter 34
S UDELEY CASTLE ROSE FROM THE LATE MORNING haze like a fantastical palace. John Shakespeare reined in his weary gray mare and gazed down on the magnificent vision nestling below him, deep in the folds of Gloucestershire.
A mass of flags fluttered idly from the battlements and towers of this great house. Its royal connections went back to the days when Great Henry brought Elizabeth’s mother, Anne Boleyn, here in 1535, the year before he relieved her of her head.
From churches all around, the joyful peal of bells filled the air. But it was the long train of carriages and horses, stretching into the distance further than a man could see, that really stirred the blood. At its head were Elizabeth’s servants, resplendent in their royal livery, followed by a troop of guards, banners held proudly aloft. Then came thirty of her equerries and chamberlains, followed by half a dozen Privy Councillors, among whom were Sir Robert Cecil, watchful and alert despite the exhausting day’s ride; the great Sir Thomas Heneage, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and the Queen’s truest friend; white-haired Howard of Effingham, Lord Admiral of the Fleet and the man who, with Drake, destroyed the Armada four years earlier.
With these was the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift-ferocious enemy of Puritans and Catholics alike- riding with fifty of his own horsemen. And last, immediately preceding the royal carriage, came the Lord Treasurer, old Burghley, afflicted by the gout and suffering in the heat of the day.
Elizabeth sat alone in splendor, waving to the adoring throng of peasants and townsfolk that lined her route with cheering and waving of little flags. They had left their looms and their mills and their shepherding to come here, never having seen such pageantry and magnificence in all their lives. It was a sight they would talk of for years to come, regaling their children and grandchildren with tales of the day they saw Elizabeth, Gloriana, come with her court to their little town of Winchcombe to stay at Sudeley Castle and celebrate the Armada victory. The family who lived here-Giles, the third Lord Chandos, and his wife Frances Clinton-had spent six grueling months preparing for this visit, to offer their sovereign three days of unparalleled feasting and merriment.
Behind the Queen rode Essex, Master of the Horse. No one sat taller in the saddle. He was followed by more Privy Councillors, then two dozen maids of honor in fine gowns, riding side-saddle on white palfreys, and a hundred more of the royal guard. And so the progress went on: scores of nobles and knights, courtiers and their retainers, hundreds of men and women, receding into the distance. Among those closest to the fabulous royal carriage, Shakespeare spotted the squat, feral figure of Richard Topcliffe. Even at this distance, two hundred yards or more, he exuded a raw malice that would frighten children and dogs.
Shakespeare was exhausted. He had pushed on hard westward and a little north across England. He had ridden through the night until he was almost asleep in the saddle. Even now, with this remarkable sight below him, he could happily fall from his horse and sleep in the open field.
Yet though he was driven in his desperation to meet up with the royal train, he had not been able to ignore the state of the country he passed through along the way. The England he had encountered was very different from the glittering spectacle of the Queen and her train now entering Sudeley. He had ridden through a land of desperate poverty, dry fields of tares, pathetic beggars with outstretched hands, gibbets of bones at every crossroads, even the occasional unburied victim of starvation and disease left at the roadside as carrion for the magpies and crows to
