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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Dramatis Personae

  Book I

  Prologue

  Merula

  David Becket

  Merula

  David Becket

  Edward Dormer

  Merula

  Book II

  Señor Josef Pasquale

  Suleiman

  Señor Josef Pasquale

  Simon Ames

  Rebecca Anriques

  Edward Dormer

  Merula

  Simon Ames

  The Last of Gloriana

  Historical Note

  Reading Group Guide

  Also by Patricia Finney

  Copyright

  In memory of my best friend, lover and husband, Chris Perry.

  Foreword

  If I thank all the many people who have helped me with my long struggle to write this book, this foreword will stretch to Oscar-winning proportions.

  The Author’s Foundation generously made me an award of two thousand pounds so I could conduct gonzo historical research with the Sail Training Association aboard the Malcolm Miller sail-training ship, and also on the two-masted Phoenix of Charlestown, owned by Square Sail Shipyards, who also helped with my research. All descriptions of seasickness in this book are based on personal experience.

  Ottakars bookshop in Truro offered me a sanctuary as an unofficial Writer in Residence, where I could sit and write the second draft without having thousands of domestic chores shouting at me. They treated me in the way I believe writers should always be treated – i.e. like royalty – and they also saved me from whaledom because my previous sanctuary in Café Three Zero in Truro sold far too many kinds of delicious food, not to mention puddings. Most of Ottakars’ customers were charming and left me in peace to clatter away on my keyboard. There was one rather peppery elderly gentleman in statutory green fur-lined Barbour and tweed flat cap who was quietly making notes from guidebooks to Ireland at my (own folding antique) desk and very cross he was indeed at being asked nicely to move. Nor did he in fact buy a single one of the guidebooks he was consulting. But that was an isolated incident.

  Many thanks to Andrew Forster, Louise Hale, Gwyneth Hemsley, Cyd Jupe, Andrew McKenzie and of course James Heneage, Ottakars’ founder and MD who approved the idea. Many many thanks to Cyd Jupe who performed the heroic and essential task of reading my book in draft, making many sensible suggestions and saving me from some embarrassing mistakes. She also comforted my post-literary jitters and said she liked it, for which I was (and am) pathetically grateful.

  Another of the brave souls I call my non-professional readers is Kendall Britt, who e-mailed me about another book and has become a friend. She too read the book and made cogent suggestions, which I have adopted.

  Keith Menadue gave valuable engineering and explosives advice on the best way to blow up London Bridge and also inspired me to do the research into the source of all that saltpetre the Elizabethans needed. Tristan Darkins kindly vetted the manuscript for nautical howlers.

  I have always got on well with librarians, despite my diabolical lateness in returning most of the books I borrow. Living in Cornwall, I have found the local mobile library a vital resource and the librarian on my route, Angela Spurgin, has been the latest of that much underrated profession to seek diligently on my behalf for obscure tomes, lend them and then cope tactfully with my wild claims to have given them back. Where would we be without libraries and librarians?

  Of course, despite all this help I have probably made silly mistakes – which are entirely my responsibility.

  I would like to thank Clive Harrison, Tonia Cox and, especially, Danny Broderick for their personal support at a time of great difficulty for me. Heather Stanton has been a true friend and has taught me more than she may realise.

  My thanks also go to Jane Wood and my publishers at Orion who were immensely patient as I struggled to get this onto paper, as deadlines came and passed unmet and as my private life went spectacularly supernova, they rescheduled again and never pressured me.

  Patricia Finney

  Truro, 2002

  Dramatis Personae

  (* indicates a real person)

  DAVID BECKET – sometime soldier and adventurer in the Netherlands. With Simon Ames (qui vide) he foiled a notable attempt against the Queen’s life [Firedrake’s Eye]. Later a swordmaster to Sir Philip Sidney, after the Poet’s death he became involved in the suppression of a wicked libel against the Queen known as the Book of the Unicorn [Unicorn’s Blood]. Unfortunately, during the course of it, he was mistaken for a Catholic priest and tortured in the Tower of London by means of the manacles, from which he is still not fully recovered.

  SIMON AMES – now known as Simon Anriques, a Jew. Once a pursuivant and inquisitor for Walsingham, he was a partner with David Becket in preventing the Queen’s assassination and also in the matter of the Book of the Unicorn. For reasons of State security, he changed his name when he retired from the Queen’s service and married Rebecca Anriques (q.v.).

  *DR HECTOR NUNEZ – Simon’s uncle, physician to the Earl of Leicester, wealthy merchant and trader in tobacco, a notable independent contributor to Walsingham’s intelligence network. Chief of the marrano Jewish refugees in London.

  *SIR FRANCIS WALSINGHAM – Elizabeth’s spymaster and energetic Puritan pursuer of Catholics.

  *SIR FRANCIS DRAKE – known to the Spaniards as ‘El Draco’. Elizabethan sailor, circumnavigator of the globe, pirate and Vice Admiral of the English fleet under Lord Charles Howard of Effingham.

  *ELIZABETH TUDOR, QUEEN OF ENGLAND

  MERULA – princess and upside-down woman of a slaving nation near the West Coast of Africa.

  ANTHONY FANT – once a friend of Becket’s, now his vehement enemy. A wealthy gentleman and trader, he lost his arm at the siege of Haarlem and his wife in the Tower.

  *ANTHONY MUNDAY – a pursuivant, inquisitor and future (mediocre) playwright.

  REBECCA ANRIQUES – Simon Ames’s wife, a Jewess from Bristol.

  JOSEF PASQUALE – sometime Inquisitor at the Holy Office, then a clerk to the Spanish Ordnance office, of New Christian descent.

  MICHAEL – a sailor

  PHILIP BECKET – David Becket’s older brother, a gentleman of reasonable means, living at Becket House, Middleton.

  GOODWIFE (OR GOODY) BROWNLOW – the oldest woman in Middleton.

  ELEANOR BECKET (NÉE FANT) – younger sister of Anthony Fant, married to Mr Philip Becket, gentlewoman.

  ELIZABETH AND DAVID BECKET – their children.

  *BEN JONSON – a bricklayer’s apprentice.

  *JOHN DONNE – a young gentleman.

  PIERS LAMMETT – a Catholic Englishman in the service of Parma, the son of a friend of David Becket’s father, and still a loyal subject to the Queen.

  *ROBERT CAREY – a courtier, rackety youngest son of Lord Hunsdon and a future Deputy Warden of the West March, among other things [see my books under the name of P.F. Chisholm].

  *THOMASINA DE PARIS – the Queen’s Fool, a muliercula or midget and the Queen’s most privy intelligencer.

  EDWARD DORMER – would-be priest, assassin and soldier.

  *FR PERSONS – leader of the English Jesuits at Rheims.

  *ALEXANDER FARNESE, DUKE OF PARMA – Philip II’s finest general in the Low Co
untries.

  *DON JUAN DE ACUNA VELA – in charge of the Spanish Royal Ordnance Office for the Armada.

  SNAKE – Merula’s lost son, Simon’s friend and fellow slave.

  *ROBERT CECIL – second son of Lord Burleigh, already in the service of the Queen, a hunchback.

  BOOK I

  Prologue

  Become a god with me, now. This is all about gods.

  Come here, look at this. Remember these? Before computers and rainbow-flashing little discs? It’s a book. Originally called a codex, a late Roman Christian invention, a scroll of paper, cut into sections, sewn together along one side, backed by something a little stronger than paper: wood, leather, cloth. A little heavy, but very portable, low-tech, convenient. The technology for creating it has changed, the thing, in its essence, hasn’t.

  Open it. You should recognise this one, despite multi-cultural education. It’s a Bible. Big, heavy, the paper thick, strong, high on linen content, the print quite readable although peppered with those unfamiliar long ‘s’s’ to confuse the mental ear. Somebody has left an inky thumbprint on the page facing Genesis, Chapter I.

  A century ago, two centuries ago, three centuries ago – if you owned any book at all, you owned this one. Perhaps you read a chapter aloud to your household every night, if you could read. Your children played with toys merchandised from it: Noah’s arks, Christmas cribs. Now? Well, very few of us have actually read its strange mixture of Bronze Age Semitic myth and oral history, seventh century BC Jewish point-scoring, first century AD Aramaic oral history, Greek philosophising, letters, histories, accounts of (possibly prophetic) delirium. Politely edited highlights only, if at all. There is a friend-of-a-friend story about a girl selling jewellery in a shop who offered a customer a plain cross or one with a little man on it.

  This particular Bible is in English. That was very radical in its day. Four hundred years ago men and women died over the question of whether they could read it in their own language, or have it interpreted for them by a priest from the inaccurate Vulgate Latin of St Jerome.

  Four hundred years ago, men set sail in ships to fight and kill other men over interpretations of this book – which is at least partly about universal brotherhood and loving your enemies. Also partly about betraying and destroying your enemies, beating them in battle and wiping them out down to their babies and their girl-children (see the book of Joshua for further details). The men who fought over it were, of course, in empirical genetic fact, far more closely related to each other than one chimp is to another chimp of the same tribe and yet … Blood flowed, people screamed and died, wood burned.

  This way, fellow-god. Yes, be careful how you put it down. That particular book is older than the USA. It was printed before even the Jamestown colonies began, let alone the later date when the Mayflower sailed. I know, it is spooky to hold in your hands something older than a nation. It seems indecent really. How can a mere thing surf the centuries like a god, when real people cannot?

  Now this book here was quite recently published, as you can tell from the excellent full-colour reproductions of paintings. It tells the story of the Spanish Armada, with potted boilings-down of the politics of the time, and a few notes on religion. Here’s a picture of a man wearing a dunce’s cap and a patterned cassock. Not looking too healthy, is he? Well, he’s a New Christian, a Spanish Jew, a marrano (or pig) who has been tortured until he admitted to practising Judaism again. He’s about to be burned at the stake for heresy. That’s what he wore to parade through the town to the auto de fe for his burning.

  Yes, the ships do look odd, don’t they, with those little puffs of smoke from the cannon, like cotton wool, and their starched formal-dress sails. You have to be careful about relying on the paintings of the time: the painters were expected to transmit a great deal of information about the battle and were far more concerned to do it than give an accurate reproduction of reality. The painter of this one wasn’t anywhere near the battle anyway and the picture was painted months, perhaps years, later. So the ships do look like toys – perhaps because he used models – and their perspective is one of status rather than mathematics. The English vessels are bigger than the Spanish, for instance, although the reverse was the case, just as the King in a medieval painting is always bigger than his council. The rigging doesn’t actually make sense, although there are interesting clues to long-forgotten technicalities if you look close enough. But you could put your nose right next to the paper and still you can’t climb in, hear the shouting, smell the salt.

  So you have to become a god, like me. You have to come this way, into the dark. Put your foot here, the other one there, take my hand. We are not so very far from the past, you know. Look beyond the streetlight, stare at the stars: there, that one! The light from it started hurtling towards us four hundred years ago.

  Look down – it’s all right, you have no mass and therefore are invisible to gravity. You won’t fall. London is in shades of brown and red, not grey. A complex crumpling of brick and wood and wattle and thatch, littering the Thames valley at the strategic place where the Romans built their bridge – where the river was still tidal enough to bring the ships in from the sea, but narrow enough to cross by round arches. It’s a cramped and cluttered, semi-medieval city, with the insistent spires and towers of churches injecting the sky with their prayers. We’ll follow the river, like the German bombers, that characteristic bend and arc – perhaps you subconsciously hear strains of a TV theme tune?

  The Thames is not a blank, silver ribbon in this time but clotted and clustered with ships, entire forests transplanted to the water surface, crawling with humans. Yes, the shape is there as we skim over the cranes worked by the men inside the great wheels like hamsters, heading up river to the sprawling, mighty stone creature that is the Palace of Whitehall.

  Barleysugar chimneys puff white woodsmoke into the air. The Queen will not have coal because she hates the smell and the smoke is dirty. We glimpse green as we go: surprising amounts. St James’s park stretches to the north into farmland with the recently retired Lazar house in the middle. Nobody knows why leprosy is almost dying out in Europe now, while consumption replaces it as a scourge. Future bacteriologists will discover that the infective bacteria are related, for what that’s worth.

  Swoop down into the polite centre of Whitehall, into King Street where the Holbein Gate makes advertising statements about the power and justice of King Henry VIII (he of the six wives, two divorced, two executed, one dead in childbed, one widowed in the nick of time). There are folded queues of best-dressed people, waiting to reach a small entrance where a bored-looking bearded man in red velvet, holding his halberd – a thing like an old-fashioned tin-opener on a stick – takes the commoners’ shillings and waves them on into the Queen’s Court.

  Follow the meek crowds, gawping around you at the painted walls, the high ceilings, the tiled floors. There’s a flurry and a small group of young men in extraordinary puffed damask and velvet swing past, carrying silver and gold plates. Because we are gods we can tell, perhaps by their atomic composition, that the silk for the damask and velvet travelled clear across Eurasia from the fabled Far Eastern Empire to be unpicked and rewoven by marvellously skilled weavers in Flanders. We know that the gold came from mines in Bohemia but that the silver was dug up by sick and starving slaves at the great mine of Potosi and came to England as part of a spectacular haul of swag stolen by the foremost armed robber of the Kingdom, Sir Francis Drake.

  Pay attention to this young man, Robert Carey. He’s laughing politely, chestnut-haired under his much feathered cap, extremely elegant in forest green velvet and black damask, his sword at his side and a poniard dagger at his back. You’ve seen something like him on TV and at the theatre, no doubt, but this one is different. For a start, he smells rather strongly of man. Not dirty, not tramp-like (as his later descendants during the bacterial paradise of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries would do). He just smells very much of himself, the (relatively unwas
hed) human male. He had a bath quite recently, two weeks ago, down at the Stews in Southwark, but deodorant hasn’t been invented yet and his Queen abhors the smell of musk. Lavender, cloves and citron waft about his clothes but are hardly up to the job. He changes his extremely fine linen shirt at least every other day, more often if he is attending his fastidious Queen as a Gentleman of the Bedchamber, but …

  There’s a distinct niff in the air from all of them, in fact. Rosewater, some Seville orange, a lot of beer and wine. And the handsome young man who holds the chased silver chalice and its lid with such a graceful flourish has a wary, hard look. He isn’t an actor, although he probably would be today. He’s as athletic as a sportsman, he’s very charming, something of a politician. In his own way, he is a celebrity. As a modern celebrity seeks to flatter and befriend and make his living out of his master, the seething democratic mass, so Robert Carey seeks to flatter and befriend and make his living out of his mistress, who is equally demanding. Except he is called a courtier and his mistress is a most well-educated, intelligent and temperamental Queen.

  It’s perfectly fine to ogle Robert Carey, if you like, although he has only a minor part to play in this particular story. He’s a cousin of the Queen. He isn’t going to notice you because, being massless, you do not reflect the light of his world. In any case, all around him are throngs of common people who stare at him as he passes them every day on his way to take part in the elaborate mummery of the Queen’s Dinner. He finds the ceremony boring but not ridiculous, although it has elements in it of a Catholic Mass. He and his elegant friends will be serving an empty chair under a magnificent cloth of estate with an extremely fine (if cold) meal involving stuffed partridges and venison pasties and spiced fish and manchet bread.

  Her subjects and the many foreign visitors pay good money to come into her public rooms and gaze around at the bright colours and tut at the expensive silver-shot hangings. Each tapestry cost as much as a fully-fitted warship, but arguably does more for the cohesion of the kingdom – united in enjoyable shock at the expense. But the Queen is far too busy actually to sit and eat in front of them like a lioness at the menagerie by the Tower. At Easter and Christmas you might be privileged to see her (after paying triple for it), with perhaps Robert Carey kneeling at her side to hand her a drinking cup full of wine. The rest of the year, when it’s his turn to do the business, Robert Carey kneels straight-backed and straight-faced to a velvet-covered wooden throne and its lion-infested canopy.