[David Becket and Simon Ames 01] - Firedrake's Eye Read online

  Firedrake’s Eye

  Patricia Finney

  FIREDRAKE'S EYE. Copyright © 1992 by Patricia Finney. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Finney, Patricia.

  Firedrake’s eye / Patricia Finney,

  ISBN 0-312-07749-1

  I. Title.

  * * *

  First published in Great Britain by Sinclair-Stevenson Limited.

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Tom O’Bedlam’s Song

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  XIII

  XXIV

  XXV

  XXVI

  XXVII

  XXVIII

  XXIX

  XXX

  XXXI

  XXXII

  XXXIII

  XXXIV

  XXXV

  XXXVI

  XXXVII

  XXXVIII

  XXXIX

  XL

  XLI

  XLII

  XLIII

  XLIV

  XLV

  XLVI

  XLVII

  XLVIII

  XLIX

  L

  LI

  LII

  LIII

  LIV

  LV

  LVI

  Historical Note

  Cast of Characters

  Glossary

  To Christopher, with love

  Author’s Note

  This is an historical novel, a thing of the imagination built around the partial skeleton of historical fact. It is not a history book and wherever it has suited me to throw out evidence or alter what is known of the Elizabethans, I have done so. Similarly, the language it is written in is not intended as a true imitation or pastiche of their splendid rhythmic tongue, because frankly I find such attempts either accurate and difficult to read, or inaccurate and irritating. However, it seemed to me that the way Sixteenth-century people thought and felt was reflected in their language and so, although this is modem English with a modem vocabulary, I have tried to give it a flavour of the Elizabethan.

  Footnotes, unless humorous, are silly in a novel, but all the same I like to know where the borderline between fact and fiction lies and so there is a historical note at the end, as well as a glossary of the more specialised words and a list of characters, stating whether they are historical or invented.

  In many ways the Elizabethans were not very nice people. They were sexually and racially prejudiced, often bigoted, often unashamedly cruel to animals and each other. It is as daft to give nice liberal opinions on homosexuality or feminism or even democracy (a dirty word to an Elizabethan) to the people of 400 years ago as it would be to dress them in top hats and frock coats instead of ruffs and doublets and give them Colt 45s to shoot. I have tried to avoid this hideous and infuriating crime of psychological anachronism. However, it would be very depressing if people thought that I agree with some of my characters’ opinions on politics or religion, race or sexual orientation.It has taken me years to research and write this book, and I have benefited from so many people’s kindness it would be impossible to include them all. My husband has helped enormously, both with the plotting and with the military history about which his knowledge is encyclopaedic. My parents have, as always, helped and encouraged me and I have pillaged my father’s library and knowledge for information on the history of London and the use of herbs. I have had the privilege and irreplaceable assistance of taking part in Historical ReCreations of the Elizabethan period at Kentwell Hall, Suffolk. I have had extremely useful criticism of earlier drafts of the book from my agent Jennifer Kavanagh, and from Melanie Raymond and Yvonne Kalms. Through Yvonne I was able to spend a happy day at Jews’ College in North London getting answers to questions that had annoyed me for years – there is no computer search as fast, thorough and effective as a truly erudite scholar.

  All mistakes, inaccuracies, gaffes and anachronisms are, of course, mine.

  Tom O’Bedlam’s Song

  From the hag and hungry goblin

  That into rags would rend ye,

  And the spirit that stands by the naked man

  In the book of moons, defend ye.

  That of your five sound senses

  You never be forsaken

  Nor wander from yourselves with Tom

  Abroad to beg your bacon.

  * * *

  While I do sing, ‘Any food, any feeding,

  Feeding, drink or clothing?

  Come dame or maid

  Be not afraid

  Poor Tom will injure nothing.’

  * * *

  Of thirty bare years have I

  Twice twenty been enraged

  And of forty been three times fifteen

  In durance sadly caged.

  In the lordly lofts of Bedlam

  With-stubble soft and dainty

  Brave bracelets strong, sweet whips, ding dong,

  With wholesome hunger plenty.

  * * *

  A thought I took for Maudlin

  And a cruse of cockle pottage,

  With a thing thus tall, sky bless you all!

  I befell into this dotage.

  I slept not since the Conquest,

  Till then I never waked,

  Till the roguish boy of love where I lay

  Me found and stripped me naked.

  * * *

  When I short have shorn my sow’s face

  And snigged my homy barrel

  In an oaken inn I pawn my skin

  As a suit of gilt apparel.

  The moon’s my constant mistress

  And the lovely owl my marrow;

  The flaming drake and the nightcrow make

  Me music to my sorrow.

  * * *

  The palsy plagues my pulse

  When I prig your pigs or pullen,

  Your culvers take or mateless make

  Your Chanticleer, or sullen –

  When I want provant with Humphrey

  I sup, and when benighted,

  I repose in Paul’s with waking souls

  Yet never am affrighted.

  * * *

  I know more than Apollo

  For oft when he lies sleeping

  I behold the stars at bloody wars

  And the wounded welkin weeping.

  The moon embraces her shepherd

  And the Queen of Love her warrior,

  While the first doth hom the star of mom

  And the next the heavenly farrier.

  * * *

  The Gypsy Snap, and Pedro

  Are none of Tom’s comradoes;

  The punk I scorn and the cutpurse sworn

  And the roaring-boys’ bravadoes;

  The meek, the white, the gentle,

  Me handle, touch and spare not,

  But those that cross Tom Rhinoceros

  Do what the panther dare not.

  * * *

&n
bsp; With a heart of furious fancies

  Whereof I am commander,

  With a burning spear and a horse of air

  To the wilderness I wander.

  By a knight of ghosts and shadows

  I summoned am to tourney

  Ten leagues beyond the wide world’s end

  - Methinks it is no journey.

  I

  It was I that saw most and have said least in the matter of the firedrake and the nightcrow, the soldier of God and the hunting of that fair white hind, the Queen of England. There has been a plague of silence upon it, made by Sir Francis Walsingham, the Queen’s Moor, darker than the blackest flurry of wings over a dunghill. But Tom of Bedlam is mad and unaccountable, being a Bedlam beggar, and since I wear his poor scratched hide and stare out of his poor mazed eyes which make my prison windows, so I will tell the tale. And all of it will be the truth.

  First must I ask forgiveness, that this has somewhat of madness colouring it. For my poor skullmate Tom was always at my side, and would often elbow past me and the Courtier to bow to the Queen Moon, and dance and discourse with angels and cower from his devils which were suddenly both his and mine. Let the Queen Moon judge between us.

  And yet Poor Tom had his uses, for his angels made him windows in men’s heads to see their souls. So I beg you, forgive his yammerings and do not put all of them aside. Perhaps it is only the weight of the infinite that made him rave. So here also is Tom’s madness, woven like gold thread into a good cloth of sense, though who would put gold into a winding cloth unless it were for a prince?

  Which it is not, it is a Turkey rug of windings and divergings and turnings and foldings, all in a dance of spiral upon counter-spiral, star upon star, swirl upon movement upon unquietness, all woven by the Queen Moon that sits above us in a silver damask petticoat and smiles. And puts her silver finger with its nail of scarlet upon this knot and that: here was the tale’s genesis, here…and there, and there….

  II

  Autumn 1583

  One beginning took place in a London alley, in the old liberty of Whitefriars, lit only by a rushlight in a paned window – which window was surely a waste of time and money since the sun never shines on Noon Alley, save on midsummer day, though the rain falls there in plenty.

  Which beginning was in itself begun in the bubbling marshes of Good- wife Alys Flick’s brewing vats.

  There are women who can draw sweet nectar from base malted barley and water and there are women who can turn the makings of Jove’s own ambrosia into horse piss and pig dung. The Gatehouse Inn’s lady, Goodwife Alys, had magic of the second kind: give her wine from the grapes of Dionysus himself and she would stretch it out with sloe berries and vinegar and sugar, because the times were bad and she must have her return on the outlay.

  Which makes it all the stranger that David Becket had drunk enough to cause him to fall out of the doorway of the Gatehouse and trip over the foothills of the midden that blocks Fleet Street there. He belched, waited in suspense to see if anything might follow the belch, and when it did not, picked up his hat and lurched with his bellyful of muddy beer down towards his lodgings on Fetter Lane. He had unbuttoned the front of his doublet to give his gut room to breathe; no need for peascod padding in his clothes, he grew his own and saved a fortune in bombast.

  For a moment he stopped under a dripping overhang on the comer of Crocker’s Lane, one hand on the wall, and wished the alehouses nearer home would still give him credit so he would have less far to walk, seeing how the curvature of his direction gave him two miles where there was less than one in truth. Furthermore the ways were muddy and dark and infested with vermin, small and large.

  Meanwhile, as Dr Nunez says, beer cannot be transformed into blood as can meat, so must it be turned to piss and removed from the body’s economy. Hiccupping faintly, Becket fumbled at his codpiece and pissed into the gutter, watering the sad shape of a dead dog. Tears pricked at his eyes: poor dog, cast out to roam and never know his old home again, foraging for what he could, better a life in the Bear Gardens than that…. He would go back. They still needed fighting men in the Netherlands, by Christ, and if the pay was bad, at least they mainly did not hang you for stealing….

  As he made a third attempt to refasten his points, muttering that a man was in a pretty state when his own codpiece defeated him, at last the sounds of scuffling, of soft thumps and gasps, battled their way past the fumes stopping his ears.

  He straightened and blinked. The noise of a fight was coming from Noon Alley, off Crocker’s Lane. For a moment he swayed: some fights were better left alone….

  Out of pure-hearted and disinterested curiosity, and a vague flickering optimism that some fights were like rainbows in that gold was at the bottom of them, Becket slid crabwise along the wall of the comer house, buttoning up his doublet and old buff coat as he went. He peered round the corner into the murk and shadow-devils clustering about the whore’s brave pale rushlight.

  A hand shoved a sagging bundle up against the wall, the other hand busy inside its clothes. Blindly the bundle swung at the footpad and got its head rammed against the stones for his trouble; thus brought into the glimmer of light, Becket could recognise the face despite its mask of blood.

  Which was all he needed as excuse for the pleasure of a fight to round off his evening. While the man fell heavily sideways and the footpad cursed and prodded the soupy blackness with his knife, Becket drew his own dagger and slipped towards the tangle of men, left hand outstretched until it closed on a coarse jerkin. He found the neck, lifted it up to the green glimmer to be sure it was the footpad and not his victim and then, as Bonecrack Smith shrieked and waved his arms, Becket did the hangman out of a fee and split his backbone.

  Too slow. Booze is not so easily conquered. Someone charged into him low from the side and he felt, rather than saw, the cudgel swinging down on his head. He roared in anger that there should turn out to be more of them, took the blow on the thick muscles of his back and bellowed like a bull in spring when he felt someone try to get a grip round his neck from behind.

  He lurched upright, the footpad clinging like a monkey, and slammed backwards two steps into the opposite wall of Noon Alley where it is still stone from the old abbey, and scraped the man from his perch. He turned, catching a little flash of light upon metal, and stabbed at venture, feeling a warm spurt of blood on his hand, but not knowing what he had hit, though it screamed. Then there was the sound of scurrying and sliding, and in the new silence came the rhythmic thumping of the whore’s truckle bed against her wall.

  He wiped his dagger blade and sticky hand on his back, under the leather of his coat where it would not show, sweeping up the packet that had fallen from Smith’s hand and putting it away absent-mindedly. The melancholic black velvet of his doublet and paned trunk hose was browned and spattered with grease and mud and gravy, but still it had the effect hoped for but never approached upon its original owner, who lost it at primero. It made a fat man look taller. Becket is two yards high and at least a yard broad, a square man run to lard with black ringlets and a square face thatched with a badly trimmed black beard, and an ugly thing to meet in an alley on a dark night.

  Having caught his breath and cleaned his dagger, Becket remembered the man he had rescued. He found him by touch, lying on his face in a pile of slimy onion peelings. He picked him up under the arms and carried him out of the alley, into the Gatehouse’s lantern light.

  The smaller man’s head lolled, draped and shiny with blood and snot: Becket tutted sympathetically at the glazed eyes, patted a bruised cheek.

  The man began to wake up, muttered and essayed a punch at Becket. Becket caught the fist in his great hand and pushed his own face very close, speaking very clearly and distinctly.

  ‘I am Master David Becket, Provost of Swordplay,’ he said. ‘We were arguing earlier. About the divine essence of man and its nature. Remember?’

  The other man frowned cross-eyed, bent forward and puked on Becket’s b
oots. Becket sighed. ‘Christ, who would play the Samaritan,’ he said, but charitably did not dump the man’s face in it. Scraping the worst off his feet, he hoisted up the footpads’ leavings with one unresisting arm over his shoulder, and carried him on towards Fetter Lane. Though in strict truth this was less for the teachings of our Lord God and more for the beckonings of our Lady Silver, whose shade and image peeked shyly between the thick velvet folds of the man’s gown and the supple Spanish leather of the man’s boots.

  III

  Autumn 1582

  And there was the firedrake also, coming slowly to full growth behind secure walls of brick and lies. It was an egg laid a year before, the progeny of a solemn and light-hearted allegory that marked the Queen’s Accession Day Tilts of 17th November 1582 Anno Domini. The young bucks and hinds of the Court had arrayed themselves sumptuously in gilded armour and embroidered silk, presenting themselves as the Children of Desire, beseeching entrance at the Castle of Virginity. Which rare and prized thing is as much sought for at Court as a unicorn, and as seldom found (save in the Queen’s Grace Herself).