16. The Heart of the Secret

We went along the mountain. The tower looked as deserted as ever. We scanned the fellside eagerly. There was no sign of Tom trudging home.

What had happened? He couldn’t still be there, surely – not of choice, at any rate. But he might have fallen into some trap. A door might have clicked behind him, making him a prisoner in some windowless room unable to signal to us. Or there might have been one of those cupboards with a hidden spring, which send a poisoned spike into the unwary hand which sets it off. We had both heard a great deal of such Italian villainies. Sir Philip was capable of anything.

‘We must find out – if we can possibly get inside,’ said Kit.

‘I’ll go,’ I said. I was in command for the moment. I’d have given a lot for Kit’s company, but I knew I wasn’t justified in taking her. ‘You keep watch here, and – can you whistle?’

‘Of course I can whistle!’ she said scornfully.

Tom had once told us that, if anything ever happened to him, we were to go to the nearest sheriff or magistrate, and get him to send word, by official courier, to Robert Cecil. But the present business might be so urgent that this wouldn’t be sufficient. We must allow two or three days for the message to reach London, and as long again (or longer) for fresh instructions and another of Cecil’s men to arrive in Cumberland. Could we afford to stand still and do nothing for so long?

‘You keep watch,’ I repeated. ‘If I don’t come out of that building within twenty minutes –’

‘I’m coming in to look for you!’

‘Oh no, you’re not, my girl. You’re going to race over the mountain and find my dad. Tell him all you know, and he’ll do something. If necessary, he’ll get a band of men and they’ll break into the tower.’

‘Let’s both go and do that now.’

‘Not likely. Tom may be all right. Or he may have fallen downstairs and knocked himself out. I’ll be careful, never fear. I won’t touch anything. And I’ll feel every board before I put my weight on it. I’ve got a pistol.’

‘What use is a pistol, if there’s no one there?’

I laughed and touched the brass butt where it stuck out from my doublet. ‘It’s a comfort, anyway,’ I said. And I went snaking down the fellside, just in case anyone was watching. But I didn’t get the feeling that anyone was.

I ran up the stone steps on silent tiptoe. The door stood inches open. That saved me a job, anyhow, and a job I wasn’t sure I could have managed without Tom’s handy little tools. He must be still inside. He’d never have left the door like that.

I pushed it back cautiously and slipped inside, still holding it with my left hand while my right closed over my pistol. There was no sound from the door. He who had oiled the lock had also attended to the hinges, and the massive timber swung silently at my push. I stood still for a whole minute, listening intently and letting my eyes get used to the dimness. The windows were small and high. Shafts of sunlight slanted through them and revealed that the room was empty except for spiders’ webs and a broken stool.

The floor was solid, flagged with grey slabs. All the same, I took no chances. Instead of crossing straight to the doorway of the inner room, I crept round by way of the three walls. The other room was like the first, but in one corner, built into the thickness of the outside wall, there was a spiral staircase. It led down into the pitch darkness of the ground-floor, which in these peel-towers is always used as a cellar and storehouse. It also continued upwards to the second floor, where the bedrooms were in the days when the peel was inhabited.

It was darkish over in this corner, but I could see a patch of something at the foot of the stairs. It was wet. Water, I told myself but I wondered … I bent down gingerly and poked the tip of my finger into it then straightened myself and raised my hand to the light. If it was water, there’d be nothing to see except a wet shininess on my skin.

It wasn’t water. I knew that as soon as I felt the stickiness. Then I saw, on my fingertip, a neat oval of red so dark that it was almost black.

One is used to the sight of blood. I’ve seen plenty of sheep killed. I’ve watched bear-baiting and bull-baiting and cock-fights and all the sports that we Englishmen love. But for a moment, as I stared at the dark stickiness on my own finger, I felt sick.

I pulled myself together. Perhaps Tom had merely had an accident – slipped on those tricky, twisting stairs as I’d suggested to Kit. Then, where was he? Perhaps dazed and confused, he’d staggered on down the stairs into the cellar, and fainted there. Well, it wouldn’t take long to see. If he was unconscious, I’d have to get Kit to help me up with him.

I felt my way stair by stair, down into the gloom of the store-cellar. One, two, three, four … At each step I paused and listened. I wished I had a candle.

As my foot flattened silently on the fifth stair, I heard something.

Footsteps overhead, coming down from the upper storey. For a deluded moment I almost shouted ‘Tom!’ but it was well I didn’t. For there were two men, and they were talking.

I stood where I was, my pistol cocked. Were they coming all the way down? No, apparently. They had stopped in that inner room which had once been the parlour. Crouching five stairs down, I could hear plainly.

‘I hope he was alone,’ said a gruff voice.

‘Getting frightened, Anthony?’ The second voice was high and mocking. I guessed that the first speaker was Anthony Duncan of Troutbeck, he of the black beard. How had he got here without our knowing? Then I realized what had happened. We had never taken an exact count of the men leaving the tower. We had seen some depart on foot, and we had seen the last of the horses ridden away, and we hadn’t allowed for one or two men staying behind.

‘I’m not frightened,’ growled Duncan, ‘but it gives you a shock. I should have thought this place was safe enough. Lucky Philip’s groom spotted him.’

‘Lucky the man was using one of those glasses,’ said his companion, with a laugh. ‘Useful things – but they do catch the sunlight.’

‘I wonder how he got on to the place. I hope he hadn’t talked to anyone else. I don’t like it, James. We thought we were all right here –’

‘Don’t worry, my dear Anthony. We’ll see what Philip says. We can easily change our headquarters.’

‘The time’s getting so near now. Couldn’t we act sooner? It’s this waiting.’

‘No; it must be the twenty-ninth. That’s the day we know for certain we can deal with Bess.’

I could hear Duncan clearing his throat. He said hesitantly. ‘Do you know … exactly … how it’s to be done?’

‘Why, yes! Don’t you? It was Vicars’ notion in the first place …’

I listened, stiff and taut on the dark stairway, as the full horror of the conspiracy was revealed.

Tom had been right. This thing was getting bigger, bigger and uglier.

The Queen was to be murdered – that we had suspected all along. She was to die in the middle of the command performance of Shakespeare’s play.

It had all been thought out in devilish detail. The conspirators had looked for an opportunity – not a sudden chance, but some definite occasion that could be foreseen. Henry the Fifth offered the perfect opportunity: a date fixed weeks beforehand; the Queen seated in her chair, with no one between her and the stage; an expert pistol-shot hidden in the curtains not twenty paces away …

‘The man’s name is John Somers,’ said the lazy voice above me.

I started. John Somers! I knew him. He was one of Burbage’s company, a disappointed, disgruntled player of third-rate parts. I had often heard him boast of his marksmanship. He was just the kind of man to lend himself to a piece of dirty work such as this. And, of course, he’d be able to stand behind the stage curtains without any question.

‘Lucky to find such a man in the company,’ Duncan was saying.

‘Oh, most actors will do anything if it’s made worth their while. Or course, he’s scared for his skin afterwards, but we persuaded him. He’ll fire his shot just at the moment when there’s a terrific row of stage cannon. If people hear the shot, they’ll think it’s part of the play.’

The blood rushed to my cheeks. Of course! Those lines, faintly under-scored in the stolen copy of the play:

                          … the nimble gunner

With linstock now the devilish cannon touches,

And down goes all before them!

I could hear and see it all in my imagination. The Queen sitting there in her jewels, her great skirts spread like a peacock’s tail; the speaker of the Chorus declaiming his lines; the splendid roar of cannon on which our manager prided himself; the faint snap of the pistol; the Queen twitching in her seat, then slowly nodding forward as though she felt sleepy, while blood gradually soaked through to her stiff outer bodice, and made a dark patch spread wider and wider round the bullet-hole …

‘H’m,’ said Duncan. ‘He counts on enough time to slip away?’

The other man’s cold chuckle was more brutal than the most ferocious threat.

‘He counts on it,’ he drawled. ‘But Philip and I thought better not. Julian Nesby will be in attendance on the Queen. He’s to jump on the stage and run the fellow through. That’ll save awkward questions.’

‘More blood,’ said Duncan, and I could tell the shudder in his voice. He wasn’t a bad man, Anthony Duncan, but weak and ambitious.

‘Of course. That’s only the beginning.’

I couldn’t follow the rest of their plans with the same clearness, because Duncan knew them as well as his friend. So, instead of listening to a straightforward description, I had to piece together odd hints and guess, half the time, what they referred to.

Of the main plan there was no shadow of doubt. On the day fixed for the Queen’s assassination there was to be an uprising in the northern counties. Simultaneously, a Spanish fleet was to cross the Bay of Biscay from Ferrol, and – not repeating the mistake of the Great Armada – make an immediate landing at Falmouth.

The high politics behind all this I couldn’t pretend to grasp. I couldn’t tell from their talk even whom they meant to set upon the throne of England. But one thing I realized without any telling: Sir Philip Morton and his friends were going to be the big men in the new order. Sir Philip had outgrown such petty methods of stealing common lands and marrying heiresses. He was playing for the highest stakes.

It was just then I heard, faint but clear, Kit’s whistle.

So did the two men. ‘What’s that?’ said Duncan with the harshness of fear in his voice. I heard him turn on his heel and stride away. In a few moments he was back. ‘All right,’ he growled. ‘Must have been that groom –’

‘Philip’s man?’

‘Yes; he’s riding up the valley.’

‘Philip said he’d come back himself this morning. He must have been hindered.’

Again came that whistle, piercing and urgent now. It was bitterly funny, in a way. Poor Kit was desperately warning me against the one man who was riding up the valley; yet I was already besieged, unknowingly, by the pair inside the tower. She whistled a third time. She must be frantic. I knew how I’d have felt in her place. But I couldn’t answer her.

I had to make a quick decision.

Should I make a dash for it? I could shoot one of the men point-blank, and, with any luck, get out of the room before the other got over his surprise. That would mean a desperate chase up the mountain, with at least one man close on my heels, and the groom not far behind.

Or should I feel my way silently downstairs into the cellar in the hope of remaining there undiscovered? Was there any reason why the men should come down there? I knew there was one very probable reason: Tom’s body might be lying there, and they might decide to remove it.

On the whole, though, the second course seemed the wiser. I would go down and crouch in the darkness. If they didn’t come near me, well and good. If they did – well, I should still have my pistol. There was a sporting chance of taking them by surprise and fighting my way out.

The cellar, which a little while before had yawned like a well of horror, became suddenly a haven of refuge. I turned and took another step down.

There must have been blood on the stair. My foot slithered over the edge. I went headlong. The pistol leapt from the breast of my doublet, bounced away, and went off with a tremendous bang. My head struck the curving wall with a resounding crash, and that was the last I knew for a considerable time.