Day of Deliverance (16 page)

Into the Wilderness

Jack, Angus, Tony and Gordon raced down the steps into the gardens. It was getting dark – a crimson sun was setting in a clear winter sky above the oaks of the deer park. The place was crawling with guards – many held flaming torches above their heads.

They paused for breath at the bottom of the stairs, as Tony surveyed the great gardens.

“Pendelshape has managed to kidnap the queen and Lady Sarah?” Jack asked.

“It must be him… desperate to make sure the plot didn’t fail,” Tony replied.

“Why not just kill her immediately?” Angus said.

“He must have some other warped plan,” Gordon said. “And there’s something else.” He put his hand inside his jacket and took out his time phone. He snapped it open and the telltale yellow light blinked back at them. “We’re getting a time signal.”

“We’ve only got minutes to find him…” Tony looked out at the broad vista of the gardens and the deer park beyond and added in frustration, “He could have gone anywhere. Dammit! Where is he?”

Just as the words left Tony’s mouth an image popped into Jack’s head. It was something from the book that Miss Beattie had shown him. He couldn’t have looked at the page for more than
five seconds as he leafed through it, but miraculously it now reappeared in his memory, perfectly formed.

“Maybe he’s hiding somewhere, preparing to time travel… where would be a good place to hide?” Gordon said.

Jack knew the answer. “On the outskirts of the palace there is a sort of forest – I’m sure of it.”

The others turned towards him. He repeated it. “I think they call it the wilderness – it’s a woodland with paths, hedges and thickets. I remember it from Miss Beattie’s book. It’s the perfect hiding place, and it’s just on the edge of the palace grounds. If we move quickly, we might catch them before they go too far.”

The light from the sky was fading fast as they sprinted away from the palace. Soon they were working their way along a narrow pathway to the threshold of the wilderness, the huge trees looming over them. The quicker members of the group, including Tony and Gordon, had raced ahead, leaving Jack and Angus slightly behind. As the two boys reached the edge of the forest, they couldn’t quite see which way the others had gone.

“Which way?”

“No idea.”

“That way then…” Angus chose one of the pathways.

Occasionally they could hear shouts or orders in the distance as the guards kept up a desperate search in the fading light. Jack and Angus pressed on, taking random choices at a further two junctions. Five minutes later and they were utterly lost.

“Stop for a minute,” Jack said. “Shall we try and go back?”

“Could do. It’s creepy in here.”

Suddenly, they heard a loud scream. It was close.

“What was that?”

“I don’t know, but I’m not hanging around to find out.”

Jack felt himself starting to panic. They ran on, weaving their way through the trees, and then suddenly they found themselves in an oval-shaped clearing, surrounded by thickets and high hedges.

Jack stopped dead in his tracks. The queen and Lady Sarah stood directly ahead of them with their backs pressed up against a huge oak tree on the far side of the clearing. A man stood in front of them, his pistol levelled at the two women. There was sufficient light from the torches for Jack to recognise Pendelshape instantly. He was pointing the gun at the queen and then moved it slowly towards Lady Sarah. He seemed to be hesitating, confused by the likeness of the two women.

The arrival of Jack and Angus took him by surprise. He swivelled around and, in panic, fired. He missed. Lady Sarah screamed. Jack and Angus dived for cover behind a thicket on the edge of the clearing.

Pendelshape shouted out at them, “You have interfered for the last time.”

He fired again but Jack and Angus were well hidden in the thick foliage. Beside himself with frustration, Pendelshape let loose a further two shots, but again they went wide. Swinging the gun back towards Lady Sarah and the queen, he fired again. This time he could not miss. As Jack peered out from the foliage, he saw Lady Sarah’s legs give way and she collapsed in a heap. Something inside Jack snapped. He felt a visceral anger well up inside him. He pounced forward, but as he did so, Pendelshape pressed his gun to Elizabeth’s head. She stared back, head high, jaw clenched, eyes defiant. Pendelshape pulled the trigger. Nothing. The magazine was empty. Pendelshape screamed in frustration and fumbled for a fresh magazine, but he was too slow. Jack, enraged by the brutal murder of Lady Sarah, leapt up and crashed into Pendelshape’s ribcage at full tilt, lifting him clear from the ground and propelling them both forward a full two metres before crunching back to earth. Pendelshape’s gun flew free.

Angus, now also up on his feet, looked on with a mixture of dumbfounded astonishment and admiration. Jack was really no match for the stocky and powerful Pendelshape. The teacher had been caught by surprise but he was quick to recover. Enraged, he lashed out with a clenched fist, which caught Jack square on the
side of the head. Jack spun sideways, and the world went dark.

“Time you learned… meddling idiot!” Pendelshape growled. He started to crawl around on the ground, cursing angrily and desperately searching for his weapon.

Suddenly, there were voices. Angus shouted, “Help! Over here, we’re in the clearing.”

A second later, Tony, Gordon and several other royal guardsmen tumbled into sight.

“Over there!” Angus pointed at Pendelshape who was still scrambling around desperately trying to find his gun.

Tony called out to him, “It’s over Pendelshape.”

Pendelshape screamed back, “That’s what you think… VIGIL is about to be crushed.”

“Stand still – or we’ll shoot,” Gordon shouted.

But Pendelshape was having none of it. He stood up, put his head down, dropped his shoulder and charged directly into the perimeter hedge. Instantly, Tony and Gordon let loose a volley of shots. For a second all was quiet. Suddenly, there was a flash of incandescent white light and for a moment the sky above them was as bright as day. Tony and Gordon rushed over to the hedge through which Pendelshape had escaped.

Tony cursed under his breath. “He’s gone. Time signal… this means trouble… we need to get to the safehouse.” He turned back to the guards. “You men – take the queen and Lady Sarah back to the palace immediately. We will go ahead and track down the intruder. When you get back to the palace, get Walsingham to send help and search the surrounding area. Now go!”

Tony peered down at Jack. “Are you okay?”

Jack was starting to come round. His head was spinning; he felt like he’d been hit by a bus.

“Hurts like hell… what happened?”

“You just saved the queen’s life.”

Jack just about had the wherewithal to reply, “But not Lady Sarah’s?”

Tony grimaced. “Don’t know – she’s in a bad way…”

“We’ve got to go…” Gordon said urgently. “We don’t know what Pendelshape is going to do. We need to act while this time signal lasts. We’ve got a couple of hours at most… come on!”

The guardsmen were already escorting the queen away from the clearing. But as they prepared to leave, she walked over to where they stood. Her voice trembled with emotion.

“Sir, you have saved my life. I must now return to the palace for protection until the area is secured. Report to us tomorrow and you shall be rewarded.”

“Your Majesty – we must give chase… the intruder,” Tony pressed.

“Yes – you must go.” Then, quite spontaneously, she slipped a ring from her finger and pressed it firmly into Jack’s hand. “Take this as a token of our thanks. Now Godspeed…” She paused before adding grimly, “And when you find the assassin – kill him – and bring me his head.”

Day of Deliverance

It took them fifteen minutes to reach what Tony called the ‘safehouse’ – a hunting lodge that they had already commandeered in the middle of the deer park about a couple of kilometres from the palace. Jack’s head was still throbbing from Pendelshape’s punch – and in the dark he had to be supported by Angus and Gordon as Tony led the way through the woodland at a
lung-bursting
pace. When they entered the lodge, Jack and Angus were surprised to find a third member of VIGIL waiting for them – Theo Joplin.

“We’ve got a problem,” Tony said.

“I noticed: the time signal,” Joplin replied.

“Yes, it all went according to plan, except for one thing – Pendelshape has escaped. He could be anywhere.”

Angus was not listening. Instead, he was looking at an array of bags and equipment that were stacked up against one wall of the room. “What is all that stuff?”

“Weaponry of various sorts. Provisions. When Joplin came back to reinforce us, VIGIL supplied what we needed to defeat Pendelshape. Don’t worry about it just now,” Tony said.

Jack’s head was spinning. “I need to sit down.”

“Sorry, Jack – sit there.” Tony pulled out a chair. “Gordon – get the lad an ice pack and break out some of the emergency provisions. We’ll all need our blood sugar up. We haven’t got much time but let’s get ourselves properly organised. What we do next… well, it’s life or death now.”

Soon they were all sitting round the table inside the main room of the lodge. Joplin had warmed up some tomato soup and they were working their way through bread, cheese and chocolate bars. Jack held the ice pack to his head. Despite the throbbing he was listening intently as the VIGIL team quickly pieced together the events of the last few days to work out their next move.

“So the Taurus transfer went wrong?” Angus said.

“It dumped us in some godforsaken bog north of London. At that point we had no idea where you two were – you could have been dead for all we knew,” Tony replied. “We had to lie low and wait for the next signal. To begin with, we froze our butts off in some shack, but then we reckoned we should head to London, because if you or the Revisionists were going to be anywhere it had to be there.”

Gordon added, “And finally, we got a time signal. VIGIL located the time phones and identified where you were and where we were – and they told us where we could find you. They also sent Joplin back to help us. Luckily, going to London was the right move – it hasn’t taken us long to find you…”

“The torture chamber in that big house?”

“Yes. But we got there too late. We must have arrived after Pendelshape took you away. The letter from Marlowe was our first piece of luck. Pendelshape made a mistake. In his rush to take all those time phones and take you prisoner, he just left it there, lying on a table.”

Jack nodded. “You’re right, now I think about it, I remember him saying he’d lost it… but I don’t think he knew he’d left it behind.”

“What did it actually say?” Angus asked.

“Well, now you know,” Joplin replied. “It explained the Spanish plot in detail. One of the plotters, Christo, who was already a member of the Henslowe Players, would use the cover of the players’ visit to Hampton Court to assassinate the queen. The rest of the letter had details of how various other plotters would encourage sympathetic Catholic aristocrats around the country to
rise up on news of the queen’s death and provoke a civil war.”

Tony continued, “We disguised ourselves as loyalists who had stumbled across the plot and immediately went to Walsingham.”

“Ironic – that was just what Marlowe had asked us to do with Fanshawe,” Jack said.

“Walsingham already knew that something was afoot – he was suspicious of Marlowe, who had written the letter and was torn as to whether or not he should send it. Then you turned up. The letter was the last piece of the puzzle. Walsingham moved quickly and decided to set a trap for the plotters at Hampton Court on the opening day of the play.”

“The plan worked well,” Tony said. “Although, Angus, what you did was a surprise. Gordon was about to take out Christo, but you were just too quick.”

“So… who was that other queen – you know, Lady Sarah?” Jack paused, his voice quiet. “Will she die?”

“I don’t know. I’m afraid it is likely. She was incredibly brave to act as the queen’s double,” Tony replied. “She looks quite like the queen… and dressed up in all that garb and in character presiding over the play, how on earth was Christo to know any different? It’s not as if he’d ever seen a photo of the queen. In the wilderness it also confused Pendelshape – probably bought us some time.”

“And the crossbow men?”

“Royal guards, disguised as courtiers. The entire thing was a set up – the whole audience – the queen’s double, everything. We hadn’t much time, but it came together on the night.”

“You knew that Whitsun and Gift would be there?”

“We were pretty sure, and we hoped Pendelshape would be there as well, together with any other Revisionists, so we could get them all at the same time. The Revisionist plan was to piggyback on the existing Spanish plot. They want their interventions to be as ‘light touch’ as possible – saves them work and makes it all cleaner.”

“You and the crossbow men were ready,” Angus said. “Brilliant.”

“Losing Pendelshape was not so brilliant, though. Unless we can nail him, we’re done for.”

Joplin looked at Jack, concentrating hard. “Jack, after Pendelshape took you prisoner, was there anything, anything at all, that he said about his plans to change history?”

“It was pretty amazing. He showed us a kind of game where Spain conquers England and then all of the Americas and that becomes a basis for some sort of global domination. He said there was a way of measuring how it would be better than our present history – real history, if you like. Called it ‘UI’ or something.”

“Utility Index?” Joplin looked at his colleagues with
ashen-faced
incredulity. “They must have developed the causal modelling to a very sophisticated degree. That is very worrying.”

“Er, sorry?” Angus said.

Joplin explained. “If this software can really model intended changes into the future with such precision, that is a truly powerful ability. It is a capability that we in VIGIL certainly never thought possible. Basically, they can play God.”

“Sometimes I reckon Pendelshape thinks he
is
God,” Jack said.

Joplin rubbed the back of his neck. “This is very serious, Jack. Did Pendelshape say anything else – was he more
specific
?”

Jack thought for a moment about what Pendelshape had told them. “He said ideally he needed to do two things. First, he said Elizabeth must die to create disorder across the country – a sort of power vacuum. Then he said the Spanish Armada needed to succeed. The Spanish troops under the Duke of Parma in the Netherlands could then just walk in and take control. In fact, he seemed to think even if they didn’t manage to kill the queen, the second part of the plan could still work, as long as the Armada succeeded.”

“The Armada – did he say anything more about that?”

Angus piped up, “He mentioned a battle… Grave –
something.”

Joplin banged the table. “Gravelines! I knew it. That confirms it.” Joplin jumped to his feet and started to pace the room. “I have been piecing together a theory based on the information your father gave us and our knowledge of history. Gravelines was a sea battle that took place in the east of the English Channel. The defeat of the Armada was down to many things… but if there was one point where you wanted to make a decisive change in favour of the Spanish fleet, Gravelines would be it. Gravelines was the point where the English ships engaged and damaged the great ships of the Armada. After Gravelines, the Armada fled up the English coast, badly battered but still intact. After that point though, the storms got them. Those that did survive the wrecks and struggled ashore were often murdered and robbed. If you wanted to change the outcome of events for Phillip II and Spain and allow a Spanish victory, the history of England, Spain and the world would be dramatically different. It would be Spain’s day of deliverance.”

“How would you do it, though? I mean, how can Pendelshape take on all those English ships on his own?” Jack asked.

Joplin shook his head. “I don’t know. But you’re right Jack, you would need some way to destroy the English fleet. Quickly and easily. Some form of military superiority. With the fleet at the bottom of the Channel, London and England would be open for the Armada to transport the Duke of Parma’s Spanish troops from the Netherlands into England, just as they planned. England had no army that could resist them. It would only be a matter of weeks before all of England was in Phillip II’s hands. Your information confirms my theory: Gravelines is the critical event. I am convinced the Revisionists will use this time signal to stage an intervention. Pendelshape will want to get on with it.” Joplin gestured at the bags of equipment arranged along one wall of the room. “We need to get going – let’s take what we need from that lot and Tony, you need to code the time phones for the battle of
Gravelines – 8th August 1588.”

“Okay.” Tony opened a thin briefcase on the table and took out two time phones. He handed one to Jack and one to Angus. “Yours – and don’t lose them this time.”

Jack picked up the time phone. “Hold on, you’re not expecting us to come as well?”

“Of course. It’s like Inchquin said – you two are fully
paid-up
members of VIGIL now – part of the team, and where we’re going, we’ll need all the help we can get.”

“What – you’re taking us into a war zone?”

“No mistake, Jack – this is war.”