Crossed Bones (32 page)

Two hours later, his face scraped raw from the intimate attentions of a not-very-sharp razor, he finally found himself in the Strand, a place of great resort lined with grand stone mansions and arcaded walkways filled with elegant shops. The house Rob sought was the grandest of all – more of a palace than a house, keeping the world at bay behind ornamental gardens in which labourers toiled and swept. One of these waved Rob and his animals angrily away as he made to pass inside the gate. ‘You can’t come in here, the Master sees no beggars.’

Rob showed him the letter from Sir Arthur, and the man squinted at it myopically. ‘Don’t mean nothin’ to me,’ he said suspiciously. He called to a boy wielding a rake. ‘Go fetch Master Burton and be quick about it.’

Rob waited, shifting from foot to foot with impatience. After what seemed an age, a white-haired man in a rich blue tunic and velvet breeches came walking gingerly down the path towards him, his cane ringing on the stones. ‘Who are you and what’s your business at Salisbury House?’

Rob handed him the letter. The man broke the seal without ceremony and scanned its contents. When he looked up again, his expression was quite different. He handed the letter back to Rob. ‘Follow me,’ he said briskly, and returned up the path at twice the pace, his stick rattling out a smart tattoo to the clack of his heeled shoes.

Rob was led into the house through a door of magnificent proportions and left in an antechamber that was larger than the whole of Kenegie Hall. Its panelled walls were lined with portraits of grim-looking men who glowered down at him unforgivingly. If he had been on any other than pressing business, he would have felt so deterred by their unblinking black eyes and forbidding visages that he would have made his excuses and departed; but that was, he considered, probably why people were left here to await their appointments: so that the proud heritage of this powerful family could impress upon them the insignificance of their own humble origins. All around him, some of the greatest men of the kingdom – Burghleys and Howards – gazed down imperiously, uninterested in the painter who had captured their image or in those who would later view them. He stood beneath a huge portrait of the current earl’s late father, a man dressed plainly in Puritan attire despite his title of Lord High Chancellor, and studied the lines of that cold, aloof face with its fox-red beard and tired regard. For all his wealth and power, Rob thought, he did not appear a man who had been much contented with his lot in life. The portraitist had opted to hide from view the reputed hunched back; he had, however, captured a strained look in those crafty eyes, the eyes of a spymaster, a man who had seen too much, including the fate that awaited him just a few years later, that swift and shocking fall from grace, from power, from wealth and eventually from life itself. Rob squared his shoulders as he heard footsteps tapping down the hall outside and turned to meet the present incumbent of the title: the second Earl of Salisbury, William Cecil.

But it was a woman who stood framed by the oak doorway: a beautiful, fragile creature with a pale face made paler still by a judicious use of expensive cosmetics, and huge dark eyes framed by tumbles of ringlets. She wore a gown of voluminous rose-pink silk, cut square and low enough across the breast to reveal a silky white cleavage nestling in froths of exquisite Flemish lace, which Rob tried hard not to stare at. Instead, he applied his gaze to the great diamond that hung around her neck on a choker of black satin, and the ornate bone fan which she held in her right hand. It was impossible to guess her age.

After pausing to make her entrance, and to observe her effect on the visitor, she walked towards him, extending a long-fingered white hand encrusted with rings. ‘I am the Countess of Salisbury: and who might you be, pretty young man?’

Rob, remembering his manners, bowed so hastily and low that a particularly huge ruby almost took his eye out. ‘Robert Bolitho, my lady, of Kenegie Manor in Cornwall. I bring a letter from my master, Sir Arthur Harris, for the Earl’s attention.’

Lady Cecil smiled sweetly. ‘My husband is otherwise engaged. Perhaps you might let me see the letter? Andrew said it mentioned something about Barbary pirates – so fascinating, so romantic!’

‘It is not a very romantic story, madam, nor one likely to entertain a lady like yourself,’ Rob said, smiling back. It was unfortunate that the Earl was not available, but to see his wife was the greatest good fortune for his own private quest. ‘But I would indeed crave your indulgence if you would hear the tale, for it concerns someone of your acquaintance, at least,’ he said, then amended hastily, ‘You have acquaintance of her work, I believe.’

The Countess tilted her head towards him like a sparrow. ‘Really? Well, then, we shall take a bowl of coffee in my chambers, and you shall tell me all.’

‘Sixty people, in a single raid?’ Lady Cecil blinked and blinked. ‘How very audacious of them.’ She leaned forward. ‘And tell me, did you catch a glimpse of these bold pirates, were they very cruel of visage and Turkish in their dress? I imagine them all glittering eyes and jutting beards, like Saladin, flourishing their shining scimitars and calling on the name of their god.’

‘I did not see them, my lady. I was at Gulval Church with the Harris family.’

Her face fell. ‘Oh,
quel dommage
. And what will they do with their captives? Will they go for slaves to the Great Turk, do you think? I hear he is a monster who has a harem of ten thousand women, and that his palace is paved with gold. Ah, Constantinople, I would so love to visit Constantinople, to see its domes and minarets, to walk inside the Sancta Sophia and breathe the ancient air of Byzantium – though I believe it is forbidden for a woman to enter there, or indeed a Christian. I should have to disguise myself as a Mahometan pilgrim!’ She clasped her hands. ‘I would stain my skin with walnut dye, fashion myself a beard and wrap myself up in robes with a dagger at my waist and coloured leather slippers, just like the chiausch who was here this spring to visit the King as an envoy of their sultan!’ She clapped her hands together at this delightful image. ‘He brought lions and tigers, you know, for the Royal Menagerie. Such a pretty gesture, I thought. But
he
didn’t look much like a pirate: in fact, he was a little fat –’

‘Lady Cecil, I beg pardon for interrupting…’

The Countess was not used to such plain speaking: she gaped, then started to fan herself agitatedly.

Rob dug inside his jacket and drew out a paper-wrapped packet which he unfolded with immense care. ‘I wanted you to see something.’

‘Great heaven!’ The Countess smoothed her hands over the thing Rob had spread out. ‘This is remarkable work.’

It had been a last-minute flash of inspiration which had prompted Rob to run up to Cat’s room before leaving Kenegie. On the threshold he had paused, as if a fraction of her might linger there out of time and he might surprise some ghostly apparition before it had time to vanish again. As he entered, he felt profoundly he was intruding into a space that was still full of her being: he could almost smell her in the air, a faint aroma of musk and roses. The half-finished altar cloth had been easy to find underneath the bed, the first place he had looked. He had stowed it inside his shirt and ridden away with it next to his skin until he realized he would likely stain it with his sweat. It was a sacred object in essence and in association: he did not wish to mar it.

Now he gazed upon the work Cat had undertaken in secret, by candlelight, in the privacy of her attic room and remembered their visit to Castle an Dinas earlier that summer, how she had voiced her desire to join the Broderers’ Guild, how he had tried to dissuade her from over-ambition.

‘The design is exquisite, visionary.’ Lady Cecil traced the path of the serpent twining about the trunk of the tree, touched a finger to the gold of Eve’s hair, the blush of the apple.

‘The design is Catherine’s own.’

The Countess looked up, startled. ‘Her own? I thought Margaret and I had agreed I would send my own man down to pounce out the design for the young lady to stitch. I must admit I was tardy in arranging it, so much to do with the children, the management of the house…’ Her voice tailed off as she was caught up in the details of the embroidery again. ‘But Christopher would never have dreamed of anything as
alive
as this. It’s quite wonderful.’ She paused. ‘Why have you brought it to me incomplete?’

Rob swallowed. ‘Catherine was taken by the raiders. She was made to write the ransom note, from Sallee in Barbary. They have demanded eight hundred pounds for her return.’

The Countess’s laugh rang out. ‘Eight hundred pounds? For a serving girl? Even for a girl who can sew like this, that’s an extraordinary sum. Did you know you can purchase a baronetcy for a mere thousand?’

He hung his head. ‘I have vowed to redeem her.’

The Countess smiled indulgently. ‘Sweet boy. How much have you raised so far?’

‘Next to nothing, though I would pledge myself to work for nothing for as long as it would take to pay the debt. Cornwall is a poor county, and Cat’s close family were taken with her by the raiders.’

She sighed. ‘Such a true heart is worth a fortune. Would that I had one at my disposal. But all this’ – she indicated the rich apartment, her dress and jewels – ‘well, my dear, it’s all show. We don’t own the palace, it belongs to the Bishop of Durham; we have just this wing. My husband would kill me for saying so, but our debts are really quite immense. William’s father died owing more than thirty thousand pounds, and as for my own family…’ She spread her hands. ‘It really would be very lovely to have you come and work for us here in some capacity to earn your Catherine’s redemption fee, but you see how it is.’

Rob saw how it was, with a sinking heart.

‘Do leave the altar frontal with me,’ she cooed. ‘I shall commission someone to complete it for our church at Framlingham.’

‘I cannot do that,’ Rob said softly. ‘It is all I have of her.’

The Countess pursed her lips. ‘Wait here.’ She clicked out of the room and returned a few minutes later bearing a leather pouch. ‘Here,’ she said, placing it in his hand. ‘It will not redeem your Catherine, but it may go some way towards helping, and it seems a fair price for the work she has thus far done. My husband is likely too drunk to miss it: if he does I will remind him that he lost the sum at cards last night.’

The pouch contained the best part of fifty pounds in gold sovereigns and angels. Beneath a chestnut tree just beginning to lose its leaves, Rob counted it out with a hammering heart. He was sad to lose contact with Cat’s embroidery, but the touch of her hand would be more welcome by far than the touch of something that hand had worked, however fine. He stowed the gold carefully away with a prayer of thanks to the mysterious workings of the Lord, and set off on his next errand: to find Sir Henry Marten and deliver his second letter and the petition of the people of Penzance. ‘Go to his townhouse in Westminster,’ Sir Arthur had told him, writing down the address. ‘He has an abrupt manner and does not suffer fools lightly, so keep your wits sharp and your tongue civil. He can be somewhat trying, but we need his help.’

After the splendours of Salisbury House, Rob was unprepared for the squalor surrounding the seat of the country’s power. The streets of Westminster were filthy and stank of swamp gases, piss and ordure. Flemish merchants cried their wares in heavy accents, drunks stood propped against walls bearing mugs of pepper-spiced ale or vomited into sewers already overrun with waste, cooks’ stalls sold meat pies, pigs’ trotters, porpoise tongues and fried cows’ ears. Rob was glad he had stuck to plain fare: a small loaf of fresh-baked bread and a lump of salty yellow cheese eaten as he walked through Long Acre.

He passed the huge structures of St Stephen’s, where the Parliament sat when in session, and the royal Palace of Westminster, wherein lay also the Law Courts, and found himself experiencing a kind of ecstatic terror at their vast, dark masses, akin to the time he and Jack Kellynch had taken a skiff beneath the forbidding greenstone cliffs of the Gurnard’s Head, and he had imagined being shipwrecked on the foam-battered rocks below. These towering buildings were inimical: their scale too grand, too imposing, to encompass him within their context. Passing out of their shadow, he stood in awe for a time beneath the north façade of the great Abbey, marvelling over its arching buttresses and Gothic pinnacles, its jewel-like glass windows and intricate carvings. Ambushed by its magnificence, he felt something spring suddenly wide in his head, like a flower opening beneath unexpected sunlight. For a moment he thought he might summon the courage to go in, but at the last he did not dare. Its beauty was too much for a simple man to bear. Besides, he had already been followed by a man with a pocked face and shifty eyes, who’d asked him if he wished to go with him to his house, and he became aware of how much of a country yokel he must look, with his mouth hanging open and his eyes wet with amazement: a pathetically easy mark for even the most amateur footpad or sneak-thief. Indeed, the narrow lanes around the Abbey were frequented by many shady types, who assessed him as he passed but seemed to decide he had nothing on his person likely to warrant the effort of robbing him, an irony which would have made him smile, were he not so nervous of their attention. He was glad that he had left the horses at a livery stable in Seven Dials; but the pouch of gold weighed heavily against his flank, and he blessed his sense in wrapping it well enough to prevent the coins chinking as he walked.

Sir Henry Marten’s house was just off Broad Sanctuary, and with great good luck he was at home, though not in the best of tempers.

‘And what does he expect me to do about it?’ he roared, having scanned Sir Arthur’s letter.

Rob, who had not been asked to sit down, clenched his knuckles. ‘I believe, sir, that he would have you raise the issue with other eminent men with Cornwall’s best interests at heart with a view to putting the petition before the Privy Council so that we may plead for monies from them to ransom our captives back.’