P. Chisholm - An Air of Treason

Why the devil did she want the thing brought up again? Why now? Did it have something to do with the scrap of parchment written with music? Why?

The Queen was standing and holding out her arms to her people. All the Court went to their knees again, Carey included, just missing a lurking patch of mud with one of his knees and nearly staining his last remaining good pair of hose. He really hoped Hughie knew how to darn. Maybe when he met his father at Oxford, he could snaffle a few new pairs?

Her Majesty said a loving goodnight to her people and then paced out to the sound of trumpets, leaning on the arm of the Earl of Essex, who was looking pleased with himself. The Gentlemen of the Queen’s Guard went ahead and behind, making red and gold borders around the maids of honour and the ladies-in-waiting, who were following the Queen, the younger ones rolling their eyes sulkily at having to leave the dancing so early.

Carey could see Emilia amongst the Earl’s followers at the end of the procession, the tilt of her feathered hat unmistakeable. Ah well. Perhaps another time. (A lucky escape, you idiot, said the puritanical part of him.)

Carey caught Hughie’s eye and beckoned him to bring over the flagon and pour for him. The lad started and looked guilty, dived into the scrum of servingmen by the large silver spiced wine bowl and disappeared. Finally he emerged, wading upstream against the flood of other servingmen, dodged a couple of whirling dancers, and came over. Carey lifted his silver cup and Hughie served him quite well, pouring carefully and using a linen napkin on his arm to wipe any drips.

When Carey sipped the wine, he nearly gagged-it was a spiced wine water, very sweet, mixed with brandy and spices and a hint of bitterness from the cloves. The attempt to hide its dreadful quality hadn’t worked. Still it was wine, so he drank it.

As soon as the Queen had gone, the musicians had struck up an alemain and the roar of voices went up another notch. He watched the peasant dance for a while, wondering if he wanted to dance anymore.

God, it was hot. Carey changed his mind about dancing, moved out again into the darkness, feeling for rain first because he did not want to damage his (still only half paid-for) Court doublet and hose. There were torches on some of the trees so you could see something in the flickering shadows.

Carey was still thirsty, so he followed the sound of water back to the stream, tipped out half of the syrupy wine in his goblet and refilled it with water caught carefully from a small rapid over a mossy stone. You never knew with water, but he’d found in France that wine generally cleaned it well.

Sipping cautiously, Carey decided it was much better and even the bitterness of cloves in it was refreshing, like well-hopped beer. Away from the torches and candle-lit tent, the evening was still and some stars were coming out, powdering the velvet cloak of the sky with diamond dust. The evening must be much warmer than you’d expect at this time of year, despite the clearing sky. Carey was burning up in his Court suit.

He spotted the dim outline of the church spire and went toward it. The clerks would no doubt be bundled up asleep inside, along with other courtiers’ servants, since there, at least, they wouldn’t be rained on despite the hardness of the floor.

Once in the churchyard he wondered what he was there for, since he wasn’t about to go and roust out John Tovey from his sleep just for the sake of it, after all. Still the church pulled him as he gulped the watered wine. Perhaps it would be cooler in there. He opened the door carefully, shut it behind him carefully and paced with great caution down the aisle. On either side were dozens of bundled figures, quite tightly packed, wrapped in their cloaks. Some had managed to beg, borrow, or steal straw pallets to ease the stone flags under them.

It wasn’t cooler in here, damn it. He went up toward the altar, still too hot and still dry-mouthed with thirst. All the Papistic nonsense had been cleared away years ago, the altar had been moved so that it was a proper communion table, the saints of the altar screen had lost their heads and been whitewashed, the Lady chapel had no figure of the Madonna on the plinth at all, though there was a puzzling carved frieze of deer around the walls. They looked oddly alive, even seemed to move.

The soft snoring from behind him was forming itself into a strange rhythmic music. He looked up at the boarded windows, one or two left intact with the old style full of scriptural pictures for the illiterate. Those were their only way of learning the gospels as they were denied hearing the Word of the Lord by the Vulgate Latin of the old Mass. That you couldn’t see the sky though the silvery light told him that the moon had risen. What were the reiving surnames up to on the Border? It was a church. Perhaps he should pray?

He drank again, took his hat off belatedly and thought about Amy Dudley nee Robsart, poor lady. She had died on the 8th September 1560, the year of his own birth, perhaps not very long after he was born, a summer baby. He smiled, thinking vaguely of his wet nurse and how he had loved her when he was tiny, when his mother sometimes frightened him on her visits back from Court with his quite terrifying father. They had become better friends when once he was breeched and he had realised how kind they were, compared to the parents of most of his friends.

He knocked back most of the rest of his wine, wondering why nothing seemed to ease his dry mouth, and sat on one of the benches against the wall. Nobody was sleeping there, perhaps because the stones were broken. There was more old destruction in the Lady chapel than the rest of the church. The plinth the statue had stood on still had a crescent moon, stars, and a snake carved on it.

Why was he so hot and thirsty after drinking so much ale earlier and then a whole flagon of watered wine? And another peculiar thing was that he didn’t need a piss at all. His insides seemed to have turned suddenly into a strange desert.

And now something really odd was happening. The whitewashed stone of the church was seeming to billow around him slowly, as if it were only painted curtains at a play. The whitewashed walls thinned and thinned and swayed in and out and back and forth like the dancers, to the rhythm of the snore-music around him.

He couldn’t stand the heat anymore and his head was hurting, his mouth glued with drought. He had to cool down. He fumbled for the buttons of his doublet, undid them with hands full of thumbs, then had to feel around the back where his poinard hung for the points and then he thought of taking his belts off, which he did, and then he broke a couple of laces and the doublet came away at last. He took the thing off his shoulders, wondering why it had got so much lighter and hung it on a headless woman saint holding a wheel.

He was still too hot and his eyes weren’t working right. Everything was blurring and billowing in front of him, and the moon must be shining through a window somewhere because he could see well in the darkness, make out the outlines of snoring clerks and Court servants on the floor. The vest that held up his paned trunk hose and canions was making him hot now so he set about undoing the buttons and laces for that. It was a nightmare of inextricable buttons and laces so he broke the damned things and wobbled as he pulled those off as well and hung them on a saint holding a castle next to the pearl-covered doublet and stood there in his shirt with his hose dropping down and his boots still on. He burped.

Blinking, rubbing his eyes which were getting worse and worse, licking lips like leather with a tongue of horsehide and panting with heat, a small part of him finally thought to wonder, “Am I ill?”

The last time he had felt so bad was on the Elizabeth Bonaventure , Cumberland’s ship, chasing the Armada north through the storms of the North Sea. He had been hot, dry, dizzy, blinding headache…