S. Parris - Treachery

I say nothing, only pick up my bag and begin walking, with a strange lurching motion, in the direction of the houses. Sidney falls into step beside me with his long loping stride, pensive and silent. I see clear as day what he does not, or will not acknowledge: Drake does not want him on this voyage. Even if we found Robert Dunne’s killer tomorrow and presented him to the Captain-General bound and gagged by dinner, I do not think it one whit more likely that Drake would take us on board. There is no point in saying this to Sidney.

‘You know, tomorrow,’ he mutters, as we turn into a narrow cobbled street that curves steeply upward from the harbour wall, ‘I think I will make it my business to visit all the larger ships of the fleet and discuss the armaments with their captains. That way they will know I am here as Master of the Ordnance, not merely an escort to exiled princes and Drake’s womenfolk. I will not have these sailors laughing at me behind their hands.’

‘But you don’t know anything about ordnance. Not when it comes to using it. They may laugh directly in your face if you pretend to knowledge you don’t have.’

He glares at me, then breaks into a grin. ‘If you affect to know what you are doing, most people will take you at your own evaluation. I believe it was you taught me that, Bruno.’

I smile, to concede the point. ‘I am not sure that will work with men who have sailed around the world once already.’

We find the sign of the Star readily enough on Nutt Street, a broad thoroughfare lined with tall, well-appointed houses. Sidney explains his connection to Drake and pays for a room, demanding — as if in parody of himself — linen sheets and a feather mattress; while he is haggling with the landlady over the best chamber I glance around the entrance. It is a fine building, perhaps a century old or more, and grand in the plain style of the times: broad flagstones on the floor, strewn with rushes; limewashed walls; a high ceiling with wooden beams. The candles in the wall sconces are beeswax, not cheap tallow, and there is a warming smell of roasting meat and spices drifting from the tap-room. And yet I find I do not like the place. Some nameless instinct makes my skin prickle; my fingers stray to the small knife I carry at my belt and stroke its smooth bone handle for reassurance. I sense something here that makes me uncomfortable, though I cannot explain why. When I remark on this to Sidney as we climb the stairs to our room, he only laughs.

‘Relax, Bruno — Robert Dunne’s murderer is back on the Elizabeth Bonaventure . He’s not going to come creeping in here in the night looking for you. Besides, this is the only decent inn in Plymouth — I’m not moving because you have a feeling in your waters, like the village wise woman.’

I laugh with him; he is probably right. But I can’t shake the notion that someone’s eyes are on us, and they are not friendly. When we come down to the tap-room for a last drink before bed, I pause in the doorway while Sidney finds a seat, scanning the tables, the other men ranged on benches. The inn is busy; anyone within twenty miles who has produce to sell will have heard that Drake’s fleet is at anchor here, and know that where there are ships, there is an insatiable demand for provisions. Two thousand five hundred hungry men altogether in the fleet, according to Knollys, and for every day the voyage is delayed, those men have appetites of all kinds that must be fed.

I push through the crowd while Sidney goes to the serving hatch, my eyes still sweeping the room for a seat, when a knot of people suddenly parts and I see a figure at the end of a wooden bench, in the shadows of a corner, close to the outer door, staring at me. I don’t have a clear sight of his face; he wears a shapeless hat pulled low, and a black travelling cloak, though the room is stuffy. All I see is that he is looking directly at me, but there is something about the shape of him, the way he hunches into his chest, trying not to be noticed, the way his eyes burn from under the brim of his hat, that echoes in my memory; I feel certain I have seen him before. I turn to Sidney to point the man out, but someone blocks my view and when I look back he is gone and the door is banging hard. Without waiting, I shove past a group of merchants, ignoring their aggrieved cries, and fling myself out into the inn yard, wheeling around for a sight of the stranger in his cloth hat.

The yard too is busy; horses, carts, stable lads, travellers dismounting. Boys cross back and forth hefting bales of straw or gentlemen’s panniers, sidestepping to avoid one another, their timing as precise as a dance. There is no sign of the man in black. Dodging the bustling people and the piles of dung, I chase out of the high gates and into the street, looking left and right. He is gone, and the light is fading. Clouds have crept in and banked up over the town while we were indoors. Sidney arrives beside me, a tankard in each hand, following my gaze with a perplexed frown.

‘What are you doing out here?’ he says.

‘That man in black, skulking in the corner. You saw him?’

‘I saw a good forty men in that room, at least half of them wearing black. What about him?’

I shake my head. ‘He was watching us. I am certain of it. When he realised that I had seen him, he ran.’ I hold my arms out to indicate the empty street. ‘But where to?’

‘Who would be watching us?’ Sidney follows my gaze up the street, sceptical. ‘No one knows we are here.’

‘I don’t know. Though I have seen him before, I am sure of it.’ But as I look around, watching the last few passers-by making their way home as night falls, I begin to doubt my conviction. I have made enemies during my time in England, but none of them could have known I would be here. The years I spent on the run in Italy, when I first fled my monastery, taught me what it meant to live always looking over your shoulder, watching every crowd for a hostile face, for the man with his hand tucked inside his cloak. I had thought in England I would be free of that, but the work I have done for Walsingham has meant that, even here, there are those who hate me enough to want to kill me. I take a deep breath; last year, when I thought I was being followed around London, I vowed I would not become one of those men who jumps at shadows and draws his knife each time a dog barks. But the man in black was real enough. I only wish I could place him.

‘Well, you’re supposed to be the memory expert,’ Sidney says, cheerfully. ‘If you can’t remember a face, what hope for the rest of us?’

‘I didn’t see his face. It was more — his demeanour.’

He gestures towards the inn with his ale. ‘For God’s sake, come in and have a drink. You can sleep with your dagger drawn if it makes you rest easier.’

He thinks, though he would not say so, that I have imagined the man in black, or at least imagined his interest in us. Perhaps he is right. We make our way back in silence. There is no sign of the man when we pass through the tap-room, though the same sense of unease lingers. Any doubts I had about the voyage have only been redoubled by the day’s events and the prospect of entangling ourselves in another murder, and one that is no business of ours. Sidney stays below in the tap-room, drinking with strangers; I lie on my bed, staring at the map of cracks in the ceiling plaster. Everywhere I turn, it seems, my life is in jeopardy, whether out to sea, back to France or even here in Plymouth. I do not sleep with my knife drawn, but I keep it beside my bed, and when Sidney rolls in later, he finds me sitting bolt upright the instant the latch creaks, one hand already reaching for it, and the sight makes him laugh.

I break my fast alone the next day; Sidney is ill-tempered after his late night, and lies moaning and tangling himself in sheets while I wash. He says he is not hungry. I take some bread and cheese and small beer at a long table with other travellers in the tap-room. My fellow guests regard me briefly with bleary eyes, before returning their attention to their food; I am by no means the only person with a foreign aspect here and I reflect that this is one advantage of a port town. The sky outside is dull, the grey-yellow of oyster flesh, and in the flat light my fears of last night shrink and lose their substance, until I can almost laugh at myself. I glance occasionally to the seat by the door where the man in black had been sitting, and wonder if I did imagine his malevolent stare after all.