Rory Clements: Prince

‘You say a Frenchman came before?’

‘Yes, very fine and elegant. A nobleman. Claimed Lucy as his slave.’

‘The Vidame de Chartres, Pregent de la Fin.’

‘Lucy told me all about him.’

‘Do you know where he has taken her?’

‘No.’ Her full, plump lips closed then parted, as if she would say something else, but then she closed them again and shook her head.

‘Beth? Tell me all you know.’

She sighed. ‘I did not want to come here, John. You have suffered grievously enough without hearing the concerns of others. But I did not know which way to turn. The constable would have laughed and said he could find plenty of trugs to take her place. The justice would have ordered me whipped at Bridewell for whoring.’

He squeezed her hands, then released them. ‘You did right to come to me. This is not to be tolerated in a free land. If the vidame has taken her, then I think he will try to remove her from England as quickly as he can. We must move with speed.’

Francis Mills could not sleep. He sat on a stone bench in his small back yard, drinking brandy and listening to the sounds of the summer night. Every so often his head slumped forward, hanging before him like the miserable vulture-bird encaged at the Tower aviary. He could not bear the thought of going indoors to his empty chamber. His wife was not home. She was with the grocer. The dream of the filleting knife and the slitting of their throats came in his waking hours now, not just in sleep.

Shakespeare’s hammering at the front door to his modest home was a welcome relief from the reverie.

‘Forgive me for the lateness of the hour, Frank, but I need your help.’

Mills allowed Shakespeare the benefit of a haunted smile. His face became more cadaverous by the day. ‘It is my pleasure, John,’ he said. ‘I was not going to sleep this night, not until she returns.’

Shakespeare did not need to ask who she was, nor did he wish to engage in talk of Mills’s blighted marriage bed. ‘I have come to find whether you have intelligence on the whereabouts of the Vidame de Chartres. Is he still at Essex House? Or is he with his father at the embassy?’

‘Neither, John. The French have acquired a country property in Surrey and he has fled there with his horses. Whores, too, I am sure. We have kept a close eye on this Frenchman in recent days…’

Shakespeare was tempted to say, Well I am glad you have been doing something of value, Frank, but instead merely nodded his head. ‘Good.’

‘A fair-sized old hall by the village of Molesey, a little way south of the Thames, not far from Hampton Court Palace. His father, the ambassador, has visited and Don Antonio Perez has travelled there also, but I know that he has now departed. No one else of note.’

‘Is this hall watched?’

‘Indeed, night and day. Sir Robert Cecil insists on it. Sawyer and Shoe are the men.’

‘And what activity has been noted apart from the arrival and departure of Perez and the Seigneur de Beauvoir-la-Nocle?’

‘Nothing but the comings and goings of everyday tradesmen.’

‘Thank you, Frank.’

‘We are on the same side, you know, John.’

‘So I am told.’

Shakespeare rode through the quiet early hours. Against his initial judgement he had Beth Evans with him. They talked little. The road was poor and pitted and the night was dark; they could demand no more of their mounts than a cautious walk. A twenty-mile journey that might have been completed in two to three hours in daylight took them six hours, so that they arrived at the village of Molesey soon after dawn.

He had taken Beth because it made sense. ‘How will you gain entry to the hall, John?’ she had said. ‘If it is a property of the French embassy, you will not be able to march up to the front door and demand that Lucy be produced. I could be of assistance. My… profession. I know how to coax a man with guile and caresses.’

‘What? You will go the the hall and offer your services? Come now, Beth.’

She had smiled the smile that had once won his heart in the meadows of Warwickshire. ‘Do not mock, sir. There may be ways. You have nothing to lose by taking me.’

It had been true enough. An uninvited intrusion into the house would be resented as much as an invasion of France. And what harm could there be in taking her? She could ride a farm horse well enough in the old days; she could probably manage a night’s ride now. She’ll have the thighs for it, he found himself thinking, and straightway reproached himself for the unkindness of the thought.

From the village, Shakespeare and Beth rode out westwards in the bright early morning light. In the distance, to the north, they saw the towers of Hampton Court, the palace built by Wolsey and purloined from him by Great Henry.

The Old Hall at Molesey was more modest but a goodly house nonetheless. Shakespeare reined in his mount half a mile away and considered his options. This had to be done with stealth. There would be guards here, as at the French embassy in Hackney. After a minute or two observing the house, he wheeled his horse’s head and they rode back to the village.

At the Silver Stag inn, Shakespeare ordered breakfast for Beth and himself: boiled eggs, gammon slices and small ale. He also asked for a loaf of manchet but had to make do with heavy black ryebread. They sat in a partitioned booth, at a table that still stank of last night’s ale.

As they ate, he asked her why she lived the life she did with all its perils. ‘Why do you not return to Warwickshire?’

‘I don’t care a pail of slurry for them and their parish ways, John. What would I do? Work my backbone bent over a loom or milking cows. If I had never come to London, I would never have tasted fine spices or sipped French wine.’

‘But you won’t be able to carry on this life many more years.’

Beth smiled that sweet smile that had once captured him. ‘Am I losing my looks, sir? Is that a way to speak to a lady?’

She could make him laugh still, which was something in this dark, empty time when it seemed his soul had been torn from his chest.

After eating, he left her and went in search of Jonas Shoe. He found him, asleep with a whore, in a small first-storey room of the inn. Shakespeare shook him awake.

‘Get up, Mr Shoe. You have slept long enough.’

The man was groggy, but managed to swing his thin, hairy legs from beneath the bedcovers. The woman at his side snored on unawares.

Shoe was one of Mills’s hirelings, a foot soldier willing to do anything demanded of him so long as he got booze, beef and a shilling a day. He was short, bald and undistinguished. You would not note him in the crowd at the bear-baiting or among a field full of harvesters, a fine attribute in a man whose work involved following others unseen.

‘I have done my hours of work, Mr Shakespeare. Sawyer’s been out on the late shift, watching since two in the morning.’

‘I don’t want Sawyer. I want you. Have you seen a black woman out at the Old Hall?’

‘A blackamoor? In Surrey?’ Shoe laughed, then coughed as though his lungs would come up through his windpipe. He reached for his pipe and tobacco.

‘Well, Mr Shoe, could such a woman have been taken there?’

‘No. Impossible. We have seen nothing and our watch is constant, night and day.’

‘But you are here, Mr Shoe. How can your watch be constant?’

‘Because Mr Sawyer is there.’

‘Can he watch back and front at the same time?’

‘There is but one approach road to the hall, a half-mile avenue to the front of the house. Anyone visiting the property comes that way.’

‘Are you saying that at night, when there is only one of you watching, that it would be impossible to smuggle someone in unseen through a postern door?’