Rory Clements - Revenger

Butler bowed. “As you wish, master.”

Rumsey Blade looked aghast. “This is intolerable. The bishop will not allow it. Not when he hears about your failure to beat the boys, your absences, your wife’s Papism.”

Shakespeare clapped the man on the shoulder and smiled broadly. “The bishop knows all that, Blade, and more. And I trust that in time he will come to support me wholly in this, my decision. So goodbye. And if you wish for advice, look for some new employment that does not involve the flogging of little boys.”

The gray mare was saddled. The groom held the reins while Shakespeare stepped on the mounting block and slid nimbly aboard. Below him, Rumsey Blade stood stone-faced in shock. Shakespeare took the reins from the ostler, then leaned over and whispered toward Blade, “And you may take your birches with you, sir, for they will no longer be used at the Margaret Woode School.”

B OLTFOOT COOPER SAT in a corner of The Hope, on the south bank of the Thames, directly facing the western edge of the Tower. He was dismayed.

In his younger days, this was one of the taverns he and his crewmates frequented. It gave a fair welcome, and offered beds at reasonable prices and soft flesh with a welcoming smile. Now the only girl in the taproom was scrawny and had a sullen aspect. The landlord scowled as he slopped the beer. Even the daub of the walls was breaking away from the wattles, and you could see sky through the thatch. It had been a similar story in a dozen or more other taverns he had visited. He was getting sick of such places. With Jane growing larger, he did not enjoy staying away from home.

But here in The Hope he had at least found Will Legge, an old companion from the three long years aboard the Golden Hind , when they sailed the world.

Legge, who had been a steward to Drake, could barely raise a cheery word of greeting. “Well, look at us. Reduced to misery. Left for dead after the great bloody Armada victory. Victory for who? Not the common mariner, Boltfoot.”

“You always did complain a great deal, Will Legge.”

“And did I not have cause? Did Drake not treat us like dogs the way he took and kept our gold, which he had promised to us? You, too, not just me. Twenty-nine ounces. I could be living in a fine manor house with that.”

Boltfoot could not argue the point, for he knew he spoke the truth, even if he exaggerated the value of the gold a little.

“Come, meet the fellows,” Legge said. “Hear what they have to say, if you don’t believe me.” He led Boltfoot across the taproom to join half a dozen long-bearded, weather-hardened men, all with wound scars. One was tall, well over six foot, and had a peg leg and a vivid red scar along his forearm; another had just one arm and no legs and was propped inside a crate; a third was blind in both eyes.

“These are the men as did for the Armada, Boltfoot. Look at them now in their rags. Many more are dead, starved on the shores where they were off-loaded when the fighting was done. And did the Queen whose skin we saved send food and gold to us in thanks? Did she buggery! They’d string me up if I said what I thought of that poxy old bag of rancid mutton.”

“You’ve said enough, Will Legge.”

“Report me, will you, to your fine friends on the Privy Council?”

“No, but you’ve said enough. Now, stow you while I stand these fellows ale and talk with them awhile.”

Boltfoot bought the group ale and beer, then asked them what they knew about the voyage that had taken the colonists to Roanoke.

“They was Puritans, so I heard,” the blind man said. “Drove the poor mariners Bedlamwards with their sermonizing and praying and damning the world to hellfire. It’s the poor savages of the New World I feels sorry for, having to listen to their zealous ranting and roaring the whole day long.”

“And what do you think might have happened to the colonists?”

“Disappeared up their own zealous arses, I reckon,” the blind man said.

Their theories went on and on, none of them surprising or original. “What I most want to know,” Boltfoot said, “is whether any of you ever heard tell of any mariners that were on the voyage that took them there. And if so, would you know where they are now? There would be gold in it for the man that could find me such a one.” It was an offer Boltfoot had made several times already that day without success.

“Gold?” the tall one said. “We don’t want gold, we want tobacco.”

“If you’ve got a name, tell me and I’ll give you a mark-and another when I’ve found him. You can buy your own sotweed.”

The seafarer turned down the corners of his mouth dismissively. “Can’t get it. All goes to the royal court. Mariners used to have as much as we liked; now it’s nowhere to be found.”

“I’ll get you tobacco,” Boltfoot said reluctantly. “I have some.”

“In that case I might just be able to help you, Mr. Cooper. But it would have to be a good half a pound.”

“Six ounces. Who is he-and where?”

The man shifted uneasily in his seat. He looked from one to another of his comrades. Then he thrust out his enormous grimy hand. Boltfoot felt most disgruntled as he fished into his jerkin pocket and brought out his prized pouch of tobacco. The landlord fetched scales and Boltfoot weighed out six ounces as if he were being forced to give up his vital organs. He looked disconsolately at the few strands of leaf that were left him. “Here.” He handed over the tobacco. “That’s best verinshe, that is, so this had better be good.”

The big mariner sniffed at it and his eyes brightened. He was about to pat some of it into his walnut-shell pipe, but Boltfoot stayed his hand. “You can smoke it when you’ve spoken-if I like what you say.”

“As you will. But none of this comes back to me if he’s unhappy. It’s dangerous business telling stuff like this. Don’t want anyone thinking I’ve got a loose tongue, not in days like these.”

“You’ve got the sotweed. Get on with it.”

The seafarer’s eyes flickered this way and that. Boltfoot could understand his fears; he had, himself, worried that there was something more to this, something sinister, and had done his utmost to avoid being followed or observed as he journeyed between these seamen’s haunts.

The man with the information sniffed again at the tobacco. “Very well,” he said. “His name was Davy. I recall him from the end of the year the Scots Queen was beheaded when all the yards and docks were getting in a frenzy about the Spanish fleet they said was coming. There was a taproom out at Blackwall, and he was in there telling the whole world of that voyage when they put them poor souls down in the New World. We was all giving him ale to keep him talking with his tales of warlike savages and mad-prattling Puritans. He was a caskwright, like you, Mr. Cooper.”

“What use is any of this to me? That was five years ago.”

“That’s the point. I saw him a few weeks since in Gully Hole and I did hail him. But it was as if he was deaf, for he just hurried on and paid me no heed.”

“How will that help me find him?”

“Because I saw where he came from, Mr. Cooper. And I reckon he’ll go back there again, being as how he’s a cooper like you and he was wearing his workman’s belly-cheat.” He patted a pinch of tobacco down hard into the walnut shell, put the straw sticking from it into the side of his mouth, begged a lighted taper from the landlord, and inhaled deeply of the fragrant smoke. He closed his eyes and sighed with the luxury of it. “Ah, that’ll keep King Pest at bay,” he said, basking in the pleasure.

“Well?” Boltfoot demanded irritably.