Michael Morpurgo - My Friend Walter

‘Someone at the party told me we were related to Walter Raleigh.’ Aunty Ellie opened her mouth to speak, but Miss Soper got there first.

‘Indeed, we are, dear,’ said Miss Soper. ‘But thankfully only distantly, and on his wife’s side. He was a terrible rogue, that one. He was imprisoned here, you know.’

‘I know,’ I said.

‘And he was a traitor,’ said Miss Soper. ‘That’s why he had his head chopped off. We are much more proud of our Sir Francis Drake connection, aren’t we Ellie? The Sopers are related much more directly to the Drakes than the Raleighs. Now there was a man if there ever was one. Francis Drake.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Drake is in his hammock and a thousand miles away . . .’ and Miss Soper began to recite a poem in such a loud and impassioned way that the whole queue gathered around her to listen, and then clapped when she had finished. ‘I think, Ellie,’ she said, giggling with embarrassment, ‘I think I drank a teeny weeny bit too much wine at the party.’

‘I think so too,’ said Aunty Ellie, ‘But what does it matter? Oh, it’s so good to see you again, Winnie, after all this time. You haven’t changed a bit.’ And they hugged each other for the umpteenth time and I began to wish I was with someone else.

We saw the Crown Jewels and ooohed and aaahed with the others as we filed past all too quickly. There wasn’t time to stop and stare. There were always more people behind, pressing us on, and Beefeaters telling us to move along smartly. The Crown Jewels were splendid and regal enough but they looked just like the pictures I had seen of them, no better. I was impatient to get to the Bloody Tower to see where Walter Raleigh had been imprisoned, and it was already getting late. When we came out of the Crown Jewels Aunty Ellie said there’d only be time for a short visit to the Bloody Tower.

So I found myself at last inside the room where Walter Raleigh had spent thirteen years of his life. There wasn’t much to see really, just a four-poster bed, a chest and a tiny window beyond.

I walked up and down Raleigh’s Walk, a sort of rampart that overlooks the River Thames, and I wondered again about the old man no one else had seen at the party.

Storm clouds had gathered grey over the river and brought the evening on early. The river flowed black beyond the trees and people hurried past to be under cover before the rain came. I was alone and I was suddenly cold. Aunty Ellie and Miss Soper had gone on without me. They would wait for me outside by Tower Green, they said. They had found the Bloody Tower grim and damp, not good for her rheumatism, Aunty Ellie said. ‘Don’t you be too long,’ she’d told me. ‘We’ve got to get back.’

I was wondering why Walter Raleigh hadn’t just made a rope out of his sheets and let himself down over the wall. It’s what I would have done. I leaned over the parapet. ‘Too far to jump,’ said a voice from behind me. A tall figure was walking towards me, his black cloak whipping about him in the wind. He was limping, I noticed, and carried a silver-topped cane. ‘So,’ he said. ‘So you came. Allow me to present myself.’ He bowed low, sweeping his cloak across his legs. ‘I am, or I was, Sir Walter Raleigh. I am your humble servant, cousin Bess.’

IT’S NOT BREAKING ANY SECRETS IF I TELL YOU that I am easily frightened. Moths in my hair, spiders in my bath – they make my skin crawl with fear. So you can perhaps imagine what it was like for me to see this black-wrapped spectre limping towards me. This was no dressing gown on the back of the bedroom door, no flapping curtain in the moonlight, no creaking floorboard. This was the real thing. It spoke words. It walked steps. I would have run, but I found my legs would not move. I would have screamed, but that part of me would not work either. So I fainted instead, not deliberately but willingly enough. I felt my knees buckle and my back scraping the stonework behind me as I fell. I remember the thud as my head hit the ground. There was no pain, only blackness.

Someone was calling to me from far away. ‘Bess! Bess!’ There was a sharp, stinging smell in my nostrils and a taste in my throat that made me cough. The stone walls of a room came out of the darkness around me and there was a beamed ceiling above me, a red-draped four-poster bed around me, and the old man’s kindly face smiling down at me. I looked about me. I was in the Bloody Tower, in Sir Walter Raleigh’s room. I was lying on the four-poster bed and he was sitting beside me passing a foul-smelling bottle under my nose. I pushed it away and sat up. ‘Sweet cousin, believe me you have nothing to fear,’ he said. ‘I am, as you see, a ghost – a misfortune I have had to learn to live with. But certain it is that I mean you no harm. On the contrary, you are my dearest cousin, else I should not have appeared to you as I did.’

My voice found itself again. ‘You? You are Sir Walter Raleigh?’ He nodded. ‘You were at the party? It was you at the party?’ He nodded again.

‘Aye,’ he said. ‘I am Walter Raleigh, or what is left of him.’

‘But that Miss Soper, she said they cut off your head. How . . .?’

‘You mean how is it that you see me now in my undamaged state?’ He chuckled. ‘I cannot tell you, dearest Bess, for I do not know. Faith, it is as perplexing to be a ghost as it was to be alive. But in truth, I am glad to have my head again for it was always the best part of me and, though I say it myself, many considered it a passing handsome face even in old age. What say you, cousin?’ And he turned his head so that I could see his profile against the dim light of the window.

‘Bess used to think my nose was quite perfect – she said as much, and often.’

‘Bess?’

‘Bess Throckmorton. She was my dear, dear wife,’ he replied, suddenly sad. ‘No man ever had such a dear sweet wife and no man ever treated a wife so cruelly. I left her behind in this world with nothing. Nothing. It hurts to say it even now, but I left my whole family with nothing.’

‘But that’s my name too,’ I said. ‘I’m Bess Throckmorton.’

He nodded.

‘Indeed it is, cousin. Indeed it is, and as I told you, you are much like her, too. I miss her, I miss her to this day.’ His voice hardened with anger. ‘You see cousin, when they dubbed me traitor and cut off my head, they cut off my fortune too and reduced my Bess to poverty. My head they were welcome to – I had worn that long enough – but they stole my fortune and impoverished my family, and for that I shall never forgive them. One day I shall have my revenge. Mark me well, cousin. I shall be avenged.’

At that moment I heard footsteps outside the door. Walter Raleigh pulled me close to him and enveloped me in his cloak. He held me tight. ‘Be still, cousin,’ he whispered. ‘Inside my cloak they shall not see you.’

The Beefeater was the first to come in, followed by a troop of several tourists all hung about with cameras and anoraks. ‘Can’t think how the door came to be shut. Always left open,’ said the Beefeater. ‘Anyway, here it is, the Bloody Tower, so called because it was from here in the cold light of dawn that many an unfortunate prisoner was taken down below to Tower Green for his execution. It was here in this very place that Sir Walter Raleigh spent thirteen years of his natural life.’ He bent down, put his hands on his knees and spoke to the children. ‘You’ve heard of Walter Raleigh. He was the one that laid his cloak in a puddle so Queen Elizabeth could walk across without getting her feet all muddy.’

‘What did he want to do that for?’ said someone, but the Beefeater ignored it and went on. ‘And it was here he wrote his famous history of the world and his famous prayer the night before they cut off his head. Let me see now, how does it go? Let me see. Yes.’ He cleared his throat and put his hand on his chest: