Raleigh's Page (6 page)

The doctor smiled as he reached out and hugged the boy goodbye.

On the boat downriver, Andrew opened the note:

“For the boy’s sake I lend it. He will go. You will not.”

11

T
HE
C
ONJUROR

That evening, Andrew stayed up with Mr. Harriot through two rounds of candles, copying the doctor’s map. The stink of candle smoke left him queasy.

“This is excellent,” Mr. Harriot muttered as they worked. “The doctor has a nose for mariners’ secrets like a fox’s for rabbits.”

Mr. Harriot kept rubbing his hands together. He noticed Andrew watching.

“They’re always cold,” he said. “Winter and summer, whatever I do. I sleep in mittens.”

The next morning, Andrew ate nothing. He wrapped the map tight and took the ferry back up to Mortlake.

There was a strange hush about the doctor’s place. His garden was trampled. As Andrew turned in at the gate, he saw books and papers strewn in the yard. The door hung on a hinge.

He called out.

No one answered.

The boy’s heart began to pound.

Finally the doctor’s serving man appeared in the doorway, ghastly pale, his eyes bright and darting like a cornered rat’s.

“He’s gone,” he whispered. “People came in the night.”

“People?” Andrew asked. He felt a chill.

“They called him a conjuror. ‘He casts spells to make us sick,’ they screamed, ‘our animals too!’”

Andrew looked around.

“Who? Was it his neighbors?”

“I couldn’t see,” the man blubbered. “It was a mob. I ran to the cellar and hid.”

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know. He ran off in the dark when he heard them coming.”

Andrew kept the map. As he left, he spied something black in the brush by the broken gate. It was the doctor’s skullcap. He put it in his pocket.

Back at Durham House, he and Mr. Harriot took the map to Mr. Raleigh.

“He’d been warned,” Mr. Raleigh said, fingering the black cap. “We’d heard that Spanish agents were stirring up his neighbors. That’s why I sent you when I did.”

“Where is he?” Andrew asked.

“Safe,” Mr. Raleigh replied as he turned and put the skullcap in the drawer beneath his writing board.

Andrew started to leave.

“Wait!” Mr. Raleigh called as he turned back. “Be careful what you write home. Use this ink our friend the doctor prepared,” he said, reaching for a stoppered jug.

“We call it onion juice. It isn’t, but that’s what it smells like. Once the liquid dries, your writing will be invisible until the letter is gently rinsed with the doctor’s tincture and held before a flame. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir,” the boy replied, “but how will I get the tincture to my family so they can read what I send?”

“Leave that to me,” Mr. Raleigh replied, opening his eyes wide.

12

W
ILLIAM

Peter always fell asleep first. The two younger boys got in the habit of whispering back and forth in the dark, glad to have a friend to share things with.

One moonlit night they snuck out of the dormitory and crept downstairs. No one was up. They began a game of silent hide-and-seek, faster and faster, choking back cries and giggles as they swerved around chairs and hid behind and under, until William slipped on a rug and crashed into a table. A huge china jug went over. That brought James. He caught sight of Andrew’s back as the boys scurried upstairs.

A cat got blamed for the jug. For days William’s arm was so sore he couldn’t hold his hawk.

A few nights later, Andrew couldn’t sleep for being hungry. The boys glided down to the cellar kitchen. Andrew stirred up the fire to look around. Again their noise brought James. They slipped into the larder as he came in. They’d left the bread box open. Next morning James told the cook she had a clever mouse, perhaps a pair. “Too small for rats, I’d say,” he told her, raising his great eyebrows and pretending to peer around the door.

“You let them mice of yours know I’ll be leaving for them under a plate,” she chuckled. “No need they should gnaw stale bread!”

Thereafter she left out second suppers for the boys—plate-scrapings and remainders of the best things served at Mr. Raleigh’s high table.

They had less and less to do with Peter. William would walk with him to Whitehall Palace in the morning for their hawking and jousting lessons, but all his free time now he spent with Andrew.

One afternoon Andrew took William to see the new shoots in the garden plot Pena had given him.

“Spanish seeds and roots,” he explained. “We don’t know what they are, so Pena says when they’re grown, we’ll have to try eating them—leaves, roots, fruits, everything—to see if they’re food. He says we’ll have to be careful, because some may be medicines to loosen the bowel or cure fever, and one root the Spaniards call potato, eaten green, can kill.”

“Make a stew for Peter!” William whispered as they made faces and put their hands to their throats as if they were gagging and throwing up.

“What are the bowls for?” William asked, pointing to the dishes set along the path.

“Flat beer to trap slugs,” Andrew explained.

“Phew!” gasped William, looking close. “Serve that to Peter for his drink!”

William showed Andrew the heavy embroidered glove he wore for hawking and the delicate velvet hood worked with silver his bird wore.

“Do you want to hear how I whistle him back?”

Andrew nodded.

William scrunched up his mouth and blew a shrill piercing call that made Andrew wince.

“It’s like his own,” William said.

The glove was scored deep with claw marks.

There was a tiny leash with a clip that went on the bird’s leg. “It’s called a jess,” he explained as he packed away his gear.

“Why do you do it?” Andrew asked. “Do you eat what it catches?”

“No,” William laughed. “You think like a farmer—everything for food! It’s for sport. It’s something courtiers do, like dancing.”

The two boys sang together and played duets, talked about home and their schools before and what they hoped to do when they finished Mr. Raleigh’s service.

“Mr. Harriot told us before you came that you’re for America,” William said. “That’s why Peter hates you. Mr. Raleigh is more for America than Ireland now. Peter’s for Ireland. His father has the Queen’s grant to thousands of acres there, but the Irish natives won’t work it because they say it belongs to them. They kill the English he brings over. If he can’t get tenants to settle and work his land, he’ll lose it. Peter wants to go make those natives submit.”

“What will you do?” Andrew asked.

“I’m training to lead soldiers.”

“And later?”

William shrugged and rubbed his head. Mistress Witkens had just cut his hair. It was like rubbing a black bristle brush.

“What about you? What do you want to do?” William asked.

“Set up a trading station and make a plantation in America,” Andrew answered.

“Out there? Away from everybody, like an exile? Why?”

“To make my fortune on my own land, free of landlords, sheriffs, and taxes!” Andrew exclaimed.

“Spoken like a farmer!” William laughed. “You’ll make your fortune, sure enough, but I’d miss London too much.”

Andrew wanted to add the part about making a place safe for Catholics like Rebecca and her family, but he held back. His father had warned him to keep those things to himself.

William was good at drawing figures and faces. He’d snatch bits of cold charcoal from the fire to scratch a likeness of whomever he was looking at—Andrew, Peter, Mr. Raleigh, Pena, Mistress Witkens, James, Mr. Harriot. He got them all. Folks liked to be drawn. They’d pose until he’d finished, then they’d ask for their picture even though he’d scribbled it on a scrap of paper or some stiffened cloth he’d got from Mistress Witkens.

“How did you learn to do that?” Andrew asked.

“My mother taught me as she taught me to write my letters. I’ll teach you.”

Andrew’s sketches were rough at first, but William made him practice. “Look and look again,” he insisted. “Don’t be afraid to smudge out what isn’t right.” For days he had Andrew draw circles and ovals to learn the shapes of heads and where ears, eyes, and mouths go. “For everyone it’s the same,” he said. “The sizes of heads differ, but where eyes are, the ears, the nose—that’s the same.”

Peter teased that the two of them would end up common face-painters.

“Let’s make masks,” Andrew suggested one afternoon. “We made masks for plays at my school—pictures we held on sticks in front of our faces for pantomimes. We did stories about the Romans and King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. Once we made masks of the big figures in town—the Lord Mayor, the High Sheriff, the Bishop—and paraded around for the other boys at school.

“We could do a play for Durham House—the fable of the fox and crow. Can you make the face of a fox and the figure of a crow?”

“Sure!” said William.

He drew a fierce crow with a bright black-dot eye on a board Andrew found by the river. Crow black was easy enough, but fox red? How to get that color?

Andrew went to Pena. Pena took him to the kitchen, where they got a pot and mixed pig’s blood with flour and beet juice.

They rehearsed. Neither liked playing the fox, so they asked Peter if he would do it.

Peter wrinkled his nose and made sneering remarks about players and low-class street theater, but finally the chance to be the clever hero took him.

One night after supper, they gave their show in the refectory. Everyone agreed Peter made a good fox, sly and wheedling as he tricked the cheese from William the crow.

“What if you painted almost-likenesses of the Queen’s head and Mr. Raleigh’s?” Andrew asked that night as they whispered together.

“Why ‘almost’? I can do them to the life,” William protested.

“No. Make them just close enough to leave folks unsure.”

William gave Mr. Raleigh a feathered hat and pointed beard. The Queen got a drooping nose under a flaming red wig. They hinged her chin so she could open her mouth.

Andrew held the Raleigh mask before his face and said Mr. Raleigh’s lines as William pantomimed the Queen.

Mistress Witkens helped them with costumes, a length of fancy cloth for the Queen’s gown, blue velvet pants and a yellow shirt for Raleigh. They made props. The cheese became a sack of gold and a long flapping title deed with ribbons. They also wrote lines for Mr. Raleigh’s flattering.

“Madam, I hear it said at Court and even in the street that you are as kind as you are wise.”

The Queen shuffled and swished her gown as she nodded, the sack of treasure and the deed bobbing in her jaws.

“Truly, madam, it is reported that your realm, rich and glorious as it is, is but a faint reflection of your beauty.”

She tittered and bent her head in modesty as she fluttered her hands.

“And the lovely grace of your dancing, madam—it is the talk of every Court in the world and the envy of all women of quality.”

The Queen jigged a little and did an awkward turn, nearly falling.

“But those envious women hiss to each other that your voice is sour and cracking. Surely, madam, your voice is a fair match to your radiant face?”

At that, the Queen opened her mouth to sing and dropped her treasures.

“Oh, madam, I am honored,” said Raleigh, bowing low as he snatched them up, wrapping the title deed around his head like a crown and tucking the sack in his pants.

“Give it back!” the Queen yawped as she chased after Raleigh.

“Too late, madam,” he called over his shoulder. “I’m off for America!”

They tried out their play for Pena in the garden shed. They could hardly act for snickering at their cleverness. Pena’s grim face stifled their giggles.

“It is treason to mock the Queen,” he said when they’d finished. “Men are locked away in the Tower for less. Worse, you insult the man who helps you. Your joke is like the taunts made behind his back at Court. Shame!”

Pena took the masks and broke them up.

“I do this as a favor,” he said as he left with the pieces.

There was no whispering between the boys that night.

13

A
NDREW’S
L
ETTER
H
OME

Durham House

30 June, 1584

Dear Family and Rebecca,

I am well. I miss you all, and the dogs. I haven’t written before because I spend so much time writing for Mr. Raleigh, my hand cramps. My guts stopped up at first, but Pena, the gardener I study under, made me eat leaves and now I am better. He teaches me farming. We try Spanish seeds, but we have nothing ripe yet. Pena says this is because the English sun is not so hot as the sun in New Spain. He remembers Mr. Raleigh’s promise that if we grow anything of profit we will send seeds to you for Stillwell. I have my own plot. One thing I grow is a thick-leaved plant with sap that eases burns. Mr. Raleigh’s scientific man burned himself with gunpowder, face and hands, and the sap of that plant healed him.

Pena puts frogs in the cistern and makes me watch them swim. He says he will teach me to swim in the river. I don’t want to. The water is cold. Everything is in it. When the tide is out it smells. Nobody else swims here, but he does every day.

He laughs and makes up songs. He is never quiet. He works the soil with a hoe that has rings and bells on the handle. “Stink, stank, reek, rank/Rats along the riverbank,” he sings as he digs. He sings as loud as he can. He took me for a walk along the river. We saw a Turk walking on a rope and a bear with a ring through its nose dancing on its hind feet as its keeper played a flute and beat a drum. These things are free, but some people toss pennies for them. Pena tossed a halfpenny in the Turk’s hat.

My best friend here is William. We do plays together. He goes to Court for hawking and jousting. We made a play about people at Court, but Pena said it was mean. I don’t like the tall page Father met named Peter. He acts highborn, but William says he isn’t really better than we are.

I copy things for Mr. Raleigh until my hand hurts. He made me write extracts from his book about plants in New Spain. It says cacao and tobacco chewed together make the Indians so strong they can travel for days without food or water. Mr. Raleigh says he will make the experiment on himself. He takes no physician’s word for anything!

He praised my extract of the Spaniard’s book. When I told William at dinner, Peter yelled, “Good dog!” and made to pat me on the head. I barked and made him jump, so people laughed as much at him as me.

Sometimes I work with Mr. Harriot, studying how the natives live in America. Mr. Harriot will go there to write a report. He talks about America as much as Tremayne does.

Sundays, we go to services at St. Paul’s Cathedral. Mr. Harriot took me down below, where sixteen men work the bellows that blow through four hundred bronze pipes. The smallest is the size of my hand. The tallest goes up to the roof. The low notes go so deep the floor shakes. The high ones sound like birds. Last week the Queen’s preacher preached for two hours. A man goes up and down the aisles with a long black stick, poking those who doze off. He pokes a lot, men and women.

Yesterday William and I walked to the broad place in the river where ships dock. It is called the Pool. A sailor said some of the ships we saw were from India, Russia, and Constantinople. We passed the Tower. William says there is a deep pit there for the priests they catch. On London Bridge Tower the heads of traitors are stuck on pikes. There are dozens, like rotted squashes. I did not know we had so many traitors.

This halfpenny is for Rebecca for a hair ribbon. Mr. Raleigh’s geographer friend gave it to me. He’s called a dream traveler. I went to him to borrow a map. He saw my future in his magic glass, but I can’t tell it, because Mr. Harriot said repeating it to anyone would be like pouring vinegar into milk: all the good will sour.

I think of every one of you every day and say my prayers.

Love,
Andrew