The Roots of Betrayal (19 page)

At that moment, Luke entered the cabin with a wooden trencher piled with two large pieces of cut cold beef, a piece of cheese, and half a loaf of bread. He set it down on the table with a flagon of wine.

Clarenceux looked at the food and drink. He reached forward with his good hand. “Was Denisot a Catholic?” he asked.

Carew spat on the floor of the cabin. “The worst kind. He worked for the old queen, when she was dying. Rather than see Calais pass to a Protestant queen, he betrayed the town to the French.”

“Then if you want to find Denisot, you must help me find Rebecca Machyn.” Clarenceux reached for the beef. Dry though it was, it made his mouth sing. It tasted so very rich, so sweet. He started to chew and turned to Carew. “She is the one who knows where Denisot is.”

Carew lifted the flagon of wine from the table and took a draught, then handed it to Clarenceux. “Why not just let her go? It cannot be that important, this document.”

“It is. With it she could start a war. An unnecessary war.”

Carew shrugged. “Men fight. It is what we do. Sometimes we use swords, ships, and guns, and sometimes laws and money. I prefer ships and guns. More honest.”

Clarenceux paused before drinking. “But do you understand what I am saying? If Rebecca Machyn and Denisot are working together, she is the way to find him.”

“Then we will find her together. You know what she looks like, I know who escorted her from the dock. You can kill her or do what you want with her—but only after I have extracted the information I need.”

Clarenceux looked again at his hand under the reddening cloth. It was still bleeding. It still hurt. He stuffed the remainder of the piece of beef in his mouth and reached again for the salt water and rough cloth. He gritted his teeth as he washed the wound again, looking at the fresh blood swelling out of it. “How is it I find myself abducted by the one person who can take me to her?”

“She led me to you, in a way,” said Carew, breaking a piece from the loaf. He continued speaking as he chewed. “Your business about these Knights of the Round Table has nothing to do with me. I could not care less. All I want is Denisot.”

“Why?”

Carew swallowed. “Revenge.”

“For what?”

Carew held up a finger. “Now that is a long story, which I will tell you when…” He looked at the doorway where Hugh had returned, his arm in a bandage. “Mr. Clarenceux, may I present the quartermaster, my second-in-command, Hugh Dean. Hugh, I want you to forgive Mr. Clarenceux for drawing blood. He has suffered as much. A wound apiece, that's fair.”

Clarenceux did not think it fair, but nor did he wish to argue. He accepted Hugh's hand with his left hand and shook it. Carew did not offer a hand. He seemed to assume that he was already forgiven. Clarenceux tried to ignore him and returned to the business of staunching the blood.

“Come, Mr. Clarenceux,” Carew said suddenly. “I want you to meet the crew.”

Walsingham pushed the plate of sweetmeats across the table toward John Richards. They were in the writing chamber of his house near the Tower. Walsingham was seated. “What do you know about Raw Carew?”

Richards took a sweetmeat, standing before the table. He shrugged. “The same as most people, I suppose. He's a bastard by birth, the son of George Carew, who went down on the Mary Rose, and a Calais prostitute. He earned the name Raw when he was about fifteen, after he had a fight with another boy aboard the vessel on which they were sailing. The captain set the two of them ashore on a rock for a few days. Carew killed and ate his adversary. He turned to piracy after the fall of Calais. Over the last six years he has taken ship after ship and roamed between Africa and the New World. They say you can never catch him unawares—he is the Robin Hood of the High Seas to some people, a menace to others.”

Walsingham held up his hand. “That is common knowledge—but do you know anything practical about him, such as where his home port is, or whether he has a wife?”

“With respect, Mr. Walsingham, I would suggest that that is the wrong way to think of such a man. He has seduced or raped a great many women, so the idea of him coming home to a wife is an unreal one. As for a home port, I suspect he takes shelter wherever he can.”

Walsingham looked at Richards. “So you do not know anything about him either. It is astonishing. Everyone knows stories, stories, stories. No one knows anything of any real use about the man. He is indeed like Robin Hood: not just a hero and a villain, but a mystery too. If I did not have to concern myself with his actual deeds, I would wonder whether he really existed or was simply a product of the imagination of the poor. Can you tell me what he looks like?”

Richards shook his head. “I imagine him to have brown hair and a long beard, with a broad forehead, and to be taller than everyone else in his crew. Otherwise I have no idea. I cannot remember anyone ever describing him to me.”

“Much as I thought.” Walsingham stood up and started to walk around the room. He stopped at a window. “People invent an image of the man because they need to see him in their mind's eye when they tell stories about him. God forgive me for making a profane comparison but it is like people saying they know what Jesus looked like, even though none of us have seen Him. We talk about Him, artists paint Him, theologians expound on His acts—and over the years, we have drawn up a picture of Him that we adapt, trim, cut, and shade. So now we all dance happily around His image in our minds. That figure is instantly recognizable, for it fits our collective idea of the calm, strong-minded Son of God.” He touched an inlaid box with his fingers. “We so happily deceive ourselves.” He turned to face Richards. “We have done the same thing with Carew. A bearded giant of a man, hurling himself from the rigging of one ship onto that of the next, cutting the stays of a ship's mast while engaged in swordplay with Spaniards, Swedes, Frenchmen, or Englishmen, roaring a challenge to his crew to follow him. And yet I do not know anyone who has actually seen him. One thing I can tell you is that he is barely any taller than me.”

“Is that a problem?”

“I have two reports that he was in London yesterday. One in a small boat at Southwark, the other in Fleet Street, in the house of the traitor Clarenceux. Two of Cecil's men stumbled in on them and witnessed Clarenceux being abducted; they heard Clarenceux address Carew by name. I also have a report that he seized a ship four days ago at Southampton. A very good ship—the
Davy
—owned by a consortium of men, headed by the ex-keeper of her majesty's ships. What was she doing in Southampton Water and not in the Port of London, where she was meant to be? If Carew has plucked Clarenceux out of the city, then heaven only knows where he will take him. We may have put the Knights of the Round Table into custody, but the
real
enemy—Clarenceux—is being held by pirates and I am at a loss to know what to do next.”

“It is a very short time,” said Richards. “Even if Carew had the wind behind him all the way, and sailed all through the night, it would have taken him three days to reach London—it's more than two hundred and twenty nautical miles. If he came all that way and went straight to find Clarenceux at his house in Fleet Street, he had prior knowledge of Clarenceux being there.”

“It was no accidental meeting, that is clear.”

“With due respect, Mr. Walsingham, you are not seeing my point. If Clarenceux were desperate for rescue, many Londoners who sympathize with his cause could have helped him. But the person who did must have alerted Carew before he took the ship from Southampton. Someone planned several days ago to take Clarenceux somewhere, probably Clarenceux himself, and he needs to be transported there by ship. Otherwise, why wait for Carew?”

Walsingham lifted a hand, trying to continue Richard's line of thinking. “You mean, you think Clarenceux and Carew are working together?”

“Not if Carew abducted him, as you said. But the message must have been received by Carew four days ago, on the eleventh. And it must have been sent from someone in London a day or two before that, at the least. And you yourself said Clarenceux knew Carew's name.”

“Where is he going? Scotland, Spain, France? Clarenceux speaks the languages. He has the knowledge.”

Richards started to draw an imaginary map on the table surface with his finger. “The seas might be very wide, but with clear sightlines, a captain can patrol a thirty-mile-wide stretch of water with one ship. Admiral Lord Clinton can control the sea lanes north to Scotland by sailing just fifteen miles off the coast of East Anglia. Not many people will sail far out into the North Sea—certainly not more than thirty miles from land. As for Sir Peter Carew, he can patrol the Channel by placing two or three ships in the sixty-mile stretch between Cherbourg and the Isle of Wight.”

“Sir Peter takes his messages from which port?”

“Portsmouth.”

Walsingham nodded. “It's seventy miles to Portsmouth. A good messenger can do that in about fourteen hours, with a change of horses. It is now ten of the clock. He could be there tonight, and Sir Peter could receive a message as early as tomorrow. If the pirates are sailing to Spain, how long will it take them, with a fair wind?”

“Three weeks. Longer with a southwesterly.”

“And Scotland?”

“They could be in Edinburgh in ten days.”

Walsingham sat at his table. “I will write immediately. We will send urgent messages in Cecil's name to Admiral Clinton by way of Boston and Sir Peter Carew by way of Portsmouth.”

“What will you order?”

Walsingham looked up in surprise. “To arrest Clarenceux, at all costs.”

“And if the pirates fight back?”

“Well, all the more force will be required. I do not doubt Her Majesty would rather risk a few ships than her throne. If it meant us being rid of Raw Carew, so much the better.”

Carew looked westward with his hand shielding his eyes from the late-afternoon sun. The breeze was full in his face, ruffling his hair. “Furl the sails and drop anchor,” he said. They were on the sterncastle, three miles off the Kent coast. “We can't make headway against this.” He glanced at Clarenceux and Kahlu. “Are you hungry?”

Clarenceux's ribs felt sore, his clothes were rough, the wound in his hand stung terribly. Other parts of his body that had been beaten were still tender.

“Yes.”

Kahlu made a noise and gestured. He stood up and went down to the main deck.

“How did he lose his tongue?” Clarenceux asked.

Carew tied the whipstaff securely against the side of the sterncastle and sat down on an upturned keg. “Slavers. They cut out negroes' tongues for resisting branding and attempting to escape—women as well as men. They all fear that. But Kahlu was never going to stop trying to escape. They caught him once and cut out his tongue. That made him all the more determined. He escaped again. We were sailing in the
Santa
Teresa
off the coast of Africa when he appeared in the water. When we pulled him out and spoke to him, he seemed not to understand us. I pointed to myself and said ‘Carew.' He pointed to himself and tried to say the same thing. Skinner thought he was trying to say ‘Kahlu' but unable to say the ‘l' because he had lost his tongue, so we took that to be his name. Later we discovered that he thought that ‘Carew' was our word for ‘captain.' He was a chief of his tribe.”

“Why doesn't he return to his own people?” asked Clarenceux.

“Because they would kill him. They will have another chief by now, one who can talk.”

Carew looked down at the deck. He picked up a splinter of wood and started picking the grime out from beneath his fingernails. “That was four or five years ago now. He's a loyal man—the most loyal. A good fighter too. Always dependable. If I was going to sail around the world with just one other man, I would take him.”

Clarenceux squinted in the sunlight and looked up at a small bird perched on the rope nearby. “What about the others? Have they all been with you long?”

“Some are new recruits. Alice has been with me for many years—I knew her before the fall.”

“The fall?”

“Of Calais. She was a washerwoman's daughter in the house where…” His voice trailed off and he looked away for a moment, across the sea. “Old James Miller survived the wreck that claimed my father's life nineteen years ago. Most of the men aboard the
Mary
Rose
that day drowned—either they were below deck or they were caught in the ship's antiboarding nets. Miller kept his head and cut his way out through the nets before the ship started to go down.

“John Devenish and Hugh Dean—they were on a boat that was captured by Spaniards. I found them working in the galley when I, in turn, took command. They were the sole survivors of their original ship. Francis Bidder ran away from Oxford because he did not want to obey his father and become a priest. I thought he was a spy, so I locked him in the hold and threw him in the sea—just like I did to you. He's educated and has a good memory, which makes up for his quietness. He will remember anything you tell him and can do difficult sums very quickly. Luke—he was recruited by Alice in Dartmouth. She heard him playing the fiddle and took him to bed. When she sailed, so did he.”

Kahlu and James Miller came up to the sterncastle with a wooden bowl of meaty broth and some bread, one passing the bowl to the other at the top of the ladder. Skinner came along behind with a selection of wooden mugs, which were handed around. He filled a mug from the bowl and handed it to Clarenceux: lamb stewed with salt, onions and thickened with oats. Globules of fat were floating on the surface.

“What about you?” asked Clarenceux, watching the steam from his broth swirl away in the breeze. “You mentioned the fall of Calais. But what drove you to sea?”

Carew lifted the mug, sipped some of the hot stock, and wiped his mouth. He held up his hand, showing the enameled ring on his middle finger. It flashed in the sunlight. “This. It was the only thing I ever got from the Carew family. My father was captain of the Rysbank Tower at Calais twenty-five years ago. After his first wife died, he took a fancy to my mother, who was only about seventeen. She became pregnant with me. When she realized, fearing for her future, she asked him for some protection. He refused to acknowledge her child and told her not to presume to speak to him again. She stole this ring from him that day, determined that I should have some reminder of who my father was.”

Clarenceux looked at it, the three black lions on a golden background. “I have seen a similar one.”

“You met my father? Where?”

“I did meet him at the siege of Boulogne, but he must already have lost that ring by then. Your uncle, Sir Peter Carew, was wearing an identical one: Or,
three
lions
passant
sable
. I tend to notice these things. I suppose there was a third ring as well. Your grandfather, Sir William Carew, had them made for his three sons. The one given to your other uncle, Sir Philip, I daresay is somewhere still in Malta.”

“What is he doing there?”

“He was killed by the Turks.”

Carew nodded. “What else do you know about my family?”

Clarenceux thought back to his study and the manuscripts that he had considered recently in preparing for his visitation of Devon. “Mostly heraldic things, not many stories. Coats of arms, seats, lands, estates, and titles. Your family motto is
J'espère bien
—which means ‘I hope well' or ‘I hope for good.' Your ancestors had extensive lands in Ireland. They used to yell the name as a war cry in battle, ‘A Carew, a Carew.'”

Skinner spat a piece of gristle over the side of the sterncastle. “How is it you know more about his family than he does?”

“Because I am a herald. It is my business to know who is descended from whom, and which lines of which armigerous families have died out and how. If your ancestors had a coat of arms, then I would know about your family too.”

Skinner looked at him. “My father had just seven acres. He also had seven children. I didn't go to sea to seek my fortune. I went looking for food.”

“And look what fine fare a seafaring life has delivered,” said Miller, lifting his mug. “As for a fortune, you've seven acres less than your father.” He helped himself to some dregs from the bowl and looked at Clarenceux. “What about you then, herald? We're told you're looking for a woman who was on this boat. Are you in love with her?”

“He wants to kill her,” said Skinner.

Miller grinned. “That sounds like love to me.”

“She has taken something of mine. I want it back,” said Clarenceux.

“Worth being nailed to a table for?” said Miller, looking at him over the top of his mug.

“It might stop a war. It may prevent the persecution of Catholics in England. People must learn to tolerate one another's religious beliefs.”

None of the men said anything. Several shifted uneasily.

Carew broke the silence. “We have no talk of religion aboard this ship, Mr. Clarenceux. No talk of God or Jesus or the saints—no discussions of Catholics or Protestants. If you can't throw your religion over the side, keep it to yourself.”