Blood Ties (3 page)

The dead hand of a queen. He had frozen there – his steady breaths, the sweet scent that had wafted away, the flickering of the lamps, all had lulled him. But the image of that hand roused him again. He had his duty to perform. All he had to do was find what should be there, and when it was found, he would make his report and return to the warmth of his lodgings, the night fading into another disagreeable task executed for the greater glory of God. His master would have to find a different method of coercion. His master was good at that.

The skull lay at the bottom of the chest, to his right, beside slippered feet. There were yet some shreds of hair, coiled up, its famed lustre long since faded. Someone had wrapped a cloak around the body, but the wool had unravelled and he was able to reach easily to the damask dress beneath, its material un-frayed by the years. Reaching up, he found the sleeve at the shoulder, traced it down to where the garment ended.

And there it was. A hand, or the bones of it, exactly where it should be. Clenched, no doubt a dying gesture, which the hardening that follows death had solidified. It was such relief to find it, his body flushing warm for the first time in an age. He was able to go back and say the strange report they had received from Rome was untrue. Thomas had no reason to love the woman within this barren chest. As an English Catholic, all the woes of his family had been caused, in a way, by the spirit once housed within these bones. But he’d seen the love she inspired in a man like Tucknell, the pain this exercise in duty was causing the warder. He was glad he would be able to end that pain, just by counting the fingers within the clenched fist.

As he reached down he noticed again that the skull was to his right. By the feet. So he was holding the right hand. The skull had confused him, because he knew, the rumours told him, he should be looking at the left. The relief he’d felt evaporated, coldness returned, squeezing his heart. Suddenly he knew. Yet knowing was not enough, he needed proof. His master would accept no less than the testament of his eyes. Leaning across, he pulled at the remains of cloak that clung there, throwing aside the clumps of wool, scrabbling at the heavy grey sleeve that was somehow rolled under the body. It was light, mere bones, yet it took an effort to pull it out. Finally, it gave with a crack, as if something had separated within the folds. Gasping, his eyes closed, he held the dress at the shoulder and ran his hand swiftly down the arm within the sleeve.

To nothing. There was nothing there. Where there should be a hand, a deformed, six-fingered hand, there was a void. He looked, though he had no need to open his eyes. His touch had told him the story, the prickle of shattered bone at the wrist digging into his questing fingers.

Somehow he forced the dress back down, the remains of cloak back over. Somehow, he reached behind him, to grasp, to slam the lid onto the arrow chest. The sound was accompanied by a sob he could not prevent, both noises echoing in the vault of the chamber.

When he opened his eyes again, feet were before him on the edge of the hole. Tucknell reached down, wordless, grasping the arm Thomas had thrust out as if to ward off evil. Pulled from the pit, his bad knee buckled again, and he slumped onto the nearest pew.

‘Done your duty, sir?’ Taking silence as his answer the warder went on. ‘Then maybe you will be so good as to let me tend to my Queen.’ He stepped down into the grave.

Thomas breathed deeply, again and again, till he gained the strength to rise and limp to the chapel door. In the entranceway he paused, looked back.

‘I needn’t tell you, Master Warder, of the silence we require of you.’ He used the ‘we’. Tucknell had seen the signature on the pass.

‘You needn’t. I have a wife and a family. You shall have my silence.’ Tucknell paused, looking down. ‘The silence of a grave.’

Thomas nodded. He thought of giving some word of comfort, some lessening of the threat he’d just made. It was still a weakness with him, wanting to be liked. But the threat was what mattered here, not his feelings.

As he turned to the door, he hardened his voice. ‘See that you do, my son.’

Tucknell, watching the cloaked figure meld with mist, spat out one word. ‘Jesuit!’

He didn’t think he’d been heard. He didn’t care, especially. Anyway, the word that had once been almost an insult was now becoming common usage for the black-robed brothers of the Society of Jesus. No, all he cared about now was the task before him.

‘Oh my lady,’ he whispered, looking straight into the eyeless sockets of the skull, seeing, though he knew it was impossible, a deeper darkness there, ‘will they never let you rest?’

Torchlight and candlelight bounced off shield, mitre and crown, off bridles held in bared teeth, couched lances, upraised swords. Every surface reflected flame, except for the floor, so that’s where Thomas looked, as was expected of him. The contrast to the mist-flecked darkness he’d come from left him little choice.

The man he’d come to see had commanded silence with a gesture. Thomas watched the man’s shadow on the floor, heard him move from chessboard to chessboard around the blazing chamber, heard the clack of piece taking piece, the soft slide of felt on polished wood as another knight or bishop slid into position. Or pawn, Thomas’s role, waiting to report. It was said, by those who understood such things, that the Fox had a mastery of pawns.

‘Do you play?’

The voice came so softly, Thomas was not sure he had heard. He looked up, blinking against the flames, and gazed into the only other darkness in the room. Behind the desk, the inevitable chessboard before it, a peaked night cap jutted. Within that shadow was the face of the Imperial Ambassador, Simon Renard. The Fox.

‘When I have leisure, my lord. And thus, not often.’

A hand emerged, very white, very thin, the nails five perfect half moons. It floated briefly over the board, withdrew.

‘Chess is not leisure. Chess is life.’

The hand came out again, striking like a cat. No, like a fox, his namesake. A knight joined his fellow on the desk’s surface, a queen glided forward.

‘Checkmate in three.’ A dry chuckle came, a rasp like sanded paper on wood. ‘I doubt the Prior of Ravenna will have seen that. He rarely looks three moves ahead.’

The beautiful fingers lingered on the queen, stroking it from crown to hip. Then the man behind the desk picked her up, leaning forward into the light. Thomas saw again the pale, long face, all planes and angles thrusting down, the eyelashes luxuriant as a veil over dark pits of eyes. His gaze met Thomas’s across the room, and the voice, when it came, had none of its former languor.

‘Well?’

‘My lord, as we suspected. It was not there.’

‘Ah!’ There was a catch to that one syllable, something almost voluptuous. ‘So your leaders have proved right once again. I do marvel at the Jesuitical control of information.’

‘We do what is necessary, my lord. For the glory of God.’

‘Of course. Always and only for the glory of God, eh?’

Thomas, hearing the mockery in the tone, breathed deeply. He had at least played enough chess to recognize so obvious a feint. The Society of Jesus had sent him to be this man’s right hand because the Imperial Ambassador was the real power behind Queen Mary’s throne. They and Renard wanted the same thing: England restored as a Catholic Kingdom and Imperially aligned. Compared to that great goal, the man’s irreverence was as nothing, anger mere indulgence. Besides, an angry response would delay what Thomas most wanted to hear.

‘What now, my lord?’

‘Now, Thomas?’ Renard leaned back into the shadows again. ‘Now you are destined to travel, with all despatch, to Rome. To the young man who provided us with the tantalizing information you have verified tonight. That youth, according to your superiors, knows more than just what was missing from the tomb. He knows where to find it.’

Suddenly, Renard was up, and across the room, his face thrust into Thomas’s, long fingers caressing him at the neck. It took an effort not to recoil from the contact, the breath that came, sickly, from between those thin lips. It was rumoured Renard suffered horribly in his stomach. It was why he never slept, spent all his nights awake among his chessboards, his spies’ reports, his intrigues.

‘Go,’ the whisper came on tainted breath, ‘fetch me back what was stolen. Fetch me that weapon of coercion. For the Glory of God. Go fetch me the six-fingered hand of Anne Boleyn.’

Thomas shuddered, even though he’d known it would come to this, shuddered as he recalled that honest warder’s face, the plea to let his Queen rest in her grave. Shuddered because he, Thomas, had violated her tomb and would violate it again with his mission now. So often, the glory of God led down a hard path.

Renard was back at the table. A scratch of a quill, a paper folded, wax melted, a signet placed to seal. Another and yet another followed.

‘This will get you across the sea to Antwerp. This is for the Cardinal, Carafa, in Rome. Only for his eyes, do you understand? Although I realize you will open and read it first.’

‘My lord, I—’

‘No protests, Thomas. I read your letters, as you read mine. Information is all that matters. Just make sure it is delivered. And this’ – he held up the final, smallest packet – ‘is for the Commander of the Imperial forces at Siena. It will get you, and our young informant, into the city.’

‘Siena?’ It was the first time Renard has taken him completely by surprise. ‘But Siena withstands a siege. They say it will last as long as the siege of Troy.’

Renard looked up, smiling, weighing that surprise, delighted that his move had caught the younger man off balance.

‘For once, Jesuit information is inferior to mine. Siena is no Troy. Siena … is about to fall.’

‘Fugger? Are you there?’

Jean Rombaud had barely spoken, yet the words bounced loudly off the earth walls, echoing down the narrow, twisting passages. He had lost his way at the last crossroads, blind as a worm, his yew stick thrust out before, fingers scraping on damp mud one of his only functioning senses. That, and the way the air got staler to his tongue as he moved deeper into the labyrinth. This was not his world and he cursed again the necessity for time spent within it. Cursed silently, for any words, he now understood, were dangerous.

He walked into flesh and cried out, but a hand from the darkness pressed over his mouth. No, not a hand, for no fingers splayed across his face. A stump. He had found the man he sought.

The stump moved away and a moment later a faint trace of light peeped from a gated lantern. In the depth of that blackness, it was like looking suddenly into the sun.

Squinting, he mouthed a word: ‘Fugger.’

The Fugger planted his lips next to Jean’s ear. ‘Rombaud. What brings you to my realm?’

The head turned away and Jean placed his own mouth to the other’s ear. ‘You know, Fugger. You sent word. Is it time?’

Instead of replying, the Fugger gestured with the lamp, raising it to a narrow earth shelf beside him. On it, sat a drum, a child’s toy. Scattered on its surface were pebbles. As Jean watched, they vibrated across the tight skin. Something was making them move. He pressed his ear to the earth wall, heard the faintest of scratchings, like mice scrabbling behind wood panels.

Jean turned back to the Fugger, lifted his eyebrows at the wall, mouthed, ‘How long?’

The man’s one hand opened and closed three times.

Jean leaned in. ‘Let us go back. I’ll send them down.’

‘I stay.’

‘Fugger—’

‘I stay. I know what’s best for my beauty.’ He patted the walls, smiling.

Jean shook his head. He had known the Fugger for nearly two decades, most of it above ground. And sometimes he forgot that when they first met, the German had lived in a cave beneath a gibbet for seven years. The man was right; no one knew a subterranean world better.

Giving him a warning look that clearly said ‘get out when your work is done’, Jean groped his way back, eventually emerging into the shocking brightness of a torch before a door. He rapped upon it with his knuckles, a staccato beat of three, two, three more. Bolts slid back, the door opened on an earth chamber. The next door admitted him to a chamber of stone, steps rising before him. He was out of the Fugger’s dark realm, under the bastion itself now. Back within the walls of Siena.

He passed through the entrance to the countermine gallery and through the archway before him. There, gathered in the lower casemate of the Porta San Viene, leaning on its guns, spread out around its curving walls, were twenty men and one woman.

It was his wife’s eyes he sought. He nodded. Beck held the look for a moment, then looked away. She always looked away first, these days.

Haakon was next, as usual. His oldest comrade straddled a gun carriage, his huge legs resting either side on its wheels. Like Jean, Haakon had lost everything when the forces of Florence, backed by the Emperor’s armies, invaded the terrritory of their old rivals, the Republic of Siena. Their farms and vineyards and the Comet Inn, their home, were among the first to be pillaged and nearly destroyed. Only if Siena won this war would they get their land back.

Yet, unlike Jean, who had seen enough bloodshed for three lifetimes, Haakon did not fight only for a cause. The Norse ex-mercenary fought mainly, as always, for the pure pleasure of it.

‘Well?’ As he rose eagerly from the gun, a shadow rose behind him, leaner, a little taller, with as thick a beard, and eyes just as blue. Erik, Haakon’s son, clutched the first of his twin scimitars in one hand, the whetstone in his other. Before a fight, he would go through the same ritual, sharpening each of them in turn, alternating, long beyond the perfect edge was obtained. Only when the actual moment of battle came would they be sheathed in the double harness on his back. Jean remembered well the young man’s inspiration, the janissary Januc and his pure mastery of the weapon. Though he had died before the lad was born, the tales of Januc’s valour had inspired Erik. Jean had never been able to decide who was the more deft with the curving blade.

‘It is time. The Fugger says fifteen minutes, at most.’