Her Last Assassin (48 page)

‘I am glad he did not.’

‘Oh, he would never have tried it.’ Goodluck shook his head. ‘I spent some time observing Lopez, keeping an eye on him for Lord Essex, and the man may be a fool, and perhaps even a coward, but he is no murderer. His nerve failed him when he should have taken these bribes to the Queen in the first place. And for this failure of nerve, Senhor Lopez will die a traitor’s death on the gallows tree, his neck wrung and his innards dragged out for all the world to see.’

‘Yet if he refuses to confess, and if they have so little evidence against him as you claim, then surely his guilt cannot be proved.’

‘Trust me, Julius. Once a man is in prison, and the torturer on hand, it is only a matter of time before he confesses to whatever nonsense they put before him, from having sex with a sow to conspiring to poison the Queen of England herself.’

‘Is it so bad, the torture?’

His brother had such a marvellous gift for understatement. ‘The torture chamber is a worse place than you could possibly imagine, Brother. Few men do not break down when faced with the physical and mental torments that Master Topcliffe can supply. Only the very bravest and most principled have ever withstood his … persuasions.’

‘But if a man is innocent …’

‘Innocence is an irrelevance in the Tower of London. That is the first lesson you learn there.’

Goodluck recalled how he had wept like a child under Topcliffe’s skilful ministrations. He shuddered, reminded of Lucy’s moans and cries as her time finally came upon her. Birth was like torture, he thought. And he could not help his wife while she suffered. He could only sit and wait, as he had done with Lucy’s mother so many years ago, her rounded body writhing in the agonies of childbirth.

The night of Lucy’s birth would never leave him. Wandering home through filthy backstreets after a performance at the Cross Keys Inn, Goodluck had come across an African woman terrified out of her wits. She was fleeing from a man, no doubt her master, and her back still bore the marks of his whip.

Goodluck had concealed her in a doorway while the man passed, then taken the woman home with him, though he could clearly see she was heavy with child.

Later, he had paid for a simple burial when she died in childbirth, and taken her baby, crying and wrapped in swaddling, to be brought up by his sister Marian. He had not even known the dead woman’s name, for although she had tried to tell her story in faltering Spanish – how she and her husband had been stolen by slavers from their village in Africa, where her husband had been the leader of his tribe, a prince among his people – she had never told him her name, nor that of her husband. All he knew was that her husband had died on the voyage to Europe, and that she had run away from her new master on arrival in England, not wanting her child to be born into slavery.

As the child’s self-appointed guardian, Goodluck had instructed his sister to baptize the infant with the English name of Lucy Morgan, despite her black skin and African origins, and had paid for her upbringing.

Now Lucy was his wife, and about to bring forth their own baby. He only prayed to God she would survive this birth, not die as her mother had done.

‘Besides,’ he struggled on, hearing voices from above, the sound of the servants running up and down the stairs, ‘Senhor Lopez has grown old. He will be more accustomed to the luxury of a feather mattress than the cold hard floor of his cell in the Tower. First he will be threatened with the arrest and torture of his son, and perhaps his wife too, if Lord Essex is heartless enough to suggest it. If the doctor still refuses to confess to the crimes they put before him, his body will be stretched and broken on the rack, his flesh burned away with hot irons, his fingernails torn out—’

‘God’s death, enough!’ Julius waved a horrified hand at him. ‘I believe you, Little Brother. Pray spare me the details.’

Being a spy meant noticing the details, Goodluck thought wryly. But he fell silent. Topcliffe’s cell was not a place he wished to think about here in Oxfordshire, with the snow lying on the ground and a robin redbreast perched on the tree stump outside his window.

‘The manor is looking rather better than it was last month,’ Julius commented. ‘When will it be finished, do you think?’

‘Not before the summer, alas. But the repairs are going more quickly than I had expected. We have four rooms habitable now, and the kitchens are in good shape.’ Goodluck glanced at him. ‘You do not regret accepting the Queen’s decision to restore the estate to me, rather than you?’

‘You are welcome to it, Faithful.’ His brother indicated his bad leg, for he was still crippled since the fall from his horse. ‘I can barely walk half a mile without exhaustion, and have no thought of living in such a large manor. My little farmhouse is enough for me. Besides, I wish you joy of the vast costs and endless hammering that it will take to set this ancient barn to rights.’

Suddenly young Sky was at the door. ‘Master Goodluck, sir?’

The boy had stayed on to serve him when he moved back into the manor, and very useful he had been too, suggesting the best – and least costly – local craftsmen to make repairs to the property so that they could at least inhabit a few of the rooms. Now he seemed one of the family rather than another servant.

‘Yes, Sky, what is it?’

‘You are wanted upstairs, sir.’

Goodluck thanked him, and took the stairs two at a time. The door to their bedchamber was open, and from within he could hear the quiet sounds of women talking.

No sound from Lucy. No crying babe either.

His heart clenched in sudden fear, Goodluck pushed open the door and trod heavily to the bedside.

‘My love?’

Lucy was lying still against the pillows, her black springy head of hair fanned out. For a terrible moment he thought she was dead. Then she opened her eyes and looked up at him, weary but smiling.

‘You have a son,’ she whispered.

‘A son?’

Agnes came to his side, bearing a small bundle wrapped tightly in white cloth. Cathy stood behind her, folding up squares of muslin, a broad smile on her face.

For a moment, Goodluck’s chest tightened and he could not breathe. The child was perfect. Dark skin, dark thatch of hair, dark eyes staring up at him as though the child knew who he was.

‘He is miraculous,’ Goodluck managed, suddenly finding tears in his eyes. Not wishing the other women in the room to see them, he leaned down and kissed Lucy on the forehead. ‘I am proud of you, my love. You are the best wife any man could have.’

‘What shall we call him?’

Goodluck hesitated. ‘Christopher,’ he said in the end, and stroked the baby’s cheek. ‘After a brave man who died in the service of his queen.’

Christopher Marlowe.

Whatever mistakes Kit had made that led to his death, Goodluck did not believe him disloyal to his country. Kit Marlowe had been betrayed and murdered by his friends, the other spies working for Essex who had been at Deptford that day. Perhaps on Essex’s own orders, so as to prevent some dangerous information reaching the Queen. Perhaps the earl was planning to seize the throne for himself one day, and Marlowe had been unfortunate enough to discover some incriminating evidence that had necessitated his death.

He recalled the strange conversation he had overheard between Marlowe and a servant in the palace corridors. Had he been the same man who later tried to stab the Queen? A man hired to kill her in truth, or hired to fail so that Essex could lend credence to his position as spymaster.

Reluctantly, he gave up the puzzle. It was impossible for him to get at the full truth. Some things were simply unknowable.

Goodluck admired the curl of his son’s lashes, and how immaculately his small mouth yawned.

Although Lucy did not seem to object to the name Christopher, she studied him thoughtfully as he played with the babe. ‘I hope you do not intend to make a spy of our son when he grows up.’

He grinned. ‘Come, my love, where’s the harm in teaching little Christopher a few tricks of the trade? I taught you some things you found useful, did I not?’

‘It’s over though, isn’t it? All that business?’ Lucy would not let it go. ‘You won’t go back to spying?’

‘Not for five thousand crowns,’ Goodluck promised her.

Author’s Note

Queen Elizabeth, the Spanish Armada, and the Lopez Plot

In the summer of 1588, England was braced for imminent invasion by the hated Spanish. The Battle of Gravelines, a port in the Spanish-held Netherlands – near where we find my fictional spy Master Goodluck working under cover at the opening of this book – had seen many Spanish vessels destroyed or routed, but more were expected any day. Troops were stationed at Tilbury in Essex, at a makeshift camp overlooking the River Thames, a stretch the Spanish fleet were expected to navigate in their push for the all-important port of London. To strengthen her people’s resolve at this desperate time, Elizabeth made the unusual – and highly dangerous – decision to walk among her troops with only a light guard of honour. She famously gave these troops a stirring speech, which in the end was not needed, for the bulk of the Spanish fleet was broken up by storms and its remainder routed. But her words served to mark her out in history as a strong and determined leader: ‘I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king – and of a King of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm.’

Not all Elizabeth’s subjects were pleased to have a strong Protestant Queen on the throne, however. The Catholic plots she had faced throughout her reign rose to the height of religious zeal during this threat of the Armada, and that previously loyal and trusted subjects were among the plotters must have infuriated Elizabeth. One of these was Sir William Stanley, a closet Catholic whose long and faithful service to the Queen in Ireland was forgotten when he abruptly turned traitor and handed the English-held port of Deventer over to the Spanish in 1587. His goal? To oust the Protestant Queen from the throne and install a Catholic monarch there instead. Stanley’s fanatical hatred of Elizabeth in the years following the failure of the Armada led even the Spanish to hold him in contempt. But it seems likely that Sir William Stanley would have continued to engineer plots against the Queen’s life from his exile abroad, such as the Portuguese plot in this book. Nor were such efforts always in vain. Henry III of France was assassinated by a fanatical Catholic monk in 1589 – though not as early in the year as I have described here.

During his colourful life, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, had always been at the Queen’s side to protect her from such fanatics, having enjoyed the position of court favourite from early in her reign. There is no doubt in my mind that Elizabeth and Robert were in love. But as the years passed, their love had become as much about friendship and mutual understanding as physical passion. When Robert died unexpectedly of fever, only a short time after the rout of the Spanish Armada, Elizabeth was heartbroken. Accounts suggest that she locked herself in her chamber for days, her grief so violent that in the end Lord Burghley ordered the door to be broken down. After Elizabeth herself died, Robert’s final note to her before his death was found in a casket beside her bed, marked ‘His last letter’ in her own handwriting. It is perhaps no surprise then that his stepson Robert Devereux, whose looks were oddly similar to Leicester’s, was soon court favourite in his place, and rapidly became one of the most influential noblemen in England.

The Portuguese plot against Queen Elizabeth during the post-Armada years was tortuous in its complexity: the version I present here has been simplified, the conspiracy scaled down. It is possible that the plot was at least partially inflated by the Earl of Essex, determined to prove himself a worthy successor to Walsingham, but the number of players involved makes it unlikely that none of it was true. Accounts vary, but the gold and diamond ring seems to have come into play slightly later than I mention it, via a young Portuguese spy named Tinoco, who had been working in Brussels in the pay of the Spanish at the time of his visit to England. Following information received by Essex’s sources, Tinoco was arrested on arrival at Dover and questioned at Essex House.

Perhaps in return for clemency, the Portuguese spy claimed that a ring from the hand of King Philip of Spain himself had been sent to Lopez, possibly as a bribe or incentive to poison the Queen. When questioned, Lopez admitted to possessing the ring: this admission alone appears to have sealed his fate, even though it is by no means certain that he would in fact have murdered his mistress of many years. After all, as one of the Queen’s senior physicians, he would have had ample opportunity to poison her, yet never did so. Curiously, Lopez claimed that the ring had been legitimately intended for Elizabeth as a gift from Philip some years before, that the late Sir Francis Walsingham had known of its existence – and that Elizabeth herself had refused to accept his gift and told Lopez to keep the ring for himself. Personally, I believe Lopez was a scapegoat for Essex’s hatred of the Spanish, and was sacrificed to his driving ambition.

It must have worked, too, for following the shocking discovery of this ‘Lopez plot’, Essex’s influence at court grew more powerful than ever.

Shakespeare, Southampton, and Lucy Morgan

We have no definitive record of Shakespeare’s sexuality. We know that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon was married to Anne Hathaway, had three children by her, and infamously left his ‘second-best’ bed to her in his will – an insult or a sentimental gesture? But that is about all we know as regards his love life. If we include his body of work as a resource, his love sonnets do seem to suggest sexual intimacy with men as well as women, though whether this was reflected in Shakespeare’s personal life is open to conjecture. But in my story, Shakespeare falls in love with both his ‘Dark Lady’ of the sonnets – here, Lucy Morgan – and his wealthy patron, the Earl of Southampton, who by all accounts was a handsome young man just out of university.