The Devil

CHAPTER TWELVE

An arc of fire blazed across the night-dark fields surrounding London. Spirals of gold sparks, whipped up in the breeze, rose from the beacons enclosing the city from the marshy western reaches by the grey Thames to the riverside woods beside the eastern city wall. Carpenter leaned on the battlements at the top of the White Tower and felt the acrid smoke sting the back of his throat.

It had been four days since the Faerie Queen had issued her hate-filled warning, four long, wearying days of organizing the militia, spinning a web of deceit to sustain the rumour that the suspected attack came from Spanish agents, surreptitiously spreading a long line of salt and protective herbs among the beacons to bolster Dee’s failing defences. Four days of hope and worry.

‘Will our preparations be enough?’ he asked, rubbing at the scar tissue under his hair. It was an unconscious tic in moments of anxiety, harking back to that bitter night in Muscovy when the bear-thing had left him for dead.

‘Hrrrm,’ Launceston murmured, acknowledging the question without answering it. He looked across the slow-moving river towards an orange glow in the east. Another ring of beacons surrounded the docks at Greenwich where men laboured through the night to provision their requisitioned galleon, the Gauntlet, for its long ocean crossing.

‘Can you not offer me even a crumb of comfort?’ Carpenter snapped. He fought down his bitterness.

‘What good would that do?’ the Earl breathed, his dry voice almost lost to the wind.

Carpenter prepared to give a barbed response, then thought better of it. What was the point in wishing his companion could comprehend such trifles as human feelings? Instead he muttered, ‘We are modern men, not superstitious fools like the country folk, and I have long since discarded the Bible’s cant. But sometimes I hope. .’ The word caught in his throat. ‘Tell me, Robert, do you think there might be a God?’

‘If there were a God, would He allow a thing like me to exist?’

Carpenter heard no self-pity in his companion’s voice, only an acceptance of his unnatural urges. For a moment, he recalled the diabolic vision of the Earl drenched in blood. He felt surprised that the emotion it stirred in him was not disgust, but sadness. ‘I have had my fill of this business,’ he sighed. ‘It wears me down by degrees, and seals me away in a dark place where I fear I will never see the sun again. I would break away. . and soon.’

‘Where would you go?’ The Earl drew his grey woollen cloak around him and stepped beside his companion to look out over the jumbled roofs of the city. ‘This business has stolen your life. No family, no woman, no friends, no trade. We company of travellers are all you have.’

Carpenter gave a bitter laugh. ‘This is it, then? You are my family, and Swyfte, and that red-headed maggot-pie Strangewayes? Kill me now and be done with it.’

‘The Enemy will come soon enough,’ Launceston said, looking up to the billowing smoke from the bonfires. ‘Even when Dee’s defences were strong, they still wandered across our territory. The alchemist only kept them from attacking in force. Now not all our charms will hold them at bay for long. We must hope that we can be at sea before they strike. At least if we can regain Dee we stand a chance of repelling them.’

And without Dee there is no hope at all, Carpenter thought.

Cries of alarm rang up from the dark of the water’s edge far below them. Frowning, Carpenter stifled his pang of anxiety as he peered over the battlements. Some waterman in distress, he tried to tell himself. The sound of running feet echoed. More cries.

‘The river is protected by the charms on the wherries working their way back and forth between the banks,’ Launceston said, as if he could read the other man’s thoughts. ‘All is as Dee prescribed.’

‘I can see nothing,’ Carpenter snapped. ‘Come.’

He wrenched himself away from the battlements and ran down the winding stone steps, Launceston only a few paces behind. In the ward he shouted to the guards to open the gates. Out of the fortress they raced, and along the grey walls to the river’s edge. The cries of fright had ebbed away. Only the lapping of the Thames broke the silence.

Struggling to see in the thin light of the crescent moon, Carpenter found the muddy path by the black water. It was low tide and the river reeked from the stink of offal dumped unlawfully in the flow by the city’s butchers after night had fallen. On a small stretch of gravelly shore, he glimpsed the flare of torches bobbing in the dark. He cast an uneasy glance at his companion, but the Earl’s sallow face was impassive.

Carpenter crunched across the slick stones, feeling colder by the moment. His hand searched for the hilt of his rapier for security. Nearing the crackling torches, he made out a group of six watermen in caps and thick woollen cloaks to keep them warm in the chill of the open river. Their attention was gripped by something he could not see. The Earl had drawn his dagger and was keeping it hidden in the folds of his cloak.

‘We are on the Queen’s business,’ Carpenter announced with a snap in his voice, grabbing the shoulder of one of the watermen and easing him aside. ‘What is the meaning of this outcry?’

Six faces turned towards him in the dancing light of the torches, each one etched with fear. One of the men stretched out a trembling arm to point. The spy followed the line of his finger.

Hunched on the edge of the cold, black water squatted a man clad in the filthy corselet of an old soldier. His breeches were coated with river mud, his hair and beard wild, his face drawn from a life lived in hedgerow and street. He had the thin frame of a man who went too long between meals. Beside him, a rod and line was set in the mud and gravel and a small fire had been built with driftwood, ready to be lit. The figure didn’t move, his gaze fixed on the eddies lapping against the shore.

Dead, Carpenter thought. But even as the notion crossed his mind, he found himself unsettled by a faint shimmer across the man’s body.

Launceston must have seen it too, for he grabbed one of the torches and held it over the still form. The old soldier all but glowed, like some apparition.

Carpenter took an unconscious step back. The dead man was rimed with frost, his hair and beard white, his skin gleaming with ice crystals as though he had spent a night out in a Muscovy winter. ‘What is this?’ the spy exclaimed. An autumnal chill hung in the air, but nothing that could account for such a state.

Launceston squatted beside the soldier, moving the torch around so he could examine the frozen face for some clue as to what had occurred.

A murmur washed around the huddling watermen as if a dam had broken. One blamed the devil, another the Fair Folk, a third some curse or other.

The Earl withdrew his dagger and jabbed the point against the man’s cheek. A clink echoed above the gentle lapping of the river. ‘Solid,’ he mused. ‘Like ice.’ He jabbed harder and the side of the soldier’s face shattered. Shards of frozen flesh rattled on the gravel. The squatting body teetered for a moment, then fell back, cracking into a hundred hard fragments.

The watermen cried out as one and fled back along the river’s edge towards their boats.

‘Zounds! What evil is this?’ Carpenter gasped.

‘I fear it is the beginning of something,’ Launceston breathed, rising to his feet. He waved the torch over the glistening remains one final time and then turned to the water. ‘Of what, I am not entirely sure.’

‘Would the Unseelie Court attack a starving soldier fishing for his supper? There must be some other answer.’

‘If you leave this work, if you flee into a new life, I will come with you,’ the Earl murmured in a distracted tone. Gripped by the sight of the shattered body, Carpenter barely realized what his companion had said before the Earl added, ‘In this mystery lies the key to what we will face in the days ahead, if we can only divine it.’

‘And if we cannot?’ Carpenter asked.

‘Then winter comes early for all of us.’