Will Shakespeare and the Pirate's Fire Page 12

  They drew up in the walled courtyard of a large house. A servant opened the carriage door and Mendoza sent Will out ahead of him. He was led into the house by the two men who had snatched him and pushed into a chair in a reception room. One of them stood over him while the other left to attend to the ambassador.

  The room was lavishly carpeted and there was a small bookcase with about two dozen volumes stored in it. To Will’s left hung a large, bloody crucifix and on the opposite wall was a huge painting of a sea battle with cannon blazing and ships on fire.

  As the sky outside grew dark, he was surprised by the arrival of a servant, who brought him a tray of food and a tankard of beer. Will gratefully devoured the spiced chicken and crusty bread. He was finishing up the scraps when Mendoza entered the room and sat down on the other side of the table.

  “Did you enjoy the meal?” the ambassador asked. “I have my own cook I brought with me from Spain.”

  “Yes, it was good,” said Will. “Thank you.”

  The ambassador nodded. “I would not want it on my conscience that I sent a man to his death on an empty stomach.”

  His voice bristled with such cold threat that Will felt his meal coming back on him. Forcing it down, he said, “I’m sure it won’t come to that.”

  “You do not sound confident,” said Mendoza, “and I do not blame you. Signora O’Malley has not appeared and my patience is almost done. It seems there is very little of what is called honour among thieves.”

  “A pirate crew’s different,” Will improvised. “We swear oaths and things. In blood.”

  “Yes, a pirate’s oath,” sneered Mendoza. “If Signora O’Malley had kept her bargain with me, you would not be here now, enjoying your last meal.” He paused to smile at Will while his words sank in. “But if you do not wish to entrust your life to a pirate’s honesty, you have another option.”

  “What’s that?” asked Will, sensing a trap.

  Mendoza leaned over the table. “You could take my part in this. If you tell me where Signora O’Malley is hiding, then I can go fetch the book for myself. Not only would you live, but you would find yourself richly rewarded.” He chuckled softly. “You would have enough money to go home and repair the roof of your church.”

  Will’s heart sank. If he revealed that he didn’t have the information the Spaniard wanted, he might be killed right now. “Wouldn’t that make me a sort of traitor?” he asked.

  Mendoza stood up and glowered down at him. “A traitor to whom? To your pirate captain? If she were in your place she would take the money like that.” He snapped his fingers. “To your heretic queen? Her own country seethes with rebellion against her and she will soon be embroiled in a ruinous war with France. It is only a matter of time before my king sends his ships to sweep her from the throne.”

  He came and stood directly over Will. “Until now I have been a genial host,” he said, “but you have not much time left.”

  He nodded to the guard who drew his sword and ran a finger down the blade.

  Will bowed his head and tried desperately to think of some way out. Mendoza had dismissed his story of the desert island as a boy’s fanciful invention, harmless and amusing, but the next lie he told might be the one that killed him. He had to invent something that would give the Spaniard pause before his frustration drove him to do away with his prisoner.

  Like a shaft of sunlight breaking through the clouds, an idea came to Will, so audacious he was almost afraid to use it. But perhaps, if he could act the part well enough, it might buy him some time. He looked up and met Mendoza’s gaze with an unflinching eye.

  “I don’t know what’s delaying her,” he said, “but you can be sure Grace O’Malley will come for me.”

  The ambassador regarded him curiously, impressed by his confident tone. “Tell me why I should be so sure,” he said.

  Will kept his voice firm as a rock as he took his gamble. “Because I’m her son.”

  21 The Reluctant Pirate

  “Her son?” Mendoza repeated dubiously.

  “Why else would she keep me around?” asked Will. “You said yourself I’m not much of a pirate.”

  Mendoza stepped back and scrutinised his captive, searching for some trace of deception. “You said you were an orphan.”

  “I didn’t want you to know the truth,” said Will. “That’s why I made up that stupid story.” He let his shoulders slump and shook his head. “To tell you the truth, I hate being at sea. I’m sick half the time and she expects me to do twice as much work as the rest of the crew. She says it will make a man of me.”

  He let some pain leak into his voice and even managed to squeeze one small tear from his left eye to complete the effect. Mendoza stroked his chin and signalled his man to sheath his sword. He paced the room, darting quick glances back at Will, as if trying to catch him out. Will continued to look beaten and dejected.

  Mendoza stopped in front of him at last. “If you are telling the truth,” he said with the beginnings of a smile, “then I may demand all that I want of her.”

  There was a tap at the door and a servant entered. He spoke to the ambassador in Spanish and Mendoza’s smile widened into a wolfish grin. “Now we’ll settle the matter, my reluctant pirate,” he said. “Your mother is here to ransom you.”

  The news hit Will like a dash of cold water to the face. He had concocted his daring lie when he’d given up all hope of Grace showing up. Now he realised he had probably doubled his peril.

  The door opened and Grace came in with two armed Spaniards at her back. She was still dressed in a man’s garb with a hooded cloak wrapped round her shoulders. As she entered the room she threw back the hood and shook out her long, black hair.

  The ambassador made a small bow. “Signora O’Malley, how kind of you to accept my invitation.”

  “I’m here to conclude our business,” Grace retorted bluntly. “Don’t dress it up in ribbons.”

  She took a leather satchel from under her arm and laid it on the table. “I’ll have my gold now,” she said.

  “And what about this fine-looking young man?” Mendoza asked. “Surely you want him too.”

  “I’ll take him along to carry the gold,” Grace said, barely glancing at Will.

  “I think he is worth much more to you than any amount of gold,” said Mendoza.

  Grace gave him a curious squint. “I didn’t come here to crack riddles with you, Signor,” she said. “All the use he is to me is to scrub the decks and empty the slops, and he does a poor enough job of that.”

  Mendoza laughed. “I do not fault you for trying to keep the secret, but the boy has already told me the truth.”

  Grace looked suspiciously from Will to Mendoza. “What secret? What truth?”

  “There’s no use pretending any more,” Will told her. “He knows the whole truth, mother.”

  Grace stared at him as if he had just grown horns.

  “Take your son,” said Mendoza, “and let his good treatment at my hands stand in place of money.”

  Grace curled her lip. “Him? My son?”

  The contempt in her voice pricked Will like a needle. She sauntered over to where he was seated and cupped his chin in her hand. “Look at him!” she said, tilting his head back. “There’s more milk and cakes in him than steel and salt water. He’s no more an O’Malley than you’re a Viking.”

  “But you came for him,” said Mendoza, confused.

  Grace let Will’s chin drop and stepped away from him. “I came for my payment,” she insisted. “As for this poor fool, you’d be as well to lock him away in Bedlam with the rest of the lunatics.”

  “Lunatics?” Mendoza echoed.

  “Yes, lunatics,” said Grace, turning her back on Will and retracing her steps to where the satchel lay. “Don’t you have madmen in Spain? One day he claims to be a king’s son, next he’s a fairy child captured by a magician. Oh, he’s a sore trial to me!”

  Will swallowed hard and listened in anxious silence. Once again it se
emed that Grace was going to humiliate him and leave.

  Mendoza considered briefly, then waved a dismissive hand. “In my work I have enough deceit to untangle without inviting more,” he said. “Take him and be a mother or murderer to him, as you wish.”

  Will rose and made his way cautiously to Grace’s side, fearing that at any moment the Spaniard might change his mind.

  “Ah Will,” said Grace, ruffling his hair, “are you not ashamed to be lying to this fine gentleman?” Then she gave him a clip across the back of the head and added sharply, “I’ll put up with no more of your tales, mind. From now on you’re to be a good and honest boy.”

  Will hung his head and looked suitably ashamed. “I’ll try,” he muttered. He was willing to play any part now as long as it would get them clear of this house.

  “Now, Signor, my money,” said Grace, extending her hand, “and we’ll part as friends. Maybe we can even do business again another day.”

  “Not so hasty, Signora O’Malley,” said Mendoza, raising a chiding finger. “I will not be a man who pays for a pearl then finds the oyster empty.”

  He unbuckled the satchel Grace had brought and slid out the green book. He frowned. “There is a lock on it. Have you not looked inside?”

  “I thought you’d want the goods undamaged,” said Grace. “You can examine it at your leisure, but I’ve the tide to catch if I’m to get away to Ireland before the English agents catch up with me.”

  Something in her tone told Will she was acting and that she had managed to unlock the book. In which case, why did she want to get away before Mendoza read it?

  “Is there a not a saying in this country,” said the ambassador, “that a book should not be judged by its cover?” He tapped the book with his finger. “Juan!” he said, summoning forward the largest of his guards, a huge man with only one ear.

  At a command from his master, the guard drew his dagger and stabbed it into the leather cover. He prised the brass lock loose, then ripped it away. The job done he backed off, leaving the ambassador to examine his prize.

  Will saw Grace edge towards the door, but at a word from Mendoza the guards blocked her way. The ambassador turned page after page, flipping them faster and faster in mounting anger.

  He rounded furiously on Grace and barked an order at his men. Two guards seized her by the arms and one of them wrenched her sword and dagger from her belt, tossing them to the floor.

  “Now I see why you were so eager to be gone,” Mendoza accused. He pointed back at the book. “This is a nonsense, a book of tricks and puzzles!”

  “It’s what you sent me to fetch!” Grace answered with equal fury. “Don’t blame me if it’s not written in Spanish!”

  “It is not written in any language!” Mendoza retorted. “Did you think to fool me with this while you keep the true Meta Incognita for yourself?”

  “This is it!” Grace insisted. “I took it from its hiding place with my own hands.”

  “Then your hands are as perjured as your tongue!” roared Mendoza.

  While they quarrelled, Will inched closer to the book to examine it for himself. Turning the pages, he saw meaningless strings of letters alternating with rows of random numbers, weird symbols set in elaborate grids, dots, lines and numerals scattered about in no discernible order.

  Mendoza shoved him aside and slammed the book shut. “I give you one hour to reconsider your treachery,” he told Grace, “or to make your peace with God. After that, a quick death is the only mercy you can expect of me.”

  He gave a curt order to his men and the big guard seized hold of Will. He and Grace were dragged out of the room and down a flight of stairs to a gloomy dungeon.

  22 A Hare in a Maze

  “You gutless ratspawn!” Grace yelled back at Mendoza. “A hell of blazing poxes on you, your king – and your horse!”

  Struggling and spitting, she was thrown into a dimly lit cell. Will was bundled roughly inside after her. The guards had no sooner finished locking the door than Grace was kicking it in a frenzy of temper.

  “You whoreson, godless dogs!” she raged. “You dung-stuffed, bog-supping lackwits! You cankerous puttocks!”

  She carried on in an ecstasy of obscenity, hurling wave upon wave of shocking profanity at the Spaniards. Will had heard his father swear on occasion but this was something else entirely. Grace made the most foul-mouthed drunk in Stratford sound like a nun at prayer. Will was half afraid God would obliterate the entire house with a thunderbolt just to shut her up.

  Much to his relief she eventually gave the door a final kick and broke off her rant. She took a deep breath, as if she had just completed a five mile run. “That’ll curdle their ears, sure enough!” she declared with some satisfaction.

  “It’s not done a lot for my health either,” Will complained.

  Grace clapped him on the shoulder. “It’s just words, Will, not bullets. You’ll live a mite longer yet.”

  Will wasn’t so sure. Nor was he sure that Grace O’Malley was the best company to die in. He doubted any angels would come within ten miles of them after her blasphemous tirade, and that left only one other place for their souls to go.

  He squatted down on the floor and contemplated their miserable situation. A horrible thought occurred to him. “You don’t suppose they’ll torture us before they kill us, do you?”

  Grace leaned against the wall and hooked her thumbs into her belt. “I’ve given birth to four strapping children,” she said. “One aboard a ship being chased by Barbary pirates. That’s pain. I’d like to see those fancy-breeches do worse.”

  “It’s all right for you,” said Will. “You’re used to this kind of thing. You’re a pirate.”

  “Pirate?” said Grace. “You English call me that for sure, but to my own people back in Ireland I’m a leader and protector. When times are hard and the harvest fails, I’m the one who’ll fight and steal to see them fed.”

  “It’s not hunger I’m worried about,” said Will.

  “I warned you to keep clear of me, Will,” Grace told him. “You should have listened.”

  “Walter explained about the book, what’s inside it. I had to help him get it back.”

  “Walter Raleigh?” Grace laughed richly. “Oh, he’s a fine looking fellow, I’ll grant him that, but he’s as much a blockhead as any other man. I live in hope that one day I’ll meet a man with half a brain between his ears.”

  “What will you do then?” Will asked.

  “Oh, I’ll probably have to kill him,” Grace replied with a shrug. “That’s the way my luck usually runs.”

  “Don’t you hope,” Will began hesitantly, “one day to, maybe, love somebody?”

  Grace pushed her hair back from her face and sighed. “There was a lad I loved once, many a long year ago. Hugh was his name. I found him washed up on the shore after a shipwreck.”

  “That’s just the way we found you,” said Will. “Though you were only pretending.”

  Grace slid down the wall until she was sitting on the floor eye to eye with Will. He fell silent before her gaze and let her carry on with her story.

  “I nursed him back to health and took him for my lover.” Grace’s face broke into a smile that seemed to turn her back into a young girl with hardly a care in her heart. “Oh, he had a laugh like bells on Sunday and when he kissed me it was as sweet as fresh spring water.”

  There was a long silence. Finally Will asked, “What happened to him?”

  Grace’s smile hardened into ice. “He was out hunting in the hills one day when some enemies of mine came upon him. They murdered him out of sheer spite towards me, even though he never did them any harm.”

  Her eyes were staring back through time now, as if she could see the grisly scene laid out before her. For a moment Will was reminded of Venus mourning for Adonis.

  “I caught up with them,” Grace said bitterly. “I tracked down and killed every one of them with my own hands.”

  She looked sadly at Will. “There. Th
at’s the true tale of Grace O’Malley. Now do you think me a monster?”

  “You acted out of love,” said Will, “for all you did a terrible thing.”

  “Out of love, yes,” said Grace, rubbing her right arm where Raleigh had cut her in the swordfight. “But the worst of it is, no matter how much vengeance you take, it never kills the hurt it grew from.” Her shoulders slumped, as if all the heart had been drained out of her. “Well, all my hurts will be over soon,” she sighed.

  “I had a little sister, Ann,” said Will. “She died just this past winter.”

  Grace stirred from her own memories and gazed at him curiously.

  “But sometimes,” Will said, “when I look out the window, I think I still see her playing in the garden, picking flowers and counting the petals. Maybe death isn’t the end of things after all.”

  Grace laid a sympathetic hand on his arm. “Will, if I can persuade Mendoza you’re a harmless loon, he’ll maybe let you go, for it’s said God loves a fool.”

  At the touch of her hand Will felt something stir inside him: the sure certainty that he didn’t want either one of them to die. He thought about the Meta Incognita, its complexity, the labyrinthine library Grace had stolen it from.

  “Look,” he said, “you already opened the book and read it, didn’t you?”

  “I know a man who can pick a lock as easy as you pull on your boots,” answered Grace. “But like you saw, it’s all written in some infernal code.”

  “And you’ve no idea how to translate it?”

  Grace spat in the corner and uttered a ripe curse. Will was glad to see a flash of her old fire. “I tried, God knows,” she said, “tracing the letters with my finger, trying to catch the sense of it, but every time I think I’ve nipped it by the tail it escapes me, like a hare dashing down a maze.”

  “A maze,” Will repeated. Something was nagging at him, a memory of the day he first arrived at Mortlake, following Dr Dee past rows and rows of books to the centre of the library. On the table there he saw a book entitled A True Treatise On The Construction Of The Labyrinth Of King Minos. It was a book about how to construct a maze – and it was bound in exactly the same green leather as the Meta Incognita.