Perfect Shadows

chapter 29

Essex sat unmoving, his hands pressed against his aching forehead. It had been a long and wearying day, and this waiting was the worst part of it. They had arrived back at the house by boat, fighting their way through the mob in the garden, only to find that Ferdinando Gorges had freed their hostages in an effort to mitigate his part in the fiasco, and so robbed them of their last desperate hope.

“Anyone with so Spanish a name should never have been trusted in the first place,” Almsbury snarled, although he knew well that the man, a kinsman to Ralegh, was as English as any there. “We should leave for France, now, tonight!” he added, mopping his dripping brow with shaking hands.

“Better Ireland,” Southampton laughed at him, “although I do not allow for a minute that we would get as far as Windsor, even supposing we escaped the grounds. You fool! The time for running was while we were still free, not now. If I’m to finish earthed up like a badger anyway, I’d as lief it be without any further such strenuous pastime. They’ll have sport enough with us ere this night’s out, without our providing more. If you’ve nothing sensible to say, Roger, do go to bed, or at least hold your tongue.” Roger’s fair skin had flushed furiously and he stepped towards Southampton with his hand on the hilt of his sword, but Hal had merely laughed at him again. “If you truly desire another fight you have only to wait, as the Queen’s guard will be along presently to fetch us all to the Tower,” he told the younger man, who made no answer, but turned his back on the company. Blount had been taken at the Ludgate, charging the guards withdrawn sword when they had found their way blocked. They had been fired upon and Robin had come close to being hit. His page, Henry Tracy, had died at his feet.

Mericke kept up a steady droning litany of blame, his own name conspicuous in its absence, until Robin screamed at them to take themselves away. He burnt every scrap of his correspondence.

As they awaited developments in the long evening, Hal lounged in a chair by the fireplace, cracking nuts and throwing the shells into the blaze. “Will you stop that infernal noise?” Robin snapped, and Hal stared at him for a second before shrugging and tossing the handful of nuts, meats and all, into the fire. “I do not understand how you can eat anything, anyway,” Essex added petulantly, rubbing the heel of his hand across his disordered hair. His doublet was unfastened, his ruff hung limply askew.

“I plan to eat as long as I have a mouth to put meat into, and as long as my gullet is still attached to my belly,” Hal retorted. He looked as fresh as he had that morning, save for a few mud stains on his boots and hose, and a large splotch of dried blood on his collar, from the nose of a man who had laid hands on him during their scramble from the water stairs at the bottom of the garden to the house. There was a feverish light in his eyes, and something about his contained stillness was more terrible than frenzy. Robin recalled with a start just where he had seen such restraint before, the night when he had held his naked blade to Prince Kryštof ’s throat. Even though he had drawn blood the man had stood just as perfectly still and as seemingly unconcerned. He realized, belatedly, what exactly Hal had said.

“She will have us killed,” he whispered, as what little color he had left drained from his face, leaving it haggard and ashen. Hal snorted.

“I really do not suppose that she will be content to slap your wrist and forgive you this time, Robin. The crown is the only thing that she holds sacred, which makes this day’s work not merely treason, but sacrilege,” he broke off as the footman brought word that their captors desired some speech with them. “I’ll go,” Hal said, rising from the chair as vigorously as if he had not just spent a day of terror following a sleepless night. He turned back as Robin caught his arm.

“Why did you come with me?” Rob’s voice was a cracked whisper.

Hal grinned mirthlessly. “Oddly enough, I believed in you,” he said. “I must have been moon-mad.” He made his way to the roof of the house, looking down at the sea of gloating faces below. A perverse recklessness seized him and he called out for a safe passage to see the Queen, and for hostages against their safe return, and was taken aback by the scoffing reply. The crowd parted to show him the ordnance that had been brought up and aimed at the house. It was a house and no fortress; it would not take much time for cannon to bring it down about their ears. Hal felt a moment of panic then, trying to remember if Libby were here or at home, and called the attackers craven, to threaten war upon a house sheltering women. Let the women go, he promised, and they would have war enough to content them. “We are every one of us fully resolved to lose our lives fighting,” Hal taunted, as Robin joined him to echo Hal’s sentiments, and denounce their enemies. Eventually it was agreed that the women should all be allowed to leave the premises, and that accomplished, the rebels withdrew to discuss their alternatives. Robin and Hal, backed by old Lord Sandys, who felt that he had nothing to lose, urged defiance unto the death.

“Better to die as men with sword in hand, than crawl to Cecil, and meet death on a scaffold,” Sandys told them. “There is no honor in an axe.” Almsbury paled at the cold certainty of violent death facing them, and urged them to surrender, almost frantic with fear: he had seen the cannon. Other voices added their fears to Almsbury’s, wearing down Robin’s resolve, and submerging his martial ardor in a morass of self-doubt and depression.

One veteran among them, Owen Salisbury, reading the earl’s intent, spun Essex around to face him. “I will not be taken, like a dog in a kennel!” he shouted, but the earl shook off his hands without appearing to notice him. Almsbury, his sweating palms leaving damp stains on the soldier’s doublet, pulled him away, ignoring the look of scorn turned on him. Without another word Salisbury doffed his steel cap and stalked to the window, throwing it wide, and jeering at the crowd below, daring one of them to shoot him. Seconds later he staggered back, his hand pressed to the side of his head, blood pouring between his fingers. “Damned fool,” he muttered, “I would that he had shot a little lower,” and then gave a little sigh as he lost consciousness. There was a matching sigh from across the room as Almsbury, fainting, crumpled into a heap on the floor. Hal eyed him with distaste as he gave orders for the care of the wounded man, and the relocation of the swooning lord.

After a time Essex returned to the roof to call out his terms for surrender, though forced eventually into agreeing to no more than the promise that the Lord Admiral should arrest them and treat them in a civil manner, that they be granted a fair and impartial trial, and that his chosen clergyman, Master Ashton be allowed to join him in prison, to requite his spiritual needs.

Hal stood beside Robin, rigid with suppressed rage and shame, then turned to follow him to the ignominious conclusion of their enterprise. He struggled to hold his temper in check when he was told to kneel before Henry Howard, the Lord Admiral, but shrugged and dropped to one knee with an insolence tantamount to a slap. A mutter of outrage swept the gathered forces, but was waved down by the Admiral. Southampton ceremoniously presented his sword to the man, and grinned to see Robin do the same, for all the world as if he were granting the admiral a signal honor. They followed the guards through the jeering crowd and out to the barge that waited to convey them to Lambeth Palace and from thence to the Tower.



Libby woke heavy-eyed to someone shaking her furiously. “Wake up, you little fool!” spat Penelope, Lady Rich, raising her hand to slap her drowsy friend, but Libby finally sat up, looking around confusedly.

“Penny? What’s wrong?”

“Everything,” Lady Rich snapped. “While you’ve been dreaming here, Robin and Hal were fighting for their very lives! They’re—”

“Hal! Is he—was he hurt? Killed?” Libby’s soft voice rose to a shriek, and she struggled with the bed clothes, flinging them aside and scooping her clothes, Hal’s clothes, from the floor. She gazed at them for a moment, then crumpled to the floor, holding his shirt to her face as she cried. She was dimly aware that Penny was still talking, but she couldn’t take in the words until her friend tore the shirt from her hands and shook her again.

“Will you listen to me, you infuriating child? They are still at Essex House. They went back there when the City betrayed them. Robin thought that the City would rally to him, when he disclosed the plots against him, but no one followed. He said that no one even seemed to hear. It must have been horrible!”

“It was,” Libby replied dully. “I was there.” Lady Rich looked at her as if she were mad, then at the men’s clothing strewn about the floor, and dropped to sit on the floor at her friend’s side.

“Oh, clever Libby!” she breathed, slipping her arms around the girl. “I wish that I had thought of that! I should have been there too!”

“No, you were right, it was horrible and there wasn’t anything I could do. I left them in Fenchurch Street; what happened later?”

“When they got to Ludgate, they found that they couldn’t pass through, so they came back by river. Robin was fired upon, and there’s a hole straight through his hat. His page and a brace of bystanders were killed! When they reached the house, they had to fight their way in, and Gorges had let the hostages go, to help the cause he said. To weasel out, I say, and it certainly took the marrow out of their mad plans to use the hostages to gain an audience with the Queen. She’s been enjoying herself, too, from what I hear, wanting to join the sortie from Whitehall as if she thought they were going a-hunting. They’re all sitting around discussing their choices. Robin is declaring his intention to fight to his last breath, and Lord Sandys, the old fool, is egging him on. I suppose that they will surrender sooner or later: the Lord Admiral brought up cannon. They let me go a few minutes ago, and I came here because Hal was worried about you. If he knew that you’d been in the city with them, his hair would go stark white!”