The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [320]
In the middle of Bishopsgate Street Francis Crawford came to a halt as, through the storm of pain now settling in his head, a thought struck him, far too belatedly. Who had sent that second barge which had come so opportunely to stop him from going to Gravesend? Someone who did not want him to go to Russia any more than Alec Guthrie and his friends. Sir Henry Sidney? He did not think it likely. And Philippa, like his own men, had not been a free agent that day.
You now know what you want. It didn’t matter. St Botolph’s was what mattered at this moment, and quickly, because it was becoming rather difficult to think. He moved quickly down Bishopsgate Street to the corner at Leadenhall, with the tall square tower opposite of St Peter’s, Cornhill, and was about to continue down Gracechurch Street when he changed his mind, and turned left instead, away from the wide market with its cobbles and then right into the winding, uneven dirt track of Lime Street. Once there, the darkness about him became quite complete.
It was there, too, that he heard the first, stealthy steps all around him, and knew that he was being surrounded.
He was a highly-trained professional soldier and he knew all the tricks—the time-worn tricks one could employ to deal with that. Noiselessly, he set himself to identify his suroundings and make use of them. The silence helped, and the night-smells, pleasant and unpleasant: the trace of incense which betrayed a church with a graveyard he could silently cross; the smells of metal; of corn from the Leadenhall Granary; of flesh from the butchers’ closed stalls. The warm scents from a stable, of horseflesh and hay, where he waited for some moments, listening. The fresh, night smell of grass and spring flowers—primroses, violets and gillyflowers, the feathers of southernwood, the cushions of wild thyme and mint from a garden where he stayed also, his hand on a tree, listening to booted feet moving on stony earth, and spurs clinking.
Four or five men, he knew by then; or even more. Not the watch; not a group of common footpads but armed men, and horsemen. From their stealth, he imagined they did not particularly want their business known. And he, of course, was their business.
He proved that, quite early on, by finding some gravel under his feet in a courtyard and throwing a pebble as far as he could, the next time the footsteps came near him. He heard the click of its fall, and the soft, concerted rush of feet which followed, telling its own story.
The trouble was, having lingered and doubled so much, it was hard to be sure still of his bearings. Or by now, he thought, he would have jettisoned his pride and tried to find Master Dimmock’s door. Or even the door of St Anthony’s. As it was, time was wearing on and although he kept moving downhill, towards the faint, distant smells of the river, he was no longer sure at what point he would be led to it, or how to find a boat once he got there. Swarming by day with seamen and porters, with stevedores and lightermen and water-carriers, the wharves with their courts and alleys and taverns were not the best place to find help in the dark.
The night, as often happened in May, was by no means as warm as the afternoon had been. A small wind had sprung up and freshened, and his clothes, moving across his bruised skin, sent shivering chills through his body. His hands were stiff with cold; his face burning like … one of Güzel’s charcoal braziers. And now nothing can hinder us. And now the only thing hindering him was himself.
And it was dangerous to let his nightmares interfere with his thinking, for he must have made a sound on the cobbles, or perhaps moved unsuspectingly into the light from a window, for somewhere to one side of him he heard a subdued shout and then again, from several places, the sound of booted feet moving rapidly. He ran, his hand outstretched, brushing the walls beside him with the light bough, soft with new leaves, which he had broken from his tree before