The Silver Skull

CHAPTER 30

espite her furious protests, John Carpenter bundled the cloaked and hooded Grace into the back of a servants' wagon beneath a heap of filthy sacks that had been used for transporting grain and still swarmed with beetles. Carpenter was not a gentle man, and treated Grace as he would any person who was not important to him, woman or not. Clearly, whatever mission had been imposed upon him, he felt it beneath his dignity. He told Grace to remain silent for the duration of their journey or he would stop the wagon and dump her out on the highway where she would have to fend for herself against whatever brigands and cutthroats waited.

His tone angered her; she had more value than he showed her, and from anyone else she would not have accepted such treatment, but there was an increasing urgency to the proceedings that had started to concern her. She remembered the strange expression on Nat's face, that sense that all was not well with the world, shocking in a man who always radiated a sunny optimism behind his sardonic exterior. What happened? she wondered. What could turn a personality on its axis to that degree? Something extreme, something terrible? And as she had told Nat, Will was always overprotective, but this was beyond even his usual concerns. Will feared for her life, and he knew things that no one else did. She felt strangely queasy at the thought, and the wagon bouncing wildly along the rutted road didn't help her disposition.

Was it something to do with all the spiralling rumours of a Spanish invasion that had blazed through the country since Mary's execution? There had been talk of a landing in Wales that had sent panic sweeping through the capital before it had proven false, and in August gone, word had circulated of two hundred Spanish ships in the Channel, driving the occupants of the coastal towns inland in fear, and bringing the rich to London for safety. Elizabeth had even been forced to issue a proclamation demanding they return to their homes in the country. But what if all those rumours were about to become true, and an invasion was imminent?

Obliquely, she realised she should have been more scared than she was, but ever since jenny's disappearance-no, murder! she reminded herself-she had lived with the constant belief that tragedy was only a heartbeat away; ironically, that had made her take more risks in her life.

Reckless! she thought bitterly.

Her mind drifted back to that night when everything changed and her potential became a shadow of what it had been. She recalled the fragrance of the night-scented stock, and the moon on the wheat fields, the soft breeze that made them stir as if some animal moved along the rows. There was a full moon so bright that the sky could not be called black. Silver, she thought. The world glowed silver.

She was still a child, though by then she considered herself a lady, already well versed in the ways of the world. If only she'd known. The hounds still howled in the fields as the search for jenny continued, and her mother and father were both still out.

She had found Will desperately rinsing his hands and face at the well. He looked like he had been crying, though she had dismissed it at the time as a trick of the moonlight. For some reason, he kept his hands from her view until he had finished his ablutions. He was barely a man himself, not long at Cambridge, but at that moment his face looked much older. It was funny she remembered that; she hadn't thought of it before. She had never seen that expression before, or that openly registered emotion since; after jenny, she always had to decipher his true feelings.

When his hands were clean, he had stepped forwards and hugged her so tightly she could barely breathe. "This is a hard world," he had said to her with quiet passion, "but you will not walk through it alone. I will be here to keep you safe. I vow it."

Over the months and years that followed, she had turned those words over so many times, and felt her own emotions solidify around them. Of all the reasons why she loved him, that was the first and the most potent. In that hard, hard world, he would keep her safe. He cared for her in a way that the other boys and men she had met had never cared, could never care. They would love her, or promise her the world, but they would never vow to keep her safe.

She did love him, even though she would never give voice to her feelings; even though he could never keep her safe. The wanting was enough.

And so she had been quick to uproot herself from her family and the quiet Warwickshire way of life, and Will had arranged for her to work at the court, where he could keep an eye upon her, and guide her progress. And her father and mother too had been more than happy to see her under Will's care.

Shortly after her arrival at the Palace of Whitehall, when she was still learning the twisting rules of that place, both written and unspoken, Will had taken her to one side and repeated his vow that he would discover the truth of jenny's disappearance. His work, which she later found out was as one of Walsingham's men, would, he was convinced, provide him with clues and insight. He was passionate in his belief, but however much she questioned the how and why of this, he would give her no answer.

"Just know that all my days are directed towards discovering what happened to jenny, and every action I make in my work will, in some way, illuminate the path to knowledge," he told her.

Finding the truth about jenny. It was the bond that united them both, on which her love for him had been built, and the thing that separated them both from the world. Her only fear, and it was one that nagged at her in the dark of the night, was that when the truth about jenny was known, the truth that they both so desperately needed, it would destroy them. The bonds shattered. Hope for the future gone. Belief in life destroyed. Was that an overreaction? She always told herself it was, but in her heart she wondered.

With the afternoon sun beating down, it was hot and stifling under the stinking sacks. The wagon bounced along the road for an age, until every part of her ached. After a while the noise of the street traffic died away and she could hear only the sound of the birds. She was half tempted to peel away the coverings so she could look where she was going, but she was afraid of Carpenter's reaction.

After a while, the bark of deer echoed nearby, and she heard the splash of oars; somewhere near the river, to the west of London. The wagon eventually moved off the rutted road onto a more even surface-flagstones, she guessed-and a few minutes later, Carpenter brought the horse to a halt. The sacks were torn from her and she shielded her eyes against the blast of lateafternoon sun.

When her vision cleared, she saw a grand brick facade, two towers flanking an imposing gatehouse, rows of mullioned windows, and a hint of the great Italian style in the lines and symmetries. All around there was rolling green land, with hawks swooping in the blue sky.

"Oh," she said, surprised. It was Hampton Court Palace, the old king Henry's great joy and source of pride.

"Grand enough for you?" Carpenter said acidly, offering her a hand to help her down from the back of the wagon. Though his tone remained gruff, his features had softened a little, as though he had been considering her and her plight during the long journey.

Hampton Court Palace was one of the most modern palaces in the world, sophisticated in intent and magnificent in design with sumptuous decor that could still impress even the most jaded member of the court. Few could understand why Elizabeth preferred to live in smoky, foul-smelling London; few, Grace knew, understood her desire to be at the heart of government.

The palace had running water, transported from Coombe Hill three miles away via the lead pipes that Henry had interred when his vast reconstruction of the palace was finally realised in 1540. It had extensive kitchens that were the pride of the nation, an enormous dining hall, a chapel, pleasure gardens filled with perfumed flowers and herbs, tennis courts, bowling alleys, and a hunting park that sprawled for more than a thousand acres. Elizabeth still visited regularly, when she wanted to escape the pressures of the city, or to stage her fabulous court masques, or the great dramatic presentations that had become the talk of London. Grace had been allowed to visit with her mistress for some of the festivities, but much of the palace had been off-limits to her.

With her hood pulled over her face, they passed through the gatehouse into the courtyard where servants wandered lazily around with no monarch or aristocracy to keep them on their toes. As Carpenter had anticipated, they drew no attention.

"Nobody will know you are here. You are safe," he said.

"Why could I not stay at the Palace of Whitehall?" she enquired. "If I am in danger, it is filled with guards and spies and all manner of defences to protect the queen."

Carpenter smiled tightly. "If an enemy seeks you, why draw them to the home of our queen and the greatest in the land?"

Grace suddenly realised she was dispensable. They would keep her as safe as they could, but not at the expense of any of the other great men of the land. It was something she knew instinctively, but which was shocking to have confirmed so harshly.

Grace paused briefly before the great clock tower bearing the seal of Cardinal Wolsey, from whom this fine palace had been stolen by Henry when he fell from favour. Everyone had their place, she recognised, and some people were worth more than others.

Carpenter studied the clock briefly with an odd expression of unease: it not only showed the time, but also the phases of the moon, the star sign, the month, the date, the sun, and the season.

"What is it?" she asked.

He shivered, didn't reply, and urged her on into the palace.

She attempted to make small talk as he guided her to the quarters Walsingham had arranged to be set aside for her use, but his mind was elsewhere, and all she got were short, dismissive replies. She wasn't surprised when he refused to discuss her questions about the threat she faced and the rumours of the Spanish invasion, but she didn't like the way his voice grew harder when he spoke of Will. Something lay between them; if Grace were Will she would not want Carpenter at her back.

He led her on a long walk through the palace to a small room overlooking the formal gardens, which was usually reserved for the servants of visiting dignitaries. It was plain but comfortable.

"I will be safe here?" She examined the wide-open spaces beyond the window.

"In our work, we have found it is sometimes better to hide something in the open if it is in a place where no one is looking," Carpenter replied. "Only a handful of people know you have been transported from Whitehall, and they can all be trusted. No one here knows who you are. Stay still, and calm, and let the background swallow you, and all will be well."

"And you?"

"I will be near at hand."

"How long do I stay here?"

"Until Lord Walsingham grows tired of wasting a man, or your friend-" The word rang with contempt. "-has decided the danger has passed."

"No one will give me a good answer why I would be in danger."

"There is no good answer." He shrugged, and left her alone.

The hours passed slowly. She watched the gardeners at work, drawing the weeds and deadheading the roses, and a man and woman from the kitchens grabbing time from the heat and the steam to court, walking together along the lavender path, hands behind their backs, heads down in quiet, intense conversation; it was a gentle love, slowly building upon pleasant foundations, that she didn't quite understand.

Food was delivered to her, and left outside the door. It made her feel like one of the prisoners in the Tower. She paced the room, sat on the bed and dreamed, tried to make sense of the shifting patterns of her life and the world in which she existed, and then as the shadows lengthened and merged into the encroaching grey, she returned to the window to watch the beauty of the silvery twilight drawing in.

At some point she fell asleep, only for a short while, for though the moon was bright in the sky, it was still not yet wholly dark. Long shadows reached across the grey, quiet gardens. Nothing moved. Grace was oddly out of sorts; she hadn't felt tired, or even felt the encroachment of sleep, yet there she was, head on her arms on the small table by the window.

Stretching, she rose and decided she could not bear to be in the room any longer. The palace was quiet, the servants returned to their quarters, the few highborn people drinking in the drawing room, as they always did after dinner.

Opening the door cautiously, she checked for any sign of Carpenter, and when there was none she stepped out with an odd tingle of excitement. She stifled a giggle; it felt like she was trespassing. Humming quietly to herself, she moved along the interconnecting corridors, secretly hoping she would encounter one of the servants so she could have even a passing conversation. She could pretend to be someone else! That excited her even more.

But as the time passed and she met no one, nor did she hear even the vaguest sound rising from the bowels of the vast building, she started to feel unsettled. It was as if everyone had vacated the palace during her short nap.

After a while, her wanderings brought her to the Long Gallery. She paused as she entered it, realising where she was and recalling the disturbing stories that had passed through the entire court. No one came to the Long Gallery after dark. It was only a year since William Grebe had been driven mad with terror. On that night, in high summer, he had seen the ghost of the old queen Catherine Howard running through the gallery, screaming, as she had done in life when she had begged Henry to save her before the guards had dragged her away towards her imminent death.

There were ghosts all over the palace. Jane Seymour haunting the staircase near the room where she gave birth to Edward. Even Anne Boleyn and Henry himself.

Drawing herself up proudly, she stepped into the gallery. Ghosts did not scare her; there was nothing on the other side of life that did not match what she had experienced during her years in the world. But as she reached the halfway mark along the room, she heard, or thought she did, faint words carried on the night breeze rustling under the doors. The insubstantial voice seemed to say: "Death is not the end. "

She hurried on, relieved to leave the strange mood in the gallery behind her, but as she passed through a deserted room with windows overlooking the twilit countryside, something caught her eye. In the row of black trees along the river's edge, she was sure a shadow had swept along at ground level, like the smoke from a bonfire caught in a strong wind. It had gone now, but as she stood at the window to be sure, there was a burst of flames in the trees, and another, and another. Torches igniting? she wondered. Something in those dancing fires made her unaccountably afraid. Hugging her arms around her, she watched them moving slowly, wondering who held them, why it mattered, and then, just as quickly as they had burst into life, they winked out, one by one.

For a moment longer, she watched intently, wondering if anyone would emerge from the tree line, but there was nothing. Were they watching her watching them? she wondered briefly, before discounting the idea as ridiculous; no one could see her at that distance.

Yet for all her rationalising, she felt a sudden urge to find Carpenter. Worried now by the lack of activity, and the silence, in the palace, which was unnatural at that time of the evening, she picked up her pace. Her heels beat out an insistent rhythm on the floorboards. She desperately wanted to call out, but was afraid of attracting attention to herself.

In a large room, where the queen sometimes held a reception for foreign guests before one of the masques, she came to a halt before a long mirror. She didn't know why. For a while, she stared at herself, spectral in the half-light, and had the strangest impression she was looking at someone else, someone who had spent time shaping themselves to resemble her, but who couldn't disguise the malign thoughts that lurked in the features, in the set of the mouth, or the narrowing of the eyes. It felt as if the glass wasn't there, and that she could reach through the space. But then the other Grace would grab her wrist and drag her in. She half realised something about the mirror mesmerised her, was holding her fast, and she forced herself to move on, but not before she caught sight of a shadow on the edge of the mirror following her.

She turned suddenly, but the room was empty. The shadow had been in the mirror and not in the real world, though it was gone now. It must have been a trick of the moonlight, for there was no other explanation. She decided as she hurriedly left the room that she didn't like mirrors at all.

Her feet pounded louder on the floorboards as she raced through the silent rooms, no longer trying to keep her presence a secret. Doors slammed open and shut. Corridors rang with the echoes of her passing. After a while she called out, "Hello?" but there was only the sound of her voice returning to her after a journey around the palace.

Her uneasiness mounted, like the stem of a rose being drawn up the skin of her back. Where could they all have gone? Had the alarm for the invasion sounded and everyone had fled to the security of London's walls? Could she really have missed it? Would Carpenter have forgotten to rouse her?

In the room where the palace elders usually gathered to drink into the evening, there was no one. The guards' quarters: empty. No sound rising from the servants' quarters, where she would have expected singing and laughter, perhaps even a fiddle.

She found herself at a window with a view over Henry's great clock, the colours a dull grey in the gloom. Instinctively, she knew something was wrong, but in her anxious state her thoughts skittered too wildly across the details of what she saw. After a moment, it came to her: the clock was running backwards. She watched the gentle judder of the minute hand as it shifted counterclockwise and shivered, although she was not sure why.

Its workings are wrong, she thought. That is all.

The season now showed winter, the month December.

Overcome with the compulsion to search the darkening countryside around the palace, she ran to another window overlooking the approach. At first all was still, but then came another brief burst of fire, closer than the last one she had seen, and another way across to the right, gone almost in the blink of an eye.

The fires were hypnotic, and she waited for another while she considered what could possibly have caused them. Instead, she saw grey shadows bounding sinuously across the fields towards the palace, like foxes only larger. She tried to count them, but they moved too fast and were soon out of the moonlight and lost from view.

She stepped away from the window, her heart tap-tapping.

The kitchens! she thought suddenly. Everyone would be gathered there, telling stories, servants and gentlemen together, in the warmth of the ovens. It was the only explanation. Focusing on the hope rather than the nagging feeling that such a thing could never be true, she hurried for the stairs that led to the great kitchens underneath the palace.

Down the winding stairs she went, and down again, deep, deep down, leaving the stark regiment of the palace for the sumptuous underworld. She could hear the crackle of the fires under the ovens and the hiss of the pots boiling on the top, the clank of their lids as they were lifted by the steam, smell the aromatic after-scent of the evening's dinner, the capons boiled in a broth of oranges, sugar, mace, cloves, nutmeg, and cinnamon, rich and powerful, intermingling with the strong notes of the strawberries soaked in red wine and ginger.

Her senses were overwhelmed, so much so that she was not wholly aware that she heard no human voices. Only when she bounded excitedly from the stairs into the vast brick vault did she see it was empty. The light from the candles danced up the orange-red walls and sent shadows rippling along the roof.

The remnants of the dinner's preparation were still scattered across the great oak tables that ran along the centre of the kitchen, juices dribbling from the edges onto the flags. The cooking pots were piled high, still unwashed.

Grace's shoulders grew taut. The kitchens should not be empty at that time; indeed, they ought to be an industrious hive of activity. The kitchen master would have his staff working hard to clear everything away so that all would be left clean and ready for the breakfast.

She looked around. Jars were unstoppered. Pans almost bubbled dry. Cheese lay uncovered. It was as if everyone in the palace had disappeared in an instant, their tasks left half finished, the ghost of their presence still haunting the place.

Grace moved slowly through the kitchens, feeling the blood pound in her head. All the signals she received from the environment were conflicting. A disappearance of so many people without a hubbub? So quickly?

The black, brackish waters of fear she had managed to suppress for so long began to rise through her.

The fires off in the dark. The grey shadows loping across the fields. What was coming? She tried to laugh at her anxiety, couldn't. She should run, hide. But where would she go?

Instead, she crossed to the largest oven. The fire inside it was roaring out of control as if the flue had been jammed open. As she stood before it, she could feel the flames burning harder, faster, with each passing moment, a furnace, and the heat in the room rose accordingly. After a few seconds of fascination, she realised that the heat was increasing faster than the oven could account for, the air becoming dense and dry. Beads of sweat stood out on her forehead. It became hotter than the hottest summer day.

Although she had heard nothing, she realised she was no longer alone. She whirled, her breath catching in her throat. Several figures stood at the entrance to the kitchens, shimmering as if seen through a heat-haze. They were watching her, as still as statues.

"Who are you?" she gasped.