A Queen's Spy, - [best books under 200 pages .txt] 📗

risen abruptly from his seat, another man sat on top of a barrel, his hands lashed behind him with leather straps, his mouth gagged, and a more than capable man sat next to him leveling a knife at his chest.

“Fitzwarren! Thank God you’ve come.” Carew threw his hands to his head and ran them through his untidy hair.

Richard turned, making sure the latch was in place.

“It’s all gone wrong. I knew I should never have got involved …” Carew wailed,

Richard cut his words off, his own slicing through the air like steel. “Still your words. Who are these men?”

Richard looked at the pair, jailed and jailor and it was the man holding the knife who spoke and not his master, Carew.

“I’m Hanwyn, Master Carew’s Steward, I caught this man,” he stabbed the air with the knife making the bound man flinch and his eye’s bulge. Hanwyn continued with his story. “I found him in the Master’s study, he was no match for me sir, and I got him down here and sent for the Master.”

Richard looked at the man, he was certainly no match for Hanwyn. A cut above his left eye was leaking blood and his right cheek was swollen and grazed. Thinning sandy hair, in his middle years, and slightly built, he had not stood much chance against Carew’s steward.

“Carew, I think we perhaps should continue this discussion between ourselves,” there was a warning note in Richard’s voice, one Carew chose to ignore.

“Hanwyn is my most trusted man, we can speak before him,” Carew said, and then before Richard could stop him he produced from his doublet several folded sheets and threw them on the table. “He’s Carter’s man, he normally delivers his messages, and we found these on him.”

“Christ!” Richard exclaimed, his eyes widening. “You left these where they could be found?”

“I hardly expected a thief in my study, did I?” Carew said defensively. “Remember you yourself said that we’d be safe if we kept to the process, and I did!”

Richard shaking his head examined the bound man. “You knew where to find those didn’t you?” Even though he was firmly gagged his eyes widened and his head shook in denial.

“He knew where they were, and worse, he knew what he was looking for,” Richard stated, pausing while his eyes bored into Carew’s. “How did he know this?”

Carew paled. “He’s Carter’s messenger. He’d wait while I penned the replies.”

“He waited while you penned the replies,” Richard repeated slowly, an unmistakable edge of anger in his voice, “and he’d watch how you did this, and where you kept these?” Richard roughly flipped over the code sheets that lay on the rough wooden table.

The look on Carew’s face was answer enough.

“But he’s Carter’s man, isn’t he? Carter already knows what’s in them, so why would he get this man to break into my study?” Carew said, confusion clouding his features.

Richard had difficult containing his temper. “I think that is fairly obvious. He doesn’t just work for Carter, this man has another master.” Turning to Hanwyn he said, “Ungag him. We need to find out who he’s working for and for how long he’s been helping himself to your master’s secrets.”

It took only a short while, the force used was brutal, and the small man’s refusal to speak did not last long. Hanwyn, releasing him from a tight hold, let him drop back onto the top of the barrel where he sobbed out his confession. He told them he’d been forced to work for another master, forced to break into Carew’s house. He begged for clemency, asserted that his very life had been in danger and he’d been given no choice. Eventually he told them who it was that had coerced him. “Master Prentice, I meet him in the Swan’s Neck Tavern off Meek Street.”

“And did Master Prentice pay you well for your duplicity?” Richard asked, folding his arms and observing the man coldly.

He shook his head, and Richard’s glance towards Hanwyn had the big man’s arm back around the captive’s neck in a hold that blocked the air from his lungs.

“Please, please …” the man gasped, struggling against the hold, his body writhing from side to side, his hands helplessly still tied behind him.

Hanwyn slackened his grip but did not let go.

“He did pay me. But I still had no choice,” the messenger pleaded.

“We are all faced with choices, it seems coin paved the way to disloyal ones in your case,” Richard observed, then asked, “how much and how often?”

He spoke freely from then on, telling them of the brief meetings he had with Prentice, of the amounts he had been paid. Any messages he was to deliver to Carter first went via Prentice, and any replies Carew sent went back were delivered after he had visited the Swan’s Neck Tavern. He had a meeting that evening planned at the Tavern when he was supposed to be handing over the papers he had taken from Carew’s study.

Richard pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes, then looked at the man seated on the barrel. His words, however, were for Carew. “Well, we are going to need to let him reach his meeting with Prentice.”

“What!” Carew blurted, “but you just said …” Richard’s raised hand stilled Carew’s words.

“He has a meeting planned at the Swan’s Neck, if he doesn’t keep this meeting then whoever he has been giving this to will know they have been discovered and we will stand no chance of finding out who it is that has been intercepting them. Isn’t it obvious?” Richard stated again, his voice sounding weary. “I will take him to the Tavern and find out who Prentice is.”

It was Hanwyn who spoke then, “Sir, the Swan’s Neck isn’t a gentleman’s tavern. You’ll look out of place. I’m known there, if I go with you no-one will give you a second look as long as …” Hanwyn let his words trail off.

“I don’t look like this?” Richard finished for him.

Half an hour later Richard, dressed in borrowed clothes, set off with Hanywn and the messenger to The Swan’s Neck. The man, when he was released from his leather bindings, was in no doubt as to what they would do to him and agreed readily enough to the plan. They had returned to his keeping some of stolen papers after Richard had made some neat incisions in the parchment so the overlay could not longer be used as the cipher key.

Richard and Hanwyn took a table together and the messenger sat a little distance away nursing a cup of ale. Cold water applied to his face had removed the trails of dried blood and in the gloom of the inn interior the purple stain on his cheek bone from the beating Hanwyn had given him was hardly noticeable.

While they waited Richard mused on what he had found out. The amounts of money the messenger had been paid were not insubstantial, and he had been relaying information back to Prentice for two months. Two months. Richard’s head spun. That was about the whole time that the planning for Wyatt’s rising had been in place, whoever Prentice was supplying the information to was potentially primed to know exactly what was planned. Despite the precautions with the code, Richard could not discount the fact that it might have been cracked. All the planning, the coordination, the work to rise against Mary had been wrecked by the work of one stupid man, and one greedy one.

Hanwyn’s elbow nudged Richard to revive his attention. The man that the messenger was to meet, Prentice, had, it seemed, arrived.

Richard looked at Hanwyn. “When the meeting is over can I rely on you to follow the messenger and take him back to Carew’s again?”

Hanwyn nodded. “Yes sir.”

Richard clapped him on the arm. “Good man, let him leave alone but follow him.”

“You can rely on me,” Hanwyn said, it was obvious from his tone that he was enjoying this immensely.

Richard observed Prentice without looking at him. He was surprised by the man who met the messenger. He strode in with a proprietary air and sauntered across the room, calling for ale as went. A large man, too well dressed to be a servant or a labourer, he wore a tight leather jacket that strained over a well fed paunch, knee high leather riding boots, and a dark brown cloak of close spun wool was held in place by a large, round silver clasp with a twisted leaf design pinned on his shoulder. Whoever Prentice was, he wasn’t afraid of being seen, and he was not a man to hide in the shadows.

When the meeting was over Prentice remained behind, joined immediately by several others, and it was another two hours before Richard could absent himself from the Swan’s Neck and follow Prentice to his destination. He did not have far to go, and the big man was an easy target to follow through streets. They arrived at the informer’s eventual destination and Richard found himself reaching out for a wall to steady himself as he watched Prentice admitted through a postern gate and into the confines of Derby’s London residence.

Richard felt sick. The wave of nausea flooded through him and threatened to overwhelm him.

Derby! Christ why did it have to be him?

Derby knew of Wyatt’s plan, at least Richard had to suppose he did.

 

†

 

Richard did not have much time to waste. Hanwyn would, he hoped, be back at Carew’s now with the messenger, and that was a more immediate problem he needed to deal with.

What to do with the man?

Quickly he made his way back towards Carew’s, little of his mind on the journey, most of it on this new and unwanted problem. He had to assume the code had been cracked, or at least part of it. Derby had experts at his disposal, and despite Richard’s precautions he was sure that if they had put enough hours into decoding it then there was very real danger that Derby was fully informed of Wyatt’s planned uprising.

If he was then that put Elizabeth in a very real danger, she needed to disassociate herself from Wyatt and from Courtney.

The more immediate issue though, was what to do with the messenger. Very little physical pressure had been needed to get him to talk. It had to be assumed that he would buckle equally as easily if asked any searching questions by his master or Prentice.

Returning to Carew’s he was admitted again to the tack room where Hanwyn waited with the messenger. He was sitting back on top of the barrel, though this time his hands were not bound.

That he had been in conversation with Hanwyn and Carew was obvious when Richard opened the door and the pair looked towards him. The messenger had completed his part of the plan, since his confession and subsequent cooperation they had treated him well. He was obviously hopeful that he was going to walk free from Carew’s tack room, maybe even a little optimistic that he could continue to profit from the venture.

“Well done,” Richard said, closing the door at his back and sliding the wooden latch into place. “I was able to follow Prentice, not an easy man to miss in a crowd.”

He’d walked behind the messenger and lay a hand on his shoulder, squeezing it slightly. If Hanwyn’s face had not creased in horror the man would have had no warning. The knife in Richard’s hand would have sliced his throat before he had been aware of the