The Tudor Conspiracy - Gortner Christopher W. (книги онлайн без регистрации полностью .txt) 📗

I shut the door behind me and leaned against it with my arms crossed. Though I wanted to grab him by his shirt and shake him until he spilled his guts, I needed his cooperation, preferably without duress.

“Actually,” I said, “I believe we’ve been both betrayed. Mistress Sybilla Darrier; she was the woman you’d been meeting here, wasn’t she?”

He reached for the decanter. I strode across the room, swiping it from his grasp. “Drink yourself to death for all I care, but not before you tell me what I need to know.”

Up close, I saw his eyes were bloodshot, rimmed in shadow. He was also halfway drunk by the looks of it, which wasn’t going to make this any easier.

“The queen has issued a warrant for your arrest,” I informed him. “They’re searching for you as we speak.”

He blanched. Staggering from his chair, he thrust his chin at me, his breath foul with wine. “Yes, and why is that? Because you lied! You promised to see me safe. You said, if I helped you, you’d not set their dogs on me. But you gave them those letters. Why should I trust anything you say now?”

“Because we’ve both been played false,” I said. “She planned this. She stole Dudley’s letters, only I didn’t know it was her at the time. Then she brought them back, claiming she’d taken them from Renard. I had to give the queen something before Renard moved against the princess. It was your head or hers. That is what I believed.”

The anger in his eyes faded. “She-she planned it?” he whispered.

I met his bewildered stare. “She made me believe she was helping me. But now I know she had something different in mind.” I leaned to him. “She has another master. I must know where she is.”

I was hoping for a revelation, but he turned away blindly, swaying. “She told me Renard had used her cruelly,” he said, as if the act of admitting her duplicity aloud would somehow make it less true. “She said she was English, that she supported our cause. I believed her. She was so beautiful, so convincing … I told her everything about the conspiracy and Dudley’s letters.”

“About me,” I said.

He nodded miserably. “She came to see me that same night. She must have seen you leaving the brothel. She asked who you were. I told her that you claimed to be working for Elizabeth and threatened me, so I had to help you get into the Tower. Later, when I saw you with her in the palace, I thought she would persuade you to see our point of view.” He came to a halt, his eyes widening as he recognized the full import of his credulity. “God help me, she lied. She used me to her own ends. What am I going to do now?”

“Tell me where she is. You can still escape. But she has Elizabeth’s letter; I have to get it back.”

Tears spilled down his cheeks. “They’ll torture me, won’t they? Break me on the rack, in the Little Ease. They’ll tear me apart with hooks; burn me with brands and whip my flesh from my bones, but nothing they do can stop it. The others will come. They will rise up against the queen. And Sybilla knows; she knows everything.”

I felt as if a pit had cracked under my feet. “Others? What others?”

He went silent, his jaw clenching. Then he said, “The nobles Dudley wrote to-they’re only the half of it. He didn’t trust anyone, not entirely, so he had me recruit others.”

“Who? When will they act?”

“When the queen’s betrothal is announced,” he muttered, lowering his gaze to his feet, “that will be their sign. Thomas Wyatt in Kent, he’s rallied his supporters; he plans to join with the Duke of Suffolk’s retainers to march on London.”

The Duke of Suffolk: Jane Grey’s father. God help her, Mary would kill her for it. She would end up paying for these men’s treachery. I couldn’t take any more. Seizing Courtenay by his chemise, I lifted him off the floor, ramming him against the wall. He moaned; glancing down, I saw his hose darken under his codpiece, the seep of piss trickling down his thigh.

“You fool,” I hissed. “Do you realize what you and Dudley have done? Elizabeth could die because of you! So could her cousin Jane Grey. Sybilla sought information for someone else, and now, because of you, she has all the information she needs.”

His eyes bulged. “I–I never meant to harm Elizabeth,” he gasped. “I swear it.”

My fist closed about his chemise, twisting the cloth, cutting off his very breath. “I need to find Sybilla. Now.”

“On the Strand.” His voice broke. “In the old Dudley manor. She’s there.”

As I let him loose, his knees buckled underneath him. He slid down the wall, crumpling at my feet. I took a deliberate step back. Much as I wanted to feel compassion for him, all I felt was disgust. His pride and foolish ambition had cost him everything. He’d brought England to the brink of disaster because of it.

He slumped in a heap. It was then that I discerned a cacophony downstairs-terrified shrieks, the smash of cutlery and overturned furniture, and the stamp of booted feet punctuated by authoritative shouts. The queen’s men were here.

Courtenay keened. I whirled about. There was nowhere to go, nowhere except-

I threw open the casement window and reached out my hand to him. “Come.”

He cringed. “No. I–I can’t. I’m … I’m afraid of heights.”

I wasn’t about to plead. Climbing onto the casement edge, I saw below me the stable yard and ramshackle stalls for horses. The commotion inside the brothel had roused an emaciated dog tied to a stump in the yard. It was barking, straining at its tether.

I looked to the left. Directly beyond the brothel lay a smaller dwelling, with a thatched roof that didn’t appear too steep; to my right, a direct fall into the street. I stepped onto the outer ledge, balancing precariously. My breath came fast. I made myself take a deep breath. I wasn’t fond of heights either, come to think of it.

Feeling with my foot past the ledge, I encountered a peeling beam that ran the length of the building, no wider than my hand. For a second, I froze. I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t skitter along the ledge like some damn cat-

Shouts boomed in the corridor. I glanced over my shoulder. Courtenay sat huddled in the corner, petrified. I couldn’t wait anymore.

Step by step, I moved onto the ledge without looking down, gripping the outer wall, my hands splayed against moldering daub, my heels scraping icicles. In the room behind me, I heard Courtenay begin to pray, “Sweet Jesus, save me. Jesu, hear my plea,” and the splintering of doors in the passageway being kicked in.

I crept onward. The dog was baying now.

An enormous crash came from the room. Courtenay let out a horrible wail.

They had found him.

I kept moving to the building’s edge, assaulted by a vivid memory of the last time I’d found myself fleeing through a window in the dead of night …

I quickened my pace, just a little more to go.

The thatched rooftop was much farther down than I’d thought, slick with melted snow. I wondered if it would hold me or if I’d end up crashing through it.

“Someone’s out the window!” a voice cried from behind me.

Unbuckling my sword in its scabbard, I tossed it into the street.

“You!” yelled the guard at the window. “Halt, by Her Majesty’s command!”

I closed my eyes.

I leapt.

The fall felt eternal. Icy air whistled in my ears. Everything slowed to a crawl so that I had a dazzling, fleeting glimpse of the torch-lit maze of Southwark and heard the incredulous dismay of the guards leaning out the brothel window, watching me plummet to what they surely believed was my death.

I hit the thatch. Winter had frozen the bundled layers to mortarlike hardness. I tucked my knees, covering my head as I slid off the side. Sodden snow cushioned my fall; it was shorter in any event, a brief tumble, and then I sprawled on the ground.

Scrambling to my feet, too pummeled at this point to feel any pain, I grabbed up my sword. The stable-yard dog was yowling; any moment, the guards would come for me.