Traitor's Storm: a Tudor Mystery Featuring Christopher Marlowe (Kit Marlowe Mysteries, 6, Band 6) - Hardcover

Trow, M. J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1780290624 ISBN 13: 9781780290621

Verlag: Severn House Publishers Ltd, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

Christopher Marlowe faces the might of the Spanish Armada in the sixth of this intriguing historical mystery series
May, 1588. With Elizabeth I’s court rocked by stories of an imminent invasion and one of his key undercover agents missing, Sir Francis Walsingham despatches Kit Marlowe to the Isle of Wight off the south coast: the first line of defence against the approaching Spanish Armada.

Lodging at Carisbrooke Castle with the Isle of Wight’s Governor, Sir George Carey, Marlowe finds the Islanders a strange and suspicious lot, with their own peculiar customs and dialect. But is there reason to doubt their loyalty to the Crown? And is the Island really haunted, as some believe? Of one thing Marlowe is certain: it’s no ghost behind the series of violent and inexplicable deaths which plague the region. But will he have time to uncover the truth and expose the killer before the might of the Armada descends?

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

M J Trow is a military historian by training and the author of the long-running Inspector Lestrade and 'Mad Max' Maxwell detective series, as well as several non-fiction books, including Who Killed Kit Marlowe? He lives on the Isle of Wight.

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Traitor's Storm

By M. J. Trow

Severn House Publishers Limited

Copyright © 2014 M.J. Trow and Maryanne Coleman
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78029-062-1

CHAPTER 1

Little Gonzalillo hated the Escorial. He was the King's jester, for God's sake, born to a life of laughter, with music and merriment – and a little mayhem from time to time. When the Court moved to Madrid or Valladolid he came into his own, tumbling and eating fire and teasing the children. After all, he was their height, and while they were kicking the shins of their elders and betters, he could do the same to them. In fact, little Gonzalillo hated children almost as much as he hated the Escorial.

The place was a palace in name only. It was also a mausoleum and a reliquary. Its evil little windows reminded the dwarf of the gun emplacements along the hulls of His Imperial Majesty's ships of the line. They were dark and mean and held nothing but death. Gonzalillo pattered along the labyrinth of corridors, through the library with its shelves of polished oak and richly embossed leather. There were 40,000 books here – he'd get round to reading one of them one of these days. Then he was bounding up the stone steps to the reliquary, wondering if anyone had yet spotted the fake prepuce of St Basil he had slipped in there a few months ago. The goat it came from wasn't likely to tell anyone of the ruse and, even if no one ever detected it, it brought a smile to little Gonzalillo's lips every day.

He paused at the black velvet arras, pulled himself up to his full four feet two inches and straightened his doublet. Mother of God, it was cold up here. It was supposed to be May but the wind from the Sierra de Guadarrama whistled and whirred along the passageways and rattled the shutters. Hail had bounced off the roofs for much of the night and the Courtyard of the Evangelists was white when Gonzalillo had padded across it. It was not dawn yet and the whole place felt like a tomb.

The dwarf twisted the ornate key and the little door in the high wall creaked open. The hinges were never oiled; not because the room's occupant was afraid of the shadow of the assassin that waited at every king's elbow, but because he so valued his privacy and wanted to know immediately that it had been violated.

King Philip sat in his closet, his long, pale face lit by a solitary candle. It looked as if he hadn't slept for a long, long time. Gonzalillo took the briefest of looks, then bowed low and held that position, as only an acrobat could, staring at his shoes. Behind him, the velvet hissed back into position with the sibilance of sin and he waited.

'The English ships, Gonzalillo,' the King said at last, without looking up from the papers on his desk. 'They are faster than ours.'

'Indeed, Felipe.' The dwarf knew the signs, had rehearsed the moment so often. When the King spoke, that was the time to drop the bow and start the day's work. Gonzalillo smiled. No one in the Escorial; no one in the whole wide world called His Majesty 'Felipe'. His children called him Papa and his wife My Darling. His Pope and his God called him My Son. Only his half-brother, Don Juan of Austria, called him Felipe – and Don Juan of Austria was dead these ten years. Gonzalillo crossed to a barrel of water and cracked the thin film of ice on its surface. He filled a jug from it, wiping the bottom on his doublet with a grimace, and carried it to his master. Then he placed it on the table, well away from the clutter of charts and maps he saw there, and dabbed the King's temples with a damp cloth. Philip of Spain leaned back and sighed. The first fingers of light were lending an eerie creeping glow to the closet. He closed his eyes.

'How much this time?' Gonzalillo asked him, fussing around the King.

'Hmm?' Philip's mind was elsewhere, his mind racing through the surf of the Channel, bringing his ships' guns to bear on the man his sailors called El Draque, the dragon: the English pirate Francis Drake.

'How much sleep have you had?'

'I don't know,' the King said in that hoarse whisper of his. 'Enough, I expect. And their gunnery is good.'

'Hmm?' It was Gonzalillo's turn to be elsewhere.

'The English fleet,' Philip explained. 'Their gunners are good.'

'Let's take this thing off.' The dwarf gently lifted the golden chain of the Fleece from his master's shoulders and let it clatter on the sideboard. 'Gives you a headache, that, doesn't it? Ready for breakfast?'

Philip looked up sharply, his pale blue eyes wide and urgent, his brooding jaw thrust forward. 'The enterprise,' he said softly. 'The enterprise of England.'

Gonzalillo stopped fussing. He put his hands on his hips and looked up at the most powerful man in the world. 'Yes,' he said, with all the gravitas of a Santa-Cruz, 'the English ships are faster than ours. And yes,' he suddenly became the Duke of Parma, 'their gunners are good. But we, Felipe el Prudente, have God on our side. The English can never claim that. Now,' he quietly took the quill out of the King's hand, 'will you please have some breakfast?'

'It all depends,' said Philip as the dwarf took his hand and led him away, 'on our friends in England.'

'Disappeared?' Nicholas Faunt was not sure he had heard all of what Francis Walsingham had just said. They were moving upstream from Placentia, following the curve of the river and the wind was roaring in his ears as they took the centre of the waterway to round the Isle of Dogs.

'Has not been heard from.' Walsingham thought that perhaps his chief projectioner had lost the plot somewhere.

'Since when?'

'Last month,' Walsingham told him, pulling his cloak tighter round him against the weather. He grimaced up at the leaden sky where thunder clouds loomed to the east. 'It is May, isn't it? I've lost all track of time, with this weather. It feels like November.'

'Where did you say he was again?'

'The Wight.' Walsingham leaned forward, lowering his voice lest the boatmen, bending their backs against the wind, should have ears.

'We are talking about Hasler, aren't we?'

Walsingham leaned back. He had known Nicholas Faunt since he was a boy. Few men in England had so sharp a brain or so loyal a heart. But Walsingham was not a well man. Back in January he had taken to his bed, all but blind in one eye, and that had frightened him. For more years than he cared to remember, he had been the Queen's Spymaster, the dagger ever-vigilant at her back. One day, and it might be soon, he would have to pass the chains of office to a younger man. Was Nicholas Faunt really that man?

'You know we are,' the Spymaster said.

It was Faunt's turn to lean forward, into the biting wind. 'What I mean, Sir Francis,' he said, 'is that you know Harry Hasler as well as I do. He'll have found a doxy somewhere or a tavern or probably both. It's his way.'

'Yes, it is his way,' Walsingham agreed, 'but we both know that underneath that loutish exterior is a projectioner of rare talent. His last report talked of danger and he couldn't, he said, be more specific. That was on the sixteenth ult.'

'From where?'

'Newport. He was working for George Carey at Carisbrooke Castle.'

'What do you propose?' Faunt asked.

'We send somebody else. Track Hasler down. Find out what's going on.'

Faunt nodded. 'Me?' he said.

'No.' Walsingham shook his head, his face greyer and deader looking than ever in the early morning light. 'I need you here.' He patted his doublet. 'You haven't seen the latest report from Lisbon. I have. And believe me, it makes for grim reading. When I've seen the Queen...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Severn House Publishers Ltd
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1780290624
• ISBN 13: 9781780290621
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 224
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar