Betrayal

"Captain," said Nell Garrow, behind him in the dark. "There's no singing."

"There is."

"There's water, and rats, and my own bloody heart. Nothing else."

"I heard her."

"You heard what you wanted." She said it without cruelty. She stood waist-deep in the black current beside him, a short square shape with a dark lantern at her belt and a cutlass in her hand, and her eyes in the faint glow were as steady as stones. "Come on. We've a grating to find."

Garrick opened his eyes.

The song had stopped. He could not have said when. He stood a moment longer with his head cocked, straining, but there was only the rush of the Fleet Ditch, a thick brown slow-moving flood, and the drip of slime from the vault of the sewer, and the heavy breathing of eight men. The stench was past describing. The brick walls ran with a green and glistening ooze. Somewhere ahead, in the dark, a great rat plopped into the water and swam away.

Perhaps I imagined it, he thought.

But he knew that he had not.

They went on.

…

It had taken them an hour to come up from the river.

The outfall lay under Blackfriars Stairs, a low black arch half drowned at high water, and they had gone in on their bellies at ten o'clock, with a tide running out and a sleet blowing, while Nell's cutter lay moored in the dark fifty yards downstream. They carried crowbars, rope, lanterns, pistols, a short ladder, a sledgehammer wrapped in sacking. Nell had brought seven of her men. Garrick had brought his sword and the pair of pistols that Hatch had pressed into his hands that evening at the door of Hartwell Square, without a word, her old face set like granite.

You will bring her home, she had said.

I will.

And yourself.

He had not answered.

Now they went up the Fleet in single file, stooped under the dripping roof, wading through filth to the thigh. Big Tom Hake went first, the enormous bald man from the Drowned Rat, with a lantern on a pole. Then Nell. Then Garrick. Then a boy named Ned, who could not have been more than seventeen, with a gap-toothed grin and a mouth that never stopped telling jokes in a thin cheerful whisper. Then four more, and a coil of rope.

The drain narrowed. It bent. It split into three, and Nell led them into the left-hand branch without hesitation, and the water rose to their ribs. A foul warm wind blew in their faces. Overhead, through an iron grille, he caught for an instant a glimpse of a street, and a lamp, and a dark huddle of roofs, and then it was gone.

"Bridewell," breathed Nell. "We're under the old prison. Another two hundred yards."

"How do you know?"

"I was born two streets from here. I used to play in this." She snorted. "Mind your head."

He minded it.

They came at last, at a quarter to midnight, to a place where the tunnel ended in a wall.

It was old brick, black with age and mortar, laid in a rough arch. Set in the center, at the height of a man's chest, was a square iron grating. It had been bricked up from the other side, once, in the time of some forgotten Magister, and the brick had crumbled to a weeping crust. Behind it, faint, cold, and sour, came the smell of coal.

"There," said Nell softly.

Garrick laid his palm on the wall.

It was wet and very cold. He stood quite still for a long moment with his eyes shut, and felt through the bricks, or fancied he felt, the shape of the building above him: the cloister, the chapel, the long white corridor, the cell. The place where she lay. She was perhaps eighty feet away. He could have counted the steps.

Hold on, he thought. I'm coming.

"Tom," said Nell.

The big man took the sledge from its sacking. He weighed it in his hands. He looked at Garrick.

"On your word, Captain."

"Do it."

…

The first blow shook the tunnel.

It rang like a gong, dull and enormous, and a skin of slime slid off the vault and fell hissing into the water. The second cracked the brick. The third drove a fist-sized hole through the wall, and a cold draft rushed out, thick with coal dust, and the lamp flames leaned and guttered. Ned crowed. Nell hissed at him to hold his noise. Tom swung again, and again, until the crust had crumbled away and the iron grating hung loose in its frame like a rotten tooth.

They pulled it out.

The black mouth of the hole gaped before them.

Garrick stooped. He thrust his lantern through. Beyond the wall lay a low vaulted cellar, bare and dark, heaped with pyramids of coal. A row of arches ran away into gloom. At the far end, perhaps forty feet off, a staircase rose, narrow and steep, with a door at its head.

No light. No sound. Nothing stirred.

"Empty," whispered Nell.

"Too empty."

"They're at their prayers. You said it yourself."

"I did." He frowned. "But I'd have expected a watch."

Pike would say it's a bad sign.

Pike's not here.

He drew his sword. He set one boot on the ledge, and ducked, and went through.

…

His foot touched coal. It slid under him. He caught himself against a pillar and stood there, crouched, listening, with the blade low and the lantern shuttered. The cellar was colder than the tunnel. The air tasted of dust and old stone. Behind him he heard the others scrambling after: Ned's whispered curse, the creak of Tom's boots, the metallic clink of the sledge. Nell came last. She stood up beside him, brushing the grit from her waistcoat, with her cutlass in her fist.

"Which way?"

"The stair."

They crossed the cellar in a line. The coal crunched underfoot, loud as gunfire. Garrick counted the arches: one, two, three, four. A rat ran across the floor. Ned stifled a laugh. They were twenty feet from the stair, fifteen, ten. Garrick had his foot on the lowest step.

Then every lantern in the cellar bloomed at once.

…

It was the light he saw first.

A wall of it. A blinding line of yellow flame, from one end of the vault to the other, as if a curtain had been snatched from a stage. Torches blazed in brackets that had been empty a moment before. Lamps flared from the tops of the coal heaps. A row of braziers burst open on the left. Shadow leaped and fled. The whole low arched hall sprang into view, blazing, dripping, crowded.

And in it, standing in a double rank along both walls, were forty men in gray.

They did not shout. They did not move. They stood perfectly still with their cassocks hanging straight and their silver pins glittering, and each held, leveled at the intruders' chests, a short stout musket with a smoking match.

"Down!" shouted Garrick.

He threw himself sideways, and the world split open.

The sound was tremendous. It struck the vault like a hammer and rolled and echoed and crashed back, and the air filled with smoke, white and choking, and the stink of powder. Something hot plucked at his sleeve. Someone screamed. He rolled behind the nearest coal heap with the sword still in his fist, and a ball struck the pillar a foot from his head and sprayed him with stone.

"Ambush!" roared Nell. "Back, back to the hole!"

"They're behind us!"

He turned his head. The hole in the wall, a black hole in the crumbling brick, thirty feet away, was dark and open. Between it and him stretched a space of rubble and coal and shadow. In the mouth of the tunnel stood three gray figures with muskets.

They knew. They knew the road.

A man went down beside him.

It was one of the lightermen, a thin quiet fellow called Perry, who had joked about the smell. A ball took him in the throat. He sat down very slowly against the coal heap with his hands to his neck, and the blood ran between his fingers black in the torchlight, and he looked at Garrick with an expression of mild surprise. Garrick caught him. He was dead before he had time to lower him.

"Perry!" bellowed Tom. "Perry, you bastard—"

The big man rose. He charged. He went up the cellar like a bull, with the sledgehammer swinging in both fists, and the first rank of the gray men broke and scattered before him. For a moment he was a whirlwind. A musket stock cracked under his blow. A man fell, screaming, with his arm hanging. Another dropped his weapon and ran. Tom roared, and swung again, and then three shots came at once from the left-hand wall, and the giant stopped in his tracks.

He stood swaying, with the hammer lifted. Blood ran down the front of his oilskin in a dozen rills. He looked down at himself, as if puzzled. Then he turned his head and found Nell.

"Sorry, love," said Tom Hake. He sounded embarrassed. "I think I'm done."

He fell like a tree.

…

It was later that Garrick would remember how quiet it became.

After the smoke, after the shouting, there was a lull, a silence in which his own breath sounded like a saw. He crouched behind the coal with his shoulder against a pillar. His left sleeve was soaked. He did not remember being hit. He saw Nell on her knees ten feet away, dragging Ned, white-faced and moaning, behind a heap, and tying a rag round his thigh. He saw the other men fighting hand to hand in the smoke. He saw two of them go down. He saw the gray ranks tighten.

Think, he told himself. Think. There must be a way.

There was none.

The exit was blocked. The stair was held. They had eight men, three dead already, two wounded, and nothing but pistols and cold steel against forty muskets. They had walked into a trap as neat as a mousetrap, prepared with care, baited with a hole in a wall. He saw it all. He saw how it had been done.

He heard a voice.

"Captain."

It came from the arch above the stair, through the drifting smoke. It was a rough voice, thick, hoarse, an old man's voice. It shook.

"Captain Wynmore. Don't."

Garrick looked up.

On the second step of the staircase stood Silas Brandt.

He had no weapon. He stood with his huge ragged shoulders hunched, his cap in his hands, and his beard glinting in the torchlight. He had been weeping. His cheeks were slick, and his small red eyes were wet. Behind him, on the stairs, the gray brothers stood with their muskets lowered, impassive, waiting.

"Silas," said Garrick.

It was all he could say.

"I'm sorry." Brandt's voice cracked on the word. "I'm so sorry, Captain. I didn't want it to be you. I swear to God I didn't. I thought you'd stay at home. I thought, if I could just get the lady out of the way..." He drew a shuddering breath. "She's a witch. She saw my Mary. She saw her in the dark. She said the shawl was green, and I buried her in it, and there's no one on earth that knew that but me. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't eat. She was in my head. I thought, Lord, if she can see that, what else can she see? And then I saw the way you looked at her, and I thought, She's got him. She's turned him. I thought, If I don't do something, she'll have us all."

"You betrayed me."

"I saved you."

"You've killed my men."

"They're thieves. They're murderers. They're smugglers and lowlifes." The tears ran into his beard. "Captain, listen. Listen to me. It's not too late. The Magister says if you lay down your arms and come out with your hands up, there'll be no more killing. He'll hear you. He'll show mercy. He says you've been bewitched, and the Church is kind. Please. For God's sake. Please."

Garrick stared at him.

Eleven years. Eleven years on the deck of the Albatross. Eleven years of storms and calms and the endless sea, of nights in the rigging and dawns on the quarterdeck. He had trusted this man with his life. He had shared a cabin with him in the Azores, in the fever. He had stood at the grave of his wife.

And he told them. Of course he did.

Because he was afraid.

It was not rage that he felt. He found it almost a relief. The thing had a shape now; it had a name. He looked at Brandt, huge and broken on the stair, and saw him as he really was: a frightened, devout, tormented man who had never learned to pray except by betraying.

"Silas," he said gently.

"Yes, Captain?"

"I forgive you."

Brandt's face crumpled.

He opened his mouth. And at that moment a voice from the head of the stair called, clear and cold, "Fire!"

…

Garrick never knew who gave the order.

It might have been the Magister. It might have been some zealous young priest. The word cracked across the cellar like a whip, and the muskets on the staircase came up in a single movement, and the match-ends flared.

Brandt turned.

He did it without thinking. He swung round on the step with his arms spread wide, a vast black shape against the flames, and stepped between the line of guns and the man below him. He said something. It might have been Captain, or Mary, or God. Then the volley struck.

He took five balls in the chest.

He staggered. He did not fall at once. He stood with his arms out and his face turned up and his mouth open in a sort of wonder, and then his knees gave, and he sat down on the steps with his back against the wall, and blood came out of his mouth.

"Silas!"

Garrick was across the floor before he knew it. He caught the old man under the arms. The brothers had stopped; a ragged silence hung in the smoke; no one moved. He dragged Brandt down off the stair and laid him on the coal, and the quartermaster looked up at him with eyes that were already far away.

"She said my Mary was at peace," Brandt whispered. "She said it in the hold. I didn't believe her. I couldn't." The blood bubbled. "Is it true, Captain? Is she?"

"Yes," said Garrick. He did not know. "Yes. She is."

"Thank God."

"Silas—"

"Forgive me."

The great chest heaved once and was still.

…

They fought their way out.

Afterward, Garrick could remember very little of it. There was fire and smoke and noise. There was the black mouth of the drain, and a scramble through it on hands and knees, and Nell's hoarse voice screaming at him to move. There was Ned's weight on his back, dead or dying, he could not tell, and then there was no weight, and he left him. There was the glare of torches behind them and the roar of pursuit, and a shot that took him high in the left shoulder and drove him against the wall, and a searing line of pain that he noted from a long way off.

There was the river. Cold air. A skiff, with a single oar. Nell, and two men, and himself.

There were the gray boats on the water behind, with lanterns at their bows.

They went ashore a half mile downstream, in the shadow of a coal wharf, and ran. He did not remember where. A maze of alleys and courts. A churchyard. A passage between two warehouses, narrow and dark, ending in a blank brick wall. He stood in it with his back to the bricks, holding his arm against his side, and watched the lanterns of the pursuit come bobbing down the passage, and heard the thud of boots.

"Nell."

"Here."

"How many?"

"Me. Dick. Wilkins." Her voice was hard, flat, and wrecked. "That's all. There was eight of us. There's three."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't." She was wiping blood from her face with her sleeve. She was bleeding from the scalp, and a cut on her scar. "Don't you dare say it. I knew what I signed on for."

"Tom—"

"I know about Tom."

Silence.

The boots drew near. He took a pistol from his belt with his good hand and cocked it. It was a strange thing to do. It felt almost peaceful. He looked at the little round muzzle of the barrel, and thought about the Duke, and the Magister, and a whitewashed cell, and a child he would never see, and he thought: It is over.

There is nothing left.

I have killed them all.

He lifted his head.

Above the rooftops, a few streets away, there was a glow. A faint, flickering, orange glow in the winter sky. He had not noticed it before. It came from the direction of the priory. It came from the great open square before the gate, and as he stared, it brightened, and he heard, very faintly, on the wind, a sound like many hammers.

"What is that?" he said.

Nell followed his gaze. Her face went still.

"They're building it," she said.

"What?"

"The scaffold. The stake." She spat. "They're doing it by torchlight. All night, so it's ready for dusk. I've seen it before."

He listened to the hammers.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

It was a very steady sound. A carpenter's sound. A sound of men going about the honest business of making a thing that would burn. He thought of the crowd, three hundred faces, white and avid, in the great hall. He thought of the boy on his father's shoulders with a stick of sugar. He thought of Ixara's face when she had said Wait for the moment.

She wanted me to be patient. To be clever.

I was both.

And look what it cost.

The lanterns were forty feet away.

He lowered the pistol.

"Nell," he said.

"Aye."

"How many boats can you raise by tomorrow dusk?"

"What?"

"The Tidewater. The whole of it. Every cutter, every lighter, every wherry on the river. How many?"

She stared at him. "Are you mad?"

"Very likely."

"It'd be thirty. Forty, if we called in the Deptford lot. But we'd never—"

"And the Albatross. She has twenty guns. They have not been fired in anger for two years. I could have her in the Pool by morning, with the powder aboard, and a crew." The words came faster. "They are going to burn her in the open. In a square. On a feast day, in front of the whole city. They think it is a spectacle. They think no one will dare." He drew a breath that tore at his shoulder. "They have been so careful. So quiet. They have set a trap in the dark, and they will do it again. We cannot beat them in the dark."

"Then what—"

"We stop hiding."

He straightened. Pain went through him like a bell. He stood up away from the wall, and the lanterns turned the corner of the passage, and he saw the gray faces beneath them, and the leveled muskets, and the glitter of silver pins. He smiled. He knew it was a terrible smile. He saw Nell see it.

"They want a spectacle," said Garrick Wynmore, softly. "They want the people to see the fire."

He lifted the pistol, and fired it at the sky.

The flash lit the passage like noon. The echo rolled down the walls. The brothers flinched, and in that instant of confusion Nell's cutlass came up and her two surviving men burst from the shadow, and a short bitter scuffle erupted in the dark; and above it, over the clash of steel and the cries and the ringing in his ears, he heard himself say, quite calmly, to nobody at all:

"I'll give them fire."