Lamentation

Stice, on my other side, turned to Barak who had taken a position beside him. ‘Did you?’

He nodded yes.

Stice’s eyes glittered in the dark. ‘Once or twice I’ve felt the house in Needlepin Lane is being watched. But I’ve not been able to catch anybody at it.’

‘We’ve never known for sure that Greening’s murderers were connected with these Anabaptists,’ Cecil said. ‘What if there’s a third party involved, someone we don’t know about?’

‘Then perhaps tonight we’ll find out,’ Stice answered. ‘Now be quiet, stop talking, just watch.’

We crouched there for the best part of an hour. My back and knees hurt; I had to keep shifting position. Once, we tensed at the sound of footsteps and voices, and hands reached for swords and daggers, but it was only a couple of sailors, weaving drunkenly along the dockside. They climbed aboard a ship some way off. Apart from an occasional distant shouting from the taverns, all was quiet save for the sound of water lapping round the ships.

Then I heard more footsteps, quiet and steady this time, and from another narrow lane to our left I saw the bobbing yellow glow of a lantern. A whisper passed along our row of men. ‘Four of them,’ Stice said into my ear. ‘Looks like our people. Right, you and Master Cecil stay at the rear, leave it to us fighting men.’ And then, with a patter of feet and the distinctive whish of swords being pulled from their scabbards, the others ran out from behind the barrels. Cecil and I followed, our daggers at the ready.

The men were taken totally by surprise. The lantern was raised to show four astonished faces. They matched the descriptions I had committed to memory: the tall, powerfully built square-faced man in his thirties must be the Scotch cleric McKendrick, the plump middle-aged man the merchant Curdy, and the rangy fair-haired fellow the Dutchman Vandersteyn. The fourth man, in his twenties, tall, strongly built and dark-haired, had to be Leeman, the Queen’s guard who had deserted. He would be trained as a fighting man, and I also remembered that McKendrick had formerly been a soldier. Apart from Curdy, who had the round flabbiness of a prosperous merchant, each looked as if they could give good account of themselves.

All four rallied in an instant, bringing up swords of their own. They were going to make a fight of it. Apart from Curdy, who had been holding the lamp and now laid it down, only the fair-haired man had been encumbered by luggage, a large bag which he let drop to the cobbles. But Stice and his crew, Cecil’s two men, and Barak and Nicholas, made eight against them. They fanned out in a circle, surrounding the smaller group, who cast glances, as did I, at the ship from Antwerp. The two crewmen had now left the cabin and stood at the rail, staring at what was happening. Then another man climbed up from below to join them.

Stice called out, ‘Lower your swords. You’re outnumbered. You are under arrest for the attempted export of seditious literature!’

The fair-haired man shouted something in Dutch to the men at the ship’s rail. One of Stice’s men lunged at him with his sword but he parried immediately, just as the three men from the boat jumped nimbly over the ship’s rail onto the wharf, each carrying a sword. My heart sank; the number of fighting men was almost even now.

One of Cecil’s men turned and raised his weapon, but in doing so he turned his back on the blond Dutchman, who thrust his own sword swiftly through his body. The man cried out, his sword clattering onto the cobbles. Then Vandersteyn turned to face the rest of us and, with his three compatriots, began retreating slowly to the boat. I looked at the fallen man; there was no doubt now that we were not dealing with some amateurish group of fanatics but with serious, dangerous people.

‘Cut them off!’ Stice yelled. A moment later there was a melee of swordplay, blades flashing in the light of the lamp. I stepped forward, but felt Cecil’s hand restraining my arm. ‘No! We must stay alive; we have to get hold of the book.’

There was a battle royal now going on beside the ship, blades flashing noisily. Watchmen came out to the rails of nearby ships and stood gawping. Curdy, the weakest of the fugitives, lunged clumsily at Gower, who, ignoring our agreement to take these men alive if possible, sliced at his neck with his sword, nearly severing his head. Curdy thumped down on the cobbles, dead, in a spray of blood.