I grant you, but everyone in this room has the blood of Walter Raleigh running in their veins, albeit thinly.’ He drew on his pipe and sighed as he looked around him. ‘It is hard to believe it, but it is so.’ He turned to me again. ‘He lived close by for some time, you know.’
‘Close by?’ I said.
‘In the Tower of London. If ever a man served his country well it was Walter Raleigh – and how did they repay him? They locked him up and cut off his head.’
‘Cut off his head? But why?’
‘That is indeed a long story and a hard one for me to tell.’ He leaned forward again and spoke gently. ‘But since you have some connection with him by blood, perhaps you should go and see where he lived all those years ago. Thirteen years he was there. Thirteen long, cold years in the Bloody Tower. You should go there child. You should see it.’ He gripped my arm so tightly that it frightened me, and looked at me earnestly. ‘He is part of your history. He is part of you. Will you go?’
‘I’ll try,’ I said, and he seemed happy with that.
He looked past me. ‘I long for something to drink, child; but there is a crush of people about the table.’
‘I’ll fetch it,’ I said. ‘Tea?’
He smiled at me. ‘Wine,’ he replied. ‘Red wine. I drink nothing else. I shall be here or hereabouts when you return.’ When he stood up he was a lot taller than I expected. I looked up into his face. His beard was white and pointed, and he seemed for a moment unsteady on his feet. ‘Back in a minute,’ I said.
I suppose I was gone a little longer than that because there was a queue for the wine, but when I came back he was nowhere to be seen. I asked after him everywhere but no one seemed to have noticed a tall old man in a black cloak carrying a silver-topped cane. I thought I had found him once and tugged at a black-cloaked figure talking to Aunty Ellie, but he turned out to be a vicar in his cape and so I offered him the wine anyway to cover my embarrassment. Aunty Ellie was delighted at my politeness. She introduced me as her little niece, her ‘little china doll’; and I was once more yoked to her skirts and paraded around amongst my inquisitive relatives. But I remember little enough of the party after that for all I could think of was the tall old man who had appeared and then disappeared, who had insisted that I visit the Tower where Walter Raleigh had been locked up all those years. The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to go; but I wondered how on earth I was going to persuade Aunty Ellie to take me.
In the end, though, it was Aunty Ellie herself who suggested it. She had met up with a long-lost cousin of hers whom she had not seen since she was a child and I suppose they wanted something to keep me happy, or quiet, whilst they reminisced about the childhood summer holidays they had spent together by the sea at somewhere called Whitstable. We could either go on a trip up the river or to the Tower, Aunty Ellie said. Which did I want? ‘The Tower,’ I said. And so I found myself that afternoon inside the Tower of London walking past red-coated, bearskinned guards whose eyes wouldn’t even move when I looked up into them, past Beefeaters who smiled down at me and curled their abundant moustaches as if they were Father Christmases.
As we stood in the queue waiting to see the Crown Jewels, I tried to ask Aunty Ellie about Walter Raleigh. After all, if he was related to me he was related to her too. She told me not to interrupt and finished telling her blue-haired cousin, Miss Soper I was to call her, all about her life as a midwife, about how she had looked after almost all the new-born babies born in Devon for over thirty years and how so many of them were named after her. ‘Now dear,’ she said, turning to me at last, ‘what was it?’
‘Someone at the party told me we were related to Walter Raleigh.’ Aunty Ellie opened her mouth to speak, but Miss Soper got there first.
‘Indeed, we are, dear,’ said Miss Soper. ‘But thankfully only distantly, and on his wife’s side. He was a terrible rogue, that one. He was imprisoned here, you know.’
‘I know,’ I said.
‘And he was a traitor,’ said Miss Soper. ‘That’s why he had his head chopped off. We are much more proud of our Sir Francis Drake connection, aren’t we Ellie? The Sopers are related much more directly to the Drakes than the Raleighs. Now there was a man if there ever was one. Francis Drake.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Drake is in his hammock and a thousand miles away . . .’ and Miss Soper began to recite a poem in such a loud and impassioned way that the whole queue gathered around her to listen, and then clapped when she had finished. ‘I think, Ellie,’ she said, giggling with embarrassment, ‘I think I drank a teeny weeny bit too much wine at the party.’
‘I think so too,’ said Aunty Ellie, ‘But what does it matter? Oh, it’s so good to see you again, Winnie, after all this time. You haven’t changed a bit.’ And they hugged each other for the umpteenth time and I began to wish I was with someone else.
We saw the Crown Jewels and ooohed and aaahed with the others as we filed past all too quickly. There wasn’t time to stop and stare. There were always more people behind, pressing us on, and Beefeaters telling us to move along smartly. The Crown Jewels were splendid and regal enough but they looked just like the pictures I had seen of them, no better. I was impatient to get to the Bloody Tower to see where Walter Raleigh had been imprisoned, and it was already getting late. When we came out of the Crown Jewels Aunty Ellie said there’d only be time for a short visit to the Bloody Tower.
So I found myself at last inside the room where Walter Raleigh had spent thirteen years of his life. There wasn’t much to see really, just a four-poster bed, a chest and a tiny window beyond.
I walked up and down Raleigh’s Walk, a sort of rampart that overlooks the River Thames, and I wondered again about the old man no one else had seen at the party.
Storm clouds had gathered grey over the river and brought the evening on early. The river flowed black beyond the trees and people hurried past to be under cover before the rain came. I was alone and I was suddenly cold. Aunty Ellie and Miss Soper had gone on without me. They would wait for me outside by Tower Green, they said. They had found the Bloody Tower grim and damp, not good for her rheumatism, Aunty Ellie said. ‘Don’t you be too long,’ she’d told me. ‘We’ve got to get back.’
I was wondering why Walter Raleigh hadn’t just made a rope out of his sheets and let himself down over the wall. It’s what I would have done. I leaned over the parapet. ‘Too far to jump,’ said a voice from behind me. A tall figure was walking towards me, his black cloak whipping about him in the wind. He was limping, I noticed, and carried a silver-topped cane. ‘So,’ he said. ‘So you came. Allow me to present myself.’ He bowed low, sweeping his cloak across his legs. ‘I am, or I was, Sir Walter Raleigh. I am your humble servant, cousin Bess.’
CHAPTER 2
IT’S NOT BREAKING ANY SECRETS IF I TELL YOU that I am easily frightened. Moths in my hair, spiders in my bath – they make my skin crawl with fear. So you can perhaps imagine what it was like for me to see this black-wrapped spectre limping towards me. This was no dressing gown on the back of the bedroom door, no flapping curtain in the moonlight, no creaking floorboard. This was the real thing. It spoke words. It walked steps. I would have run, but I found my legs would not move. I would have screamed, but that part of me would not work either. So I fainted instead, not deliberately but willingly enough. I felt my knees buckle and my back scraping the stonework behind me as I fell. I remember the thud as my head hit the ground. There was no pain, only blackness.
Someone was calling to me from far away. ‘Bess! Bess!’ There was
