Raleigh's Page by Alan Armstrong

Raleigh. “The West Indian islands are shown with their harbors. Where the Spaniards have forts, there are red marks.”
    He paused and looked at Tremayne.
    “Will you go with them?” he asked. The sweep of his hand took in Mr. Harriot and Andrew.
    “The three of us?” Tremayne asked. “Andrew, Mr. Harriot, and me?”
    “Yes,” said Mr. Raleigh. “You three are my Americans now.”
    Andrew caught his breath: he was going too! Pena was nodding and smiling at him.
    “Yes, I’ll go,” said Tremayne.
    “Good,” said Mr. Raleigh. “Understand, you’ll not be going as settlers: this expedition will be to gather facts and write a report to encourage others to invest and settle. You and Andrew will go as explorers under Mr. Harriot.
    “For now, go back to your school and carry on as before. We hope to sail in the spring.
    “Neither of you will speak of this to anyone. To those who ask, say you’ve been to Ireland.”
    He nodded for them to leave.
    As Andrew got to the door, he turned and asked the question that had been gnawing at him since the night they left Marseilles.
    “Sir, did the drug kill them?”
    “No,” Mr. Raleigh said with a dry laugh. “I diluted it to one-quarter strength. I feared your hand would shake and you’d give too much.”
    “So they’re alive?”
    “Ha!” he exclaimed, making a face. “They are, and eager to renew your acquaintance, along with the Crown’s agents who have warrants for your arrest. Had you not made it out that night, you might not be standing here. By dawn they were searching every ship.
    “That map you took—it did not belong to Viton, you know. He’d borrowed it from someone high in Paris who had no business lending it.
    “Trouble all around!” Mr. Raleigh said with a happy smile.
    When Andrew got into the hall, Pena embraced him.
    “The French have invitations for me too,” he said. His face was grim.
    “For you? Why?”
    “We were plotting against the Crown,” he said.
    “The gardeners?” Andrew asked.
    “In life we all wear many hats,” he said slowly. “To some I was a gardener, to others I was a revolutionary for the Protestant cause. My name was on their list. A dozen years ago on Saint Bartholomew’s Eve, they killed ten thousand of us Protestants. All of my family. Every Huguenot on which they could lay their hands—noble or simple, man, woman, or child—murdered. The streets ran with blood; the river was full of corpses. The killing went on for days as Catholics rose in many towns and followed the example of Paris.
    “Mr. Raleigh was in France then,” Pena continued. “We were escaping together when we got caught. The men who found us had their knives out to cut our throats when Mr. Raleigh splashed them with his black oil and set them afire.
    “Ah!” he exclaimed, shaking the dark memory from his mind like a dog shedding water.
    “Come see our children!” said Pena. “The plants, the seedlings—the melons are up! And today we begin the swimming!”
    “No!” cried Andrew.
    “Well, when your sores heal.”
    That night, Andrew undressed out of sight. He was so tired he left his clothes where they fell.
    “Where have you been?” William asked.
    “To Ireland, training to be a merchant.”
    “You would be a merchant?” Peter sneered. “Only that?”
    Peter’s tone of voice made him shiver, like the scraping of fingernails over slate.
    “That much,” Andrew replied quietly. It crossed his mind to tell them what Doctor Dee had said about merchants being heirs to adventure, but he didn’t. He was too tired.
    Hours later he awakened to Peter’s shrieks: “A Catholic! Andrew is a Catholic! A spy!”
    Somehow, when Andrew undressed, the rosary Rebecca had given him must have slipped from his pocket. When Peter got up in the night, he’d found it.
    As William and Andrew started up, Peter dashed into the hall, yelling, “Andrew is a spy! Andrew is a spy!”
    For a moment the boy lay helpless. Then his strength came on,