My Friend Walter Read online

  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 a sharp, stinging smell in my nostrils and a taste in my throat that made me cough. The stone walls of a room came out of the darkness around me and there was a beamed ceiling above me, a red-draped four-poster bed around me, and the old man’s kindly face smiling down at me. I looked about me. I was in the Bloody Tower, in Sir Walter Raleigh’s room. I was lying on the four-poster bed and he was sitting beside me passing a foul-smelling bottle under my nose. I pushed it away and sat up. ‘Sweet cousin, believe me you have nothing to fear,’ he said. ‘I am, as you see, a ghost – a misfortune I have had to learn to live with. But certain it is that I mean you no harm. On the contrary, you are my dearest cousin, else I should not have appeared to you as I did.’

  My voice found itself again. ‘You? You are Sir Walter Raleigh?’ He nodded. ‘You were at the party? It was you at the party?’ He nodded again.

  ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘I am Walter Raleigh, or what is left of him.’

  ‘But that Miss Soper, she said they cut off your head. How . . .?’

  ‘You mean how is it that you see me now in my undamaged state?’ He chuckled. ‘I cannot tell you, dearest Bess, for I do not know. Faith, it is as perplexing to be a ghost as it was to be alive. But in truth, I am glad to have my head again for it was always the best part of me and, though I say it myself, many considered it a passing handsome face even in old age. What say you, cousin?’ And he turned his head so that I could see his profile against the dim light of the window.

  ‘Bess used to think my nose was quite perfect – she said as much, and often.’

  ‘Bess?’

  ‘Bess Throckmorton. She was my dear, dear wife,’ he replied, suddenly sad. ‘No man ever had such a dear sweet wife and no man ever treated a wife so cruelly. I left her behind in this world with nothing. Nothing. It hurts to say it even now, but I left my whole family with nothing.’

  ‘But that’s my name too,’ I said. ‘I’m Bess Throckmorton.’

  He nodded.

  ‘Indeed it is, cousin. Indeed it is, and as I told you, you are much like her, too. I miss her, I miss her to this day.’ His voice hardened with anger. ‘You see cousin, when they dubbed me traitor and cut off my head, they cut off my fortune too and reduced my Bess to poverty. My head they were welcome to – I had worn that long enough – but they stole my fortune and impoverished my family, and for that I shall never forgive them. One day I shall have my revenge. Mark me well, cousin. I shall be avenged.’

  At that moment I heard footsteps outside the door. Walter Raleigh pulled me close to him and enveloped me in his cloak. He held me tight. ‘Be still, cousin,’ he whispered. ‘Inside my cloak they shall not see you.’

  The Beefeater was the first to come in, followed by a troop of several tourists all hung about with cameras and anoraks. ‘Can’t think how the door came to be shut. Always left open,’ said the Beefeater. ‘Anyway, here it is, the Bloody Tower, so called because it was from here in the cold light of dawn that many an unfortunate prisoner was taken down below to Tower Green for his execution. It was here in this very place that Sir Walter Raleigh spent thirteen years of his natural life.’ He bent down, put his hands on his knees and spoke to the children. ‘You’ve heard of Walter Raleigh. He was the one that laid his cloak in a puddle so Queen Elizabeth could walk across without getting her feet all muddy.’

  ‘What did he want to do that for?’ said someone, but the Beefeater ignored it and went on. ‘And it was here he wrote his famous history of the world and his famous prayer the night before they cut off his head. Let me see now, how does it go? Let me see. Yes.’ He cleared his throat and put his hand on his chest:

  ‘Even such is time! Who takes in trust

  Our youth, our joys, and all we have,

  And pays us but with age and dust;

  Who, in the dark and silent grave,

  When we have wandered all our ways,

  Shuts up the story of our days!

  But from this earth, this grave, this dust,

  The Lord will raise me up I trust.

  ‘Not bad, eh, to make that up the night before you have your head cut off? Brave man he was, must have been eh? And every evening y’know he’d walk up and down the ramparts out there to stretch his legs. Raleigh’s Walk we call it now.’ He bent down and spoke in a hushed voice to a little boy who was sucking his finger. ‘And there’s some who say he still does.’

  ‘But you haven’t ever seen him, though?’ said the little boy’s mother quickly, more to reassure herself than her son, I thought. The little boy’s eyes were wide with terror. He had his whole hand in his mouth now.

  ‘Nope,’ said the Beefeater, smiling conspiratorially and stroking his moustache, ‘not myself I haven’t, but I knowed someone that knowed someone else who knew a friend of his and his cousin’s niece’s nephew said he’d seen it.’ And he boomed with laughter as they all did.

  When they’d finished it was the boy’s father who spoke. ‘How come he was put in here anyhow?’ he said. They were Americans. You could tell from their accents and their haircuts and their spongy shoes. ‘After all, didn’t he find America for you British? I mean, we wouldn’t be speaking English if he hadn’t found the good old U S of A, would we? We’d be speaking Spanish or Dutch or something. And didn’t he sink lots of those Spanish galleons for you in the Armada? And didn’t he burn lots of others?’

  His wife joined in. ‘Yeah, and wasn’t it Walter Raleigh who brought back the potatoes from Virginia and taught you British how to grow them?’

  The Beefeater stroked his moustache and thought for a while. ‘I believe he did, lady. I believe he did. All I know is, he was a traitor and that’s why he found himself inside here. I mean he wouldn’t hardly have been put in here if he was innocent, would he?’ At this the Americans looked at each other and fell silent, until the little boy piped up. ‘Mommy,’ he said.
‘It smells in here.’

  ‘Well it is old, dear,’ said his mother. ‘Perhaps it’s the damp.’

  ‘You’re right, son,’ said his father, lifting his nose and sniffing the air. ‘Smells just like tobacco smoke to me – cigars, perhaps.’

  A tall man in spectacles at the back of the party spoke next. He was carrying a book in his hand and he spoke very deliberately and earnestly. ‘In zis book it say zat Sir Valter Raleigh was ze virst man’ (he wasn’t an American this one, I could tell) ‘who brought ze smoking of ze tobacco in England.’

  ‘That’s right, sir,’ said the Beefeater. He leant down and whispered to the little boy again. ‘P’raps it’s old Sir Walter himself puffing away on his pipe, son. P’raps that’s what you’re smelling.’ The boy’s hand went straight back into his mouth and everyone roared with laughter, except the boy and his mother. ‘Before you go, ladies and gentlemen, you’d better take the opportunity to walk up and down Raleigh’s Walk a few times – it’s just outside the door. It’ll give you a feel of the place. Like I said, old Walter Raleigh himself used to pace up and down there every day he was here.’

  But the tall bespectacled man had not yet finished. He waved his guide book in the air. ‘But I do not exactly understand,’ he said. ‘Zey cut off his head in ze end, yes?’

  ‘That’s right sir,’ said the Beefeater, trying his best to be patient.

  ‘Zen vy did zey vait sirteen years to cut off his head? Vy did zey not cut off it at once, in ze beginning?’

  ‘Well,’ said the Beefeater. ‘Well, things was different then, in them days, wasn’t they? I mean if you was a king, you could change your mind when you felt like it, couldn’t you? And old James the First, he just kept changing his mind. In the end he let old Sir Walter out sort of on bail. Sir Walter told the King he knew where there was this gold mine in South America, Guiana it was, and so King James sent him off to find it, but he never found it, see? And so he came back empty-handed. ’Course the King was none too pleased at that so he chopped off his head.’

  ‘But that isn’t fair,’ said the little boy’s father. ‘Not cricket, as you British say.’

  ‘That’s true ’nough sir,’ said the Beefeater. ‘I suppose if you think about it, and to be honest I haven’t much, but if you did think about it nothing much that happened in this place in them days was very fair. They was hard times, sir, hard times.’

  ‘Daddy, I can still smell that smoke,’ said the little boy, looking around in alarm. ‘Can we go now?’ And so they went, the little boy sucking his hand and looking round over his shoulder directly at me, it seemed, as he went out of the door. At last we were left alone.

  Walter Raleigh left me wrapped in his black velvet cloak and limped across the room to the door. ‘They’ve gone,’ he said and he closed the door again.

  ‘But why didn’t they see us?’ I asked. ‘That little boy, he was looking right at me.’

  ‘Cousin Bess, though I yearn often to be once more amongst the living, there are some advantages to be had in my present more spiritual state. Since I am but a spirit, and a spirit has no body, I may go where I will unseen. My cloak is part of me and I may hide what I will under it. I may pass through walls and doors as if they were not there, and I may eavesdrop invisibly on the living world as much as I wish – indeed there is little else to do in this wretched damp place. Oh, do not think cousin, that I do not still feel the damp in my bones. To be a ghost is to live with all the pain of the living but with little of the pleasure.’

  ‘But I still don’t understand: how can I see you and they can’t?’ I asked.

  Sir Walter smiled. ‘You can only see me because I wish you to see me. I do not wish them to see me, so they cannot. Seek to know no more, good cousin, for I know but how things are and not how they come to be so. I may tell you that I am often sorely tempted to use this ghostly talent and howl around the towers like a proper ghost, for it would certainly alarm those ignorant wretches such as the one we have just seen who have so cruelly wronged my name in history. For what is Walter Raleigh known? For laying his cloak in a puddle and for ending his days a condemned traitor. They spoke false. I was wronged, cousin; wronged, I tell you. I mind not for myself, not any more. What harm can it do me now? But I mind for my name and for my family’s honour. For I never in my life betrayed my country. Indeed, I spent all my life in the loyal service of my queen and her realm. They wronged me by my death, cousin; and such a wrong should be righted – is that not so, Bess?’ I nodded. ‘I tell you, I cannot rest for this hurt inside me. It lingers in me like the ague that racks my bones. I would be free of it. I will have again what was rightly mine and what was taken so cruelly from me and my family. I will have back what is mine – mark my words, cousin.’

  I shrank back from his anger and he saw that he had frightened me. He came towards me, arms outstretched to comfort me. He was dressed, I noticed, in black silk, or perhaps it was satin, I could not tell which; but it glistened even in the gloom of the room. He wore a doublet, a waistcoat and breeches, and all were black. ‘I would not hurt you dear cousin, not for all the gold in the world,’ he said, and he reached out his gloved hand, lifted my chin and looked into my eyes. ‘I promise you, chick, Walter Raleigh is your friend and your humble servant.’ And he took my hand and kissed it.

  It was a little difficult to know quite what to do. I mean, no one had ever kissed my hand before. I felt suddenly like a queen or a princess and, to be honest, I liked it. He took my hand and helped me down from the bed.

  ‘I think I’d better be going now,’ I said. He looked a bit upset at this and I hated myself for my clumsiness. ‘It’s my Aunty Ellie,’ I tried to explain. ‘She’ll be waiting for me down on Tower Green. She’ll be wondering where I’ve got to and if I don’t go soon she’ll come looking for me. We’ve got to go all the way back to Devon tonight. It’s a long way.’

  ‘Devon?’ said Sir Walter Raleigh, his eyes suddenly lighting up. ‘Did you say Devon?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We’ve got a farm down in Devon, Exeter way it is, not far from Honiton. That’s where I live.’ He took his cloak off my shoulders and folded it over his arm. As we walked together towards the door he said nothing. He seemed deep in thought. ‘I know Devon well. In truth I am, or I was, a Devon man,’ he said. ‘When I was a boy – and that was indeed hundreds of years ago – when I was a boy I too lived on a farm in Devon. I have dreamed of that place ever since. Perchance you know it, cousin. They call it Hayes, Hayes Barton. It lies within the parish of East Budleigh, not many miles from the sea. There never was a place more beautiful in all the world. And I should know, cousin, for I have travelled far and wide on this earth and never have I found a more pleasant place. Had I but lived out my life at Hayes, I might have kept my head on my shoulders and I might now be at peace with my soul. But what’s done cannot be undone.’ He stopped and put his hand on my shoulder. When I turned round and looked up, his eyes were pleading. ‘Dear cousin Bess, I would I could see those green fields once again and the cows and the sheep in the meadows. I would fish once more in the silver streams and ride over the hills with the wind in my face salty from the sea. Prithee, good cousin, take me with you back to Devon. I would not trouble you for long, for a few days perhaps.’ He looked around him. ‘Dear God, how I tire of these grim grey walls. They were a prison for me in my life and they have been my prison ever since. There is no comfort here for my troubled spirit.’

  ‘Bess! Bess Throckmorton!’ Aunty Ellie’s voice was calling from below. She was angry. She always used my surname when she was angry.

  ‘I’ve really got to go,’ I said and reached out to open the door. But when I turned and saw him standing alone in that cold bleak room I knew I could not leave him behind.

  ‘Bess Throckmorton!’ – Aunty Ellie again.

  I opened the door. ‘I’m coming!’ I called out. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘but I don’t think anyone at home would like the idea of a ghost in the house. They wouldn’t understa
nd, and my Gran’s got a bad heart. If she gets upset she has one of her turns, so you’ve got to promise you won’t ever show yourself. It’ll be a secret, just you and me, no one else.’

  ‘I would not have it any other way, dear cousin,’ said Walter Raleigh, his face beaming with joy. ‘We shall bind ourselves now in a solemn promise. I shall not reveal myself to anyone except to you and in return you shall tell no one of this meeting or of your cousin Walter. They would only think you mad – and I would not have anyone believe that of you. I will be your true and secret friend, dear Bess, for as long as you have need of me. You have my word on it.’

  ‘Bess Throckmorton!’

  ‘I shall follow you, cousin. You will not always see me, for I find it tires me to show myself for too long, but rest assured that I shall be at your side.’

  As I came down the steps I noticed that Aunty Ellie and Miss Soper were talking to the same Beefeater I had seen showing the tourists round the Bloody Tower. I called out to Aunty Ellie because I had a sudden terrible sinking feeling that she might not be able to see me, that no one would ever see me again. I was quite relieved when she looked up and saw me. ‘Bess!’ she cried, rushing towards me. ‘Bess Throckmorton! Whatever have you been up to? Where have you been?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, shrugging my shoulders. ‘Nowhere.’

  ‘I was just telling this gentleman here how I left you up there and he swore blue murder there was no one else up there.’ The Beefeater she was talking about came over to join us. ‘You see,’ Aunty Ellie said to him pointedly. ‘She was up there, just like I said. I told you, didn’t I?’

  The Beefeater looked at me and frowned. He was more than a little puzzled. ‘Well, I just don’t understand it, lady,’ he protested. ‘I don’t understand it at all. I was up there not five minutes ago and I’m telling you there was no one up there. Hiding under the bed were you? You’re not s’posed to go near that bed. They do that, these kids, sometimes. Got no discipline these days.’