The Queen's Men Read online

  Early on the second day, with the use of a bone taken from the stockpot, Beale lures one of Overbury’s mastiffs a decent distance from the house and then throws the bone into a sheep pen he has learned belongs to Overbury. He does not believe Overbury would ordinarily be called out to kill a dog among his sheep, but he might if it is his own.

  Sure enough a boy comes running from the fields and Overbury will not believe it is his dog among his sheep until he cannot find it, and then he takes up his coat and hat and leaves his fireside to sort it. Beale is on his socked feet fast, and up the steps to the bedroom in which Ness Overbury is overseeing the turning of a mattress. He asks for words in private and the girls who are turning the mattress manage to keep their faces straight as they leave.

  “Mistress Overbury,” Beale begins. “I have a great deal to tell you, to ask you and very little time in which to do so.”

  She stands listening to his strange request, and as the winter light slides in from the unshuttered window, catching the dust motes, and falling across her alabaster skin, made only more beautiful by the beauty spot on her right cheek, she listens with her mouth slightly open, her teeth better than the Queen’s, her hands by her side, and he badly wants to press his mouth on hers and as he has not the time to explain his proposition now, properly, persuasively, he tells her that he has one to put to her, and that it would be an incredibly valuable service, for the sake of her Queen and country, and God even, but that it would require her absolute discretion.

  “You wish me to be involved with something—some scheme of which you cannot talk now, here in this room—and about which I am not to tell my husband or anyone else I know?”

  She is mocking him, of course, and he cannot stop himself flushing furiously.

  “Yes,” he says, and he tries to reassure her his scheme is not as she believes, and that he means what he says about Queen and country, but it sounds absurd and he only tangles himself further. He tells her he needs to see her alone, with time to explain what it is he wants her to do—the fact itself, the act itself, and the ramifications that might stem from it—and that this needs be done properly for he cannot risk even mentioning what it is he wishes her to do without her expressing an interest in pursuing it, or feeling she mayn’t for feeling her obligations elsewise forbid it.

  “I will be in Bury St. Edmunds,” he tells her, “until the day after the second market day this week coming. I will be staying at the house of the physician Dr. Paley, on the corner where there’s a sign with three dogs, nearby the Angel inn. If you feel you are at least open to the suggestion then, please, come and find me there.”

  “It is a lot to grapple with,” she says.

  He agrees. But he can see she is breathing very fast and that her eyes are alive with the thrill of it.

  “Come here,” she says.

  * * *

  A week later, and Hilliard and Jeffers and the two yeomen have left Beale and ridden back to London, while he remains in Bury St. Edmunds. It remains bitingly cold, but dry, and he has the makings of a room to himself, under the thatch of the Angel inn, overlooking the old abbey gate. There is a cat for company, and a strong-smelling scullery maid who assumes he is a sodomite for he makes no move to touch her, but on the fifth day, Beale sees Ness Overbury, in green wool, with her two maidservants bobbing along a walkway in the marketplace like ducklings behind their mother. He has thought of nothing but her since the moment they kissed and pressed their bodies to each other in the room with the turned mattress. He has since masturbated four times a day, once twice more, and cannot now ride a horse without doing himself a mischief.

  He gets to his feet and hurries through the backyards to the house of the physician Paley, who is one of Master Walsingham’s men. Paley is elderly, somewhat deaf, and with vision that can only be hampered by the bubbles held in the finger-thick glass of his eyeglasses. Beale ushers him out of his rooms, and then out of the house, into his own backyard, before Ness can knock on his door.

  Their first meeting is smeared and breathless, and as soon as the door is shut and locked and they are alone in the small enclose of Dr. Paley’s consulting room, they tug at each other’s points, throwing their clothes aside, heedless of the things they send ascatter: scales and weights; a glass jar for the sniffing of piss; bundles of twigs; gathered leaves in linen bags; and a stone mortar of a ruby-colored powder that is perhaps cinnamon bark. Before the powder settles they are half naked, her thighs are wrapped around his hips, and his cock is buried deep within her. They stare into each other’s eyes from a finger’s width apart and breathe the same air. They have exchanged not one word before he feels he must withdraw, but she clinches him in her, and she whispers in his ear that she is barren and though the words we’ll see flit silently through his mind, he is past caring and he comes in a great rush and thinks he will faint with the pleasure of it.

  She laughs and holds him while he gasps like a river-banked fish, and she tells him that that is not how her brother does it.

  He freezes stock-still.

  She laughs more.

  “It is a joke,” she says. “About Suffolk people.”

  He manages a laugh and withdraws and rolls off her and collapses on the floor next to her. He blinks away the sweat. The smell of the ruby-colored powder is all around them. It clings to their skin. After he regains his breath, he lies on his side, hand holding his head, elbow on the ground and looks at her disarray. Her body is very pale, with a fine spray of freckles, and a nipple that clenches under his touch. He traces his finger across her belly, linking the larger dots, like making figures from the constellations: here is Ursa Major; Ursa Minor; Scorpio; Taurus; Virgo. He thinks: You might send a coded message on freckles such as this. A cipher. One of those grilles Girolamo Cardano devised: you press it over an agreed text, and each perforation reveals a letter that you wish shown. But why not a shift, cut precisely, with each freckle and moles given a value?

  She watches him.

  “Well,” she says. “What now?”

  They do it again, less urgently this time, though it reaches its ending soon enough, and her ears and cheeks are set aflame and she clings to him with an almost frightening ferocity while her body writhes of its own accord. Afterward she lies on her back and trembles, breathing as if in pain, and she lets slip a single tear to leave a trail into the fine red hair at her temple.

  “My God,” she says. “I needed that.”

  He, too, is drained, enfeebled by something more than just his efforts. He can scarcely gather the strength to find her clothing and pass it to her, one tangled piece at a time, let alone his.

  “You did not even take your boots off.” She laughs. “Even my brother manages that.”

  He sits on the bench, she on the rushes. He watches her pulling up a sock and he tries to see her as the Queen. To tell himself he has just fucked the Queen of England. It is the sort of thing men would tell other men in the tavern, isn’t it? I fucked the Queen. I swived her good and proper. But he cannot. He has fallen down a hole. He is lost.

  When they are dressed, and they have righted as much of the physician’s paraphernalia as they can, he takes the position of the physician, she the patient.

  “So what is this really about?” she asks.

  “Really about?”

  “You cannot have come all this way just for that? However good it was.”

  He tells her. She listens.

  “The Queen?”

  He nods. She starts to laugh. She has hands just like the Queen. She holds one over her mouth when she laughs, just like the Queen. And her laugh: it is… actually not like the Queen’s. While he talks, her gaze dances about the place, and each time she identifies some hurdle or improbability, he has an answer for it. Except what to do about Overbury while she is learning how to comport herself as Elizabeth Tudor.

  “There are two possible ways to get your husband out of the way,” Beale tells her. “Three, really. The first is to find some venture that takes him
away—a cloth fair in Antwerp, if Antwerp had not just been sacked. Amsterdam then. That is the coming place for cloth.”

  “He is an old soldier, he always says. If there were some ordering men to their deaths in muddy fields, then he would be there like a bolt.”

  Beale thinks: Ireland.

  “What are the other two options?” she asks.

  “If he were detained—in a prison say, then you might have good reason to stay in a house nearby. To visit him.”

  “And that is where you would be? In this house? With my tutors?”

  “I would come and see you,” Beale agrees.

  “Come and see me!” She chuckles. She knows that is not what he really means. Her laugh really is not like the Queen’s. “And what is the third?”

  Beale does not want to tell her. Her eyes widen.

  “You could do that? Kill him?”

  Beale says nothing. He does not want to admit that he could have it done. But yes. She laughs again, quietly this time, and he can see her trying to picture her life without Overbury.

  “Is it so bad?”

  “With John? No. So long as you do what he says.”

  “Why did you ever marry him?”

  “The truth? I was with child. He served the old King, with my father, and he claimed not to mind an experienced wench. That is what he said. He was already a widower, already getting on, with no children of his own and he has an income of forty pounds a year.”

  “What happened to your child?”

  “Pffft,” she says. “I miscarried a week after the marriage.”

  “So you were stuck with him.”

  “Yes,” she says with a deep sigh. “I sometimes wonder if… if this is all there is to life. We cometh up and are, by and by, cutteth down. It sometimes strikes me that our souls are wasted in the pursuit of— I am not certain what. A new dress of red velvet?”

  “But what of the rewards of heaven?”

  “Oh yes, them.”

  She rights her hood and then stands to go. He is gripped with lust again, and would cast caution to the wind, but she holds up her hand to stop him.

  “You are serious about this?”

  She means the impersonation.

  He nods.

  “I will have to think on it. I will let you know.”

  “Of course,” he says, disappointed. “It is no simple thing I ask of you.”

  “By Christmastide?”

  He agrees.

  “God willing we can keep Her Majesty alive that long,” he half jokes.

  She stands as the Queen can sometimes stand. It is only the dark freckle on her lip that sets her obviously apart. That could be covered, surely. And she has none of the Queen’s scarring. But the Queen wears so much powder that she might merely seem to be wearing more, or better, or thicker powder. Whatever would serve.

  Before Nell takes her leave of Beale, she cups his cods and feeling them heed her call to arms, she smiles a strange hard personal smile of satisfaction. Then she is gone, leaving Beale as if boneless, as if bloodless.

  “My God,” he says. “My God.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Seething Lane, City of London,

  third week of December 1577

  It is late December, and Francis Walsingham has been confined to bed for ten days, on the rack of a fever his physicians say he must have caught on the road to Lincolnshire. They wrap him in henbane poultices, bury him under woolen blankets, and seal him in his room. Occasionally they return to ply him with a concoction brewed from verjuice and the liver of a baby bear they buy from the gardens in Southwark.

  “He can have no more than a spoonful an hour or it will kill him.”

  The thought of his death is the only thing that keeps him alive.

  Walsingham dreams of burning shipyards, and of drowning sailors. He dreams of an enormous Turk, buried upright in gold coins. He dreams of hard black bread, soft cheese in roundels, and of a baby crying like a peacock in the distance. On the tenth day of his illness he is well enough to be allowed daylight—winterish—filtered through the murky glass of his window, and on the eleventh day, the window is opened a notch.

  On the twelfth he is allowed to stand.

  But on the thirteenth Sir William Cecil comes.

  “We feared for your life, Francis,” he tells him. “We prayed for you.”

  Walsingham acknowledges their concern—whoever they are—and thanks them for their prayers.

  “What news?” he asks.

  Cecil shakes his head.

  “Bad first?” he asks.

  “Bad,” Walsingham confirms.

  “Parma has reached Luxembourg.”

  Walsingham had hoped for some disaster on the way: an avalanche in some alpine pass; a sudden drought; a plague of snakes.

  “We must pray he keeps to his barracks until the campaigning season.”

  “Amen to a hard winter.”

  “What else?”

  “Do you recall Mistress Jane Frommond?”

  “Vividly.”

  “She has gone missing.”

  “How?”

  “She took two horses from the stables at Richmond—the morning we were there, before all your”—Cecil turns his hand over, to indicate Walsingham’s time-consuming, inconvenient illness—“and has disappeared. The horses, though, have been found, hitched to the roadside in, of all places, Waltham Forest, exactly, according to Sir John Jeffers, where Her Majesty’s coach was attacked.”

  Walsingham tries to make sense of this.

  He can’t.

  “Have you searched the wood?”

  Cecil looks affronted.

  “I don’t have the time to spend looking for runaway maids of honor, Francis. Your absence—it has proved an added burden.”

  “But anything can have happened to her, Sir William. We can’t just—”

  He starts to cough and his wife comes in. Cecil stands and is instantly placating.

  “All is well, Ursula!” he says, his little arms out. “All is well. I have brought up an unpleasant subject, of which we will speak no more.”

  “Francis?” Ursula checks.

  Walsingham gives her the best smile he is able. She has been through the wringer, and not just with his latest illness, he knows. At length she is content to leave them to it with reassurances from Cecil he will not be long, nor raise any more subjects likely to overtax her husband.

  “Do not mention John Dee,” she jokes.

  Cecil throws up his arms in mock horror.

  “Reassure yourself on that front, my dear Ursula,” he says, “for there is nothing to say. He has rather gone to ground, and though I shall soon have to tear him away from alchemical books, I will ensure that he is kept from bothering your dear husband until he is restored to health.”

  This just about satisfies Ursula, and with one last concerned look at her husband, she takes her leave, closing the door softly behind her.

  “What has Dee done now?” Walsingham asks.

  “Ah, well,” Cecil tells him, “it is not what he has done, it is what he is about to do. This is the only piece of good news I bear you: from Anthony Jenkinson. His Saracen has sent Her Majesty a barrel of the naft. A small one, as a sample of what is to come. Jenkinson says he—the Turk, whose name he will not share—is much smitten with what he has heard of Her Majesty.”

  “So soon?”

  “Your man Robert Beale—he’s been opening your messages while you have been so ill—believes Jenkinson has connections among the Marrano bankers, who have a carrier pigeon system to get a message from here to Constantinople in a week.”

  “What price is he asking?”

  “Ah,” Cecil says. “That is the strangest thing: I still do not know. There was a verse that came with the delivery, which Jenkinson says contains the terms.”

  Walsingham’s eyeballs are starting to hurt again.

  “A verse?”

  Cecil has a small square of paper.

&
nbsp; “Written in their language, but thankfully alongside what I believe must be a translation into Latin. I have given it to your man Phillips, in the event there is some underlying encryption, but he tells me that so far he has found nothing, and that he believes it should be read at face value. Would you like to hear it?”

  “Not in Latin. I am not strong enough for that.”

  “I have translated it into English. It is a bit rough. As you know, I am no versifier.”

  “Go on then.”

  “See what you think of it,” he says. “Remember, it is a first draft.”

  And he recites it in his most sonorous tones:

  “They say of love;

  the heart one day fell prisoner to a prince

  but long has mine been captive of

  England’s twice-sceptered jewel,

  Wherein each facet the wise man may discern

  heaven’s sacred cipher,

  And for whom the lion and the dragon

  stay their course despite rough winds.

  Oh Hoca! All faces gleam for us,

  the sublime porte, the whole world’s awe,

  yet red grows the grief-scorched heart:

  a poppy in the wasteland.

  Now rain from a bounteous cloud doth slake

  the parched heart’s court,

  And the unflawed gem must cross briny ocean wave,

  the Pleiades to complete,

  As a wine-bowl among friends,

  time turns to us to savor its cup,

  And oh! What wines we shall draw, my love!

  What wines we shall draw!”

  Cecil stops and looks at Walsingham. He is obviously very proud of his translation.

  “What do you make of it?”

  “Very nice,” Walsingham says.

  “Any ideas?”

  “The sublime porte is the Ottoman court, in Constantinople, but who or what is ‘Hoca’?”

  “That I cannot tell you.”

  Walsingham struggles up on his elbows.

  “And that is the price?”

  “Apparently so.”

  “But there is no price mentioned. No marks or pounds. A jewel. ‘England’s twice-sceptered jewel.’ If we can work out what that is, we will be halfway there, but what is it to be sceptered? To be hit with one? Twice? Whatever is ever hit by a scepter, even once? And why would anyone hit a jewel with one? Let alone twice?”