The Eyes of the Queen Read online

  He tells Walsingham of the salt merchant, and of the two journeymen hog gelders he met, and how they seemed very decent fellows.

  “Noble professions,” Walsingham falsely avers.

  He pours him another mug from the jug.

  Soon the boy’s eyes flag, and a little after that the dogs are put out, the mattresses are unrolled, and the fire covered. That is it for the night.

  “You have chosen a good spot for it,” Walsingham tells the boy, stretching out next to him.

  “You are not taking a chamber, master?”

  “I have stayed in it before,” Walsingham confides. “The mattress is rife with fleas, and there are rats, too.”

  He offers to show him a bite.

  The boy is already asleep.

  Walsingham eases the bag from under the boy’s head during the short hours. There doesn’t seem to be much within: some of his linens, a single shoe, a heft of long-stale bread, a spoon, nicely carved, and a hook for carving more of them. There is no message written as before, and the only oddity seems to be the parcel that must have come from the silversmith. It is heavy, about half a cubit long and tightly wrapped in waxed linen. In the gleam of his covertly lit lamp Walsingham can make neither head nor tail of it. He puts it back and slides it next to the boy’s head.

  * * *

  James Hamilton can shoot an arquebus more accurately than any man alive. He can hit a scallop shell at fifty paces, a pumpkin at a hundred, but this new gun is another matter.

  “It kicks like a donkey,” he tells his host.

  Lord Kerr suggests he aim lower to allow for the kick.

  Several moments later he tries again.

  The ball smashes the shell to pieces.

  “Ha.”

  “The Queen is dead,” Lord Kerr smiles. “Long live the Queen.”

  * * *

  Queen Mary has been in a good mood for two days now. She seems almost excited by the possibilities of life and has been hard at her needlework with the Countess of Shrewsbury, Bess. Every now and then you can even hear her laugh.

  “But it must be hard,” Mary Seton tells Margaret Formby.

  “What?”

  “Being constrained so.”

  “Yes, I can see that.”

  “Still,” Mary goes on, “it will be over soon after Michaelmas.”

  Margaret is startled. “Michaelmas?”

  But Mary Seton will say no more.

  * * *

  In the end, they arrest the boy in Pontefract.

  “It is convenient for the castle,” Walsingham admits, “and I could not stand a moment longer not knowing what it is.”

  When the boy recognizes his captors he glares at them with hot eyes and swears feebly as he is taken away. Robert Beale feels a stab of guilt at his betrayal, for he had actually liked the boy.

  “It’s a bad business,” Walsingham agrees, “but who knows? Perhaps we have saved the Queen’s life. Now let’s see what this damned thing is.”

  They are in the guardroom at Pontefract Castle, waiting now for Gregory and Wilkins to bring the Scottish silversmith.

  Walsingham slices through the stitches of the linen and parts the various other wrappings to leave a fine silk drawstring bag. He raises and lowers his eyebrows.

  “No expense spared,” he says. He loosens the ties and lets the contents land with a meaty thump on the table.

  It is the candlestick melted down and recast into a six-inch shaft of dimpled silver about the girth of a baby’s arm, knotted along its length with irregular bumps and welts. At one end is a loop through which is loosely tied a length of red silk cord.

  Walsingham prods it.

  “What is it?”

  He has no idea.

  “Does it open?”

  It feels solid. He raps it against the tabletop. It sounds solid. He gives it a twist between his two fists. Nothing.

  “Bring the boy up.”

  The boy is dragged up by two guards. He has obviously cursed them, too, for his lip is split and one eye is swollen shut.

  “Fell down the stairs,” they tell Walsingham.

  “Make sure it doesn’t happen again, will you?” Beale asks.

  The boy knows nothing about the object.

  “Do you know nothing, or admit nothing?”

  “I know nothing,” the boy promises.

  Walsingham looks at him a long time. The boy stares back.

  “I have a feeling,” Walsingham says, “that you are telling the truth, but you are not telling all the truth. All that you know.”

  The boy holds out his hands, palms up, as if to say: I can’t tell you everything I know, for where would I end?

  “What do you do for Queen Mary?”

  “I light the fires in the morning. Bring down the pots. Clean the shoes and boots. Take the laundry to the maids. Help the cook and then the other women in any way they wish. I run any errands she wants.”

  “You are a useful man to have about,” Beale supposes.

  “Aye,” the boy agrees, but he has forgiven none of them their pretenses on the road to Edinburgh.

  Walsingham gives a rare, reassuring smile: John is such a simple, honest hapless youth that they agree, when he is taken away, that it would be wrong to put him to close questioning, even supposing they had license to do so.

  Hamish Doughty, on the other hand, is another matter entirely, and when he is brought before them, he is a hot pocket of angry grease, and no one is at all surprised. But by God, it is fascinating to see someone so fat, Beale thinks. One of the guards is actually feeling his dimpled flesh. Pushing it and letting it slowly spring back. It is like dough. He stops when he sees he is being watched.

  “You’ve no fucking right to be bringing me here. You’ve fucking kidnapped me from my own fucking country and brought me to this fucking shithole. You’ve no right to look at me, let alone ask a question.”

  Walsingham slaps him. His jowls quiver a long moment later.

  “Stop your yammering and listen.”

  Doughty is, if possible, more enraged.

  They will get no sense out of him today.

  “Put him in the Gascoigne Tower.”

  Other than the Tower in London, there is no place in England more likely to bring a man eye to eye with his own mortality than the Gascoigne Tower. Flint-faced, windowless, it is where the Lancastrian kings put men they wanted the world to forget ever lived, including King Richard.

  “Do we have license to put him to close questioning?” Gregory asks.

  “Yes,” Walsingham lies.

  It is desperate. He is desperate. If he cannot find evidence enough to condemn Queen Mary, then this second part of his plan, the most intricate part, will unravel, and he will be left with what? With only the strange ghost trail of Meneer van Treslong’s shifting loyalties, and sideways dishonesty to pursue.

  They sit for a while, thinking, the silver object on the table between them. All the bright pleasure of the early days of the scheme has contorted into frustration. Walsingham is furious.

  “Well,” he says. “We will have to confront her ourselves then.”

  * * *

  Hamilton should have taken a ship from Berwick, but suffers terrible seasickness, so he takes one of Lord Kerr’s palfreys and rides east from Ferniehirst to find the London road. In addition to what might be expected of a traveling man, he carries two medals blessed by the pope himself, an ivory crucifix made in Venice, an earthenware vial of water from the river Jordan.

  He rides south, sleeping at the side of the road, wrapped in his traveling cloak. The leaves are turning, and it will soon be autumn. Will he live to see Advent? Not in this world, he thinks.

  Just before Doncaster he takes the precaution of pulling his horse off the road when he sees a large party of men following him along the road from the north. He stands letting the horse crop the weeds, waiting, and his blood turns to absolute ice and then fire when he recognizes among them Master Francis Walsingham.

  He
should have shot him in Paris, as he stood against the wall on the day of vengeance. No one would have guessed he had done so deliberately. Instead he’d shot a Frenchman, of his own faith, and saved the devil. It was pride, of course. Look what I can do.

  There are ten of them: Walsingham; another man, his secretary probably; six men who are obviously soldiers; and a boy who looks panicky. Hamilton watches them go, and he misses that gun now, for with it he could have lodged a bullet in the man’s ear. But for fear of attracting attention to himself, and of being caught abroad with it, he has left it with Lord Kerr in Ferniehirst and is riding now to find its twin, sent from Milan especially for his purpose.

  He waits until Walsingham’s party is out of sight, and then for a long while more before he leads his horse back onto the road, mounts up, and continues south.

  * * *

  Queen Mary cries out with frustration.

  “No! No! No! You let it go! I was nearly there, but you let it go!”

  Margaret Formby gets up off her knees and wipes her face.

  “I am sorry, ma’am, I—”

  “I don’t care! Get out! Get out! Oh God! Send me Mary!”

  Margaret cannot help weeping as she runs past Mary Seton on the steps. She runs out of the tower and into the bailey. There is a conduit across the cobbles, providing clean water for the kitchen and the brewery. She plunges her head under it, letting the thick flow soak her headdress and her face, careless of the guards watching. She wants to scream and cry and fly from here.

  When she looks up and wipes her eyes on her apron, she sees the bailey is now filled with men on horses. They look down on her in stern surprise.

  One of them speaks. “You are Margaret Formby?”

  She bobs in acknowledgment.

  He gets down off his horse. He is short, stern, with, when he removes his cap, short-cropped hair.

  “I am Francis Walsingham,” he says. Her heart seems to engorge with terror. This is the very devil, she knows, and so, God help her, she cannot help but look at his feet, expecting hooves. His gaze seems to peer through a window into her soul, and he smiles to see what she is thinking.

  “We are here to see your mistress,” he tells her.

  * * *

  Queen Mary sits in her chair under her cloth of state, silent and still. Her face is pallid and swollen, and Beale remembers the purple urine in her chamber pot. Master Walsingham betrays no anxiety. He stands likewise in silence, and equally still, waiting with unfeigned patience.

  They are in the gloomy solar of the tower with its thick old windowpanes, and Beale finds himself looking at the back wall for the knot in the wainscoting through which he saw this room, when the man who is now pretending to be an usher was saying Mass. He cannot identify it and wonders if it is filled up when not in use? The room smells of old water, of dead flowers, of pent-up sorrow. He cannot wait to be out, in fresh air, to be able to breathe.

  At length the queen sighs.

  “Have you come to set me free, Master Walsingham?”

  “Oh, you are not in any state from which you need be set free, Your Majesty.”

  Mary makes a dismissive noise. She is too tired for silly arguments and they all know the truth.

  “Then to what or whom do I owe the unexpected pleasure of your company?”

  “I am in need of your assistance,” Walsingham tells her.

  “My assistance?”

  Beale feels sure she is about to develop some further ironic curlicues, but Walsingham cuts her off.

  “We believe we have stumbled upon the strings of some plot that is currently in play designed and directed to bring an early end to the life of our own dear sovereign, Queen Elizabeth. We believe that—unwittingly or no—you may be the focus of this plot, the point about which it revolves.”

  He includes a small hand gesture to indicate something turning.

  Queen Mary looks at him. Her nut brown eyes betray almost nothing.

  “Oh yes?”

  Walsingham’s smile tightens. He hates this woman. A bead of sweat in his hairline betrays his feeling.

  “Yes, and in the certain hope that you would not wish to see the life of your cousin of England harmed in any way, I am left wondering if you could enlighten me as to why in the week before last you might have sent your servant—one John Kennedy—to Edinburgh, against explicit embargo to communicate with they whom may indeed be Her Majesty Elizabeth’s great rebels?”

  Queen Mary makes a show of confusion, but there enters into her eyes and onto her lips the ghost of a smile.

  “John Kennedy?” she wonders. She turns to Mary Seton, who stands at her side.

  “The boy, Your Majesty.”

  Queen Mary pretends she did not know before, and Walsingham goes on to describe what the boy has been doing, when and where, and then comes to the subject of Hamish Doughty.

  The curious thing is that while Walsingham speaks, Queen Mary seems impassive, or even slightly amused, and it is Mary Seton who cannot hide her feelings. Her eyes are very wide and wet, and she looks strangely beautiful in her anxiety. She betrays her queen in every gesture and every glance, and when, at last, Francis Walsingham calls for Beale to come forward and present the silver object to the queen, Mary Seton gives a small scream.

  But Queen Mary merely smiles.

  “What is it, Your Majesty?” Walsingham asks. He is burning with rage.

  She now looks up at him.

  “Are you married, Master Walsingham?”

  He is taken aback by this change in tack. “Your Majesty?”

  “You have a wife?”

  “I do. I do. Yes.”

  “And do you indulge in coitus?”

  “Coitus?”

  “Coitus, Master Walsingham. Between a man and a woman. A husband and a wife.”

  She looks at him dead levelly. She is challenging him. Defying him. Fighting him. Beating him. Walsingham’s face is flushed.

  “My God, ma’am, I— What are you saying?”

  Mary says nothing. She stretches to take the length of silver from Beale. Her fingers wrap around the silver shaft.

  And it is then that it all suddenly becomes clear.

  * * *

  Francis Walsingham stands waiting for his horse to be readied in the bailey of Sheffield Castle. His gaze is fixed on the star that is still shining in Cassiopeia but he is not thinking of it, not wondering what it means. His guts, his soul, his mind: all three are turbulent. He cannot yet bring himself to laugh at what has happened, at the fool he has made of himself, though he can see Beale cannot hide his smirk as he sets about altering the stirrup strap on his saddle.

  Christ. How could he have been such a fool?

  He stands waiting, watching the boy—John Kennedy, blameless John Kennedy, with his black eye and split lip—who now sits on an old log by the door, using his hook to carve a spoon, and Walsingham thinks how he chased him five days up, five days down, all over the country; how he kidnapped the subject of another country—and God knows how that will play out up there, since last night Hamish Doughty died on the rack, without his close questioning being approved by the Privy Council—and how he confronted Queen Mary, all because—because—because of what? His own hubris.

  He clenches his eyes shut. He could scream.

  Instead though, he controls himself.

  He will do the right thing. He will start by apologizing to the boy.

  He walks over to him. Beale is there, too, now, probably likewise apologizing.

  Yes.

  “Hello, John,” he says.

  John squints up at them, but says nothing. He is rightly furious. With them, but also with Queen Mary.

  He carries on working, furiously slicing through the wood.

  “What is it you are making?” Beale is asking. He is trying to engage the boy. Make conversation. The boy says nothing. A long peel of wood comes off his knife and falls between their feet on the dew-wet stones.

  “It is not a spoon,” Beale continues.


  The boy grunts.

  “Are you—what? Carving an egg?”

  The boy holds it in his palm.

  “Queen Mary likes them.”

  Beale and Walsingham lock alarmed gazes. Is this another thing?

  “No,” the boy says, reading their minds.

  “Then what?”

  The boy shrugs.

  Walsingham asks to see it. It is very light, soft wood, pine. There is a little hole in the side.

  “Can’t be easy, that,” Beale suggests.

  “Have to do it with an awl,” the boy agrees. He mimes the action needed.

  “Whatever for?”

  The boy shrugs again. Walsingham rubs his thumb over the notch. It reminds him of a dead-letter drop that he once used in Leuven. That was a notch at the base of a wringing post in which one of his agents—was it Willem van Treslong?—placed a note rolled in a wax ball.

  The boy is watching him, as is Beale, too. Walsingham tosses the egg into the air like a trainee juggler. It has little heft. He throws it to Beale, who catches it.

  The boy holds out his hand for it.

  Beale gives it to him.

  “Well,” Beale says, ready to finish things up.

  But Walsingham hears that jangling inner bell again. He feels he is atop something. But what? What is it?

  “Can I see it again?” he asks.

  The boy passes him the egg.

  Walsingham stares at it for a long moment. In the silence, a flight of geese slice through the gray sky not twenty feet above, their wings creaking. Walsingham looks up to watch them pass, across the bailey, and over the low wall, making to land on the river beyond.

  My God, he thinks. My God.

  He walks across the bailey, rests his hands on the wall. Damp gray stone, chest high perhaps, and beyond, haunted by a faint mist, is the choppy broth of the river Don.

  He weighs the wooden egg in his hand.

  My God.

  It comes perfectly natural to him, the obvious thing to do.

  He throws the egg into the waters. He loses it for a moment, and then, there it is, bobbing along.