The Queen's Men Read online

  And it is here, after a couple of weeks, that Gregory first glimpses Beale’s design: “They aim to turn this Ness Overbury into Her Majesty and have dressed her far above her station and she is learned to walk and move in ways that do ape the Queen.” Two weeks later, after a period of time during which he had nothing much to report save that they and he are still alive he writes urgently to say that someone else has arrived to watch the house and its occupants. A week later it strikes him that he has seen the man before, on the road somewhere, and he thinks perhaps it was at an inn near Great Dunmow in Essex and then once more in Bury St. Edmunds.

  Walsingham can feel pressure building up between his ears. In a flurry now, he gets up, and unlocks and relocks his three locks, and then bellows for Gregory, who appears from the shadows of the hall like a whipped dog that knows it is about to be whipped again.

  “Walk with me,” he tells him.

  Gregory breaks from the shadow like a drop of treacle off a spoon and together they walk down to the Custom House and take a barge for Whitehall.

  “One of Hatton’s men?” Walsingham shouts when they are in midriver. “And a constable?”

  “It happened very quickly. There was no choice.”

  Christ.

  “What did you do with the bodies?” he asks. “No. Don’t tell me. How can you be sure Hatton knows?”

  “I can’t, but the man was carrying this.”

  Gregory shows him a letter instructing John Rhys to keep eyes on Robert Beale.

  “It was worn like that when we took it from him, so he must have had it awhile. If he’d been sending reports back—and if Hatton had been reading them—then Hatton must know.”

  Jesus. Northampton is Hatton’s county, too. He has property there. Did Beale not know this? Find out in advance? Christ.

  Walsingham gets Gregory to tell him everything. It takes until they arrive at Whitehall and he almost runs to find Cecil, bursting into his chambers with scarcely a knock, and only then, too late, does he realize Cecil is not alone.

  Oh Christ. Of all people. Hatton. Cecil in black, Hatton in a sober shade of blue, as befits a man on the business of government rather than party planning.

  “Ah! Here he is in person,” Cecil says of Walsingham. “Sir Christopher was just talking about you, Francis, and I told him I was certain you would have an explanation. One of his men has been following your man Robert Beale, he tells me, but has recently gone missing.”

  Walsingham must think on his feet. Must play for time.

  “Gone missing, you say? And he was following Master Beale? Why? Why in God’s name was he doing that?”

  “Don’t try to slip out of it, Master Walsingham,” Hatton tells him. “I became concerned about Beale last year, when he was behaving so erratically after the Queen was shot at in the woods.”

  “And a woman died, if you recall, Sir Christopher!”

  It is desperate, Walsingham knows, and even Cecil raises his eyebrows in surprise. A bold move, he seems to suggest, to try to deflect it that way. But Hatton is above that sort of thing and ignores it.

  “And then I kept meeting him on the road north, always evasive, hiding something, so I set a man to follow his trail, to see what that might be because at the time I suspected he might have slipped your oversight and was up to some foul intrigue of his own, but then I heard he was still coming and going from your house in the Papey, and so I saw that you had not lost control of him, but that he was doing your bidding.”

  “Bidding? What are you talking about? Card games?”

  “Shut up, Walsingham,” Hatton snaps. “And this was confirmed within just a few weeks, when Master Beale was seen meeting the wife of a man named John Overbury at the house of a physician that I know you employ as one of your snouts, rootling around for anyone you deem insufficiently zealous as regards the practice of your faith.”

  “I am sorry, Sir Christopher, I do not know what you are talking about.”

  “You may not, Master Walsingham, but I do. I know that some arrangement was made with this woman, John Overbury’s wife, and that then John Overbury was subsequently sent to join Henry Sydney, fighting for his Queen and country in Ireland, where I understand he has been wounded, while you pursued your diabolic plot.”

  “Hatton—”

  “Sir Christopher Hatton to you, Master Walsingham. Please give my title, as I would give you yours.”

  Cecil pulls an eloquent face, but nothing more.

  “So with Overbury out of the way, your man Beale was seen running away with the man’s wife, to take a house in the parish of Sulgrave, in Northamptonshire, not twenty miles from my own house, and it was here that it was revealed just how black and treacherous your scheme really is, for that’s where you had Dr. Dee, and Mistress Frommond—that maid of honor who made such a poor impression on us after the Queen was shot at—waiting for Overbury’s wife, and why?”

  “Why?”

  “Because Mistress Overbury looks just like Her Majesty! You were training her to replace Her Majesty!”

  “These are serious charges, Sir Christopher,” Cecil intones. “Have you any proof?”

  “I do!” Hatton says.

  But there is a slight slide of his gaze, a lick of lips, and a rub of the fingers on the expensive stuff of his breeches, and Walsingham knows he is lying.

  “What is it?”

  Hatton hesitates.

  “Look, Sir Christopher,” Walsingham says, all reasonableness now. “I do not know anything about this. If Master Beale has done as you say, then I will be the first to sign his death warrant, but until I have some proof…”

  He trails off.

  Hatton says nothing.

  “Do you have the girl?” Cecil asks him. He’s leaning forward, the benign old snake. “This woman whom you say Francis is training up to replace Her Majesty?”

  Hatton admits that he does not.

  “But I know where she is,” he tells them. “I know where she may be found.”

  “Well then,” Cecil says, “let us hurry there at all speed.”

  He hardly moves.

  “Where shall we go, Sir Christopher?” Walsingham joins in. “Where shall we find her? Will we need many men? Horses? Should I whistle up to the Tower for a pair of manacles?”

  Hatton rises above him, figuratively and literally, standing to collect his hat and leave the embrace of Cecil’s chamber.

  “That is a kind offer, Master Walsingham,” he says, “but given the circumstances I believe I had best bring her in myself, don’t you?”

  “But haven’t you a party to be organizing?”

  Hatton shoots Walsingham the sort of look he can laugh about now but will come back to him in the short hours.

  When he is gone, Cecil turns his unsettling eyes on him.

  “Well, Francis,” he says. “A pretty pickle.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Isle of Ely, Huntingdonshire,

  third week of June 1578

  Robert Beale sees the minster at Ely rising out of the fens from twenty miles distant.

  “We will be with your sister by nightfall,” he tells Ness.

  She nods, or perhaps it is the state of the road that makes her nod.

  “Would you like some ale? I have a little left.”

  She closes her eyes and this time she definitely shakes her head. Beale stoppers his flask. He hates traveling in a coach. It is unmanly. He should be riding ahead, to warn Ness’s sister that she is to expect a guest, but he does not wish to leave Ness alone with her thoughts, though perhaps his loyalty is misplaced, for he has been unable to distract her from them, and she has resisted any attempt at conversation since they left Sulgrave in such a hurry.

  “We had to kill him, Ness, I promise,” he repeats.

  She does not even look at him but keeps her gaze fixed on the linen-covered window, through which the flat marshy land can be sensed as a low smear of greenery. She is very hot, impatient, and her belly is
a drum on her slender frame.

  “You have said not a word since… since we left.”

  And she doesn’t now.

  It was a horrible moment, he can see that. Ness had come down from her chamber to find Arthur Gregory throttling the constable in the hall, in front of the heaped ashes of the fire, and the constable was making the most terrible sounds and his heels were drumming on the floor. And it had taken so long. Frommond was bent away, with her hands clapped to her ears, and Dee, too, had turned his face from the sight.

  Beale had not noticed her standing there until she fell back onto the steps as if her legs had been taken from under her. She’d hit her head on the wall, and by the time he had reached her, five strides across the flagstones, Ness was shaking as if in the grips of the deadliest kind of ague, as if she, too, were being strangled by Arthur Gregory. Beale gathered her up, cushioning her head as best as he could, and he held her until the shaking stopped, after which she seemed to fall into the deepest sleep from which she would not wake. She had snored very loudly, and once the constable was dead, they left him and came to stand around her, waiting, watching.

  Eventually the snoring stopped and for a moment they thought she had died, until, with a start, she woke. He—Beale—had been so pleased that he kissed her on the lips and it must have seemed to her that he had forgotten the two dead men that lay a couple of paces away, on their backs, staring blank eyed at the roof beams.

  “Get away,” she’d said, and her eyes had deepened and become wild. Her nails flew to his face and she’d scratched three deep grooves in his cheek before he’d managed to throw himself back. Frommond and Dee had been a soothing influence on her, and Frommond had coaxed her back up to the bedchamber while Beale stanched the blood with his cuff.

  “Christ,” was all Gregory had said.

  After that they had sought and found the best place to bury the two men and set about doing so, the three of them taking turns to dig while Frommond sat watch over Ness. By the time the hole was deep enough, it was dark enough to drag the bodies out: Hatton’s watcher first, then the constable, who had deserved to die the least and so was to be put on top. They had flopped the corpses into the hole, and while Dee had said a prayer, they had covered them with earth and then, when the hole was full, they had tamped it down and covered it with ivy borrowed from a nearby wall. The moon was up, and a fox had barked as they walked back to the house.

  “So would you call that a good day’s work, d’you think?” Dee had asked Gregory.

  Gregory had said nothing.

  The next morning, the household had broken up. Dee and Frommond had waited with Ness while Beale rode to Banbury to hire horse and carriage and a man willing to take them to Ely. It had taken all Beale’s remaining gold, and some of Frommond’s besides, because he looked so untrustworthy, with scabs on his cheeks and terrible gravediggers’ blisters on his palms.

  Then Dee had left on his own, walking westward, and a tearful Frommond had helped a tearful Ness into the carriage and then mounted her own horse and rode alongside them until they reached the road for London, where she’d left them, joining a party from one of those northern houses, riding south to join the Queen on progress, and Beale, left with a silent Ness and a suspicious carriage man and his lackey, had felt powerfully envious of their parting. Gregory had long since slipped away with word for Master Walsingham.

  And so now here he is, with Ness and her swollen feet and belly, and a tear-stained face. She sniffs all the time and is lost in her own misery, and Robert feels bruised with shame. He cannot imagine what Master Walsingham will say. He cannot imagine what he will say to Ness’s sister, the woman who hoped she was helping her sister get away from Overbury. Beale had only ever tried to do the right thing, and now here he was, returning her in this state.

  The silence lasts until they reach Ely.

  “Here,” she says, pointing, and he knocks on the carriage roof.

  Ness’s sister lives with her husband and three children in one of a row of houses on a lane Beale will come to know as Cat Lane. Her husband is a mercer, and she keeps the shop at the front. The shutters are down, and the children and neighbors come out to see the carriage stop. Beale gives Ness one last tight smile and tries to grip her hand. She flinches and pulls hers away. After a moment, he gets out.

  Claire, Ness’s sister, has three children and spends her days on her feet, so she is an older, worn-out version of Ness. She comes out of the shop and onto the lane, in a dress of nubbly blue wool with a linen apron and hood over the same reddish hair as her sister’s, and opens the carriage door. The driver just sits and stares at her, and his boy takes the opportunity for a piss.

  When she sees Ness, she gasps.

  “Oh dear Jesus! Ness!”

  Beale comes to help. He wishes Claire would tell him to get away, call him a viper, a lewd monster, a fornicating devil, a ravisher of women, a damned soul, anything that would allow him to take his leave, but she doesn’t. He believes she knows that that would be to offer him the easy way out, and that staying will cost him most.

  “Help me,” she says, and they edge Ness from the carriage and across into the house. Two of the children sense the mood, but the third is a simpleton, and comes to gad and caper about in front of Aunty Ness, telling her she has become fat, and asking why she is crying when she should be happy to see them, until the other two return to take the child away.

  They get Ness into the house and into the back room, behind the shop where there is a table and stools around the cooking fire, with its new, brick-built chimney. They sit her down and Claire makes some sort of brew with herbs and bread sops and all questions go unasked.

  Eventually Master Vernier, Claire’s husband, arrives.

  “What is she doing here—oh.”

  He sees Beale.

  “Master Vernier, God give you good day.”

  Vernier—very narrow, clerkish—is quick to assess the mood of the room, and though ordinarily he might simper and defer to Beale—who is from London, wears a sword on his waist, and is of the sort to look down on Vernier if he were to even notice him—today, with Beale looking diminished and seeking his help, the man sees a chance to take revenge for all the past slights he has ever received. And here, too, is his sister-in-law—stuck-up Ness after whom he has always lusted, though she only ever treated him with an indifference bordering on disdain—sitting in his house, ruined, just as he always said she would be.

  “Oh dear, oh dear. What have we here, then, hey?”

  His voice is thin and nasal, like a fly caught behind a mesh.

  Claire turns to her husband with effort.

  “Nigel,” she says, “Ness will stay with us here a few days longer, just until she is quite well, with your permission, before she goes back to Overbury.”

  “Oh, she will, will she?”

  “With your permission?”

  And so it starts, a grim, disheartening process of attrition, obviously wearyingly familiar to Claire Vernier as she tries to extract an unexpected favor from her bitter and vindictive husband. Meanwhile Ness sits there, an object to be haggled over, and Beale sees tears dripping from her cheeks once more, but he is too sickened with guilt and shame to move. He knows he has no rights or standing here, and that if he were to say anything, they all three would turn on him. The children, too, even the simpleton, who is staring at him as if they are old friends met by chance.

  “Look,” he says, when he can stand it no longer, “I will find an inn.”

  He means for himself but they think he now means to take Ness from them, and for wildly differing reasons they do not want this, so they turn on him and accuse him of having done enough already and telling him that he has not been able to look after her when she was healthy and what now can they expect of him that she is heavy with child and that her time is coming fast? He has no answers.

  “Go,” Ness says. Her voice is very low.

  Beale takes his chance and is out onto Cat Lane with scarcely
another word. It is only when he reaches the marketplace that he realizes he is weeping. He misses Frommond. He misses John Dee. He even misses Francis the lurcher. They have been his constant companions these last months, never judging him as he lost his head over Ness, always there with quiet consolation when she threw him out of her room. Now, though, he has not a friend in the world it seems, and no money, either, even had Ness taken him up on his offer of finding an inn.

  A thin, welcome rain starts to fall.

  What has he done, he asks himself.

  He knows he must seek out Master Walsingham. He needs to find out how much Sir Christopher Hatton knows about Ness, and what can be done about it. He sets off south in the early-evening light, down the hill toward the fens, and it is only as he leaves Ely and is in the marshes that he realizes what he has really done: he has used Ness as a pawn, a sacrificial pawn, just as Robert Dudley’s family used Lady Jane Grey as their pawn, and it will surely end the same way: only with Ness on the pyre, instead of the block, unable to deny she looks like Her Majesty, because her guilt is written into her face, her body, the color of her hair. He has turned her into a weapon against herself. A spark to light her own pyre.

  He cries out into the evening, something incoherent.

  And if Hatton knows she exists, he will know why she exists—to thwart him—and so he will bend all his might to find her, because with her as proof, he can bring down not just Beale, but also Walsingham and maybe even Cecil.

  He stops on the road and turns back to Ely. Not a light can be seen after curfew, but the moon is up and he is certain he can make out the distinctive shape of the island rising up from the fens with its minster atop.