The Eyes of the Queen Read online

  “Thank God!” says a relieved Walsingham.

  They are King Charles’s personal bodyguard, in extravagant blue-and-yellow livery, well-armored with helmets, breastplates, pikes, halberds, and guns. Their captain is shouting and gesturing, commanding everyone to move away from Walsingham and Fellowes. Fellowes might weep with gratitude. He has never been so pleased to see anyone his entire life.

  “But what in God’s name are they doing here?” he asks as they descend to the courtyard. “And why do they wish to save us? How do they even know who we are?”

  “M’sieur,” the captain greets Walsingham with a lazy touch of the brim of his helmet.

  “I am indebted to you, sir,” Walsingham says. “And especially your markman.”

  Fellowes can feel his entire body trembling with relief.

  “Don’t thank me, m’sieur,” the captain says. “Thank her.”

  He indicates the caroche.

  “Her?”

  Fellowes peers. A window is lowered and a red-sleeved arm waves. It is not a summoning gesture, as he might have expected, but one of pleasure, of glee even, and the arm is long and slender and belongs to a woman.

  Fellowes and Walsingham turn to each other.

  “Great God in heaven,” Fellowes breathes.

  It is Isobel Cochet.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Paris, same day, August 24, 1572

  Mistress Cochet pulls back her hood to reveal she has lost her cap, and that her hair—dark with a tinge of red—has escaped its confines. Fellowes feels his mouth go dry, for her beauty is the sort to make any man—and woman, and child, and horse, and dog even—stop and stare: to open and turn toward her like a daisy to the sun. They wait to be warmed by her smile, to be lost in her brown-eyed gaze, to be lifted up by just a moment’s attention, and here is Fellowes sitting on a bench in a caroche, with his knee touching hers. Though there is another man in the cabin with them, and though all are turned to the window, struck by the horror unfolding in the streets, a little part of Fellowes is concentrated fiercely on his kneecap.

  “How did you know it was us?” Walsingham asks.

  “I saw you on the wall,” she says. “I thought, my God, I recognize that rump. It is Master Walsingham’s.”

  Walsingham reddens.

  “It was not very dignified,” he admits.

  She flicks her wrist. Her bracelets chime. She is in dark blue linen, with those red sleeves, but she has on her feet very fine riding boots, heeled, chisel toed, and polished like a fresh-spring conker.

  “Some things are not worth preserving,” she says.

  “But where were you going?” he goes on. “And how did you come by this caroche? And a guard of the king’s troops?”

  “I persuaded the Queen Mother to send them to Saint-Marceau,” she tells him. “In case the mob had reached the residency yet. And I thought I should come, too, just in case.”

  Walsingham sits back, finally believing what he is seeing, and laughs sibilantly.

  “My God, Isobel, my God. I knew you would be able to look out for yourself, but for us, too? You have my gratitude.”

  She smiles distractedly. She is looking out of the window but winces when a moment later a hand bangs against the shutters and there is a growl of command and the stamp of horses’ hooves. Soldiers struggle to keep the crowd back while the gates open to allow the caroche off the bridge and onto the south bank.

  “What happened?” Walsingham asks.

  “No one knows yet,” Isobel tells them. “But either the Queen Mother or the Cardinal of Lorraine ordered Coligny murdered in the night. They went to his bed and threw him out the window, and then the king’s Swiss Guard evicted every Huguenot from the palace and murdered them in the street. Women and children, too, with those halberds of theirs. Then Saint Germain’s was set to ring, and every man in Paris took to the streets, and so it began.”

  “So it is planned?”

  She shakes her head.

  “I am not certain,” she says. “To begin with, yes. The Swiss Guard, by God. You should have seen them. But I think all this”— she indicates the streets—“was unexpected, but there is such fear: you can see. Look. They are almost relieved to be doing it to others before it is done to them.”

  My God, Walsingham thinks, she is right: it is relief.

  “This is the start of something terrible,” he says. “Something that will consume all Christendom. Catholic will kill Protestant, and Protestant will kill Catholic. And this time, there will be no crowd of groundlings to stand and watch: All must play their part. All must bloody their hands.”

  Fellowes is hardly listening. He stares at the skin of Isobel Cochet’s throat where a pulse beats so prettily.

  “But what were you doing in Paris, Master Walsingham?” she asks. “So far from home?”

  Walsingham makes a small movement of his hand that she understands: you do not need to know and it is better you do not. But Fellowes sees a tiny splinter of steel appear in her eye. She is not used to being checked, of course. She glances at him and tries to hide it with a smile that melts his bones. He finds himself gabbling something about his gratitude to her for having saved his life, and that he would unquestionably and unquestioningly do the same for her if ever the opportunity arose.

  She smiles with gentle amusement and he feels somehow shut out of something, like a child in conversation with adults.

  Walsingham pats his arm.

  “Well,” he says, “there is a chance you may soon redeem your obligation, Oliver.”

  Fellowes turns to him, finally relieved not to be consumed by the sight of Isobel Cochet’s skin.

  “Sir?”

  “When we reach the residency, I’d like you to take Tewlis, and half his men, and be ready to lead the party to the barge at Issy.”

  Fellowes is perplexed.

  “You are not coming?”

  “No,” Walsingham says. “I will stay here in Paris, to keep the residency as long as possible. In case of more incomers.”

  Now Fellowes is crestfallen.

  “Sir Philip might serve,” he suggests. “Or Tewlis himself? My place is here, sir, by your side.”

  Though the thought of spending so many days by Isobel Cochet’s side is no mean consolation. However, Isobel speaks.

  “I will likewise stay in Paris, Master Walsingham,” she says.

  Fellowes feels a swoop of disappointment.

  Walsingham frowns.

  “Are you sure? Are you not worried about young Rose? Or will Rose not worry about you?”

  A shadow crosses Isobel’s face.

  “My daughter is with my father,” she says, her voice low and sorrowful. “She is quite safe, but— I will send word, with you, if I may, Master Fellowes?”

  She knows his name. Fellowes blushes. “Of course. It would be my pleasure.”

  Walsingham looks at him beadily, but they are nearly in Saint-Marceau now, on open ground, and before he can add anything they see over the shutters of the carriage a group of men dragging a screaming naked woman into a field by her hair. Isobel lowers the shutter and shouts at the French captain who halts the coach. A moment later, there is a boom of a gunshot from above, and one of the men in the field jerks his head to one side, and then falls away.

  “What a markman!” Fellowes says.

  “He is Scottish,” Isobel tells them, as if she has found a new milliner.

  “The first time in my life I have reason to be grateful for the Auld Alliance,” Walsingham mutters.

  Three horsemen ride out after the rapists. They kill two with their swords, or wound them so badly they might as well be dead, and the others scatter across the fields. Another shot rings from above, wounding one by the hamstring. The horsemen don’t bother to finish him off but ride back. The woman sits up, now saved, and tries to cover her breasts.

  “Allons-y!” the captain calls, and the coach lurches to life.

  Ahead is the residence, surrounded by a small crowd that retr
eats at the sight of the king’s guard. The caroche comes to a halt before the gates, and Walsingham calls out to Sir Philip Sidney, who raises his handsome face over the parapet, laughs at what he sees, then drops down. A moment later the gate is opened. Walsingham helps Isobel out, and they turn to thank the captain and the marksman.

  The captain nods at the driver’s bench and clicks his fingers.

  “Écossais,” he says.

  The man watches them with a reserved, dispassionate gaze from his seat. He is tall and rangy, with a broad, freckled face, probably ginger under his helmet. He carries an arquebus of greater than ordinary length.

  “Wherever did you learn to shoot like that?” Walsingham asks.

  He says something that is utterly unintelligible. A place name? An insult? A threat? Who knows.

  “Well,” Walsingham says, “please take this, as a token of my gratitude.”

  He finds in his purse only a single coin, an angel, and passes it up. He curses silently, for an angel is three weeks’ wages for an ordinary man and will have to be accounted for. The man reaches down to take it without a word, and it vanishes into a fold in his doublet.

  “Well,” Walsingham says, somewhat discomfited. “Good-bye.”

  The man nods but says nothing more, and Walsingham can feel his cold-eyed stare as he turns and steps back into the yard, grateful to be safe once more.

  * * *

  The yard of the English residence is fifty paces by fifty paces, and it is now filled with carts, horses, dogs, and people, all milling around anxiously waiting for the gates to open, so they may start their journey to the barge at Issy. Smoke from a nearby windmill set alight and from the bonfire—to destroy any incriminating documents—hazes the sky.

  Walsingham seeks out Fellowes, who is overseeing the creation of some documents they wish to leave only half burned—a letter from Sir John Hawkins, for example, which overestimates the speed at which the naval commander can build his still-unknown ship design by five times—and he takes him to one side.

  “Oliver,” he says, “I have had no time to look at this, but you know the pains we went to get it, so you know how seriously I take it.”

  Fellowes nods.

  “I think it best it goes with you straight back to London, as fast as you can, to be placed directly into Lord Burghley’s hands. No one else’s, you understand? Not Leicester, not Derby, and certainly not Smith. Burghley’s and Burghley’s alone, when he is alone.”

  Walsingham withdraws the package, sealed in waxed linen, and he palms it in through the points on Fellowes’s doublet.

  “I still do not know where it came from,” Fellowes says.

  Walsingham smiles. “We will discuss it all over something hot and sweet when we are both back in London,” he reassures him. “Until then, next to your heart, yes?”

  Fellowes nods. They shake hands, one last time.

  “See you in London, sir.”

  “God bless you, Oliver.”

  Neither notices Isobel Cochet until she is almost between them.

  “Master Fellowes,” she begins, “I am sorry to intrude, but I wonder if it is not too late to take you up on your kind offer to assist me, and whether I might join you in your party back to England.”

  Fellowes is delighted, Walsingham surprised.

  “I have been thinking what you said about Rose,” she tells him. “I have not seen her for a month or more. A six-year-old shouldn’t be without her mother.”

  And so it is agreed.

  Fellowes is indescribably pleased. He offers to find her a horse. Walsingham leaves them to it and goes to find his wife and child sitting with the other women and children, in the bed of the cart by the gate. He kisses each, one last time.

  “I will see you safe, back home in London,” he promises.

  He shakes Tewlis’s hand and salutes the departing soldiers. The gates open. The French soldiers are still there, holding back a sparse crowd with ease. The first carter lashes the first ox and the cart’s wheels grind across the stones. The second carter lashes his, and out they go. Walsingham holds his wife’s gaze and mimes a blown kiss.

  Oliver Fellowes rides alongside Isobel Cochet. They make a terrifyingly handsome couple and despite his gloomy turn of thought, Francis Walsingham cannot believe God would let anything happen to such a pair.

  And yet. And yet.

  “Godspeed, Oliver,” Walsingham says, and God bless.

  * * *

  When the convoy is gone, and the gate is shut, Walsingham retires to his chamber. He kneels and prays for the safety of his wife and his child, and that with God’s grace, his scheme will play out to England’s advantage.

  Sir Philip Sidney comes later and asks how he is.

  “As well as can be hoped,” Walsingham tells him.

  * * *

  The convoy—two carts, eight horses—passes a loose group of men in sober black cloth with those white crosses daubed on their hats and white kerchiefs tied around their arms. They are gathered amid the posts where the women would usually wring their laundry, but today they’ve murdered someone and there’s a dead body on the ground between them. They look up and watch the English pass, and then they leave their victim and fall in behind.

  The road runs westward, past windmills and onion and cabbage fields, across low ground that is marshy come winter, where the smell of dyers’ yards and tanners’ pits enriches the air. Ordinarily a traveler might fear wild dogs or pigs, or feral children with stones to hand, or the roads pitted so deep a man might easily vanish up to his chest, but today there are mobs of men and even women on the wayside, crosses daubed on their hats, to spit at the English as they pass, and to shout foul curses, and threaten acts of violence. They laugh at the terror of the English women and children, but they are mindful of Tewlis and his four soldiers with their smoking fuses. No one wishes to be the first to die.

  But that will change, Oliver Fellowes knows, and fear claws his heart.

  “Nurse your flames,” Tewlis tells his men. “And shoot the big ones first.”

  On they ride. The crowd becomes louder, closer, denser. The horses’ eyes roll, and their ears press flat. There is a chant of a sort Fellowes does not wish to know the words. He feels Mistress Cochet watching him, from where she rides talking to Mistress Walsingham like mother and daughter, and he is determined to impress them both.

  Something foul is thrown.

  “Do not react!” he calls. “Do not.”

  The people in the crowd jeer and press close. A pale-skinned baby’s arm, hacked off at the elbow, is made to make obscene gestures. More join the crowd, and the road is almost blocked ahead. They are having trouble keeping their line. A pisspot is thrown but ducked. A soldier fires his gun and the crowd flinches like a single animal. A moment later it pushes back, closer than before. A woman draws a finger across her throat. A horse rears. A man bellows something, his mouth holding a single tooth.

  Steady, steady, for the love of God.

  Fellowes enters a state of extreme calmness, where the sounds of the menacing mob are muffled as if by oakum in his ears, the image of men as seen through cheap church glass. Isobel Cochet watches him with steady intent.

  Oliver smiles.

  She does too.

  The provocation continues until at last they reach Issy, late in the afternoon, when the first stone catches Fellowes just above his right eye, a ringing bang, and then blood is half blinding him. A soldier shoots a boy in the crowd. The crowd recedes like the ebb of the tide, then surges back. Every man raises his sword. The soldiers grip their guns. Ahead is the choppy broth of the Seine where the bargemaster waits aboard his craft.

  Another stone and then one more. A gunshot. Then a flurry of them. The crowd scatters but only for a moment. Then more stones. Cobbles the size of fists. Screams. A howling child. Another gunshot. This one French. A soldier staggers, bellowing, clutching an arm that hangs limp in his burning sleeve. Fellowes feels a glancing blow. His horse rears as if wasp-stun
g. He slides from the saddle, and lets the horse go, bucking downriver.

  Tewlis has spread his three remaining men in a fan, but they have not loaded yet.

  “Get aboard!” Fellowes shouts. “Get aboard!”

  The bank at Issy is built up, and the river is low, and the gangplank is level. Fellowes runs to help the women and children from their carts. The ground is tussocky, stone. Mistress Cochet is still mounted, turning her horse this way and that. Men pluck at her cloak. She has a whip and uses it with precision.

  She’ll soon be pulled down, though. Fellowes helps Mistress Walsingham across the gangplank. She is frozen, terrified, so finally Fellowes wraps her in his arms and carries her. He deposits her on board, into the arms of the master, and turns and runs, his heels slipping on the greasy planks, back to Isobel Cochet.

  He runs up the incline. A glancing blow on his shoulder. Shrugged-off hands. A fist connects. Good. Isobel is still mounted, her horse terrified, ten paces away, but a man has the hem of her skirt, and another her boot.

  She lashes both with her whip.

  From behind, Fellowes pulls one man and spins him away. He holds up an arm, imagining she will slide off her saddle and under it as if it were a wing.

  She does, and they are, for an instant, face-to-face and he might kiss her on any other occasion, but—

  Something is wrong.

  A great heat swarms in his chest. As if he is being crushed. He can’t breathe. Can’t move. He opens his mouth to bellow, to push Mistress Cochet away, for she is very close now and one arm is around him, and the other holds a—

  A knife.

  He clamps a hand over his breast. Blood. He looks at her face. Pure sorrow. Pity. Regret.

  “Do not struggle,” she says. “Embrace it as you would embrace me.”

  A blue blade. A stiletto. Hidden where? He reels. Falls. Darkness closing, life narrowing.

  Life. Gone.

  CHAPTER THREE