The Eyes of the Queen Read online

  After the passing of time during which a man might say the first cycle of the rosary, Mary takes over from Margaret, as they have practiced. Oftentimes, in the past, the earl used to insert into her anus a stubby, knobbled length of silver that he called his “other membrum verile,” which, when she was on the point of her delivery, he would slowly withdraw. The first time he did this, she fainted. He spoiled her, she thinks, just as he spoiled so many women.

  “Now! Now!”

  Margaret presses. Mary cannot breathe. The light fades. She can see worms in the peripheral of her vision. Hot. Waves of pleasure swell through her body, and she thinks this is what transubstantiation will be like. This is rapture. This is what it will be like when she is finally lifted up by the angelic host and borne in bliss to heaven. But then the pleasure becomes intense—violent, and in its extremity it becomes pain. Her mind is collapsing; her body is killing itself.

  She jerks upright on the bed, throwing Margaret away. She draws in great gasps of air. Her face is scarlet; her entire body feels afire. She feels cored out, caved in.

  Margaret never knows if this is what she wants.

  “Get away,” Mary tells her, for now she cannot stand to look at her.

  Mary rights her braies and pulls down her skirts and after she has regained her breath, her composure, and her sense of solidity, she stands. Her heart beats in her temples.

  Margaret is back at her stitching.

  Time gathers weight. Heavier and heavier. Mary feels it everywhere, pushing her down, crushing her. She is crushed. By time. By despair. By misery. She turns back to the bed and falls on it, lying facedown, and she lets the tears come.

  * * *

  Later that afternoon, she receives her gaoler, Sir George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, with no fewer than four of his guards, each with a sword, primed to act as if she would attack their master.

  “God give you good day, Your Majesty,” he says, bowing low, maintaining the pretense that he is other than her keeper. He wears broadcloth breeches, a finely stitched doublet, and a wide, furred cape, which opens to reveal a surprisingly modest, though pearled, codpiece that fails to catch her slightest attention.

  “And unto you, Sir George.”

  “I trust you are well? You look somewhat downcast.”

  Downcast? Downcast? She thinks to give him downcast.

  “I am quite well,” she tells him instead. “Tired is all.”

  He glances over at Margaret, whose hand is paused midstitch. Of course she is a spy. Does she tell him all?

  By the Mass, who cares.

  “What is it you want, Sir George?” she asks.

  Now he comes to it, and it is a good thing.

  “The Queen sends permission that you should be permitted to walk our grounds.”

  She is pleased but will not show it.

  “Your grounds? Why, Sir George, I shall scarcely set off before I shall need to turn about.”

  “The Queen has given permission for you to take your hawk to the park.”

  Now she cocks her head. This is news indeed.

  “My hawk? In the park?”

  Shrewsbury smiles.

  “Today,” he says. “This very afternoon.”

  It is no better a pastime than pleasuring herself, she thinks to say, but holds her tongue.

  * * *

  She is in grosgrain and linen, for it is an oppressively warm day, and she rides on an elegant roan, with red leather saddle and reins. She carries her hawk in its polished leather hood, and Sir George is at her side, though a little behind, as befits his rank. He concentrates on the greenery of the oaks and the elms that fill the far end of his park, perhaps five hundred paces away, whence he supposes the birds will come. The tip of his tongue is very pink between his bearded lips, but he probably has no idea what he looks like. He and Bess of Hardwick? She doubts it.

  But she is not interested in birds. She is tensed for something else, and she believes the hawk, a merlin, senses her tension unlike the other men, especially not the pathetic little huntsman who is so eager to please. He hops from foot to foot, trying not to point out the various birds that are even now scattering for their lives. Her hawk’s leather-helmeted head turns this way and that, this way and that. It might almost twist off, she thinks, and for a moment she is seized by the idea of grabbing it in her fist and doing just that. Its head would fill her palm as a satisfying ball. Imagine Sir George’s face!

  They ride up onto a ridge like a causeway above the river. The sky is filled with alarm calls and fleeing birds.

  “Sir?”

  It is the huntsman, following along with all the guards, twenty paces behind. Sir George quiets him with a glare. They all know the hawk should have long ago been set at the birds. Why does she delay?

  “Your bird is disposed?” Sir George asks.

  She does not answer. Why should she? Why should she tell him she is not in search of any old prey?

  At last they come to a promontory overlooking a fat bend in the river, beyond which are thick woods. There is, by now, not a bird in the sky and it seems to all as if she wishes it so. She reins in her horse to stand still and allows it to crop the grass. She is deliberate and slow, almost as if she is putting herself on show. She waits for a long moment and then removes the hawk’s cap.

  Instantly the hawk becomes another being.

  Its eyes permit no secrets.

  It turns its head like the mechanical devices Mary used to see in Paris. This way, that. Now that she can see its eyes, she does not wish to pull its head off. She wishes to let it fly, to give it freedom, just as she wishes it for herself.

  Up it goes, to become a distant dot in the sky and there is always the fear that it will never return. And just when she can hardly see it, from the fringes of the wood beyond the river’s bank, comes a fluttering pale bird. A pigeon? A dove! It seems not to have seen the hawk. But the hawk sees it. It returns in screaming vengeful fury, descending with unnatural speed, and then—pluff!—the dove is hit as by a bullet.

  Sir George makes a noise of admiration.

  The two birds tumble to the ground. The dogs are into the water. The merlin perches above the dove and rips at its breast. The merlin departs from its prey only reluctantly, but one of the dogs retrieves the dove and brings it back in its jaws. The hawk meanwhile returns to Mary’s glove. She replaces its hood and strokes its bloodied chest. The dog drops the dove at the huntsman’s feet.

  The huntsman looks puzzled.

  “A dove,” he says, as in Where did it come from?

  “Bring it to me,” Mary says.

  The huntsman picks the bird up by its wingtip and brings it to her with a bow. She grips it in her gloved right hand. Under its feathers it is no more substantial than a mouse. The hawk arches toward it. She takes it away. The dove’s eyeballs are burst, and there is a wound in the feathers from which spring scraps of pink flesh. She taunts the hawk with it. The hawk might bate at any moment, but it does not. She can sense the discomfort of Sir George and the other men, of Margaret, too, and does not care.

  She can see it: a tiny ring of mottled silk, wrapped around the dove’s ugly foot.

  She turns away, and cuts the silk band with the edge of her ring, and then folds it between her fingers. The she turns back and tosses aside the dove.

  “Sir George, I am tired,” she says. “Have your man take my bird.”

  The outing is over.

  * * *

  Back in her room, she dismisses Margaret.

  “Be gone from my sight. I will call if I need you.”

  Alone, Mary unwinds the silk ring. Within, she finds a folded piece of paper. She lays it next to the ewer, before the mirror. It is blank. Under her bed is her night pot, empty and washed. She crouches over it and urinates. With a puddle of piss in its bottom, she brings it to the table and holds Margaret’s stitching into it for a moment. She cares not that Margaret will find her work stained and pungent. She lifts the stitching out, shakes the excess on
the floor, and then places it on the table. She flattens the paper against the piss-soaked thread; the heat of the fresh urine works without her having to breathe on it, and the cipher emerges.

  Her eyes are bad. It takes her a moment to read in the mirror the tiny numbers etched onto the scrap of paper, which she copies to another paper.

  She rolls the first scrap into a ball the size of a dried pea and puts it in her mouth. Her urine—tinged very slightly purple—is royal urine. She chews once and swallows. The tiny scrap of silk follows the paper.

  When this is done, she returns the pot to its place under the bed, and returns the mirror and Margaret’s stitching too. Then she reaches for her Bible. With a pin she pricks out the words. It takes a long time, flipping to and fro, backward and forward. Kings, Judges, Leviticus. Verses 12, 18, 36, 4. With each number the word changes in relation to the word indicated. Before the bell rings the hour, though, she has the message.

  She sits back in the window seat, Bible at her side, and she stares through the old glass at the wavering image of the castle’s courtyard. She does not smile, but she breathes quickly, as if panicked. She knows it is hope that kills a prisoner. The hope of freedom, and the hope of triumph. She looks at the little pinpricked piece of paper.

  This gives her hope.

  Her friends give her hope.

  She wishes one or two of them were with her now, so that she might share the news: They have it. They have the very thing for which her cousin of England most hoped, and the very thing her cousin of Spain will make most use of. And all because of that silly bitch Isobel Cochet and the love the woman bears for her whining daughter.

  This, Mary thinks, will change everything.

  But she will have to bide her time. She will have to be patient.

  She chews and swallows the paper.

  “Margaret,” she calls, returning to lie on her bed.

  * * *

  Later that night, in the darkness, she hears Margaret breathing in her sleep. Mary thinks of James Hepburn, and the way he kept that silver membrum virile on his belt, and she wonders again where he got it from, and who made it, and how much it cost him. She thinks about how many women he had used it on, because you don’t just keep a thing such as that about your person, and not make use of it, do you? She wonders: Where is it now? And then: Where did it come from?

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Whitehall, September 1, 1572

  Heavy summer rain beats upon the shoulders of his cloak as Francis Walsingham hurries up the steps of the palace. He has not slept in five days, and whenever his eyes shut for longer than a blink, he relives the hellish days in Paris after Saint Bartholomew’s. He can hear their songs, see their smiling faces as the Catholics laughed and danced and waved their bloody axes in the air. As if it had been carnivale.

  Now, though, he is come fresh from home in Mortlake, chin shaved, mustaches tipped in oil, hair kept in place by a neat black velvet cap. His doublet is very dark, his collar broad and white as snow, and the only concession he has made to his journey across the Narrow Sea and up through Kent are his mud-spattered riding boots. He does not want to look too tidy.

  Thunder rumbles in the south. He takes the steps three at a time and does not break stride as the two halberdiers before the door ground their weapons in salute and stand aside to let him pass. He marches straight into the long, paneled anteroom where he finds Robert Beale, another of his intelligencers, bent over a fire, busy feeding papers into its depths. He is dressed as soberly as Walsingham, though his collar is smaller. Beale starts when he sees Walsingham.

  “So it is true?”

  Walsingham nods once, keeps walking. He unties his cloak and throws it to a standing servant. Beale slides the rest of the papers into the fire. Together they walk the length of the room toward another pair of halberdiers guarding another set of doors at the far end.

  “The lucky were cut down,” Walsingham tells Beale. “The unlucky garroted.”

  Beale runs a finger under his collar.

  “Dear God. Does the Queen know?”

  “Only the half of it,” Walsingham tells him.

  “God save them,” Beale murmurs.

  “God save us,” Walsingham corrects.

  Beale is confused. He breaks step.

  “Us?”

  He has never known Walsingham to exaggerate.

  “There has been a breach of— I have lost a document. To them.”

  “Something sensitive?”

  They have reached the halberdiers at the second doors now, and Walsingham must begin his act, if his plan is to succeed.

  “Enough,” he says. “The DaSilva document.”

  The halberdiers ground their weapons and step back as the doors open.

  “Leave me, Robert,” he tells Beale. “This is my mess, and mine alone.”

  Beale says nothing. But he nods and steps back and away. Walsingham stands quite alone.

  Through the doorway is a very fine room: tall windows, tapestried walls, a fire ablaze in a brick-built hearth. Walsingham notices none of this. He is fixed by the stare of the woman who sits in a tall chair at the head of a long table filled with the bulky shapes of her Privy Council. The eyes of this woman are the fiercest blue and see straight through him. He is grateful to have to bow his head and stare at the floor.

  “Master Walsingham,” the woman says. “We have heard dire tidings from Paris. Tell us we are misinformed.”

  He raises his head again. The woman is in silver, with a high collar, and her fiery red hair is tamed with a garland of gold, studded with rubies, emeralds, and diamonds.

  She is his Queen.

  Walsingham looks her in the eye.

  Once again, he is caught unawares by the powerful effect she has on him, just as she has on every man in the land, from the Archbishop of Canterbury to the humblest turnspit. It is not that she is especially or particularly beautiful, but she possesses something no mere painted courtesan could ever hope for: an extraordinary combination of fragility and strength, of high seriousness with dark humor, of fierce intelligence and passionate sensuousness, of silk and steel. That, Walsingham thinks, is what so unmans a man.

  Her question still hangs.

  He gathers himself. “I regret I cannot, Your Majesty.”

  And now there is movement among the men gathered at the table, three of them, heads turning on collars like turnips on plates. Chief among them is Lord Burghley, the Old Fox to whom Walsingham owes much. He is gray bearded, dressed in rich red today, with a cloak of plum, his chain of office around his shoulders. He looks more fretful than Walsingham has ever seen him. Then there is Sir Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, impressively dapper in mustard velvet, one eye always on the Queen to gauge her reaction, and change tack accordingly; and then there is Sir Thomas Smith, the sneering Secretary of State, who has lost much weight recently, so that you may see his skull beneath his skin. Perhaps only Walsingham knows why this should be: Smith has been trying to plant Englishmen in Ulster, in the north of the island, to civilize it, but the Irish have taken exception and killed many of the settlers, burned down their buildings, and scorched the earth. And though he persists in hope, Smith has already sunk and lost almost all his money in the enterprise and is forever on the lookout for more, most especially from the Queen, who will not give it to him.

  Of the Privy Council, only Edward Stanley, Earl of Derby, is missing. Interesting.

  There is a long silence. A peal of thunder overhead. Much closer already. Wind rattles the windowpanes. Smoke is blown back down the chimney.

  “So then,” she says. “We are alone.”

  It is dramatic, of course, but no one contradicts her. This is something they have all feared would one day happen: that France would fall to the Catholics, and now she has, and all Christendom is united under Philip of Spain. Only Reformed England holds out: lone, isolated, and meager-powered England.

  Perhaps God has forsaken them.

  “But it is not hopeless, eh? Wal
singham?”

  This is from Sir Thomas Smith. He is smiling at Walsingham, encouraging him, and yet—

  Does he already know?

  Walsingham remains silent.

  “Well, since Master Walsingham chooses modesty,” Smith continues, “then I shall have to blow his trumpet for him. He has—what word would you use, Master Walsingham? Procured?—procured for us, the most startling piece of intelligence imaginable, haven’t you? Something to show that God has not entirely forsaken His English nation. Something to tip the balance of power in our favor.”

  The Queen is skeptical.

  “What is this… intelligence?”

  Walsingham closes his eyes. He waits.

  Smith has the bit between his teeth. “It is material taken from the logbook of the Portuguese admiral Baltazar DaSilva.”

  Now Walsingham opens his eyes to find Smith smiling at him, but his eyes are alive with malice. Smith believes he is feeding Walsingham gallows rope. The Queen is looking pleased, albeit uncertain, as if she has been promised a great surprise for her birthday.

  “And what does it disclose, this material?”

  “I regret to say, ma’am, that I cannot say: for as I believe Sir Thomas knows full well, the material has been taken from us.”

  There is a slight recoil, not least from Smith.

  “Taken from us?” he repeats. “Taken from us by whom?”

  It is an act. It fools some, but not Walsingham.

  “It does not matter,” Walsingham tells them.