“If they knew how weak we were,” Beale says, “they would come now. With more than five ships.”
Which they are doing, and which makes the loss of DaSilva’s document all the more serious still.
* * *
When they reach Seething Lane, Walsingham checks to ensure the door to his inner chamber has not been opened since last he closed it, and when satisfied, he springs the three locks. Despite being Walsingham’s right-hand man, Beale has never been in this windowless sanctum, and he stares amazed not so much by the ranks of well-ordered files and boxes of papers on shelves that line the room, as by the various ornately tooled contraptions, fabricated in gold and bronze and ebony. One with a small bank of plates bears all the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and another consists of interlinking brass cylinders marked with tiny nubbles and indents. He gazes, furrow browed, trying to divine some understanding of these cryptographical devices, but it is no good: to the uninformed, they are enigmatic beyond comprehension.
Walsingham ignores him and lights a candle in a bull’s-eye glass lamp. After a moment it sends out a focused beam of light on the wall where there are astonishingly detailed charts of the Western Approaches to the Narrow Sea, as well as various others, of islands and reefs Beale has never seen before, all pinned and marked, but Walsingham focuses the lantern’s beam on a more familiar map of northern France, centered on Paris.
“Thoughts?” Walsingham asks.
This is the sort of test Walsingham often sets his men. Beale relishes the chance to prove himself.
“Isobel Cochet?” Beale checks.
“Yes.”
“Motivation, first.”
This is a puzzle. There is no obvious reason Cochet would betray all she had previously claimed to believe. She is not religious, or if she is, only mildly Reformed. Her maiden name is Pinkney, and she was born and grew up near Canterbury in Kent, with her loyalties undoubted. She has worked for Walsingham tirelessly and wholly successfully for five years or more, her judgment impeccable. Thanks to her dead husband, she is never short of money.
“Was she pressured?” Beale asks.
Walsingham nods. Her daughter, of course, would be a possible bargaining chip.
“Find out where she is, will you, Robert?”
Beale writes a memo.
“Who’d take her?” Walsingham tests.
Beale exhales loudly. He gestures at the map, sweeping his hand across it: all this, he is saying, means everyone. “Not Spain, though,” he supposes after a pause. “Nor France. Had either known we had the DaSilva pages, they would have sent troops to take them.”
Walsingham agrees. “Levers,” he says.
Beale waits.
“Some powerless prince,” Walsingham muses, “attempting to lever a king to act on his behalf.”
“Christendom is full of powerless princes.”
Walsingham agrees.
“So then who knew about DaSilva’s pages?” Beale asks.
He does not expect an answer. He knows Walsingham will not tell him the details of how he came by them, anyway, because Walsingham is Walsingham, and he tells no one anything they do not need to know. Nor will he risk another of his networks being revealed from top to bottom through indiscretion. He has learned this the hard way, with the death of two of his best-placed espials, including Isobel’s husband, Guy de Cochet.
Walsingham places his fingertip on the map: Lisbon. A courtier, Beale thinks, at the São Jorge palace, perhaps. Beale follows Walsingham’s finger as it runs north over the map to Santiago de Compostela. A priest then, Beale supposes, or an idolater at the shrine of Saint James the Great. From there Walsingham’s finger moves north again, across the sea, to La Rochelle on the French coast. A sailor, with the Italian admiral Strozzi, perhaps, involved in the sea blockade of the city. Then Walsingham runs his finger upward across the Bay of Biscay, through the Western Approaches to the Narrow Sea and then past Calais and into the North Sea, where it settles briefly on the Dutch city of Den Brill. So a Sea Beggar, Beale thinks; one of the Dutch pirates who have broken the blockade of La Rochelle, and who are holding out against the Spanish up there. From Den Brill the finger slides south to the French city of Rheims. Rheims! An English priest then. A Catholic. A recusant, God save us. From Rheims: a short stab westward across the map to Paris. That could literally be anyone.
“So,” Beale prompts, “where is the weak link?”
In the gloom, Walsingham’s eyes seem to sweat with the effort of thought. His fingertip hovers as he retraces the document’s journey. It stops over Rheims.
“If there is compromise, it is here,” he says.
“And Isobel Cochet?”
Walsingham taps the map.
“Paris, of course. The Louvre.”
“And is there a connection to the handover in Rheims?”
“De Guise,” Walsingham says.
“The duke?”
Beale refers to the Duke of Guise, the leader of the Catholic League in France, the man who perhaps ordered the first attempt on Gaspard de Coligny’s life, and the man who hates Protestants above all else.
“The bishop,” Walsingham corrects.
The bishop—of Rheims—is the duke’s brother. He is the Cardinal of Lorraine, the man whom Walsingham thinks of as the Minister for Mischief, whom Isobel Cochet herself suggested might be to blame for ordering the second, final, and successful attempt on Coligny’s life, and the massacre that followed. Both are uncles to Mary of Scotland, and each would stop at nothing to have her returned to a throne, any throne, but particularly that of England, to which—whisper it only—she has a good claim.
“A powerless prince all right,” Beale agrees.
“And one who would not wish England to know the whereabouts of the Straits of Anian, that is for certain.”
Beale and Walsingham look at each other in surmise.
“But who knowing it himself,” Walsingham continues, “will use it to force King Philip’s hand in any matter. Any matter at all.”
Both are thinking of Mary of Scotland, and of the Spanish fleet sailing under Quesada. Walsingham feels the wolves circling ever closer. Why cannot the Queen just have her cousin put to death? A stain on her hands, yes, but while she lives… He sighs in frustration.
“So,” Beale asks. “Do we have anyone inside the bishop’s palace?”
Walsingham shakes his head.
“No longer,” he says. “Betrayed. They cut him open, wound his guts around a spinning wheel, and burned them from the far end.”
Beale shuts his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose.
“Could we get someone in to find Cochet?” he asks.
“We could, I suppose, but in to where? Where will she be? The cardinal will know we need to find her and will not keep her in Rheims. He will keep her close, surely, but he has properties all over France.”
He taps from west to east, north to south.
“It is impossible. Like the needle from the proverb.”
“And yet it is what Her Majesty commands we must do.”
“But even if we should ever locate her, who could we send to get her out?”
After a moment’s thought, Walsingham adjusts the lantern so that its beam switches to fall on the table before his writing stool, and on which sits a simple clothbound book, the sort in which any wool merchant might keep his figures of profit and loss. He opens it and reveals column after column of names.