Another, different look from Walsingham.
“Ah,” Beale says. “That remains to be seen?”
They ride in silence for a bit. Walsingham’s eyebrow is cocked, waiting for the next bit, waiting for Beale to say: “And when she does, if she does, she will be utterly dejected and will send desperate messages to Hamilton, forgetting all precaution of secrecy!”
Et voilà!
“That is very neat,” Beale has to admit.
Walsingham almost smiles as they ride.
He thinks so too.
There is, though, one thing, or perhaps two, that bother him still.
The first is Meneer van Treslong.
The second is also Meneer van Treslong.
PART | TWO
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Sheffield, September 22, 1572
The town is of gray stone, handsome, with a marketplace in which to buy strong cloth and cheap pies. The dogs are lean, the tongues are sharp, and the scent of burning coal hangs thick in the air. At its heart: the castle, of the same gray stone, and of the old sort that has stood three hundred years or more but might now be knocked down in an afternoon by a single cannon. Moat and ditches to the south and a lively brown river—the Don—under its northern wall.
In rising dusk and falling rain, Masters Walsingham and Beale leave their horses at the stable and cross the drawbridge, but they linger in the gatehouse and do not enter the cobbled bailey.
“One of her household will see us,” Walsingham says.
Instead a servant is sent to find George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, who will meet them in the guardroom of the gatehouse. When Talbot comes he is about forty, forty-five perhaps, with a spreading beard and sad, wise eyes. How does he feel about his charge? Does he see her in the round, as a person? Or does he, like every other man, see her as a threat, or a means to an end? Beale cannot guess. But there is another dimension of course: should Queen Elizabeth die without issue, then Queen Mary of Scotland will take her throne. How would she then repay a gaoler who mistreated her now?
“She is at prayer,” Talbot tells them. “Up there.”
He points through a door to the limestone tower in the southwestern corner of the castle. It is three stories high, with windows from which light filters through thick panes. The rain still comes down, and a fire would be nice, Beale thinks.
“Anyway, this way,” Talbot tells them, and he leads them through a long kitchen in which a boy sits staring at an empty pot, and a deserted bake house that smells of mold. They pass through a very thick oak door and find themselves in the tower, the ground floor of which is given over to a hall, from which lead two doors, and a spiraling flight of closed steps up into the darkness above.
Talbot knocks very gently on one of the doors and a moment later a bolt is drawn back. The door swings open on oiled hinges to reveal a tired-looking man with his shirtsleeves rolled up, despite the cold.
No one says anything about the strong smell of shit.
Walsingham doesn’t introduce him. “Wouldn’t be his real name anyway.”
“Arthur Gregory,” the man says, catching Beale’s eye, but not offering to shake his hand.
Walsingham grunts good-naturedly. “As I say, not his real name.”
On the table is what might be a chamber pot covered in a linen cloth.
“That hers?” Walsingham asks, just as if he has spoken to Gregory not five minutes earlier.
Gregory grunts affirmatively.
“Anything?”
Gregory lifts the linen cover of the chamber pot. The stinking mess within sits in a bath of purple liquid.
Beale is shocked. Walsingham is unsurprised.
“Porphyria,” he tells him.
Then he turns back to Gregory: “Who’s upstairs?”
“John Wilkins.”
“And with Mary?”
“Lord and Lady Livingston, Mary Seton, the priest they’ve got pretending to be her usher, and Margaret Formby.”
Walsingham nods.
“Come this way,” he tells Beale, “but take off your boots.”
Beale does so. He has been wearing the same socks for five days. Walsingham leads him up the steps and along a short corridor, the boards powdered so they do not creak, past a door through which they can hear the burble of a man’s voice, and on to another, smaller door, iron battened, and seemingly made for a dwarf. Walsingham has a key. He opens it on more oiled hinges and crouches to enter. Beale follows. Inside it is absolutely dark save for one tiny spec of light that comes in about waist height. There is another man within, sitting on a stool. The room smells rank.
No word is spoken.
They can hear the man’s voice more clearly. He’s chanting the Latin Mass. The hair on Beale’s arms stands on end: this is enough to get them all hanged.
The man on the stool moves to let Walsingham press his eye to the hole. After a moment he lets Beale take his turn. The hole is drilled through the plaster, through a knot in the wainscoting, and there is little enough to see: a chair covered above with a purple cloth of state; the heels of three kneeling women. That’s it.
Despite his own socks, Beale can smell the man next to him, John Wilkins. It is like gaol scent, and he is pleased when Walsingham taps him on the shoulder and they are able to leave him to it.
Talbot is waiting in the kitchens.
“There is one more thing,” he tells them. “The Queen has sent permission for Her Majesty to go hawking this week.”
Walsingham is surprised.
“When did this come?”
“Today. In the hand of Sir Thomas Smith.”
Beale calculates that this means the Queen must have granted permission five days earlier, probably longer, when, to all intents and purposes, Quesada was on his way to attack England, burn London down, and set Queen Mary free. The last thing they would have wanted was for her to be out in the countryside, on a horse, with a hawk. A spasm of irritation crosses Walsingham’s face.
“And you’ve told her? Queen Mary?”
Talbot nods, as why should he not have?
“I will have Beale ride along,” Walsingham decides. “You like hawking, don’t you, Robert? You can borrow one of Sir George’s birds.”
They leave the castle through the postern gate and make their way back up to an inn—the White Hart—that Walsingham knows. It is thatch and timber-built, overlooking two fish ponds, and prey to damp.
“You will concentrate on Margaret Formby, won’t you, Robert?” Walsingham says.
Beale knows what he must do.
Walsingham hardly drinks a thing. He is rapt, and his eyes are glossy and fierce, Beale thinks, like one of those hunting birds; his whole self is honed but for one purpose. And that purpose? To catch Queen Mary in the act, to find proof that she is plotting the death of her cousin Elizabeth of England; to find incontrovertible proof of it, that he may, at last, and once and for all, lay before his mistress and force her hand in the matter. He wants to bring about the death of that woman.
Sleep that night comes hard, and Walsingham wakes Beale long before dawn to tell him that it is raining.
No hawking.
Walsingham paces all day. He is a ball of heat, twitching in frustrated fury.
“God damn it! God damn her!”
He writes messages then won’t send them. He scraps the page or burns it. Once he laughs very bitterly.