* * *
James Hamilton of Bothwellhaugh and Woodhouselee is back from service with the French king and now stands over the meager fire in the hall of the keep of Ferniehirst Castle, in the county of Roxburgh, twenty miles from the English border. He fingers his rosary beads while he listens to his host, Lord Kerr, eating the haunch of some animal. The noise reminds him of being in the kennels, and he wishes he had not left Paris.
It is strange to think he would not have been able to do so had Master Francis Walsingham not paid him that angel for having saved his life on that day of vengeance. God works in mysterious ways.
But he has in mind this evening the message that awaited him when he arrived in Ferniehirst this morning, sent from Queen Mary in captivity, which he just spent an hour or more decrypting. He very much wishes to discuss it with someone, for he cannot decide if it is what he has been waiting for all this time, or dreading all this time. He wishes his priest were here, Father Goole, or that his wife were still alive so that he might consult her.
“What ails you?” Kerr asks. He is still in his hunting boots, and in fustian trews the color of blood. He speaks Scots.
Hamilton does not wish to tell Kerr. The man has given him shelter, and with it his life, but he does not wish him further implicated in any plot, should it go awry, and nor, if he is honest, does he trust him completely.
Still.
“Her Majesty has overcome her scruples,” he says.
Lord Kerr stops chewing.
“Oh, aye?”
“I am to go to London,” Hamilton tells him. “To find Elizabeth Tudor.”
Kerr’s eyes shrink with pleasure.
“Bang bang,” he says.
* * *
“That is no sin, Your Majesty,” Father Goole says. “Queen Elizabeth is excommunicated these past two years, and in his bull Regnans in Excelsis did not our holy father in Rome command all her subjects to seek her end? Indeed, did he not say that those who did not do so were likewise to be included in the sentence of excommunication, likewise to be damned to hell for all eternity!”
“But she is a queen, appointed by God,” Queen Mary says.
Father Goole sighs.
“She would not hesitate to have you murdered herself, Your Majesty, were it to suit her, and you are no heretic as she is, nor cut off from the unity of the body of Christ our Savior. You are not excommunicated as she is.”
* * *
They find the boy John Kennedy not so much by skill, or by chance, but by sitting still, in an inn, diagonally opposite the house of Hamish Doughty, the Edinburgh silversmith, and waiting.
It is three days later.
“That’s him.”
They don’t move for a long moment. They watch the boy knock on the shutters, which open. A few words are exchanged, then the boy is permitted within.
Not very much later he emerges. He is carrying his bag, less bulky this time, and he looks left toward the castle, then right, down the road that will eventually lead him to England.
“He looks heartsore,” Wilkins says.
“He looked that way when he went in,” Gregory tells them.
“Maybe he doesn’t want to go back?”
“How are we going to do this then?” Beale asks.
“Master Walsingham’ll have to do it this time.”
They watch the boy set off eastward down Land Market.
“Get after him, Robert,” Wilkins tells Beale. “If he hires a horse in Leith or somewhere, send word to Master Walsingham at Thomas Randolph’s house.”
“What will you do?”
Wilkins looks across at the silversmith’s.
“I think Master Doughty is due a trip to England.”
Beale leaves and tails the boy down the road. The houses get steadily less grand and soon they are among cottages and hovels, and patches of unappetizing vegetables cropped at by ugly sheep. The wind is in his face and a thin rain begins to fall.
He watches the boy enter an inn on the outskirts of the town, and then, a little while later, emerge on a nag that has ideas of its own, which do not include walking to Berwick with this lad on his back. Beale watches the boy plodding eastward: he looks so weary that Beale can only believe he is privy to bad news. He cannot believe he is riding to find Hamilton. He risks returning to Thomas Randolph’s house, where Walsingham is deep in thought. Within a few moments they have said good-bye to Randolph and are on the road on hired horses.
They catch sight of the boy within a few miles and Beale leaves Walsingham to ride ahead and befriend him at the same inn in Dunbar.
* * *
Wilkins and Gregory catch Hamish Doughty while he is on the privy in the backyard of his workshop. He is a big man who fills the tight space almost completely, and it is a struggle to subdue him without making a lot of noise. Once he is down, he makes a very heavy deadweight. They force him into a couple of sacks, though, and haul him out and up onto the bed of a cart that Thomas Randolph has acquired for their purpose, and they are rolling down the nameless lane that runs parallel to Land Market before he is missed by his assistants and apprentices.
“You didn’t even let him finish his business,” Wilkins tells Gregory. “That is something you’re going to have to clear up, not me.”
“A bit of shit’ll be the least of it,” Gregory says. They have both seen men hanged, drawn, and quartered. Bellies sliced open and guts wound out and held up to the crowd like a master butcher showing a string of prized sausages. That is to see a man bathe in blood.
* * *
Ordinarily Master Walsingham would not spare a glance let alone a word for this boy, but here he is, plying him with the Dolphin Inn’s best ale and telling him tales of Lincoln’s Inn, and jurisprudence, in the hope he will soon be fast asleep and relinquish his grip on the bag at his side. John tells Walsingham he is an apprentice cutler, on his way to Sheffield. It’s a good lie, because it is close to the truth. He has a funny view of what travel in Scotland is like, for, he says, this is the third night friendly men have bought him his ale, and so far he has not been robbed, as he feared, “or worse.”
He tells Walsingham of the salt merchant, and of the two journeymen hog gelders he met, and how they seemed very decent fellows.
“Noble professions,” Walsingham falsely avers.
He pours him another mug from the jug.
Soon the boy’s eyes flag, and a little after that the dogs are put out, the mattresses are unrolled, and the fire covered. That is it for the night.
“You have chosen a good spot for it,” Walsingham tells the boy, stretching out next to him.
“You are not taking a chamber, master?”
“I have stayed in it before,” Walsingham confides. “The mattress is rife with fleas, and there are rats, too.”
He offers to show him a bite.
The boy is already asleep.
Walsingham eases the bag from under the boy’s head during the short hours. There doesn’t seem to be much within: some of his linens, a single shoe, a heft of long-stale bread, a spoon, nicely carved, and a hook for carving more of them. There is no message written as before, and the only oddity seems to be the parcel that must have come from the silversmith. It is heavy, about half a cubit long and tightly wrapped in waxed linen. In the gleam of his covertly lit lamp Walsingham can make neither head nor tail of it. He puts it back and slides it next to the boy’s head.