He waits until Walsingham’s party is out of sight, and then for a long while more before he leads his horse back onto the road, mounts up, and continues south.
* * *
Queen Mary cries out with frustration.
“No! No! No! You let it go! I was nearly there, but you let it go!”
Margaret Formby gets up off her knees and wipes her face.
“I am sorry, ma’am, I—”
“I don’t care! Get out! Get out! Oh God! Send me Mary!”
Margaret cannot help weeping as she runs past Mary Seton on the steps. She runs out of the tower and into the bailey. There is a conduit across the cobbles, providing clean water for the kitchen and the brewery. She plunges her head under it, letting the thick flow soak her headdress and her face, careless of the guards watching. She wants to scream and cry and fly from here.
When she looks up and wipes her eyes on her apron, she sees the bailey is now filled with men on horses. They look down on her in stern surprise.
One of them speaks. “You are Margaret Formby?”
She bobs in acknowledgment.
He gets down off his horse. He is short, stern, with, when he removes his cap, short-cropped hair.
“I am Francis Walsingham,” he says. Her heart seems to engorge with terror. This is the very devil, she knows, and so, God help her, she cannot help but look at his feet, expecting hooves. His gaze seems to peer through a window into her soul, and he smiles to see what she is thinking.
“We are here to see your mistress,” he tells her.
* * *
Queen Mary sits in her chair under her cloth of state, silent and still. Her face is pallid and swollen, and Beale remembers the purple urine in her chamber pot. Master Walsingham betrays no anxiety. He stands likewise in silence, and equally still, waiting with unfeigned patience.
They are in the gloomy solar of the tower with its thick old windowpanes, and Beale finds himself looking at the back wall for the knot in the wainscoting through which he saw this room, when the man who is now pretending to be an usher was saying Mass. He cannot identify it and wonders if it is filled up when not in use? The room smells of old water, of dead flowers, of pent-up sorrow. He cannot wait to be out, in fresh air, to be able to breathe.
At length the queen sighs.
“Have you come to set me free, Master Walsingham?”
“Oh, you are not in any state from which you need be set free, Your Majesty.”
Mary makes a dismissive noise. She is too tired for silly arguments and they all know the truth.
“Then to what or whom do I owe the unexpected pleasure of your company?”
“I am in need of your assistance,” Walsingham tells her.
“My assistance?”
Beale feels sure she is about to develop some further ironic curlicues, but Walsingham cuts her off.
“We believe we have stumbled upon the strings of some plot that is currently in play designed and directed to bring an early end to the life of our own dear sovereign, Queen Elizabeth. We believe that—unwittingly or no—you may be the focus of this plot, the point about which it revolves.”
He includes a small hand gesture to indicate something turning.
Queen Mary looks at him. Her nut brown eyes betray almost nothing.
“Oh yes?”
Walsingham’s smile tightens. He hates this woman. A bead of sweat in his hairline betrays his feeling.
“Yes, and in the certain hope that you would not wish to see the life of your cousin of England harmed in any way, I am left wondering if you could enlighten me as to why in the week before last you might have sent your servant—one John Kennedy—to Edinburgh, against explicit embargo to communicate with they whom may indeed be Her Majesty Elizabeth’s great rebels?”
Queen Mary makes a show of confusion, but there enters into her eyes and onto her lips the ghost of a smile.
“John Kennedy?” she wonders. She turns to Mary Seton, who stands at her side.
“The boy, Your Majesty.”
Queen Mary pretends she did not know before, and Walsingham goes on to describe what the boy has been doing, when and where, and then comes to the subject of Hamish Doughty.
The curious thing is that while Walsingham speaks, Queen Mary seems impassive, or even slightly amused, and it is Mary Seton who cannot hide her feelings. Her eyes are very wide and wet, and she looks strangely beautiful in her anxiety. She betrays her queen in every gesture and every glance, and when, at last, Francis Walsingham calls for Beale to come forward and present the silver object to the queen, Mary Seton gives a small scream.
But Queen Mary merely smiles.
“What is it, Your Majesty?” Walsingham asks. He is burning with rage.
She now looks up at him.
“Are you married, Master Walsingham?”
He is taken aback by this change in tack. “Your Majesty?”
“You have a wife?”
“I do. I do. Yes.”
“And do you indulge in coitus?”
“Coitus?”
“Coitus, Master Walsingham. Between a man and a woman. A husband and a wife.”
She looks at him dead levelly. She is challenging him. Defying him. Fighting him. Beating him. Walsingham’s face is flushed.
“My God, ma’am, I— What are you saying?”
Mary says nothing. She stretches to take the length of silver from Beale. Her fingers wrap around the silver shaft.
And it is then that it all suddenly becomes clear.
* * *
Francis Walsingham stands waiting for his horse to be readied in the bailey of Sheffield Castle. His gaze is fixed on the star that is still shining in Cassiopeia but he is not thinking of it, not wondering what it means. His guts, his soul, his mind: all three are turbulent. He cannot yet bring himself to laugh at what has happened, at the fool he has made of himself, though he can see Beale cannot hide his smirk as he sets about altering the stirrup strap on his saddle.
Christ. How could he have been such a fool?
He stands waiting, watching the boy—John Kennedy, blameless John Kennedy, with his black eye and split lip—who now sits on an old log by the door, using his hook to carve a spoon, and Walsingham thinks how he chased him five days up, five days down, all over the country; how he kidnapped the subject of another country—and God knows how that will play out up there, since last night Hamish Doughty died on the rack, without his close questioning being approved by the Privy Council—and how he confronted Queen Mary, all because—because—because of what? His own hubris.
He clenches his eyes shut. He could scream.
Instead though, he controls himself.
He will do the right thing. He will start by apologizing to the boy.
He walks over to him. Beale is there, too, now, probably likewise apologizing.
Yes.
“Hello, John,” he says.
John squints up at them, but says nothing. He is rightly furious. With them, but also with Queen Mary.
He carries on working, furiously slicing through the wood.
“What is it you are making?” Beale is asking. He is trying to engage the boy. Make conversation. The boy says nothing. A long peel of wood comes off his knife and falls between their feet on the dew-wet stones.
“It is not a spoon,” Beale continues.
The boy grunts.