I murmured a vague agreement and took my leave. I could not argue with Stafford’s assertion that, without Paget, I would likely still be in the Conciergerie, or facing questions from the Duke of Guise, quite possibly at the end of a hot poker. It appeared that Paget had already chosen to be useful to me, whom he had every reason to hate, and the question was – why?
SEVEN
Gaston seemed more effusive than usual when I arrived at the Swan shortly after midday.
‘Jesus, boy, what’s happened to your face?’
I touched a finger to my swollen lip. I had not seen myself in a mirror yet. ‘I was involved in an altercation.’
‘That right?’ He seemed impressed. ‘One of your philosophical debates, was it?’
I grinned, and winced at the pain. ‘My opponent put forward a robust defence of Aristotle.’
He clapped me hard on the shoulder.
‘What can I get you, then? How about a dish of the beef, now that we have a clean slate, so to speak?’
‘Clean slate?’
‘I don’t know how you do it, Bruno. You could charm your way out of Purgatory, I always say. Not that it was a problem—’ he held up a hand – ‘you know I’ve never chased you for it, but I take my hat off to you all the same, I really do, you’ve the luck of the Devil.’ He shook his head, indulgent. ‘Will I bring you some wine with it?’
‘Gaston – what are you talking about?’ I never ordered beef at the Swan; he knew my purse did not stretch that far.
Now it was his turn to look puzzled. ‘Your debt, my friend. Feller come in this morning and paid off the lot. Said he owed you a favour.’ He looked stricken. ‘Maybe I wasn’t meant to tell you.’
I sighed. ‘An Englishman?’
‘That’s right.’ He brightened. ‘Friend from London, he said. Very generous of him, I thought. I mean, I don’t want to remind you how much it’d crept up to, but—’
‘Then don’t.’ I preferred not to think about actual figures. I had no doubt that my benefactor would make clear the extent of my debt in due course. ‘He is generous, no question.’
‘Well, don’t look too happy about it. Some of us’d be glad to have a friend like that.’
‘Make it the beef, then. But leave the wine.’ All I could think of was the old adage that with friends like Charles Paget, one has no need of enemies.
While Gaston disappeared to bellow my order through to the kitchen, I closed my eyes and mulled over the letter from Walsingham that had just taken me the best part of an hour to transcribe, before committing it to memory and burning it.
My skill at deciphering had grown rusty and the cipher Walsingham had given me before I left England was devilishly complex, disguised as four unique alphabets of letters, numbers and symbols and hidden in separate books so that no one, happening upon only one of the papers, would hold the complete cipher in his hand. The exact combination of the four keys to unlock any text was not set down anywhere in writing, but existed only in my memory. But with patience, Walsingham’s brisk, direct voice had emerged from the impenetrable jumble of signs on the page. He must have been confident that the cipher was beyond Stafford’s capabilities, since much of the letter concerned the ambassador and his new protégé:
It has come to my attention that Charles Paget has once again offered his services to England in the hope of buying a pardon for his past treasons – an offer he has made to me several times and which I have repeatedly refused But I fear Stafford is taken in by him, for he has a most plausible manner and was born to double-dealing. Be assured – Charles Paget is a most dangerous instrument, and I wish for England’s sake he had never been born. While Stafford congratulates himself, you may be sure that Paget is steering their alliance to his own advantage. Do not be fooled. Paget takes money from many hands, but he serves only himself.
Stafford believed he was engaging my services, at Walsingham’s instruction, to bring him intelligence from the royal court as to where the King intended to make alliances, either with the Huguenots or the Catholic League. But that was only half the story. The old spymaster’s real intention, he explained, was to give me a reason to visit the embassy on a regular basis so that I could keep an eye on Stafford, and particularly his dealings with Paget. All secret correspondence concerning them was to be sent via a trusted messenger, an agent of Walsingham’s in Paris who would make himself known to me in due course, and would place my letters directly into Walsingham’s hands, so that Stafford would not suspect I was watching him.
Fresh reports from Rome said that Pope Sixtus had issued a new bull, the lead still soft on its seal, confirming and reinforcing the excommunication of Queen Elizabeth and denouncing her as a bastard, a heretic and a schismatic – justification enough for a patriotic Catholic to feel he was doing a service to God and England by dispatching her. This bull, Walsingham feared, might be the spark that lit the fuse under the powder keg. Mary Stuart’s supporters in Paris had recovered from their defeat two years ago and he had reason to believe that another substantial plot was brewing, making Paget’s overtures to Stafford all the more suspicious for, as Walsingham said, no conspiracy worth the name would unfold in Paris without Paget at the heart of it. Meanwhile it appeared that Paget had also been watching me, for reasons as yet known only to him, but which were unlikely to be to
