“Is that so?”
He holds the Queen’s gaze, but thinks of Smith. He must allow him a glimpse of his panic. Just a glimpse.
“Your Majesty—” he starts, relying on being cut off. Smith duly obliges, performing for the Queen as a juggler, or a clown. If only he were so innocent.
“And you have given it away with one of your silly games of cloak-and-dagger!” he shouts. “Pissing about across the Narrow Sea, with your ciphers, and your codes, and… and whatever else it is you people do.”
The Earl of Leicester looks calculating, but Lord Burghley does at least come to Walsingham’s partial defense.
“Master Walsingham’s ‘activities’ did at least yield the document in the first instance,” he points out.
“The first instance matters not one whit!” Smith jeers. “What matters is how the thing plays out. And in this instance it has played out very badly. Very badly indeed. You’re a bloody fool, Walsingham! An incompetent bloody fool!”
“Enough!” the Queen snaps.
Silence. She stares at Walsingham. He can taste his heart in his mouth. He knows his fate hangs in the balance. He might have misjudged this. The Queen might now call for those halberdiers outside. They’ll happily take him under the arms and drag him to the Tower with the sort of pleasure of which they might later tell their wives over bread and ale.
She looks at him for a long time, sitting in judgment, waiting for him to justify her faith in him, and in that moment, he changes his mind: she is beautiful, in moments such as these, beautiful enough to stop a heart.
And finally she says: “If what you say is done, Master Walsingham, then for the sake of all England, it must be undone. You must make this right, or, God help you, I will find someone who can.”
He breathes again. His lease of life is extended. But for how much longer? He backs out of the room, trembling, but bows extravagantly as he goes, and finds Nicholas Gethyn, Thomas Smith’s private secretary, hastily retreating from his post listening at the door.
“Francis,” he says, “may God grant you good day.”
Walsingham smiles. Gethyn is an oddity at court: tall and shy, there against his inclination, and of the sort to believe every man can see his darkest secrets. As it happens, Walsingham can: Gethyn has against his better judgment allowed himself to be bullied into investing much of his wife’s money in Sir Thomas Smith’s Ireland colony, to the probable ruination of his family.
“Gethyn,” he says. “How are you? How is your wife? All those children of yours?”
“Passing well, Francis. Good of you to ask. Ten of them now and have just welcomed another. Can never remember their names but I miss each one, very much. And my wife, too, of course, who sends love.”
Romilly Gethyn was a great beauty, Walsingham recalls, though not seen since she took to childbed. He thinks he must do something for them—remove them from their obligations to Sir Thomas Smith, perhaps—but not right this instant.
“Nicholas,” he says, “I am rather up against it at the moment. May we resume our conversation at a later date?”
They have slipped to Christian names.
“But of course, Francis. Of course.”
Gethyn has something to tell him, of course, but what? Something about Smith no doubt, though Walsingham believes he knows enough about Smith for the moment. He will ask Beale to investigate, anyway.
Beale is waiting in the antechamber, pale and sick with fret.
“Walk with me,” Walsingham tells him. “Back to Seething Lane.”
The rain has let up, and Beale does so, along the Strand, for Walsingham is sick of taking ship. Beale fills in his master on all that has happened, insofar as he is able to, though it is obvious he believes his master already knows more than he, despite being so taken up in Paris. He tells him that the Queen has been very restless.
“It was the shooting of Coligny that started it all over again,” he says. “It reminded her too much of James Stewart’s murder.”
James Stewart, first Earl of Moray, had been Regent of Scotland until he was shot with a gun from an upstairs window while riding through Linlithgow. The murderer had spread feathers on the floor to mask his movements and put up a dark cloth to hide the smoke from the fuse and the explosion after the gun had been fired. Walsingham had likewise thought of him when he had heard Coligny had been shot, though the man who shot Stewart was— He stops suddenly.
“Stewart’s killer was never found, was he?”
Beale shakes his head.
“A man named James Hamilton,” he says. “He escaped overseas. France, I suppose.”
My God, thinks Walsingham. My God.
It is just one other thing to remember: Hamilton.
Beale sighs with displeasure. “It’s a bad business,” he goes on. “Anybody may now just take a shot at anybody from thirty paces. Thank God guns are so inaccurate.”
Yes, Walsingham thinks, well, we’ll see about that, soon enough.
“And how did the Queen greet the news that Quesada has set sail?” Walsingham asks.
“Not well,” Beale admits, “but it is only five ships, and none of them big, so we do not fear imminent invasion.”
Walsingham wonders if they have yet read his report that the comptroller in Bilbao is short of hay to feed the horses sailing with Quesada’s fleet? Insignificant in itself,
