“How many will they need if they can free Mary of Scotland?” Walsingham asks Beale. “With her at their head, the north will rise as one behind her, and Scotland will send troops, too, of course.”
It is a bleak picture. Beale flushes slightly, assuming Walsingham knows more than he does, which he does. He is a good man, Beale. The son of a mediumly well-to-do wool merchant from Cambridge feeling his way in a changing world. Dedicated, discreet, and loyal, with a sharp mind and sharp eyes, he will go far, Walsingham thinks. Further than poor Fellowes, at any rate.
Dear God. Poor Fellowes. He has had scarcely a moment to mourn the man or address his own guilt in that matter.
“While you were in Paris, Lord Burghley renewed his plea to have Queen Mary’s head over Norfolk’s rebellion,” Beale tells him.
Norfolk’s rebellion had been earlier in the year, when Queen Mary had promised to marry the Duke of Norfolk if he would free her and let her lead his army to replace Elizabeth on the throne and restore England to Rome. It was only thanks to Lord Burghley that the plot was foiled, after which Norfolk faced the headsman, but Queen Mary did not, and now she lingers like the sword of Damocles over all their heads.
“And still she will not allow it?” Walsingham supposes.
“No. Not without solid proof. And even then…” He trails off.
They have had this conversation so many times before: every threat to England exists only because Queen Mary lives still. She is the toehold that Spain has in England, and she is the pintle around which every secret Catholic plot in Reformed England turns. Without Mary alive, men such as James Hamilton would not now be prowling around the fringes with his arquebus; without Mary alive, the Spanish would have no pretext or cause to attack; and without her, there would not be this constant possibility of armed rebellion in the north. Until she is dead, these threats only loom larger and more deadly with every passing day.
“As long as that devilish woman is alive, Queen Elizabeth will never be safe on her throne,” Walsingham tells Beale, again. “We must somehow, in any way we can, bring her to the scaffold.”
There are times when he thinks that is his sole purpose in life, the reason he was put on this earth. But Queen Elizabeth will not countenance the killing of another God-anointed queen.
“She is moved to Sheffield, though,” Beale tells him, “and George Talbot is told to double her guard.”
“Yes,” Walsingham murmurs: it was he who organized that. He wanted her in tighter containment for the next step in his grand plan.
Beale is quiet for a moment, then starts as if he has had something on his mind.
“Master Walsingham…?”
“Mmmm?” He knows what is coming.
“Is it true? About Isobel Cochet?”
Walsingham can only nod.
Walsingham had heard the news later that terrible day, while he was still in Paris, and he had come back to England because of it, to be met at Sandwich by Tewlis, the erstwhile captain of his guards, who had seen some of what happened, and then later, when he got home to his wife, who had seen the rest.
“Stabbed him, and then ran,” she’d said. “Among everything else going on, I hardly noticed, only that it was poor Oliver. Poor Oliver. And Isobel, too. My God, Francis, I never thought… well, you don’t, do you?”
You don’t, Walsingham had thought.
“And you definitely saw her take the document? From his doublet?”
“Oh yes. Well. It wasn’t there when— Master Tewlis sent two of his men to bring him aboard. Just in case there was anything that might be done with him. He was carrying no document that I saw. Just a great hole in his heart. And oh my, Francis, so much blood.”
He had soothed her then and asked after her health and had kissed his daughter, but he was summoned to Whitehall.
Now he walks with Beale, watching the shipping on the river.
“And how progresses Master Hawkins?” he asks. Admiral Hawkins has been promising a new, nimble, race-built design of ship that he says will be able to maneuver around the top-heavy galleons favored by the Spanish and pepper them with shot from a distance.
Beale is noncommittal.
“He tells us he cannot build ships out of air,” he says, “and that his new designs cost money.”
“So we are still—?” He does not want to say defenseless, but that is what he means.
“If they knew how weak we were,” Beale says, “they would come now. With more than five ships.”
Which they are doing, and which makes the loss of DaSilva’s document all the more serious still.
When they reach Seething Lane, Walsingham checks to ensure the door to his inner chamber has not been opened since last he closed it, and when satisfied, he springs the three locks. Despite being Walsingham’s right-hand man, Beale has never been in this windowless sanctum, and he stares amazed not so much by the ranks of well-ordered files and boxes of papers on shelves that line the room, as by the various ornately tooled contraptions, fabricated in gold and bronze and ebony. One with a small bank of plates bears all the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and another consists of interlinking brass cylinders marked with tiny nubbles and indents. He gazes, furrow browed, trying to divine some understanding of these cryptographical devices, but it is no good: to the uninformed, they are enigmatic beyond comprehension.
Walsingham ignores him and lights a candle in a bull’s-eye glass lamp. After a moment it sends out a focused beam of light on the wall where there are astonishingly detailed charts of the Western Approaches to the Narrow Sea, as well as various others, of islands and reefs Beale has never seen before, all pinned and marked, but Walsingham focuses the lantern’s beam on a
