He trails off. He is wearing strong perfume, Walsingham notices. Ambergris. But the smell of his body is beginning to emerge in the warmth of this late sun. It is the truth, behind the lies.
“So?” Walsingham asks. “You saw the body?”
Van Treslong nods tightly.
“Took it off, as instructed, and then—overboard. At sea.”
Walsingham never liked Dr. Dee, but this—is not what he wanted.
“He will be with his precious angels, I suppose,” he says.
“Sure,” Van Treslong says. “And he served his purpose, no?”
Walsingham agrees.
But then he wonders when he ever told Van Treslong what that purpose was.
“Do you believe Quesada is sailing for the Northwest Passage?” he asks.
Van Treslong is unsure.
“At this time of year,” he says, “no, but he might cross the ocean to be ready to sail north when the ice melts in spring?”
In his wildest dreams, Walsingham sometimes hoped that Quesada would be foolhardy enough to follow DaSilva’s directions there and then and find himself trapped by ice and freeze to death, but no one is such a fool as to set off into the northern latitudes in September.
“Though we can live in hope, eh, Francis?” Van Treslong laughs.
“Have you told anyone else about Quesada?” Walsingham wonders.
“Only you, and…”
He gestures at the Queen and the members of the Privy Council gathered in the shade of the cedar tree. They are trying to console her. Did she really feel so strongly about Dee? Walsingham feels a further twist of the blade of guilt. Burghley, in his red, looks rotten, and Smith is still jeering, and it is only Gethyn who looks to the Queen’s person and comfort.
“Good,” Walsingham says. “Will you keep it to yourself, Willem?”
Van Treslong looks at him carefully.
“Controlling the flow?”
“Something like that,” Walsingham agrees.
An hour later Walsingham is at Seething Lane, and Beale wonders at his boss.
“You do not seem so very pleased?” he asks.
“I am,” Walsingham tells him.
“But?”
“But it is a mere reprieve. They will be back to set her free next year, or the year after. So long as she is alive. They will be back. And each time, stronger than ever.”
He means Mary of Scotland, of course, and the Spanish, or the French. He is forcibly stuffing linens in a saddlebag.
“Pack your stuff, will you, Master Beale,” he says.
“Where are we going, Master Walsingham?”
“Up t’North,” he says. “To t’Sheffield to see if we cannot once and for all declaw the bitch.”
The road north is long, but they travel it swiftly, lightly encumbered on good horses, and without drawing overmuch attention to themselves they aim to be in Sheffield within five days. A courier might have overtaken them, in the night, say, or by a different road, so they ride fast and far each day, doing as much as they might to forestall word of Quesada’s change of tack from reaching Sheffield before they do, and most especially the castle’s royal prisoner.
Beale had broached the subject of Dr. Dee on that first day.
“So he did not manage to retrieve the DaSilva document?”
Walsingham had shrugged.
“Perhaps we will never know,” he said, which had struck Beale as strange, but Walsingham was deep in thoughts elsewhere.
“Talbot knows to expect us,” he had told his secretary, “the others, too.”
“The others?”
“The watchers, in the castle.”
They ride in silence after that, both thinking, and Beale divines the scheme before they reach Oakham. Or at least identifies its possibilities.
“How can you be certain that Queen Mary knew Quesada was coming to rescue her?” Beale asks.
Walsingham, never comfortable on a horse, gives him a look.
Of course, Beale thinks, he told her so himself.
“I had to explain why her guard was doubled,” Walsingham admits.
Beale laughs.
“So how will she hear that Quesada has changed course?” he wonders.
Another, different look from Walsingham.
“Ah,” Beale says. “That remains to be seen?”
They ride in silence for a bit. Walsingham’s eyebrow is cocked, waiting for the next bit, waiting for Beale to say: “And when she does, if she does, she will be utterly dejected and will send desperate messages to Hamilton, forgetting all precaution of secrecy!”
Et voilà!
“That is very neat,” Beale has to admit.
Walsingham almost smiles as they ride.
He thinks so too.
There is, though, one thing, or perhaps two, that bother him still.
The first is Meneer van Treslong.
The second is also Meneer van Treslong.
PART
| TWO
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Sheffield, September 22, 1572
The town is of gray stone, handsome, with a marketplace in which to buy strong cloth and cheap pies. The dogs are lean, the tongues are sharp, and the scent of burning coal hangs thick in the air. At its heart: the castle, of the same gray stone, and of the old sort that has stood three hundred years or more but might now be knocked down in an afternoon by a single cannon. Moat and ditches to the south and a lively brown river—the Don—under its northern wall.
In rising dusk and falling rain, Masters Walsingham and Beale leave their horses at the stable and cross the drawbridge, but they linger in the gatehouse and do not enter the cobbled bailey.
“One of her household will see us,” Walsingham says.
Instead a servant is sent to find George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, who will meet them in the guardroom of the gatehouse. When Talbot comes he is about forty, forty-five perhaps, with a spreading beard and sad, wise eyes. How does he feel about his charge? Does he see her in the round, as a person? Or does he, like every other man, see her as a threat, or a means to an end? Beale cannot guess. But there is another dimension of course: should Queen Elizabeth die without issue, then Queen Mary of Scotland will take her throne. How would she then repay a gaoler who mistreated her now?
“She is at prayer,” Talbot tells them. “Up there.”
He points through a door to the limestone tower in the southwestern corner of the castle. It is three
