“Anyway, this way,” Talbot tells them, and he leads them through a long kitchen in which a boy sits staring at an empty pot, and a deserted bake house that smells of mold. They pass through a very thick oak door and find themselves in the tower, the ground floor of which is given over to a hall, from which lead two doors, and a spiraling flight of closed steps up into the darkness above.
Talbot knocks very gently on one of the doors and a moment later a bolt is drawn back. The door swings open on oiled hinges to reveal a tired-looking man with his shirtsleeves rolled up, despite the cold.
No one says anything about the strong smell of shit.
Walsingham doesn’t introduce him. “Wouldn’t be his real name anyway.”
“Arthur Gregory,” the man says, catching Beale’s eye, but not offering to shake his hand.
Walsingham grunts good-naturedly. “As I say, not his real name.”
On the table is what might be a chamber pot covered in a linen cloth.
“That hers?” Walsingham asks, just as if he has spoken to Gregory not five minutes earlier.
Gregory grunts affirmatively.
“Anything?”
Gregory lifts the linen cover of the chamber pot. The stinking mess within sits in a bath of purple liquid.
Beale is shocked. Walsingham is unsurprised.
“Porphyria,” he tells him.
Then he turns back to Gregory: “Who’s upstairs?”
“John Wilkins.”
“And with Mary?”
“Lord and Lady Livingston, Mary Seton, the priest they’ve got pretending to be her usher, and Margaret Formby.”
Walsingham nods.
“Come this way,” he tells Beale, “but take off your boots.”
Beale does so. He has been wearing the same socks for five days. Walsingham leads him up the steps and along a short corridor, the boards powdered so they do not creak, past a door through which they can hear the burble of a man’s voice, and on to another, smaller door, iron battened, and seemingly made for a dwarf. Walsingham has a key. He opens it on more oiled hinges and crouches to enter. Beale follows. Inside it is absolutely dark save for one tiny spec of light that comes in about waist height. There is another man within, sitting on a stool. The room smells rank.
No word is spoken.
They can hear the man’s voice more clearly. He’s chanting the Latin Mass. The hair on Beale’s arms stands on end: this is enough to get them all hanged.
The man on the stool moves to let Walsingham press his eye to the hole. After a moment he lets Beale take his turn. The hole is drilled through the plaster, through a knot in the wainscoting, and there is little enough to see: a chair covered above with a purple cloth of state; the heels of three kneeling women. That’s it.
Despite his own socks, Beale can smell the man next to him, John Wilkins. It is like gaol scent, and he is pleased when Walsingham taps him on the shoulder and they are able to leave him to it.
Talbot is waiting in the kitchens.
“There is one more thing,” he tells them. “The Queen has sent permission for Her Majesty to go hawking this week.”
Walsingham is surprised.
“When did this come?”
“Today. In the hand of Sir Thomas Smith.”
Beale calculates that this means the Queen must have granted permission five days earlier, probably longer, when, to all intents and purposes, Quesada was on his way to attack England, burn London down, and set Queen Mary free. The last thing they would have wanted was for her to be out in the countryside, on a horse, with a hawk. A spasm of irritation crosses Walsingham’s face.
“And you’ve told her? Queen Mary?”
Talbot nods, as why should he not have?
“I will have Beale ride along,” Walsingham decides. “You like hawking, don’t you, Robert? You can borrow one of Sir George’s birds.”
They leave the castle through the postern gate and make their way back up to an inn—the White Hart—that Walsingham knows. It is thatch and timber-built, overlooking two fish ponds, and prey to damp.
“You will concentrate on Margaret Formby, won’t you, Robert?” Walsingham says.
Beale knows what he must do.
Walsingham hardly drinks a thing. He is rapt, and his eyes are glossy and fierce, Beale thinks, like one of those hunting birds; his whole self is honed but for one purpose. And that purpose? To catch Queen Mary in the act, to find proof that she is plotting the death of her cousin Elizabeth of England; to find incontrovertible proof of it, that he may, at last, and once and for all, lay before his mistress and force her hand in the matter. He wants to bring about the death of that woman.
Sleep that night comes hard, and Walsingham wakes Beale long before dawn to tell him that it is raining.
No hawking.
Walsingham paces all day. He is a ball of heat, twitching in frustrated fury.
“God damn it! God damn her!”
He writes messages then won’t send them. He scraps the page or burns it. Once he laughs very bitterly.
“Dr. Dee,” he says, “he always swore there was a way of communicating instantly over very long distances. He said there was a book—one he couldn’t find—that described how it was done. Something to do with angels.”
Beale notices Walsingham talks of Dee in the past.
The next day Beale is once again woken by Walsingham, his pacing this time. Up and down the end of the mattress they have shared. Beale lies in bed. He can hear the rain on the roof. Still no hawking.
“We have but six months’ grace, Robert,” Walsingham tells him more than twice that day. “Six months before the Spanish equip and send another fleet. We’ll still be as poor as we ever were, and that devilish woman will still be alive, sending out her treacherous messages, like some terrible spider, pulling men into her web of treasonous deceit. I will not have it! I will not have it! I cannot be thwarted by this accursed rain.
