Her hands are shaking and the blue powder scatters across her lectern. Using the blunted point of her fattest needle she goes over the letters and numbers, pressing only hard enough so that the blue powder is transferred to the cheap paper, but not so hard that she indents it. When that is done, she inspects it: blank. She rolls it into a tiny scroll no bigger than a lady’s fingernail and places it in the lid of the pot of face powder. She tips the candle so that the wax drips into it, and while it fills and seals the note, she tears all her other writings into shreds, half of which she chews fifty times before swallowing, half of which she will force Margaret Formby to swallow.
When the scrap of paper is submerged in the wax, she straightens the candle, and takes up the soft fat disc of wax. She rolls it into a ball the size of a chickpea, and before it cools too much, she inserts this into a small hole cut in a piece of wood that she had the boy John Kennedy carve for her especially. He had been pleased to be asked and has come up with something that is almost the size of a duck’s egg, in pinewood, with a plug to stopper the hole, which can then be sealed in candle wax.
“Will it float?”
He supposes so.
Later, the sun appears, and Mary Seton comes.
“Sir George suggests you might like to take your walk now, Your Majesty?”
They put on their cloaks and hats and old-fashioned pattens, and they walk together, clacking across the cobbles with Margaret Formby trailing miserably behind, along with Father Goole, who is pretending to be an usher. It is hardly scenic, or far, and so they must walk in a circle: right out of the tower door, past the gatehouse with its raised drawbridge and lowered portcullis, then a left turn past the old tower and here, for a few paces at least, the wall is lower, and they have a view down the precipice to the burbling brown waters of the river Don, twenty feet below.
A heron stalks through the rushes at the far side.
“Can you throw a stone?” Queen Mary asks Margaret Formby.
The girl nods. She does not look well. She may be ill. It is a pity, but Mary believes she will soon not have too much need of her anyway. Only a few more weeks perhaps.
“Do so,” she instructs. “I should like to see the heron fly.”
She wishes them to finish her sentence for I cannot.
Margaret finds a stone and tries to throw it. It falls short of the heron, so another is found. Father Goole is more successful. A guard watches them from the battlements of the great tower.
“Throw another,” Queen Mary instructs.
He does so. A bit better this time.
“I shall try.”
She throws the wooden egg. It sails across the river and lands in the brown waters with a plop. The heron sets off along the valley.
Mary Seton watches the guard.
He doesn’t notice the stone is floating.
Off it goes, downstream, where three men, hose rolled up, are “fishing.”
The queen laughs. Walsingham would have seen through that. Not Talbot though.
The boy has been brought up with horses and is a steady rider, and, despite the rain, he makes good progress. He rides from dawn to dusk, swapping horses at the post stations, always taking the best, so that in pursuit, Beale is forced onto swaybacked nags, the lame and the halt. Pontefract, Ripon, Darlington, Newcastle, Alnwick. Five hard days in the saddle. By the middle of the sixth, Beale believes there is only one place the boy can now be riding: Berwick, and from there: Scotland.
It is not a surprise. In fact, it is a relief to know that Queen Mary’s allies are not, as was most feared, among the nobility of northern England, but across the border in Scotland. These are the sorts of enemy the English are used to. Beale can see that even from every house he passes: stone-built, grimly defensive, studded with arrow loops, and on every horizon another all-but-impregnable castle.
Nevertheless, something must be done about the boy before he gets over the border.
Walsingham is too old for all this, but he so badly wants to know what the boy has, he rides so hard and far that when he catches up with Robert Beale in Berwick, he has lost all strength in his body and must be helped from his saddle. He is sodden from the rain, and his skin is the color of rendered goose fat.
“Where is he?” he gasps.
“Asleep in the hall at the Garter,” Beale tells him.
Wilkins and Gregory look better than when Beale last saw them. Fresh air and exercise, but something more than that too.
“Has he seen you at all?” Walsingham asks.
Beale thinks not.
“Better not risk it, though, eh?” Wilkins says. “We’ll go.”
Beale stands with Walsingham huddling under the eaves of the Angel, south of the river, from where they can see the bridge over the Tweed, and the town’s new-built walls against the Scots.
“More than a hundred thousand pounds, they cost,” Walsingham tells Beale. He is not sure if they were worth it. Probably though.
They see Wilkins and Gregory crossing the bridge.
“What will they do?” Beale asks.
“Think of something,” Walsingham tells him.
Wilkins and Gregory are good at this, though when, at length, long after curfew, they return they both smell of drink.
They seem thoughtful.
“He’s just a boy,” Gregory says.
“What is in his bag?”
“A candlestick. Silver. Good quality. Worth a bit.”
“But only a bit.”
He means it is not six hundred gold coins. Not enough to fund a revolution or an invasion. An assassination, though? Perhaps.
“Carrying any message?”
Wilkins pulls out a piece of paper.
“I got most of it down, but—”
He shrugs.
Walsingham, recovered, reads the letter.
“Who is this Hamish Doughty? Have we heard of him? A silversmith? In Edinburgh?”
Walsingham passes the letter to Beale. It is an instruction from
