“ ‘Save if it pleaseth you to make its girth somewhat more fulsome’? What in God’s name can that be about?”
“I copied only what was written,” Gregory says.
Walsingham is pulling hard on his beard again.
“A new encryption,” he says, “or else—she is supposed to have some powder—some form of brimstone—that pressed into paper is invisible to the naked eye, but once exposed to ammonia becomes legible.”
They know not to bother asking how he knows this.
“We’ll have to get hold of it then,” Wilkins says. “Make a copy to put in his bag, and get to work on the original.”
“We will have to move fast in the morning,” Walsingham says. “But he’s seen you already, so you will have to make the swap, Master Beale, tomorrow night.”
The next morning they are once more up and about before dawn. Gregory and Wilkins cross the bridge into town again and return with papers and inks from a bookseller, and wax, too, the color of blood. They sit outside in the best light possible and while Wilkins makes a passable copy of Queen Mary’s signet, Gregory re-creates the letter.
When it is done, Beale is up into the saddle, and Master Walsingham passes him the letter, as well as another addressed to Sir Thomas Randolph.
“Our man in Edinburgh,” Walsingham tells him. “An introduction. We’ll meet at his house tomorrow night, yes?”
Beale rides out across the bridge. He has never been to Scotland. It doesn’t feel so very different for a while, and he catches up with the boy as they are approaching the town of Dunbar. The road winds through bracken and heather, and there are black-faced sheep dotted about. A cold wind comes off the North Sea, and already night falls earlier.
“God give you good day, master, you’ve come far?”
The boy is cautiously polite and tells him the truth. Beale tells him he is a salt merchant from Droitwich. The boy is quite obviously bilious from last night’s ale and wishes only to get down off his horse and to sleep. They stop at the Dolphin tavern, in the shadow of the slighted castle, and stable their horses. The language here is impenetrable and Beale expresses his gratitude for the boy’s help by buying him beer in the Flemish style. The inn is old-fashioned, and straw pallets are brought out and set up around the fire on which the clay cover ticks as it warms and then, much later in the night, as it cools. By then Beale has already extracted the message the boy was carrying, replaced it with the copy, and both now snore loudly.
The next morning, after a smoked bony fish and more beer, Beale leaves the letter, enclosed within another letter, for Walsingham and the others to examine at their leisure, and he and the boy set off together along the coast road, toward Edinburgh. The boy does not mind his company, but nor does he beg for any salt-dealing anecdotes, so they ride in easy silence, with the wind at their backs and they raise Edinburgh in the early afternoon.
Francis Walsingham stares down at the paper in fury. They have tried everything, but none avails.
“Maybe… maybe it just is a thing that she wants?” Wilkins asks.
Everything smells very strongly of alum and vinegar, and Walsingham’s fingers are stinging from touching one or the other of the solutions.
“But what is the thing she wants?” Gregory wonders. “What did the silversmith make for the Earl of Bothwell?”
Walsingham has a terrible feeling he is doing something he should stop doing, or that he is leaving undone a thing he should do. But what?
“Beale will tell us what steps the silversmith next takes.”
They collect up their bottles and jars and brushes and they set off after Beale and the boy.
Three days later they are all gathered in the solar of Thomas Randolph’s house near Holyrood Palace, thinking about Hamish Doughty, the silversmith, who turns out to be… a silversmith, and, at first glance, not much more besides. No assassin, at any rate.
“He is just another link in the chain,” Walsingham tells them.
He sounds desperate that this should be so, but Wilkins and Gregory, and now Beale, are no longer convinced he is dispassionate. Besides, following Doughty will not be easy. He is moderately active in Edinburgh politics. He comes; he goes; he speaks to many men; he sees many others. It would need ten of them, all of whom knew Edinburgh, just to keep a watch on him, and there are only four of them.
Thomas Randolph is there though; Walsingham’s brother-in-law or something. He’s a dapper little man, bright-eyed and clean-shaven, with an unsuppressed delight in life, and full of stories of Russia, from where he has just come back, and her tsar, Ivan.
“I do not wish to sound disloyal, Francis,” he says, “but in the matter of her cousin of Scotland, Queen Elizabeth might have done better to take a page from Tsar Ivan’s book: he’d’ve had her strangled at birth. Then he’d’ve had everyone she was ever likely to meet likewise strangled—at birth again—and then he’d’ve sent his Cossacks to conquer every land she had ever thought to set foot in and they’d’ve forced the men of those countries to plow salt into their own fields, dig their own graves, and then kill themselves. In Russia they know how to make an omelette!”
Meanwhile, they have lost the boy, John Kennedy.
“There is something not right about this,” Wilkins murmurs.
It
