Hamish Doughty, on the other hand, is another matter entirely, and when he is brought before them, he is a hot pocket of angry grease, and no one is at all surprised. But by God, it is fascinating to see someone so fat, Beale thinks. One of the guards is actually feeling his dimpled flesh. Pushing it and letting it slowly spring back. It is like dough. He stops when he sees he is being watched.
“You’ve no fucking right to be bringing me here. You’ve fucking kidnapped me from my own fucking country and brought me to this fucking shithole. You’ve no right to look at me, let alone ask a question.”
Walsingham slaps him. His jowls quiver a long moment later.
“Stop your yammering and listen.”
Doughty is, if possible, more enraged.
They will get no sense out of him today.
“Put him in the Gascoigne Tower.”
Other than the Tower in London, there is no place in England more likely to bring a man eye to eye with his own mortality than the Gascoigne Tower. Flint-faced, windowless, it is where the Lancastrian kings put men they wanted the world to forget ever lived, including King Richard.
“Do we have license to put him to close questioning?” Gregory asks.
“Yes,” Walsingham lies.
It is desperate. He is desperate. If he cannot find evidence enough to condemn Queen Mary, then this second part of his plan, the most intricate part, will unravel, and he will be left with what? With only the strange ghost trail of Meneer van Treslong’s shifting loyalties, and sideways dishonesty to pursue.
They sit for a while, thinking, the silver object on the table between them. All the bright pleasure of the early days of the scheme has contorted into frustration. Walsingham is furious.
“Well,” he says. “We will have to confront her ourselves then.”
Hamilton should have taken a ship from Berwick, but suffers terrible seasickness, so he takes one of Lord Kerr’s palfreys and rides east from Ferniehirst to find the London road. In addition to what might be expected of a traveling man, he carries two medals blessed by the pope himself, an ivory crucifix made in Venice, an earthenware vial of water from the river Jordan.
He rides south, sleeping at the side of the road, wrapped in his traveling cloak. The leaves are turning, and it will soon be autumn. Will he live to see Advent? Not in this world, he thinks.
Just before Doncaster he takes the precaution of pulling his horse off the road when he sees a large party of men following him along the road from the north. He stands letting the horse crop the weeds, waiting, and his blood turns to absolute ice and then fire when he recognizes among them Master Francis Walsingham.
He should have shot him in Paris, as he stood against the wall on the day of vengeance. No one would have guessed he had done so deliberately. Instead he’d shot a Frenchman, of his own faith, and saved the devil. It was pride, of course. Look what I can do.
There are ten of them: Walsingham; another man, his secretary probably; six men who are obviously soldiers; and a boy who looks panicky. Hamilton watches them go, and he misses that gun now, for with it he could have lodged a bullet in the man’s ear. But for fear of attracting attention to himself, and of being caught abroad with it, he has left it with Lord Kerr in Ferniehirst and is riding now to find its twin, sent from Milan especially for his purpose.
He waits until Walsingham’s party is out of sight, and then for a long while more before he leads his horse back onto the road, mounts up, and continues south.
Queen Mary cries out with frustration.
“No! No! No! You let it go! I was nearly there, but you let it go!”
Margaret Formby gets up off her knees and wipes her face.
“I am sorry, ma’am, I—”
“I don’t care! Get out! Get out! Oh God! Send me Mary!”
Margaret cannot help weeping as she runs past Mary Seton on the steps. She runs out of the tower and into the bailey. There is a conduit across the cobbles, providing clean water for the kitchen and the brewery. She plunges her head under it, letting the thick flow soak her headdress and her face, careless of the guards watching. She wants to scream and cry and fly from here.
When she looks up and wipes her eyes on her apron, she sees the bailey is now filled with men on horses. They look down on her in stern surprise.
One of them speaks. “You are Margaret Formby?”
She bobs in acknowledgment.
He gets down off his horse. He is short, stern, with, when he removes his cap, short-cropped hair.
“I am Francis Walsingham,” he says. Her heart seems to engorge with terror. This is the very devil, she knows, and so, God help her, she cannot help but look at his feet, expecting hooves. His gaze seems to peer through a window into her soul, and he smiles to see what she is thinking.
“We are here to see your mistress,” he tells her.
Queen Mary sits in her chair under her cloth of state, silent and still. Her face is pallid and swollen, and Beale remembers the purple urine in her chamber pot. Master Walsingham betrays no anxiety. He stands likewise in silence, and equally still, waiting with unfeigned patience.
They are in the gloomy solar of the tower with its thick old windowpanes, and Beale finds himself looking at the back wall for the knot in the wainscoting through which he saw this room, when the man who is now pretending to be an usher was saying Mass. He cannot identify it and wonders if it is filled up when not in use? The room smells of old water, of dead flowers, of pent-up sorrow. He cannot wait to be out, in fresh air, to be able to breathe.
At length the queen
