“Have you come to set me free, Master Walsingham?”
“Oh, you are not in any state from which you need be set free, Your Majesty.”
Mary makes a dismissive noise. She is too tired for silly arguments and they all know the truth.
“Then to what or whom do I owe the unexpected pleasure of your company?”
“I am in need of your assistance,” Walsingham tells her.
“My assistance?”
Beale feels sure she is about to develop some further ironic curlicues, but Walsingham cuts her off.
“We believe we have stumbled upon the strings of some plot that is currently in play designed and directed to bring an early end to the life of our own dear sovereign, Queen Elizabeth. We believe that—unwittingly or no—you may be the focus of this plot, the point about which it revolves.”
He includes a small hand gesture to indicate something turning.
Queen Mary looks at him. Her nut brown eyes betray almost nothing.
“Oh yes?”
Walsingham’s smile tightens. He hates this woman. A bead of sweat in his hairline betrays his feeling.
“Yes, and in the certain hope that you would not wish to see the life of your cousin of England harmed in any way, I am left wondering if you could enlighten me as to why in the week before last you might have sent your servant—one John Kennedy—to Edinburgh, against explicit embargo to communicate with they whom may indeed be Her Majesty Elizabeth’s great rebels?”
Queen Mary makes a show of confusion, but there enters into her eyes and onto her lips the ghost of a smile.
“John Kennedy?” she wonders. She turns to Mary Seton, who stands at her side.
“The boy, Your Majesty.”
Queen Mary pretends she did not know before, and Walsingham goes on to describe what the boy has been doing, when and where, and then comes to the subject of Hamish Doughty.
The curious thing is that while Walsingham speaks, Queen Mary seems impassive, or even slightly amused, and it is Mary Seton who cannot hide her feelings. Her eyes are very wide and wet, and she looks strangely beautiful in her anxiety. She betrays her queen in every gesture and every glance, and when, at last, Francis Walsingham calls for Beale to come forward and present the silver object to the queen, Mary Seton gives a small scream.
But Queen Mary merely smiles.
“What is it, Your Majesty?” Walsingham asks. He is burning with rage.
She now looks up at him.
“Are you married, Master Walsingham?”
He is taken aback by this change in tack. “Your Majesty?”
“You have a wife?”
“I do. I do. Yes.”
“And do you indulge in coitus?”
“Coitus?”
“Coitus, Master Walsingham. Between a man and a woman. A husband and a wife.”
She looks at him dead levelly. She is challenging him. Defying him. Fighting him. Beating him. Walsingham’s face is flushed.
“My God, ma’am, I— What are you saying?”
Mary says nothing. She stretches to take the length of silver from Beale. Her fingers wrap around the silver shaft.
And it is then that it all suddenly becomes clear.
Francis Walsingham stands waiting for his horse to be readied in the bailey of Sheffield Castle. His gaze is fixed on the star that is still shining in Cassiopeia but he is not thinking of it, not wondering what it means. His guts, his soul, his mind: all three are turbulent. He cannot yet bring himself to laugh at what has happened, at the fool he has made of himself, though he can see Beale cannot hide his smirk as he sets about altering the stirrup strap on his saddle.
Christ. How could he have been such a fool?
He stands waiting, watching the boy—John Kennedy, blameless John Kennedy, with his black eye and split lip—who now sits on an old log by the door, using his hook to carve a spoon, and Walsingham thinks how he chased him five days up, five days down, all over the country; how he kidnapped the subject of another country—and God knows how that will play out up there, since last night Hamish Doughty died on the rack, without his close questioning being approved by the Privy Council—and how he confronted Queen Mary, all because—because—because of what? His own hubris.
He clenches his eyes shut. He could scream.
Instead though, he controls himself.
He will do the right thing. He will start by apologizing to the boy.
He walks over to him. Beale is there, too, now, probably likewise apologizing.
Yes.
“Hello, John,” he says.
John squints up at them, but says nothing. He is rightly furious. With them, but also with Queen Mary.
He carries on working, furiously slicing through the wood.
“What is it you are making?” Beale is asking. He is trying to engage the boy. Make conversation. The boy says nothing. A long peel of wood comes off his knife and falls between their feet on the dew-wet stones.
“It is not a spoon,” Beale continues.
The boy grunts.
“Are you—what? Carving an egg?”
The boy holds it in his palm.
“Queen Mary likes them.”
Beale and Walsingham lock alarmed gazes. Is this another thing?
“No,” the boy says, reading their minds.
“Then what?”
The boy shrugs.
Walsingham asks to see it. It is very light, soft wood, pine. There is a little hole in the side.
“Can’t be easy, that,” Beale suggests.
“Have to do it with an awl,” the boy agrees. He mimes the action needed.
“Whatever for?”
The boy shrugs again. Walsingham rubs his thumb over the notch. It reminds him of a dead-letter drop that he once used in Leuven. That was a notch at the base of a wringing post in which one of his agents—was it Willem van Treslong?—placed a note rolled in a wax ball.
The boy is watching him, as is Beale, too. Walsingham tosses the egg into the air like a trainee juggler. It has little heft. He throws it to Beale, who catches it.
The boy holds out his hand for it.
Beale gives it to him.
“Well,” Beale says, ready to finish things up.
But Walsingham hears that jangling inner bell again. He feels he is atop something. But what? What is it?
“Can I see it again?” he asks.
The boy passes him the egg.
Walsingham stares at it for
