Yet Hamilton cannot help it. He turns and looks and there he is again: Master Francis Walsingham, marching swiftly down the street toward the river with a crowd of others and some armed guards.
Hamilton wonders what it means, that their paths should so nearly cross so often? First in Paris, and then twice in this week: on the London Road, and now here in Seething Lane. It is a sign, he thinks, sent from above. If God did not wish his mission to succeed, he would have engineered those meetings to end very differently.
Now Hamilton feels himself swell with ecclesiastic fervor.
God wills it. Deus Vult.
When they return to the street, they pause again. Stepping out into its various ruts and potholes feels a terrible risk, but they do, and cross it unmolested. Then they feel safer, in the warren of darkened alleys north of the Tower, an area of leatherworkers, where the upper stories are so close a man might lean from his own window to shake the hand of his neighbor opposite. Within, it smells of rats and of rotting leather. They climb a ladder in the dark, and Hamilton must feel his way. His heart pounds, his breathing uneven. It is very close and noisome. Like breathing ancient cloth.
The priest strikes a light. They are surrounded by cured leather skins, as if in a bed at home, save the stench is so powerful. There is a crucifix on a low table, covered in a cloth, and what looks like a very small tabernacle. In one corner is a chamber pot.
The priest takes off his hat. His skull is shaved and dented with old scars, small pox, and worse.
“I am called Father Simon,” he says.
He moves as if to take Hamilton in his arms.
Hamilton thrusts him back. “Do you have it?” he asks.
“All in good time, my child.”
“No. No. Now.”
The priest’s eyes catch the rushlight’s glow. He looks like no one Hamilton has ever seen before. A fervor rises from him, like a miasma. He has a perverted zealotry of purpose. Every fiber of Hamilton’s body revolts against him.
But he is a priest.
“Father,” he adds.
The priest’s breath is cold, as if from a crypt.
“Very well,” he says.
He turns and is gone for some little while. When he comes back, he carries a long tube of waxed linen. Hamilton takes it, feeling the familiar heft of the gun, muffled by padding and sackcloth. He cuts through the bindings to reveal the gun within, a sister to that he spent so many days shooting in Ferniehirst. With her he could shoot the head off a wren at fifty paces. A woman’s from a hundred will be easy.
A woman’s from two hundred remains to be seen.
It is an object of great beauty, longer than any ordinary arquebus by a cubit or so, slender where she can be, beefy where she need be, the work of the finest smiths in Lombardy. In its stock, an ivory lozenge with a verse from the book of Numbers: “The Avenger of Blood shall put the Murderer to Death.”
There is fine black powder and there are balls, each blessed by the pope himself, with words from the Old Testament engraved by the best Venetian craftsmen upon their silken surfaces. He runs his fingers through the powder, searching for larger crumbs that will blow with too much force, and then he rolls each ball between finger and thumb. Even the slightest irregularity will send it awry.
The priest watches him, his stare disquieting.
“We must go to Greenwich,” Hamilton tells him hurriedly.
“Tomorrow, my child. It is too dangerous now: she will have guards in numbers. Ushers. Agents. Poursuivants.”
His voice hisses like a snake. Usshherssss, agentsssss, pourssssuivantssss.
“I will need to see the lay of the land.”
“Put your faith in God, my child, for He is the wise father and will guide you in all things.”
His hand crawls out of its long greasy sleeve to cup Hamilton by the cods.
Queen Mary has been ill these last few days, but now she is up, out of bed, on her feet, in blood-red grosgrain and ostrich feathers, pacing by her window.
“Where is she?”
Mary Seton does not know and cannot explain it.
“Gone, Your Majesty. The boy John says she left with her bag, two days ago, but he did not think to tell me.”
“Why? Why would she leave me? Why would she abandon me?”
“I am certain it is a misunderstanding, Your Majesty.”
“When I am queen, I will have her winkled out and I will repay her disloyalty.”
Mary Seton looks around to see that they are not overheard.
“Oh, the mice are not yet back behind their wainscoting,” Queen Mary says. “And even were they I should not care to curb my tongue, for I shall be queen long before they are able to bleat their nothings into the ear of my dear cousin of England.”
John Kennedy sits on a log within the Tower’s doorway, barely sheltered from the thin rain, and he strokes the knife away from him. A very thin peel rises from the spoon’s handle to fall to join the others beneath his feet, and he thinks his mother will like it.
In Waltham Cross, in Hertfordshire, nearly 170 miles to the south, Margaret Formby is offered a ride for the last twenty miles to London by a dark-skinned sumpterman, whose cart holds three sacks of unmilled grain and a sad-eyed cockerel in a cage.
“There is no need for this, Dee,” Walsingham tells him. “I am as anxious to talk to Meneer van Treslong as you are.”
But Dee keeps the barrel of his pistol pointing at Walsingham’s nethers.
“Walsingham,” he explains again. “I trust you only so far as a man might spit a rat, so sit tight and let us pray Master van Treslong has not yet weighed anchor.”
They are in the stern of a ferryman’s humble riverboat, the ferryman pulling on his oars, anxiously eyeing the gun that smokes in Dee’s hands. Behind them, following along
