He shakes Tewlis’s hand and salutes the departing soldiers. The gates open. The French soldiers are still there, holding back a sparse crowd with ease. The first carter lashes the first ox and the cart’s wheels grind across the stones. The second carter lashes his, and out they go. Walsingham holds his wife’s gaze and mimes a blown kiss.
Oliver Fellowes rides alongside Isobel Cochet. They make a terrifyingly handsome couple and despite his gloomy turn of thought, Francis Walsingham cannot believe God would let anything happen to such a pair.
And yet. And yet.
“Godspeed, Oliver,” Walsingham says, and God bless.
When the convoy is gone, and the gate is shut, Walsingham retires to his chamber. He kneels and prays for the safety of his wife and his child, and that with God’s grace, his scheme will play out to England’s advantage.
Sir Philip Sidney comes later and asks how he is.
“As well as can be hoped,” Walsingham tells him.
The convoy—two carts, eight horses—passes a loose group of men in sober black cloth with those white crosses daubed on their hats and white kerchiefs tied around their arms. They are gathered amid the posts where the women would usually wring their laundry, but today they’ve murdered someone and there’s a dead body on the ground between them. They look up and watch the English pass, and then they leave their victim and fall in behind.
The road runs westward, past windmills and onion and cabbage fields, across low ground that is marshy come winter, where the smell of dyers’ yards and tanners’ pits enriches the air. Ordinarily a traveler might fear wild dogs or pigs, or feral children with stones to hand, or the roads pitted so deep a man might easily vanish up to his chest, but today there are mobs of men and even women on the wayside, crosses daubed on their hats, to spit at the English as they pass, and to shout foul curses, and threaten acts of violence. They laugh at the terror of the English women and children, but they are mindful of Tewlis and his four soldiers with their smoking fuses. No one wishes to be the first to die.
But that will change, Oliver Fellowes knows, and fear claws his heart.
“Nurse your flames,” Tewlis tells his men. “And shoot the big ones first.”
On they ride. The crowd becomes louder, closer, denser. The horses’ eyes roll, and their ears press flat. There is a chant of a sort Fellowes does not wish to know the words. He feels Mistress Cochet watching him, from where she rides talking to Mistress Walsingham like mother and daughter, and he is determined to impress them both.
Something foul is thrown.
“Do not react!” he calls. “Do not.”
The people in the crowd jeer and press close. A pale-skinned baby’s arm, hacked off at the elbow, is made to make obscene gestures. More join the crowd, and the road is almost blocked ahead. They are having trouble keeping their line. A pisspot is thrown but ducked. A soldier fires his gun and the crowd flinches like a single animal. A moment later it pushes back, closer than before. A woman draws a finger across her throat. A horse rears. A man bellows something, his mouth holding a single tooth.
Steady, steady, for the love of God.
Fellowes enters a state of extreme calmness, where the sounds of the menacing mob are muffled as if by oakum in his ears, the image of men as seen through cheap church glass. Isobel Cochet watches him with steady intent.
Oliver smiles.
She does too.
The provocation continues until at last they reach Issy, late in the afternoon, when the first stone catches Fellowes just above his right eye, a ringing bang, and then blood is half blinding him. A soldier shoots a boy in the crowd. The crowd recedes like the ebb of the tide, then surges back. Every man raises his sword. The soldiers grip their guns. Ahead is the choppy broth of the Seine where the bargemaster waits aboard his craft.
Another stone and then one more. A gunshot. Then a flurry of them. The crowd scatters but only for a moment. Then more stones. Cobbles the size of fists. Screams. A howling child. Another gunshot. This one French. A soldier staggers, bellowing, clutching an arm that hangs limp in his burning sleeve. Fellowes feels a glancing blow. His horse rears as if wasp-stung. He slides from the saddle, and lets the horse go, bucking downriver.
Tewlis has spread his three remaining men in a fan, but they have not loaded yet.
“Get aboard!” Fellowes shouts. “Get aboard!”
The bank at Issy is built up, and the river is low, and the gangplank is level. Fellowes runs to help the women and children from their carts. The ground is tussocky, stone. Mistress Cochet is still mounted, turning her horse this way and that. Men pluck at her cloak. She has a whip and uses it with precision.
She’ll soon be pulled down, though. Fellowes helps Mistress Walsingham across the gangplank. She is frozen, terrified, so finally Fellowes wraps her in his arms and carries her. He deposits her on board, into the arms of the master, and turns and runs, his heels slipping on the greasy planks, back to Isobel Cochet.
He runs up the incline. A glancing blow on his shoulder. Shrugged-off hands. A fist connects. Good. Isobel is still mounted, her horse terrified, ten paces away, but a man has the hem of her skirt, and another her boot.
She lashes both with her whip.
From behind, Fellowes pulls one man and spins him away. He holds up an arm, imagining she will slide off her saddle and under it as if it were a wing.
She does, and they are, for an instant, face-to-face and he might kiss her on any other occasion, but—
Something is wrong.
A great heat swarms in his chest. As if he is being crushed. He can’t breathe. Can’t move. He opens his mouth to bellow, to push Mistress Cochet away, for
