He knew me only as an occasional traveller who paid promptly but he must have suspected I had some connection with what was going on at Chartley. We exchanged greetings, with me pretending I was out to exercise my horse and he pretended to believe me. I asked as casually as I could if he had seen my travelling companion, who had business at the house.
‘The young man with herbs? Yes, sir, I have seen him, waiting his turn like everyone else. It is busy there today, not only me and your herb man but the world and his wife have found reason to call. Sir Amias is in a choler with them all and now the Queen insists she must ride out to breathe the air and he must find soldiers to escort her. It is a great to-do. Ride on and you will see for yourself.’
He flicked his carthorse on. I should have turned back, having learned what I needed to know, but just as curiosity killed the cat, so it spurred me on that day. I had a yen to set eyes on Queen Mary, having heard she was beautiful. Within a few minutes of riding farther into the grounds I could see the house and the moat through the trees. There was a bustle of people about the drawbridge and I had pulled up, determining to go no closer, when I heard hooves and wheels behind me. A carriage with half a dozen soldiers as outriders approached slowly along a track among the trees to my right. I backed up to make way and as the carriage passed I beheld her.
To those who never set eyes upon the Queen of Scots, I can say that, even at twenty or thirty yards, hers was a face to launch a thousand ships, as our poet put it. Framed by abundant red hair, it had a clarity and a fineness that leapt across distance like a bright light, claiming your attention to the neglect of all else. Hers was an almost unreal glamour which, while you beheld it, eclipsed in your mind those other qualities, moral and personal, that made her so unwelcome in Scotland and such a threat in England.
She stared hard at me and bade her carriage stop. She beckoned and I approached to within a few yards. This was not at all what I had planned and I was uncertain how to proceed.
‘Oo are you?’ she asked. She spoke English through her nose, like most French. She could not pronounce her H.
‘Thomas Phelippes, if please your Majesty.’ I had been about to use one of my other names but thought that if she were to make trouble I would have to seek protection from her keeper, Sir Amias, who knew my in my own name.
She stared at me for some moments more, then turned away and bade her carriage continue.
When she passed it was as if the sun had left me and I was back in the shadows in which I normally subsisted, a man of low stature with yellow hair and beard and a face marked with the pox. The sight of that Queen, with her impossible beauty, made me despair of marriage. What hope had I, how would I ever meet a woman who would have me? Yet, while God spared me from age and infirmity, I was still determined to find a good wife. On my ride back to our inn I did not think at all of our great matter.
When Christopher returned that afternoon I told him I had seen the Queen. He had too, he said. She had set off in her carriage while he was waiting to be admitted to Curll.
‘Did you not think her beautiful?’
‘Yes, she is striking.’ He nodded as if contemplating an abstract quality. Then he looked at me. ‘A face does it for you, eh, Thomas? A face is enough?’
‘A face such as hers, yes.’
He smiled. ‘You are too easily smitten.’
He had done his job, passing the letters to Curll and receiving some from him which by candle that night I had to carefully open and set about deciphering, which was never easy work. But it was the next morning that he suggested the ruse, sir, that is the reason I am telling you all this. I had paid our bill and as we waited for our horses to be brought round I remarked on our host’s cheerful rapacity. Under cover of banter he had tried to charge for more ale than we had drunk. When I pointed it out he did not argue but laughed as at a joke.
‘An honest knave,’ said Christopher. ‘You know where you are with such men. Who pays him owns him. I helped unload the barrels while I was waiting and they gave me an idea for your future letters. Those barrels. Every week they go into the house and every week others come out. Why could not Queen Mary’s secret correspondence go in them? Wrap the letters in something waterproof so that they float
