The Eyes of the Queen

by Oliver Clements

  The priest guides them to the side chapel on their left. They leave footprints on the flagstones. In the chapel there is a memorial to a long dead canon, and a tall window of fine colored glass. The small altar is covered in a cloth but is otherwise bare.

  “What are we doing?” Fellowes whispers again.

  The priest lingers to collect his next coin.

  “Distract him, will you?” Walsingham asks Fellowes. “Only for a moment, otherwise we will have to kill him.”

  They hear the door through which they came boom shut behind someone coming in, or going out.

  Fellowes approaches the priest. Both speak Latin, Fellowes not too well.

  “Confession?” he asks.

  The priest’s eyes light up, and Fellowes follows the priest out of the chapel to be out of Walsingham’s earshot. Before he goes, Fellowes glimpses Walsingham bending to kneel before the altar. A dead-letter drop.

  Fellowes kneels before the priest, and remembers the old words, and they come to him now, and when he has recited them the priest blesses him and starts the questioning. Fellowes has not confessed since Queen Mary died, but he can hardly tell the priest that. He makes something up, but the priest hardly cares; he wants to delve into the proper sins, those of which Fellowes is most deeply ashamed and Fellowes is reminded how intrusive the sacrament of confession is.

  “Lust, my son?”

  He is about to shake his head and deny it when he thinks—my God. Isobel Cochet.

  The priest seems to read his thoughts.

  “A woman?” he presses.

  Fellowes can only nod. What did he expect? He hears footfalls in the church behind him. Stout boots on marble flags.

  “Who is she?” the priest persists. Fellowes feels the priest’s breath gusting on his face, garlic and meat and wine. “Is she married?”

  “No.” Fellowes laughs. “She’s a widow.”

  “A widow?” The priest is disgusted. He does not want to hear of an old lady. But Isobel Cochet could not be less like that. Fellowes wants to proclaim that she is nothing like that. But as soon as he starts to think what she is like, all he can see is the flash of her smile, the curve of her lip, that questioning look in her eye. More than that, though: the shape of her throat, her shoulders, her hips, the way she laughs. The smell of her as she passes. My God, he thinks. He flushes scarlet at the memory of a loose strand of her dark hair in the spring sunshine on the river’s bank. He has only seen her a few times, always with Master Walsingham, always in the Louvre, though, no, once at the residence, in Saint-Marceau, and then once again, that time on the river’s bank. The moment he saw her, his life changed, and from then on, he was always aware that somewhere she was out there, sometimes close, sometimes farther away. A lodestone, if she but knew it, around which he rotated. There must be others besides him, he knows that. A fraternity. He feels no animus.

  He wonders if adjusting his clothing will break the seal and sanctity of the sacrament? This is no time for that.

  The priest wishes to know if when Fellowes thinks of her he spills his seed, as did Onan in the Bible? Another time Fellowes might laugh.

  “Oliver?”

  It is Walsingham. Fellowes turns.

  “We must go,” he says.

  “Wait!” the priest snaps. He claps a surprisingly steely hand on Fellowes’s wrist.

  But Fellowes has just seen the two men looming behind Walsingham.

  “Master!” he shouts.

  Walsingham turns.

  Fellowes wrenches his hand free of the priest, sending him sprawling. He draws his sword. In a church? Why not? Walsingham too.

  The two men they face are smeared and flecked with blood. One—with the cleaver—wears clogs. The other wears a leathersmith’s apron and carries one of those knives they use in slaughterhouses. Something purposeful with no name. Both have bloodstained rags tied around their right arms.

  “I know you!” the clog and cleaver man shouts at Walsingham. Walsingham doesn’t know him, exactly, but can guess enough.

  “Sanctuary,” Walsingham tries, reminding them all of their location. It is not clear if he means it, but the cleaver man is confused enough to need to look to the priest for guidance.

  “They are English,” the priest says from the floor. He has bloodied his nose in the fall. “Huguenot.”

  Fellowes has never cut a man deliberately, let alone killed one. But the clogged man comes at him so fast he has no choice. He leaps back. He flicks the blade from his right knee up across the man’s face. The man is left-handed, and he’d hoped to bring the cleaver down on Fellowes’s head. Instead Fellowes’s blade bites deep into his wrist and the cleaver flies spinning in the air to clatter to the ground well away. The man screams. Fellowes steps aside to let him blunder on a step or two and then he plunges the point of his sword into his liver. The butcher squeals, arches his back, then falls to his knees, nearly pulling the sword from Fellowes’s grasp. The man in the smith’s apron turns and runs.

  “Damn you!” Walsingham cries as he sets off after him.

  Fellowes joins him, but the man is fast, and running for his life. He cuts this way and that across the nave, nippy as a terrier. He crashes back out of the door into the precinct before they can catch him.

  Fellowes and Walsingham crash against it. They exchange a look.

  “Did you get it? What we came for?” Fellowes ask.

  Walsingham pats his doublet and nods.

  “Let’s go, then.”

  “Not this way.”

  “No.”

  They start back from the western end, running toward the altar. By now the priest is screaming and shouting. Most of the clerics are outside, watching the bloodshed, but there are still enough to come running to find the cause of the disturbance.

  “We can’t kill him, can we?” Fellowes wonders. He has developed a taste for it.

  “You may have to,” Walsingham says. “I am Her Majesty’s ambassador to the court of King Charles. If I am caught like this—”

  It doesn’t bear thinking about.

  “That’ll be the least of our worries,” Fellowes says, glancing over his shoulder. The west door is being opened, and men are forging through, and they can hear a great hubbub of voices without.

  “Jesus.”

  They both start sprinting. There must be a way out through the sacristy or one of the side doors in the transepts.

  They hear a shout behind them and a great charging scuffle of feet as the crowd of Frenchmen push through the door and run down the nave after them.

  Christ, Walsingham thinks, this has gone very badly. They may not live to find out if it was worth the risk. They stop in the apse under the spire, two rose windows on either side, the sun blasting through that to the south, but a breeze coming in from below that in the north. The side door: it is open.

  They run toward it.

  “Can you swim?” Walsingham asks.

  “Not a stroke,” Fellowes admits.

  “Nor me,” Walsingham says. “Always promised I’d learn.”

  They are both breathless as they emerge into the shadows of the cathedral’s north side. Here, too, is another pile of corpses, this one being picked over by a crowd of women and boys, while two men wait to load them into the bed of a cart. Beyond, fifty paces or so, is a line of houses, and beyond them, the river again.

  “Look natural,” Walsingham says.

  Fellowes almost laughs. He tries, but it is hard, and their stiff-legged walk only attracts suspicion. It is the boys who look up. Even though both Walsingham and Fellowes have their blades drawn, the boys know weakness when they see it.

  Walsingham tugs on his armband, to emphasize its presence.

  “Huguenot scum!” he says, nodding at the pile of dead people.

  But he can’t help but glance over his shoulder at the cathedral’s side door. The first of the Frenchmen is there now. He looks like the dead man’s older brother.

  They start running again.

 
A street curves to the left, leading them westward. Merchants’ houses, three or four stories high, lean in to greet one another. Ordinarily peaceful enough. Today there is a chain across, manned by five or six men with those white crosses on their hats.

  The men are working their way down the street, emptying some houses, leaving others, and right now they are pulling two screaming women and three children from one of the houses—one of the women is clinging to the doorjamb while a man repeatedly punches her—so they do not see Walsingham or Fellowes who slip around the chain and disappear into an open doorway.

  Inside they close the door. There is a locking bar, which they drop. In the gloom they look at each other once more. There is nothing to be said.

  The back.

  They turn and run down the narrow hall. It’s a cloth merchant’s house, and his stock-in-trade is piled in one room along with various coffers as well as lecterns and benches for his apprentices. A low door gives out into a high-walled, brick-floored yard at the end of which: a privy. Two-seater. A drop into the river. Too small for a man to fit through. They are trapped.

  Fellowes finally says it: “Fuck.”

  He cannot help but look at Walsingham’s doublet, where he knows his master will have tucked the documents. They need to get rid of them. Imagine if the French got hold of them? England would be at her mercy.

  But Walsingham shakes his head.

  “Not yet,” he says. “Not until we have to.”

  The roof.

  They run back inside. The French pound on the door. Dust falls from the ceiling and light blinks in the cracks around the doorframe each time they land a blow. Up the steps they go: one, two flights, then it is just ladders for the servants. Up they clamber, Walsingham first. The ceilings are lower, and the windows smaller, and the comfort less, the higher they climb, until finally they are under the eaves, in total darkness. Fellowes pulls the ladder up behind them, using it to smash through the slates, letting the shards crash around their shoulders. Light floods in. Two children are revealed in one corner, hiding behind a mattress: whimpering, huge-eyed, and the room smells of mice and fresh urine.

  Neither says a thing.

  Walsingham is first out onto the roof. It is turning into a very fine morning, though a fire has started to the south, in Saint-Marceau, and smoke hazes the air. He thinks of his wife and his child, and of the others at the residency. Sir Philip Sidney is capable enough. Walsingham crawls toward the front edge of the roof. Down below the scene is carnage, and while many men are pulling others from their houses—some alive, some dead—many more are waiting below, waiting for those who chased them from the cathedral to break down the door.

  “Bring the ladder!” Walsingham instructs.

  Fellowes hauls it up through the hole they’ve made, and they use it to climb up a wall onto the roof of an even taller house. From here they can see across to the north bank of the river, to the palaces and the castles, to the church of Saint-Gervais, where the bells still ring, and where down on the riverbank the slaughter continues. Men hunting men. More corpses pile up. Others are being pitched into the water.

  There’s a narrow gap above an alleyway that only the most athletic might jump, but they cross it with the ladder—a slender confection of planks and nails more suited to the weight of a house maid, or a boy perhaps—which creaks and sags horribly as each man crawls across the alleyway. Walsingham slips and grabs the riser. He drops his sword. It spins down and bounces on the stones, fifty feet below, where two men sharing a flagon of something start and look up. They shout and go running out into the street to raise the alarm.

  On the other side of the alley is a roof on which laundry hangs from a tired old string, and there’s a hatch but it is locked from the inside. The slates are hot under their hands and covered in bird shit. Pigeons erupt from unexpected places. On they go, relieved and even congratulating themselves on their progress, their ingenuity, when they hear the first boom of a gun, and a ball thrums through the warm air overhead. They stop and look at each other, and back, just as there’s another thunderclap, and the wall next to Walsingham cracks, showering them with fragments of brick. Behind them three men are ranged along the skyline, and more coming, powder smoke lingering above their heads. The one from the church leads the way, Fellowes sees, only he’s found himself a short-handled ax.

  They drop behind a palisade and one after the other slides down another roof, their heels scrabbling against the slates, to butt up against a low wall.

  Where the terrace ends.

  “By Christ, what now?”

  The ladder is useless and they can hear men scrabbling across the roofs after them.

  Fellowes leans over the edge and feels sick with dizziness.

  It is easily fifty feet to their deaths on the road below.

  “We have to break in,” Walsingham says, and they start ripping at the tiles, prying them up. Fellowes cuts his hand, a deep gash across the palm. He curses but carries on.

  The sun beats down, and even up here they can smell the blood from the street below. Or maybe it’s Fellowes’s. They keep pulling at the tiles, but each is held in place by the one above it. Fellowes makes a small hole, smashing it with his heel. There is another gunshot from the advancing Frenchmen. They duck but don’t see where the ball goes. Now suddenly there is a riot of men’s voices, much closer. They’ve come up through one of the other houses: the one with the laundry.

  But now there is just enough of a hole to slither through into the baking darkness of the attic below.

  Fellowes tells Walsingham to go first.

  “I will hold them off,” he says. “They can only come in one by one.”

  It is a good idea, but Walsingham will not allow it.

  “You go first.”

  Fellowes does, slithering through the hole they’ve made, feeling his way among the smoke-blackened rafters. He can hear rats squealing in alarm in the eaves and behind the wainscoting. He drops down onto the bare boards of the attic: straw and horsehair beds, a broken pot, a single shoe, and pigeons escaping through an unshuttered window. A moment later, Walsingham drops behind him and staggers a few paces.

  “I’m getting too old for this,” he says.

  Down they go. Fellowes leading the way. Fellowes knocks the ladder to the floor. This is the house of a well-to-do man of law—featherbeds and painted hangings on the walls, even this far up the steps—and the family are present, but they are pressed to gaps in the shuttered windows, watching the scenes below. Each turns and screams when they see the filthy, blood-smeared men in armbands, one carrying a sword. But Walsingham raises his hand to placate them. He and Fellowes hardly pause as they run stamping down the stairs.

  The ground floor is given over entirely to an office, with one wall of shelves completely filled with rolls of paper; the shutters are drawn, and two men in sober suits are pressed to the door, looking very tense. Neither have armbands, but both have weapons: one a fine but useless sword, the other a rough but ready kitchen knife. Walsingham holds up his hands in peace. The men turn and stare openmouthed.

  For some reason, Fellowes thinks they might have gotten away with it, and that if they somehow exit the back, say, and onto the road, they may yet return to the little boat and make it across the river, or float downstream to Issy, to safety. But then he hears a crash somewhere in the fabric of the house above, several guttural screams, and the thunder of footsteps down the stairs.

  He turns and runs toward the back of the house. Walsingham follows. They run through a smaller study, where a shrill lapdog barks fiercely, and then a deserted kitchen that smells of bacon. A door out into the yard, and against one brick-built wall: a wood stack. Fellowes clambers up it, sending loose logs skittering below. Walsingham swears as one catches his shin.

  Fellowes hauls himself up to straddle the top of the wall. There is a flow of men, walking to and from the bridge to the north bank. Some stop to watch. He indicates his armband.

  “Huguenot scum!”
he says, aping Walsingham.

  The men are unconvinced. They still stand and watch. They are armed and very dangerous, looking for someone else to kill.

  “Oliver!”

  It’s Walsingham, below, still in the garden with his arm upstretched.

  The running footsteps in the house are accompanied by bellowed shouts and desks screeching across the floors. They are coming through the house, this way. Fellowes leans down to haul Walsingham up. His cut hand throbs with pain, all the way up to his elbow. Walsingham scrambles up and over the wall. He lands in the street below just as the man they’d chased in the cathedral comes hurtling out of the house. He sees Fellowes on the wall and cuts that way. He is bellowing with rage and hate, his ax raised, and he’s followed by many others.

  Fellowes swings his leg over and drops down beside Walsingham. Together they face about ten curious French Catholics, each with a band around his arm, and a cross on his hat. Each with a weapon. They have, naturally perhaps, formed a semicircle around the two Englishmen, pressing them to the wall. But they are not even the real danger. The real danger comes from behind the wall.

  “Master Walsingham?” Fellowes says. “I think we had best say our prayers.”

  “Oliver,” Walsingham starts, “I am sorry I have gotten you into this. There was no need—”

  Just then the Frenchman from the cathedral appears on top of the wall. He is bellowing with rage, lunging at them with his newfound ax. Fellowes ducks and turns. If I can kill one more man, he thinks, let it be this one.

  But before he can move, there is a boom, and the Frenchman’s head rocks back, and the ax spins from his grasp. When his head rocks forward again, there is what looks like a third eye in the very middle of his forehead. The man disappears behind the wall.

  Walsingham and Fellowes turn back to the bridge. There is a closed caroche, fifty yards away, at the head of the bridge, and perhaps twenty men on horseback. A man stands upright by the coach’s driver, and the puff of pale smoke identifies him as the marksman. The crowd in the street gasp in awe and back away, while those in the courtyard behind are shouting and arguing to see who should next put his head over the parapet. The horsemen come riding forward, and the rioters scatter out of their way.