The Eyes of the Queen

by Oliver Clements

  “By God it matters, Walsingham!” Smith bellows. “It matters a great deal. It has been taken by one of your ‘espials,’ hasn’t it? Admit it, man! You have failed. This is what your nonsensical intelligencing has come to! Abject bloody failure!”

  Smith is purple with rage. The Queen quiets him so that others may be heard.

  “Explain, please, Master Walsingham,” she demands. “Leave nothing out.”

  Walsingham takes a deep breath. He knows he is treading the very fine line between success and having his head removed by an ax.

  “The document,” he begins, “which was two pages removed from Admiral DaSilva’s logbook, came to me in Paris from a source in the court in Lisbon, just this last week.”

  “How did it come to you?” the Queen asks.

  Francis Walsingham has eyes that some men have called hooded, and he uses them now to great effect, turning his gaze to the Queen. He need say nothing of the labyrinthine pathways that link Whitehall to the court of King Sebastião in Lisbon, and the Queen understands. She nods.

  “Never mind,” she says. “Go on.”

  “The recent tumult meant I had no leisure to study it, or make a copy, and so, believing our embassy to be in danger, I entrusted the document to Oliver Fellowes—may God rest his soul—to bring it back to London to place in the hands of Lord Burghley here.”

  Burghley looks mildly surprised.

  “Unfortunately,” Walsingham continues, “Oliver Fellowes was murdered before he left France, and the document was stolen.”

  There is a mumble of respect for the soul of the dead man before business resumes.

  “You did not look at it at all?” Leicester asks.

  “I did, my lord, but had no time to decrypt it before the tumult overtook us.”

  “It was encrypted?” This is from Burghley. He has removed his hat and is pulling his beard.

  Walsingham nods. They all sit back and they all exhale. They know what that means: the Portuguese admiral Baltazar DaSilva is known first and foremost as a navigator, and an encrypted logbook can only mean one thing. He has been sailing in uncharted waters and has found something he does not wish to share with the world.

  “And what do we believe he found?” the Queen asks for them all.

  Walsingham must say it: “The Straits of Anian. Or so I believe.”

  “The Straits of Anian? The Straits of Anian? Dear God! You had information as to the Straits of Anian?”

  A babble of voices. Ten, twenty questions. How could this happen? How could he allow it? The Queen’s voice cuts through it.

  “The Northwest Passage? He has found the Northwest Passage?”

  For the last fifty years, every navigator in Christendom has sought the Northwest Passage to Cathay. It is the route to untold wealth, and the only way to break the power of Spain; the only way to ensure England’s safety, her freedom.

  “So I am led to believe,” Walsingham tells them.

  “Well,” Smith says, a sneer on his face. “We’ll only know for sure when we see Spanish convoys coming through, won’t we?”

  Now the Queen’s eyes are very piercing.

  “The Spanish?” she demands. “The Spanish have DaSilva’s pages?”

  “I do not know who has them now,” Walsingham admits.

  “Then who took them, Walsingham? Tell us that.”

  This is Smith, of course.

  “A woman named Isobel Cochet,” Walsingham answers.

  “Cochet? She sounds like a Frenchy,” Leicester says.

  “She was married to one,” Walsingham agrees.

  “So it is the French who now know the location of the Northwest Passage? Not the Spanish?”

  “I am sorry, Your Majesty, I do not know on whose behalf Mistress Cochet now works.”

  “And why is that?” Smith wonders aloud. “Is that because she is—or was!—one of your most valued espials, Walsingham? Is that it?”

  Walsingham says nothing. He loathes Smith.

  “But she turned her coat, didn’t she?” Smith continues. “And now she acts for—pffft! Who knows? Not for Master Walsingham at any rate. Not for England. Not you, Your Majesty.”

  The Queen raises her hand.

  “So let me see, Master Walsingham, let me see if I have this straight,” she starts, her voice steely as a blade. “With our treasury empty of any coin for war; and with a Spanish fleet under Admiral Quesada sailing from Cádiz in order to land here, burn our country, suppress our religion, and replace me here on this throne with our cousin Mary of Scotland; and now with all hope of assistance gone from France, you have let slip through your fingers the one thing—the very thing!—the only thing!—that could conceivably have saved us from invasion? From the Inquisition? The one thing that would have allowed us to buy the ships and pay the men to furnish our defense? The one thing that would allow us to build up castles strong enough to repel a fleet of Spanish galleons? That would allow us to keep England free? And you have gifted it to Spain?

  “Is that so?”

  He holds the Queen’s gaze, but thinks of Smith. He must allow him a glimpse of his panic. Just a glimpse.

  “Your Majesty—” he starts, relying on being cut off. Smith duly obliges, performing for the Queen as a juggler, or a clown. If only he were so innocent.

  “And you have given it away with one of your silly games of cloak-and-dagger!” he shouts. “Pissing about across the Narrow Sea, with your ciphers, and your codes, and… and whatever else it is you people do.”

  The Earl of Leicester looks calculating, but Lord Burghley does at least come to Walsingham’s partial defense.

  “Master Walsingham’s ‘activities’ did at least yield the document in the first instance,” he points out.

  “The first instance matters not one whit!” Smith jeers. “What matters is how the thing plays out. And in this instance it has played out very badly. Very badly indeed. You’re a bloody fool, Walsingham! An incompetent bloody fool!”

  “Enough!” the Queen snaps.

  Silence. She stares at Walsingham. He can taste his heart in his mouth. He knows his fate hangs in the balance. He might have misjudged this. The Queen might now call for those halberdiers outside. They’ll happily take him under the arms and drag him to the Tower with the sort of pleasure of which they might later tell their wives over bread and ale.

  She looks at him for a long time, sitting in judgment, waiting for him to justify her faith in him, and in that moment, he changes his mind: she is beautiful, in moments such as these, beautiful enough to stop a heart.

  And finally she says: “If what you say is done, Master Walsingham, then for the sake of all England, it must be undone. You must make this right, or, God help you, I will find someone who can.”

  He breathes again. His lease of life is extended. But for how much longer? He backs out of the room, trembling, but bows extravagantly as he goes, and finds Nicholas Gethyn, Thomas Smith’s private secretary, hastily retreating from his post listening at the door.

  “Francis,” he says, “may God grant you good day.”

  Walsingham smiles. Gethyn is an oddity at court: tall and shy, there against his inclination, and of the sort to believe every man can see his darkest secrets. As it happens, Walsingham can: Gethyn has against his better judgment allowed himself to be bullied into investing much of his wife’s money in Sir Thomas Smith’s Ireland colony, to the probable ruination of his family.

  “Gethyn,” he says. “How are you? How is your wife? All those children of yours?”

  “Passing well, Francis. Good of you to ask. Ten of them now and have just welcomed another. Can never remember their names but I miss each one, very much. And my wife, too, of course, who sends love.”

  Romilly Gethyn was a great beauty, Walsingham recalls, though not seen since she took to childbed. He thinks he must do something for them—remove them from their obligations to Sir Thomas Smith, perhaps—but not right this instant.

  “Nicholas,” he says, “I am
rather up against it at the moment. May we resume our conversation at a later date?”

  They have slipped to Christian names.

  “But of course, Francis. Of course.”

  Gethyn has something to tell him, of course, but what? Something about Smith no doubt, though Walsingham believes he knows enough about Smith for the moment. He will ask Beale to investigate, anyway.

  Beale is waiting in the antechamber, pale and sick with fret.

  “Walk with me,” Walsingham tells him. “Back to Seething Lane.”

  The rain has let up, and Beale does so, along the Strand, for Walsingham is sick of taking ship. Beale fills in his master on all that has happened, insofar as he is able to, though it is obvious he believes his master already knows more than he, despite being so taken up in Paris. He tells him that the Queen has been very restless.

  “It was the shooting of Coligny that started it all over again,” he says. “It reminded her too much of James Stewart’s murder.”

  James Stewart, first Earl of Moray, had been Regent of Scotland until he was shot with a gun from an upstairs window while riding through Linlithgow. The murderer had spread feathers on the floor to mask his movements and put up a dark cloth to hide the smoke from the fuse and the explosion after the gun had been fired. Walsingham had likewise thought of him when he had heard Coligny had been shot, though the man who shot Stewart was— He stops suddenly.

  “Stewart’s killer was never found, was he?”

  Beale shakes his head.

  “A man named James Hamilton,” he says. “He escaped overseas. France, I suppose.”

  My God, thinks Walsingham. My God.

  It is just one other thing to remember: Hamilton.

  Beale sighs with displeasure. “It’s a bad business,” he goes on. “Anybody may now just take a shot at anybody from thirty paces. Thank God guns are so inaccurate.”

  Yes, Walsingham thinks, well, we’ll see about that, soon enough.

  “And how did the Queen greet the news that Quesada has set sail?” Walsingham asks.

  “Not well,” Beale admits, “but it is only five ships, and none of them big, so we do not fear imminent invasion.”

  Walsingham wonders if they have yet read his report that the comptroller in Bilbao is short of hay to feed the horses sailing with Quesada’s fleet? Insignificant in itself, but horses mean troops, and a shortage means a greater than expected demand. And that there are fifteen ships, all of them big.

  “How many will they need if they can free Mary of Scotland?” Walsingham asks Beale. “With her at their head, the north will rise as one behind her, and Scotland will send troops, too, of course.”

  It is a bleak picture. Beale flushes slightly, assuming Walsingham knows more than he does, which he does. He is a good man, Beale. The son of a mediumly well-to-do wool merchant from Cambridge feeling his way in a changing world. Dedicated, discreet, and loyal, with a sharp mind and sharp eyes, he will go far, Walsingham thinks. Further than poor Fellowes, at any rate.

  Dear God. Poor Fellowes. He has had scarcely a moment to mourn the man or address his own guilt in that matter.

  “While you were in Paris, Lord Burghley renewed his plea to have Queen Mary’s head over Norfolk’s rebellion,” Beale tells him.

  Norfolk’s rebellion had been earlier in the year, when Queen Mary had promised to marry the Duke of Norfolk if he would free her and let her lead his army to replace Elizabeth on the throne and restore England to Rome. It was only thanks to Lord Burghley that the plot was foiled, after which Norfolk faced the headsman, but Queen Mary did not, and now she lingers like the sword of Damocles over all their heads.

  “And still she will not allow it?” Walsingham supposes.

  “No. Not without solid proof. And even then…” He trails off.

  They have had this conversation so many times before: every threat to England exists only because Queen Mary lives still. She is the toehold that Spain has in England, and she is the pintle around which every secret Catholic plot in Reformed England turns. Without Mary alive, men such as James Hamilton would not now be prowling around the fringes with his arquebus; without Mary alive, the Spanish would have no pretext or cause to attack; and without her, there would not be this constant possibility of armed rebellion in the north. Until she is dead, these threats only loom larger and more deadly with every passing day.

  “As long as that devilish woman is alive, Queen Elizabeth will never be safe on her throne,” Walsingham tells Beale, again. “We must somehow, in any way we can, bring her to the scaffold.”

  There are times when he thinks that is his sole purpose in life, the reason he was put on this earth. But Queen Elizabeth will not countenance the killing of another God-anointed queen.

  “She is moved to Sheffield, though,” Beale tells him, “and George Talbot is told to double her guard.”

  “Yes,” Walsingham murmurs: it was he who organized that. He wanted her in tighter containment for the next step in his grand plan.

  Beale is quiet for a moment, then starts as if he has had something on his mind.

  “Master Walsingham…?”

  “Mmmm?” He knows what is coming.

  “Is it true? About Isobel Cochet?”

  Walsingham can only nod.

  Walsingham had heard the news later that terrible day, while he was still in Paris, and he had come back to England because of it, to be met at Sandwich by Tewlis, the erstwhile captain of his guards, who had seen some of what happened, and then later, when he got home to his wife, who had seen the rest.

  “Stabbed him, and then ran,” she’d said. “Among everything else going on, I hardly noticed, only that it was poor Oliver. Poor Oliver. And Isobel, too. My God, Francis, I never thought… well, you don’t, do you?”

  You don’t, Walsingham had thought.

  “And you definitely saw her take the document? From his doublet?”

  “Oh yes. Well. It wasn’t there when— Master Tewlis sent two of his men to bring him aboard. Just in case there was anything that might be done with him. He was carrying no document that I saw. Just a great hole in his heart. And oh my, Francis, so much blood.”

  He had soothed her then and asked after her health and had kissed his daughter, but he was summoned to Whitehall.

  Now he walks with Beale, watching the shipping on the river.

  “And how progresses Master Hawkins?” he asks. Admiral Hawkins has been promising a new, nimble, race-built design of ship that he says will be able to maneuver around the top-heavy galleons favored by the Spanish and pepper them with shot from a distance.

  Beale is noncommittal.

  “He tells us he cannot build ships out of air,” he says, “and that his new designs cost money.”

  “So we are still—?” He does not want to say defenseless, but that is what he means.

  “If they knew how weak we were,” Beale says, “they would come now. With more than five ships.”

  Which they are doing, and which makes the loss of DaSilva’s document all the more serious still.

  * * *

  When they reach Seething Lane, Walsingham checks to ensure the door to his inner chamber has not been opened since last he closed it, and when satisfied, he springs the three locks. Despite being Walsingham’s right-hand man, Beale has never been in this windowless sanctum, and he stares amazed not so much by the ranks of well-ordered files and boxes of papers on shelves that line the room, as by the various ornately tooled contraptions, fabricated in gold and bronze and ebony. One with a small bank of plates bears all the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and another consists of interlinking brass cylinders marked with tiny nubbles and indents. He gazes, furrow browed, trying to divine some understanding of these cryptographical devices, but it is no good: to the uninformed, they are enigmatic beyond comprehension.

  Walsingham ignores him and lights a candle in a bull’s-eye glass lamp. After a moment it sends out a focused beam of light on the wall where there are astonishingly det
ailed charts of the Western Approaches to the Narrow Sea, as well as various others, of islands and reefs Beale has never seen before, all pinned and marked, but Walsingham focuses the lantern’s beam on a more familiar map of northern France, centered on Paris.

  “Thoughts?” Walsingham asks.

  This is the sort of test Walsingham often sets his men. Beale relishes the chance to prove himself.

  “Isobel Cochet?” Beale checks.

  “Yes.”

  “Motivation, first.”

  This is a puzzle. There is no obvious reason Cochet would betray all she had previously claimed to believe. She is not religious, or if she is, only mildly Reformed. Her maiden name is Pinkney, and she was born and grew up near Canterbury in Kent, with her loyalties undoubted. She has worked for Walsingham tirelessly and wholly successfully for five years or more, her judgment impeccable. Thanks to her dead husband, she is never short of money.

  “Was she pressured?” Beale asks.

  Walsingham nods. Her daughter, of course, would be a possible bargaining chip.

  “Find out where she is, will you, Robert?”

  Beale writes a memo.

  “Who’d take her?” Walsingham tests.

  Beale exhales loudly. He gestures at the map, sweeping his hand across it: all this, he is saying, means everyone. “Not Spain, though,” he supposes after a pause. “Nor France. Had either known we had the DaSilva pages, they would have sent troops to take them.”

  Walsingham agrees. “Levers,” he says.

  Beale waits.

  “Some powerless prince,” Walsingham muses, “attempting to lever a king to act on his behalf.”

  “Christendom is full of powerless princes.”

  Walsingham agrees.

  “So then who knew about DaSilva’s pages?” Beale asks.

  He does not expect an answer. He knows Walsingham will not tell him the details of how he came by them, anyway, because Walsingham is Walsingham, and he tells no one anything they do not need to know. Nor will he risk another of his networks being revealed from top to bottom through indiscretion. He has learned this the hard way, with the death of two of his best-placed espials, including Isobel’s husband, Guy de Cochet.