The Eyes of the Queen

by Oliver Clements

  Walsingham agrees.

  But then he wonders when he ever told Van Treslong what that purpose was.

  “Do you believe Quesada is sailing for the Northwest Passage?” he asks.

  Van Treslong is unsure.

  “At this time of year,” he says, “no, but he might cross the ocean to be ready to sail north when the ice melts in spring?”

  In his wildest dreams, Walsingham sometimes hoped that Quesada would be foolhardy enough to follow DaSilva’s directions there and then and find himself trapped by ice and freeze to death, but no one is such a fool as to set off into the northern latitudes in September.

  “Though we can live in hope, eh, Francis?” Van Treslong laughs.

  “Have you told anyone else about Quesada?” Walsingham wonders.

  “Only you, and…”

  He gestures at the Queen and the members of the Privy Council gathered in the shade of the cedar tree. They are trying to console her. Did she really feel so strongly about Dee? Walsingham feels a further twist of the blade of guilt. Burghley, in his red, looks rotten, and Smith is still jeering, and it is only Gethyn who looks to the Queen’s person and comfort.

  “Good,” Walsingham says. “Will you keep it to yourself, Willem?”

  Van Treslong looks at him carefully.

  “Controlling the flow?”

  “Something like that,” Walsingham agrees.

  * * *

  An hour later Walsingham is at Seething Lane, and Beale wonders at his boss.

  “You do not seem so very pleased?” he asks.

  “I am,” Walsingham tells him.

  “But?”

  “But it is a mere reprieve. They will be back to set her free next year, or the year after. So long as she is alive. They will be back. And each time, stronger than ever.”

  He means Mary of Scotland, of course, and the Spanish, or the French. He is forcibly stuffing linens in a saddlebag.

  “Pack your stuff, will you, Master Beale,” he says.

  “Where are we going, Master Walsingham?”

  “Up t’North,” he says. “To t’Sheffield to see if we cannot once and for all declaw the bitch.”

  * * *

  The road north is long, but they travel it swiftly, lightly encumbered on good horses, and without drawing overmuch attention to themselves they aim to be in Sheffield within five days. A courier might have overtaken them, in the night, say, or by a different road, so they ride fast and far each day, doing as much as they might to forestall word of Quesada’s change of tack from reaching Sheffield before they do, and most especially the castle’s royal prisoner.

  Beale had broached the subject of Dr. Dee on that first day.

  “So he did not manage to retrieve the DaSilva document?”

  Walsingham had shrugged.

  “Perhaps we will never know,” he said, which had struck Beale as strange, but Walsingham was deep in thoughts elsewhere.

  “Talbot knows to expect us,” he had told his secretary, “the others, too.”

  “The others?”

  “The watchers, in the castle.”

  They ride in silence after that, both thinking, and Beale divines the scheme before they reach Oakham. Or at least identifies its possibilities.

  “How can you be certain that Queen Mary knew Quesada was coming to rescue her?” Beale asks.

  Walsingham, never comfortable on a horse, gives him a look.

  Of course, Beale thinks, he told her so himself.

  “I had to explain why her guard was doubled,” Walsingham admits.

  Beale laughs.

  “So how will she hear that Quesada has changed course?” he wonders.

  Another, different look from Walsingham.

  “Ah,” Beale says. “That remains to be seen?”

  They ride in silence for a bit. Walsingham’s eyebrow is cocked, waiting for the next bit, waiting for Beale to say: “And when she does, if she does, she will be utterly dejected and will send desperate messages to Hamilton, forgetting all precaution of secrecy!”

  Et voilà!

  “That is very neat,” Beale has to admit.

  Walsingham almost smiles as they ride.

  He thinks so too.

  There is, though, one thing, or perhaps two, that bother him still.

  The first is Meneer van Treslong.

  The second is also Meneer van Treslong.

  PART | TWO

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Sheffield, September 22, 1572

  The town is of gray stone, handsome, with a marketplace in which to buy strong cloth and cheap pies. The dogs are lean, the tongues are sharp, and the scent of burning coal hangs thick in the air. At its heart: the castle, of the same gray stone, and of the old sort that has stood three hundred years or more but might now be knocked down in an afternoon by a single cannon. Moat and ditches to the south and a lively brown river—the Don—under its northern wall.

  In rising dusk and falling rain, Masters Walsingham and Beale leave their horses at the stable and cross the drawbridge, but they linger in the gatehouse and do not enter the cobbled bailey.

  “One of her household will see us,” Walsingham says.

  Instead a servant is sent to find George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, who will meet them in the guardroom of the gatehouse. When Talbot comes he is about forty, forty-five perhaps, with a spreading beard and sad, wise eyes. How does he feel about his charge? Does he see her in the round, as a person? Or does he, like every other man, see her as a threat, or a means to an end? Beale cannot guess. But there is another dimension of course: should Queen Elizabeth die without issue, then Queen Mary of Scotland will take her throne. How would she then repay a gaoler who mistreated her now?

  “She is at prayer,” Talbot tells them. “Up there.”

  He points through a door to the limestone tower in the southwestern corner of the castle. It is three stories high, with windows from which light filters through thick panes. The rain still comes down, and a fire would be nice, Beale thinks.

  “Anyway, this way,” Talbot tells them, and he leads them through a long kitchen in which a boy sits staring at an empty pot, and a deserted bake house that smells of mold. They pass through a very thick oak door and find themselves in the tower, the ground floor of which is given over to a hall, from which lead two doors, and a spiraling flight of closed steps up into the darkness above.

  Talbot knocks very gently on one of the doors and a moment later a bolt is drawn back. The door swings open on oiled hinges to reveal a tired-looking man with his shirtsleeves rolled up, despite the cold.

  No one says anything about the strong smell of shit.

  Walsingham doesn’t introduce him. “Wouldn’t be his real name anyway.”

  “Arthur Gregory,” the man says, catching Beale’s eye, but not offering to shake his hand.

  Walsingham grunts good-naturedly. “As I say, not his real name.”

  On the table is what might be a chamber pot covered in a linen cloth.

  “That hers?” Walsingham asks, just as if he has spoken to Gregory not five minutes earlier.

  Gregory grunts affirmatively.

  “Anything?”

  Gregory lifts the linen cover of the chamber pot. The stinking mess within sits in a bath of purple liquid.

  Beale is shocked. Walsingham is unsurprised.

  “Porphyria,” he tells him.

  Then he turns back to Gregory: “Who’s upstairs?”

  “John Wilkins.”

  “And with Mary?”

  “Lord and Lady Livingston, Mary Seton, the priest they’ve got pretending to be her usher, and Margaret Formby.”

  Walsingham nods.

  “Come this way,” he tells Beale, “but take off your boots.”

  Beale does so. He has been wearing the same socks for five days. Walsingham leads him up the steps and along a short corridor, the boards powdered so they do not creak, past a door through which they can hear the burble of a man’s voice, and on to anoth
er, smaller door, iron battened, and seemingly made for a dwarf. Walsingham has a key. He opens it on more oiled hinges and crouches to enter. Beale follows. Inside it is absolutely dark save for one tiny spec of light that comes in about waist height. There is another man within, sitting on a stool. The room smells rank.

  No word is spoken.

  They can hear the man’s voice more clearly. He’s chanting the Latin Mass. The hair on Beale’s arms stands on end: this is enough to get them all hanged.

  The man on the stool moves to let Walsingham press his eye to the hole. After a moment he lets Beale take his turn. The hole is drilled through the plaster, through a knot in the wainscoting, and there is little enough to see: a chair covered above with a purple cloth of state; the heels of three kneeling women. That’s it.

  Despite his own socks, Beale can smell the man next to him, John Wilkins. It is like gaol scent, and he is pleased when Walsingham taps him on the shoulder and they are able to leave him to it.

  Talbot is waiting in the kitchens.

  “There is one more thing,” he tells them. “The Queen has sent permission for Her Majesty to go hawking this week.”

  Walsingham is surprised.

  “When did this come?”

  “Today. In the hand of Sir Thomas Smith.”

  Beale calculates that this means the Queen must have granted permission five days earlier, probably longer, when, to all intents and purposes, Quesada was on his way to attack England, burn London down, and set Queen Mary free. The last thing they would have wanted was for her to be out in the countryside, on a horse, with a hawk. A spasm of irritation crosses Walsingham’s face.

  “And you’ve told her? Queen Mary?”

  Talbot nods, as why should he not have?

  “I will have Beale ride along,” Walsingham decides. “You like hawking, don’t you, Robert? You can borrow one of Sir George’s birds.”

  They leave the castle through the postern gate and make their way back up to an inn—the White Hart—that Walsingham knows. It is thatch and timber-built, overlooking two fish ponds, and prey to damp.

  “You will concentrate on Margaret Formby, won’t you, Robert?” Walsingham says.

  Beale knows what he must do.

  Walsingham hardly drinks a thing. He is rapt, and his eyes are glossy and fierce, Beale thinks, like one of those hunting birds; his whole self is honed but for one purpose. And that purpose? To catch Queen Mary in the act, to find proof that she is plotting the death of her cousin Elizabeth of England; to find incontrovertible proof of it, that he may, at last, and once and for all, lay before his mistress and force her hand in the matter. He wants to bring about the death of that woman.

  Sleep that night comes hard, and Walsingham wakes Beale long before dawn to tell him that it is raining.

  No hawking.

  Walsingham paces all day. He is a ball of heat, twitching in frustrated fury.

  “God damn it! God damn her!”

  He writes messages then won’t send them. He scraps the page or burns it. Once he laughs very bitterly.

  “Dr. Dee,” he says, “he always swore there was a way of communicating instantly over very long distances. He said there was a book—one he couldn’t find—that described how it was done. Something to do with angels.”

  Beale notices Walsingham talks of Dee in the past.

  The next day Beale is once again woken by Walsingham, his pacing this time. Up and down the end of the mattress they have shared. Beale lies in bed. He can hear the rain on the roof. Still no hawking.

  “We have but six months’ grace, Robert,” Walsingham tells him more than twice that day. “Six months before the Spanish equip and send another fleet. We’ll still be as poor as we ever were, and that devilish woman will still be alive, sending out her treacherous messages, like some terrible spider, pulling men into her web of treasonous deceit. I will not have it! I will not have it! I cannot be thwarted by this accursed rain. I cannot.”

  The day after that, it dawns bright and clear, as if the rain has washed the air. It will be good for hawking.

  “Thank God,” Beale says softly. He would not have been able to stand another day of Walsingham’s impatient fretting.

  Beale is to pass as a member of Talbot’s household, and he presents himself at the castle in riding clothes. The ostlers and stable lads have the horses ready in the bailey, and though there may be thirty or so riders in the party, Queen Mary is instantly the center of attention. It is the first proper sight Beale has of her, and he feels as he did when as a child he was taken to his first bear-baiting: he could not then believe such an animal as a bear might exist, and yet there it was. When he saw it in the pit, he could not take his eyes from it. It is the same with Mary, Queen of Scots: human and yet not. She is veiled in the French manner, aloof and isolated, and she looks sickly, moving as if in pain, and Beale recalls the purple contents of her chamber pot.

  He has to tear his gaze from her, for he has been told to look for Lord and Lady Livingston, whom he identifies as the nervy man and his anxious wife; and Mary Seton, the last of the queen’s longtime companions, all four of whom were also called Mary. She is fraught and fussing impatiently with points and buckles. Beale wonders what it might be like to have your fortunes depend so much on one person. Beale’s eye is then drawn to the girl trailing behind: Margaret Formby. She looks cowed, he thinks, as if straining under a mental load. No. She looks guilty. That is it.

  He looks forward to telling Walsingham his divination. He can imagine him now: utterly restive, pacing up and down, waiting; waiting for Beale to come back with his report; waiting to get on with the next part of his plan. The thought makes Beale smile, though it should not. It is the death of a queen they are talking about.

  After a while during which pewter cups of warm wine are passed around, and the birds are brought from their mews and cautiously admired, the queen is anxious to be off. Beale lingers at the back, almost with the servants, while at the head of the party Queen Mary rides with unexpected ease. Behind her comes George Talbot, hunched in his saddle as if going to a funeral, and Beale realizes that far from being the usual happy hunting party, there is a strange nervous tension to this one, as if everyone is primed for a disappointment.

  They pass through the furlongs and market gardens that surround the town, and everything is at the peak of harvest. Men and women come to the wayside smiling and offering a taste of their produce: apples, pears, strawberries even, and it should be a sight to gladden any heart, but the hunting party seems immune to its pleasures.

  When they emerge onto sheep-cropped pastures at the top of the hill, they look down into the town below as if into a plate: the castle, the church, the marketplace, and the houses all packed within its walls and rivers. On the other side of the hill is a stretch of moorland, and beyond, deep oak and beech woods where the huntsman says the beaters are ready.

  It is perfect.

  There follows the usual fussing about with the birds: their hoods, their jesses. The huntsman signals his men in the nearby wood, who start beating the trees and soon the sky is filled with the alarm calls of various fleeing birds. This is when the hawks should be launched, but the hunting party remains stationary in their saddles, waiting for the queen to remove the hood of the bird she has been passed.

  “Come on,” Beale finds himself murmuring. “What is she waiting for?”

  But she will not do it. He can hear the sigh suppressed in every chest. Here we go again.

  The huntsman looks desperate.

  A long, long moment passes.

  The beaters are still beating but the wood is emptying of birds. The sky likewise.

  Beale has slowly maneuvered himself to be alongside Margaret Formby.

  “Shame,” he murmurs.

  She glances at him. Under her veils she is very pale. She seems on the verge of tears.

  When at last nothing seems to be about to happen, there is one last bird, a pigeon of some sort, that comes flapping up out
of the margins of the wood. How the beaters can have missed it, Beale cannot guess.

  And only now does Queen Mary remove the hood of her falcon and, when its eyes are right, and it has seen the pigeon, she sets it free. It drops and hurtles through the air and it brings its prey down with precise ease. The pigeon tumbles to the ground and the dogs bound down through the bracken after it. The falcon circles back and kills it but is put to flight by the dogs.

  He comes circling back to Mary’s glove and lands with a thump. There is polite applause. Mary seems not quite indifferent to the bird, but she is watching the huntsman extract the pigeon’s little body from the jaws of the dog, and the way he gives the dog a treat of sorts.

  “May I have it?” she asks.

  It is the first time Beale has heard her speak. Her accent is neither French nor Scottish, but somewhere in between. He’d like to hear her speak more. The huntsman brings her the bird. It is not an everyday pigeon, Beale sees, but a dove of some sort. Probably escaped from a nearby cote.

  “Won’t do that again,” he jokes.

  Margaret Formby glances at him again. She looks terrified.

  “Are you quite well, my lady?”

  She nods tightly. She will hardly look at him. Instead she watches Queen Mary with a feverish intent.

  Beale is rebuffed.

  Meanwhile Mary holds up the dove for her falcon to take sharp pecks at and returns it to the huntsman to do with it as he will.

  There is a settling sense of unsurprised disappointment among the hunting party when Mary summons Lord Livingston to her side and tells him something none can hear. He announces that Her Majesty is tired and wishes to return to her chamber.

  Hoods are put back on birds, and jesses are tightened.

  Beale knows better than to suppose the rest of them might stay to enjoy the rest of their day.

  The party turns and winds back down the hill after the queen, the day done.

  He returns his horse to the stable and tips the ostler and finds himself back in the hall of the White Hart before noon.

  “Well?” Walsingham asks almost before he is through the door.