The Eyes of the Queen

by Oliver Clements

  “Will it float?”

  He supposes so.

  Later, the sun appears, and Mary Seton comes.

  “Sir George suggests you might like to take your walk now, Your Majesty?”

  They put on their cloaks and hats and old-fashioned pattens, and they walk together, clacking across the cobbles with Margaret Formby trailing miserably behind, along with Father Goole, who is pretending to be an usher. It is hardly scenic, or far, and so they must walk in a circle: right out of the tower door, past the gatehouse with its raised drawbridge and lowered portcullis, then a left turn past the old tower and here, for a few paces at least, the wall is lower, and they have a view down the precipice to the burbling brown waters of the river Don, twenty feet below.

  A heron stalks through the rushes at the far side.

  “Can you throw a stone?” Queen Mary asks Margaret Formby.

  The girl nods. She does not look well. She may be ill. It is a pity, but Mary believes she will soon not have too much need of her anyway. Only a few more weeks perhaps.

  “Do so,” she instructs. “I should like to see the heron fly.”

  She wishes them to finish her sentence for I cannot.

  Margaret finds a stone and tries to throw it. It falls short of the heron, so another is found. Father Goole is more successful. A guard watches them from the battlements of the great tower.

  “Throw another,” Queen Mary instructs.

  He does so. A bit better this time.

  “I shall try.”

  She throws the wooden egg. It sails across the river and lands in the brown waters with a plop. The heron sets off along the valley.

  Mary Seton watches the guard.

  He doesn’t notice the stone is floating.

  Off it goes, downstream, where three men, hose rolled up, are “fishing.”

  The queen laughs. Walsingham would have seen through that. Not Talbot though.

  * * *

  The boy has been brought up with horses and is a steady rider, and, despite the rain, he makes good progress. He rides from dawn to dusk, swapping horses at the post stations, always taking the best, so that in pursuit, Beale is forced onto swaybacked nags, the lame and the halt. Pontefract, Ripon, Darlington, Newcastle, Alnwick. Five hard days in the saddle. By the middle of the sixth, Beale believes there is only one place the boy can now be riding: Berwick, and from there: Scotland.

  It is not a surprise. In fact, it is a relief to know that Queen Mary’s allies are not, as was most feared, among the nobility of northern England, but across the border in Scotland. These are the sorts of enemy the English are used to. Beale can see that even from every house he passes: stone-built, grimly defensive, studded with arrow loops, and on every horizon another all-but-impregnable castle.

  Nevertheless, something must be done about the boy before he gets over the border.

  * * *

  Walsingham is too old for all this, but he so badly wants to know what the boy has, he rides so hard and far that when he catches up with Robert Beale in Berwick, he has lost all strength in his body and must be helped from his saddle. He is sodden from the rain, and his skin is the color of rendered goose fat.

  “Where is he?” he gasps.

  “Asleep in the hall at the Garter,” Beale tells him.

  Wilkins and Gregory look better than when Beale last saw them. Fresh air and exercise, but something more than that too.

  “Has he seen you at all?” Walsingham asks.

  Beale thinks not.

  “Better not risk it, though, eh?” Wilkins says. “We’ll go.”

  Beale stands with Walsingham huddling under the eaves of the Angel, south of the river, from where they can see the bridge over the Tweed, and the town’s new-built walls against the Scots.

  “More than a hundred thousand pounds, they cost,” Walsingham tells Beale. He is not sure if they were worth it. Probably though.

  They see Wilkins and Gregory crossing the bridge.

  “What will they do?” Beale asks.

  “Think of something,” Walsingham tells him.

  Wilkins and Gregory are good at this, though when, at length, long after curfew, they return they both smell of drink.

  They seem thoughtful.

  “He’s just a boy,” Gregory says.

  “What is in his bag?”

  “A candlestick. Silver. Good quality. Worth a bit.”

  “But only a bit.”

  He means it is not six hundred gold coins. Not enough to fund a revolution or an invasion. An assassination, though? Perhaps.

  “Carrying any message?”

  Wilkins pulls out a piece of paper.

  “I got most of it down, but—”

  He shrugs.

  Walsingham, recovered, reads the letter.

  “Who is this Hamish Doughty? Have we heard of him? A silversmith? In Edinburgh?”

  Walsingham passes the letter to Beale. It is an instruction from Her Majesty, Queen Mary of Scotland, to a Master Hamish Doughty, alderman of the guild of Scottish silversmiths, addressed to his place of work on a certain corner of the Land Market in Edinburgh. It instructs him to melt down the candlestick that is brought to him by the same hand as the letter, and to reconstruct in as close a manner as possible the “certain piece of personal adornment” as was undertaken by himself on behalf of Queen Mary’s erstwhile husband, and once his client, James Hepburn, fourth Earl of Bothwell.

  “ ‘Save if it pleaseth you to make its girth somewhat more fulsome’? What in God’s name can that be about?”

  “I copied only what was written,” Gregory says.

  Walsingham is pulling hard on his beard again.

  “A new encryption,” he says, “or else—she is supposed to have some powder—some form of brimstone—that pressed into paper is invisible to the naked eye, but once exposed to ammonia becomes legible.”

  They know not to bother asking how he knows this.

  “We’ll have to get hold of it then,” Wilkins says. “Make a copy to put in his bag, and get to work on the original.”

  “We will have to move fast in the morning,” Walsingham says. “But he’s seen you already, so you will have to make the swap, Master Beale, tomorrow night.”

  The next morning they are once more up and about before dawn. Gregory and Wilkins cross the bridge into town again and return with papers and inks from a bookseller, and wax, too, the color of blood. They sit outside in the best light possible and while Wilkins makes a passable copy of Queen Mary’s signet, Gregory re-creates the letter.

  When it is done, Beale is up into the saddle, and Master Walsingham passes him the letter, as well as another addressed to Sir Thomas Randolph.

  “Our man in Edinburgh,” Walsingham tells him. “An introduction. We’ll meet at his house tomorrow night, yes?”

  Beale rides out across the bridge. He has never been to Scotland. It doesn’t feel so very different for a while, and he catches up with the boy as they are approaching the town of Dunbar. The road winds through bracken and heather, and there are black-faced sheep dotted about. A cold wind comes off the North Sea, and already night falls earlier.

  “God give you good day, master, you’ve come far?”

  The boy is cautiously polite and tells him the truth. Beale tells him he is a salt merchant from Droitwich. The boy is quite obviously bilious from last night’s ale and wishes only to get down off his horse and to sleep. They stop at the Dolphin tavern, in the shadow of the slighted castle, and stable their horses. The language here is impenetrable and Beale expresses his gratitude for the boy’s help by buying him beer in the Flemish style. The inn is old-fashioned, and straw pallets are brought out and set up around the fire on which the clay cover ticks as it warms and then, much later in the night, as it cools. By then Beale has already extracted the message the boy was carrying, replaced it with the copy, and both now snore loudly.

  The next morning, after a smoked bony fish and more beer, Beale leaves the letter, enclosed within ano
ther letter, for Walsingham and the others to examine at their leisure, and he and the boy set off together along the coast road, toward Edinburgh. The boy does not mind his company, but nor does he beg for any salt-dealing anecdotes, so they ride in easy silence, with the wind at their backs and they raise Edinburgh in the early afternoon.

  * * *

  Francis Walsingham stares down at the paper in fury. They have tried everything, but none avails.

  “Maybe… maybe it just is a thing that she wants?” Wilkins asks.

  Everything smells very strongly of alum and vinegar, and Walsingham’s fingers are stinging from touching one or the other of the solutions.

  “But what is the thing she wants?” Gregory wonders. “What did the silversmith make for the Earl of Bothwell?”

  Walsingham has a terrible feeling he is doing something he should stop doing, or that he is leaving undone a thing he should do. But what?

  “Beale will tell us what steps the silversmith next takes.”

  They collect up their bottles and jars and brushes and they set off after Beale and the boy.

  * * *

  Three days later they are all gathered in the solar of Thomas Randolph’s house near Holyrood Palace, thinking about Hamish Doughty, the silversmith, who turns out to be… a silversmith, and, at first glance, not much more besides. No assassin, at any rate.

  “He is just another link in the chain,” Walsingham tells them.

  He sounds desperate that this should be so, but Wilkins and Gregory, and now Beale, are no longer convinced he is dispassionate. Besides, following Doughty will not be easy. He is moderately active in Edinburgh politics. He comes; he goes; he speaks to many men; he sees many others. It would need ten of them, all of whom knew Edinburgh, just to keep a watch on him, and there are only four of them.

  Thomas Randolph is there though; Walsingham’s brother-in-law or something. He’s a dapper little man, bright-eyed and clean-shaven, with an unsuppressed delight in life, and full of stories of Russia, from where he has just come back, and her tsar, Ivan.

  “I do not wish to sound disloyal, Francis,” he says, “but in the matter of her cousin of Scotland, Queen Elizabeth might have done better to take a page from Tsar Ivan’s book: he’d’ve had her strangled at birth. Then he’d’ve had everyone she was ever likely to meet likewise strangled—at birth again—and then he’d’ve sent his Cossacks to conquer every land she had ever thought to set foot in and they’d’ve forced the men of those countries to plow salt into their own fields, dig their own graves, and then kill themselves. In Russia they know how to make an omelette!”

  Meanwhile, they have lost the boy, John Kennedy.

  “There is something not right about this,” Wilkins murmurs.

  * * *

  It is dark, but Queen Mary is in pain tonight and does not wish for a candle. Instead she summons Father Goole to the solar and tells him she wishes to make her confession.

  He looks alarmed.

  “Here, Your Majesty?”

  “The mice are gone,” she says. “They will not hear us.”

  It had always been her idea to have the portable altar set up in the solar so that the mice could see them saying Mass, because the mice would then think they did not know they were being watched, and, crucially, would not strive to find a peephole into the chamber above.

  She lies on the settle while he says the prayers, and then she begins.

  * * *

  James Hamilton of Bothwellhaugh and Woodhouselee is back from service with the French king and now stands over the meager fire in the hall of the keep of Ferniehirst Castle, in the county of Roxburgh, twenty miles from the English border. He fingers his rosary beads while he listens to his host, Lord Kerr, eating the haunch of some animal. The noise reminds him of being in the kennels, and he wishes he had not left Paris.

  It is strange to think he would not have been able to do so had Master Francis Walsingham not paid him that angel for having saved his life on that day of vengeance. God works in mysterious ways.

  But he has in mind this evening the message that awaited him when he arrived in Ferniehirst this morning, sent from Queen Mary in captivity, which he just spent an hour or more decrypting. He very much wishes to discuss it with someone, for he cannot decide if it is what he has been waiting for all this time, or dreading all this time. He wishes his priest were here, Father Goole, or that his wife were still alive so that he might consult her.

  “What ails you?” Kerr asks. He is still in his hunting boots, and in fustian trews the color of blood. He speaks Scots.

  Hamilton does not wish to tell Kerr. The man has given him shelter, and with it his life, but he does not wish him further implicated in any plot, should it go awry, and nor, if he is honest, does he trust him completely.

  Still.

  “Her Majesty has overcome her scruples,” he says.

  Lord Kerr stops chewing.

  “Oh, aye?”

  “I am to go to London,” Hamilton tells him. “To find Elizabeth Tudor.”

  Kerr’s eyes shrink with pleasure.

  “Bang bang,” he says.

  * * *

  “That is no sin, Your Majesty,” Father Goole says. “Queen Elizabeth is excommunicated these past two years, and in his bull Regnans in Excelsis did not our holy father in Rome command all her subjects to seek her end? Indeed, did he not say that those who did not do so were likewise to be included in the sentence of excommunication, likewise to be damned to hell for all eternity!”

  “But she is a queen, appointed by God,” Queen Mary says.

  Father Goole sighs.

  “She would not hesitate to have you murdered herself, Your Majesty, were it to suit her, and you are no heretic as she is, nor cut off from the unity of the body of Christ our Savior. You are not excommunicated as she is.”

  * * *

  They find the boy John Kennedy not so much by skill, or by chance, but by sitting still, in an inn, diagonally opposite the house of Hamish Doughty, the Edinburgh silversmith, and waiting.

  It is three days later.

  “That’s him.”

  They don’t move for a long moment. They watch the boy knock on the shutters, which open. A few words are exchanged, then the boy is permitted within.

  Not very much later he emerges. He is carrying his bag, less bulky this time, and he looks left toward the castle, then right, down the road that will eventually lead him to England.

  “He looks heartsore,” Wilkins says.

  “He looked that way when he went in,” Gregory tells them.

  “Maybe he doesn’t want to go back?”

  “How are we going to do this then?” Beale asks.

  “Master Walsingham’ll have to do it this time.”

  They watch the boy set off eastward down Land Market.

  “Get after him, Robert,” Wilkins tells Beale. “If he hires a horse in Leith or somewhere, send word to Master Walsingham at Thomas Randolph’s house.”

  “What will you do?”

  Wilkins looks across at the silversmith’s.

  “I think Master Doughty is due a trip to England.”

  Beale leaves and tails the boy down the road. The houses get steadily less grand and soon they are among cottages and hovels, and patches of unappetizing vegetables cropped at by ugly sheep. The wind is in his face and a thin rain begins to fall.

  He watches the boy enter an inn on the outskirts of the town, and then, a little while later, emerge on a nag that has ideas of its own, which do not include walking to Berwick with this lad on his back. Beale watches the boy plodding eastward: he looks so weary that Beale can only believe he is privy to bad news. He cannot believe he is riding to find Hamilton. He risks returning to Thomas Randolph’s house, where Walsingham is deep in thought. Within a few moments they have said good-bye to Randolph and are on the road on hired horses.

  They catch sight of the boy within a few miles and Beale leaves Walsingham to ride ahead and befriend him at the same inn in D
unbar.

  * * *

  Wilkins and Gregory catch Hamish Doughty while he is on the privy in the backyard of his workshop. He is a big man who fills the tight space almost completely, and it is a struggle to subdue him without making a lot of noise. Once he is down, he makes a very heavy deadweight. They force him into a couple of sacks, though, and haul him out and up onto the bed of a cart that Thomas Randolph has acquired for their purpose, and they are rolling down the nameless lane that runs parallel to Land Market before he is missed by his assistants and apprentices.

  “You didn’t even let him finish his business,” Wilkins tells Gregory. “That is something you’re going to have to clear up, not me.”

  “A bit of shit’ll be the least of it,” Gregory says. They have both seen men hanged, drawn, and quartered. Bellies sliced open and guts wound out and held up to the crowd like a master butcher showing a string of prized sausages. That is to see a man bathe in blood.

  * * *

  Ordinarily Master Walsingham would not spare a glance let alone a word for this boy, but here he is, plying him with the Dolphin Inn’s best ale and telling him tales of Lincoln’s Inn, and jurisprudence, in the hope he will soon be fast asleep and relinquish his grip on the bag at his side. John tells Walsingham he is an apprentice cutler, on his way to Sheffield. It’s a good lie, because it is close to the truth. He has a funny view of what travel in Scotland is like, for, he says, this is the third night friendly men have bought him his ale, and so far he has not been robbed, as he feared, “or worse.”