by Karen Harper
“But—did you not bring Piers with you?” Meg blurted before the queen could say a word.
“Piers?”
“Yes—yes, I sent him to you just a little while ago, when you rode in.”
“Meg, what is it? Why are you all assembled? I have not seen Piers.”
“Did you ride around in back and dismount there? Oh, gracious, he may be lost in this big place!” she cried, and started for the door without being given leave or offering a curtsy.
“Meg, stop!” Elizabeth ordered, though for a moment she thought the woman might defy and ignore her.
“Your Grace,” Cecil said, “Mistress Milligrew sent the boy down to tell you that both Naseby lads saw the green pillow delivered directly to the Duke of Norfolk and overheard their conversation, too. With further questioning, we may be able to get more out of them than—”
“But I’ve got to find him!” Meg cried, interrupting Cecil.
She was coming unhinged, Elizabeth thought. “Meg, we’ll find him. He’s probably with his brother, is that right, Ned? Ned!”
“I don’t know. May I help Meg search, Your Grace, and we’ll bring both boys to you straightaway?”
“Yes, go—and bring Jenks back with you!” she called after them. Ned remembered to bow and back toward the door before he turned to rush away, but Meg just ran out as if her very life depended on it.
If the queen wanted to dissolve into tears and tantrums, poor Meg seemed to be acting those frustrations out for her. In a two-hour search of the Vyne and its grounds, they had not found Piers or his brother. Meg and Ned had just come back in, the first time Elizabeth had seen them since they went to look for the boy.
“He can’t—can’t have just disappeared!” Meg wailed, as Ned tried to comfort her. “And Sim gone, too? It’s foul play!”
“But you know how boys are,” Cecil said. “Perhaps Piers became distracted by Sim or someone else, and off they went for an adventure in the woods or town.”
“No!” Meg insisted, pushing Ned away. “No, they wouldn’t—Piers wouldn’t.”
“No, my lord,” Ned put in, as Meg rushed to the window to look out, “Piers wouldn’t. And they wouldn’t just head back toward Guildford as Captain Drake suggested when he helped us search, even if Sim did once want to take over his father’s place as hedger.”
“I just thought,” Drake put in, “they might have been homesick, and now we are closer to Guildford than we have been in days.”
“Meg,” the queen said quietly, calmly, going to stand by her at the window, “to help us find them, you are going to have to tell us what Piers did say. Exactly what message did you send him to recount to me about Norfolk receiving the pillow? What can you recall? Meg!” she said, taking her by her upper arms to give her a slight shake.
The woman’s eyes seemed to finally focus from far away, and yet she seemed to stare right through Elizabeth. Pray God, the queen thought, she wasn’t going back into her dark abyss, thinking of her infant son again.
“I can’t lose him, Your Grace,” she whispered. “Just—can’t.”
“You won’t. Now listen to me. Even if someone has taken the boys, we will find them, but you must recall clearly whatever he did tell you.”
“He—he said they were looking through the hedge, you know, back near Loseley House, the very place from which we later learned the fatal arrow had been shot. They went to see where the hedge had been broken through with the new stile.”
“Good. Say on.”
“He has nightmares of that spot, Your Grace,” she cried, pressing her palms over her eyes. “He dreams that men there want to kill his father, and he hears them saying that something is a life-and-death matter.”
Elizabeth shuddered. “Then maybe Norfolk ordered the man with the pillow to silence their father, especially if they had stolen his arrows to try to cast the blame on him. Or maybe Piers overheard their plans to shoot at me but didn’t quite grasp it—except later, in the depths of his dreams.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know!”
“What else did the boys overhear?”
“That the man giving the duke the pillow said something like ‘She sends you this with love and hope and trust.’ And ‘This will seal their bargain’ or some such.”
“I swear I will have Norfolk arrested and imprisoned the moment I can find him!” Elizabeth announced to them all. She did not let go of Meg’s arms. She felt as if she were propping her up, as if the woman would crumple to the floor otherwise. “I don’t give a fig,” she went on, “if our evidence is just a pillow and the testimony of eavesdropping boys, I will have him put away at the very least! Meg,” she said, lowering her voice, “did Piers describe the man delivering the pillow?”
“He had broad shoulders and a leather quiver full of arrows. I figured we’d get more out of Piers later, when you questioned him, too, but he didn’t see his face clear. Oh, what if that’s the same one’s been killing men that took my Piers?” she wailed, and burst into tears.
Though Elizabeth longed to comfort her, she motioned for Ned to tend to his wife and stepped away. On the far side of the room, the queen huddled with Cecil and Drake, speaking over Meg’s loud sobs.
“I would wager a kingdom—which indeed I am doing—that the man who brought the pillow is the lethal archer who has dogged our steps since Loseley House, and he, as well as that pillow, links Mary, Queen of Scots to Norfolk in complicity of treason.”
“It’s all starting to come together,” Cecil agreed, nodding, “and, I fear, it leads straight to the launching of the insurrection.”
“This messenger, who may also be the murderer,” she went on, “probably stole Tom Naseby’s bolts, with which he hit Fenton, and he may be the one who pilfered two longbows from Hern the Hunter, so that he could plant evidence against him if he needed to throw us off again. It’s me he’s been toying with, but the key is that the boys will be able to link that murderer to Norfolk. And since Piers must have overheard the words clearly, it cannot be that Spanish archer—unless it was his interpreter speaking for him, but then why would he have a quiver full of arrows?”
“I’d guess that the interpreter could be the archer,” Cecil said, “except we know the approximate date that Juan de Vila entered England with the interpreter. That would not have given either of them time to head north to see Queen Mary and receive and then deliver that pillow. Besides, her so-called host Shrewsbury cannot be so dimwitted that he’d allow a Spanish-speaking man access to her, however much’tis rumored the woman is skilled at wrapping men around her little finger.”
“You’re right about the timing,” Elizabeth agreed. “As for who is allowed to see her and who is not, she hasn’t been a strictly held prisoner—so far. Who knows who has had access to her? The point is, what we must do is learn for certain who the messenger is.” Her gaze met Cecil’s frown. “What?” she prompted. “What are you thinking?”
“That, if he’s a courier, Keenan might know the man.”
“It can’t be, can it,” she said, gripping her hands tightly together and lowering her voice, “that Keenan could be that man?”
“No, impossible,” he insisted, frowning. “He hasn’t been sent north for months and knows naught of archery, not that I’ve ever heard. I keep him busy. Before this progress began, he was in and out of Hampshire, helping to arrange things for us, but was not ordered north.”
Detesting herself for even bringing up that possibility, she sighed with relief. All she needed was for someone she trusted—someone she’d included in her Privy Plot Council meetings who knew entirely too much—to turn traitor. Keenan had been busy working his way up with Cecil and could not have had time to deliver something on the side to Norfolk even if pretty, flirty Mary of Scots had begged him to. Could he? The man could ride like the very devil.
“You’re right,” she said, “but we shall question Keenan about couriers he’s seen in the north or en route there. And here we just sent him away again—and to our
enemy.”
“He’ll be our eyes and ears there as well as our hands,” Cecil assured her. “I can vouch for what a fine job he’s done with that.”
“And I can vouch for you, so there you are. That means we’re back to closely examining Captain John Hawkins, when I can ill afford to find him guilty, either.”
She sank into a chair. “But first,” she went on, looking from Cecil to Drake, “I believe the better, quicker way to find someone to question is to observe the next secret meeting in the Church of the Holy Ghost. Wait here. I’ll be right back and explain. I think the answer to the who and when is still encoded in that green pillow, if we can but learn to read the signs and symbols.”
She went into her bedroom, got down on her knees—as she never would to another person—and pulled out the pillow. She carried it into her outer privy chamber and over to the bright window light where Ned had been comforting Meg, though he’d now taken her from the room.
Flipping the pillow over, Elizabeth studied the embroidered bird—the dove of the Holy Ghost, as she now believed. “Cecil,” she said, “if you still have that magnifying glass John Dee gave you, please fetch it.”
“What is it, Your Grace?” he asked, squinting down where she looked. “Jenks, you always had hawk’s eyes. Come over here and try to read it in the sun while I fetch the glass. It could be some sort of spy’s code.”
Spy’s code? the queen thought as Cecil hurried out and she, Drake, and Jenks squinted at the bird in the sunlight streaming through the window. Those people meeting at night in that church could well be spies for the lords who were planning to coordinate a rebellion in the north. Surely, if it caught fire there, they would need help from the south, too—and two of her hosts here in the south, Sir William More and the Earl of Southampton, could be in league with them, sending their own spies or agents to meet in the church at the crossroads of north and south.
“That wreath looks like a bunch of scratchings’til you read them all sideways by turning the pillow,” Jenks said, doing exactly that.
The queen gasped as he slowly rotated it. “Numbers?” she said. “Are those tiny numbers attached to each other? Some sort of secret code, indeed, maybe matching numbers to letters of the alphabet to give people’s names or key places? Read them to me as best you can,” she ordered, rushing to the table for parchment and ink.
“Looks like they just repeat over and over, Your Grace. It’s a wonder the Scots queen could make them so fine and small.”
“Can you read them, man?”
Cecil rushed back in with his glass, even as Jenks read out, “Starting at the place the bird’s beak touches the wreath, it reads eight, two, six, six, nine, one, two. Then it starts over, eight, two, six, six, nine, one, two.”
“Yes,” Cecil said, huddled with Jenks, holding his glass over the pillow. “We should have tried magnification before, but it just looked like a thorny wreath.”
Elizabeth ignored them now, quickly transposing numbers to letters and words. “H-b-f-f-i-a-b?” she cried. “It doesn’t spell anything, though with the three vowels, I supposed it could be made to form several words as a sort of anagram. I had thought it might be a word like r-e-v-o-l-t-s, but there’s no such pattern. How I wish you had brought one of your cryptographers along, Cecil.”
“Could the numbers stand for people’s names?” Drake asked, as he and Cecil came over to sit across the table from her.
“Or the names of houses or shires the conspirators dwell in?” Cecil said. “The H could surely stand for Hampshire and the F for Farnham, or Fareham, for that matter.”
“Your Grace,” Jenks put in, bringing the pillow to the table, “I know this is important, but I would ask permission to go help search for the boys—and be with Ursala. I don’t think she’ll come apart like Meg, but—”
“Yes, of course. But Jenks, I do believe we might find the boys another way than random, panicked searching. Tell both Meg and Ursala I will do my very best.”
“I fear someone thinks they know too much,” Jenks said, as he bowed, went out, and closed the door behind him.
“Your Grace,” Cecil said, keeping his voice low, “if someone involved in all this snatched those lads right out of this house—”
“Or Piers ran into his brother, they went outside, and the wrong person overheard them talking about what they’d seen,” Drake put in.
“Neither of you has to tell me that someone in my household is not to be trusted, even with Norfolk gone,” she said, frowning and steepling her fingers before her nose.
Please, dear Lord, she prayed, don’t let it be Robin who’s betrayed me from within. Don’t let him be another of those who want to give my power and people to Mary of Scots. Years before, Elizabeth had considered having him wed Mary to control her, but the Scots queen had haughtily rejected him as the English queen’s rejected suitor—and as only her master of the horse. Surely he didn’t have his hand in all this now, just to frighten her—or even to scare Drake away. No, not him, for there were numbers of others who—
Then it hit her.
“Drake, Cecil, what if these are just numbers?”
“What?” Drake said. “They are numbers.”
“But what if they signify a date on which something occurs? Mary knew of it, was looking forward to it, maybe the beginning of the rebellion.”
“Read out the numbers again, Your Grace,” Cecil prompted.
“Eight, two, six, six, nine, one, two.”
“The eighth month—August,” Cecil intoned. “Two, six could mean the second, the sixth, or—”
“Or the twenty-sixth,” Drake said, “which is today.”
“And the year, sixty-nine,” she said, “this year. Today—if we are correct, that signifies today! What about the one and the two?”
“The time the rebellion commences?” Cecil asked. “One or two of the clock—or twelve, as she may have combined those earlier numbers.”
Elizabeth stood. “Lord Sandys says the forbidden Catholic meetings sometimes start around midnight, ones held in the Church of the Holy Ghost on the edge of town. It may be all wrong—a long shot—but I’m getting desperate. I believe we should visit the church at midnight tonight.”
“You can remain here while Drake and I go with a full contingent of guards to arrest everyone in sight,” Cecil said, as he and Drake scrambled to their feet.
“But what if it is just envoys or representatives they send?” she demanded. “I want not the ones left holding the bag but the ones who made the bags—and the pillow. So here’s what we are going to do, and neither of you will gainsay me on this.”
Chapter the Nineteenth
The queen donned men’s garb again that night, but when he saw her, Cecil reacted as if she were a mere lad.
“Just send the troops, Your Grace, and wait here with me. I insist you stay safely here, or at least that I go with you.”
“We’ve argued this before, and I have said that I must go in person and you must stay here to oversee things. Desperate doings demand desperate measures. Just be grateful I have not decided to lead the army I may soon be sending north to stem a full-fledged rebellion. Besides, troops are noisy and could scatter and alert whoever appears—if anyone appears. We still are not certain we have read that pillow aright, so this, like all else we’ve tried lately, may be an exercise in futility.”
“If your purpose is to merely gather information, let Ned and Jenks go.”
“I am taking them with me. Dear Cecil, I shall be careful. I do not intend to go into the church to wait for the arrival of the plotters, for I could be trapped there. I shall stay outside by the woods until they are inside, then hide behind the effigies to eavesdrop.”
“But the woods have been so dangerous that—”
“All right. Another compromise. Wearing Drake’s armor, I shall not go into the woods but hide myself behind the stones in the old graveyard until our enemies enter. Then I shall go into the church via the tunnel,” she rushed on, perhap
s now trying to convince herself as well as him. “Drake will lead me in, since he knows where its entrance is. If the Naseby lads can pull off eavesdropping, the queen can, too.”
“So you could send Ned ahead of the conspirators into the church but stay behind yourself with Drake and two guards.”
“I’ll stay behind with Drake and Ned and send Clifford and Jenks inside. All will be armed. If I deem those assembled worth trapping rather than just following after we hear them speak their piece, we can simply seal their secret escape and have them caught like rats in a trap in that barred and locked church—and then I’ll send for a full troop of guards. All will be well, you’ll see.”
Elizabeth used the servants’ stairs and plunged out into the dark night. She met her men beyond the gatehouse where Jenks held the horses.
“How are Ursala and Meg?” she asked them.
“Ursala is trying to keep up Meg’s spirits,” Ned reported, “but she’s just staring off into vacancy again.”
“We’ll find the boys,” Elizabeth promised, as Jenks gave her a boost up to ride astride. “If we don’t learn where they are from listening, we will seize one of the conspirators and force him to tell us.”
That’s if anyone comes tonight, her inner voice taunted her, and if the plotters know where the Naseby lads are and haven’t dispatched them one way or the other already. Talk about playing fox and geese—this indeed might be a wild goose chase.
She had not reckoned on the full moon rising, but it suddenly rolled over the horizon like a ripe peach, bathing the scene with an eerie, pale red-gold light. At least her party was all in black. The armor of Drake’s she wore could catch the glint of moonshine, but she kept her inky cloak wrapped close about her.