Midnight Never Come

by Marie Brennan

  Nothing save his suspicions about Walsingham’s death. And Beale had argued well against those.

  Carrying a message from a council meeting at Somerset House to St. James’ Palace, his cloak pulled tight around him in feeble protection against a driving rainstorm, Deven abruptly remembered Beale’s words.

  “I know it would be easier to believe that someone poisoned or cursed Sir Francis . . .”

  Poison, no. But Deven could think of at least one man who might have the capacity to bring about a man’s death through infernal magic.

  Doctor John Dee.

  He raised his head, heedless of the water that streamed down his face, and stared blindly through the gray curtain of rain. Dee. A necromancer, they said, who trafficked with demons and bound spirits to his will. But also Walsingham’s friend; would Dee have betrayed him so foully?

  There were other problems. Dee had been on the continent for six years — six crucial years, in the tale of the Queen of Scots. But Fagot’s work in the embassy had begun around the time that Dee departed. And Gifford, too, had conveniently shown up in that time.

  Could they have been working for the astrologer, while he was abroad?

  Someone had persuaded Elizabeth, possibly by meeting with her in person. Dee could not have done that, unless someone had gone to a great deal of effort to fabricate rumors about his travels with Edward Kelley. It was a stretch to imagine the man working so effectively through intermediaries. And what would Dee care about events in Ireland?

  Deven shook his head, sending water flying. Beneath him, his bay gelding kept stolidly putting one foot down after another, ignoring both the rain and the preoccupation of his rider. Too many questions without answers — but it was the strongest possibility yet. Before his departure for the continent, Dee had spun out grand visions of England’s destiny in the world, with Elizabeth upon the throne. The Queen of Scots would have been an obstacle to those visions, one he might take steps to remove.

  And perhaps his difficulties now stemmed, at least in part, from Elizabeth’s disillusionment over how she’d been managed into killing her Scottish cousin.

  What did Deven know about Dee’s activities now, the positions and benefits for which he was petitioning the Crown?

  The answers came obediently to mind — and with them, something else. The reason why he knew those answers.

  Anne.

  “ ’Tis listening, not spying, and you are not asking me. I do it of my own free will.”

  Yes, she had volunteered information on Doctor Dee quite eagerly. Deven knew all about the man’s penury, the theft of books and priceless instruments from his house at Mortlake, the dispute with his wife’s brother over the ownership of that house. Even Burghley’s attempts to get Dee’s confederate Edward Kelley back to England, so he could put his Philosopher’s Stone to work producing gold for Elizabeth. Information Deven had taken in and set to one side, because he could not see what to do with it.

  The thought of Anne twisted like a knife in him. They hadn’t spoken since that confrontation in the orchard; shortly thereafter, according to the Countess of Warwick, Anne had begged and received permission to leave her service. Deven did not know why, nor had he asked; the subject was too painful, the unresolved questions between them too sharp. These thoughts, however, cast the entire situation in a new and unpleasant light.

  What she could possibly be doing in Dee’s service, he did not know. But if Dee were the player . . .

  More ifs. He had so few names to chase, though. And going after Dee directly would not be wise.

  Was he thinking of this because he truly suspected Anne, and thought finding her would accomplish something? Or did he just wish to see her again?

  “A bit of both,” he admitted out loud, to no one in particular. The gelding flicked his ears, scattering droplets of rain.

  By the time he arrived at St. James’ Palace, drenched and shivering, he had made up his mind. He stopped to change clothes only because it would not do to drip on the floor of a peer.

  The Countess of Warwick frowned when Deven asked what reason Anne had given for leaving. “She did not speak of your argument, though I suspect that played a part. No, she named some other cause. . . .”

  Deven stood in his wet hair and dry clothes, and tried not to chafe with impatience.

  “ ’Tis hard to recall,” the countess admitted at last, looking embarrassed. “I am sorry, Master Deven. An ailing family member, perhaps. Yes, I remember, that was it — her father, I believe.”

  “I have no father,” Anne had said, when he asked her why she could not marry.

  So either she had lied to the countess, or to him. And she had lied to him before.

  He put on a look of solicitous concern. “I am very sorry to hear it. Perhaps it was concern for her father that led to our troubles. Do you know where her family lives? I have been given a leave of absence from my duties; I might call upon her, to offer my sympathies if nothing else.”

  The countess’s confusion melted away, and she smiled indulgently at him, no doubt thinking of young love. “That would be very kind of you. She is London-born, from the parish of St. Dunstan in the East.”

  Little more than a stone’s throw from Walsingham’s house, south and west along Tower Street. Deven would have ridden to Yorkshire, but he need not go far at all.

  “I thank you, my lady,” Deven said, and left with all the haste decency would allow.

  THE ONYX HALL, LONDON: April 14, 1590

  Though almost everything of value had been stripped from Lune’s chambers following her disgrace, her gowns remained. No one, apparently, wanted to be seen wearing the clothing of a traitor imprisoned beneath the White Tower.

  She dressed herself in raven’s feathers, simple but elegant, with an open-fronted collar and cuffs that swept back from her hands in delicate lacework. Now, of all times, she wanted to show her loyalty to Invidiana by wearing the Queen’s colors. The plain pins holding up her silver hair were her only adornment; humility, alongside loyalty, would be her watchword tonight.

  When she was ready, she took a steadying breath, then opened the door to her chamber and stepped outside.

  “Are you ready?” Sir Prigurd asked in his resonant bass voice, and waited for her brief curtsy. “Come along, then.”

  Two guards accompanied them through the palace. Lune was not taken to the presence chamber. A good sign, or a bad one? She could only speculate. Prigurd led her onward, and soon Lune knew where they were going.

  The Hall of Figures was a long gallery, sunken below the usual level of the rooms by the depth of a half-flight of stairs. Statues lined it on both sides, ranging from simple busts to full figures to a few massive works large enough to fill a small chamber on their own. Some were made by mortal artisans, others by fae; some had not been crafted at all, unless the basilisk could be called a crafter.

  Lune prayed the stories were not true, that Invidiana kept a basilisk in some hidden confine of the Onyx Hall.

  Prigurd and the guards stayed on the landing at the top of the stairs. Lune went down alone. As her slipper touched the floor, she saw movement out of the corner of her eye; she flinched despite herself, thinking of basilisks.

  No monster. In her distraction, she had simply taken the man for a statue. The mortal called Achilles had more to recommend him to Invidiana than just his battle furies; his nearly naked body might have been a sculpted model for the perfection of the human form.

  He took her by the arm, his hard fingers communicating the violence that always trembled just below the surface. Lune knew better than to think it directed at her, but she also knew better than to think herself safe from it. She offered no resistance as Achilles led her down the gallery, past the watching statues.

  A chair had been placed partway down the Hall of Figures, and a canopy of estate erected above it. Before Lune came anywhere near it, she sank gracefully to her knees — as gracefully as she could, with Achilles still holding one arm in an iron grip.<
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  “Bring her closer.”

  The mortal hauled Lune to her feet before she could stand on her own, towed her forward a few steps, and shoved her down again.

  The moments passed by in silence, broken only by breathing, and a scuff at the entrance to the gallery as Sir Prigurd shifted his weight.

  “I am given to understand,” Invidiana said, “that you have been telling Madame Malline lies.”

  “I have,” Lune said, still kneeling in a sea of raven feathers. “More than she realizes.”

  A few more heartbeats passed; then, on some unspoken signal from the Queen, Achilles released Lune’s arm. She remained kneeling, her eyes on the floor.

  Invidiana said, “Explain yourself.”

  There was no point in repeating the early steps of it; Invidiana knew those already. She might even know what Lune had said at the end. But that was the part she wished to hear, and so Lune related, in brief, honest outline, the lie she had told the ambassador. “She believed me, I think,” Lune said when she was done. “But if she does not, ’tis no matter; the lie tells her nothing she can use.”

  “And so you gained your freedom,” Invidiana said. Her voice was as silken and cold as a dagger of ice, that could kill and then melt away as if it had never been. “By slandering your own sovereign.”

  Lune’s heart thudded painfully. “Your Majesty —”

  “You have spread a lie that will damage my reputation in other lands. You have given the ambassadrice du Lys information about the undersea that might be turned against England. You have sold details of a royal mission, for the sake of your own skin.” The whip crack of her words halted. Invidiana murmured the next part softly, almost intimately. “Tell me why I should not kill you.”

  Feathers crumpled in her fingers, their broken shafts stabbing at her skin. Lune’s heart was beating hard enough to make her body tremble. But she forced herself to focus. Invidiana was angry, yes, but the anger was calculated, not heartfelt. A sufficiently good reply might please the Queen, and then the rage would vanish as if it had never been.

  “Your Majesty,” she whispered, then made her voice stronger. “When those in other lands hear that you dream of extending your control over the folk of the sea, they will fear you, and this is no bad thing. As for Madame Malline, indeed, I hope she tells her king what I have said, and he attempts to pursue it; if he threatens war undersea, thinking to win himself some concession thereby, then we will have the pleasure of watching those proud and powerful folk destroy him. Moreover, by satisfying her with this lie, I have ended her prying questions, that might otherwise have uncovered the truth of my embassy, and the secrets I have kept on your Grace’s behalf.”

  Having offered her political reasons, Lune risked a glance upward. A flash of white caught her eye, and she found herself meeting an unfocused sapphire gaze. Tiresias knelt now at Invidiana’s feet, leaning against her skirts as a hound might, with her spidery fingers tangled in his black hair. He wore no doublet, and the white of his cambric shirt blazed in the darkness of the hall.

  She swallowed and lifted her chin higher, fixing her attention just below Invidiana’s face. “And if I may be so bold as to say it, your Majesty — no fae who cannot find a way to benefit herself while also serving the Onyx Throne belongs in your court.”

  Invidiana considered this, one hand idly stroking Tiresias’s hair. He leaned into the touch, as if there were no one else present.

  “Pretty words,” the Queen said at last, musingly. She tightened her grip on Tiresias, dragging his head back until he gazed up at her, mouth slackened, throat exposed and vulnerable. The Queen gazed down into her seer’s eyes, as if she could see his visions there. “But what lies behind them?”

  “Your Grace.” Lune risked the interruption; silence might kill her just as surely. “I will gladly return to the service I left. I told Dame Halgresta I had other options available to me; give me my freedom, and I will discover all you wish to know about Walsingham.”

  Tiresias laughed breathlessly, still trapped by Invidiana’s hand. “A body in revolt, the laws of nature gone awry. It cannot happen. Yet the stories say it did, and are not stories true?” One hand rose, as if seeking something; it faltered midair, came to rest below the unlaced collar of his shirt. “Not those that are lies.”

  His words hardened Invidiana’s black eyes. She trailed one fingernail down the seer’s face; then her hand moved to hover near the jewel in the center of her bodice, the black diamond edged by obsidian and mermaid’s tears. The sight transfixed Lune with fear. But when the Queen scowled and returned her attention to Lune, she left the jewel where it was pinned. “Walsingham is no longer a problem. You may be. But I am loathe to cast aside a tool that may yet have use in it, and so you will live.”

  Lune immediately bent her head again. “I am most grateful for —”

  “You will live,” Invidiana repeated in honeyed, venomous tones, “as a warning to those who might fail me in the future. Your chambers are no longer your own. You may remain in the Onyx Hall, but for hospitality you will be dependent upon others. Anyone giving you mortal food will be punished. If hands turn against you, I will turn a blind eye. Henceforth you are no lady of my court.”

  The words struck like hammer blows on stone. Lune’s hands lay slack and nerveless in her lap. She might have wept — perhaps Invidiana wanted tears, begging, a humble prostration on the floor, a display of sycophantic fear. But she could not bring herself to move. She stared, dry eyed, at her Queen’s icy, contemptuous face, and tried to comprehend how she had failed.

  “Take her,” the Queen said, her voice now indifferent, and this time Achilles truly did have to drag Lune to her feet and out of the hall.

  MEMORY: April 6, 1580

  I t began as a trembling, a rattling of cups and plates on sideboards, a clacking of shutters against walls.

  Then the walls themselves began to shake.

  People fled into the streets of London, fearing their houses would fall on them. Some were killed out there, as stones tumbled loose and plummeted to the streets. Nothing was exempt: a masonry spire on Westminster Abbey cracked and fell; the Queen felt it in her great chamber at Whitehall; across all of southern England, bells tolled in church steeples, without any hand to ring them.

  God’s judgment, the credulous believed, was come to them at last.

  The judgment, though, did not come from God — nor was it intended for them.

  Out in the Channel, the seabed heaved and the waves rose to terrifying heights. The waters swamped all under, with no respect for country; English, French, and Flemish, all drowned alike as their ships foundered and sank.

  Some few were close enough to see the cause of the tremor, in the short moments before their death.

  The bodies struck the waves with titanic force. Those few, hapless sailors saw colossal heads, hands the size of cart horses, legs thicker than ancient trees. Then the waters rose up, and they saw nothing more.

  At Dover, a raw white scar showed where a segment of the cliff had cracked and fallen in the struggle.

  In the days to come, mortals on both sides of the Channel would feel the aftershocks of the earthquake, little suspecting that beneath the still unsteady waves, terrible sea beasts were tearing at the corpses of Gog and Magog, the great giants of London, who paraded in effigy through the streets of the city every Midsummer at the head of the Lord Mayor’s procession.

  Rarely did the conflicts of fae become so publicly felt. But the giants, proud and ancient brothers, had long refused to recognize any Queen above them, and Invidiana did not take kindly to rebellion. Some said she had once been on friendly terms with them, but others scoffed; she had no friends. At most, they might have once been useful to her.

  Now their use had ended.

  Giants could not be disposed of quietly. She sent a legion of minions against them, elf knights and hobyahs, barguests and redcaps from the north of England, and the brutal Sir Kentigern Nellt to lead them. On the cliffs of
Dover the battle had raged, until first one brother and then the other fell to their opponents. In a final gesture of contempt, Nellt hurled their bodies into the sea, and shook the earth for miles around.

  While the mortals cowered and prayed, the warriors laughed at their fallen enemies. And when the waves had subsided and there was no more to see, they retired to celebrate their bloody triumph.

  TOWER WARD AND FARRINGDON WITHOUT, LONDON: April 15, 1590

  A monumental stone Elizabeth gazed down on Deven as he rode up Ludgate Hill toward the city wall, making him feel like a small boy that had been caught shirking his duties. He had leave from the lieutenant of the Gentlemen Pensioners to be absent that day, but still, he breathed more easily when he and Colsey passed through the gate, with its image of the Queen, and into London.

  The rains that had deluged the city of late had washed it moderately clean for once. The smaller streets were still a treacherous sludge of mud, but Deven kept to wider lanes, where cobbled or paved surfaces glistened after their dousing. Only when he turned north onto St. Dunstan’s Hill did he have to be careful of his horse’s footing.

  In the churchyard, he halted and tossed his reins to Colsey. He cleared the steps leading to the church door in two bounds, passing a puzzled laborer who was scrubbing them clean, and went inside.

  The interior of the church was murky, after the rain-washed brilliance outside. Deven’s eyes had not yet adjusted when he heard a voice say, “How may I be of service, young master?”

  The words came from up ahead, on his left. Deven turned his head that way and said, “I seek a parishioner of yours, but I do not know where the house lies. Can you direct me?”

  “I would be glad to. The name?”

  His vision had cleared enough to make out a balding priest. Deven said, “The Montrose family.”

  The priest’s brow furrowed along well-worn lines. “Montrose . . . of this parish, you said?”

  “Yes. I am searching for Anne Montrose, a young woman of gentle birth, who was until recently in service to the Countess of Warwick.”

  But the priest shook his head after a moment of further thought and said, “I am sorry, young master. I have no parishioners by that name. Perhaps you seek the church of St. Dunstan in the West, outside the city walls, near to Temple Bar?”