“So!” They pulled out the documents. “Something to the Queen of Scots! I think you’d best tell your tale to Secretary Walsingham, friend.”
* * *
Although it was only midafternoon, in the short December day Walsingham had already lit a candle on his desk and now he stared, unblinking, at Gilbert across from him. The light, yellow itself, made Walsingham’s skin look even sallower than usual. He looked at his quarry with dark, shiny eyes, moving only them and not his head as he appraised him.
It had the desired effect. Gilbert grew nervous, and began to squirm.
Verily the man does look like a Spaniard, Gilbert thought. So dark and saturnine. And still. Utterly still, and waiting. They say Philip of Spain is the same way. Quiet, calm, always in control.
Why doesn’t he speak? thought Gilbert.
Still Walsingham continued staring. He folded his hands like a man who deliberates upon everything. Outside, Gilbert could hear the cries of the London street vendors, calling about Christmas.
“So you are a spy for Morgan and the Queen of Scots,” said Walsingham in a flat, even tone.
“No, not a spy! I was returning home to Staffordshire, and Morgan asked me to carry a simple letter!” He smiled what he hoped was a convincing, disarming smile. I’m just a simple country boy, he hoped to convey. I know nothing of these matters.
“Nonsense.” Walsingham’s voice was crisp. “You aren’t returning home. You haven’t been here in eight years, and you don’t belong here now. You are a soldier of fortune, a man who has no real country anymore.”
“No, I—”
“A modern man, a man above parochial strife. Who are you loyal to, Gilbert? The Catholic Church? Your family? I think not. I think you are loyal to only one thing: to Gilbert Gifford. Am I right?” He continued staring with those level eyes.
“Yes, of course I am loyal to myself, but not only to myself! To greater things as well!”
“Like the Queen of Scots?”
“I have no particular loyalty to her. I was only helping in a lowly way to reconnect her to the outside world,” said Gilbert.
“Would it surprise you to know that I, too, am anxious to reconnect her to the outside world?” said Walsingham.
“Yes!” said Gilbert, with a laugh. “For you of all people want her gagged so she cannot foment any more plots. And it is by your orders that she is gagged.”
“Yes, but now I find she is too effectively gagged. Do you understand me, Gilbert?”
“Yes … yes, I do.”
“Now, you know what the penalty is for carrying letters such as you had, do you not? Death. Alas.” Walsingham opened his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “Do you wish to die for that lady imprisoned at Tutbury? For you will.”
“Unless?”
Walsingham gave his first smile of the interview. “So you would entertain an ‘unless’?”
“Indeed, yes.”
Just then someone knocked on the door and entered, bearing some fig cakes and candied fruit. “A Christmas gift, sir,” he said, putting down the silver tray.
Walsingham fingered the sweets. “I love the Christmas foods, although I abhor the excesses of that pagan celebration,” he said. He popped a piece of crystallized ginger in his mouth. “Here.” He extended the tray to Gilbert.
Gilbert forced himself to take one and rolled it around in his dry mouth.
“Now, Gilbert, I wish you to join my ranks,” said Walsingham. “Work with me. My agents are the finest. You could do work you would be proud of. I believe you have the capability. But your task would be simple: continue doing exactly what you were sent here to do. Deliver your letters. Make your contacts. Receive the messages. Only report it all to me. That’s all. That’s the only difference. Do you think you could agree to it?”
“Oh, yes!”
As if there were a choice between hanging and spying!
“And, Gilbert—if you attempt to deceive me, I shall know,” he said. “And you will be deeply sorry, and wish you had taken your original punishment instead. A double traitor who attempts to betray on yet another level is a creature who will find no mercy from any quarter.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Stay within my call,” said Walsingham. “Soon I will need you.”
* * *
That night, Walsingham and Phelippes met after supper in the guarded inner room of Walsingham’s house. Three doors in a row were locked after them. Then Walsingham wound up a contraption that consisted of wheels and cogs and gongs and sticks. When it was going, it made such a clamour of metal and dull thuds that any eavesdroppers would have had trouble discerning the low voices speaking in the background.
Phelippes had been restless with inactivity, and was eager for the meeting. He hoped this meant that some new venture was to be launched.
“We have a new agent, Phelippes,” said his master. “I had the pleasure of welcoming him into our august company this afternoon. He is exactly what we have been searching for: someone whose credentials are impeccable and absolutely acceptable to the other side. He needs no made-up story to explain himself, because his own story is perfect: a man from a well-known local Catholic family, active in Catholic circles overseas, recommended by Thomas Morgan himself! And yet his Catholics are in opposition to the Jesuits here, giving him a perfect excuse to have dealings with our office.”
“And his name?” asked Phelippes. He narrowed his already slitlike eyes as if he would sit in judgement.
“Gilbert Gifford.” Walsingham paused to see if Phelippes would recognize the name. “Now the rest of the plan can be realized. It is time to reopen the post office of the Queen of Scots. She is being transferred from Tutbury to Chartley, and this will prove a change for the better—as far as her mail is concerned. We will be able to peep into her letters, by arranging for there to be a falsely secure transfer of them. As I said, Phelippes, she loves this ‘secret message’ business. So let us indulge her! Let her letters pass through … oh, let me see! What would be dramatic? A beer keg! Yes, let her put her secret messages in a waterproof package in a beer barrel. Chartley has no brewery of its own, so it will be necessary for a barrel to go back and forth from the nearest town.”
“One letter at a time?” said Phelippes.
“Naturally. We do not want a flood, and the beer barrel will not permit a very large package to be hidden in it.”
“But the brewer! What if he does not cooperate?”
“Phelippes! That is your job, to make sure he does!” Walsingham was looking sternly at him. “I find, generally, that between the threat of government displeasure, the promise of money, and the thrill engendered by this sort of thing, they never say no.”
* * *
By New Year’s Day, Phelippes was able to report that the brewer, who wished to go by the code name “the honest man,” was with them.
“He looks like his own beer barrel,” said Phelippes. “And you would hardly believe this, but his name is Bruno! As they say, ‘a great big bear of a man.’ He also has a bear’s appetite for payment; he demanded more than you mentioned.”
“And?” asked Walsingham.
“I paid it, of course. I had no choice.”
Walsingham winced. Yes, he was right, of course, but bother! all this was so expensive, and he would never recoup his expenditure from the Queen. “Indeed, yes. Now that that is taken care of—by the way, did he take to the idea?”
Phelippes laughed—a braying sort of laugh—and nodded. “He is like most folk, longing to feel wicked in a safe sort of way. I gave him to understand that he, and he alone, was the only ‘corrupt’ man in the whole chain. The Queen of Scots’ secretary, that Frenchman Nau, will give him the packets.”
“And he will give them directly to Paulet, who will then give them to you. You will translate them, then return them to Paulet, who will then give them back to the brewer. Then, the brewer, Mr. Honest, will give them to the man he believes is the simple messenger to take them directly to the
French embassy. However, that man will be our friend and new colleague, Gilbert Gifford. Gifford will once again give them to Paulet, who will give them to you.”
“Why a second time? This will be time-consuming, and perhaps the delay will cause suspicions—” Phelippes was scowling, and all the pits on his pockmarked face shifted and elongated.
“To check on the brewer, to make sure he hasn’t added anything or held anything back from Paulet. To make sure he isn’t playing a double game. And the same thing in reverse when the letters come back, to check on Gilbert. One must always have a check on one’s own corrupt agents to make sure their corruption has not run amok or been utilized by others.”
Phelippes now relaxed his face. “That is why you are the master,” he admitted. “No one can equal you in this game.”
Walsingham permitted himself a momentary warm feeling. If only Elizabeth would show her approval thus! “I thank you. I do it all for Her Majesty. No knowledge is ever too dear. Now, later today I would like you to meet our Gilbert Gifford.” He paused and got up to rewind the noise machine, which had run down. Turning back to Phelippes, he said, “He has been busy about London, ingratiating himself with the French at the embassy. The ambassador’s secretary, Sieur de Cherelles, is a trusting soul, and Gilbert is convincing him of his ardent devotion to the Queen of Scots. He is giving Cherelles time to check on his references. Soon he will break the news to Cherelles about the secret post office, and offer to carry the letters that have been piling up at the French embassy for a year now. Cherelles will accept, and—voilà!—our links are complete. The road will open—the road down which the Scottish Queen, we hope, will gallop to her destruction.”
XX
“We are getting a Christmas present,” Mary told her household, as they huddled around the fireplace in the main hall of the lodge at Tutbury.
“A book of annotated Scriptures from Sir Paulet?” said Jane Kennedy, with a giggle.
“No, underdrawers with embroidered admonitions on them,” said Marie Courcelles, the high-spirited Frenchwoman who tried to fill Seton’s place in Mary’s heart.
“A privy stool with Queen Elizabeth’s face on the bottom,” said Willie Douglas.
“Willie!” cried Mary. “That is not funny!”
But everyone was screaming with laughter.
“We are going to be moved,” she said, over the laughter. At once everyone cheered. “To Chartley Manor, an almost-new manor house not far away, belonging to the Earl of Essex.”
“New!” Marie exclaimed. “New!”
“To what do we owe this?” asked Willie, ever suspicious.
“Perhaps to God’s love and concern for us,” said Mary. “Or perhaps just to pure luck. No one ever has all bad luck, you know. Even our luck has to change sometime.”
“Chartley Manor will have down mattresses,” said Marie, looking at the old stained mattress of foul, flattened, mildewed feathers on her mistress’s bed.
“Chartley Manor will have huge glass windows to let in the sunlight,” said Jane.
“Chartley Manor will be made of rose-red bricks that soak in the warmth and hold it long after the sun goes down,” said Barbara Curie, a new attendant who had come and quickly fallen in love with, and married, Mary’s Scottish secretary Curie. There had been a threadbare wedding in the drafty hall at Tutbury only two months earlier.
“Chartley Manor will have espaliered pear trees against those warm bricks,” said Elizabeth Curie, sister to the secretary. “And a bower to sit and read in, where we can just lean back and lazily pick one of the pears.”
“Chartley Manor seems to have inspired your imaginations,” said Mary affectionately. “I can no longer even picture such luxuries.” She glanced at the ugly, dark room with its one guttering, smoky candle. “But dreams are free.”
Geddon came trotting over to her and stood, his ears pricked up as high as they would go.
“Did you hear me, Geddon?” she said. “We are going to a new home. A better place for your old bones. If a year in a dog’s life equals seven of a human’s, then you are … seventy-seven. Almost as old as old Madame Rallay, God rest her.” Mary looked around at the birdcages, all covered now for the night. Not that it mattered, the days being almost as dark as the nights. So few of the birds had survived Tutbury; the drafts had killed them. And the Cardinal, who had sent them to her, gone now as well. No one was left in France who cared about the little things for her. Only the exiles and their eternal plotting.
To them I am not a woman who would like a pet bird, or some new silver embroidery thread, but only a symbol of Catholicism. Symbols don’t need living, breathing things; they don’t read or become lonely or need medicines. They exist on slogans—or so they think, Morgan and Paget and his like. For that is all they offer me for my comfort. Sometimes I would rather have a pair of turtledoves.
* * *
Early the next morning, Willie came bursting into the hall where they were filling their mugs with breakfast ale.
“Damn his black soul!” he cried, throwing down a smouldering box. Sparks and ashes flew out of it. “He was stuffing it in the furnace next to the wall!”
“Why, Willie, what is it?” Mary made her way over to the box, which was emitting puffs of smoke.
“It was from Mary Seton,” he said. “They actually sent it through, from the French embassy. A fellow was here, a Nicholas de Cherelles, and he handed it right over to our friend Paulet. And while I was watching—for I had gone out to empty the chamberpots—that black-hearted wretch, that self-righteous ass, opened it, peeked inside, and then thrust it into the furnace!”
“What happened then? How was it rescued?”
“I ran up to him and shoved him. I grabbed it out and yelled. And do you know what he said, that clodpole with Scripture-books for a spine?” Willie twisted up his face and mimicked him perfectly. “‘This is full of abominable Papist trash!’”
“Yet he let you keep it,” said Mary, surprised.
“I did not give him a chance to grab it back,” Willie said. “He is probably coming after it now.”
Mary and her ladies went to the smudged window and looked out at the courtyard. Paulet was indeed there, talking to two men, and nodding gravely. But he was not following Willie.
“That one’s Cherelles, I heard him say his name,” said Willie. “The other fellow—I don’t know who he is.”
Mary had bent down to the package and was pulling off its singed lid. Inside were rosaries, paintings of saints, holy medals, and silk badges marked Agnus Dei. There was no letter—or if there had been, it had been removed.
“I know Seton sent them,” said Mary. “I remember the sisters making just such badges at St.-Pierre.”
She would treasure the little devotional objects. But, oh! it would have meant so much to have heard directly from Seton how she was faring in France.
* * *
Chartley Manor was indeed a stately house, built on a hill with a moat encircling it, and overlooking the surrounding countryside. An older castle was adjacent to it, its towers embellished with crosses proclaiming that the original owner had gone crusading in the Holy Land. In the summer, doubtless it would prove pleasant enough, but now it lay in the grip of snow and ice, and huge flocks of crows perched on the bare trees surrounding the house. They seemed to be holding their own Parliament, cawing and interrupting one another raucously. Mary shuddered as she had to pass beneath them.
Once settled, everyone—Paulet included—seemed to be in better spirits. The quarters, while not fulfilling the soaring dreams of Mary’s attendants, were so much more spacious and comfortable that they seemed like paradise. Once again the dreary, calcified routine was put into effect, and Mary’s days were ordered from sunrise to midnight. She trod them like a donkey harnessed to go round and round a waterwheel, always turning, but going nowhere.
She was sitting in her chair, one thoughtfully sent from Sheffield that she had always liked, as it had a rung where she could rest her f
eet above the cold floor, when Nau approached her. She sighed. It was time, then, for the daily business meeting. She would have preferred to go on reading. But deviating from the schedule upset the household, particularly its older members like Nau, Balthazzar the tailor, the physician, and the apothecary. So be it.
“Yes, Nau, I know it is time to continue with the memoirs.”
He just stood and bit his lip. She saw that he was trembling.
“Why, what is it? Bad news? Is someone ill?”
“I can hardly relate this to you, I am so filled with joy,” he whispered. “There is—he came this morning—a messenger. From Paris.”
“Without the knowledge of Paulet?” She tried to keep her voice steady. Could it be, could it possibly be?
“Yes. He came, he said, to bring letters to Paulet from the French embassy. But he managed to signal to me—as if he knew me—”
“Perhaps you had been described to him?”
“It would have to be by our friends. No one at court has seen me. That is one advantage—perhaps the only one!—of being shut away from the world as we are. He said—he said—that a way had been arranged to get letters in and out, right under Paulet’s nose. It seems our sympathizers have managed to bribe the brewer who brings the beer from Burton every week, to carry letters.”
“It can’t be true,” said Mary. “Paulet has closed us up so tightly that nothing has got through.”
“But it is! There is no such thing as a truly sealed dwelling. And this fellow—”
“What is his name?” asked Mary.
“Gilbert Gifford. He comes from a Catholic family nearby.”
“How are we to reach him?” she asked.
“Through the brewer. I will transmit the letters to the brewer when he arrives. We must wait until the beer is stored in the cellar before approaching. Gifford himself will come but rarely; otherwise it will be too suspicious. He said to expect the first delivery next Saturday, January sixteenth. And have your letters ready to send. Only one or two, though, as the secret box in the beer barrel is of necessity small, to avoid detection.”
Mary Queen of Scotland and the Isles Page 114