by Ann Swinfen
‘You are right.’ His voice had dropped from a passionate cry to a whisper. ‘You are right. I should not inflict this on you. But we must not forget! If men forget the evil that can be done, then evil will be done. Again and again.’
‘I do not believe that Sir Anthony Babington is capable of such evil.’ My voice was trembling, but I had to speak what I believed to be the truth.
‘I agree,’ he said. ‘I too do not believe Babington capable of such evil. However, it is men like Babington who make clear the path for other men to outdo the Devil himself. That is their danger. Good men, acting according to their principles, and bringing down evil on all of us.’
I looked at him blankly. I was so tired I could hardly think. ‘But how . . .?’ And then there came into my mind the face of Robert Poley. ‘You mean, people like Babington are used by evil men?
‘Well,’ he said with a sigh, ‘Babington does not plan to massacre people on the streets, I am sure, but he does plan for assassins to kill the Queen and for foreign troops to invade England. No doubt he hides from himself what the consequences will be. Or perhaps he has begun to understand, at last. That is why he wants to go abroad. To run away from this great boulder he has started rolling down the hill. He is afraid of what it may crush. Or perhaps not. The letter he writes to the Scottish queen will make all clear, one way or the other. Will he stay or will he run away?’
‘You want him to stay, do you not?’
‘Yes, Kit. I do. Because these conspiracies to murder our Queen and put Mary on the throne in her place have gone on long enough. This is, at the very least, the seventh plot to kill Her Majesty since she came to the throne. It is time matters were brought to a head at last. Apart from murder and invasion and a forced return to the power of the papacy, have you ever thought what would become of this country with that woman on the throne? A woman who arranged the murder of her own husband? A woman so hated by her own people in Scotland that they cast her off the throne? Her own son wants nothing to do with her and has rejected her religion. As queen she would destroy this country.’
I leaned my elbows on my knees and put my head in my hands. I knew when I was defeated.
‘What do you want me to do?’ I said.
He got up and poured me another glass of wine.
‘Drink it,’ he said, as he sat down again. ‘In a few minutes you must go home and get some rest. I do not want you to do very much, Kit. Babington wants you to deliver his answer to the Scottish queen. First you will bring it here to be deciphered, then you will ride to Chartley and deliver it. Once you have done that, stay nearby. Thomas and Arthur Gregory will be coming after you, but not with you. Gifford is still acting as courier. We expect Mary’s response to Babington will be despatched in the usual way, in the beer barrels taken from the house to the brewer. Gifford will hand it over in Chartley, instead of bringing it to London, so you and Thomas will decipher it there, Gregory will reseal it, and Gifford will despatch it. You can then all return to London.’
‘That is all?’
‘That is all.’
Apart from that long, long ride, it did not sound so terrible now, particularly if Phelippes and Gregory would be there with me.
‘Very well,’ I said.
‘Good. Now go home, take off those dreadful clothes and rest for two days. Then we will see.’
At the door of his chamber I paused and turned back.
‘It is not that I do not understand the terrible danger to England, Sir Francis. It is that I do not think I am the right person for this work.’
‘You underrate yourself, Kit,’ he said.
Two days later I donned the clothes of ‘Simon’ the messenger boy and collected Hector from the Seething Lane stable. I was to present myself at Hernes Rents as ready to ride north at once, but would in fact return to Walsingham’s house where the letter would be opened, copied and resealed before I set out. Once again I was apprehensive, in case someone followed me, but I hoped I could weave a way through the back streets of the city and lose any pursuer.
When I reached Babington’s lodgings, however, all this careful scheming was thrown into disarray. The door was opened by a different servant, not in Babington’s livery, who shook his head when I asked for Sir Anthony.
‘He’s not here any more. He’s moved to lodgings in Fleet Street. Some tailor’s house.’ And he shut the door in my face.
My heart sank. I had not wanted this task, but having taken it on I did not want to fail in it. Babington had told me to come here. Why had he moved and left no word for me? I remembered that Phelippes had told me he was constantly moving from house to house. He had once mentioned a tailor’s house on Fleet Street, just outside Temple Bar. I could go back to Seething Lane to ask for directions, or I could try to find it myself. I decided on the latter course, thinking I could always return to Walsingham’s if I could not find it.
It proved easier than I expected, as there was only one tailor’s premises near Temple Bar, an ancient rambling house with the business premises on the ground floor, opening on to the street, and several other doors and staircases leading to wings that had been added to the original building. I enquired in the shop and one of the doors was pointed out to me. When I knocked, the serving man I had seen before opened it to me.
‘Good. You found us.’ He beckoned me inside. ‘You were given Sir Anthony’s message to come here?’
I shook my head. ‘A man just said Sir Anthony was lodging with a tailor in Fleet Street. He did not give me any message.’
The man clicked his tongue in annoyance.
‘Is the letter ready?’ I asked. ‘I should be off. It’s a long ride.’
‘Sir Anthony has changed his mind,’ he said. ‘He left for Lichfield yesterday.’
Dismay must have showed on my face, for he smiled. ‘Don’t worry. You’ll still earn your fee. He wants you to ride after him and meet him at the White Hart Inn. He will finish his letter there, and be on hand for the reply. He left this to pay for your inn at Lichfield. Better you stay at a different inn, he says, but call on him as soon as you arrive.’
He handed me a purse. Quite a heavy purse. Sir Anthony was generous with his money. He was known to be wealthy, but many wealthy men are misers. I stowed the purse in my pocket.
‘I’ll be off then.’
He showed me to the door. It was a strange, disreputable lodging for a man of Sir Anthony’s standing.
‘God go with you on your journey,’ he said.
‘Thank you. God be with you.’
As I unhitched Hector and mounted, I thought again of how courteously a poor messenger boy was treated by Sir Anthony and his servant. However, I now had a problem. I could not take the letter back to Phelippes, for I had no letter. I would, however, need to return to Seething Lane to explain the change in plans.
When I told him of Babington’s departure, Phelippes frowned at first, and then shrugged.
‘It cannot be helped. Arthur and I intend to follow you tomorrow anyway. There is a small inn in the village, Stowe-by-Chartley. We’ll take rooms there. Once you have collected the letter in Lichfield come to us in Stowe.’
He rubbed his eyes, as he often did when thinking.
‘That horse you ride is very conspicuous. Someone from the manor might notice it. You’d better conceal him somewhere outside the village and come to the inn on foot. Then when we have the letter resealed for you, you can ride up to the manor house as though you have just arrived.’
I nodded. It was a wise precaution. Hector was unmistakable.
My second journey to Lichfield was much like the first, save that I now knew the way, so that it seemed to pass more quickly. The weather was, if anything, even hotter. In the fields that we passed the cut hay lay drying and the wheat and barley stood tall and golden, but there had been little rain in recent weeks to plump the grain. After several wet summers, the farmers might be glad of the heat to dry the hay, but I found it worrying. This was the kind of weather that bred the
plague. I should be in the hospital, not careering about the country.
A long ride along a known route leaves much time for thinking and I gave a good deal of thought to how I might extricate myself from Walsingham’s service. His further description of what had happened in Paris had frightened me badly, awakening memories of Portugal that I had managed to bury for the last four years. I knew I must complete this mission, which he deemed so crucial for the safety and security of both Queen and country, but when it was ended – and surely it would soon be ended? – I would tell him that I no longer wished to work for him.
Poley! How could I forget Poley? I understood by now that he had brought me into Walsingham’s service as part of his efforts to show himself an agent faithful to England’s cause. Phelippes had needed another code-breaker and Poley had found him one, young and biddable, easy to manipulate. Congratulations to Master Poley. But if I tried to break away, would Poley betray me? If it suited his purposes, he would not hesitate. But where did Poley stand in the present projection? Sir Francis had placed Poley in Babington’s household as a spy, but what if Poley was already a part of that group of conspirators, and was passing information about Sir Francis’s network to them? I had seen him in Babington’s company long before it was said he had been placed there. And if all the conspirators were rounded up and sent to trial, as Walsingham hoped? Did that include Poley?
These thoughts went round and round in my head as I rode north. And when I could shake myself free of them, thoughts of Simon rushed in. I had not seen him since before my first trip to Lichfield and I found I was longing for him. And with the longing, certain forbidden ideas came into my head. What if I were to reveal my true identity to him? He might reject me in horror, as a monster, a man-woman, the repulsive thing against which the church thundered and the law shook its horrified finger. A woman who did not keep to her inferior position but dared to ape the finer species, her superior in every way.
Man.
No. I did not think Simon would be horrified, but certainly he could no longer be the easy companion he had been. He might not even like me. A man does not look for the same qualities in a woman as he values in a man. I would lose his friendship and it might not be replaced in him with the feeling that now knotted itself in my stomach and turned my legs to water. I had never known anything like this before. I was beginning to accept with my mind that I was in love with Simon, but I was unprepared for these physical signs of weakness over which I seemed to have no control. Even in his absence I could not suppress them.
How I wished I had not lost my mother and sister. I wanted another woman to talk to, but in my male world there was only Sara Lopez, and I did not feel I could talk to her of this, although I was not quite sure why. Certainly I could not talk to my father. Much as I loved him, I did not think he would understand my feelings. Besides, he would fear the danger I would place myself in if I should reveal myself as a woman. And he did not like Simon, merely because he was an actor. He would not regard an English mountebank as even worth considering as the suitor of a Portuguese professor’s daughter. My father’s pride had been humbled since we had come as refugees to England, but certain moral standards he would not relax, and that was one of them.
I was still lost in the maze of these thoughts when I reached Lichfield and found myself a room again at the Swan. Once I had seen to Hector, I walked round to the White Hart, where I asked for Sir Anthony.
‘Come in, lad, come in!’ he said, waving me to a chair. ‘Edward, see whether the landlord can find some food for the boy. He looks hungry to me.’ He beamed at me, clearly in high spirits.
As the servant went out in search of food, which I would not refuse, he said, ‘I’ve forgotten your name, lad.’
‘It is Simon, sir.’
‘Well, Simon, the letter is not quite ready, but it would be too late to take it tonight anyway. Can you read?’
‘Certainly, sir,’ I said stiffly.
‘I’ll wager you’ve never read anything like this!’ He beckoned me over and held out to me the top sheet from a pile of papers.
It was covered with the symbols of one of Curll’s simplest ciphers. I could read it straight off, even without a key. It was a long paragraph listing possible ports where ships from France could land men.
‘Clever, isn’t?’ he said. ‘Takes me the devil of a time to work out, though.’
‘Is it a secret language, sir?’ I asked innocently.
‘Yes, I suppose you could call it that. Secret, certainly. It’s what they call a “cipher” or a “code”. Ah, here’s Edward with a tray.’
I ate the excellent game pie and gooseberry fool with relish. It would save me paying for a meal at my inn. When I had finished, I stood, turning my dreadful cap in my hands.
‘Shall I come back tomorrow morning, sir?’
Babington ran his hands through his hair and flipped through his papers.
‘To be quite honest with you, Simon, I do not think this will be finished until the evening. Come about dusk and I’ll have it ready for you. Then you can start for Chartley first thing the next morning.’
‘Should I wait for an answer, sir?’
‘See what Curll says. It may take some time. Perhaps you should stay up there for a day or two, if Curll thinks best.’
I bowed my way out. Despite a bad start, it seemed things were falling into place now.
Having the next day to myself, I strolled about the little town, visiting the marketplace and buying a new cap with some of the money from the purse I had been given. It was still a cap suitable for a messenger boy, but at least it was clean and not as hot. When I passed the great pond near the cathedral, I threw the old cap in and waited for it to sink. A couple of mallards swam over to investigate, thinking it some curious form of vegetable life, but they soon scorned it and it sank at last.
During the afternoon I spent some time on my knees in the cathedral. I love the cool bare spaces of these English cathedrals. The churches I had known in Portugal had been a riot of colour, so full of statues and draperies and candles and side altars and crucifixes that my mind was always distracted. The space here was like a quiet grove of great trees, ancient beeches, perhaps, with their trunks soaring high above me and meeting overhead in a glorious intertwining of the branches in the roof of the nave. Yet at the same time the patterning of the ribbed vaulting was like the physical manifestation of a mathematical problem, elegant and pure, a problem which had been solved by those long-ago stone masons in a breathtaking union of tree and stone, art and reason, nature and mathematics.
It set me to thinking about symmetry in nature, the beautiful symmetry of the most humble leaf, or the complex spiral at the centre of a daisy. Yet mankind is not symmetrical. Yes, we seem symmetrical, our bodies’ symmetry mapped from one side to the other down the central line from nose to crotch. Yet we are not. Even our faces give us away with their tiny asymmetries. The real secret of man’s deviation lies within, however. I was not a surgeon, but my father had instructed me in the anatomy of the human body that I might be a better physician, and I had read his Vesalius, one of the few books he had managed to bring with him from his considerable library.
Is it the asymmetry of our internal organs that makes us restless, never quite at ease in the world? The Bible says Eve ate the forbidden fruit of knowledge and thus mankind was cast out from Eden. But what if that asymmetry, that sense of being slightly askew from nature was the real root of the trouble?
I stayed in the cathedral until it was time to go back to the White Hart, letting its peace wash over me. I prayed that what I was doing was right, that God would give me some sign if I should abandon this task now. But He gave no sign. I emerged from the cathedral blinking in the setting sun. I felt quiet. Not at peace exactly, but as though I must simply move through the next hours not thinking, but simply doing.
Phelippes and Gregory should be near now. If they had left the day after me, they should reach Lichfield this afternoon or evening, but
they would ride on to Stowe-by-Chartley without stopping. It would have been a hard ride for Phelippes. I hoped they would be there when I reached the village tomorrow, otherwise I would have to wait about, and that might cause comment.
The letter was ready. Sir Anthony handed me a fat packet, firmly sealed and stamped with his coat of arms, which I recognised from one of those seals regularly in use on Gregory’s desk. It was no wonder it had taken him so long to encode. What I held in my hand was more the size and weight of a government report than a letter.
‘I’ll be on my way first thing tomorrow, Sir Anthony. Then wait near Chartley in case there is an answer to bring back.’
He wished me God speed and slipped another sovereign into my hand. At this rate I would soon be the richest messenger boy in England.
The next morning I was not in a great hurry to leave. Having heard and seen nothing of Phelippes and Gregory, I did not want to reach Stowe too soon. After a leisurely breakfast at the Swan, I set Hector ambling peacefully along the road to Rugeley. It took us considerably longer than it had done the previous time, but at last I rode up to the outskirts of the village. Remembering Phelippes’s advice to arrive on foot, I found a copse of birch and elm where I tethered Hector, removing his bridle so that he could graze more easily, and hanging it on a branch. Then I made my way the last few hundred yards on foot into the village with its single inn. I need not have worried. Phelippes was sitting on a bench outside, apparently enjoying the sun. He seemed to be smiling to himself over some private joke.
‘Ah, there you are, Kit. Do you have what we came for?’
‘It is here.’ I tapped the satchel at my side. ‘It’s very fat. It will take a long time to copy.’
‘Then we’d best make a start.’
He grinned again and I wondered what had amused him. I did not need to ask, for he was keen to tell me.
‘You will never guess who has just passed by.’
‘Curll?’ I ventured.
‘No. Her Scottish Majesty herself! She drove past in a carriage. I suppose they must let her out occasionally for some air.’