by S. J. Parris
‘Entrez.’
She is seated at a small writing desk by the window, a pen in her hand. She looks up and an expression of confusion flits briefly across her face when she sees me in the doorway, as if I am out of context, an actor who has wandered on to the stage in the wrong scene, but she composes herself quickly and motions to me to close the door.
‘Bruno.’ She stands and smooths down her skirt; she wears a dress of pale gold silk, the bodice sewn with pearl buttons. Her hair is unbound and falls around her shoulders; the light catches the curve of her cheekbone as she moves towards me. I remind myself that I am doing this to catch a murderer, and that this woman may even be the architect of those murders.
‘You have heard the terrible news about the clerk, I suppose?’ She does not immediately approach me but stands a few feet away, her hands folded in front of her. She seems more than a little discomfited by my unexpected visit, which is probably to my advantage.
‘Dumas. Yes. I - I can hardly believe it.’ I pinch the bridge of my nose between my forefinger and thumb and lower my eyes. Let her think I am overcome with emotion; women are always glad of an opportunity to comfort a man in distress, I have noticed.
‘One can so easily forget what a dangerous city this is.’ She gives a little shudder of distaste. ‘Especially if you are a Catholic. Poor - Dumas, was it? And how are you today? You must have quite a headache.’ She laughs, nervously, and glances at the door.
‘Yes. I wanted to apologise for my conduct last night -‘ I begin, touching my fingers to my temple.
‘Oh, please think nothing of it. It was amusing to see the Earl of Arundel so shocked. He really is the most unbearable prig.’ She pouts, and this time her laughter sounds more relaxed. ‘I did not take you for a drinker though, Bruno.’
‘No, I am not usually,’ I say, allowing my gaze to wander around the room in a way that I hope is not too obvious. Against the opposite wall stands a bed with white curtains drawn around and beside it a dresser with a looking-glass propped against the wall, strewn with pots of cosmetics, brushes and glass bottles. If someone wanted to fill a perfume bottle with poison, here would be an obvious place to find one. By the window is the small writing desk; several sheets of paper lie covered in neat script where she left off at my interruption. I turn my attention back to her face. ‘It was out of character. I have a lot on my mind. Forgive me.’
Finally she seems to soften; she comes closer, lays a hand on my arm.
‘Nothing to forgive. We are all carrying a great weight at the moment - there is so much at stake here. Not just our lives, if we should fail, but the future of Christendom. Let us not forget that this is what we fight for.’ She looks up at me, her eyes wide and full of meaning. ‘We must all try to stay strong. There are so few of us - we will not succeed divided.’
I nod with feeling as I glance again at her dressing table, and then I see it. Amid the pots and cloths and trailing strings of glass beads, a small green velvet casket, of the size that might hold a signet ring. Mary Stuart’s ring was sent in a green velvet casket, I recall. I cross to the dresser and make a pretence of studying myself in the mirror.
‘I must apologise too for my appearance,’ I say, bending as if to examine my own dishevelled face.
‘Your appearance is as charming as ever, Bruno,’ she says, still smiling, but there is uncertainty in her voice; she would like me to get to the point. I meet her eyes in the mirror as I pick up a necklace and allow its stones to trickle through my fingers.
‘You have some beautiful jewellery here,’ I murmur, trying to sound as if I am a connoisseur. ‘And this is pretty too.’ I pick up the green casket and hold it up to the light, turning it around in my hands.
‘Yes, my husband is very generous with his gifts.’
‘May I see?’ I open the casket; it is empty. ‘Is this from Paris? I have seen some similar -‘
‘I do not recall where it is from,’ she says, and this time her impatience is unmistakable. ‘Bruno - was there anything? Only, I am just writing some correspondence while Katherine is with her governess, and soon they will be finished, so if …’ She leaves the implication suspended.
I replace the box and turn to face her.
‘I am sorry. I have been confused by my feelings for you, Marie. I have been trying to fight something that cannot be fought.’
She seems taken aback by this; again I have the sense that I am reading the wrong lines. For a moment I fear she is going to tell me that it’s not a convenient time, that I have missed my chance. But she regards me with a kind of curiosity, then moves again towards me with a last glance over her shoulder at the door before laying a hand on my chest. I must get her talking about Dumas again while I have her attention.
‘I have been distressed by the death of my friend, too.’ I lower my head towards her. She cups a hand around the back of my neck and strokes my hair. A simple gesture of reassurance; I do not fool myself that she is sincere, and yet this touch reminds me how long it has been since I allowed anyone to show me affection.
‘Poor Bruno,’ she murmurs. ‘But there was nothing you could have done.’
‘Yet he seemed so anxious yesterday morning,’ I persist, curling my neck back like a cat as she caresses me. ‘I should have paid more attention.’
‘You were not to know,’ she whispers, soothing. ‘Did he seem anxious about something in particular, then? Did he tell you what was troubling him?’ Her fingers slide through my hair and down my nape inside my collar, but I am alert now; she wants information from me, just as I want it from her without yielding anything myself.
‘He didn’t get the chance.’
She tilts her head back sharply with a questioning look.
‘That poor man,’ she says lightly, resuming her stroking. ‘I barely paid him any heed, except to worry what he might say to my husband about my visiting your chamber. I suppose that is one less problem now.’ She smiles up as if expecting me to share the joke. By this time I should not be surprised at her callousness, but somehow it shocks afresh with each new display. But I smile in return. ‘Besides,’ she purrs, as she takes my arms, still hanging awkwardly at my sides, and places them purposefully around her small waist as she presses against me, ‘my husband is out at the Spanish embassy this afternoon. Perhaps it would do you good to forget your worries for a while, Bruno.’
And then her mouth is on mine and I simply let her; my conscience and my will seem to recede to a pinpoint at the back of my skull so that I stand there, almost inert with tiredness and resignation, while my body responds predictably. Among the detached thoughts circling my brain as her fingers slide along my collar bone and begin to unlace my shirt is the memory of the look that passed between her and Dumas the previous morning in my chamber. He was afraid of her. This woman, the one whose tongue is flickering over my lips and who is even now lifting my shirt over my head as her nails scrape lightly up my spine, might be the very person who decided at that moment to have him silenced.
She drops my shirt to the floor and runs a hand down my chest, then takes both my hands and leads me to the bed, where she draws back the curtain and pushes against me until I am lying across the sheet. She eases herself down beside me - a complex manoeuvre, given the volume of her skirts - and I close my eyes as her hair brushes my skin and I feel her lips on my chest, moving lower, as her hand massages expertly along the inside of my thigh, my skin fully alive but my thoughts still remote until a woman’s voice from somewhere beyond the room distinctly says.
‘Madame?’
Marie leaps up as if she has been stung, motioning for me to pull up my legs inside the bed.
‘What is it, Bernadette?’
There is a timid tap at the door.
‘May I speak to you, madame? About Katherine.’
‘Can’t it wait?’ she calls back, peevish.
‘I fear not, madame. She complains of a fever and a pain in her stomach.’
‘Well, I am not a physician. Tell he
r you will fetch the barber surgeon - that will soon put an end to these games.’
A pause from the other side of the door.
‘Madame, I do not think she pretends. She feels very hot.’ The governess’s voice is strained. ‘She is calling for her mother.’
‘Oh, very well. Give me a moment.’
Marie rolls her eyes, stands and brushes down her dress. ‘Stay there,’ she mouths, then draws the curtain around me. I lie motionless as I hear the door click shut, then with an almighty effort of will, I bring my thoughts back to the task in hand. Adjusting my breeches, I scuttle to the writing desk and scan the sheets of paper Marie has left there. ‘Mon cher Henry,’ the letter begins. At first I assume she is writing to Howard, but as I scan through the papers, I am startled to find a reference to taking the crown of England followed by the French throne. Is this King Henri of France, then? Convinced I must have misread it, I force myself to look again, more thoroughly, and I see that in the same paragraph she writes of ‘your Scottish cousin’ being easy to move aside in due course, and ‘the reign of our weak king’ facing its last days. I feel my face stretch in disbelief as I take it in. This is meant for Henry, Duke of Guise, and the letter is full of scattered intimacies; a mention of the pain of separation, the cruelty of distance, remembered embraces, a wish to be reunited as soon as God allows. At the end of the letter she has scribbled a postscript, in a hand that looks as if it was done in haste: ‘I do not know when you will receive this, as I cannot send by my usual means.’ Beside her signature she has drawn a picture of a rose.
I return the paper to the desk, slow and stupid with amazement. This invasion plan truly has become all things to all men; Marie may talk of unity but while Henry Howard contrives his own secret agenda, so too does she scheme to turn it to her own profit. So she is more intimate than I guessed with the Duke of Guise, who evidently regards the English throne as his rightful spoils once the small matter of replacing the monarch is dealt with. What is Marie’s ultimate ambition, I wonder - is she hoping her husband will be a casualty of the ‘weak’ French king’s demise, so that she can take her place by Guise’s side? I wander back to the dressing table and pick up the green velvet casket again, still shaking my head. Behind their talk of religious purity and their duty to Christendom and the eternal souls of the English people, each of them is scrambling for dynastic advantage. You can be certain that Mendoza and the Spanish king are not lending their resources out of piety either, I think, turning the box over and over between my hands; if this invasion should really happen, they would tear England apart between them like street dogs falling on a scrap of meat. Elizabeth Tudor will certainly be a casualty, but Mary Stuart could also find her jubilant restoration turns quickly to a worse fate if the wrong faction gains the upper hand, and those good, rational men of the Privy Council - Walsingham, Burghley, Leicester - would all be destroyed. This small island, with its strange ways and the few precious freedoms it offers to those who, like me, have made an enemy of Rome, will be thrown into a turmoil that will make all the end-of-days prophecies of the penny pamphlets look like children’s stories, and who will be left to restore order except the powers of France or Spain, funded by the pope?
The green casket tells me nothing. I am no expert in jewel-lery, so I have no way of knowing whether this little box could be Mary Stuart’s and have made its way to Marie via Dumas, or whether it is the commonest sort of container. But thinking of Dumas, I suddenly stop and remember in a new light Marie’s hasty postscript. She could not send by her usual means - could she have meant Dumas? If Guise is her lover, she could not send letters to him through the embassy’s diplomatic packet; she would have needed another messenger, a secret means of conveying letters to France. Guise has his own agents and envoys in England - he conducts himself as if he were an alternative king already - and Dumas, forever trotting back and forth to the city with letters for Throckmorton and the official embassy correspondence, could easily carry one more set of messages. As I knew only too well, he was more than willing to run additional errands if there was a chance to make money - a willingness that eventually cost him his life. Did Marie imagine that he had told me her secret? I recall the Duke of Guise from his appearances at the court of King Henri when I was living in Paris last year; a handsome man in his early thirties, with exuberantly curled hair and a sweeping air of entitlement. The French king always seemed cowed by him; it is easy to see how he might seem, by contrast, like the charismatic leader France lacks, especially to a woman like Marie. I regard my own naked torso in the glass and cannot avoid wondering whether she does to him what she had been about to do to me if the governess had not interrupted; I dislike myself for the pang of resentment this produces.
When the latch clicks I turn in anticipation, but instead of Marie, it is Courcelles who stands in the doorway with a piece of paper in his hand. He blinks rapidly, looks me up and down, glances to the bed and makes several attempts to speak before any words emerge.
‘What -? Where is she?’
‘Her daughter was taken ill.’
He glances at the door, then back to me as if struggling to accept the evidence of his eyes. Then he tucks the paper away by his side.
‘And you - she -?’ He waves a hand vaguely in the direct ion of the bed. I find myself battling an urge to laugh at his evident lack of composure; I wonder if Courcelles is also her lover, if she amuses herself with him while she writes her scheming billets-doux to Guise. Certainly his demeanour betrays a very personal sense of outrage. I merely shrug and raise an eyebrow; my state of undress and evident arousal make any justification redundant.
‘I might ask what brings you to her private chamber,’ I say instead, trying to sound casual as I bend to retrieve my shirt.
‘A messenger has just arrived for her from Lord Henry Howard.’ He brandishes his folded letter at me.
‘Is that your job now? Should you not be making the burial arrangements for poor Dumas?’
This seems to galvanise him; he strides across to me and jabs a finger in my face.
‘You think you can get away with anything, don’t you? You just talk your way into everyone’s confidence, you show no respect for birth or position, you think you can carve your own path with no consequences, all because you can make the king of France laugh.’
‘Oh, stop - you are making me blush.’
‘How do you think the ambassador will respond to this, Bruno?’ he hisses, poking my bare chest and leaning down so that his face is almost as near to mine as Marie’s was a moment ago. ‘After the faith he has placed in you. I should not be surprised if he decided to send you back to France. Let the king protect you from what’s coming there, if he can.’
‘And what is coming there, Claude?’ I say, determined to keep my voice light. ‘Something King Henri should know about? Or my lord ambassador? Some sort of coup, perhaps? As a loyal subject, I’m sure you would share whatever you knew to protect your sovereign. Or do your loyalties lie elsewhere now?’ I pull my shirt over my head and stare him down; to my satisfaction, he looks away first. I glance over his shoulder and see Marie standing in the doorway, her arms folded across her chest and her lips pressed into a white line.
‘If my husband hears a word about this, you will both be on the next boat to France with such a stain on your reputat ions that you will never find a position in the French court again,’ she says, pointing between us. ‘Understand?’
‘Marie - I have done nothing! I came to bring you this and found him here.’ Courcelles flaps his letter at her, aggrieved. She gives him a long, reproving look.
‘Don’t be disingenuous, Claude. We must all keep one another’s confidences in this house.’ She looks from him to me and I realise then that Courcelles is familiar with this room, this bed. I watch Marie with rising anger. She certainly knows how to keep herself busy. The worst of it is that I am most annoyed with myself for feeling even a passing stab of jealousy. Then I think of Castelnau keeping his lonely night vig
il in his study and the anger is displaced by a wave of guilt.
‘How is Katherine?’ I ask.
‘She’ll be fine.’ Her tone is clipped now, businesslike, as she reaches for the letter and breaks the seal. It is clear that I am no longer required. ‘You had better go, Bruno. And lace your shirt. We don’t want the servants to gossip.’
Courcelles aims a look of pure hatred at me as I reach the door, but my attention is fixed on the letter in Marie’s hand. What can Howard have to tell her since last night, unless it is something about me?
‘Bruno,’ she says, holding out her hand, palm up. ‘The box?’
I realise I am still clutching the green velvet casket. I pass it over with a muttered apology; she narrows her eyes, then her face softens and she squeezes my hand briefly. ‘Perhaps we will pick up our discussion where we left off another time.’
Lifting her hand, I press it to my lips in a grand gesture, just to irritate Courcelles, who appears ready to explode with an excess of choler. I may not have achieved everything I came here for, but I have discovered Marie’s underlying motive. What part does Courcelles play then, I wonder, considering him as I stand in the doorway and he watches me with the face of a man who would gladly commit murder at this moment? Does he know about the Duke of Guise, or does he believe that he, Claude de Courcelles, is destined to replace the ambassador at Marie’s side when the glorious Catholic reconquest is complete? Either way, I sense that the two of them have closed ranks against me, standing shoulder to shoulder as they wait for me to leave so they can discuss this message from Howard, and again I am furious with myself for feeling that she has toyed with me; absurd, too, when it was I who went to her chamber with the intention of tricking her in the first place. I give them a last look, then leave them to their plotting. As I pass the door of the nursery, I catch the muffled sound of a child crying.