by S. J. Parris
‘Courage, mon brave. Think of the coins chinking in your purse, if nothing else. You could hop across the river to Southwark and find yourself a willing girl in one of the bawdy-houses. That would put a smile on your face. Besides —‘ I turn with a sigh towards the window, where a pale light slides through the gap in the shutters and slants across the bare boards — ‘I don’t yet know what we are involved in here, Leon, but if we do our work carefully, a great many people may end up owing us their lives. Including,’ I add, in a whisper, as the young clerk’s eyes threaten to pop out of his head, ‘the English queen herself.’
I step out at around eleven into a golden autumn morning, as if the half-hearted English sun were belatedly trying to atone for its absence all through the cold, damp summer. In the embassy garden at Salisbury Court, the trees are a riot of colour, almost luminous against the blue with the dusty sunlight behind them: crimson, ochre, burnt amber, delicate greens still lingering from the summer, all gaudy as the coloured silks Sidney and his friends wear to parade around court. I am dressed, today as every other day, in black; a lone sombre shadow in this landscape of colour. For thirteen years I wore the black habit of the Dominican order; later, when I scraped a living teaching in the universities of Europe, I put on the black gown of doctors and academics. Now that I am free of the constraints of a uniform, I still wear black; it saves me the trouble of thinking about it too much. Fashion has never held much interest for me; sometimes I wonder how the young dandies can move about freely in their costumes, puffed up as they are with ballooning breeches and sleeves, slashed so that the rich linings show through in contrasting colours, or choked by their vast ruffs of starched lace. My only indulgence with the retainer Walsingham pays me is to buy clothes of good quality cloth, shirts of fine linen under a black leather jerkin, cut to fit close to my body, no material wasted. Sidney teases me that I am wearing the same clothes every time he sees me. In fact, they are many different copies of the same clothes; I am fastidious about clean laundry, and change my linen far more often than most of the Englishmen I know. Perhaps this comes from those months I spent running from the Inquisition when I first fled the monastery at Naples; when I slept in roadside inns in the company of rats and lice, sometimes walking miles in a day to put enough distance between myself and Rome, with only the clothes on my back. To recall that part of my life even fleetingly makes me start to itch all over and want to change my shirt.
Through the scattered patterns of bright leaves I walk the length of the garden as the morning grows warmer, a book unopened in my hand. Beyond its boundary wall I hear the cries of boatmen on the river, the soft lapping of the waves against the muddy shoreline. Fowler’s note asked me to meet him at three o’clock today at the Mermaid Tavern on Cheapside; there is nothing for me to do until Dumas has finished copying out the ambassador’s secret letters and is ready to take them to young Master Throckmorton. If luck and timing are on our side, we can take the letters to Walsingham’s man Thomas Phelippes in Leadenhall Street on the way, have them opened, copied and resealed, then Dumas can deliver the originals to Paul’s Wharf while I take the copies to Fowler at the tavern.
I have spent the morning in my room, trying to make some progress on my book. Since my return from Oxford in the spring, this has been my chief occupation; the work that I believe will turn all the established knowledge of the European academies on its head. In the same way that Copernicus’s theory that the Sun and not the Earth lies at the centre of the known universe sent ripples through Christendom, forcing every cosmologist and astronomer to reconsider what they believed to be fact, so my treatise is nothing less than a new and enlightened understanding of religion, one that I hope will open the eyes of those men and women who have a mind to comprehend it to the possibility of unity. My philosophy is nothing less than a revolutionary understanding of the relationship between man and that which we call God, one that transcends the present divisions between Catholic and Protestant that have caused so much needless suffering. I have some hope that Queen Elizabeth of England has a mind equal to understanding my ideas, if I could only secure a chance to present them to her. To this end I have been passing my days as often as I can in Dee’s library, immersing myself in the surviving writings of Hermes Trismegistus and the neoPlatonists, as well as other, secret volumes, full of hard-won wisdom and ancient knowledge, books of which Dee holds the only copy.
But since the night of Sidney’s wedding and the murder of Cecily Ashe, I have been drawn back from the world of ideas to the present violence I hope one day to end. My mind will not settle, so I have brought a book out to the garden, where all I do is scuff the scattered leaves and dwell on the image of Cecily Ashe stretched out on a bed in Richmond Palace in her gentleman’s clothes, her bruised and distorted face, the mark cut into her breast. The death is no longer my business, I suppose, and yet the image of her corpse nags at me; last night I dreamed about the murder, dreamed I was chasing a shadowy figure with a crucifix through the mist in an abandoned graveyard until finally he turned around and I glimpsed beneath his hood the face of Doctor Dee.
This murder reminds me too closely of the deaths I witnessed in Oxford in the spring; this was not violence done in the heat of the moment but a cold-blooded killing meant as a symbol, a warning. But of what? And if it had been the young suitor Abigail had mentioned, what calculated planning he must have put into his work! To woo a young woman for the best part of a month with sweet words and expensive presents, with the intention all along of leaving her cold body as a blank page on which he would write his own message in her blood. I picture the girl Cecily, the way Abigail had described her delight in her secret liaison, the innocence of that first love at seventeen, never imagining that she was inviting her own destruction. Perhaps inevitably my thoughts follow this path to another young woman whose life had been destroyed by falling in love: Sophia, the girl I had known in Oxford who had briefly touched my own heart, though I did not know then that she had already given hers to a man who betrayed her and almost killed her. As if to prolong the discomfort, my memory gropes further back, to Morgana, the woman I had loved two years earlier when I lived in Toulouse. She was in love with me, but as I had neither the money nor the position to marry her, I had slipped away quietly one night to Paris without saying goodbye. I had thought I was doing the right thing, leaving her free to make the marriage that would please her father and give her a life of ease, but she too had died before her time. Was her life also cut short because she made the mistake of falling in love?
I will never know, but I remember the look that passed between Walsingham and Burghley across the body of Cecily Ashe and feel a profound wash of relief that I have no daughter to fear for. Despite the unseasonable warmth, I shiver. The fragility of these girls, how vulnerable they make themselves when they put their trust in men. If I were a praying man, I would pray that the maid Abigail remains safe. As it is, all I can do is hope that the killer believes his message has been understood. If not, he may feel the need to write it again.
All this musing has brought me to the end of the garden. Turning back along the path towards the house, I am almost bowled over by a small beribboned dog chasing a ball made of rags and chased in its turn by a girl of about five years who comes flying through the piles of leaves, her hair and her blue gown whipping behind her. The ball rolls to my feet and I snatch it up just before the dog reaches it. I hold it aloft and the dog’s yapping grows frantic as it leaps and twists off the ground, its eyes fixed on my hand. The little girl slows to a halt in front of me, her expression wary; I lob the rag ball to her over the dog’s head and the child is so surprised that she catches it, more by accident than design. The dog flings itself at her and she scoops it up into her arms, giving it the ball, which it worries with a comical growl, as if it had subdued a great enemy.
‘Pierrot, tu es mechant!‘ the child scolds.
‘Pierrot?’ I ask, crouching so that I can look her in the eye. ‘He’s a boy?’ She nods, bashfu
l. ‘So, the ribbons?’
‘He likes them.’ She shrugs, as if this should be obvious. A woman’s voice comes from beyond the wall.
‘Katherine! Katherine, viens ici! Ou es-tu?’
Marie de Castelnau appears in the archway that divides this part of the garden from the more manicured paths nearer the house. The rich light touches her hair as she brushes a stray curl away from her face, giving her a faint halo; she is frowning but as her gaze alights on me and her daughter, her expression softens and she slows her pace towards us.
‘Ah. Monsieur l’heretique. Bonjour.’
‘Madame.’ I bow.
She bends to the child and lays a hand on her shoulder. ‘Katherine, take Pierrot inside, look — your shoes are all dirty now and it’s nearly time for your lesson. You can play in the garden afterwards, if you have worked hard.’
Katherine sticks out her bottom lip. ‘I want to have my lesson out here.’ She points at my book. ‘Monsieur l’heretique is allowed his books outdoors.’
Marie glances at me and smiles, half apologetic, before turning back to her daughter.
‘Well, Monsieur l’heretique is allowed to do all sorts of things that are not proper and you had better not follow his example. He is very wicked.’ She winks.
The child looks up at me, her mouth open, waiting for confirmation or denial; I make my eyes wide and nod.
‘I’m afraid it’s true.’
She giggles.
‘Go on, off you go,’ Marie says, sharper this time, patting the girl’s back. Katherine scampers away, the little dog bleating at her heels.
‘I’m sorry — my daughter thinks that is your name now.’ Castelnau’s wife laughs and falls easily into step beside me, folding her arms across her chest, as we begin to walk slowly back towards the house. ‘It’s what King Henri calls you. It is meant affectionately. On his part, I mean,’ she adds hastily, glancing quickly sideways and then back to her feet.
‘You spoke to King Henri about me?’
She laughs again, a gentle, fluting sound.
‘No. But your name came up often when I was with Queen Louise. I have known her since we were girls. The king misses you, apparently. He says there are no original thinkers left in Paris now that Monsieur l’heretique has abandoned him for London.’
‘Well, it is kind of him to say so.’ We walk in silence for a few paces, the sun warm on our faces.
‘I must say, I was intrigued to meet you,’ she continues, after a moment, and there is a silkiness in her voice that sounds a warning note. ‘Queen Louise said you were a great favourite among the ladies in Paris.’
‘Was I?’ This is news to me; there were idle flirtations at the Parisian court, but nothing worth the notice of the queen consort, as I recall. After my experience in Toulouse, I had vowed to devote my energy to writing and to harden my heart against the possibility of love.
‘Oh, yes, indeed,’ Marie says, lightly touching my arm and allowing her hand to rest for a moment, ‘because you were a great enigma, apparently. There were many stories told about you, but no one ever got close enough to sort the truth from the rumours. And of course you frustrated all the ladies by never choosing any of them, which only fuelled the gossip.’
‘I had not the means to marry.’
‘Perhaps you had not the inclination?’ she says, with a sly smile. I pause and look at her. Does she mean what I think?
‘There have been women,’ I say, defensive. ‘I mean to say, I have loved women, in the past. But I have always had the misfortune to fall for the ones I cannot have.’
She smiles, as if to herself. ‘Isn’t it always more interesting that way? But I did not mean to imply what you thought.’ A brief hesitation. ‘You know it is said of Lord Henry Howard, though?’
‘What — that he doesn’t look at women?’ I recall Howard’s fist thumping on the table the night before, the blaze of his eyes. Perhaps that would account for his air of suppressed rage.
‘He has never married. Although,’ Marie adds, leaning in with a confidential air, ‘it may only be that he has been put off marriage by example. You have heard why his brother was executed?’
‘Treason, I thought?’
‘Yes. But the exact nature of his treason — you did not know? The Duke of Norfolk intended to marry Mary Stuart and so become King of England when she returned to the throne, after they were rid of Elizabeth.’
She nods enthusiastically, waiting for a response, her blue eyes lit up with the thrill of her story, as if she has told me something she should not. She is standing inappropriately close, her hand still on my arm, and we have now walked far enough to be visible from the house. Instinctively I glance up and see a figure standing silhouetted there, watching us, but though I shield my eyes and squint, I cannot make out who he is. Immediately I take a step back from Marie, as if her mere proximity makes me guilty of something. I am already betraying Castelnau on one front; the last thing I want is for him to suspect me of dealing dishonestly with him on another.
‘Henry Howard does not wholly trust you,’ she says, her tone suddenly serious. ‘Because of your breach with Rome. But my husband defends you and says you are a true Catholic and a friend to France, whatever strange philosophies you may toy with. And Howard responds that if you were a true Catholic you would have been reconciled to the Church by now.’
‘What are you asking me?’
‘I don’t know. I suppose I find you something of an enigma, too. They can’t both be right. I must confess that I have never met a true Catholic who was happy to be excluded from the Church. Why do you not repent and find a bishop to give you the sacrament of reconciliation?’
‘I was excommunicated for leaving the Dominican order. If the excommunication were lifted, I would be obliged to return, and I fear I am not made to be a monk.’
She gives me a knowing look, half-smiling, at this; she assumes I mean for the obvious reason. She assumes wrongly: I mean because I cannot accept being told what to think. A monk copies the wisdom that already exists; he is not supposed to discover a new philosophy of his own.
‘Well, Monsieur l’heretique — I shall not give up on you. I will pray for your soul. Perhaps with patience and prayers, we may bring you back to the fold.’
She laughs then, and skips ahead of me, holding her skirts away from her shoes to kick at fallen leaves. I do not know what to make of this woman. Perhaps she just enjoys gossip and is starved of company at the embassy, but she strikes me as too shrewd for that and there is something in her manner that makes me guarded. I can’t be sure if she is flirting with me to amuse herself, or if she suspects me to be more or less than I appear and is trying to catch me out; either way, I determine that I must not be flattered or beguiled by her attentions into giving anything away. One thing at least is certain: there is a great deal more to Madame de Castelnau than a pious Catholic wife. But her news about Howard’s brother is worth knowing.
‘So is the position still vacant?’ I call out, as she pauses to pick a sprig of purple heather from a bush at the side of the path. ‘Mary Stuart’s husband, I mean?’
She turns, shredding the plant between her fingers and scattering the pieces.
‘Why, are you interested?’ Her clear laugh rings across the garden. ‘I must warn you, Bruno — that lady’s husbands are unusually prone to misfortune. The first died of an abscess, the second she had blown up and the third died insane in a Danish prison. And the Duke of Norfolk lost his head for merely aspiring to be the fourth.’
At that moment the figure watching from the house detaches himself from the wall and is revealed to be Claude de Courcelles, his blond hair reflecting shards of light as he bounces down the steps towards us.
‘Madame — your daughter is looking for you to begin her lessons.’ He effects a fussy little bow, impeded by his ruff, and sends me a scathing glance. Marie tosses her head and tuts.
‘Where is her governess? She should be dealing with her. Can I not have a moment’s p
eace?’ With a rustle of satin, she hitches up her skirts to climb the steps to the house. ‘By the way, Courcelles,’ she says airily, over her shoulder, ‘Bruno is thinking of marrying the Scottish queen. What do you say to that?’
‘My congratulations.’ The secretary offers me a thin smile, hard as ice. ‘Although you may find she prefers a gentleman of independent means.’
‘I hear she is not that choosy,’ Marie calls from the doorway. ‘Apparently she is monstrously fat these days.’
Courcelles and I watch her lithe figure disappear into the recesses of Salisbury Court and exchange a glance. With exaggerated courtesy, he gestures for me to lead the way.
‘You’ve heard the news from court, I suppose?’ Fowler says in his lilting accent, as I slide into the settle opposite him at the Mermaid. The tavern spans the fork between Friday Street and Bread Street on Cheapside, east of the great church of St Paul’s, and is popular with merchants and professionals; most of the men crowded around the wooden tables are dressed in well-cut cloth with feathers in their caps and meet here to argue over deals and contracts, shipments, lawsuits, loans. Behind the hubbub of lively conversation and the occasional oath you catch the chink of coins. The air is warm and yeasty; after casting my eyes around for some moments I have found the Scotsman tucked into a table at the back of the tap-room, sitting in a spill of sunlight scored with diamond shadows from the window panes. The high-backed wooden settles effectively barricade us in our corner from any prying eyes or sharp ears. When I shake my head, he leans in closer, pushing his fringe out of his eyes. ‘I was at Whitehall this morning. They have arrested Sir Edward Bellamy for the murder of the queen’s maid.’
‘Really? Was he the girl’s lover, then?’
‘He says not, but it turns out to be his clothes she was wearing when they found her. The young fool forgot that his monogram was embroidered on the shirt.’
‘But he denies the murder?’
‘Naturally. He says they were old clothes the girl asked him to sell her, but apart from that they had barely spoken before. It’s true that it’s an old trick these maids use for slipping out in disguise, but it seems he is not believed about the rest. They have dragged him kicking and screaming to the Tower and the girl’s father has ridden down from Nottingham breathing hellfire and demanding satisfaction. Poor fellow will have made a loss on his investment.’