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To my sister Gwendollyn,
who keeps the lights buzzing,
the secrets silent,
and the dragons flying.
Hatfield House, Hertfordshire,
first week of November 1577
The Great Comet is first glimpsed in the first week of November, in the twentieth year of the reign of Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth of England. It is seen low in the sky above the western horizon and it is widely understood to signal the End of Days, a time when the Son of Man will come to sit in judgment on peoples of all nations, after which the seas will rise up, the sun will turn black, and molten fire will fall from the skies.
At Hatfield House in Hertfordshire, twenty miles north of London, the Queen already lies sick in her bed. She is sweating, her joints are aching, and her guts are coiled in knots. On hearing of the comet, she sends her physicians away and summons in their stead Dr. John Dee.
It is too late to send word today, though, and Her Majesty sleeps very badly that night, dreaming of boiling fire and screaming men, and when she wakes, she tells her lady of the bedchamber that she wishes to return to her palace at Whitehall, to be with her Privy Councillors, and with her people of London, and to be close on hand when John Dee comes.
Her physicians and women advise against it, as does Sir John Jeffers, who is that day appointed her captain of the Yeomen of the Guard.
“The road is very bad,” he tells Lettice Knollys, senior lady of the bedchamber, sent to communicate Her Majesty’s wishes. “And the weather, too, and if Her Majesty is already ill…”
He trails off under Mistress Knollys’s withering stare.
“Right,” he says. “I will see to it.”
So late in the morning of a filthy day of charcoal skies and teeming rain, he oversees the packing up of Her Majesty’s immediate household, bringing with her only her most immediate necessities in five carriages—including the closestool carriage, for her relief en route—and they set out on the road eastward toward Waltham Cross, hoping to be in London before darkness truly falls.
But Jeffers is right: already at this time of year the road is dire, and a spring in the frame of the Queen’s principal carriage breaks, and then a horse in the traps of her second carriage falls lame, so that must be left in Waltham Cross, and even before they reach the turn on the road south, just after noon, they have had to stop three times for Her Majesty to use her closestool carriage to void her bowels in comfort and privacy. Each time the convoy must stand waiting, eyes averted, while the Queen is guided from one carriage to the other, and there is much consternation as to which of her women Her Majesty is to have in her own carriage, and soon Jeffers hardly knows whether they are coming or going.
“We should have waited until tomorrow,” his sergeant reminds him as they are forced to stop once more.
“Try telling Mistress Knollys that.”
The afternoon turns toward evening, and as they approach the great forest south of Waltham, they find themselves stuck behind a farm cart piled high with filthy straw giving off a dense trail of steam.
“Only good for dressing soil, that,” the sergeant says.
Jeffers shouts at the drayman to clear the road, and a bugle is sounded, but the hay cart is broad, and the road is narrow between the high banks of encroaching hornbeams. There’s little the drayman can do but whip his animal harder.
The Queen’s procession—now led by a humble cart—slows to a snail’s pace and they travel for half a league or more like this until, at a dip in the land where the road enters a boggy stretch amid stands of tangled holly and bramble, the cart becomes stuck fast in glutinous mud, and the dray horse strains in vain to move it any farther.
“A turd in his teeth!” the coachman next to the Yeoman captain shouts.
Jeffers is just getting to his feet to do something—what he does not know—when two men hidden in the cart’s straw throw off their cover and emerge like stinking ghouls. There is a moment when Jeffers stares, unable to believe it: they have arquebuses, and the steam rising from the hay was smoke from their lit match fuses. He lurches from the bench of the carriage just as the guns go off with two dull flashes and barks of powder burn. Jeffers leaps, and slams to the ground, just as the gun balls hammer into the face of the coachman who’d been sitting next to him, openmouthed. The man’s head snaps back and he throws up his arms as he is flung from his seat.
Jeffers tries to rise up. But more shadows emerge from the trees above his head, at the side of the road, each with a burning fuse and an arquebus. Jeffers bellows incoherently and he tries to draw his sword. He struggles to get up the bank, slipping in the mud. He would throw himself in front of a gun for Her Majesty, but before he can move, a dozen flashes light up the canopy of leaves, and earsplitting thunder fills the air. Spikes of gray smoke stab out from the darkness, and ten or twelve holes are punched through the painted wooden panels of the Queen’s carriage.
From their various perches on the other carriages, Her Majesty’s Yeomen roar with rage and throw off their sodden cloaks. They drop to the ground to draw their swords, and as one they scramble up the steep banks of the roadside, but even before they reach the top, even before the gun smoke has roiled clear, the gunmen are gone, their weapons with them. They are like phantoms. John Jeffers leads the chase, blundering through the forest after them, stumbling on rough ground, whipped and snapped at by every kind of bough and branch. The gunmen have vanished silently into the darkness ahead, as if through witchcraft, leaving John Jeffers tangled in undergrowth, caught in thorns. He hears a strangled roar, of pure outraged pain and anger, and realizes it is coming from his own throat.
“Christ! Christ! Christ!” he bellows and he falls to his knees in the darkness. “Christ!”
He bangs his head on the earth.
“Christ!”
After a long while he stands. His men are gathered about, hands loose, swords drawn to no end. He hears his own heartbeat and their ragged breathing and the rain drumming on the leaves all about. None is even wounded save scratches across their faces. Jeffers has lost his hat. They are each stilled, staring, shocked by the calamity of what has befallen them.
It is the end of everything.
Jeffers gathers himself.
“Right,” he says.
She might still be alive? The gunmen, they might have missed?
He takes a deep breath.
“Come on then.”
And he leads the way back, his men falling into line behind in silence. It is like walking to the scaffold. Already he can hear weeping from the road ahead. A woman is wailing and the horses are snorting with fright. Over the sharp smell of burned powder comes something earthier, bloodier, something from the shambles.
“Get a lantern lit, for the love of God,” he calls.
The women have the Queen’s carriage door open. One of the women turns to him. It is Jane Frommond. One of the young ladies-in-waiting. Her palms are black with blood, and her dress soiled like a butcher’s apron.
“She is wounded,” she says. “A ball. In her shoulder. And also one in her stomach, thus.”
She indicates her own belly. Jeffers’s right hand twitches to cross itself. He fought Spain in the Low Countries. He has seen such wounds. He knows what they mean.
“We
must find her a surgeon,” another—Mary Sidney—says. “Get her to London.”
The best course would be to make her comfortable, Jeffers thinks, to sit with her and hold her through this next hour, which will prove her last.
But they cannot be seen to just let this happen. They must be seen to be busy. So…
“Yes,” he defers.
He orders his men to clear the hay cart from the road and sends a rider ahead, one of the boys from the back, on the best horse, to alert the Queen’s household, to summon the Queen’s surgeons, the Queen’s chaplain, and the Queen’s Privy Council, including, and most especially of all, Master Francis Walsingham.
CHAPTER ONE
Whitehall Palace, London,
same evening, first week of November 1577
Sir William Cecil, First Baron Burghley, stands in the darkness, in the middle of the great courtyard of Whitehall Palace, next to Sir Christopher Hatton, whom the Queen has recently appointed member of the Privy Council purely because—Cecil coined the rumor—he is an uncommonly graceful dancer. They are looking up at the Great Comet in the night’s sky.
“There,” he says. “Do you not see, Sir Christopher? Its tail points to the Low Countries.”
Cecil is half joking, extending a hand of friendship to patch up what has been a bitter few months of rancorous factionalism in the Privy Council, with two parties opposed to each other on the matter of sending troops to help the Dutch Protestant armies against the Spanish and Catholic Dutch. Cecil had hoped the argument was ended, this last week, when the Queen at last made up her mind in favor of sending troops, deciding in favor of the faction led by Cecil and Walsingham, and against the faction led by Hatton. But Hatton is obviously not yet ready to accept defeat, nor the proffered hand.
“That might mean anything,” he scoffs.
“No,” Cecil tells him. “It means good Protestant Englishmen will soon be coming to the aid of their Dutch cousins, and that together we will drive Spain back within her own borders and, God willing, strike such a blow as will rid Christendom of popish superstition for all time.”
He, again, is only half joking.
“I still believe it is a grave mistake,” Hatton says, seriously. “We should not even be sending them money, let alone troops. It will deplete our treasury, and our numbers, and it will unite France and Spain against us. More than that, also, it gives succor to any subject who rises up against his rightful king. Her Majesty is sowing the wind, and she shall reap the whirlwind.”
Cecil sighs.
“We’ve been hearing that same old refrain for years now,” he reminds Hatton. “The simple fact is that if we let the Spanish crush the Dutch, they will. And then they will turn to us and crush us. There will be fighting, I know, and it will cost gold, and blood, but so much less if it is done now, and in the Low Countries, and mostly by Dutchmen. Spend now, save later. I am glad the Queen has finally seen sense.”
Hatton blows out air.
“Twenty thousand pounds? Ten thousand men? It is the thin end of the wedge, Lord Treasurer.”
Cecil knows Hatton hardly cares about the money. It is the old religion he hankers after. A return to Rome. And that is really why the Queen appointed him to the Privy Council: not because he has a well-turned calf, though he does that, but because she is naturally cautious in these affairs—or is too aware of the risks they involve—and Hatton is there to serve as a bulwark against Master Walsingham’s zeal.
“Well,” Cecil tells him, “it is done now in any event.”
“We shall see,” Hatton says. “There is many a slip between cup and lip.”
Cecil wheels on him, suddenly furious. This argument has been had! It has been lost and won and now there is nothing more to be said.
“What do you mean by that, Hatton?”
Hatton is taller and younger, and infinitely more agile, but Cecil is Sir William Cecil, Lord Burghley, Lord Treasurer of England. And two Yeomen of the Guard are never more than ten paces from his side.
“Nothing,” Hatton says, backing away. “Nothing, I do assure you.”
Cecil growls and pulls his furs tight about his shoulders. He wonders at his sudden flare of anger. Perhaps because he knows Hatton is partly right? At the beginning, five years ago now, when the Protestant Dutch provinces first rose up against their Spanish Catholic king, the Dutch looked to the English for help—for money, or troops, or ships at least—but Her Majesty was too conscious of the divine right of a king over his subjects and was too afeared of offending the Spanish, and so she dithered, and it has taken Cecil and Walsingham five years to persuade her to help the Dutch, and though she now sees sense, there is no telling what she will feel next week. Or the week after that. And even if she stays her course, will the promise of money be enough to keep the fragile Dutch alliance together? The so-called Pacification of Ghent? If the northern Calvinists under William of Orange gain too much head, the southern Catholic states under Philippe de Croÿ will almost certainly revert to King Philip of Spain, and then England is back to where she was, only having spent twenty thousand pounds and lost ten thousand English lives.
Until then, though, Cecil is content, and is wondering about returning home, since there seems nothing afoot that cannot wait until the morrow, when he hears bells tolling in the city.
“What in Christ’s name is that? Fire?”
A moment later, Sir John Jeffers’s boy—filthy, stinking, and tearful—is marched into the courtyard and brought before them.
“How now, boy, what is this?”
At the news, they retire at once, utterly incredulous, utterly dismayed, to the Privy Chamber where they question the boy, who stands almost incoherent and hoarse from shouting out the news as he rode through the city that the Queen is dead.
“You did not see her wounds?” Hatton asks.
The boy shakes his head.
“Captain Jeffers sent me here straight off, soon as it happened. Tell them she has been shot, he said. In her belly. By a dozen men with guns, in Waltham Forest. I saw the carriage. Full of holes, it was, sir, like a strainer. And her women were weeping and pulling their hair, and Mistress Frommond was with blood all on her hands.”
He holds out his own to show them his leather-stained palms as if they were hers. His eyes are bright, as if he were mad, and he has lost his cap.
“But she was not dead when you left to ride here?” Hatton asks.
“I was not going to tarry till she was, was I?”
“Fair enough,” Cecil supposes. He thanks the boy and sends him to the kitchens.
“Only do not dismay the cooks,” he tells him. “We are in for a long night and shall have need of their services.”
Then he sends for the Queen’s surgeons and her physicians to be roused, and for messengers to ride for Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and for Master Walsingham, also. He sends for more candles, and a fire to be lit. Finally, he sends for the casket to be brought up from the vaults below, and then he sits at the board and is still for a moment, save for his fingers that drum a rhythm from his childhood.
“Dear God,” he says, more to himself than Hatton. “Dear bloody God. What now?”
Hatton says nothing. He paces like a cat in the shadows. Cecil can imagine his tail twitching. A moment later, a steward returns to usher in two footmen, carrying between them the casket Cecil ordered. They place it on the table and step back and set about lighting the fire and the candles. Cecil remains staring at the casket for a long moment.
He knows he should fish out that key from his doublet and start summoning all the messengers he will need to promulgate the news, to send out the letters contained therein: to George Talbot in his castle in Sheffield to alert him to post a heavier guard on Mary, Queen of Scots, who must be the likely focus of this plot to kill Queen Elizabeth, and probably at the heart of whatever comes next. He should send word to the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, and to Edward Clinton, Lord High Admiral of the fleet in the Narrow Sea, to warn them to expect an
attack from Spain at any moment. Likewise to the governor of Berwick Castle that he must anticipate some incursion from Scotland. He should be mustering the city’s militia and warning the Constable of the Tower to ready his keep for the arrival of a court without its Queen.
It is what they have planned to do, but really, now that it has happened, what is the good of all that?
Nothing.
It is useless.
Elizabeth Tudor is dead. Long live Mary Stuart.
Cecil continues to stare in silence at the casket on which the dust lies so thick it forms a wrinkled cloth, like fine felt. He cannot believe it. He cannot believe she is dead. Elizabeth, the Queen, who has been through so much and who meant so much to so many. The Queen in whom all their hopes reposed.
My God.
It is no surprise, of course. It has been long threatened, long expected, even, but however hard he has tried to imagine it over the years—and planned for it, as they all have—he has never grasped until now how it would feel. Even when she was stricken with smallpox back in 1562, he did not think she would actually, genuinely, die. After all she’d been through, the dangers she had weathered, when all around there were men desperate to kill her, it seemed too much an affront then, for her to go by her own bodily weakness.
Opposite him Hatton now sits in silence, waiting. There is a rumor—reliable, according to Walsingham, though denied by Hatton—that Hatton has promised Mary of Scotland that should Elizabeth of England die without heir, then he himself will be the first to come north to collect her; and that he will lead her south, carrying her Sword of State upright before him, into London and onto her throne of England.
And yet still he sits, with his long nose, and his sculpted beard, and his velvet cap with its band of gold-foiled pearls and pert white feather. There is cloth of gold, too, threading through the dark stuff of his doublet that catches the candlelight quite beautifully, and though he cannot be blamed for wearing such a thing on a night like this—for how could he have known what might happen?—nevertheless, Cecil does blame him.
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