The Queen's Men
Page 18
Beale shakes his head. This aspect of the plot seems to upset him most, and there is something peculiarly, and deliberately, degrading about it. It is as if they are insulting Alice, and the risks she took to let them know the Queen was coming.
“But then… why did she let them know the Queen was coming?” he speaks aloud. And now a tear trembles on Frommond’s eyelid. Walsingham knows when to speak, when to stay silent. He stays silent and after a while Mistress Frommond points to the limning.
“That is the father of Alice’s child,” she says.
Beale’s eyes widen. Walsingham had neglected to tell him Alice was pregnant.
“And who is he?” Beale asks.
“His name is Jan Saelminck,” Frommond tells them. “A Dutchman who used to assist an alchemist, whose name I cannot now recall, but who was once imprisoned in the Tower.”
“De Lannoy?” Walsingham supposes. “Cornelius de Lannoy?”
She nods. The tear retreats. She opens her mouth as if to ask something, then shakes the thought away.
“Well,” she says, “that is why I asked to see you, Master Walsingham. I wanted you to know.”
Walsingham takes a deep breath.
“How do you know he was the father?”
“Well,” she admits, “I don’t. No man can. But I found the limning hidden in Alice’s clothes, here in the palace, after she was killed.”
It is just about reasonable to suspect that Jan Saelminck might be the missing father, Walsingham supposes, but— Then Frommond describes her meeting with Marcus Teerlinc, Levina Teerlinc’s son.
“The pornographer?”
“Yes. Saelminck commissioned a pair of limnings: one of him, one of Alice. But when it came to paying, he would pay for only one of the two: his to give to her. He was not interested in hers. He was not interested in having a keepsake of her.”
“So he did not love her as she loved him?”
“I am surmising,” she admits. “But the receipt for the limning is written in Dutch, and Marcus says his mother and Saelminck spoke that language together. And then, that night, Mistress Teerlinc died before a priest could be summoned.”
“You think he killed her? Poisoned her perhaps?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she admits. “Everything is conjecture, isn’t it? Even John… Dr. Dee recognizing the limning. Is it really Jan Saelminck? Or just someone who looks like him?”
Beale raises his brows and catches Walsingham’s eye. Oh Lord, Walsingham thinks, Beale’s intrigue with Ness Overbury. He has not yet managed to raise himself to read the reports from Arthur Gregory, the man whom Cecil suggested Walsingham set to watch over Beale in case his scheme should warp out of proportion, and as a precaution against implication.
“But that suggests… that he seduced her months ago?”
“At least a year,” Frommond says. “Look at the date.”
1576.
Walsingham looks more closely at the limning. Now that he does so, he sees the boy is wearing a badge on his cap. It looks to his poor eyes like a pilgrimage badge, but there is something about its design that stills his heart.
“Robert,” he says, “take a closer look, will you.”
He passes the limning to Beale, who squints and frowns. Then he looks up and stares at Walsingham.
“My God,” he breathes. “The Black Madonna.”
And Walsingham knows the worst is confirmed. He feels a chill wind.
“The Black Madonna?” Frommond asks.
“The Guild of the Black Madonna,” Beale clarifies. “You see the badge? On his cap. It is like a pilgrimage badge, such as any pilgrim might collect to show he has been to Canterbury, or Saint James’s in Santiago de Compostela, but this one is different. This one is only given out to members of a guild of men who worship the idol of the Black Madonna in Halle, a town in Flanders.”
Frommond frowns.
“They are the most… pffft.”
Beale cannot find the words to describe the extremity of their commitment, which borders on lunacy, nor really can Walsingham.
“They are zealots,” Walsingham says. “Dangerous unreasoning zealots. Worse than the Inquisition because they operate beyond the law. Not even Bloody Mary would tolerate them in England.”
“And there is an oath they take,” Beale continues, “to root out by fire the enemies of their idol, as they see her, or die in the attempt. Like the martyrs of old.”
Frommond pales.
“And if they have their claws into Her Majesty—they will not cease until either she or they are dead. It is a death sentence.”
“How many of them are there?” Frommond asks.
“No one knows. Oh Christ. That explains it. The men in the barge: they were guildsmen.”
Walsingham nods.
“Well, there have been no further attempts on Her Majesty’s life, have there?” Frommond asks. Walsingham allows there may not have been.
“Then perhaps he—Saelminck—has gone home? Back to Halle. Or perhaps he is already dead?”
She is an optimist. Beale shakes his head.
“No,” he says, pointing at the limning. “Or, well, maybe, but look at the date again. This was a long-laid plan. Well seasoned. They waited more than a year before they struck. They wanted to be certain.”
Beale is right, Walsingham thinks. Saelminck will have gone to ground again. He’ll be planning something else. He’ll never give up. Christ. What is he to tell Her Majesty?
“Why did he wait so long?” Frommond wonders. Walsingham thinks to remind her that he himself is not incapable. It is not an easy thing to attempt to shoot the Queen, because he, Walsingham, ensures that it is not. But perhaps there is a simpler explanation.
“Perhaps Alice would not do as he asked,” he speculates. “Sooner, I mean? Or perhaps Saelminck only asked when he knew she was ruined—after he had ruined her.”
“And even then,” Frommond muses. “And even then, perhaps she would only have betrayed Her Majesty after Her Majesty had threatened her with the Tower. Only then did Alice give him the glove.”
They look at it now, a twisted relic of a dead love, a dead girl, and her dead baby.
Christ.
“Was it Saelminck whom Dee killed on the river Lea barge?” Beale asks. “Dee is said to have made a horrible mess of the man.”
Walsingham can hear the squeak of hope in his voice, but Frommond shakes her head.
“He would have said something, surely, wouldn’t he? If John knew him from the past, and when he came out of the cabin and first—”
She touches her neck. The bruises are faded now, but there is still the scar. She shivers. Perhaps it is the cold. The sun has dipped behind the stable block, leaving them in shadow, and Frommond suddenly looks as exhausted as Walsingham feels. But he has noted the easy use of Dee’s Christian name. Well. Well, what? They were confined together for days. It might mean nothing. And yet.
“It is lucky for us, for us all, you found the limning,” Walsingham congratulates her.
Frommond agrees.
“Especially,” she goes on, “as I was not the only one who looked through Alice’s belongings after her death.”
She tells them about the finger marks in the dust on her coffer, and the gone-through bags on Alice’s makeshift bier. Walsingham is very alarmed now. He feels there is a bird trapped in his chest.
“And nothing was missing? There was nothing stolen?”
“Nothing I noticed. There were some coins. And rings. Left behind. It might be that someone had been looking for something specific. Something hidden, perhaps, such as this likeness.”
“Why did you not tell us sooner?” Beale asks.
Frommond thinks for a moment.
“You told me yourself, Master Walsingham, on that step there, that in ordinary times you might have the leisure to discover the name of the father of Alice’s child, but now was not that time. Also, how could I know that he… that Jan Saelminck… might be connected to Alice’s de
ath? It was not until I found her glove, in the forest, and saw what was done to it, and by then— Well. It was too late.”
Walsingham feels his grip slipping again. He thinks about Saelminck coming into the palace to rummage through a maid of honor’s possessions, just as if he were some searcher at the docks.
“Can I be sure of this? You are saying that Saelminck was in the palace after Alice’s death? Right here? At leisure looking for something in Her Majesty’s privy rooms?”
Frommond nods.
“Or someone looking on his behalf.”
Christ. That is even worse! Saelminck himself, or some bastard from the Guild of the Black Madonna! Prowling the palace! Walsingham can feel that vinegar sweat beading his forehead again. He stands.
“Double the guard, Robert,” he tells Beale. “Lock this place down. Find out exactly who comes and who goes. Christ. Find out who’s come and who’s gone.”
Beale makes another note.
“Now, Robert,” he insists.
Robert coughs meaningfully.
Oh Christ. His deception of the Queen’s person.
“There is no time for that now, Robert,” Walsingham tells him.
But Beale is defiant.
“With respect sir, it is now more timely than ever.”
Walsingham is momentarily taken aback by Beale’s intransigence. It borders on disobedience. But by Christ, now of all times, perhaps he is right. Perhaps Walsingham has a field of blindness in this matter, and he should acknowledge it, and yield.
“Very well,” he says, “I will see to it myself.”
“I am happy to leave you to your deliberations,” Mistress Frommond tells them, and she starts to gather her things, though she touches neither the glove nor the limning.
“I would be happy to see neither again,” she says.
He puts them in his own bag and excuses himself, leaving Beale to pitch his plan to Frommond. He wants no part in that, and it is not as if he does not have things to get on with, he thinks, and he makes his way to Sir William Cecil’s chambers to find him looking gloomy. He looks worse when Walsingham tells him about the Guild of the Black Madonna.
Cecil claps both hands to his cheeks.
“Those bastards? That is all we need.”
He turns to stare at the flames in his chimney place.
“What shall we do?” he asks after a moment.
“What can we do? That we are not already doing?”
“But they might still be in the country. An enemy within, as if we did not already have enough of them.”
“But these are armed and dangerous.”
“Oh, that stupid oath. What is it? To root out by fire—”
“—the enemies of Her Grace the Mother of Christ, or something. Beale knows it.”
“It is not as if anyone is an enemy of the Mother of Christ, is it?”
Walsingham shrugs. Cecil has put his finger on the nub of the stupidity of the rhetoric of this war between Catholics and Protestants.
There is a longish silence. Then Cecil sighs and tells him that Parma is on the move. He means the Duke of Parma’s army, the one that they’d hoped might keep to its barracks this winter, is out and on the march.
“Twenty thousand troops, ready for battle with the rebels, and we know how that always ends.”
He rubs his eyes.
“Perhaps Hatton was right, after all. Imagine if we had sent troops,” he goes on. “They’d be just another contingent in what is already an ungovernable hodgepodge of every country and creed.”
The room seems to grow darker.
“Oh, bloody hell,” Cecil says, sighing. “At this rate we will have Parma and his tercios in Westminster by Easter. Which is why this becomes all the more important.”
He raps his knuckles on the desk, specifically on his draft of Jenkinson’s verse. He reads out the first three lines:
“They say of love;
the heart one day fell prisoner to a prince
but long has mine been captive of
England’s twice-sceptered jewel,
Wherein each facet the wise man may discern
heaven’s sacred cipher…”
“It is this last line that seems to me to offer a way in,” he supposes. “The poet is talking about a jewel—forget that it has been twice-sceptered for the moment—in which a wise man—by which I take him to mean an adept—may read heaven’s sacred cipher.”
“Yes,” Walsingham agrees. That is more or less what it says, he thinks.
“So what is heaven’s sacred cipher?”
“You tell me.”
Cecil looks peeved. Then he moves some papers and finds a roll to show Walsingham. It is a list of the presents the Queen gave and received this last New Year: object, name of donor, and estimated value. Cecil was given a cup with a cover, Walsingham notes, cost estimated at three pounds. He gave the Queen twenty pounds in gold. There is no mention of Walsingham’s gift of two jars of green ginger. Hatton gave her a gold cross, enriched with diamonds and pearls, and a medallion with a picture of a man being pulled by a dog, and on the back, certain verses. Walsingham thinks they ought to summon Hatton to have a look at Jenkinson’s verse. See what he makes of it.
“Just because he dances a superior galliard, you believe he will have a superior understanding of verse?”
Walsingham does not know why, but yes, he does. Cecil chews the clipped stub of his pen for a moment before doubtfully making a note.
“I will send him a copy, then. But anyway, I did not show you the list for that. I wanted you to see, there.”
He points:
“By Doctor John Dee, Shew-stone, £7 s6 d0”
“Did you know that Dee gave Her Majesty his scrying stone at New Year’s?” Cecil asks.
“I didn’t know he owned one.”
“He doesn’t anymore, if, in fact, he ever did: Master Bowes, a goldsmith of Lombard Street, is petitioning for its return on the basis that Dee bought it for eight pounds in gold that two days later revealed itself to be… not gold. Anyway. Bowes’s position is that Dee never owned it and had no rights to give it away, even to the Queen. I take his point but can only wish him well with that one.”
“It cannot be the jewel mentioned in the verse?”
Cecil sighs.
“I hoped you’d say it must be. It’s valued at only seven pounds and six shillings.”
Walsingham laughs.
“Imagine.”
“Do we know of any other scrying stones?”
“Perhaps we might use Dee’s to divine that.”
“Don’t joke, Francis.”
They continue to mull over the verse’s meaning for a while, coming at length to no clear conclusion. As with the identity of Saelminck, it is, as Mistress Frommond would say, all conjecture.
“Do you suppose it might be something uniquely Ottoman?” Cecil wonders.
“To set a price this way? Or write the verse?”
“Both.”
“I am not an Ottoman so I cannot say.”
Cecil is disappointed.
“I think we need to get Jenkinson down,” he decides. “Get him to talk us through it. Tell us who this man is.”
“The Tower?”
“The Tower.”
When the meeting is concluded Walsingham walks to the river, wondering where they might find a scrying stone that might approximate the value of a hundred and fifty tons of anything, and so he only hears his name being called at the third time of asking.
“Master Walsingham! Sir!”
It is an unknown, short, and poorly dressed man in faded lawyer’s robes. He has an armful of papers rolled under his arm and no hat.
“Thomas Penyngton,” he introduces himself. “I am clerk to the Court of Sewers.”
He realizes his hat is missing.
“You are just the man I have been looking for,” Walsingham tells him. Penyngton looks nervous. Perhaps no one has ever said that about the clerk to the Court of Sewers.
“Ah. That would be Master Honrighe you need to talk to. Garrett Honrighe. A surveyor, sir, and, being a Hollander, interested in water, or rather interested not in water, but in its want. He is interested in being dry, I should say.”
Walsingham wonders if this Honrighe is also a member of the Guild of the Black Madonna. Not that Penyngton would know, of course, unless Honrighe wore the pilgrimage badge. He asks the clerk.
“No, sir,” Penyngton replies, “no badges or anything of that sort. He is a very plainly dressed sort of man, sir. Not unlike your good self, sir, if I may be so bold as to say so.”
Well, if you were a member of the Guild of the Black Madonna, you would not want it known, not in England, would you?
“So he is supervising the construction?” Walsingham asks.
“No, sir. Master Honrighe is the surveyor. He employs builders under contract to do the actual work. Why? Is there a problem with the lock?”
“It is nothing like that,” Walsingham reassures him. “I merely wish to know the name of the builder of the lock, that is all.”
“Are you thinking of having your own lock built? Is that it? I know Lord Burghley—”
“I merely need his name.”
Penyngton is flustered and starts going through the rolls under his arm. Walsingham offers to hold those he has discarded. The second-to-last one the clerk looks at is the one he wants. He unrolls it. The writing is awkward and crabby, but after a moment he comes to the name.
“That’s right,” he says. “I remember being surprised at it now. It’s a man called Henk Poos.”
Walsingham has not heard of Henk Poos.
“Why were you surprised?” he queries, almost despite himself.
“Well,” Penyngton says, warming to his subject and turning sideways to whisper from the corner of his mouth, as if imparting a great scandal. “Master Honrighe is a Hollander from West Friesland, you see, which is practically in the sea, and where all the best water engineers come from, but Henk Poos is a Fleming.”