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‘As I recall,’ Castelnau says stiffly, maintaining his composure, ‘you were my greatest ally not so long ago when it came to the marriage negotiations between your queen and my king’s brother.’
‘For the sake of appearance. But that was doomed before it began.’ Howard waves an arm in grand dismissal. ‘The Duke of Anjou never really wanted to marry Elizabeth – she’s at least twenty years older than him, for pity’s sake. I mean – would you?’ He looks at the men around him, inviting scorn; Douglas responds with a lascivious cackle. ‘And the minute she sniffed her subjects’ unrest at the idea,’ Howard continues, ‘she sent him packing. She will make no marriage now – and even if she does, it will never be with a Catholic prince. She has seen where that leads.’
‘Nor will she have an heir now, at the age of fifty,’ Marie de Castelnau points out, scorn in her voice. ‘France’s best hope is to put Mary Stuart on the throne of England and from there let her work on her son as a mother and as a Catholic sovereign, to bring him back to his natural obedience. Et voilà!’ She holds her hands out to us with a delighted smile, as if she has performed a conjuring trick, though her hands are empty. ‘The whole island united again under Rome.’
‘Et voilà?’ I look at her, incredulous. ‘Problem solved? You talk as if they were chess pieces – move this one here, take this one off the board, let this one see he is threatened. Fin de partie. Is it so simple, madame, do you think?’
Marie presses her lips together until they turn white, but she returns my stare, defiant. Howard glares.
‘You presume to speak –’ he splutters, but Castelnau holds up a hand. He looks tired.
‘Go on, Bruno,’ he says gently. ‘You have hardly spoken. I would like to hear what you have to say. You knew King Henri’s mind as well as any of his councillors.’
I can feel Fowler’s eyes on me. Without turning in his direction, I know he is willing me to be circumspect, not to compromise my privileged position at this table by appearing hostile. Yet Castelnau expects me to be outspoken; he would be suspicious if I did not take the role of devil’s advocate, I think.
‘I say only that these queens are not dolls to be moved around at will.’ As I say it, I have a sudden image of the Elizabeth doll clutched in the dead hand of Cecily Ashe, the needle sticking from its breast. I shudder; the memory makes me falter. ‘This glorious reunification under Rome could not be achieved without great bloodshed in England. I hear no one mention that.’
‘Such things are taken for granted, you damned fool,’ Howard growls.
‘Do you make bread without crushing the grain?’ Marie says, half-smiling, still pinning me with her stare. She has neat, white teeth; it seems she is not afraid to use them.
‘The Queen of the Scots will not shy away from spilling blood when it suits her, I assure you,’ Douglas declares confidently to the room, rousing himself from his own thoughts to pour another large glass of wine, which he drinks off almost in one go. ‘Now, I could tell you a story about the Queen of the Scots.’ He laughs into his empty glass.
‘Really? Is it the one about the pie?’ Courcelles says, with a stagey roll of the eyes.
‘Aye.’ Douglas’s eyes light up. ‘After her husband died, there was a great feast –’
Courcelles holds up a hand.
‘Perhaps on another occasion. I think Madame de Castelnau might not appreciate it.’
‘Oh. Aye. Sorry.’ Douglas glances at Marie and touches his fringe with a self-mocking grimace.
A brief, uncomfortable silence follows; everyone turns to look at him and I sense that I have missed something. A glance passes between Marie and Henry Howard but I cannot read its meaning. Her cheeks are flushed with excitement among the moving shadows that sculpt out the lines of her face, her eyes bright and determined, her lips softly parted, glistening. She sees me watching her and lowers her eyes modestly, but she glances up again to see if I am still looking.
‘The seminaries in France are still working tirelessly to send missionary priests here undercover, my lords, and the Catholic network for their continued support remains strong,’ Fowler says, and the company turns to regard him. ‘We may pray that their endeavours succeed in bringing souls back to the Holy Roman Church –’
‘Yes, Fowler, I admire your piety, and I’m sure we are all praying for the same thing,’ Howard cuts across him, impatient. ‘But they are gutting every Jesuit missionary they catch on the scaffold at Tyburn like pigs on a butcher’s block, as a warning to potential converts. It is time to accept that this country will not be made Catholic again by politicking nor by preaching. Only by force.’
‘Then – forgive me if I seem slow – but you are talking about an invasion?’ I turn, wide-eyed, from Howard to Castelnau. It is not really a question; the ambassador’s face answers with a look of helpless sorrow.
‘Michel – is this wise, that he sit here with us?’ Howard snaps his fingers towards me, impatient now. ‘We all know this man is wanted by the Holy Office on charges of heresy. Tell me – where do you think his loyalties naturally fall, in this enterprise? Him? With Rome, or with his fellow excommunicate Elizabeth?’
‘Doctor Bruno is a personal friend of my king,’ Castelnau says quietly, ‘and I will vouch for his loyalty to France myself. His ideas might occasionally seem a little . . .’ he searches for the diplomatic term ‘. . . unorthodox, but he remains a Catholic. He attends Mass regularly with my family here in the embassy chapel, and always observes the terms of his excommunication. Which is something we may resolve in time, eh, Bruno?’
I assume what I hope is an expression of piety and nod gravely.
Howard scowls but says nothing more, and I feel a sudden rush of affection for the ambassador, and a corresponding pang of regret for my own deception. Whatever unfolds in this case, I determine that Walsingham will know the ambassador argued for peace. Castelnau, like King Henri of France, is a moderate, the sort of Catholic who believes that faith should be able to accommodate a variety of viewpoints. He is a man of integrity, in his way; he would not choose war, but perhaps he will not be given a choice. His wife, on the other hand, looks as if she can’t wait.
‘Listen,’ she says now, clasping her hands and allowing her bright eyes to sweep around the company before adding, ‘my lords, friends,’ with a calculated lowering of her lashes. ‘We have come together around this table from different backgrounds, but we all share one common goal, do we not? We all believe that Mary Stuart is the rightful heir to the English throne, and that she would restore the Catholic faith that unites us, is it not so?’
There is a swell of murmured assent from the company, some more enthusiastic than others; I catch Fowler’s eye again and look quickly away.
‘Besides, Mary Stuart on the English throne would better serve the interests of our respective nations,’ Marie continues briskly, stretching out her elegant fingers and affecting to examine the colourful array of rings she wears. ‘This joins us in our purpose as much as our religion. We must take care to remember what makes us natural allies, even when we may disagree, or we shall lose all hope of success.’ Here she looks up and aims the full beam of her smile at me, before turning it on the rest. I watch the ambassador’s wife with fresh curiosity. Whatever her reputation for piety, there can be no doubting her political acumen; beneath the smiles and the modest blushes lies a steely force of will that contrasts with her husband’s habit of trying to balance all interests harmoniously. I steal a glance at Castelnau; he pinches the bridge of his nose between his finger and thumb and looks weary. It seems the balance of power in the embassy has subtly shifted since Marie’s return.
‘Shall I fetch fresh candles, my lord?’ Courcelles murmurs; without our realising it, the feeble flames have almost died and we are sitting in near darkness.
‘No.’ Castelnau pushes his chair back and rises heavily. ‘We will retire. My wife is not long returned from Paris and she needs to rest. Tomorrow evening my chaplain will say Mass here before supper. Goodnight, gentlemen. I think, Claude, that Monsieur Douglas may need a guest room.’ He nods down the table to where Douglas appears to have fallen asleep face down on his hands. Courcelles makes a little moue of disgust.
Our host holds the dining-room door open for us, bidding us a good night as we file past him into the corridor. I am forced to halt abruptly as Henry Howard, in front of me, embraces Castelnau in the French style, though with a very English lack of warmth.
‘Speaking of natural allies – you know we must talk to Spain if this is to proceed,’ he hisses in the ambassador’s ear as he leans in. ‘Sooner rather than later.’
Castelnau sighs.
‘So you say.’
‘Throckmorton carries letters from Mary to Spain’s embassy as well. Oh – you didn’t know?’
Castelnau looks wounded at the news, as if he had just learned that his wife was unfaithful. He is still clasping Howard by the arm.
‘She involves Mendoza? But the man is so . . .’
‘Forthright?’
‘I was going to say uncouth. For an ambassador.’
‘Mendoza is a man of action,’ Howard says emphatically, then bows curtly and leaves, the implicit criticism still hanging in the air.
Outside in the passageway, once we are out of earshot, Howard rounds on me, pointing a finger heavy with gold into my face.
‘You may have duped the French king and his ambassador, Bruno, but you should know that I do not like the look of you at all.’
‘I can only apologise, my lord. These are the looks God gave me.’
He narrows his eyes and leans back to give me a long hard appraisal, like a man who suspects he is being sold an unreliable horse.
‘I hear what is said of you in Paris.’
‘And what is that, my lord?’
‘Don’t toy with me, Bruno. That you practise forbidden magic.’
‘Ah, that.’
‘And it is said you converse with devils.’
‘Oh, all the time. They often ask after your lordship. They say they are keeping a place warm for you.’
Howard steps even closer. He is taller than me but I do not step back. His breath is hot in my face.
‘Joke all you like, Bruno. You are nothing but a glorified jester, just as you were at the French court, and a licenced fool may say anything. But when King Henri no longer has the power to protect you, who will be laughing then?’
‘Can a sovereign lose his power just like that, my lord?’
He laughs then, low and knowing.
‘Watch and wait, Bruno. Watch and wait. Meanwhile, I shall have my eye on you.’
There are footsteps on the boards behind us; Howard breaks off, gives me a last blast of his disapproving glare, then hastens away, calling for a servant to bring his cloak. I turn to see William Fowler with Courcelles beside him.
‘Goodnight, Doctor Bruno,’ Fowler says, his smooth face inscrutable in the candlelight. ‘It was a pleasure to meet you.’
Likewise, I assure him, my own expression as neutral as his. He reaches out to shake my hand and there is a paper folded into his palm; I tuck it into my own with a finger and bid him a safe journey as I turn towards the staircase, wishing that I could walk with him now so that we might talk openly and together make some sense of what we had heard that night.
Chapter Four
Salisbury Court, London 27th September, Year of Our Lord 1583
It feels as if I have barely closed my eyes when there comes a soft, insistent knocking at the door of my chamber. Dawn is just creeping around the edge of the shutters; only bad news brings callers this early. I bundle myself into a pair of under-hose and a shirt to unlatch the door for my impatient visitor, steeling myself, but it is only Léon Dumas, the ambassador’s clerk, who hurtles into the room so quickly in his haste not to be seen that he almost knocks me backwards and cracks his head against the sloping ceiling. Here on the second floor of the house, under the eaves, the rooms are designed for people of my height, not his.
Dumas rubs his forehead and sits heavily on my bed. He is an earnest young man of twenty-seven, tall and skinny with thinning hair and slightly bulging eyes that give him a permanent expression of alarm – though I cannot help feeling that this has intensified since I persuaded him to share with me the ambassador’s correspondence. Now he looks up at me with those big eyes and a pained frown, as if the knock on the head was my doing as well. He is fully dressed.
‘Léon. You are up with the lark – is something the matter?’
He shakes his head.
‘I only wanted to warn you – my lord ambassador has already gone down to his private office to make a start on the day’s correspondence. He was up half the night reading the letters from Mary Stuart that Monsieur Throckmorton brought from Sheffield, and now he sets about writing his replies. He wants them delivered to Throckmorton’s house at Paul’s Wharf before nightfall today – apparently Throckmorton rides for Sheffield again tomorrow at first light.’
‘Good. So Throckmorton expects you sometime this afternoon?’
‘I believe so. Castelnau will spend the morning writing his letters and ciphering them and I must be there to assist him. Then he will leave me to write out the fair copies while he and the rest of the household are dining, and when he has eaten he will approve and seal them and I will be dispatched.’
‘So . . .’ I run over the timing in my mind. ‘We will need to work quickly. Have you seen the letters from Queen Mary?’
He shakes his head, a nervous, twitching motion.
‘No. But the packet is in his writing desk.’
‘Read them while he is out. If you do not have time to make a copy, at least get the sense so that you can relay it. But it may be that she has sent him a new cipher – they change it often for fear of interception. That we must copy, if it is there.’
Dumas swallows hard and nods, sitting on his hands.
‘If I don’t have time to make two copies of his reply before he wants it sealed . . .?’
I pace the room for a moment, considering.
‘Then we will have to pay a visit to our friend Thomas Phelippes on the way to Master Throckmorton. Don’t look so alarmed, Léon – Phelippes is so gifted in the art of interception, I suspect he may be a wizard. No one will see anything amiss.’
Dumas looks miserable and jiggles on his hands more vigorously.
‘But if we should be caught, Bruno?’
‘Then we will be thrown out into the street,’ I reply solemnly. ‘We will be forced to join a troupe of travelling players. We can offer ourselves to play the ass for Christ’s entry to Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.’
‘Bruno –’
‘Ah – I know what you are going to say. Very well – you can be the front legs.’
‘Must you turn everything to a joke?’
Despite himself, he smiles, while I remember Howard’s sharp insult from last night. A glorified jester. Was that really how they spoke of me in Paris? Queen Elizabeth keeps an Italian fool at court, who goes by the name of Monarcho; am I to be compared with him? It stung because I recognised the truth of it: with no money, land or title to my name, I must make myself indispensable to men of wealth if I hope to thrive, and I have learned the hard way that most men of wealth would rather be entertained than enlightened. But might I not hope to do both? That, at least, was the intention of the book I was now writing, which would set forth my new ideas about the universe in a style that could be read outside the universities, by ordinary men and women, in their own language.
I sit beside Dumas on the bed and put my arm around his shoulder to chivvy him into better spirits.
‘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, Léon, 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.