S. J. PARRIS

Prophecy

Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

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Copyright © Stephanie Merritt 2011

Stephanie Merritt asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780007317714

Ebook edition © 2011 ISBN: 9780007317752

Version: 2018-08-13

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Epilogue

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by S. J. Parris

About the Publisher

Prologue

Mortlake, House of John Dee 3rd September, Year of Our Lord 1583

Without warning, all the candles in the room’s corners flicker and feint, as if a sudden gust has entered, but the air remains still. At the same moment, the hairs on my arms prickle and stand erect and I shudder; a cold breath descends on us, though outside the day is close. I chance a sideways glance at Doctor Dee; he stands unmoving as marble, his hands clasped as if in prayer, the knuckles of both thumbs pressed anxiously to his lips – or what can be seen of them through his ash-grey beard, which he wears in a point down to his chest in imitation of Merlin, whose heir Dee secretly considers himself. The cunning-man, Ned Kelley, kneels on the floor in front of the table of practice with his back to us, eyes fixed on the pale, translucent crystal about the size of a goose-egg mounted in fixings of brass and standing upon a square of red silk. The wooden shutters of the study windows have been closed; this business must be conducted in shadow and candlelight. Kelley draws breath like a player about to deliver his prologue, and stretches his arms out wide at shoulder height, in a posture of crucifixion.

‘Yes . . .’ he breathes, finally, his voice little more than a whisper. ‘He is here. He beckons to me.’

‘Who?’ Dee leans forward eagerly, his eyes bright. ‘Who is he?’

Kelley waits a moment before answering, his brow creasing as he concentrates his gaze on the stone.

‘A man of more than mortal height, with skin as dark as polished mahogany. He is dressed head to foot in a white garment, which is torn, and his eyes are of red fire. In his right hand he holds aloft a sword.’

Dee snaps his head around then and clutches my arm, staring at me; the shock on his face must be mirrored in my own. He has recognised the description, as have I: the being Kelley sees in the stone matches the first figure of the sign of Aries, as described by the ancient philosopher Hermes Trismegistus. There are thirty-six of these figures, the Egyptian gods of time who rule the divisions of the zodiac and are called by some ‘star-demons’. There are few scholars in Christendom who could thus identify the figure Kelley sees, and two of them are here in this study in Mortlake. If, indeed, this is what Kelley sees. I say nothing.

‘What says he?’ Dee urges.

‘He holds out a book,’ Kelley answers.

‘What manner of book?’

‘An ancient book, with worn covers and pages all of beaten gold.’ Kelley leans closer to the stone. ‘Wait! He is writing upon it with his forefinger, and the letters are traced in blood.’

I want to ask what he has done with the sword while he writes in this book – has he tucked it under his arm, perhaps? – but Dee would not thank me for holding this business lightly. Beside me, he draws in his breath, impatient to hear what the spirit is writing.

‘XV,’ Kelley reports, after a moment. He turns to look up at us, then over his right shoulder, his expression perplexed, perhaps expecting Dee to interpret the numerals.

‘Fifteen, Bruno,’ Dee whispers, looking again to me for confirmation. I nod, once. The lost fifteenth book of Hermes Trismegistus, the book I had come to England to find, the book I now knew Dee had once held in his hands years earlier, only to be robbed of it violently and lose it again. Could it be? It occurs to me that Kelley must know of his master’s obsession with the fifteenth book.

The scryer raises a hand for silence. His eyes do not move from the crystal.

‘He turns the page. Now he traces . . . it seems . . . yes, he makes a sign – quickly, fetch me paper and ink!’

Dee hurries to bring him the items; Kelley reaches out and flaps his hand impatiently, as if afraid the image will fade before he has time to transcribe it. He takes the quill and, still gazing intently into the stone, sketches the astrological symbol of the planet Jupiter and holds it up for our inspection.

I tense; Dee feels it where his hand still holds my arm, and half-turns to look at me with questioning eyebrows. I keep my face empty of expression. The sign of Jupiter is my code, my signature; it replaces my name as the sign that my letters of intelligence are authentic. Only two people in the world know this: myself and Sir Francis Walsingham, Her Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State and chief intelligencer. It is a common enough sign in astrology, and coincidence, surely, that Kelley has drawn it; still I regard the back of Kelley’s head with increased suspicion.

‘On the facing page,’ Kelley continues, ‘he traces another mark – this time, the sign of Saturn.’ This he also draws on his paper, a cross with a curving tail, the quill scratching slowly as if time has thickened while he watches this unfold in the depths of the stone. Dee’s breathing quickens as he takes the paper and taps it with two fingers.

‘Jupiter and Saturn. The Great Conjunction. You understand, I think, Bruno?’ Without waiting for a reply, he turns impatiently to Kelley. ‘Ned – what does he now, the spirit?’

‘He opens his mouth and motions for me to listen.’

Kelley falls silent and does not move. Moments pass, Dee leaning forward eagerly, poised as if held taut on a rope, balanced between wanting to pounce on his scryer and not wishing to crowd him. When Kelley speaks again, his voice is altered; darker, somehow, and he proclaims as if in a trance:

‘“All things have grown almost to their fullness. Time itself shall be altered, and strange shall be the wonders perceived. Water shall perish in fire, and a new order shall spring from these.”’

Here he pauses, gives a great shuddering sigh. Dee’s grip around my arm tightens. I know what he is thinking. Kelley continues in the same portentous voice:

‘“Hell itself grows weary of Earth. At this time shall rise up one who will be called the Son of Perdition, the Master of Error, the Prince of Darkness, and he will delude many by his magic arts, so that fire will seem to come down from heaven and the sky shall be turned the colour of blood. Empires, kingdoms, principalities and states shall be overturned, fathers will turn against sons and brothers against brothers, there shall be turbulence among the peoples of the Earth, and the streets of the cities will run with blood. By this you shall know the last days of the old order.”’

He stops, sinks back gasping on to his heels, his chest heaving as if he has run a mile in the heat. Beside me, I can feel Dee trembling, his hand still holding my wrist; I feel him hungry for more of the spirit’s words, silently urging the scryer not to stop there, unwilling to speak aloud for fear of breaking the spell. For myself, I reserve judgement.

‘“Yet God has provided medicine for man’s suffering,”’ Kelley cries in the same voice, sitting up suddenly and making us both jump. ‘“There shall also rise a prince who will rule by the light of reason and understanding, who shall strike down the darkness of the old times, and in him the alteration of the world shall begin, and so shall he establish one faith, one ancient religion of unity that will put an end to strife.”’

Dee claps his hands gleefully, turning to me with shining eyes and the excitement of a child. It is hard to believe that this is his fifty-sixth autumn.

‘The prophecy, Bruno! What can this be, if not the prophecy of the Great Conjunction, of the ending of the old world? You read this as plain as I do, my friend – through the good offices of Master Kelley here, the gods of time have chosen to speak to us of the coming of the Fiery Trigon, when the old order shall be overturned and the world made anew in the image of ancient truth!’

‘He has certainly spoken of weighty matters,’ I say, evenly. Kelley turns then, his brow damp with sweat, and regards me with those close-set eyes.

‘Doctor Dee – what is this Fiery Trigon?’ he asks, in his own, somewhat nasal voice.

‘You could not know the significance, Ned, of what your gifts have revealed to us this day,’ Dee replies, his manner now fatherly, ‘but you have translated a prophecy most wondrous. Most wondrous.’ He shakes his head slowly in admiration, then stirs himself and begins to pace about the study as he explains, resuming his authority, the teacher once more. While the séance occurs, he becomes dependent upon Kelley, but it is not his habit to be subservient; he is, after all, the queen’s personal astrologer.

‘Once every twenty years,’ he says, holding up a forefinger like a schoolmaster, ‘the two most powerful planets in our cosmology, Jupiter and Saturn, align with one another, each time moving through the twelve signs of the zodiac. Every two hundred years, give or take, this conjunction moves into a new Trigon – that is to say, the group of three signs that correspond to each of the four elements. And once every nine hundred and sixty years, the alignment completes its cycle through the four Trigons, returning again to its beginning in fire. For the past two hundred years, the planets have aligned within the signs of the Watery Trigon. But now, my dear Ned, this very year, the year of Our Lord fifteen hundred and eighty-three, Jupiter and Saturn will conjoin once more in the sign of Aries, the first sign of the Fiery Trigon, the most potent conjunction of all and one that has not been seen for almost a thousand years.’

He pauses for effect; Kelley’s mouth hangs open like a codfish.

‘Then it is a momentous time in the heavens?’

‘More than momentous,’ I say, taking up the story. ‘The coming of the Fiery Trigon signifies the dawn of a new epoch. This is only the seventh such conjunction since the creation of the world and each has been marked by events that have shaken history. The flood of Noah, the birth of Christ, the coming of Charlemagne – all coincide with the return to the Fiery Trigon.’

‘And this transition into the sign of Aries at the end of our troubled century has been prophesied by many as signifying the end of history,’ Dee agrees, thoughtful. He has arrived in front of his tall perspective glass in its ornate gilt frame that stands in the corner by the west-facing window. Its peculiar property is that it reflects a true image and not the usual reversed image of an ordinary glass; the effect is unsettling. Now he turns to face us and raises his right hand; in the glass, his reflection does the same.

‘The astronomer Richard Harvey wrote of this present conjunction, “Either a marvellous fearful and horrible alteration of empires, kingdoms and states, or else the destruction of the whole world shall ensue”,’ I add.

‘So he did, Bruno, so he did. We may expect signs and wonders, my friends, in the days to come. Our world will change beyond recognition. We shall bear witness to a new era.’ Dee is trembling, his eyes moist.

‘Then – the spirit in the stone – he came to remind us of this prophecy?’ Kelley asks, his face full of wonder.

‘And to point to its special significance for England,’ Dee adds, his voice heavy with meaning. ‘For what can it signify but the overthrowing of the old religion once and for all in favour of the new, with Her Majesty as the light of reason and understanding?’

‘I had no idea,’ Kelley says, dreamy.

I watch him closely. There are two possibilities here. One is that he truly has a gift; I do not yet discount this, for though it has never been granted to me, in other countries I have heard of men who speak with those they call angels and demons through just such showing-stones, or else a speculum made for the purpose, like the one of obsidian that Dee keeps above his hearth. But in my years of wandering through Europe I have also seen plenty of these itinerant scryers, these cunning-men, these mediums-for-hire, who have a smattering of esoteric learning and for the price of a bed and a pot of beer will tell the credulous man anything they think he wants to hear. Perhaps this is snobbery on my part; I cannot help but feel that if the Egyptian gods of time chose to speak to men, it would be to men of learning, philosophers like myself or John Dee, the true heirs to Hermes – not to such a man as Ned Kelley, who wears his ragged cloth cap pulled down to his brow even indoors, to disguise the fact that he has one ear clipped for coining.

But I must be careful what I say to Dee touching Ned Kelley; the scryer has had his feet firmly under Dee’s table since long before I arrived in England, and this is the first time Dee has allowed me to take part in one of these ‘actions’, as he calls them. Kelley resents my recent friendship with his master; I see how he regards me from under the peak of his cap. John Dee is the most learned man in England, but he seems to me unaccountably trusting of Kelley, despite knowing almost nothing of the medium’s history. I have grown fond of Dee and would not like to see him hoodwinked; at the same time, I do not want to fall from his favour and lose the use of his library, the finest collection of books to be found in the kingdom. So I keep my counsel.

With a sudden draught, the study door is thrown open and we all start like guilty creatures; Kelley, with surprising quickness, throws his hat over the showing-stone. None of us is under any illusion; what we are engaged in here would be considered witchcraft, and is a capital offence against the edicts of Church and State. It would only take one gossiping servant to catch wind of Dee’s activities and we could all be facing the pyre; the Protestant authorities of this island, more tolerant in some matters than the church of my native Italy, still strike with force against anything that smells of magic.

Dusty evening sunlight slants through from the passageway outside, and in the doorway stands a little boy, not more than three years old, who looks from one to the other of us with blank curiosity.

Dee’s face crinkles with tenderness, but also with relief.

‘Arthur! What are you about? You know you are not supposed to disturb me when I am at work. Where is your mother?’

Arthur Dee steps across the threshold and at once gives a great shiver.

‘Why is it so cold in your room, Papa?’

Dee casts me a look of something like triumph, as if to say, You see? We were not deceived. He flings wide the shutters of the west window and outside the sun is setting, staining the sky vermilion, the colour of blood.

Chapter One

Barn Elms, House of Sir Francis Walsingham 21st September, Year of Our Lord 1583

The wedding feast of Sir Philip Sidney and Frances Walsingham threatens to spill over into the next day; dusk has fallen, lamps have been lit and above the din from the musicians in the gallery and the laughter of the guests, the young woman with whom I have been dancing tells me excitedly that she was once at a marriage party that lasted four days altogether. She leans in close when she says this and presses her hand to my shoulder; her breath is laced with sweet wine. The musicians strike up another galliard; my dancing partner exclaims with delight and clutches eagerly at my hand, laughing. I am about to protest that the hall is warm, that I would like a cup of wine and a moment’s respite in the fresh air before I return to the fray, but I have barely opened my mouth when the wind is knocked out of me by a fist between the shoulder blades, accompanied by a hearty cry.

‘Giordano Bruno! Now what is this I see? The great philosopher throwing off his scholar’s gown and lifting a leg with the flower of Her Majesty’s court? Did you learn to dance like that at the monastery? Your hidden talents never cease to astonish me, amico mio.’

Recovering my balance, I turn, smiling widely. Here is the bridegroom in all his finery, six feet tall and flushed with wine and triumph: breeches of copper-coloured silk so voluminous it is a wonder he can pass through a doorway; doublet of ivory sewn all over with seed-pearls; a lace ruff at his neck so severely starched that his handsome, beardless face seems constantly straining to see above it, like a small boy peering over a wall. His hair still sticks up in the front like a schoolboy hastened out of bed. In all the tumult I have not exchanged a word with him since the morning’s ceremony, he and his young bride have been so comprehensively surrounded by high-ranking well-wishers and relatives, all the highest ornaments of Her Majesty’s court.

‘Well,’ he says, grinning broadly, ‘aren’t you going to congratulate me, then, or are you just here for the food from my table?’

‘Your father-in-law’s table, I had thought,’ I answer, laughing. ‘Or which part of the feast did you buy yourself?’

‘You can leave your debating-hall pedantry at home today, Bruno. But I hope you have had enough meat and drink?’

‘There is enough meat and drink here to feed the five thousand.’ I indicate the two long tables at each end of the great hall, spread with the detritus of the wedding banquet. ‘You will be eating left-overs for weeks.’

‘Oh, you may be sure Sir Francis will see to that,’ Sidney says. ‘Today, generosity, tomorrow – thrift. But come, Bruno. You have no idea how it pleases me that you are here.’ He holds his arms wide and I embrace him with sincere affection; I am the perfect height to have his ruff smack me directly in the nose.

‘Watch the clothes,’ he says, only half-joking. ‘Bruno, allow me to introduce you to my uncle Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester.’

He steps back and gestures to the man who stands a few feet away, at his shoulder; a man of about Sidney’s own height, perhaps in his mid-fifties yet still athletic, his hair steel grey at the temples but his face fine-boned and handsome behind his close-clipped beard. This man regards me with watchful brown eyes.

‘My lord.’

I bow deeply, acknowledging the honour; the Earl of Leicester is one of the highest nobles in England and the man who enjoys greater influence over Queen Elizabeth than any alive. I raise my head and meet his shrewd appraisal. It is rumoured that in their youth he was the queen’s only lover, and that even now their long-enduring friendship is more intimate than most marriages. He smiles, and there is warmth in his gaze.

‘Doctor Bruno, the pleasure is mine. When I learned of your courage in Oxford I was eager to make your acquaintance and thank you in person.’ Here he lowers his voice; Leicester is the Chancellor of the University of Oxford, charged with enforcing the measures to suppress the Catholic resistance among the students. That the movement had gathered so much momentum on his watch had been a matter of some embarrassment to him; my adventures with Sidney there in the spring had helped to disarm it, at least temporarily. I am about to reply when we are interrupted by a man dressed in a russet doublet, with a peasecod belly so vast it makes him look as if he is with child; the earl nods politely to me and I turn back to Sidney.

‘My uncle likes the idea of you. He’s keen to hear more of your outrageous theories about the universe.’ I must look anxious, because he elbows me cheerfully in the ribs. ‘Leicester’s friendship is worth a great deal.’

‘I am glad to have met him,’ I say, rubbing my side. ‘And may I now pay my respects to your bride?’

Sidney looks around, as if for someone to deal with this request.

‘I dare say she is here somewhere. Giggling with her ladies.’ He does not sound as if he is in a hurry to find her. ‘But you are needed elsewhere.’

He turns and bows to my companion, who has discreetly withdrawn a couple of paces to watch us from under lowered lids, her hands modestly clasped together. ‘I am borrowing the great Doctor Bruno for a moment. I will return him to you at some stage. There will be more dancing after the masques.’ The girl blushes, smiles shyly at me and obediently melts away into the brightly coloured, rustling mass of guests. Sidney looks after her with an expression of amusement. ‘Lady Arabella Horton has her sights set on you, it seems. Don’t be fooled by all the fluttering lashes and simpering. Half the court has been there. And she will soon lose interest when she learns you are the son of a soldier, with no capital but your wit and a pittance from the King of France.’

‘I was not planning to tell her that immediately.’

‘Did you tell her you were a monk for thirteen years?’

‘We had not got around to that either.’

‘She might like that – might want to help you make up for lost time. But for now, Bruno, my new father-in-law suggests you might like to take a turn in the garden.’

‘I have not yet had the chance to congratulate him.’

But it is clear that this is business. Sidney rests a hand on my shoulder.

‘No one has. Do you know, he disappeared for two hours altogether this afternoon to draft some papers? In the middle of his own daughter’s wedding party?’ He smiles indulgently, as if he must tolerate these foibles, though we both know that Sidney is in no position to complain; financially, he needed this marriage more than young Mistress Walsingham, who I suspect entertains greater romantic hopes of it than her new husband.

‘I suppose the great machinery of state must keep turning.’

‘Indeed. And now it is your turn to grease the wheels. Go to him. I shall find you later.’

On all sides we are pressed by those who wish to congratulate the bridegroom; they jostle, aggressively smiling and attempting to shake his hand. In the mêlée I slip away towards the door.

Outside, the night air is hard-edged with the first frost of autumn and the grounds are quiet, a welcome relief from the celebrations inside. In the knot-garden close to the house, lanterns have been lit and couples walk the neatly cultivated paths, murmuring, their heads close together. Even in the shadows, I can see that Sir Francis Walsingham is not to be found here. Stretching my arms, I strain my head back to gaze up at the sky, the constellations picked out in bright silver against the ink-blue of the heavens, their arrangement different here from the sky above Naples where I first learned the star-patterns as a boy.

I reach the end of the path and still there is no sign of him, so I set off across the open expanse of lawn, away from the lit paths, towards an area of woodland that borders the cultivated part of the garden at the back of Walsingham’s country house. As I walk, a lean shape gathers substance out of the shadows and falls into step beside me. He seems made of the night; I have never seen Walsingham wear any suit other than black, not even today, at his daughter’s wedding, and he wears still his close-fitting black velvet skullcap, that makes his face yet more severe. He is past fifty now and I have heard he has been ill this last month – one of the protracted bouts of illness that confines him to his bed for days at a time, though if you enquire after his health he swats the question away with a flick of his hand, as if he hasn’t the time to consider such trifles. This man, Queen Elizabeth Tudor’s Principal Secretary, though he may not seem an imposing figure at first glance, holds the security of England in his hands. Walsingham has created a network of spies and informers that stretches across Europe to the land of the Turks in the east and the colonies of the New World in the west, and the intelligence they bring him is the queen’s first line of defence against the myriad Catholic plots to take her life. More remarkably still, he seems to hold all this intelligence in his own mind, and can pluck any information he requires at will.

I had arrived in England six months earlier, at the beginning of spring, sent by my patron King Henri III of France to stay for a while with his ambassador in London in order to spare me the attentions of the Catholic extremists who were gathering support in Paris, led by the Duke of Guise. I had barely been in England a fortnight when Walsingham asked to meet me, my long-standing enmity with Rome and my privileged position as a house guest at the French embassy making me ideally suited to his purposes. Over the past months, Walsingham is a man I have grown to respect deeply and fear a little.

But his cheeks are hollowed out since I last saw him. He folds his hands now behind his back; the noise of the celebrations grows fainter as we move away from the house.

‘Congratulazioni, your honour.’

‘Grazie, Bruno. I trust you are making the most of the celebrations?’

When he converses alone with me, he speaks Italian, partly I think to put me at ease, and partly because he wants to be sure I do not miss any vital point – his diplomat’s Italian being superior to the English I learned largely from merchants and soldiers on my travels.

‘Out of curiosity – where did you learn our English dances?’ he adds, turning to me.

‘I largely make them up as I go along. I find if one steps out confidently enough, people will assume you know what you are doing.’

He laughs, that deep rolling bear-laugh that comes so rarely from his chest.

‘That is your motto in everything, is it not, Bruno? How else does a man rise from fugitive monk to personal tutor to the King of France? Speaking of France –’ he keeps his voice light – ‘how does your host, the ambassador?’

‘Castelnau is in good spirits now that his wife and daughter are newly returned from Paris.’

‘Hm. I have not met Madame de Castelnau. They say she is very beautiful. No wonder the old dog always looks so hearty.’

‘Beautiful, yes. I have not spoken to her at any length. I am told she is a most pious daughter of the Catholic Church.’

‘I hear the same. Then we must watch her influence over her husband.’ His eyes narrow. We have reached the trees, and he gestures for me to follow him into their shadows. ‘I had thought Michel de Castelnau shared the French king’s preference for diplomatic dealings with England – so he claims when he has audience with me, anyway. But lately that fanatic the Duke of Guise and his Catholic Leaguers are gaining strength in the French court, and in your letter last week you told me that Guise is sending money to Mary of Scotland through the French embassy –’ He pauses to master his anger, quietly striking his fist into the palm of his hand. ‘And what need has Mary Stuart of Guise money, him? She is more than generously provided for in Sheffield Castle, considering she is our prisoner.’

‘To secure the loyalty of her friends?’ I suggest. ‘To pay her couriers?’

‘Precisely, Bruno! All this summer I have laboured to bring the two queens to a point where they are prepared to hold talks face to face, perhaps negotiate a treaty. Queen Elizabeth would like nothing better than to give her cousin Mary her liberty, so long as she will renounce all claim to the English throne. For her part, I am led to believe that Mary tires of imprisonment and is ready to swear to anything. That is why this traffic of letters and gifts from her supporters in France through the embassy troubles me so deeply. Is she double-dealing with me?’

He glares at me as if he expects an answer, but before I can open my mouth, he continues, as if to himself:

‘And who are these couriers? I have the diplomatic packet intercepted and searched every week – she must have another means of delivery for her private letters.’ He shakes his head briskly. ‘While she lives, Mary Stuart is a banner to rally England’s Catholics, and all those in Europe who hope to see a papist monarch back on our throne. But Her Majesty will not move pre-emptively against her cousin, though the Privy Council urges her to see the danger. This is why your presence in the French embassy is more crucial to me than ever, Bruno. I need to see every communication between Mary and France that passes through Castelnau’s hands. If she is plotting against the queen’s sovereignty again, I must have hard evidence that incriminates her this time. Can you see to it?’

‘I have befriended the ambassador’s clerk, your honour. For the right price, he says he can give us access to every letter Castelnau writes and receives, if you will guarantee that the documents will bear no evidence of tampering. He is greatly afraid of being discovered – he craves assurances of your honour’s protection.’

‘Good man. Give him all the assurances he needs.’ He clasps my shoulder for a moment. ‘If he will obtain for us an example of the ambassador’s seal, I will set my man Thomas Phelippes to create a forgery. There is no man in England more skilled in the arts of interception. In the circumstances, Bruno, I do not think it prudent that you should be seen so much with Sidney,’ he adds. ‘Now that he is so publicly tied to me. Castelnau must not doubt your loyalty to France for a moment.’

Even through the dark, my face must betray my disappointment; Sidney is the only person I truly consider a friend in England. We had first met years ago in Padua, when I was fleeing through Italy, and renewed our friendship in the spring, when we had travelled to Oxford together on Walsingham’s business. The adventures we shared there had only served to bring us closer. Without his company, I will feel my state of exile all the more keenly.

‘But I have found you another contact. A Scotsman named William Fowler – you will meet him in due course. He is a lawyer who has worked for me in France, so you will have plenty to talk about.’

‘You would trust a lawyer, your honour?’

‘You look amused, Bruno. Lawyers, philosophers, priests, soldiers, merchants – there is no one I will not make use of. Fowler is well connected in Scotland, both among our friends and those loyal to the Scottish queen, who believe he is a friend to their cause. He has also insinuated himself with Castelnau, who believes Fowler to be a secret Catholic unhappy with Her Majesty’s government. He has the knack of making himself all things to all men if necessity demands. Fowler is well placed to convey your reports from inside the embassy without you compromising your position.’ He pauses and lifts his head; strains of music and laughter drift faintly towards the house and he seems to remember the occasion. ‘For now, this is all. Come – we should be merry today. You must rejoin the dance.’

We turn to face the lit windows across the lawn, his hand lightly on my back. Out here, so far from the City, clean night scents of earth, grass and frost carry to us on the breeze. Even the Thames, running its sluggish course beyond the line of the trees behind us, smells fresh here, so far to the west of London. We are only a mile from Dee’s house; I am surprised that he has not been invited. He is, after all, Sidney’s old tutor and a friend of sorts to Walsingham. As if reading my thoughts, the Principal Secretary says, casually.

‘You are spending a good deal of time in Mortlake lately, I hear?’ It is not really a question.

‘I am writing a book,’ I explain, as we begin to move slowly together in the direction of the music. ‘Doctor Dee’s library has been invaluable.’

‘What manner of book?’

‘Of philosophy. And cosmology.’

‘A defence of your beloved Copernicus, then.’

‘Something like that.’ I did not want to say too much about the book I was working on until it was completed. The ideas I was attempting to put forward were not just controversial but revolutionary, far beyond the theories that Copernicus had proposed. I wanted at least to have written it before I was obliged to defend it.

‘Hm.’ A heavy silence. ‘Be wary of John Dee, Bruno.’

‘I thought he was your honour’s friend?’

‘Up to a point. In matters of cartography, or ciphers, or the reformation of the calendar, there is no one in the kingdom whose knowledge I prize higher. But lately his talk runs much on prophecies and omens.’

‘He believes we are living in the end times.’

‘We are living in times of unprecedented turbulence, that much is certain,’ he replies brusquely. ‘But Her Majesty has enough to fear without Dee whispering these apocalyptic forecasts in her ear because he wants to make himself indispensable to her. As do we all, I suppose, in our way,’ he concedes, with a sigh. ‘But then his influence filters down even to the Privy Council chamber and suddenly she will not allow any decision without first consulting a star-chart. It makes the business of government very difficult. Besides,’ he lowers his voice, ‘it is my firm belief that Almighty God has written some secrets into the Book of Nature that are not supposed to be unlocked. From what I hear, Dee’s newest experiments come dangerously close to crossing that line.’

There is no point in asking how he knows of Dee’s experiments; Walsingham’s eyes and ears encompass all of Europe and even the colonies of the New World. It should be no surprise that he knows what goes on a mile from his own house. Yet Dee has been so scrupulous about secrecy where his scrying is concerned.

‘There are some at court who feel he has too much influence over Her Majesty, and must be removed from favour,’ Walsingham continues.

‘Your honour included?’

His teeth shine briefly in the dark as he smiles.

‘I have a great respect for John Dee, and I would not do anything to hurt his reputation. The same is not true of some others on Her Majesty’s Privy Council. Lord Henry Howard is publishing a book, I am told, to be presented to the queen – a fierce attack on prophecy and astrology and all those who claim to tell the future, calling them necromancers, accusing them of speaking with demons. He does not mention Dee by name, but the intent is clear enough . . . If Dee can be tainted for witchcraft, so much the worse for those of us known as his friends – me, Sidney, the Earl of Leicester. The Howards are dangerously powerful, and the queen knows this well enough. You may like to mention this to Dee the next time you are using his library.’

I incline my head to show that the warning is understood. As I bow and prepare to take my leave, I glance up to see a figure haring across the grass to us, a short riding cloak flapping behind him. He drops breathlessly to his knees at Walsingham’s feet, and even in the thin silvered light I can make out the royal ensign on his livery, beneath the spattering of mud that shows he has ridden hard to get here. He mutters something about Richmond, a matter of urgency; there is alarm in his bulging eyes. I step away discreetly so that he may deliver his news privately, but Walsingham calls me back.

‘Bruno! Wait for me a moment, will you?’

I stand a little way off, stamping my feet against the chill and rubbing my hands while the man rises to his feet and imparts his news in frantic bursts, Walsingham canted over to receive it, his hands still folded immobile behind his back. Whatever news this messenger has brought from the royal household must be serious indeed to interrupt a man’s family wedding feast.

At length, Walsingham murmurs a response, the messenger bows and departs in the direction of the house with the same haste. Walsingham raises his hand to beckon me over.

‘I am needed at Richmond Palace on a most grave matter, Bruno, and I want you with me. It will be preferable to disturbing the celebrations. We must leave quietly, without attracting attention – that fellow is gone to instruct the servants to make a boat ready. I will tell you as much as I know while we travel.’ His voice is tight but controlled; if something distressing has befallen Her Majesty, Walsingham is the man she relies upon to bring order, discipline, calm.

‘Will you not be missed?’ I gesture in the direction of the wedding feast. He laughs, briefly.

‘So long as I leave my steward in charge with the keys to the wine cellar, I doubt anyone will notice. Come, now.’

He leads me around the back of the house and through the garden to the little wharf where lights are bobbing gently, reflected in the black water. I must wait for him to tell the messenger’s tale in his own time.

Chapter Two

Richmond Palace, south-west London 21st September, Year of Our Lord 1583

‘A violent death, the fellow said.’ Walsingham has to raise his voice over the rhythm of the oars as the servant doggedly ploughs the small craft westward against the tide. The wind blows the spray sideways into our faces. In daylight we could ride the distance from Barn Elms to Richmond Palace in half the time, covering the ground as the crow flies across the deer park, but in darkness the river is the surest way, though it loops its course lazily around the headland.

‘But of some special significance, for them to disturb your honour?’ The wind snatches my words away even as they leave my mouth.

‘One of Her Majesty’s maids of honour, apparently, killed within a stone’s throw of the queen’s own privy apartments, under the noses of the yeomen of the guard and the serjeants-at-arms – you may imagine the entire household is in an uproar. But it is the manner of this death that makes my lord Burghley summon me with such urgency. We will learn more anon.’

He sits back and points up as the white stone façade of the palace looms ahead, a pale shadow under the moon, its chapel and great hall rising to an imposing height either side of the gatehouse with its warmly lit windows. From the range that flanks the river, a forest of slender turrets rises against the clouds, all topped with gilded minarets, onion-shaped, like the palace of an eastern sultan. A servant is waiting for us at the landing stage behind the palace where a row of wooden barques are tethered, the water slapping idly at their sides; he welcomes the Principal Secretary with a bow, but his face is strained. Here, where the royal apartments face the river, he shows us to a little postern gate set into the wall. By the door stand two men, each holding a pikestaff, who move aside to let the servant pass. He bangs hard on this door and calls out; a small grille is slid open and a series of brusque, whispered exchanges follow before the door is opened wide and a short, round-faced man with feathery white hair under a black skullcap strides through, his arms outstretched, his face creased in a harried frown. He embraces Walsingham briefly, then catches sight of me and the anxiety in his drooping eyes intensifies.

‘This is . . .?’

Walsingham lays a hand on his arm to placate him.

‘Giordano Bruno. A most loyal servant of Her Majesty,’ he adds, with a meaningful nod.

The older man considers me for a moment, then a light of recognition steals over his face.

‘Ah. Your Italian, Francis? The renegade monk?’

I incline my head in acknowledgement; it is not a compliment, though it is a title I wear with some pride.

‘So the Roman Inquisition likes to call me.’

‘Doctor Bruno is a philosopher, William,’ Walsingham gently corrects.

The older man reaches out a hand to me.

‘William Cecil, Lord Burghley. Francis has spoken highly of your talents, Doctor Bruno. You served Her Majesty well in Oxford this spring, I understand.’

I feel my chest swell and my face flush at this; Walsingham is miserly with his praise to your face, which makes you strive for it all the more, yet he has talked about me favourably to Lord Burghley, the queen’s High Treasurer, one of her most influential advisors. You fool, I chide myself, smiling; you are thirty-five years of age, not a schoolboy praised for his penmanship, though this is exactly how I feel. I continue to beam to myself even as Burghley’s face turns sombre again.

‘This way, gentlemen. Let us not waste time.’

Inside the palace, the air seems stiff with fear. Faces, half-hidden, peer anxiously out of doorways as our footsteps echo along wood-panelled corridors lit by candles whose flames waver in the disturbance we make, sending our shadows looming and shrinking along the walls as Walsingham and I follow Burghley’s purposeful strides.

‘I almost forgot, Francis,’ he says, over his shoulder, ‘how was the wedding?’

‘Well enough, I thank you. I have left the party in full spate. Heaven only knows what will be left of my house when Sidney’s young bloods have finished their roistering.’

‘I am sorry, truly, to draw you away,’ Burghley replies, lowering his voice. ‘If the circumstances were not so very . . . well, you shall see. Her Majesty asked for you in person, Francis.’ He hesitates. ‘Well – to be honest, she called first for Leicester. But I thought the earl, after a day at his nephew’s wedding feast . . .’

Walsingham nods.

‘I thought you were the man to take charge, Francis. The queen is rightly afraid. This thing has happened within her own walls and its implications . . .’ The words die on his lips.

‘Understood. Show me this deed, William, then take me to the queen.’

He brings us up two flights of stairs where the panels are painted in scarlet, green and gold tracery, then along a more richly furnished and considerably warmer corridor, hung with tapestries and damask cloths; I guess we are nearing the site of the queen’s private apartments. On the way we pass three more armed men in royal livery. Burghley pauses outside a low wooden door where a stout man stands guard, a sword at his belt. The Lord Treasurer nods to him, and he steps back; Burghley rests his hand on the latch and his shoulders twitch.

‘Your discretion, gentlemen.’

The door swings open and I follow Walsingham through into a small chamber, well lit by good wax candles, where a body lies in repose on a bed whose curtains have been drawn back. At first I think it is a young man; the breeches and shirt are a man’s certainly, but as we step closer I see the long fair hair spread over the pillow, threads of gold glinting in the candlelight. Her motionless face is swollen and purple, with the popping eyes and bulging tongue that tell of strangulation. The white linen shirt she wears has been ripped down the front, though the two halves have been arranged to preserve her modesty, even in death. She looks young, no more than sixteen or seventeen; her slender neck is ringed with dark bruises and ugly welts and her breeches are torn, the silk stockings muddied and snagged. I glance from one to the other of my companions and understand with a jolt that I am flanked by the two highest officials of the queen’s Privy Council. This is no ordinary death.

Walsingham pauses for a moment, perhaps out of respect, then walks around the bed, examining the body dispassionately, as if he were her physician.

‘Who is she?’

‘Cecily Ashe,’ Burghley says. He has closed the door behind us and stands by it, twisting his hands together; perhaps he feels we are committing an impropriety, three men gathered to stare at the barely cold body of a young woman. ‘One of Her Majesty’s maids of honour, under the care of Lady Seaton. Her Majesty’s Lady of the Bedchamber,’ he adds, for my benefit.

‘Ah.’ Walsingham nods, and clasps his hand across his chin, obscuring his mouth. I have noticed that he does this when he does not wish to betray any emotion. ‘Ashe . . . Then she would be the elder daughter of Sir Christopher Ashe of Nottingham, would she not? Poor child – she has not been at court even a year. The same age as my Frances.’

We all stand silent for a moment, all our thoughts following Walsingham’s to his seventeen-year-old daughter, the new bride who, perhaps even now, is being led to the marital bed by Sir Philip Sidney, a man eleven years her senior and with notoriously vigorous appetites.

‘Almost the same age as my Elizabeth was when she died,’ Burghley adds softly. Walsingham glances at him; there is a moment of unspoken sympathy as their eyes meet and I sense that these two men share an understanding deeper than politics.

‘The clothes?’

‘Ah, yes.’ Burghley shakes his head. ‘The usual trouble, I suspect. Trying to steal out undetected to a tryst with someone she should not.’ He makes it sound as if this is a common problem.

‘Has she been violated?’

Walsingham’s tone is brisk again; Burghley gives a little cough.

‘She has not yet been officially examined by the physician, but the body was found with the breeches and underclothes torn, the shirt ripped apart likewise. There are bruises and bloody marks on her thighs. She was laid out in the form of a crucifix, with her arms outstretched. There is something else you should see.’ Taking a deep breath, he crosses to the body and, taking one corner of the torn material gingerly between his forefinger and thumb as if it might scald him, he folds down the left side of the shirt to expose the girl’s small, pale breast.

Walsingham and I both gasp simultaneously; there is a mark cut into the soft white flesh, over her still heart. The lines have been traced into the skin carefully and the blood blotted away, so that the mark stands out in jagged crimson lines, a shape that looks like a curved figure 2 with a vertical line bisecting its tail. This mark is unmistakably the astrological symbol for the planet Jupiter. He shoots me a questioning look, swift as blinking, but Burghley’s sharp eye notes it.

‘That is not all,’ says the Lord Treasurer, as he covers the girl again. ‘In each of her outstretched hands she held these objects.’ From the wooden dresser beside the bed he holds up a rosary of dark wood adorned with a gold Spanish cross, and with the other hand he presents Walsingham with a small wax effigy, about the size of a child’s doll.

‘Dear God,’ Walsingham breathes, holding up the figurine for me to see. It is crudely made, but unquestionably an imitation of Queen Elizabeth; red wool for hair, a cloak fashioned from a scrap of purple silk, a paper crown on its head, a sewing needle protruding from its breast, where it has been stabbed through the heart. We both look at Burghley, who nods, once. No ordinary murder indeed.

‘Who found her?’ I ask, breaking the silence.

‘The queen’s chaplain,’ Burghley replies, turning away from the corpse.

‘What was the chaplain doing in her chamber?’

‘Oh – she was not found here,’ he says, with a tight little laugh at the implication. ‘No – the body was outside. There is a ruined chapel behind the Privy Orchard – the last remains of the priory that used to stand on this site. It is separated from the palace compound by high walls and its garden grown somewhat derelict. Lately it has been said –’ Burghley frowns – ‘that it was becoming a popular place for meetings between the queen’s ladies and the court gentlemen, because it is out of the way and not properly patrolled. This sort of thing is strictly forbidden by Her Majesty, you understand. Being a man of stern propriety, the chaplain thought he would check the area as dusk fell. And he found her laid out there as I have described.’

‘He saw no one fleeing as he approached?’ I ask.

‘No one, he says, though there is an open entrance to the abandoned garden from the river. The killer could have slipped away and hidden on the bank, perhaps even had a boat tied up further downstream. The only other way in is through the gatehouse from the Privy Orchard, but at that time of the evening there are always people coming and going on the palace side, including the yeomen of the guard on their watch. No one recalls seeing anything out of the ordinary. But then dusk was falling and since she was dressed as a boy . . .’ Burghley sighs, runs his palm over his skullcap.

‘You have set extra men-at-arms around the gates?’ Walsingham asks.

‘Naturally. The wharf at the back where you landed was already patrolled, as was the gatehouse at the front. But the captain of the palace guard has ordered more men to be set around the perimeter walls, and has sent a company to search the Privy Orchard and the deer park. Under cover of darkness, though, I fear they will have little success. The perpetrator could be long gone.’

‘Or he could still be inside the compound,’ I offer.

Both men turn to look at me; Walsingham raises his eyebrows for me to continue.

‘Only, it seems this was hardly a spontaneous killing. All these devices and props were carefully prepared. And the victim was chosen deliberately too, it seems – maid of honour to the queen? This killer means to indicate a direct threat to Her Majesty, surely, and he is showing how near he can get to her person. And if the girl was dressed for a tryst, then whoever killed her either knew when and where to find her, or he was the very person she was waiting for.’

Walsingham tilts his head to one side and considers me.

‘You talk sense, Bruno. But let us keep such speculation between ourselves. Her Majesty will hardly be reassured to think that someone familiar to her own household may be behind this, and I must attempt to put her mind at rest.’

‘There is speculation enough in the palace as it is,’ Burghley says, his lips pursed. ‘The chaplain raised such a noise when he found her that by the time the news reached me, half the servants had already been to gape at the spectacle and embellished it in their own fashion before passing it on. We cannot hope to keep the details quiet now. Already the lower servants murmur of devilry, that this is the work of the antichrist, come to fulfil the prophecy of the end times.’

‘The prophecy?’ I look from one to the other of them, amazed.

Walsingham catches the alarm in my voice, and laughs softly.

‘Did you think it was only learned men like yourself and Doctor Dee who knew of these prophecies? No, no – in England, Bruno, this year of Our Lord 1583 has been the talk of the common people long before it dawned. Even the poorest household has an almanac predicting the Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, the first of its kind in a thousand years, the dire consequences that will follow, the floods and famines and tempests and droughts, the marvels in the heavens – oh, there have been pamphlets and interludes circulating in the taverns and the market squares for as long as I can recall, promising that the prophecy of the end times will find its fulfilment in these days.’

‘The wars of religion in these last years have only fuelled the fire,’ Burghley adds, his jaw set tight.

‘“When you shall hear of wars, and rumours of wars, be not troubled: for such things must needs be, but the end is not yet,”’ I muse, quoting the Gospel of Saint Mark.

‘These present wars began in universities and in kings’ bedchambers, not in the movements of the heavens,’ Walsingham chips in sharply. ‘None the less, the result has been to whip the populace into a frenzy of fear, and when unlettered people grow fearful, they fall back on old superstitions. I don’t know what it is about the English, but they have a peculiar weakness for prophecies and predictions.’

‘We have had five people arrested this year in London alone for disseminating printed prophecies of the queen’s death,’ Burghley adds sagely.

‘The people take this nonsense about the Great Conjunction seriously – and not just the humbler sort of folk,’ Walsingham says, his eyes flitting to the dead girl’s breast. ‘It will be all the easier for the secret priests to crawl out of their dog holes and turn the people back to Rome if they believe the second coming is at hand.’

‘She held a rosary,’ Burghley says, almost in a whisper. ‘An effigy of the queen killed, and in the other hand a rosary. The message is clear, is it not? The triumph of Rome and Her Majesty’s death?’

‘Someone wishes us to think along those lines, certainly.’ Walsingham sets his jaw and a nerve twitches in his cheek. ‘And the sign of Jupiter, too. Her Majesty is skittish enough touching these movements of the planets, thanks to John Dee. Now she will insist her fears are grounded.’ He sighs. ‘I should go to her without delay. Bruno – you can begin by talking to anyone close to Lady Cecily who might cast some light on her movements. Say you are Lord Burghley’s man. William, you will point Doctor Bruno to the right people? And have the serjeants-at-arms search every private apartment in the building, as well as the kitchens, the chapel and every common space. If this killer is still hereabouts, he will have a bloody shirt and knife he may have tried to hide somewhere.’

Burghley nods, running his hand over his head again, and looks suddenly weary. He must be a good ten years older than Walsingham, perhaps in his mid-sixties already, though he has the appearance of better health. He glances at me sidelong, his eyebrows knit in concern.

‘You will find the ladies-in-waiting somewhat hysterical, Doctor Bruno,’ he remarks drily. ‘Understandable, of course, though I was hard pushed to get any sense out of them. Still – perhaps a younger man with fine dark eyes and a pleasing smile might have better luck.’ He smiles grimly and pats me on the shoulder as he holds the chamber door open for me.

‘That is the nearest you will get to a compliment from Burghley, Bruno,’ Walsingham says, following behind me.

‘I assumed he was talking about you, your honour.’

Burghley throws a look of amusement over his shoulder.

‘At least he knows how to flatter, this one,’ he observes. ‘Let us hope he can turn it to good use with these women.’

Lady Margaret Seaton, Queen Elizabeth’s Lady of the Bedchamber, does not seem hysterical when I am shown into the private chamber where she waits; if anything, she seems impressively composed, you might almost say guarded. Lord Burghley introduces me as a trusted assistant, before backing politely through the double doors and closing them behind him. Lady Seaton wears black as if she is already in mourning and sits back among her cushions, regarding me with shrewd eyes. She is older, some way through her forties, closer to the queen’s own age, and though her fine skin begins to show the marks of time it is clear that she must have been considered a beauty in her youth. Two younger women sit on floor cushions on either side of her chair, clutching at her hands, both dressed in gowns of white silk and weeping copiously. At length she raises a hand and the girls make an effort to dampen their sobs.

‘What are you?’ she asks, in a clear voice. There is something accusatory in her tone; I sense that her apparent dislike is not personal, but that she is acutely conscious of her station and would prefer to have been sent someone with more authority.

‘I am an Italian, my lady. Lord Burghley has asked me to see if you can recall anything that –’

‘I mean by profession. You are not a courtier, I don’t think. Are you a diplomat?’

‘Of sorts, my lady.’

She rearranges her broad skirts, rustling the silks ostentatiously while avoiding my eye.

‘How odd, that Burghley should send a foreigner. But continue.’

‘The young lady, Cecily Ashe – do you have any idea who she might have been meeting in the ruined chapel this evening?’

‘The papists have done this, you know,’ Lady Seaton snaps, leaning forwards. At the same time, I note that the red-headed girl kneeling by the left side of her chair bites her lip and drops her eyes to the floor.

‘Why do you say so, my lady?’

‘Because of the sacrilegious nature of it.’ She looks at me as though this should be obvious. ‘I suppose you are one, or have been?’

‘Once. But His Beatitude Pope Gregory had me excommunicated and wishes to burn me. This is why I now live under Her Majesty’s kindlier skies.’

‘I see.’ Her expression changes to one of curiosity. ‘What did you do to upset him?’

‘I have read books forbidden by the Holy Office. I abandoned the Dominican order without permission. I have written that the Earth turns around the Sun, that the stars are not fixed and that the universe is infinite.’ I shrug. ‘Among other things.’

She considers this with a slight wrinkle of her nose, as if a bad smell had drifted into her orbit.

‘Good heavens. Then I’m not surprised. To answer your question, I have no idea why Cecily should have been in that chapel. I last saw her at about four o’clock this afternoon, when she was engaged under my supervision with the other maids of honour in preparing the queen’s jewels for the evening. There was to be a musical recital in the great hall after supper. Master Byrd was to play.’ Here she pauses, and there is a minute tremor in her voice. The red-haired girl stifles a sob. ‘Cecily retired to dress with the other girls before Evensong, and that was the last time I set eyes on her.’

‘But evidently she slipped away to meet someone, disguised as a boy. Do you know who that might have been?’

Lady Seaton’s eyes narrow.

‘Preposterous,’ she says, eventually, though her voice remains steady. ‘The very suggestion. These girls are under my direct authority, Master –’

‘Bruno.’

‘– yes, so the idea that I should be so lax with their honour and reputations is deeply distasteful to me, especially in the circumstances. Her Majesty does not tolerate immorality at her court. Whatever your customs in Italy, the Queen of England’s maids of honour do not engage in trysts in broad daylight for all to see.’

I am tempted to ask whether they always wait until dark, but sense that she would not respond well to mockery. The red-haired girl darts a furtive glance upwards and catches my eye for a moment before quickly looking away, evidently distressed.

‘I can only assume that she was crossing the courtyard and was dragged into the chapel garden by her assailant,’ Lady Seaton asserts, nodding a full stop, as if this is the last word on the matter. Then her face softens into something like regret. ‘Cecily was a particular favourite of Her Majesty’s, you know. She liked Cecily to read to her from Seneca in the evenings. Cecily had the best Latin of any of the girls.’

‘Seneca?’

‘Oh, yes, Master Bruno – no need to look so astonished. Our sovereign is highly educated and she expects the same standards of her attendants. She will not have girls who can’t read to her and understand what they read.’

I glance down at the red-haired girl, who blinks up at me again, biting her lip. She is the one I need to speak to, if I can only find a way to get her alone. I wonder if she reads Seneca. She looks barely old enough to have learned her letters.

‘Why was she dressed in men’s clothes?’

‘I cannot account for that, Master Bruno. The girls are high-spirited, they do sometimes get up to games and pranks. Dressing up, and so on . . .’ The words die on her lips. It is clear that she will swear black is white if she must, rather than willingly offer anything that might reflect badly on her own vigilance over the dead girl.

‘Thank you for your help, my lady.’ I bow and make as if to leave, then turn back, as if struck by an afterthought. ‘There is no reason to suppose that Cecily had any loyalty to the Roman faith?’

Lady Seaton is so outraged by this that she rises to her feet, though the vast bulk of her farthingales means she almost becomes stuck in the chair, so the gesture loses some of its impact. She shakes off the girls’ hands on her arm.

‘How dare you, sir! Her family’s loyalty to the queen is impeccable, and if you think I would not have been able to sniff out a papist right under my own nose –’

‘Forgive me. I was only thinking aloud. She was found with a rosary in her hand.’

‘Planted on her by the papist conspirators who carried out this heinous deed!’ She points a finger into my face. ‘I think you should leave, sir. You come here charged with finding poor Cecily’s killer and instead accuse her of whoring and popery!’

I murmur an apology for any offence caused and retire, backing through the doors in a low bow. As I leave, I catch the red-haired girl’s eye and try to convey by a look that I would welcome any confidence she may choose to share. It is not clear if she has understood.

The many fine tapestries hanging on the walls keep the corridor free of draughts, but I hear an insistent wind worrying at the window frames as I settle myself almost out of sight in a bay opposite the stairs, where I can watch the door to the chamber I have just left. Walsingham will be some time with the queen, I suppose, and there is nothing for me to do but wait and hope that the young maid of honour with the red hair will show herself at some point, without the company of Lady Seaton.

Minutes pass, and more minutes. Distant creaks and footfalls tell of activity elsewhere in this warren of passages, but my corridor remains empty. Cupping my hands around my face to the window pane I can make out, under the moonlight, the expanse of the palace compound ahead of me, the great hall on the west side and the chapel on the east, connected to the complex of privy apartments by a narrow covered bridge that spans the moat dividing us from the Great Court. The palace is well protected, bordered on one side by the deer park and another by the river, and all its gates and entrances heavily guarded against intruders. But the truth is that any would-be assassin has ample opportunity to run at Queen Elizabeth during her open procession from the Chapel Royal to her chambers of state every Sunday, or her summer progressions around the country, or any of her many other public appearances. Walsingham frets endlessly over her faith in the love of her subjects – naïve, in his opinion – and her desire to show herself unafraid amongst them; but she insists that she will not be cowed by whispered threats. She likes to meet her people face to face, to give them her hand to kiss. Perhaps this is because Master Secretary Walsingham does not tell her everything he hears regarding plots hatched in the seminaries in France, now filled with angry young Englishmen in exile, who believe that the Papal Bull of 1570 declaring Elizabeth a heretic also gave them, in not so many words, a mandate to kill her on behalf of the Catholic Church.

But tonight’s murder is not the reckless act of a hot-blooded youth willing to martyr himself for his faith; there is a chilling touch of theatre about it, a degree of planning designed to inspire real fear. Fear of what, though? The Catholics? The planets? There is a message, too; Burghley reads it straightforwardly, but I am not so sure. The sign of Jupiter troubles me, perhaps only because it comes so near to me and Doctor Dee and our secret work. I stretch my legs out in front of me and sigh. After my experience in Oxford, I had hoped for some respite from the under-currents of violence that attend the court of Elizabeth. I am a philosopher, after all; what I really wish for is time to work on my book in peace, for as long as King Henri III of France sees fit to go on paying for me to live here with his ambassador. When I agreed to work for Walsingham shortly after my arrival in England, I had thought it would be merely a question of keeping my eyes open at the embassy, watching who among the English nobles came to dinner there, who stayed for Mass, who grew close to the ambassador and who was corresponding with whom among the Catholics in exile. Now, for the second time, I find myself caught up in a matter of violent death and I am not sure what is expected of me.

My thoughts are disturbed by the soft click of a door opening at the end of the passageway; I shrink back into the window seat and lean my head around cautiously, but in the dim light I can only make out the figure of a woman, too slender to be Lady Seaton. She carries a candle in a holder and walks briskly towards me; as she passes under a sconce of candles on the wall, I catch a flash of red-gold under her white linen cap and whistle softly through my teeth. She gives a little cry and immediately stifles it with her hand; I press my finger to my lips, uncross my legs from the seat and we both freeze, still as marble, waiting to see if any guard comes running. A moment passes before we are satisfied that no one has heard.

‘I waited for you. Can we speak privately?’ I ask her, my voice barely escaping my lips.

She hesitates for a moment, then glances over her shoulder before nodding. Holding her finger to her lips, she gestures for me to follow her, and leads me down the staircase, along another passage and into an empty gallery, unlit except for the moonlight that spills through the diamond panes, casting pale shapes on the wooden boards, faintly coloured where the windows bear heraldic emblems of stained glass. Almost as soon as the doors swing shut behind us, she appears to regret her decision; her eyes open wide in fear and she looks frantically about her.

‘If they should find me here –’

I make soft reassuring noises, such as you might make to a skittish horse, while guiding her away from the door towards one of the large windows.

‘You were friends with Cecily?’

She nods, with emphasis, then smothers a sob behind her handkerchief.

‘What is your name?’

‘Abigail Morley.’

‘You know more than Lady Seaton, I think, Abigail,’ I prompt gently.

She nods again, disconsolate; she will not meet my eye and I guess that she fears disloyalty to her dead friend.

‘Did Cecily have a lover? Did she tell you she was going to meet someone? If you know anything, it may help to catch him.’

Finally the girl raises her head.

‘Lady Seaton says it was black magic.’

‘People talk of magic to cover their ignorance. But you know better, I think.’

Her eyes widen in amazement at this and she almost smiles; the audacity of someone questioning her mistress’s authority. She is standing close to me and I notice that she is pretty in that milky, English way, though there is something bland about her features that does not move me. I prefer a woman with more fire in her eyes.

‘We are not allowed to associate with the gentlemen of the court,’ she whispers. ‘It is strictly forbidden. Even the merest rumour could have us sent straight back to our families in disgrace with no chance of return, you understand?’

‘That seems hard.’

The girl shrugs, as if to say things have always been arranged like this.

‘Being maid of honour to Her Majesty is the surest step to making a grand marriage at court. This is why our fathers send us here, and lay out their money for the privilege. Cecily told me her father paid more than a thousand pounds to get her a place.’

‘Poor man. A double loss for him, then. But how are you supposed to make these grand marriages if you are not allowed near the courtiers?’

‘Oh, the marriages are made for us,’ she says, with a little pout. ‘Between our fathers and the queen. And naturally no man wants to know us if there are rumours flying about the court concerning our virtue. Besides,’ she adds, slipping into a sly grin, ‘Her Majesty is renowned as the Virgin Queen, so she thinks we should all follow her example. She should really know that all the tricks of secrecy make it the more exciting.’

‘Like dressing as a boy?’

‘Cecily was not the first girl to have tried that. You’re just noticed less – it makes it simpler to slip away. Men have it so much easier,’ she adds, with a pointed look, as if this imbalance were my fault.

‘Well, I’m afraid your poor friend is beyond any disgrace now. So she did have a sweetheart?’

‘She had met someone,’ the girl confides. ‘Quite recently – for the last month she was all smiles and secrecy, and quite distracted. If Lady Seaton chastised her for not having her mind on her duties, she would blush and giggle and send me meaningful looks.’ A resentment has crept into Abigail’s tone.

‘But did she tell you who he was?’

‘No,’ she says, after a slight hesitation, and in the silence that follows her eyes dart away. ‘But in the Maids’ Chamber at bedtime, she would hint that he was someone very important – someone she evidently thought would impress us, anyway. He must have been rich, because he bought her beautiful presents. A gold ring, a locket, and the most exquisite tortoise-shell mirror. She was convinced he meant to marry her, but then she always was fanciful.’

‘So he was here at court?’ In my haste I inadvertently clutch at her sleeve, startling her; quickly I withdraw my hand and she takes a step back.

‘I assume so. He must have been a frequent visitor, anyway, because lately she would often go missing at odd times, and she would come back all flushed and hugging her secret, though she made sure we all knew. She begged me to tell Lady Seaton she was feeling unwell, but the old woman is no fool, as you saw – she was growing suspicious. Cecily would have been found out sooner or later – or ended up with a full belly.’

‘But someone found her first,’ I muse. ‘So she never mentioned his name? You’re certain? Or anything that would identify him?’

She shakes her head, firmer this time.

‘No name, I swear. Nothing except that he was unusually handsome, apparently.’

‘Well, that would narrow it down in the English court.’

She giggles then, finally looking me in the eye; at the same moment, the sound of footsteps echoes along the passageway outside and the laughter dies on her lips.

‘Have you told anyone else of this?’ I hiss. She shakes her head. ‘Good. Say nothing about the secret suitor – neither you nor any of the other girls who knew about it. And tell no one that you spoke to me. If you remember anything else, you can always get a message to me in secret at the French embassy. I have lodgings there.’

Her eyes grow wider in the gloom. ‘Am I in danger?’

‘Until they know who killed your friend and why, there is no knowing who might be in danger. It is as well to be on your guard.’

The treads – two people, by the sound of it – grow closer; just as they stop outside the doors to the gallery I motion to her to keep back in the shadows, out of sight. Then I open the door just as the guards are about to reach for the handle, affecting to jump out of my skin at the sight of them.

‘Scusi – I was looking for the office of my lord Burghley? I think I have become lost in all the corridors.’ I offer a little self-deprecating laugh; they glance at one another, but they lead me away without looking further into the room.

‘Lord Burghley, my arse. You’ll answer to the captain of the palace guard first, you Spanish dog,’ says one, as he drags me roughly towards the stairs. ‘How did you get in here?’

‘Lord Burghley let me in,’ I repeat, with a sigh; in six months in England I have learned to expect this. They regard all foreigners – especially those of us with dark eyes and beards – as Spanish papists come to murder them in their beds. I will find my way to Burghley eventually; what matters is that no one should know the maid Abigail has spoken to me. Cecily’s mystery inamorato may not know that she kept his identity a secret; there is every chance he may want to silence her friends too. Assuming – and I have learned to assume nothing without proof – that he is connected to this bizarre display of murder.

Chapter Three

Salisbury Court, London 26th September, Year of Our Lord 1583

‘Cut off both her tits, the way I heard it.’ Archibald Douglas leans back in his chair and picks his teeth with a chicken bone, apparently satisfied that he has delivered the definitive version. Then he remembers another detail and sits forward in a hurry, his finger wagging at no one in particular. ‘Cut off both her tits and stuck a Spanish crucifix up her. Fucking brute.’ He slumps again and drains his glass.

‘Monsieur Douglas, s’il vous plait.’ Courcelles, the ambassador’s private secretary, raises his almost invisible eyebrows in a perfect mannerism of shock that, like all his gestures, appears learned and rehearsed. He passes a hand over his carefully coiffed hair and tuts, pursing his lips, as if his objection is principally to the Scotsman’s vulgar turn of phrase. ‘I was told by a friend at court she was strangled with a rosary. On the steps of the Chapel Royal, if you can believe it.’ He presses a hand to his breast bone with a great intake of breath. He should be in a playing company, I think; his every move is a performance.

Across the table, William Fowler catches my eye for the space of a blink before he glances away again.

‘These reports do have a tendency to grow in the telling,’ he says, evenly, looking at the ambassador. He too speaks with the Scottish accent, though to my foreign ears his conversation seems more comprehensible than the broad tones of Douglas. Fowler is a neat, self-contained man in his mid-twenties, clean-shaven with brown hair that hangs almost into his eyes; his voice is restrained, as if he is always imparting a confidence, so that you have to lean in to listen. ‘I have been a frequent visitor to the court on official business these past days, and I’m afraid the truth is less sensational.’ But he doesn’t elaborate. I have noticed that Fowler, my new contact whom I have met for the first time this evening and have not yet spoken to alone, has a talent for implying that he knows far more than he is prepared to say in company. Perhaps this is why the French ambassador is drawn to him.

Why Castelnau tolerates Douglas, on the other hand, is anyone’s guess. The older Scotsman is some kind of minor noble, about forty years of age, with prematurely greying reddish hair and a face hardened by drink and weather, who has attached himself to the embassy with the promise of supporting the Scottish queen’s claim to the English throne. Improbable as it seems, he is a senator in the Scottish College of Justice and said to be well connected among the Scottish lords, both Catholic and Protestant; he comes personally recommended by Queen Mary of Scotland. For the ambassador, these connections must be worth the price of feeding him. I have my doubts. Given that I too have been obliged to survive these past seven years by seeking the patronage of influential men, perhaps I should be more charitable to Archibald Douglas, but I like to think that I at least offer something to the households of my patrons in return for their hospitality, even if it is only some lively dinner-table conversation and the prestige of my books. Douglas brings nothing, as far as I can see, and I am not persuaded by his professed interest in Mary and her French supporters; he strikes me as one of those who will always agree with whoever happens to be pouring the wine. It irks me that Claude de Courcelles, the ambassador’s too-pretty secretary, tars me with the same brush as Douglas; Courcelles is responsible for making the embassy’s books balance, and he looks with undisguised resentment on those he views as leeches. I am often forced to remind him that I am a personal friend of his sovereign, whereas Douglas – well, Douglas claims to be a friend of many influential people, including the Queen of Scots herself, but I cannot help wondering: if he is so popular among the Scottish and English nobles, why does he not beg his dinner at one of their tables once in a while? Why, for that matter, is he never in Scotland at his own table?

The murder at court has been the chief topic of conversation at dinner this evening, eclipsing even the usual preoccupation with the Scottish queen and the ambitions of her Guise cousins. That night at Richmond Palace, I told Burghley and Walsingham of my conversation with Abigail; since then, the maids of honour have been given extra guards and the men at court are being questioned again but, naturally, when it comes to forbidden affairs, people are conditioned to lie. Walsingham grows increasingly anxious; the queen’s household at Richmond numbers upwards of six hundred souls. Though the hierarchies are strictly defined – each senior servant responsible for the duties of those below him or her – how can so many people be made to give true accounts of their movements on one evening? Queen Elizabeth, for her part, chooses to believe that a crazed intruder broke into the palace compound; her solution is to move the court earlier than usual to her central London palace at Whitehall, which is not so exposed to the open country and easier to defend. She will not admit the possibility that the killer might still be living among them. Walsingham had said he would send for me if he needed further assistance. Meanwhile, he said, I should return home and turn my attentions to the conversations behind closed doors at the French embassy.

In the wood-panelled dining room at Salisbury Court, the candles are burning low and the clock has already struck midnight, but the dishes with the remains of Castelnau’s grand dinner still litter the table, their sauces long cold and congealed. The servants will clear the board in the morning; after the meal is when the ambassador addresses himself to private business with his guests. Now that England’s most influential and restless Catholic lords gather so often around Castelnau’s table, it makes sense not to risk these discussions being overheard by servants; after all, says the ambassador, you can never be too careful. This means that we must all try to ignore Archibald Douglas toying with the carcass of a chicken, or wiping a finger through cold gravy and licking it while he delivers his half-formed opinions.

Michel de Castelnau, Seigneur de Mauvissiere, pushes his plate away from him and rests his elbows on the table, surveying his company of men. He is remarkably hale for a man of sixty winters; you have to look hard for the flecks of silver in his dark hair, and his dour face with its long bulbous nose is brightened by keen eyes that miss nothing. Castelnau is a cultured man, not without his vanities, who likes his supper table busy with men of wit and progressive ideas, those who are not afraid of controversy and enjoy a good argument in the pursuit of knowledge, whether in the sciences, theology, politics or poetry. I still do not see where a man like Douglas fits into this scheme, except that he has Mary Stuart’s personal blessing. In the low amber light, our shadows loom large behind us, wavering on the walls.

‘A virgin defiled in the very court of the Virgin Queen.’ The ambassador’s gaze travels steadily over each of us in turn. ‘My friends, this was done to slander the Catholics. Why else? Crucifix, rosary – it matters little. The details may differ in the reports but the intent is the same: to stir up fear and hatred – as if more were needed. The Catholics have done this, the English are saying in the street. The Catholics will stop at nothing, they mean to kill our Virgin Queen and make us all slaves to the pope again. This is what they are saying.’ He puts on a peevish, whining approximation of an English voice to simulate the common gossips. Courcelles laughs sycophantically. Douglas belches.

‘What I hear,’ says a new voice that cuts through the silence like a diamond on glass, ‘is that her body was marked all over in blood with symbols of black magic.’ He looks directly at me as he says this, the one who has spoken in that clipped, aristocratic tone, the one who sits half in shadow at the far end of the table. Everything about him is sharp; pointed face, pointed beard, brows like gothic arches, eyes hard as arrowheads. He has been unusually silent this evening, but I can feel the resentment emanating from him like the heat of a fire every time he turns those narrowed, unblinking eyes on me.

Castelnau casts a nervous glance my way; despite his secretary’s misgivings, the ambassador has never been other than a genial, even kindly, host to me since I arrived in April as his house guest, at his king’s request, but I know this part of my reputation troubles him. In Paris I taught the art of memory – a unique system I had developed from the Greeks and Romans – to King Henri himself, who called me his personal philosopher; naturally this elevated position drew envy from the learned doctors of the Sorbonne, who whispered into every ear that my memory techniques were a kind of sorcery, born of communion with devils. It was these rumours, together with the rising influence of the hard-line Catholic faction at the French court, that led to my temporary exile in London. Castelnau is an honest Catholic; not an extremist like the Guise crowd, but devout enough to be worried when people joke to him about keeping a sorcerer in his house. He is another who warns me that my friendship with Doctor Dee will not do my reputation any favours. I suspect he says this because his close friend Henry Howard hates Dee, though the cause of this passionate hatred remains a mystery to me.

Lord Henry Howard continues to stare at me from under his arched brows as if his position demands that I account for myself. ‘Did you not hear any such reports, Bruno?’ he adds, in his smoothest voice. ‘It is your area of expertise, is it not?’

I smile pleasantly as I return his stare, unyielding. It would shock him to learn that I alone among the company saw the dead girl with my own eyes, but naturally no one at Salisbury Court knows I was there that night, any more than they know the truth about my work for Walsingham. Castelnau thinks that my acquaintance with Philip Sidney works to his own advantage; occasionally I feed him snippets of disinformation from the English court that support this illusion. Poor, trusting Castelnau; it gives me no pleasure to deceive him, but I must shift for myself in this world and I believe my future is safer with the powers of England, not France. I have no such qualms about informing on the likes of Henry Howard; a dangerous man, as Walsingham warned me. Since the execution for treason of his elder brother, the late Duke of Norfolk, this Henry Howard, at the age of forty-three, is now the senior member of the most powerful Catholic family in England. He is not to be underestimated; unlike many of the English nobles, he has an excellent mind and has even taught Rhetoric at the University of Cambridge. Sidney says the queen appointed him to her Privy Council because she knows the wisdom of keeping one’s enemies close, and because she likes to keep her more Puritanical ministers on their toes.

‘My lord is mistaken – I am only a humble writer,’ I reply, holding out my hands in a gesture of humility. ‘Like your lordship,’ I add, because I know the comparison will annoy him. It works; he glowers as if I have questioned the legitimacy of his birth.

‘Oh, yes – how does your book, Howard?’ Castelnau asks, perhaps grateful for the distraction.

Howard leans forward, an accusing finger raised to the ceiling.

‘This murder – this was precisely the point of my book. When the queen herself leans so openly on divination and on conjurors like John Dee, her subjects are encouraged to follow suit. Since she has led them all away from their proper obedience to the pope, is it any wonder they clutch at supposed prophecies and any old grand-dam’s tales of stars and planets? And where there is confusion, there the Devil rubs his hands with glee and sows his mischief. But people do not take heed.’

‘You are saying, if I understand you, my lord, that this murder occurred because people have not read your book thoroughly?’ I ask, all innocence. Castelnau flashes me a warning look.

‘I am saying, Bruno –’ Howard enunciates my name as if it set his teeth on edge – ‘that all these things are connected. A sovereign who turns her face from God’s anointed church, who claims all spiritual authority for herself but will not walk out of doors without consulting the constellations? Prophecies of the end of days, the coming of the antichrist, rumours of wars – the proper order is overturned, and now madmen are emboldened to slaughter the innocent in the name of the Devil. I’ll wager it will not be the last.’

Douglas snaps his head up at this, as if the conversation at last promises more of interest than his chicken carcass.

‘But if the reports are to be believed,’ I say, carefully, ‘it seems rather that this killer did his work in the name of the Catholic Church.’

‘Those who have slipped out from under the authority of Holy Mother Church will always be the first to blaspheme her,’ Howard counters, as quick as if we were fencing, a thin smile curving his lips. ‘As I suppose you would know, Master Bruno.’

‘Doctor Bruno, actually,’ I murmur. I would not usually insist, but I happen to know from Walsingham that, while he may have a family title, Henry Howard holds only the degree of Master. Among university men, these things matter. From his expression I can see that I have scored a hit.

‘Alors . . .’ Castelnau smiles uncertainly, holding out the wine bottle as a distraction, peering across our glasses to see who needs more drink. Douglas, the least needful of the company, thrusts his glass forward eagerly; as the ambassador passes the bottle down the table, we all jump like startled creatures at the soft click of the door, our nerves set on edge by the secretive nature of these meetings.

The company breathes with relief as the newcomers enter. Despite the late hour, it seems they have been expected, at least by our host. At first you might take them to be a couple, they step into the room so close and conspiratorial, until the young woman draws down her hood and moves immediately towards Castelnau with her arms outstretched; he stands and greets his young wife with a spaniel look in his eyes. When she moves into the light you see that she is not quite so young as you might at first think; her figure could be a girl’s but her face betrays that she is the wrong side of thirty. Even so, that makes her nearly three decades younger than her husband; perhaps this accounts for the spark in his eyes. She places a delicate hand on her husband’s shoulder, then raises her eyes briefly to look around the table. Marie de Castelnau is petite and slender, like a doll, the sort of woman men rush to protect, though she carries herself with the poise of a dancer, in a way that suggests she is well aware of her own allure. Her chestnut hair is bound up and caught in a tortoiseshell comb at the back of her neck, though loose strands tumble around her heart-shaped face; she brushes one away as she unlaces her cloak and takes in the assembled guests.

I catch her eye; she holds my gaze for a moment with something like curiosity, then demurely returns her attention to Castelnau, who pats her hand fondly. Walsingham was right: she is very beautiful. I try to smother that thought immediately.

‘You have found our dear Throckmorton, then,’ the ambassador says, beaming at the young man who came in after his wife and now hovers by the door, still wearing a travelling cloak. ‘Close that behind you and come, take some wine.’ He gestures broadly to an empty chair. Courcelles is dispatched in search of another bottle; the secretary is not too proud to take on a servant’s duties when secrecy is at stake. For my part, I am surprised that I have been allowed to stay for what is evidently a clandestine meeting; Henry Howard may dislike me, but it seems Castelnau’s faith in my loyalty to France, if not necessarily to Rome, is untarnished. My heartbeat quickens in anticipation.

‘He came in by the garden?’ Castelnau asks his wife anxiously.

‘I came by Water Lane, my lord,’ the young man called Throckmorton says, as he takes the seat that was offered. He means that he entered the house the back way, from the river, where he would not be seen. Salisbury Court is a long, sprawling building at least a hundred years old, which has its main door at the front on Fleet Street, by the church of St Bride’s, but its garden slopes down as far as the broad brown waters of the Thames; anyone wishing to visit the embassy in private can land a boat at Buckhurst Stairs after dark, pass up Water Lane and be admitted through a gate in the garden wall, without fear of being seen. This Throckmorton seems young; his beardless face is narrow and elfin, framed by fair hair long enough to curl over his collar; he has a pleasant, open smile but his pale eyes dart around nervously, as if he half-expected one of us to assault him while he was looking the other way. Seated, he unfastens his cloak; his eyes linger on me as an unfamiliar face, questioning, though not hostile.

‘Doctor Bruno, you have not met Francis Throckmorton, I think?’ Castelnau says, noticing the direction of the young man’s gaze. ‘A most valuable friend to the embassy among the English.’ He nods significantly.

Howard regards the new arrivals without smiling, then cracks his knuckles together.

‘Well then, Throckmorton,’ he says, without preamble. ‘What news from the queen?’

He means the other queen, of course: Elizabeth’s cousin Mary Stuart, whom they believe is also the rightful queen of England, the only legitimate Tudor heir. They being the extremists of the Catholic League in France, led by the Duke of Guise (Mary’s cousin on her mother’s side), and those English Catholic nobles who see the tide in their own country turning against them, and gather around Castelnau’s table to grumble and agitate for something to be done. Except that, at the moment, Mary Stuart is not queen of anything; her son James VI rules Scotland under Elizabeth’s watchful eye, and Mary is imprisoned in Sheffield Castle, sewing, precisely so that she can’t inspire a rebellion. This measure has apparently done nothing to lessen the number of plots fomenting in her name on both sides of the English Channel.

Throckmorton lays his hands flat on the table, palms down, and allows his gaze to travel around the company once more, then he draws himself up as if he were about to embark on some great oratory, and smiles shyly.

‘Her Majesty Queen Mary asks me to convey that her spirits are greatly lifted by the love and support she receives from her friends in London and Paris, and very particularly by the fifteen hundred gold crowns my lord ambassador so generously sent to aid the comfort of her royal person.’

Castelnau inclines his head modestly. Howard sits up, amazed.

‘You spoke with her?’

‘No.’ Throckmorton looks apologetic. ‘With one of her ladies. Walsingham has ruled that she may not have visitors for the present.’

‘But she may have letters?’

‘Her official letters are all opened and read by her gaolers. But her women bring my correspondence in and out secretly, hidden in their undergarments.’ He blushes violently at the thought, and hurries on. ‘She is confident that her keepers have not yet found a means to read these. And she is permitted to have books.’ He gives Howard a significant look. ‘In fact, she most particularly asks that you send her a copy of your new book against prophecies, my lord Howard. She finds herself most eager to read it.’

‘She shall have it by your next delivery,’ Howard says, leaning back, his satisfaction evident in his smile.

‘She is also particularly anxious,’ Throckmorton continues, looking hopefully from Douglas to Fowler, ‘to have news from her son. To know the King of Scotland’s mind.’

Castelnau gives a short, bitter laugh. ‘Wouldn’t we all like to know that? Where will young James nail his colours, when he is finally made to choose?’ He produces an exaggerated shrug.

‘He does not write to his mother directly, then?’ Howard frowns.

‘Infrequently,’ Throckmorton says. ‘And when he does, he writes in the language of diplomacy, so that she can’t be sure of his intentions. She fears that his loyalties are not wholly where they ought to lie.’

‘King James is seventeen,’ Fowler says, in that quiet, authoritative voice, so that everyone has to lean towards him. He dresses plainly, with no ruff, just a shirt collar protruding above his brown woollen doublet. In a small way, this pleases me; I have an instinctive mistrust of dandies. ‘He has only just emerged from the shadow of his regents – what seventeen-year-old, having tasted independence, would willingly hand over the reins again to his mother? He will need a more material advantage than filial sentiment if he is to be persuaded to support her cause. Besides,’ he adds, ‘he was not one year old when he last saw her. She may believe they have a natural bond, but James knows he stands to gain more from a queen on a throne than from one in prison.’

‘Well, Monsieur Throckmorton, you may assure Queen Mary that at this very moment, her son entertains at his court an ambassador of the Duke of Guise,’ Madame de Castelnau interrupts, looking out from under her fringe of lashes, ‘who will offer him the friendship of France if he will acknowledge his proper duty as Mary’s son.’

There are murmurs of surprise at this from around the table. Fury flashes briefly over Castelnau’s face – this is clearly the first he has heard of it and, as far as he is concerned, France’s friendship is not in Guise hands to give – but I watch him master his anger, ever the professional diplomat. He does not want to reprimand his wife in public. She does not look at him, but there is a quiet triumph about the set of her mouth as she lowers her eyes again to the table.

‘In any case,’ the ambassador says brightly, as if he has been having an entirely different conversation, ‘there is every reason to believe we will soon have a treaty that will give Queen Mary her liberty peacefully, restore her to her son and allow France to preserve our friendship with both England and Scotland.’

‘Treaties be damned!’

Henry Howard throws back his chair and pounds a fist on the table, so suddenly that again we all jolt in our seats. The candles have burned down so far that his shadow leaps and quivers up the panels behind him and creeps over the ceiling, looming like an ogre in a children’s tale.

‘In the name of Christ, man, the time for talking is over! Do you not understand this, Michel?’ Howard bellows, leaning forward with both hands on the table to face down the ambassador, while Courcelles makes little ineffectual flapping gestures at him to lower his voice. ‘Are you so comfortable now at the English court that you do not feel which way the wind is blowing in Paris?’

‘The King of France still hopes to forge a political alliance with Queen Elizabeth, and it is my job to make every effort to secure this while I represent his interests,’ Castelnau says, keeping his patience. But Howard will not be placated.

‘The French people want no such alliance with a Protestant heretic, and your King Henri knows it – he feels the might of the Catholic League rising up at his back. No more treaties or marriages or seeking to appease and befriend the pretender Elizabeth – there is only one path left to us now!’ He thumps the table again for good measure so that the plates rattle.

‘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.

‘Pierrot, tu es méchant!’ the child scolds.

‘Pierrot?’ I ask, crouching so that I can look her in the eye. ‘He’s a boy?’ She nods, bashful. ‘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! Où 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’hérétique. 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’hérétique is allowed his books outdoors.’

Marie glances at me and smiles, half apologetic, before turning back to her daughter.

‘Well, Monsieur l’hérétique 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’hérétique 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’hérétique – 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 peace?’ 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.’

Fowler makes a grim face and sits back while a serving girl arrives to fill our pots of beer from an earthenware jug. She attempts to exchange pleasantries but soon concludes that my companion and I are too sober and dull to be out for any merriment. When she has gone, he raises his beer towards me.

‘Your good health, Doctor Bruno. I am glad we finally have the chance to talk. I have heard glowing reports of you from our mutual friend.’ He arches his eyebrow to indicate the secrecy that binds us.

‘Likewise, Master Fowler.’ I clink the pot briefly with his. He gives a curt nod, indicating the table with his eyes, and slides one hand underneath it on to his lap. It takes me a moment to understand him; feeling a little foolish, I draw from inside my doublet the copies of Castelnau’s letters lately made at the house of Thomas Phelippes and slip them across my lap into Fowler’s waiting palm. With practised fingers, he tucks them deftly away inside his clothes and wraps both hands around his tankard of beer. I glance briefly over my shoulder around the tavern, but the exchange appears to have gone unnoticed.

‘Thank you. I shall take these back to Whitehall this afternoon,’ he murmurs, barely audible.

‘May I ask you something?’

‘Please.’ He opens his hands in a welcoming gesture.

‘What exactly do you do at court?’

For the first time, he laughs, and his face relaxes. His fringe falls across his forehead again as he dips his head and he pushes it back, revealing keen blue eyes.

‘I make myself useful. You know how it works at the English court – the same as anywhere else, I suppose. Noblemen send their sons to recommend themselves to the queen in the hope of advancement. The difficulty is that there is only one queen and dozens of hopeful courtiers all chasing her favour.’ He pauses to take a draught. ‘So you end up with a lot of young gentlemen who have nothing to do all day but hang about the galleries and halls in the hope that the queen might pass by at some point and take notice of them. In the meantime, there is ample opportunity for them to gamble away their fathers’ money, or trap themselves in a hasty marriage because they’ve got some girl with child, or bluster their way into dangerous duels. And when they find themselves in trouble, they are often too afraid or ashamed to ask their fathers for help.’

‘Which is where you come in.’

‘Which is where I come in. They are very inexperienced in the world, some of these young lads, and often lonely – they want advice and someone to listen. And I have good connections in the City – I know lawyers who can make unwanted marriage contracts go away, find solutions to bad debts, that kind of thing. People who can arrange loans discreetly. This way, I learn everybody’s business around the court, their affairs, their complaints, their alliances, sometimes even the state of their souls. All those snippets of information that interest our mutual friend.’

‘I can see how that would be useful. And they trust you, these courtiers?’

‘They are grateful to me. I am known to keep a confidence. But I suspect at least half of them don’t even remember my Christian name, which is all to the good.’

I regard him with interest. His face is beardless, his hair mid-brown and his skin pale. Only his eyes are particularly memorable; they burn with an intense light, sharp and alert. With his soft manners, he melts easily into the back ground, the ideal observer. I begin to understand his value to Walsingham.

‘But with all the confidences that come your way, you heard nothing to make you suspect this Sir Edward before he was arrested?’ I ask, keeping my voice low.

‘He was one who lived quietly. He always seemed a gentle sort.’ Fowler looks perplexed for a moment, then drains his pot and raises a hand for more beer.

‘Do they suspect a religious motive for the killing?’

‘I know no more than I have told you. Apparently he has a cousin who was once fined for refusing to attend church, but then most families have one of those. Edward Bellamy was not among those suspected of dangerous papist leanings, if that’s what you mean. But I dare say they will get a confession from him in the Tower, one way or another. They will want this business wrapped up quickly so the queen may sleep easy in her bed.’

His fingers curl slowly into a fist and stretch out again as he says this; I wince. It is better not to think about what they do in the Tower. In the summer I saw a prisoner after the interrogators had finished with him; death would have come as a blessing. This thought triggers another memory.

‘Is he a handsome man, this Sir Edward?’ I ask, as the serving girl reappears with her jug. Fowler looks surprised, and amused.

‘I can’t say I’ve considered him in those terms. It’s not how I usually assess young men.’

‘Nor I,’ I add hastily. ‘I only wondered – you know: if he had seduced the girl or forced her.’

Fowler is still looking at me with a curious expression.

‘Now that you mention it – I don’t suppose he would be accounted handsome to women. He has a slight disfigurement – what we call in English a hare lip – and he is rather sickly looking. Not that a spell in the Tower will do much for his looks, either.’ He picks up his beer and we consider this in silence for a moment. Then he leans in closer. ‘But we must concentrate on our own business. Any further news from the embassy, besides these?’ He pats his breast, where he has tucked the letters inside his doublet.

‘Nothing much since last night.’

Léon Dumas and I had walked to Thomas Phelippes’s house after dinner with the packet for Throckmorton to take to Sheffield Castle, Dumas fretting and griping the whole way and continuing to do so all the while Phelippes was expertly removing the seals from Castelnau’s letters to Mary so that we could make our own copies for Fowler to pass on to Walsingham. To my eyes the resealed letters bore no trace of having been intercepted, but Dumas was almost feverish with anxiety when he set off again to Paul’s Wharf to make his delivery; I had to buy him a drink and wait for him to calm down before I was willing to send him on his way.

‘Turn up on his doorstep in this state and you may as well hang a sign around your neck saying “I’ve given all these to the Privy Council first”,’ I told him. Dumas had wrung his hands. ‘What if she can tell they’ve been opened?’ he bleated. ‘Queen Mary, I mean? Castelnau will kill me!’

‘By the time they get to Mary, they will have been through so many people’s hands, how could anyone point to you?’ I sighed. ‘Besides, Castelnau could not kill a soul,’ I added. ‘Although I wouldn’t put it past some of his friends.’

Now, the originals have been taken to Throckmorton in time for his departure tomorrow and Dumas is on his way back to the embassy. Thus far, the system is working smoothly. I wrap my hands around my mug and lower my voice.

‘The ambassador sends Mary a long letter – four pages, all in code. But his clerk has managed to take a copy of the new cipher, so that should be straightforward. It’s in the package you have. And Lord Henry Howard sends her a copy of his book against prophecy in which he signs himself “votre frère”.’

Fowler nods. ‘How touching. He would have been her brother by marriage, if his own brother’s plot had succeeded. Was there anything concealed inside the book?’

‘No. Phelippes checked when he opened the package.’

Fowler grows thoughtful. ‘Then the book itself must contain some message, or some significance. One of us will have to read it. You are the scholar, I believe.’

I roll my eyes in mock protest. ‘I’ll find myself a copy. At least I will be better armed to argue with him over dinner next time.’

Fowler smiles, but lifts a finger in warning. ‘Be very careful around Howard, Bruno. He believes his family has suffered more than any from the Protestant reforms and he is quite willing to be ruthless in return. The Howards forfeited the lands and titles of the Duchy of Norfolk when his brother was executed, and he has been biding his time for revenge.’

‘And now he wants a war.’

Fowler grimaces.

‘It begins to look that way. None of them really cares about Mary Stuart, they all use her as an excuse to pursue their own interests. But they are quite willing to plunge England into war to achieve them. Has Mendoza visited Salisbury Court yet?’

‘The Spanish ambassador? I am not sure I would recognise him.’

‘Oh, you’ll know Don Bernadino de Mendoza if you see him. Looks like a bear, voice like a war drum. As soon as he comes to speak privately with Castelnau, let me know and I can tell our mutual friend. If Howard and the Duke of Guise can secure Spanish money, all this talk of invasion might grow into more than words.’

‘Isn’t the talk of treason enough, if the queen knew?’

He gives a brisk shake of his head. ‘The queen will not make accusations against Howard or Mary Stuart – nor the ambassadors of France or Spain, for that matter – without absolute proof that they mean her or the country harm. They are all too powerful. And I mean proof that can be held in front of their faces in a court of law. Our friend wants this business to progress far enough that someone spells out their intentions on paper and signs their name to it.’

‘It’s a dangerous game to play.’ I find myself unreasonably irritated by the easy assurance with which he asserts Walsingham’s intentions, as if he is privy to Master Secretary’s innermost thoughts on a daily basis. I recognise also that this is only jealousy on my part; an irrational wish that I were as intimate with Walsingham, or as trusted.

‘Certainly.’ Fowler presses his lips together until they almost disappear. ‘Though it’s no game. I understand from my sources in Paris that Guise is already mustering troops, to be deployed whenever they have the word that England is ready.’

His sources in Paris. He talks as if he is an old hand at this intelligence business, though he can’t be more than twenty-six or -seven.

‘Have you served him long? Our friend, I mean.’

He shrugs.

‘A few years.’

‘And how did you come to be involved in all this?’ I ask, waving a hand vaguely to indicate the web that Walsingham weaves around himself, and which we do not name.

His mouth curves into a half smile.

‘Adventure, at first, I suppose. My father is a respectable Edinburgh burgess who intended me for the law. But when I arrived in Paris a few years ago to pursue my studies, I was surprised by the number of disaffected young Englishmen I found there – converts out of Oxford and Cambridge, tempers running high, all ready to whip up a Catholic rebellion against the English queen.’ He pauses to take a drink. ‘Of course, it’s easy to talk about revolution among your fellows from the safety of a Paris tavern, and it was mostly bluster, but I soon came to see that one or two among them were sincere, and knew something of significance. All I had to do was sit quiet and nod in the right places, and they assumed I was of their mind.’ He glances cautiously around. ‘But I was also sharp enough to realise that what I learned among them might be of considerable value to others, so I waited until I gathered a hoard of useful tidbits and then I presented myself at the English ambassador’s house. It was he who put me in touch with our mutual friend. Afterwards I returned to Scotland and set myself to work cultivating friendships among the few prominent Scottish Catholic lords, those who favour Mary Stuart. I travel back to Edinburgh now and again to keep up with the politics there. It’s essential to our friend to know their intentions, and it seems I have successfully passed myself off among the Catholics there and here as one who supports their cause.’

‘Very enterprising of you.’

He inclines his head as if to say, Perhaps.

‘It was the first time in my life I felt I’d chosen a path for myself, instead of following what my father laid out for me. That was exciting to me.’ He shrugs, implying that I am welcome to think what I like of this.

‘And what of your religion?’

‘Religion?’ He looks surprised. ‘It was never my principal motive, strange as that may sound. Yes, I was raised in the Protestant Church, but I have often felt I have more in common with moderate Catholics than with the more extreme devotees of my own faith. Excessive religion of any kind is dangerous, in my view. Elizabeth Tudor understands this, I think.’

I nod, with feeling.

‘And you?’ he prompts. ‘I know you call yourself a Catholic at Salisbury Court.’

‘It’s a question of freedom,’ I say, after a while, looking into my mug. ‘There is no freedom of thought under the rule of the Inquisition, no freedom to say What if? and then to imagine or speculate, and in such a climate, how can knowledge progress? The book I am writing now, for instance – in my own country I would be burned just for setting those ideas on paper. So when Wal—, when our friend approached me, I agreed because I thought the intellectual freedoms of Elizabeth’s England worth defending.’

‘But you have still not told me your religion,’ he says, with a knowing look.

‘I have been charged with heresy by Catholics in Rome and Calvinists in Geneva,’ I counter, smiling, ‘and when it comes to factions, I side with neither. My philosophy transcends both. But for that, you will have to read my book.’

‘I await it eagerly,’ he says, lifting his mug with a mischievous glint in his eye.

We sit in companionable silence for a few moments, finishing our beer.

‘But don’t you ever feel . . .’ I shake my head, lay my hands on the table. ‘I don’t know. Guilty?’

He regards me with those clear, serious eyes.

‘For betraying trust? For having more than one face? Of course,’ he says, and smiles sadly. ‘To feel no guilt would mean you had no conscience, and our friend would never trust a man with no conscience, for there would also be no loyalty. I placate my conscience with the thought that if I must betray someone on a personal level, I do it for the good of the country.’

I nod, thoughtfully; this is the argument Walsingham has always presented to me. What he doesn’t tell you is that personal relationships are often the more compelling, and that to betray someone whose trust you have won pulls against human nature.

‘You feel this keenly though, I think,’ Fowler whispers, studying me carefully. ‘You are fond of the ambassador.’

I acknowledge this weakness with a tilt of my head.

‘He is the one good man in Salisbury Court.’

‘He is trying to please too many people,’ Fowler says, as if this is the definitive judgement on the matter. ‘That is what will undo him. But guard yourself against sentiment, Bruno. If he ends up assisting with plans for a Catholic invasion, he is a traitor, regardless of his good intentions.’

‘I know this.’ I catch the sting in my voice; again, I find I resent his tone of seniority, and am ashamed of myself for it. Does he imagine I need to be told how to perform my role in the embassy? Perhaps I am being over-sensitive; it is a valuable warning for anyone in our business, as I learned to my cost in Oxford.

‘Of course.’ Fowler sits back, holding his hands up as if to mitigate any offence. ‘And for now, it is all about the letters. This enterprise depends on you and your friend the clerk.’

We pay for the beer and press our way through the crowded tavern, emerging into the slanting afternoon light. The weather has improved the mood of the Londoners; as we walk down Friday Street, people smile and greet one another, remarking on the unseasonable warmth, instead of shoving you aside with their usual grim-faced determination. Fowler and I walk in silence at first, subdued by our conversation; only now, as I watch the passers-by cheerfully going about their business, am I able to understand the weight of the work we are engaged in. We are talking about nothing less than a possible invasion, by France or Spain or both, whose ultimate aim is to unseat Elizabeth and bring England back under the control of Rome. And what will become of her Protestant subjects then, these ruddy-faced market traders and broad-hipped goodwives merrily sidestepping the horseshit on the cobbles as they wave to one another and call out for the hundredth time that you’d think it was July, wouldn’t you?

Sidney and Walsingham were both in Paris during the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre of 1572, when ordinary Huguenot families were systematically slaughtered in their thousands by Catholic forces and the city’s gutters ran with Protestant blood. This, I know, is what Walsingham fears above all: the same happening in the streets of London if the Catholics take power again. In Paris, there are plenty of people who murmur that the Duke of Guise was responsible for the bloodshed on St Bartholomew’s Day.

‘This is where I leave you,’ Fowler says, as we reach the corner of Watling Street. ‘If you need to get a message to our friend, you can reach me at my lodgings close by the cock-pit on St Andrew’s Hill.’ He pauses, laying a hand on my arm. ‘Watch who comes to Mass at Salisbury Court this evening. See if Howard brings any Englishmen we don’t already know about. And keep an eye on Archibald Douglas. He is not quite the drunken boor he pretends to be.’

‘Then he is a master of deception,’ I say. ‘I wonder that Castelnau and Howard put up with his manners.’

‘They tolerate him because Mary Stuart tells them to. And Douglas trades on the fact that she is deeply in his debt. You know it was he who engineered the murder of her second husband, Lord Darnley?’

‘The one who was blown up?’

‘The very one.’ Seeing my eyes grow wider, he smiles. ‘That is why Douglas may not go back to Scotland – there is a warrant out for his arrest. He is a notorious intriguer, and suspected of other political conspiracies to murder besides. And he is devilishly clever in the way he works his hooks into people – witness the fact that King James likes him, though he is suspected of murdering James’s own father. Women apparently find him beguiling.’

‘There is no accounting for women’s likes,’ I say, picturing Douglas’s three-day growth of silvered stubble and his belches. Fowler rolls his eyes and nods wholeheartedly, as people step around us. ‘What’s the story about the pie?’

‘Ah, you had better have that from the horse’s mouth.’ He grins. ‘Only Douglas can give that tale the savour it deserves. I’m sure your chance will come. Well – we shall meet again soon, Bruno. Meanwhile, bring me word if any Spanish envoy sets foot in Salisbury Court. Good luck.’ He nods briefly, turns on his heel and is swallowed into the colourful jostling crowds.

The sun has sunk lower over the rooftops as evening eases in, washing London in forgiving amber light that flashes from window panes as I make my way home through the city. On a day such as this, I begin to think I could perhaps learn to feel at home here. Above me, a riot of painted signs creak gently in the breeze, emblazoned with bright pictures proclaiming apothecaries, chandlers, barber-surgeons, merchants of cloth and wine and taverns named for animals of every kind and hue – black swans, blue boars, red foxes, white harts, hounds, hares, cocks and even unicorns. At each side of the thoroughfare a steady stream of people press by: street vendors crying their wares, men with cages of squawking chickens swinging from poles across their shoulders, women with baskets of oranges balanced on their heads and pedlars with wooden trays fastened around their necks full of all kinds of oddities – combs, quills, buttons, brushes and knives, sometimes all jumbled together. In the vast churchyard of St Paul’s, which is more like a marketplace, beggar children thread barefoot through the crowds, importuning the better-dressed ladies and gentlemen, while on one corner a ragged man stands playing a battered old lute and singing a forlorn song, hoping to be thrown a few coins. The smell of cooking meat fights with the stink of rotting refuse, and the richer sort hold pomanders and posies of flowers close to their noses to keep the vapours at bay.

As I cross the courtyard, past where the former shrines and chapels are now fallen into disrepair or turned into stalls for booksellers and traders, a pamphlet-seller steps in front of me, thrusting his wares in my face. I almost dismiss him, but the image on the front of his pamphlet catches my eye and I take one to look more closely. Here, again, are the symbols of Jupiter and Saturn conjoined, beneath a bold title: End of Days? The fellow selling it holds out a hand for his penny, his fingers waggling impatiently. He has his hood up, despite the sun; a wise precaution, since I can see at a glance that neither the printer nor the author has dared put his name to this piece of work, meaning that it is printed illegally. Intrigued, I scrabble for a coin and walk away, bumping into people as I read the thing. The anonymous author writes with a doom-mongering tone: he has attempted to cast the queen’s horoscope from her nativity and tie his dramatic predictions to the coming of the Fiery Trigon, the terrifying alignment of the great planets whose symbols decorate the front. Queen Elizabeth’s days are numbered, he writes; God will smite England with war and famine and her disobedient subjects will cry out for a saviour. Inside, there is a woodcut of a devil prodding a man with a pitchfork. I tuck the pamphlet into my jerkin to save for Walsingham, though I imagine if he has not already seen it, he soon will.

* * *

I have barely closed the front door behind me at Salisbury Court when Courcelles materialises out of the shadows beside the staircase, as if he has been waiting for my arrival.

‘There is a boy here says he has a letter for you,’ he announces, resting one delicate white hand on the carved wooden eagle that decorates the end of the banister. ‘He has been here the best part of the afternoon and, try as we might, we could not persuade him to leave it for you, not even for a shilling. Nor will he tell us who sent him. He says his instructions are to put it into your hands alone and it was a most urgent and confidential matter.’ His fine eyebrows arch gracefully as he says this; evidently he expects me to offer some explanation.

‘Then I had better see him,’ I reply evenly, though my pulse quickens. I think first of Walsingham, then Sidney, then Dee; any one of them might want to contact me as a matter of urgency, but Walsingham would surely not arouse suspicion by sending an obviously secretive message directly to the embassy, and Sidney is still on his honeymoon, as far as I know. That leaves Dee, and my gut clenches; has Ned Kelley done something to him?

Courcelles presses his lips together and points me in the direction of the stables at the side of the house. There I find a skinny boy of about twelve years old sitting miserably on a straw bale, picking at his fingernails while the stable hands jeer at him in French. He shows signs of having been in a scuffle.

‘I am Bruno. You have something for me?’

He leaps to his feet as if stung, and pulls a crumpled letter out from inside his jacket. He wears no livery but he is not poorly dressed. He beckons me closer and passes me the letter as if it contained secret intelligence.

‘From Abigail Morley.’ His voice is barely a whisper. ‘She said I must only put it in your hands, sir, though they tried to take it from me.’ He glances resentfully at the stable boys, who twist awkwardly and look away.

‘You did well.’ I find a coin for his trouble and see him out of the side gate, before pausing in a pool of shadow, away from curious eyes, to tear open the letter. It is written in an elegant, curling hand; Abigail asks me to meet her tomorrow at eleven in the morning at the Holbein Gate, Whitehall. She says she is afraid.

Chapter Five

Whitehall Palace, London 28th September, Year of Our Lord 1583

Another morning of empty blue skies and warm light; I take a wherry upriver to Whitehall, landing at Westminster Stairs, the nearest public jetty to the palace. The River Thames is wide and calm, jewelled with reflections of the sun and white ripples where the breeze ruffles the water’s surface, and I lean back in the boat as the oarsman heaves his way through the flotilla of small craft transporting goods and passengers up and down London or eastwards, out towards the docks.

From the stairs I walk back up King Street past the boundary walls of the palace to the Holbein Gate, a vast, imposing structure that spans the main thoroughfare out of London to the west, joining the sprawling privy apartments and state chambers of Whitehall with the tiltyard and the park of St James on the other side. Three storeys of red brickwork and white stone, with an octagonal tower at each corner in the English style, and grand rooms above the main archway, the gatehouse is patrolled by palace guards and always densely crowded, as all travellers on the road must be funnelled through it to pass in either direction. Abigail has chosen wisely; often the best place to pass unobserved is in a crowd.

From somewhere nearby a church bell chimes the hour of eleven and I wait, hesitant, by the passageway through the eastern tower of the gatehouse, which is reserved for those on foot. Through the central archway, carts pulled by horses or mules churn up clouds of dust from the dry road as traders bring their goods into the palace or on towards the city. People bustle past with bundles or packs and I press myself back against the wall, out of the way; suddenly an old woman with no teeth thrusts a filthy hand into my face, demanding money or food and I jump back, startled. I know from experience that if I reach for a penny, a hundred more beggars will stream in an instant from the shadows with their hands out, but there is such desperation in her face that I cannot refuse; she folds her fingers with their swollen joints painfully around the coin I slip into her palm, clutches at my jacket and pulls me towards her.

‘When hempe is spun, England’s done,’ she croaks into my face, so that I have to reel back from her stinking breath. ‘Take heed, sir. The signs are all about us.’ She points one trembling, crooked finger to the sky, then releases me and scuttles back into the crowd.

I stare after her, puzzling over her words, when another figure wrapped in a thin cloak approaches and guiltily I regret my generosity; here they come already, and I don’t have enough coins to part with them all. But this woman sidles up to me, reaching inside her clothes, and from the depths of her hood whispers my name in an educated voice.

‘Abigail!’

‘Shh. We must not be seen. Walk with me into the passage for a moment.’

We step into the shadow of the tower archway; immediately the deep chill of damp stone settles on my skin. The passage through the tower is not wide and we are jostled and shoved, with the occasional curse, as we huddle at one side. Abigail keeps her hood pulled up around her face.

‘They have the wrong man,’ she whispers, without preamble. ‘I didn’t know who else to tell.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because Sir Edward Bellamy tried to court me once, and we laughed about it – I mean, Cecily and I. It was cruel of us, but he is such a poor figure of a man. No woman would want him, for all his lands, unless she were past caring.’ She rubs self-consciously at her throat as she says this. ‘But Sir Edward is a gentleman and does not deserve to have this pinned on him. He was not her secret sweetheart, I would swear to it.’

‘But her lover was not necessarily her killer. It need only have been someone who knew she had a tryst that evening. The lover could have been one of Sir Edward’s friends, perhaps?’

The bottom half of her face is visible below the hood; she chews her lip doubtfully.

‘I just do not believe he could kill anyone, or be party to it. He is so mild-mannered.’

‘Quiet men have murdered before.’

She shakes her head decisively.

‘It doesn’t feel right. He sold Cecily his old clothes so she could disguise herself as a boy – that much I believe. But I think the palace guard were just glad to make an easy arrest so the queen will think they are doing their job. Anyway, I did not ask you here for that. There is something else.’

She beckons me closer and from inside her cloak draws out a little velvet bag tied at the top with ribbon.

‘Lady Seaton went through Cecily’s things to give her father when he came.’ She speaks so low that her face is almost touching mine to make herself heard. Her breath is warm on my cheek. ‘But I suspected she was looking for something that might give away Cecily’s affair. She found nothing. She didn’t know about the cushion.’

‘What cushion?’

‘It was one of Cecily’s most beloved things – a little cushion that she embroidered as a child. A bible text, flowers, you know the sort of thing. She kept it on her bed – I thought it was just a sentimental keepsake, for when she was homesick, but one day she showed me how she would unpick the seam and hide her secret gifts inside the cushion cover.’

She holds out the bag; I weigh it in my hand. It is light and chinks softly as I move it.

‘These are the presents from her admirer, everything she had sewn inside the cushion. I don’t know what use they may be – I can see no clue in them, but perhaps you might find something. Especially since everyone seems determined to find Sir Edward guilty – it would be a terrible thing if he were to take the punishment for it.’ She tugs at my sleeve, and there is something childlike in the gesture. ‘There is a design on the ring, an emblem. It is not the Bellamy arms, though it is no one’s I recognise. But you could give it to Lord Burghley – he might know.’

‘He might. Have you told anyone else about these things?’

She bites her lip and looks away, but then she shakes her head firmly. Again I have the sense that she is holding something back.

‘I almost did when they arrested Sir Edward, but I could not approach Lord Burghley myself. Besides, I remembered what you said. If the killer is someone inside the court, he might know that Cecily was my friend, might he not? So he might think she had told me her secrets and want to stop my mouth too?’ She raises her face to me and in the dim light I see how pale she is, how her lips are trembling, though she tries to fight it.

‘You are brave to have brought me Cecily’s things – thank you. I have no doubt that they will be invaluable.’ I place my hands on her small shoulders to reassure her. ‘As for the danger, I think it more likely that this killer, if it is not Sir Edward, will be glad to let another man take the blame and remain in the shadows. Why would he risk drawing attention to himself with another attack when he has the chance to get away with murder?’

‘I suppose that would depend upon why he killed Cecily in the first place,’ she says, sensibly. ‘I mean, a man might kill a woman because she is with child and he doesn’t want to marry her – you hear such stories. There was a great deal of that kind of talk at first around court. But that spectacle he made of her body –’ she shudders – ‘makes me think it must be something else. What if he killed her because she knew something she should not? He would want to silence her friends then, sir, would he not, in case she had shared confidences?’

Looking down at her earnest face, I begin to think that I have underestimated Abigail Morley. These have been my own thoughts; I have even wondered about Lady Seaton, whether her defensive manner on the night of the murder was all to do with the fear of salacious gossip, or whether it masked another motive. I squeeze the girl’s shoulders gently.

‘Why do you say that? Did Cecily give you reason to think she was guarding dangerous secrets?’

‘It was only that –’ she hesitates, glances around – ‘since she met this man, she had begun to talk a lot of prophecies.’

‘What kind of prophecies?’

‘Oh, you know the kind of thing, they’re two a penny – that the queen’s days are numbered, that England will be destroyed. You hear such stuff on every street.’

‘I heard one just now, I think, from an old crone. “When hempe is spun, England’s done.”’

Abigail nods enthusiastically.

‘That is a favourite among the servants. You know what it means, of course?’ She drops her voice. ‘It’s the Tudor line. Hempe stands for Henry, Edward, Mary and Philip, and Elizabeth. The old granddams quote it to predict England’s downfall when the last Tudor dies. Cecily knew them all.’

‘But she only showed an interest in such things recently?’

‘This past month or so. I wondered what ideas this man had been putting in her head. I would tell her, “Cecily, some of these things you’re saying could be treason!” She just laughed at that, as if she didn’t care, and told me everyone was talking of it.’

‘Did she mention religion? Or who she thought should take the throne instead?’

‘No, nothing like that. It was more of a personal resentment,’ Abigail adds, then claps a hand to her mouth. ‘I don’t know if I should tell you this.’

‘Abigail.’ I look her directly in the eyes. ‘It would be as well to tell me anything that might help. Why did she resent the queen?’

‘When Cecily first came up to court, last year,’ she whispers, drawing in closer to me as a group of boys in the garb of apprentices elbow their way past, ‘she had a sweetheart from home, some gentleman’s son she’d known since she was a child. He got himself to London in the hope of seeing her, but when Lady Seaton heard of it she told the queen and they had him turned away. Cecily was forbidden even to write to him. He wasn’t high-born, you see. She forgot him quickly enough, but she didn’t forget her resentment of the queen for it. And she was afraid the queen might interfere with this new man as well.’ Her eyes flit from side to side. ‘For being too high-born for her.’

I cannot help but laugh at this.

‘I had no idea love was so minutely calibrated. Must you all measure your husbands’ status so carefully?’

She giggles, sounding for a moment light-hearted.

‘I may not choose my husband for love, but I shall make damned sure I choose my lover carefully. What? Would you look so shocked?’ she adds, in response to my expression, which makes her giggle all the more. ‘No need to be such a prude, even if you were once a monk.’

‘Are you going to stand there blocking the way all day, then?’ grumbles a heavy-set man in a coarse smock as he lumbers past, knocking Abigail hard enough that she stumbles into my arms as I try to stop her falling. Startled, she regains her balance and brushes herself down as we look at one another, then quickly glance away.

‘I should probably –’ she says, gesturing back towards the palace wall.

‘Yes. But take care, Abigail. Make sure you do not go about the palace alone. Someone at court knows who killed Cecily and why, and you are right – he may be watching you. Be wary about who you trust.’

‘It is hard to know who to trust at court after this.’ She laughs, a nervous, high-pitched sound, her fingers twisting at the strings of her cloak. ‘I mean, how do I even know that I can trust you?’

‘You can trust me, Abigail. I have no pledge to give except my word.’ Gripping her shoulders a little tighter, I make her look into my eyes. She searches them with her pale green gaze, and eventually she nods.

‘Yes – it is odd, for all the women say never trust foreign men, especially those from Spain or Italy. But I feel I can trust you. Will you let me know if you learn anything more? It would help me to feel safer.’

I am about to promise, when two young dandies in puffed satin push roughly by us, this time jostling Abigail into the wall.

‘Hey! Watch yourselves!’ I call after them; the shorter of the two, who wears a scarlet cap with a peacock feather, turns at my accent.

‘Do you speak to me, you Spanish whoreson?’ He pauses, spits on the ground and seems about to come back for me, but his friend restrains him, and with a last filthy look, they resume their walk.

‘Fools,’ I mutter, though I am grateful that they were not spoiling for a fight in the street. ‘Thank you for trusting me. And, Abigail – you must let me know if you remember anything more that Cecily told you. It could be essential.’

I speak gently, but she understands my implication: I think she is keeping something back, some clue to the identity of Cecily’s lover, either out of fear or misguided loyalty. She smiles hesitantly and I realise I am still holding her by the shoulders; our eyes meet again, for slightly too long. For a moment I entertain the absurd thought that, once this business is resolved, I might ask to see her again. There is something about her expectant eyes that makes me wonder if she has thought the same. I could hardly be considered the grand match her father has in mind, but has she not already made clear that she would have different criteria for a lover? I push to one side the uncomfortable suggestion that her father is probably not much older than I am. Embarrassed by my unspoken thoughts, I release her and she draws her hood up closer.

‘The perfume is disgusting, by the way,’ she says, as she turns to leave, nodding to where I have stuffed the velvet bag inside my jerkin. ‘Only a man could possibly think a woman would want to wear that.’ She laughs then, and with a little wave, steps out of the archway into the bright light of the morning.

I watch her as she disappears into the throng, then turn and make my way back in the opposite direction. It is only when I emerge into the light at the other end that I sense someone behind me; quick as blinking, I spin around, but there are dozens of people in my wake, none of them paying the slightest attention to me other than to tut at the fact that I have stopped dead in the path, interrupting the flow of human traffic again. I turn urgently left and right, craning my neck above the crowd, knocking into people as I go, but all I can see is a steady stream of faces coming towards me from the gatehouse passageway. None of them makes eye contact. It is possible that I imagined the sensation. Yet I know, instinctively, that there was someone at my back, just now, watching me, and he must have seen me talking to Abigail Morley.

I hail a boat back to Salisbury Court, thinking that it would be harder for anyone to follow me inconspicuously by river, but although I spend the journey peering out at the other wherries and their passengers until even the boatman grows nervous and asks what is the matter, I see nothing to give me any cause for concern. By the time I arrive back at the embassy, I have almost persuaded myself that I was mistaken.

Halfway across the first-floor gallery, with my fingers burning to examine the contents of the velvet bag, which I have not dared to open in any public place in case I was being followed, I hear a woman call my name. So fixed am I on reaching the privacy of my room in order to examine its contents that I nearly curse aloud at being detained. Marie stands in the doorway behind me, regarding me with her head on one side, her daughter’s little dog clasped in her arms. Reluctantly, I turn and bow.

‘Madame.’

‘Who was your mysterious letter from yesterday, Bruno? We are all dying to know.’ She advances on me, smiling coquettishly, and stops a little too close. She wears a dress of blue silk, and on her bodice is pinned a large jewelled brooch, studded with rubies and diamonds that glint and sparkle in the sun. The dog stretches out its small head and licks my hand in an enquiring manner. ‘I have speculated that you have some besotted English girl sending you verses, but Claude is quite convinced that it is something more intriguing. Who would be sending Bruno letters, he wonders, that could not divulge his name? Or her name.’ She widens her eyes in an affectation of intrigue.

I smile politely, but this is worrying: it will not do me any good to have the household speculating on my communications, especially in the midst of such conspiracies as I heard the other night. I begin to think it was a mistake to suggest that Abigail contact me here. Thinking as quickly as I can, I compose my expression into one of regret.

‘I only wish you were right, madame, but I’m afraid there is no besotted English girl. The letter came from a young man at court who has read one of my books and wishes to become my private student.’

‘One of your books?’ She looks disappointed.

‘As unlikely as that may seem.’

‘Student of what?’

‘Of the art of memory. Just as I taught to King Henri in Paris.’

‘Oh.’ She considers this. ‘Then why the secrecy?’

‘Because ignorant people mutter that the techniques of memory owe something to occult sciences. I expect he is being cautious. Though I assure you there is no truth in that,’ I add, hastily.

She continues to study me with her head tilted, as if I make more sense viewed at an angle.

‘Well, then, Bruno,’ she says, at length, ‘I insist that I become your private student too. I would like to learn your system. You can sort out the payment with my husband – although he may feel that the board and lodging you already receive are wages enough.’

‘Madame, I am not sure that would be –’

‘Don’t be tiresome, Bruno. It would be perfect – it is not as if you are employed elsewhere, and I must fill my time somehow while Katherine is with her governess. Besides, my memory is quite shamefully poor. I came after you to tell you something, and now I have quite forgotten what it was. You see? I need you.’ She smiles up at me with a twitch of her eyebrow, all innocent and knowing. Looking for a distraction, I reach out to stroke the dog and she does the same, with the result that her hand lightly caresses the top of mine; I pull my own hand back as if burned, and she blushes and drops her gaze. Christ, I think: the idea of trying to teach her anything, alone in a room, is more daunting than any task Walsingham could ask of me. I am reassured by the thought that Castelnau would never sanction it.

‘Anyway, where are you heading in such a hurry?’

‘Oh – just to my room. I had one or two ideas while I was out walking and I must write them down before they evaporate.’

Her laugh is musical. ‘You are not a very good advertisement for your own memory techniques, Bruno.’

‘You have been warned.’

‘Oh, I am not deterred. I only feel sorry for your young student – I hope he is not wasting his money. What was his name?’

I hesitate only for the space of a breath, but she is sharp enough to notice.

‘Ned. Ned Kelley. Well, madame, I must –’ I gesture towards the door at the other end of the gallery. It is a handsome room, running the length of the house at the front, with tall windows along the walls on both sides. Sunlight plays along the darkened panelling, dust dancing in perpetual motion in glittering shafts. The same light falls sidelong on Marie’s face and I have an urge to reach out and touch her cheek, not from desire but merely to see how soft it feels, lit up and golden. I take a step back as if to leave and she reaches out and grasps my sleeve.

‘There – now I have remembered what it was! The ambassador wishes to speak to you in his private office – he has been asking for you all morning but no one knew your whereabouts.’ She says this as a kind of accusation.

‘Then I will go to him shortly,’ I say, feeling the shape of the bag still pressing against my chest under my jerkin. ‘First I must change my shirt.’

She looks at my collar doubtfully.

‘While you are there, tell him I wish to take lessons in your arcane magical arts.’

‘Madame, there is no magic involved, whatever they say in Paris –’ I begin, earnestly, but then I catch sight of her impish smile.

‘Oh dear, Bruno – you are too easy to tease. I think I will enjoy our lessons.’

I reply with a curt bow, leaving her standing in a ray of light with her jewels glittering, still laughing to herself.

The velvet bag, when it is opened, reveals the items Abigail mentioned to me before: a gold signet ring with an engraved emblem; a tortoiseshell hand mirror, beautifully smooth; a small glass vial of perfume in the shape of a diamond, of the kind that women wear around their necks, with a gold clasp and a chain attached at the top. Love-tokens, clearly expensive, but what can these trinkets tell me of the story of Cecily Ashe and her lover? One by one, I hold them up to the light and examine them. The ring’s design is of a bird with outstretched wings and a curved beak, an eagle perhaps, and around the edge letters are carved in mirror image, so that they would read true when pressed into warm sealing wax. I frown for a moment, trying to decipher the motto, until I realise it is written in French: Sa Virtu M’Atire. ‘Her virtue draws me’ – or perhaps ‘its virtue’. But the word ‘attire’ is misspelled – a curious mistake. You would think if you were having a gold ring engraved, you would make sure the goldsmith carved it correctly; nor would any craftsman worth his fee want the expense of making such an error. So, I think, rotating the ring again while my eye follows the letters around, what appears at first glance to be a mistake must be by design, and therefore perhaps the motto has a hidden or coded meaning. If this is the case, it is not giving itself up to me easily; I am no nearer than Abigail to knowing whose emblem this is, though it seems the giver of the ring had a French connection. That hardly helps, of course – half the nobility have some French ancestry and everyone of the gentry class and above learns at least a few words.

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