The Tudor Vendetta (2 page)

Walsingham’s voice broke into my thoughts. “Poison or perfume? You don’t have all day to deduce its contents. In most cases, if it’s poison, you’ll have less than a minute before the intended victim dies.”

I lifted my eyes, staring hard at him. I had experienced the horror of his statement all too vividly. I had held a boy, my friend and squire, Peregrine, in my arms as he perished because I had not acted fast enough. Walsingham knew it, of course. He used it to his advantage to prod me into an emotional reaction.

“You shove this at me and expect me to decipher it in—what? Five seconds?” I said, knowing as I spoke that I was doing precisely what he intended. “It’s perfume.”

“It is not. And you must decipher it in less than five seconds.” His bony finger tapped the sample before me. “Almond,” he stated and I sagged in my chair. “Yes,” he went on, with that insufferable superiority I’d come to dislike even more than his blank slate of a face, “most common poisons will smell faintly of almond, if you train yourself sufficiently to detect it. Though, of course, there are exceptions.”

“But this wasn’t one of them,” I said.

He pursed his lips, retrieving the sample and returning it to the wooden casket. His hand hovered over the rows in search of his next selection. Poison or perfume?

Abruptly, I pushed back from the table. “Enough. I can’t do this. My nose is still clogged from all the smells you had me work on yesterday.”

Though he had perfect control over his expression, so that he often appeared more stone than flesh, I discerned mordant amusement in his gaze. Finally, he said, “Will you feel thus, I wonder, on the day you’re called upon to defend our queen? This is what we
do,
Prescott. We are intelligencers. We cannot concede defeat even when we are weary, because our life is nothing compared to the one we must protect. You almost failed her last time and she barely survived it. Now, you must sacrifice everything you feel and think, if you’re to become her weapon.”

I gritted my teeth. Loathe as I was to admit it, he was right. I had nearly failed, and in the process been obliged to shed the last illusion I had that I might retain any semblance of the man I had been. Too much had happened. I’d been the cause of too much loss. The memory of Sybilla naked in my chamber, a siren of deceit, returned to grip me in a vise.

If I had been better prepared, she would never have destroyed as much as she had.

Peregrine might still be alive.

Tugging at my doublet, I turned to the narrow window of this bare room where I’d spent so many hours in sweltering heat or frigid cold, with this man for whom I bore no affection. As I gazed out onto the city, a sudden pang overcame me. I missed England. I missed it with everything I had inside me, though my life there had been rife with lies and sorrow, though I was as much a stranger in my own country as I was here. I missed the green of the hills, the majestic oaks, and the silver rain. Most of all, I missed Kate, even if I knew I could hold no claim on her anymore, not after what I had done.

“We bring our regrets with us wherever we go,” Walsingham said from behind me, with that uncanny ability he had of discerning my thoughts. When he first did it, I had thought it an eerie coincidence. By the fifth time, I began to think he was a seer. Now, I knew it was but another of his sleights of hand, a trick he had perfected after years of studying the unspoken turmoil in those around him, while he stayed aloof.

I chuckled. “Am I still so obvious? I must be such a disappointment.”

“Only to me,” he said dryly. I heard the rustling of paper. Drawing a breath, I turned around, bracing myself for another endless day of unintelligible inscriptions I’d be expected to unravel. Besides the detection of poison, it was my most persistent challenge, the decoding of ciphers, and he knew it. He told me that educated men like me had a much harder time training their eye to see past the haphazard randomness of a cipher to the inevitable structure underneath.

“Every code has a flaw,” he said. “None is invincible. But we allow its chaos to confuse and overwhelm us, just as its creator intended. We forget that if one man devised it, so can another man undo it.”

I found it hardly reassuring, not when I faced a page that looked as if a rat had scampered over it with ink-stained paws, but I had nothing else to do and resigned myself to this next task, at which I would labor all day until supper, followed by—

My heart leapt. Walsingham held a paper with a broken seal. “A letter,” he said. “From my lord Cecil.” When he saw my frozen stance, his lips twitched as if he found himself on the verge of a rare smile. “I thought to wait until we finished for the day. Evidently, we have.”

He extended the paper. Snatching it from him, I devoured its contents with my eyes, then, realizing it was composed in Cecil’s habitual cipher, made myself slow down and read again, carefully unpicking the code that I had by now committed to memory.

I looked up. “This says…” My voice turned harsh with incredulity. “You’ve waited all this time to tell me?”

“I hardly see how it makes a difference. We can’t leave at a moment’s notice.”

“But, Elizabeth—this letter says she’s already establishing her court at Whitehall!” Indignation exploded from me. “Queen Mary has been dead over a week!”

He shrugged. “I obey Cecil’s instructions. He wrote first to advise me of the queen’s illness, after it was discovered that her pregnancy was actually a malignant tumor in her belly. He relayed he would make the necessary arrangements when the time came. Passage had to be booked, passports obtained; I had to oversee the closure of this safe house and transfer of its contents. There are papist spies here, watching for us as surely as we watch for them. We must leave without rousing notice, part of the crowd of English Protestants who went into exile and now return at Elizabeth’s behest. Secrecy remains of the utmost importance.” He flipped the lid of his box shut. “We’ll depart the day after tomorrow at first light. You can start packing.”

I glared at him. I had nothing to pack, save for my clothes and a few books. “I can be ready in under an hour,” I said through my teeth.

His brow lifted. “Then I suggest you cultivate patience. The very fact that I have to remind you of it proves you’re far from ready.” He turned to the doorway, his coffer tucked under his arm. “We’ll take an hour and then go over that cipher you couldn’t break last night.” His tone hardened as I began to lift protest. “Until we are back at court, Master Prescott, you remain under my charge. Is that understood?”

I gave terse assent, the letter announcing Elizabeth Tudor’s accession crunched in my fist. If I could have, I would have swum back to England that very hour, my fear of deep water and his charge over me be damned.

Walsingham’s snort as he walked out indicated he knew it, too.

LONDON

Chapter Two

By the time we landed in Dover four days later, waited for our luggage to be unloaded from the hold, and shoved our way through hordes of travelers to find the inn where the mounts Cecil had arranged for us were waiting, I almost wished I’d opted to swim instead. Crossing the Channel at any time of year was arduous enough, its currents and sudden tempests unpredictable as a vicious child, but in mid-November, with winter clamping down, the journey had been a purgatory that emptied my very guts.

I must have looked as terrible as I felt, for Walsingham arched his brow at me. “I trust you can ride? We’ve still a long journey ahead to reach the city and I’d rather not pay an exorbitant price for some lousy room in one of these overcrowded dockside inns.”

“I can ride,” I muttered, though I staggered like a newborn foal and could still taste the rot of sea-churned bile in my mouth. Coming upon the forlorn mares awaiting us, I realized I couldn’t wait to reclaim my Cinnabar, whom I’d had to leave behind in Cecil’s manor, and hoped someone had thought to bring my horse to court. “Though I hardly see how we’ll get far on these,” I said, as we strapped our bags to the saddles and sidestepped the muck of the yard to mount. “They look half-dead on their feet.”

“Messengers have been racing back and forth across the Channel since Elizabeth took the throne,” said Walsingham, as he fastidiously arranged his cloak over his saddle. “There probably aren’t enough of these nags to satisfy the needs of those who send and receive intelligence. We’re lucky to have obtained horses at all. We could have found ourselves crammed into public transport with the rest of this mob.” As he spoke, he passed disdainful eyes over the city, its white-stone royal fortress brooding on the chalk cliff that overlooked the cluster of winding streets and crooked buildings, punctuated by a multitude calling, cursing, and shouting at each other. Squalling gulls and rooks wheeled overhead. Walsingham’s nostrils flared as if he could detect individual smells within the general miasma of ordure, unwashed skin, and garbage.

“We’ll be overwhelmed at this rate,” he said, “all these exiles returning; there are too many of them and too few of us. I daresay, nobody’s passport is even being checked. Anyone with a purse and able tongue can bribe their way in.”

I paused. A chill went through me. His countenance had darkened. With another appraising stare at the city, he said to me, “Mark it well. This is how chaos sneaks in.”

Yanking his mare about, he led us onto the road.

*   *   *

He proved as taciturn on horseback as he had on the ship, conveying only what was necessary to advance our progress. Still, we had no choice but to halt for the night. While our horses had proven hardier than their dejected attitudes suggested, we needed rest, and Walsingham chose a roadside inn after we’d gone far enough to outpace the multitude of carts and carriages departing Dover for the four corners of the realm.

Our room was a mean affair, containing a dirty mattress and rickety stool. We opted to sleep on the floor instead, wrapped in our cloaks with our bags as pillows, as neither of us was of a mood to be infested by vermin. Nevertheless, I ended up squashing numerous fleas and was scratching welts on my neck and arms in the morning. By the time we took to the road again after a breakfast of stale bread, flat beer, and moldy cheese served by a scowling wench with a boil on her lip, I was beginning to realize Basel’s astringent Protestant air and scrubbed cobblestones had much to commend them.

Walsingham made no comment, though he too must have marked the contrast. We’d vacated a tidy home in a tidy Reformed city for a three-day ride through the Low Countries and along the coast to Calais, where we’d boarded a vessel to be tossed about like a child’s toy, only to arrive unceremoniously back in our homeland along with hundreds of other refugees, who cluttered Dover like cattle. What did he make of it, this upheaval that had overtaken our existence? Even as we rode past the copses of oak trees on the side of the road, avoiding waterlogged ditches that reflected a leaden sky threatening rain, all around us the foundation of our world was shifting.

Yet Walsingham rode as if he were impervious, and soon the bite of the wind sinking its teeth in my neck subsumed my own ruminations. Muffled in my doublet and cloak, my cap pulled low on my brow, I anticipated the proverbial crack of thunder and gushing release of icy rain. Other travelers began to appear, walking in groups and riding on mules or carts, some driving livestock, shepherd dogs barking at their ankles. The road grew wider and more crowded, so that we had to slow our pace. I sensed a quickening in my nag’s gait. Peering ahead through the dusk, I discerned a smoky haze hanging over the glittering breadth of the Thames. The river coiled like a dragon’s tail, spanned by the great Bridge on its twenty stone piers. Beyond it clustered the city, having outgrown its ancient lichen-spotted walls—a patchwork of orchards, gardens, and affluent suburbs spilling beyond the main gates.

My chest tightened. Every time I had been in London, I’d ended up risking my life; this city was never safe for me, and as if he sensed my trepidation, Walsingham gave me a pensive glance. I thought he would merely rebuke me with his stare. Instead, he said quietly, with more consideration than he had thus far ever shown me, “Returning home is never easy, unless one is a fool. But here is where you belong. It is what—”

“We do,” I interrupted, with a taut smile.

He nodded. “Indeed. Never forget it. On us now depends everything.”

*   *   *

We left our horses in Southwark at the designated return stable, Walsingham muttering that he was in no temper to contend with the crowds lining up at the Great Stone Gate to traverse the Bridge. Night was falling, along with curfew, and a tide of impatient, tired travelers queued up for public wherries at the landing jetty of St. Mary Overy. The stench of churned-up leavings and the dirt in the streets were just as I recalled. I also detected, even here in this pleasure-loving district across from the City, where brothels, gaming dens, taverns, and baiting pits abounded, a tangible air of suspicion and impoverished fear. Gaunt figures hustled to various assignations without so much as a glance at each other, when in the past I’d noticed that Londoners, while invariably wary of visitors or foreigners, were usually pleasant to their fellow citizens. A lone gibbet near the Great Stone Gate revealed a potential cause: the rotting carcass of a Protestant, headless and limbless, so decayed its crow-gnawed ribs showed through tattered shreds of skin. I had no doubt that the rest of whoever this poor soul had been was hung on other gates, as was the habit with traitors, and averted my eyes as I had to force myself to look away from the many beggars, crawling on gangrenous stumps into doorways for the night. Emaciated dogs snarled and competed with feral urchins for leavings in the trash heaps.

A tribe of these orphans assaulted us as Walsingham whistled and called out for a private boat, thrusting out grubby hands to implore us for alms, their pitiful eyes and scrawny faces unable to hide a pack-like cunning as they circled us, angling to filch whatever they could. I’d contended with these Southwark wildlings before and tucked my purse, dagger sheath, and anything else that could be stolen into my clothing; with a disgusted moue, Walsingham yanked out a groat and tossed it as far as he could.