Queen & Country (10 page)

He had told her the truth, or a version of the truth that would not anger Walsingham, since anyone among them might have been his spy. ‘I am in exile, your Grace, and sorely sick at heart, to have lost the faith and favour of my king. False men spoke against me, and won him with their lies.'

She had nodded. ‘Then, we may be sorry for your plight. The king our son is young, and he is ill-advised. We pray to God that he may come to better judgement. Yet there have been times when we were moved to doubt it.'

One of the ladies who sat by her side had cried out at that, ‘Ma Reine, keep strong your heart, and do not say alas, for God will hear your prayers.'

That queen had said simply,
‘Perhaps
. Tell to me, monsieur, do you know our son? Have you met with him?'

‘Once or twice, your Grace, when he was still a boy. Before the lord adventurers had placed their hands on him.'

She had shuddered at that. ‘Praise be to God he is free of them now. We pray he will come to know his own mind.'

Hew had said amen to that. Then, she had held hopes still of the king her son, which now were surely dashed. James had signed a pact with Queen Elizabeth, on which, as Phelippes rode to Chartley, the ink had still been wet.

She had spoken then, with a mother's wistfulness. ‘Tell us what you saw in him. For we should not know him now if he stepped into this chamber.'

‘For certain, you would know him then, ma Reine,' her lady had exclaimed, ‘as well as any mother knows her son, and if he saw you in this place then he would kneel and weep, and beg your Grace's pardon for the hurt that he has done, in sway of those whose minds are evilly disposed to you, who turn his heart against you.' The queen had smiled at her.

‘God grant him the eyes and the heart to see, now that he is grown.'

‘God,' the queen corrected, ‘grant him the will. They tell me,' she had put to Hew, ‘that he is ungracious and unmannerly. Do you find him so?'

He had struggled for a way to answer this. The young king had a restlessness, and could not sit at ease. His mother, by contrast, held a quiet dignity that marked her for a queen, however low she came, and however ill she looked.

‘I have not, your Grace, seen the king at the court, but in such places where he has shown skill as a scholar; he has a sharp and clear, a penetrating mind, and is well-accomplished at his books,' he had replied at last.

‘Then he is not a fool?'

‘Not by any means.'

‘But with the kind of books that they have filled his head, twere better for his own sake and that of the world, that he had been a dunce. Does he ride, and hunt?'

‘As I understand.'

‘Then he were advised to make most of that liberty, and use it while he can. We have a little picture painted in a glass, but we have not seen another since he was a child. They tell us he is loath to sit still for his likeness. Is he truly such a fidget?'

‘He has, it may be said, a roaming sort of mind.'

She had seen through the flattery. ‘That is a kindness, we think. Does he grow fair? Does he favour his father, Lord Darnley, at all?'

She did not call him king, the title she had granted to him while he was alive. Most likely she had never felt it in her heart. But she spoke of Darnley now, in a calm and loving voice. She did not sound like a woman who was troubled in her conscience, or in any way complicit in her husband's death. She seemed to look back on the years, wistfully detached, as if they were but matters she had come upon in books, memories of things that did not belong to her. ‘That was a handsome young man.'

Hew had answered diplomatically. ‘I cannot say, your Grace, if the king should favour him. I never saw a likeness of his lordship's face.'

‘We suppose not.' There was mischief in her eyes. ‘Not all men, after all, turn out like their fathers. And in Lord Darnley's case, it may not be desirable. But you, we dare say, may yet turn out like yours. You would not be the worse for it.'

‘My father, your Grace?' He had not, for a moment, thought she would remember him. That was her trick, Phelippes would have said, of pulling people close, of drawing in their spirit and their courage and their confidence, and claiming them as hers.

‘We knew him very well. He should have been our advocate, had times not turned against us. He helped us find our way, when we first came from France. Tell us, is he well?'

Hew had felt blood well up in his ears, like the water that streamed from the fount. He wanted her to stop.

‘He has been dead for three years, your Grace.'

‘Then we are sorry for it. That was a good, loving friend. And a good Catholic too. Did he build his house, on the land we gifted him?'

‘What land was that?', he could not help but ask, and did not want to hear.

‘It was land that had belonged to the archbishops of St Andrews, and had come into our hands. He would not have a title, or a place at court, but asked for leave to live out quiet in retirement; since that land had come to us, and was of little worth, we placed it in his hands, a small mark of our gratitude. Now, as we suppose, it must be yours. Did he not say?' she had asked, in her eyes a faint flicker of hurt. ‘We suppose he did not, for it was not much.'

He had answered her, hollow, it was the world.

At Chartley, Phelippes said, ‘I do not blame you, Hew. For your duty to my family, I must give you thanks. But the truth is you have come here at an awkward time. Your appearance has thrown Amias in a heightened state of fear. He does not dissemble well, and in his agitation may resort to such a rigour as will make the Scottish captive fearful for her life, which is not what we want, for we must console her with a smiling countenance, and keep her mind and spirit free from all suspicion. I can hope to still Amias, and make calm his fears, but until this work is done, I must keep you here. I am sorry for it, but I cannot let you go.'

‘Then your family,' Hew objected, ‘will despair of us both.' He had no wish to be kept as a prisoner at Chartley.

‘I have written in the letter that you will remain here, to help me with my work, that we may the both of us more speedily return. Laurence will see that it finds its way to Mary, and that your coming here will not be known to Walsingham, until we have undone whatever harm it caused. He will hear it soon enough, and he will not be pleased. You have been irksome to him, from the very first. You must be aware, there is a net about to close, and I cannot run the risk of your warning the conspirators.'

‘How should I warn them?' asked Hew, ‘when I do not know who, or what they are? You know, upon my life, that I will take no part in a conspiracy, against either queen.'

‘Trust me, when I say, we know that all too well. Therein lies the trouble, Hew.' Tom sighed. ‘We do not want, besides, a second thief to fly.'

He was alluding to the fraud Hew had uncovered in the custom house. ‘That is not fair,' Hew objected. ‘The thief was alerted by the presence of a stranger. He would loup at a shadow. He was poised for flight.'

So much had been true. Yet when he thought of the face of that foolish young piker, nervous as a lute-string, no more than a boy, he could not have sworn he would not have forewarned him, had the frightened faulter given him the chance. He had not had the stomach for the taking of a thief. His heart was harder now.

‘So much may be true of the conspirators. And if they were to fly, and you go out from here, what conclusion, think you, Walsingham would take from that? No matter if he knew you had no hand in it, you would pay the price. He would make you suffer for it. It is vexing to him, that he cannot put your talents to their best effect. Your conscience is a trial, and cannot help us here. Wherefore, you must stay, and we must watch and wait, till Walsingham sends word.'

Chapter 7

A Dead Man in Delft

Phelippes kept him close, for Hew's sake and his own. He hoped that Hew had good intentions, yet he could not take that risk. For though he knew him well, could capture to the life the manner of his speech, the letters from his hand, and frame them in a wink, he could not win his confidence, or see into his heart, as Laurence Tomson did.

Hew had never spoken with, or seen, that queen again. His journey to the spa had been judged successful. Phelippes had informed him that Walsingham was pleased with him. ‘It is better than we hoped. She liked you. So much, in fact, that she has asked the earl for you to be enlisted in the service of her household. She says' – and he had smiled at this – ‘that she wants a Scottish man of law, having for the present only someone French, and that
a friend
had told her, you were close at hand. The pity of it is, it cannot be agreed, for she cannot be allowed to think that she can have her way, nor to become suspicious of her will acceded easily. But, you can be attached to the household of whoever has the keeping of her when the earl demits it, the better to insinuate, and build upon her trust.'

It was rare enough that Phelippes showed his hand. Doubtless, it had been his own idea, to try Hew in that place, and he had been well satisfied, at first, with the result; that queen was taken in. The sticking place had been their confidence in Hew, who could not be trusted not to play a double game.

Hew had spilled his heart to Laurence Tomson, knowing as he did so it would go to Walsingham, that Laurence, in all conscience, could not recommend him.

‘He is honest, in all ways, to his faith and country, that is to say, to his king. And where there is no conflict with his own beliefs, so far, we can trust him. He will not, I think collude in any manner of conspiracy, that threatens to unseat the Scottish king. There is no question of his faith. He could no sooner change it than the colour of his eyes. It is thorough and complete. But his quest for justice, of a personal kind, sometimes supersedes his allegiance to the state. He has confessed that he was moved by the appearance of that queen. That queen has a claim over him, through family ties, not easily thrown off. He will help us bring her down, if he sees her harm to us, yet may not be persuaded to it
by whatever means;
he will not see that the method may be justified by cause, and where it is our will her malice may betray itself, he may seek to mend, or put her on her guard,' Laurence might have said.

‘She knew his father. Is that all?' Phelippes put contemptuously.

Laurence understood that it was enough.

Laurence had recommended Hew have nothing more to do with the queen of Scots, less likely in that cause to help them than to hinder it. ‘What devil shall I do with him?' Walsingham asked then. His answer came emphatically, more bloody and more urgent, than he did expect.

It was Phelippes who had brought the news to the house at Leadenhall, not long after their return from Buxton spa. Aroused by the commotion, in smocks and linen caps, the older family members had been shaken from their beds. Hew had been going out, to see if Audrey would be willing to indulge in conversation on a sultry summer's night, while Frances sat alone, in solitary candlelight, transcribing for her uncle the accounts of business done by Phelippes and his brothers in his absence at the baths.

William, the Silent, of Orange-Nassau, stadholder in the Netherlands, was dead, shot through the stomach in his dining room at Delft. Phelippes had resounded every lasting note, harrowing and pitiless. The assassin had bought the weapon he had used with money that the stadholder had given him himself, to buy a pair of shoes; a
penniless fanatic, he had nothing in his pockets but the bladder of a pig – to keep himself afloat as he swam through the canals. With hopeless satisfaction, Phelippes had described the bodily afflictions that were practised on the perpetrator in the hours of anguish that were drawn out till his last, sparing no account, until his mother's shuddering and murmurs of disgust, and Frances' pale face, caused Hew to protest that this was not the place.

‘Not the place?' Phelippes cried. ‘You will say tis not the place, when we are overrun, and all that we hold dear is brought down in flames. There is not a woman nor a child would shrink to see sharp justice pinch and sear his flesh, and trail the flaming ribbons smarting through the crowd. Anyone who whimpered at it, would be flayed alive. And rightly so.'

Joan had whispered,
Tom
, and William had objected that the women did not like to hear speak of such things, so tender were their hearts.

‘Then better they had learn to make them hard, against the terror that will strike them, that threatens all the world.' And brought to a standstill by a savage kind of grief, a fury wrought of impotence, the staid Thomas Phelippes, who had seemed impassible, had broken down in tears.

Though Hew had not wept, the cold grip of horror had clutched at his bowels, and left him sick at heart. The loss of that good prince had touched him in a personal way, over and above the damage it had done to what was right and civil in the Christian world. He had met the prince in 1582, on travels in the Netherlands, where William had been kind enough to treat to save his life, when Hew had found himself in hostile Spanish hands. The prince had been disfigured from a gunshot wound, and Hew had learned of courage, moderation, love, in the gentle contours of that ravaged face. So resolute a Calvinist, he would not take precautions to protect his life, nor close his gates and mind to those who meant him harm, for what would be, would be; and so, of course, it was.

Once Phelippes had departed, and the house was still again, and
Hew was drawn at last into a restless sleep – no more thought of Audrey – he had dreamt of that face, and felt upon his head the light touch of the blessing of that gentle prince. The hot-water bladders of the spa at Buxton were blown up into water wings, a fool's bladder bobbing on a Dutch canal, that became the swollen belly of a man upon a stick, spilling out its innards like a pudding in a flame. Hew had woken to a world that felt bleak and desolate, that no amount of rage, no spilling out of blood, could possibly assuage, a tidal wave of terror that had caught him in its flood.