Queen & Country (3 page)

Walsingham himself he did not see for months. He had gone to
court, reporting to his queen what little grace and kindness he had found in Scotland, and how the earl of Arran, insolent and proud, insinuated sly hooks round the Scottish king, whose tender youth bent easily to his insistent snares. He had gone to Barn Elms, his mansion at Richmond, to recover from the hurt to his pride and to his health that the Scottish trip had dealt him, and attend to some affairs, arising from his daughter's recent marriage, his private life as fraught, and pressing in its purpose, as affairs of state. Else he was at Whitehall to confer with Robert Beale, or with Burghley and his councillors, on what had taken place while he was abroad; and in this dizzy trail, he had no time for Hew, nor, it seemed, a purpose for him. Yet he was not forgotten. Walsingham had marked him as a note of interest, a postscript to a letter, to be answered still.

At Bishopsgate, the parched bones of the priests had fallen from their posts; their skulls, long since picked clean, made footballs in the dust. Here Grey Gelding slowed, pushed back by the traffic crowding at the wall. To the mouth of the city came a surge and swell of melancholy sheep. A foot post passed them by, blowing on his horn, and crying to the wind, ‘Mind, make way, for life!' In moments, he had disappeared, deep into the current of the waking city, to the river, or the court, or the house at Seething Lane, where the flow of letters did not ever cease, but endlessly revolved.

Seething Lane was aptly named, for the still of human life that boiled and bubbled quietly, the fervent undercurrent, coursing through its vaults. So it seemed to Hew. Laurence had corrected him, in his patient way: it was former
Sieuthienstrate
, named for those who lived there. Laurence Tomson was a scholar, of the purest sort. He was Walsingham's own secretary, and the first true friend that Hew had found in London, loved and trusted still. It was Laurence who had taken him in charge, in those bewildered days, who had brought him from the darkness to a place of wonder, to begin again, who taught to him his alphabet, and showed him how to read.

To Laurence fell the task of filtering the flood of letters and despatches which were sent to Walsingham, or which were intercepted, copied and sent on. There were others in that office to assist him with the load, but Laurence was the only one who did not leave his desk to go into the field. His life was lapped in paper banked up by the ream, a far returning tide which threatened to engulf, but which he called to order there and quietly controlled. Daylight hours brought letters, in a thousand hands, from footmen, knights and courtiers, beggar boys and clerks, dressed in silk or rags, and every paper passed through Laurence, under his command. Those letters that were written in the hearts of men were ushered in by night, to be opened secretly in pockets of the house that Hew had never seen. Their bearers had been brought up, blinking, from their beds. Some left wearily by morning, of their own free will. Others were escorted out, to Newgate or the Tower.

Laurence had the patience of the mildest Puritan, gentle in his inquisitions, thoughtful and exact. He was interested to hear what Hew could report of Andrew Melville and his nephew James, whose teaching he admired. Laurence had made translations of Beza's New Testament and of Calvin's lectures, which he gave to Hew. And though Hew understood it was a kind of test, that Walsingham had primed him for the quiet purpose of finding out Hew's faith, he was touched at the gift, and had accepted gratefully. ‘I had a friend, Nicholas Colp, who looked after my books. He would have liked to have had these.' But when Laurence had answered, ‘Perhaps one day, he shall,' Hew had shaken his head, ‘Not in this life. For, he is dead,' and had turned to escape from an unwanted kindness, that brought to him too poignantly the tenor of his loss, and what was left behind.

He had been set to work, at first upon the letters from the Netherlands and France, in English or in French, which he had supposed to be the simplest sort. Laurence had explained to him that this was not the case.

‘You may think that a cipher is more difficult to read. And that may be so. But a message set in cipher is more often unequivocal,
when you have the key to it. We shall come to those. Here we have despatches from ambassadors abroad. You will find them filled with matter, news of every kind. It takes a little practice to discern their worth. These others, from their wives to their friends and families back home, increase that worth tenfold, if you have the patience to look between the lines.

‘A man will tell you what was done, by whom and when, and why. His wife will tell you
how
. She will notice more, and write it to her friends. Imagine that you see a flock of birds, rising from the ground and flying to the trees. A superstitious man would take it for a sign. But you and I will know they sense the coming of the hawk, long before our own ears have become attuned to it.'

The letters, with their flow of tattle, gossip and complaint, ‘is pleased to welcome Master John' . . . ‘has suffered from a distillation since he had your last' . . . ‘is presently in Paris' . . . ‘fallen from his horse' . . . ‘did not eat the plums' . . . ‘a skein of dark red silk', gave up little at the start. But gradually, Hew learned to sift, and find small specks of gold. Sometimes, it was buried in a mutual understanding, of the sort that goes unspoken, has no want of words. The signs the writers chose were close among themselves. But when Hew had their measure, through the slips and streams of a longer correspondence, he could work them out. It was more than language, he had come to see. It was holding up a mirror to the secrets of their hearts, which secrets might be hidden, even from themselves.

Others chose to write obliquely, concealing of their true intent, knowing they were overlooked: ‘Our hope and trust', ‘your honest friend'. The key was hard to find. By careful inquisition, sometimes it was wrung out from the man himself, who brought it to their door. There were lists of such words –
nomenclators
– for the use of Walsingham's men.

Once, he had found a letter for the queen of Scots. Laurence, in a heartbeat, had stolen it from sight. ‘You are inquisitive, my friend, and that is what we want. But not quite yet. It is too soon.'

On the road to Staffordshire, Hew shook his head. Three long years, adrift. He had been an outlaw, exiled from his home. Now, he had licence and the freedom to return. What was it that kept him here? In part, it was the fear of what Phelippes did at Chartley, and the hope of finding out.

English Catholics, he had learned, were in a state of flux, of conflict, fraught and perilous. They fought among themselves. ‘It is impossible for them to be true to their country and to their religion. Wherefore they are lost,' Laurence Tomson said. ‘It is the fault of the Pope, who when he excommunicated our sovereign lady Queen Elizabeth, made it lawful in their eyes to seek for her destruction. Elizabeth is a queen beloved of her people, who will not rise against her, and she is the true defender of the faith. There are good Catholic families who honour and respect her, and young Catholic nobles welcome still at court, for their grace and wit. Yet though their only trespass were to pray for her conversion, that were treason in itself. Some are English to the bone, and would rather die than see these green lands fall to foreigners. Some see no other course but to sacrifice their country to protect their faith. The younger sons of gentle folk are easily allured and tempted into plots, by those who would latch upon small discontents, and stir them to rebellion, who are reckless, fierce and hot, who in their youth's confusion do not know themselves, or know where they belong.'

‘For that, they might be pitied,' Hew had said.

‘Not pitied. Stopped.'

He had been moved to confess, ‘My father resisted reform to his faith. He was what you call now, here in this place,
recusant.'

‘We are aware of that.'

‘Yet he had me brought up as a Protestant, grounded in a faith that he did not embrace. It was a bone of contention between us.'

Laurence had corrected him. ‘It was an act of love.'

Threat came from all sides: uprising from within; invasion in collusion with the Spanish or the French; the captive insurrection of the queen of Scots, whom traitors hoped to set upon the English
throne. ‘Do not underestimate that woman's reach and influence. She is the devil's handmaid, hunkered in our midst.'

The Jesuits, and those who were in league with them, came cloaked in secret garb and wrote their dark intentions down in secret inks, of alum or onion juice, in ciphers and false script. The riddle they had made of it hid their living hearts, and made their deaths a game. The first cipher Hew had solved had come with its own alphabet. It took him several minutes to discover it was French, and less than half an hour to make a perfect copy of it, which he had presented to Laurence with a grin. ‘Child's play.'

‘And very fine it is. Now turn it into English.'

‘What do you think it is?' Hew had objected.

‘I should have said, Scots.'

It was a shrewd enough rebuke, from one who spoke twelve languages, and Hew took more care with the rest of his work.

The simplest of the ciphers were based on substitutions, and could be worked out on the basis of their frequencies. Hew had shown some skill in sounding out their secrets, and it brought him satisfaction. Confinement gave his mind the quietness to work, and the ciphers had distracted him from other, darker thoughts. He took a simple pleasure in the spaces filled, clear and unequivocal, and if the end and purpose of it was to hang a man, he did not think of that.

Sometimes, in those early days, Laurence took him out with him to explore the streets and stairways to the Thames. The walks took place at dusk, the flagstones in the market places bared to bone and blood, or at the breaking dawn, the milky vapours of the river rising in each whisper of their frozen breath, where Hew could see the waking city, stripped down to its flesh, before the pink-tipped sunlight warmed it back to life. They travelled from the Tower, by boat, to London Bridge, or wandered by St Pauls, to browse among the bookstalls at the close of day, where Laurence once bought a psalter and the Book of Common Prayer, which he gave to Hew. ‘They are not the same, as those you may be used to. You should know the difference.' And Hew had thanked him, touched, and
grateful for the gifts. They had walked among the houses of the potent and the great, by Fleet Street and the Strand, while Laurence gave accounts of those who worked and lived there. Once upon a dusk, they had turned into a quiet little street, and stopped before a door that was plain and unremarkable, like many others tucked behind the highway of fair mansions, as a good man walks in shadow of the grand. ‘Whose house is this?' Hew had asked, and Laurence had answered, it was his own.

He had taken Hew inside, to a white-washed chamber stark in its simplicity, with nothing to adorn it but some cloths of black work and a shelf of books. Hew had shared a supper there with Laurence and his wife, and a little daughter, who had thrown herself at Laurence, squealing in delight, ‘Daddie, Oh, my Daddie!'

‘She is generally asleep, by the time he is home,' her mother Jane had said, while Laurence had lifted her to settle in his lap. ‘This is my friend, Hew Cullan. He is far from home, and he has no little girl, so we must be kind to him.'

One trouble had disturbed him in those early days, and robbed him of the pleasure he had found in the deciphering. Among the siege of letters that he dealt with day by day, he had had no word of Giles and Meg. He had asked whether he might write to his family, to tell them he was safe. Laurence had refused.

‘But they will think that I am dead.'

Laurence had answered, ‘Better that way. Then their own lives are not drawn into danger. What they do not know, they cannot hide. They are in the care of Sir Andrew Wood, the coroner. He will have to work to extricate himself, and your family too, from any implication in your escape. It will take him some time to build up credit with the king.

‘Better, for the while, if you are counted dead, until your family has been cleared of all possible suspicion, and the king no longer frets upon these strange events. Your escape must not be linked to Master Secretary Walsingham. Play dead for the while. When it is safe to write, be assured that we shall tell you.'

‘But why should Andrew Wood have risked so much for me, in bringing me to Walsingham? To stop me speaking of his dealings to the king? It were simpler, surely, to have had me killed.'

‘Now that I cannot say. I do not know the man. Perhaps he has a liking for you,' Laurence had replied.

The question of what force had moved the crownar's mind came back to Hew, and troubled still. Sometimes, in the night, it would not let him rest.

For all that, he took solace in the work to which he had been set, and the friendship he was shown, at the house in Seething Lane. A day had come at last when he was sent alone, with a letter to be taken to the French Ambassador, to his house at Salisbury Court. That packet, he was certain now, had been of little worth. But the value of it lay in the introduction; the understanding that he was deserving of that trust, in Laurence Tomson's eyes, was lifting to his heart. He was ready to go out, to be tested in the world.

The first command is patience, Laurence had instructed him. Patience was prerequisite in any kind of spy. But it was not the kind of patience that suffers and endures. It was an endless restlessness, tempered and alert, pricked to wait and watch, alert to any sign. The patience of the cat that fixed upon the mouse-hole watches it for hours, each twitching hair and sinew taut and tightly poised. That kind of patience Phelippes had, that left no pause for doubt.

Chapter 2

Leadenhall

Grey Gelding kept his course, coming into Ware a little after ten, where Hew had resolved to rest for a while, out of the heat of the sun. He entrusted the horse to the ostler at the White Hart Inn to be watered and fed. ‘For he is cold and moist, and serves best in that element. I would keep him cool, and sheltered from the glare.'