Midnight Never Come (12 page)

“Forget Spain.” The voice came from behind Deven; he twisted in his chair in time to see Walsingham closing the door behind himself.

The Principal Secretary’s face looked pinched, and his words were startling. Forget Spain? They were the Great Enemy; Deven would no more expect Walsingham to forget Spain than for Philip to forget Elizabeth.

“Not you, Robin,” Walsingham said, as the Secretary moved to set down the papers in his hand. Beale sighed and kept them. “I have a task for you, Deven.”

“Sir.” Deven rose and bowed, wishing he had at least kept his doublet on. His breeches, only loosely laced on in the absence of a doublet to be tied to, threatened to flap at the waist.

Walsingham ignored his state of undress. “Ireland.”

“Ireland?” He sounded foolish, repeating the Principal Secretary’s statement, but it was entirely unexpected. “What of it, sir?”

“Fitzwilliam has accused Perrot of treason — of conspiring with Philip to overthrow her Majesty.”

Sir John Perrot was a name Deven had only recently become familiar with; one of Walsingham’s men, he had returned a year and a half before from a stint as Lord Deputy in Ireland. Fitzwilliam, then, must be Sir William Fitzwilliam, his successor.

Beale had been listening, not reading; now he said, “Impossible.”

Walsingham nodded. “Indeed. And this is why, Deven, you will turn your thoughts from Spain to Ireland. Fitzwilliam has a grievance with Perrot; he resents that Perrot sits on the privy council and advises her Majesty on Irish affairs, and resents more that the lords in Ireland have taken to writing him directly, bypassing Fitzwilliam’s own authority. I am not surprised by his antagonism. What surprises me is the form it has taken. Why this accusation, and why now?”

Deven didn’t want to voice the thought that had come into his head, but no doubt Walsingham had already thought the same. “The answers to that, sir, most likely lie in Ireland.”

He did not want to go. Aside from the general unpleasantness of traveling to Ireland, it would take him away from court and Anne, neither of which he wanted to leave for long. But he could not pledge his service to Walsingham, and then balk when asked to serve him elsewhere. It would be a mark of the Secretary’s trust; Beale himself had been sent on diplomatic missions before.

But Walsingham was shaking his head. “It may come to that, but not yet. I suspect some cause here at court. Fitzwilliam is Burghley’s man; I doubt Burghley has goaded him to this, but there may be factional forces I am not seeing. Before I send you anywhere, I will have you look about court. Who shows an interest in Ireland? Who is formulating petitions regarding affairs there, that have not yet reached the privy council?”

“It might have nothing to do with Ireland. Perhaps this strike has entirely to do with Perrot, and Fitzwilliam is simply a convenient route to it.”

Beale nodded at this, but Walsingham again shook his head. “I do not think so. Keep your eyes open, certainly, for anything regarding Perrot — but Ireland is your focus. Search out anything I may have missed.”

“Yes, sir.” Deven bowed again and reached for his doublet.

“Anything,”
Walsingham repeated, as Deven quickly looped his points through the waist of the doublet and started on the buttons. “Even things in the past — years past. Whatever you may find.”

“Yes, sir.” Dressed enough to go out once more, Deven took his leave. He would have to find Colsey and put himself together properly, starting with a doublet that wasn’t coming unsewn. His quiet day in private, it seemed, would have to wait.

H
AMPTON
C
OURT
P
ALACE
, R
ICHMOND
:
February 13, 1590

The banked coals in the fireplace cast a dim, sullen glow over the bedchamber, barely enough to highlight its contents: the chests containing clothes and jewels, the bed heaped with blankets, the pallets of sleepers on the floor.

Anne Montrose lay wakeful, eyes on the invisible fretwork of the ceiling above, listening to her companions breathe. A gentle snore began; the countess had drifted off. One of the other gentlewomen made quiet smacking noises and rolled over. A few sparks flared up the chimney as a glowing log end crumbled under its own weight. The snoring ceased as the countess lapsed into deeper sleep.

Silent as a ghost, Anne rolled back her own blankets and stood.

The rushes pricked at her bare feet as she stole across the floor. The hinges did not creak when she opened the door; she took particular care to keep them well oiled at all times. A muted thud was the only sound to betray her when she left.

Midnight had passed already, and the palace lay sleeping. Even the courtiers indulging in illicit trysts had retired by now. The dark cloak she wore was symbolic as well as practical; it served as a useful focal point for the minor charm she called up. Anyone who might be awake would not see her unless she wanted them to.

By the thin bars of light that came in through the courtyard windows, she made her way along the gallery and to the privy stair that led down to the gardens. Snow had dusted the ground during the day. In the moonlight, their shoulders and heads capped with white, the heraldic beasts that marked out the squares of the Privy Garden seemed even stranger than usual, like frosted gargoyles that might leap into motion without warning. She cast sidelong glances at them as she passed, but they remained lifeless stone.

Up ahead, the banqueting house loomed tall and sinister in the Mount Garden, surrounded by trees pruned carefully into grotesques. And on the far side of that, murmuring to itself under a thin shell of ice, the Thames.

A figure waited for her in the shadows of the Water Gallery, just above the river’s edge.

“You are late.”

Lune kept the illusion of Anne Montrose over her features; she did not want the nuisance of reconstructing it. She did not have to think like a human, though, and so she stood barefoot on the icy ground, the cloak now flapping free in the wind off the river.

“I am not late,” she said, as a bell ringer inside the palace clock tower began to toll the second hour after midnight.

Vidar smiled his predatory smile. “My mistake.”

Why Vidar? Ordinarily he dispatched a minor goblin to bring her bread. Lune supposed she would learn the answer soon enough, but she would not satisfy him by asking. Instead she held out one hand. “If you please. I am near the end of my ration.”

She was unsurprised when Vidar did not move. “What matters that? Unless you expect a priest to leap out of the river and bid you begone, in the name of his divine master, you are in no immediate danger of being revealed.”

Months before, Lune had snatched a few days of solitude for herself, pleading an ill kinswoman in London to cover for her absence. Those days spent wearing her true face had allowed her to shift the schedule of her ration; the goblins delivered it on Fridays, but she ate it on Tuesdays. The margin of safety might be important someday. But Vidar did not know that, and so she feigned the apprehension she should have felt, hearing him come so close to naming the mortal God to her face.

“My mistress may wake and find me gone,” she said, sidestepping Vidar’s jibe. “I should not tarry.”

He shrugged his bony shoulders. “Tell her you slipped off for a tryst with that mortal toy of yours. Or some other tale. I care not what lie you give her.” He settled his back against the brickwork of the Water Gallery, arms crossed over his narrow chest. “What news have you?”

Lune tucked her reaching hand back inside her cloak. So. Again she was unsurprised; she knew she was hardly the Onyx Court’s only source of information regarding the mortals. But it meant something, that Vidar considered the matter pressing enough to seek her out here. Like the mistress he strove to emulate and eventually unseat, he rarely left the sanctuary of the Onyx Hall.

“Sir John Perrot has been accused of treason,” she said, allowing the pretense that Vidar did not already know. “He is a political client of Walsingham’s, and so the Principal Secretary is moving to defend him. Deven has been assigned to investigate: who is taking an interest in Irish affairs, and to what end.” That Deven and Walsingham both were at Richmond, she did not say. The Countess of Warwick had been bidden there the other day to attend the Queen, by which fortunate chance Lune had been able to learn of Deven’s assignment; Vidar would be displeased if he knew how rarely she saw him at the moment. He was her link to Walsingham. Without him, she had very little.

Vidar tapped a sharp fingernail against a jeweled clasp that held the sleeve of his doublet closed. “Has your toy asked you to tell him of what you hear?”

“No, but he knows I will do it regardless.” Lune’s eyes went from the tapping fingernail to Vidar’s face, his sunken eyes hidden in shadow. “Is the accusation our doing?”

The fingernail stopped. Vidar said, “You are here to do the bidding of the Queen, not to ask questions.”

How the removal of Perrot would advance Invidiana’s bargaining with the Irish fae, Lune could not guess, but Vidar’s attempt to dodge the question told her it would. “The better I understand the Queen’s intentions, the better I may serve her.”

She startled a bitter but honest laugh out of Vidar. “What a charming notion — understanding her intentions. Dwelling among mortals has made you an optimistic fool.”

Lune pressed her lips together in annoyance, then smoothed her features out. “Have you instructions for me, then? Or am I simply to listen and report?”

Vidar considered it. Which, again, told her something: Invidiana was permitting him some measure of discretion in this matter. He had not come here just as a messenger. And that told her why it was Vidar, and not a goblin, bringing her bread tonight.

She tucked that information away, adding it to her meager storehouse of knowledge.

“Seek out the interested parties,” he said, the words guarded and thoughtful. “Assemble a list of them. What they desire, and why, and what they would be willing to do in exchange.”

Then no bargain had yet been settled with the Irish fae. If it had been, Lune would be assigned more specifically to cultivate a particular faction. Had the accusation of Perrot been simply a demonstration of Invidiana’s power, to convince the Irish of her ability to deliver on her promises?

She could not tell from here, and Lady Nianna, even when feeling friendly, was not enough to keep her informed. It was pleasant to dwell among mortals, close enough to the center of the Tudor Court to bask in its glory without being caught in its net, and to enjoy the illusion of freedom from the ever more vicious intrigues of the Onyx Court, but she could never forget that it was an illusion. Nowhere was safe. And if she ever let that slip her mind, she would discover what it meant to truly fall from favor.

“Very well,” Lune said to Vidar, allowing a note of boredom to creep into her voice. Let him think her careless and inattentive; it was always better to be underestimated. “Now, my bread, if you will.”

He remained motionless for a few breaths, and she wondered if he would try to extort some further service out of her. But then he moved, and drew from inside his cloak a small bundle of velvet.

Holding it just short of her extended hand, Vidar said, “I want to see you eat it now.”

“Certainly,” Lune replied, easily, with just a minor note of surprise. It made no difference to her; adding a week of protection now would not negate the remnant she still enjoyed. Vidar must suspect her of hoarding the bread, instead of eating it. Which she had done, a little, but only with great care. The last thing she wanted was to see her glamour destroyed by a careless invocation to God.

The bread this time was coarse and insufficiently baked. Whether Vidar had chosen it from among the country tithes, or Invidiana had, or someone else, it was clear the chooser meant to insult her. But it did the job whether it was good bread or bad, so Lune swallowed the seven doughy bites, if not with pleasure.

The instant she was done, Vidar straightened. “There will be a draca in the river from now on. If anything of immediate import develops, inform it at once.”

This time Lune failed to completely hide her surprise, but she curtsied deeply. “As my lord commands.”

By the time she straightened, he was gone.

R
ICHMOND
P
ALACE
, R
ICHMOND
:
March 3, 1590

As much as Deven would have liked to present Walsingham with a stunning revelation set in gold and decorated with seed pearls, after a fortnight of investigating the Irish question, he had to admit defeat.

It wasn’t that he had learned nothing; on the contrary, he now knew more than he had ever expected to about the peculiar subset of politics that revolved around their neighbor island to the west. Which included a great deal about the Irish Earl of Tyrone, and the subtleties of shiring Ulster; there were disputes there going back ages, involving both Sir John Perrot and the current Lord Deputy Fitzwilliam.

But it all added up to precisely nothing Walsingham would not have known already.

So Deven laid it out before his master, hoping the Principal Secretary would make something of it he could not. “I will keep listening,” he said when he was done, and tried to sound both eager and determined. “It may be there is something I have missed.”

For this conference he had been permitted into Walsingham’s private chambers for the first time. They were not particularly splendid; Deven knew from Beale the financial difficulties the Principal Secretary faced. He had understood from his earliest days at court that many people there were in debt, but the revelation of Walsingham’s own finances had disabused him of any lingering notion that the heaviest burdens lay on ambitious young men such as himself. A few hundred pounds owed to a goldsmith paled into insignificance next to tens of thousands of pounds owed to the Crown itself.

Of course, Elizabeth herself was in debt to a variety of people. It was the way of the world, at least at court.

But Walsingham did not live in penury, either. His furnishings were understated, like his clothing, but finely made, and the chamber was well lit, both from candles and the fire burning in the hearth to drive away the damp chill. Deven sat on a stool near that fire, with Walsingham across from him, and waited to see if his master saw something he did not.