Midnight Never Come (13 page)

Walsingham rose and walked a little distance away, hands clasped behind his back. “You have done well,” he said at length, his measured voice giving nothing away. “I did not expect you to discover so much about Tyrone.”

Deven bent his head and studied his hands, running his thumb over the rough edge of one fingernail. “You knew about these matters already.”

“Yes.”

He could not entirely suppress a sigh. “Then what was the purpose? Simply to test me?”

Walsingham did not respond immediately. When he did, his voice was peculiarly heavy. “No. Though you have, as I said, performed admirably.” Another pause; Deven looked up and found the Principal Secretary had turned back to face him. The firelight dancing on his face made him look singularly unwell. “No, Michael — I was hoping you might uncover something more. The missing key to a riddle that has been troubling me for some time.”

The candor in his voice startled Deven. The admission of personal failure, the use of his given name — the choice of this chamber, rather than an office, to discuss the matter — Beale had said before that Walsingham had an occasional and surprising need to confide in others about sensitive matters. Others that included Beale.

Others that had not, before now, included Deven.

“Fresh eyes may sometimes see things experienced ones cannot,” he said, hoping he sounded neither nervous nor intrusive.

Walsingham held his gaze, as if weighing something, then turned away. His hand trailed over a chess set laid out on a table; he picked up one piece and held it in his hand, considering. Then he set it down on a smaller table next to Deven. It was a queen, the black queen. “The matter of the Queen of Scots,” he said. “Who were the players in that game? And what did they seek?”

The non sequitur threw Deven for a moment — from Ireland to Scotland, with no apparent connection. But he was accustomed by now to the unexpected ways in which Walsingham tested his intelligence and awareness, so he marshaled his thoughts. The entire affair had begun when he was very young — possibly before, depending on how one counted it — and had ended before he came to court, but the Scottish queen had more influence on English policy than most courtiers could aspire to in their lives, and her echoes were still felt.

“Mary Stewart,” he said, picking up the chess piece. It was finely carved from some wood he could not identify, and stained dark. “She should be considered a player herself, I suppose. Unless you would call her a pawn?”

“No one who smuggled so many letters out through the French embassy could be called a pawn,” Walsingham said dryly. “She had little with which to fill her time but embroidery and scheming, and there must be limits to the number of tapestries and cushions a woman can make.”

“Then I’ll begin with her.” Deven tried to think himself in her place. Forced to abdicate her throne and flee to a neighboring country for sanctuary — sanctuary that became a trap. “She wanted . . . well, not to be executed, I imagine. But if we are considering this over a longer span of time, then no doubt she wished her freedom from confinement. She was imprisoned for, what, twenty years?”

“Near enough.”

“Freedom, then, and a throne — any throne, from what I hear. English, Scottish, probably French if she could have got it back.” Deven rose and crossed to the chessboard. If Walsingham had begun the metaphor, he would continue it. Selecting the white queen, he set her down opposite her dark sister. “Elizabeth, and her government. They — you — wished security for the Protestant throne. Against Mary as a usurper, but there was a time, was there not, when she was considered a possible heir?”

Walsingham’s face was unreadable, as it so often was, particularly when he was testing Deven’s understanding of politics. “Many people have been so considered.”

He hadn’t denied it. Mary Stewart had Tudor blood, and Catholics considered Elizabeth a bastard, incapable of inheriting the throne. “But it seems she was a greater threat than a prospect. If I may be so bold as to say so, my lord, I think you were one of the leading voices calling for her removal from the game.”

The Principal Secretary did not say anything; Deven had not expected him to. He was already considering his next selection from the chessboard. “The Protestant faction in Scotland, and their sovereign, once he became old enough to rule.” The black king went onto the table, but Deven placed him alongside the white queen, rather than the black. “I do not know James of Scotland; I do not know what love he may bear his late mother. But she was deposed by the Protestant faction, and branded a murderess. They, I think, did not love her.”

Having mentioned the Protestants, the next components were clear. Deven hesitated only in his choice of piece. “Catholic rebels, both in England and Scotland.” These he represented with pawns, one black and one white, both ranged in support of the black queen. It would be a mistake to assume the rebels all unlettered recusant farmers, but ultimately, whatever their birth, they were pawns of the Crowns that backed them. “Their motives are clear enough,” he said. “The restoration of the Catholic faith in these countries, under a Catholic queen with a claim to both thrones.”

What had he not yet considered? Foreign powers, that backed the rebels he had depicted as pawns. They did not fit the divide he had created, using black pieces for the Scots and white for the English; in the end he picked up the two black bishops. “France and Spain. Both concerned, like the rebels, with the restoration of Catholicism. France has long invested her men and munitions in Scotland, the better to bedevil us, and Spain sent the Armada as retaliation for Mary Stewart’s execution.”

Walsingham spoke at last. “More a pretext than an underlying cause. But you have them rightly placed.”

The pieces were arrayed on the table in a strange, disorganized game of chess. On one side stood the black queen with her two bishops, a pawn, and a second pawn from the white; on the opposing side, the white queen and the black king. Had he missed anyone? The English side was grievously outnumbered. But that was a true enough representation. She had Protestant allies, but none whose involvement in the Scottish matter was visible to Deven.

The only group he still wondered about was the Irish, with whom this entire discussion had begun. But he did not know of any involvement on their part, nor could he imagine any that made sense.

If he had failed the test, then so be it. He faced Walsingham and made a slight bow. “Have I passed your examination, sir?”

By way of reply, Walsingham took a white knight and laid it on the English side. “Her Majesty’s privy council,” he said. Then he moved the white queen out into the center, the empty space between the two. “Her Majesty.”

Dividing Elizabeth from her government. “She did not wish the Queen of Scots to be executed?”

“She was of two minds. As you observed, Mary Stewart was a potential heir, though one who would never be acceptable to those of our Protestant faith. Her Majesty also feared to execute the anointed sovereign of another land.”

“For fear of the precedent it would set.”

“There were those who sought our Queen’s death, of course, regardless of precedent. But if one Queen may be killed, so may another. Moreover, you must not forget they were kinswomen. Her Majesty recognized the threat to her own safety, and that of England, but she was most deeply reluctant.”

“Yet she signed the execution order in the end.”

Walsingham smiled thinly. “Only when driven to it by overwhelming evidence, and the patient effort of us her privy councillors. Bringing that about was no easy task, and her secretary Davison went to the Tower for it.” At Deven’s started look, he nodded. “Elizabeth changed her mind in the end, but too late to prevent Mary’s execution; Davison bore the weight of her wrath, though little he deserved it.”

Deven looked down at the table, with the white queen standing forlornly, indecisively, between the two sides. “So what is the riddle? Her Majesty’s true state of mind regarding the Queen of Scots?”

“There is one player you have overlooked.”

Deven bit his lip, then shook his head. “As much as I am tempted to suggest the Irish, I do not think they are who you mean.”

“They are not,” Walsingham confirmed.

Deven studied the chess pieces once more, both those on the table and those unused on the board, then made himself close his eyes. The metaphor was attractive, but easy to get caught in. He mustn’t think of knights, castles, and pawns; he must think of nations and leaders. “The Pope?”

“Ably represented by those Catholic forces you have already named.”

“A Protestant country, then.” Mustn’t think in black and white. “Or someone farther afield? Russia? The Turks?”

Walsingham shook his head. “Closer to home.”

A courtier, or a noble not at court. Deven could think of many, but none he had cause to connect to the Scottish Queen. Defeated, he shook his head. “I do not know.”

“Nor do I.”

The flat words brought his head up sharply. Walsingham met his gaze without blinking. The deep lines that fanned out from his eyes were more visible than ever, and the gray in his hair and beard. The vitality of the Principal Secretary’s intellect made it easy to forget his age, but in this admission of defeat he looked old.

Not defeat. Walsingham would not be outplayed. But it seemed he had, for the moment, been stymied. “What do you mean?”

Walsingham gathered his long robe around him and sat once more, gesturing for Deven to do the same. “Her Majesty had little choice but to execute Mary Stewart; the evidence against her was unquestionable. And years in the assembling, I might add; I knew from previous experience that I would need a great deal. Yet for all the efforts of the privy council, and all that evidence, it was a near thing — as her treatment of Davison shows.”

“You think someone else persuaded her in the end? Or was arguing against it, and turned her back after her decision?”

“The former.”

Deven’s mind was racing, pursuing these new paths Walsingham had opened up. “Not anyone on the Catholic side, then.” That ruled out a good portion of Europe, but fewer in England, even with some educated guesses as to who was a closeted papist.

“There is more.” Walsingham steepled his ink-stained fingers, casting odd shadows over his weary face. “Some of the evidence against the Queen of Scots fell too easily into my hands. There are certain strokes of good fortune that seem too convenient, certain individuals whose assistance was too timely. Not just at the end, but throughout. During the inquiry into her husband’s death, she claimed that someone had forged the letters in that casket, imitating her cipher in order to incriminate her. An implausible defense — but it may have been true.”

“Someone among the Protestant Scots. Or Burghley.”

But Walsingham shook his head before the words were even out. “Burghley has long had his agents, as did Leicester, before his death. But though we have not always been free with the knowledge we gain, I do not think they would, or could, have kept such an enterprise concealed from me. The Scots are a better guess, and I have spent much effort investigating them.”

His tone said enough. “You do not think it was them, either.”

“It does not end with the Queen of Scots.” Walsingham rose again and began to pace, as if his mind would not allow his tired body to remain still. “That was the most obvious incident of interference, and the longest, I think, in the founding and execution. But I have seen other signs. Courtiers presenting unexpected petitions, or changing stances that had seemed firmly set. Or the Queen herself.”

Elizabeth, not Mary. “Her Grace has always been of a . . . -mercurial temperament.”

Walsingham’s dry look said he needed no reminder. “Someone,” the Secretary said, “has been exercising a hidden influence over the Queen. Someone not of the privy council. I know my fellows there well enough; I know their positions. These interventions I have seen have, from time to time, matched the agenda of one councillor or another . . . but never one consistently.”

Deven respected Walsingham enough to believe that evaluation, rather than assume someone had successfully misled him for so long. Yet someone must have, had they not? Incredible as it was, someone had found a way to play this game without being uncovered.

The Secretary continued. “It would seem our hidden player has learned, as we all have, that to approach the Queen directly is less than productive; he more often acts through courtiers — or perhaps even her ladies. But there are times when I can think of no explanation save that he had secret conference with her Majesty, and persuaded her thus.”

“Within the last two years?”

Walsingham’s dark gaze met Deven’s again. “Yes.”

“Ralegh.”

“He is not the first courtier her Majesty has taken to her bosom without naming him to the council; indeed, I sometimes think she delights in confounding us by consulting others. But we know those individuals, and account for them. It is not Ralegh, nor any other we can see.”

Deven cast his mind over all those with the right of access to the presence and privy chambers, all those with whom he had seen the Queen walk in the gardens. Every name he suggested, Walsingham eliminated. “But your eye is a good one,” the Secretary said, with a wry smile. “There is a reason I took you into my service.”

He had been pondering this matter since Deven’s appearance at court? Since before then, from the sound of it; Deven should not be surprised to find himself a pawn in this game. Or, to switch metaphors, a hound, used to tease out the scent of prey. Yet a poor hound he was turning out to be. Deven let his breath out slowly. “Then, my lord, by your arguments, there are a number of people it cannot be, but a great many more who it
might
be. Those you can set aside are a few drops against an ocean of possibilities.”

“Were it not so,” Walsingham said, his voice flat once more, “I had found him out years ago.”

Accepting this rebuke, Deven hung his head.

“But,” the Secretary went on, “I am not defeated yet. If I cannot find this fellow by logic, I will track him to his lair — by seeing where he moves next.”