‘Giordano Bruno?’
His breath is hot on my cheek, his voice barely audible. In the corner of my vision, a bearded face appears so close to mine that I can’t focus.
‘Don’t turn or speak, sir. In a few minutes, find a moment to slip through the door behind you, as discreetly as you can. Master Secretary’s orders.’
He moves away as invisibly as he arrived, without my even having seen his face fully. I wait until I am sure that Castelnau, Marie and Courcelles have their eyes fixed on the choir and take a short step backwards, then another, until I am hidden by other guests. A side door is built into the panelling; as I approach, the guard there holds it open a fraction and I back through the narrow gap. On the other side, a tall young man, bearded and wearing a black suit, waits for me. He has the appearance of a clerk.
‘This way.’ He gestures to the corridor ahead.
‘Can you tell me what this is about?’
He shakes his head, his mouth set in a grim line, and motions for me to continue down the passageway that leads away from the Great Hall towards a warren of state apartments. When we need to turn a corner, he places a palm lightly on the small of my back to show me the way. At the end of another corridor he stops outside a door and knocks, before ushering me into a small, sparsely furnished office with tall windows. The Earl of Leicester leans against the wall by the window, looking out at the darkening sky as if deep in thought while shadows carve deep hollows around his eyes and the sharp bones of his face; Walsingham paces, one hand clasped across his mouth and chin; Burghley stands by the writing desk, watching the door, his skullcap awry and his white hair sticking up in tufts where he has run his hands through it. Beside him, to my immense surprise, stands the skinny boy who brought me the message from Abigail three days ago. He wipes his hands repeatedly on a streaked apron that suggests he works in the kitchens, and by the look of his face he has been crying. As the guard shuts the door softly behind me, the boy points at me and cries, accusing -
‘That’s him, sir! That’s the man!’
Palace of Whitehall, London
30th September, Year of Our Lord 1583, cont.
Lord Burghley’s face constricts in an expression of distress. I suspect it is mirrored on my own face, though I don’t yet know why. No one moves.
‘You’re quite sure? This is the man who gave you the message for Lady Abigail?’
Walsingham speaks sharply and the boy looks confused; his eyes flick wildly from me to Walsingham to Burghley and back, as if between us we are trying to trick him.
‘No! Not the message - that is to say - the message came from him, but it wa’n’t him who gave it to me.’
‘You are not making any sense, boy.’
‘He told me the message came from Master Bruno - the man who stopped me in the yard,’ the boy says, a note of panic rising in his voice. ‘I couldn’t rightly see him in the dark, but he had an English voice.
This
is Master Bruno,’ he adds, pointing again. ‘It wa’n’t his voice. He’s not English.’
‘We know that.’ For a moment Walsingham betrays his impatience, then he masters himself and his tone softens. ‘We need to understand what happened tonight. Jem, is it?’
The boy nods unhappily.
‘Good. Then, Jem - tell us again. A man you don’t know stopped you earlier in the yard by the kitchens and asked you to give a message to Abigail Morley from Master Bruno. Is that right?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And you didn’t see this man clearly?’
‘No, sir. The candles hadn’t been lit yet and it was shadowy. And he had a big hat, pulled down over his face, and his collar all up like this, sir.’ He tugs at the neck of his dirty tunic to demonstrate. There is a pause. ‘He might’ve had a beard,’ the boy offers, hopefully.
Walsingham rolls his eyes.
‘He
might
have had a beard. Well, at least we can rule out the women and children.’
‘Not
all
the women,’ Leicester says, under his breath, from the window. I catch his eye and he smiles, briefly; despite the tension in the room, I return it. It is almost a relief. Burghley sends him a reproachful stare.
‘And what was the message, exactly?’ Walsingham continues.
‘To tell her - to say that Master Bruno wanted to meet her in secret at the kitchen dock before the concert. He said it was urgent. Then he gived me a shilling.’ The boy glances around again nervously, as if afraid he might be asked to give up the coin.
Walsingham frowns.
‘And you delivered this message straight away? To Her Majesty’s private apartments? How did you manage that?’
‘I took up some sweetmeats, sir. Then the guards can’t stop you - you just say the queen’s asked for ‘em, they don’t know otherwise. The girls - Her Majesty’s maids, I mean - they often get messages in and out by us kitchen boys.’ He bites his lip then, looking guilty. ‘I got as far as I could and got one of them to fetch Abigail.’
‘And how did she seem when you gave her the message?’
‘Frightened, sir,’ the boy says, without hesitation. ‘She said she’d come directly, and not to tell anyone else about it.’
‘And this was before the concert began? How long before?’
‘I couldn’t say, sir.’ The boy looks at his frayed shoes. ‘I don’t know how to read the time. Not long, though - there weren’t many people left in the kitchens, I know that. They gived us the night off because she had her supper early, on account of the music. Her Majesty, I mean. And there was already people arriving.’
Walsingham gives me a frank look.
‘I never sent any such message tonight,’ I say, trying not to sound defensive. ‘Will someone tell me what has happened?’
‘They’ve killed her,’ the boy blurts, glaring at me with accusing eyes. ‘And if it wa’n’t you, then it was the other feller, and if it wa’n’t him, then it was the Devil himself!’
I find, when I hear the words spoken aloud, that I had expected this, or something like it; the sense of foreboding that had taken root when I first noticed Abigail’s absence in the queen’s train had been steadily growing in my imagination, but the bluntness of the boy’s outcry still shocks me. So the killer has found his way to Abigail, I think, as my mind fumbles blindly to make sense of the boy’s story, and though the message was not my doing, the circumstance is indisputably my fault.
Leicester stirs unhurriedly from his place by the window, stretching out his long limbs as if this were his cue. He nods to Walsingham and then gestures towards the door with the slightest movement of his head. Walsingham holds up a forefinger, signalling for him to wait.
‘You’ve been very helpful, Jem,’ Walsingham says gently to the boy. ‘I have one more question. Do you think this man waited for you especially to take his message?’
‘Well - yes, sir.’ The boy blinks rapidly, as if he fears another trick. ‘Because of me taking the message before, see? I suppose he must have known, somehow.’
‘What message before?’ Walsingham’s voice is sharp as a blade again.
‘From Lady Abigail to him.’ He points at me. ‘In Fleet Street, sir. I had to wait half a day in the stables with them French boys threatening to knock me down.’ He bares his teeth, as if the memory of it still stings.
‘Thank you. I’d like you to go with the sarjeant now, Jem. We may have some more questions for you. If you can remember any more details about the man with the hat - anything about his voice, his face, his figure, anything at all that might help us - I would be very grateful.’
‘It’s my fault, i’n’t it?’ The boy looks suddenly to Burghley, who has a grandfatherly air that makes him less severe than the others. ‘If I hadn’t taken that message, she wouldn’t ‘a died, would she? I’m to blame - for a shilling!’ He bunches his fist against his mouth and looks as if he might cry. ‘She was always kind, the lady Abigail. Not like some.’
Burghley lays a hand on his shoulder.
‘It’s no one’s fault except the wicked man who killed her. And with your help we shall find him, so he can’t hurt anyone else.’
The boy gives me a last look over his shoulder as the guard leads him away.
When the door is firmly closed, the three members of the Privy Council turn their eyes sternly upon me.
‘Message, Bruno?’ Walsingham folds his arms across his chest.
As succinctly as I can, I outline my dealings with Abigail Morley, from the kitchen boy’s visit to our meeting at the Holbein Gate, when she gave me the bag of Cecily Ashe’s treasures and I first suspected we were being watched, to the discovery Dee and I had made about the perfume and my most recent guess at the significance of the gold ring - which I take from inside my doublet and hand to Walsingham. He turns it over between his fingers, nodding gently, as I continue my story. When I come to the end, they regard me for a moment in silence; I can almost read the separate workings of their minds in their faces.
‘They’ll have to release Edward Bellamy from the Tower.’ Burghley speaks first, squeezing his plump fingers together anxiously.
Walsingham turns on his heel and paces the width of the room, his hands flexing and uncurling. I have never seen him so rattled and working so hard to contain it. Eventually he stops and turns on me with an expression so fierce it startles me.
‘You did not think to pass any of this on to me, Bruno? You appoint yourself this girl’s sole confidant, regardless of the fact that you already suspect the killer has an eye on her? Why did you not come to me immediately?’
‘Your honour, I -‘ I spread my hands out in apology, feeling once again like a schoolboy. ‘I did not want to cause unnecessary panic until I was sure about the perfume bottle. The engraving on the ring I only worked out this evening.’
‘It is my responsibility to judge whether panic is necessary or not. Those objects should have been brought straight to me,’ Walsingham says again, his voice tight.
‘I thought that until I was certain, the fewer people knew of this, the better.’
‘Including me, evidently.’
‘Peace, Francis.’ Burghley extends a hand towards him. ‘The girl said nothing even to Lady Seaton and she would have been too intimidated to approach the Privy Council. She confided more readily in Bruno, and he was sensible to test his theory before coming to us.’ He turns to the rest of us. ‘This serves at least to prove that the killer is familiar with the court and its ways.’ He shakes his head, and his face seems paler. ‘No matter how many extra guards we place around Her Majesty, he knows how to slip right under their noses. Kitchen boys, indeed.’
‘What happened to her? Abigail?’ I hear my own voice falter and there comes a sudden memory of the warmth of Abigail’s breath on my cheek as she whispered the secrets I persuaded her to part with. She had thought I was the one person she could trust; someone knew that, and used the knowledge to kill her.
Walsingham glances at Burghley, then crosses to me and places the flat of his hand between my shoulder blades. ‘Come, Bruno. I want you to see this. We will need every last grain of intuition we possess between us. My lord of Leicester - you had better return to the hall and reassure Her Majesty. She saw the guard enter and she will be anxious enough already, but I think it best the recital is allowed to play out without interruption.’
Leicester gives a terse nod, his handsome face creased in a frown. He turns to me.
‘Your theory, Doctor Bruno, if I have understood correctly,’ he says, his eyes searching my face, ‘is that the first murdered girl, Cecily Ashe, was being set up by her lover as part of a plot to poison the queen, and that this plot is somehow connected to the Guise plans of invasion being cooked up at Salisbury Court?’
‘That is how I read it, my lord.’
‘So she was killed because those who were directing her feared she would betray them?’
‘I believe so.’
‘And Abigail Morley possibly knew enough to identify the lover, or so he thought, therefore he killed her as well?’
Again I nod.
‘Then we have all the suspects right here, within these walls,’ he says, looking around at the two statesmen. ‘Everyone we know is party to this plot of a French and Spanish attack is at court this evening for the concert. The guests were gathered at least three-quarters of an hour before the queen made her entrance - any of them could have had time to slip out unnoticed in the crowd. At this very moment, there could be a man in that hall who quite literally has blood on his hands.’
Walsingham looks uneasy; Burghley tuts.
‘What would you have me do, Robert - publicly arrest Henry Howard and the Earl of Arundel, not to mention the French and Spanish ambassadors, before the whole court on suspicion of murder, with barely a shred of evidence?’ Burghley shakes his head. ‘In any case, it is hardly to be supposed that any of them are committing murder with their own hands, even if there is a connection. They’ll have been safely mingling in the hall in full view of three hundred people while some accomplice dispatched that poor girl, you can be sure of it.’
‘It would be expedient if we could get the guests from the hall to their boats and horses without alerting them to any of this,’ Walsingham says, brisk now. ‘I will instruct the guards to move people swiftly along once the recital is finished.’
‘She will want to see Dee,’ Leicester says, looking at Walsingham with an expression I cannot read.
Walsingham closes his eyes for a moment, as if testing the weight of this further complication.
‘So she will.’
‘She has been greatly agitated since his visit yesterday, as we all know. And now, with this -‘ Leicester breaks off, gesturing vaguely towards the door. ‘Well, it seems more than coincidence. Though she will no doubt take it as prophecy.’
‘Good God. Dee’s vision. I had not thought of it until this moment.’ Burghley presses his hands together as if in prayer, his forefingers touching his lips. ‘I suggest John Dee be questioned immediately. And not necessarily by one of his friends,’ he adds with a warning glance at Leicester. In response to my quizzical look, he turns to Walsingham. ‘We should take Bruno now. Time runs at our heels.’
Walsingham nods.
‘Quite so. Even Master Byrd’s motets cannot go on all night.’
Along a series of corridors, past tapestries and torches flaming in wall brackets, he leads me at a trot, with Burghley following, carrying a light. At every corner the guards appear even more numerous than when I arrived, and there is a tension on their faces that adds to the atmosphere of dread that seems to have infected the palace. We pass into a part of the complex that is clearly the domain of servants and tradesmen, the people behind the scenes whose tireless work allows the glorious pageant of state to run smoothly. Here, too, guards are stationed; as they hear our footsteps their hands move immediately to their pikestaffs, but they step back, respectfully lowering their eyes when they see who it is striding so purposefully and stony-faced towards them.
I follow Walsingham across a dimly lit yard, where barrels are stacked in one corner and timber in another; two men are moving a pile of sacks into one of the outbuildings by the light of a small lantern. Still Walsingham has not said a word; I desperately want to ask him about Dee, but the Principal Secretary’s expression is so forbidding I hold my tongue. On the right-hand side of the yard runs a long, two-storey building of red brick with a series of tall chimneys. Here Walsingham slows his pace and pauses by a semi-circular grille built into the wall at ground level, rising to the height of a man’s waist. Through the iron bars that close it off from the yard, I hear the gentle lapping of water below.
‘The palace kitchens,’ Walsingham says, gesturing to the building, his voice low. Bending slightly, I see that this grille is the end of an arched tunnel that runs through the middle of the kitchen building, its other end opening on to the river itself. The daylight has almost seeped from the sky entirely, and the tunnel yields only blackness. This, I suppose, is the kitchen dock. At a respectful distance, a huddle of servants whispers urgently between themselves, keenly watching our arrival. From among them I hear the stifled sound of a woman’s sob. Another guard, leaning against the wall by a small door to the left of this grille, pulls himself quickly to attention as he sees Walsingham approach, then at a nod opens the door for us. Walsingham gestures for Burghley to come forward with the torch. The door opens on to a stone-flagged passageway in the kitchen building, where a faint smell of cooked meat and herbs lingers as if ingrained in the brick walls. Almost immediately there is another door on the right, which Walsingham opens slowly and then turns to me.