Winter Blockbuster 2012 (64 page)

Walsingham tapped his fingers against the letter, regarding Rob with his red-rimmed, murky eyes. ‘Were you working when you took part in that little disturbance outside the White Heron? A quarrel over a bawd, I hear.’

‘It may have seemed so. I had to come up with a quick excuse to cover my stealing of this.’ Rob took out a small, folded packet of papers and passed it across the desk.

Walsingham glanced at it. ‘A step in the right direction. Yet we still do not have the names of the traitors in Lord Henshaw’s Men. We know only that they pass coded information to Spain’s contacts via plays and such. Surely you are well placed to discover them?’

Rob watched Walsingham steadily. He had no fear of the
Queen’s Secretary, for he had never done him double-dealing in his secret work here. But Walsingham held so many lives in his hands, and one slip could mean doom for more than himself. This was Robert’s first task of such magnitude—tracking down a traitor in Tom Alwick’s theatre. It was a change from coding, courier work and fighting. It was a dangerous task on all sides.

He could not fail at it. No matter who was caught in Walsingham’s wide net.

He pushed away the image of Anna’s smile and said, ‘I am close.’

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ Walsingham answered. ‘Phellipes is busily decoding a letter another agent intercepted, which should be of more help to us in this matter. Once we have that information I will send you word. But for now, tell me all your impressions of Lord Henshaw’s Men and their home at the White Heron …’

It was a half hour more before Rob left Walsingham’s house, ushered out through the door by Lady Walsingham herself, whose pale, worried face spoke of her concerns for her husband, working so hard through his illness. Once outside in the lane, he drew in a deep breath. Even the thick, fetid city air of the Tower Ward was better than the dark closeness of the house.

Rob frowned as he thought of Walsingham and Phellipes, bent over endless letters, tracking down traitors among the theatre people he spent his own days with. One of them used his art for a darker purpose, but which one and why? He could not be wrong in this. So very much was at stake.

He put on his cap and turned back towards the river. His thoughts were still in that dark house, and for a moment he didn’t notice the lady lurking across the street. But then a
flash of grey, a surreptitious movement, caught his eyes and he swung round with his hand on the hilt of his sword.

To his shock, he saw it was Anna Barrett who tried to duck down a side street out of sight. What was
she
doing so far from home, so near the lion’s den? What was she looking for—and what did she know?

Rob strode after her, determined to find out.

CHAPTER SEVEN

‘W
HAT
are you doing so far from home, Mistress Barrett?’

Anna whirled round, her heart pounding at the sudden sound of Rob’s voice. When he had emerged from that house, alone and with a distracted cast to his face, Anna had been so startled she’d stumbled back against the wall behind her hiding place. He had not been in there very long.

As he started towards her, she spun and hurried down the alleyway—only to find her path blocked by a blank stone wall. She ran back the way she’d come and tried to retrace her steps to the river. Rob was no longer in sight, and she thought she could breathe again.

But she was quite wrong. She ran down to the riverbank—only to be brought up short by the sight of Rob standing there, negotiating with a boatman. He glanced back over his shoulder, as if he could sense her standing there, and she whirled around to feign interest in a tray of flower posies.

What a terrible intelligencer I would be
, she thought, holding her breath as she prayed he would leave now, that he hadn’t seen her.

Her prayers were in vain.

At his words, she turned to him and tried to give him a
smile. If only she could hear above the pounding of her heart in her ears!

‘Why, Robert Alden,’ she said. ‘I could ask the same of you. Do you have business at the Tower, mayhap? It does seem strangely appropriate …’

He suddenly reached out and caught her arm in a hard clasp. It wasn’t painful, but it was as implacable as a chain, and Anna found she couldn’t break away. He leaned close to her, his face hard and blank as he studied her.

He seemed like a complete stranger, not at all the tender, passionate lover who had kissed her in the garden. It made her feel cold, despite the warm breeze that swept down the river.

‘You saw where I went,’ he said. His voice was as fearsomely blank as his face.

Anna tried to tug her arm free, but he wouldn’t let go. He held her so easily, so effortlessly. She swallowed past the sudden dry knot in her throat and said, ‘I don’t know what you mean, Robert. I care not where you go.’

‘I tell lies for my profession, Mistress Barrett,’ he said. ‘You can’t out-deceive an actor—especially with eyes like yours.’

‘Eyes like mine?’

‘So green and pretty—so transparent, like a clear country pool. You can’t hide from me.’

‘I have naught to hide.’ Anna stiffened her shoulders and threw her head back to look at him directly. She wouldn’t cower, no matter how frightened she might feel. ‘Not like you, it seems.’

‘Come with me.’ Still holding on to her arm, Rob steered her back to the walkway. Once again the crowd seemed to make way for him, and he moved quickly, so easily, though Anna had to almost run to keep up with him.

She wanted to break away, to run—not to know whatever
secrets he held. But something deep in her heart, the spark of some long-lost sense of adventure she had worked so hard to erase after her marriage,
did
want to know. She had long thought there were many things Rob hid—angles and shadows he dwelt behind, where no one could follow.

Was she about to discover what they were? She felt as if she stood on a stony windswept ledge, peering down into a roiling sea. One small shove and she would topple over and be lost.

Rob looked down at her, his eyes very dark, like the bottom of that sea. She had the feeling he was already lost in those depths.

‘Where are we going?’ she asked.

He turned down one of the narrow, twisting lanes that led endlessly into other streets and squares, to a press of houses and people that formed an inescapable maze of their world. The light of the sky above was blotted out by the eaves of the roofs, and the flow of the river was lost behind them. All was stillness and darkness.

‘Look out below!’ someone shouted, and Rob pulled her under the shelter of a wall until the stream of waste water from the window above flowed into the latrine ditch in the middle of the road. He kept walking, not answering her.

At last they came to a tavern at the turning of the lane, not far from the White Heron. A sign painted with three golden bells swung over the half-open door. The place seemed quiet so early in the day. Only a few ragged men sat drinking in darkened corners, and a maidservant scrubbed at the floor.

Rob led Anna up the rickety wooden stairs, all the way to the top floor under the eaves. All the doors were closed along the narrow corridor, the rooms behind them silent, and the heavy smell of cabbage and boiled beef and tallow candles hung in the air.

He opened a door at the end of the corridor and pulled her inside. Only then did he let go of her arm.

As he turned away to bolt the door, Anna rubbed at her arm, where she could still feel the heat of his touch, and went to stand as far from him as she could. It was a small, spare room, with a sloping beamed ceiling and one window that looked out on the street far below. There was a bed with rumpled blankets and bolsters tossed about, a table under the window scattered with ink-blotted pages, and two straight-backed chairs. His fine red doublet from last night was tossed over a clothes chest.

Rob threw his cap down next to it and ran his hand through his hair, throwing the glossy dark waves into disarray. He looked somehow older today, his face drawn, his eyes shadowed and wary.

‘Please, Anna, sit,’ he said as he offered her one of the chairs. ‘I’m sorry I have no refreshments to offer you. The Three Bells is a fine, private place to lodge, but I fear it lacks some of the more gracious amenities.’ As Anna hesitated, he laughed. ‘I promise you, fairest Anna, I will not hurt you. You wanted to know where I went. Well, now I shall tell you, even though I’m quite sure to regret it in the end.’

She slowly sat down, not taking her gaze away from him. She placed her basket on the floor, along with her shawl, and carefully unpinned her hat. ‘I am not so sure I do want to know.’

‘Ah, but I have the feeling you already know. Or at least you have your suspicions.’ Rob took the other chair and swung it round to sit down on it backwards, facing her over its chipped wooden slats.

They watched each other, as if they could not turn away even if they tried. Anna felt those same invisible bonds she’d felt in the garden tighten around her again, binding them together
in some mysterious way she could not escape. They were all alone here in this room, so high above the world.

‘Was that Secretary Walsingham’s house?’ she asked. She clasped her hands in her lap, twisting her fingers together to hold herself still.

‘You know about Walsingham?’

‘Everyone in Southwark knows about Walsingham. We can scarcely escape him,’ she said. ‘They say he has long known everything that happens in England, and beyond. That he has superhuman powers and uses them to protect Queen Elizabeth from plots of all sorts.’

Rob gave a bitter laugh. ‘He has no superhuman powers, Anna, but he
is
like a great, strong spider, looking over all of us. He thinks he sees terrible papist plots around every corner, and he will do what he must to crush them. He and his circle thrive in these days of suspicion and fear.’

Suspicion and fear—had there ever been days
not
filled with those? Anna could remember none such. ‘And are you one of his circle?’

Many people worked for Walsingham, or for his political rivals the Cecils, or for Lord Leicester before he’d died last year. Everyone knew that. Each person had to survive as best they could, and life was nothing but a succession of masks in the end. They were changed as needed, and no one knew the truth about anyone else.

But somehow to be faced with real evidence that Robert was one of those secret men, that he too wore masks upon masks, made her head spin. It felt as if her world was tipping, everything falling top to bottom in chaos—and the blinds crumbled from her eyes.

‘Writers and actors are among his favourite recruits,’ Rob said. ‘We have some education, we must be observant to ply our trade. We move about the country on tours, we know
people of all sorts and ranks—and we always need money. I work for him sometimes, aye, when there is a task he thinks I can perform.’

‘And you have a task now?’

For the first time his steady, watchful gaze flickered away from her and he shrugged. ‘I keep in touch at Seething Lane. These are uncertain days, with the Spanish still hovering in every corner and the succession not certain.’

Anna slumped back in her chair. So
this
was his secret—or one of them anyway—he was an intelligencer. Recruited for his skills of observation, his deceptive acting abilities.

What had he observed of her?

‘How did you come to this work?’ she asked.

He shrugged again. ‘Because it is a way forward in the world, I suppose, and writers who live by their pens and their wits have few of those. It puts coins in my purse and I meet influential people.’

‘Such as Lady Essex?’

‘They do say her husband has taken his late stepfather Leicester’s place in the Queen’s favour. It can’t hurt to know them.’

Anna studied his face carefully, wishing she too had a writer’s power of observation, of knowing the secrets of the human heart. She had a disquieting sense that he was not telling her all his secrets. That there was more to his work than money and connections.

But she could only bear one secret at a time.

Rob suddenly knelt beside her chair and took her hands in his. Unlike the hard grasp he’d used to lead her here, his touch was gentle. He twined his fingers with hers and raised them to his lips for a swift kiss.

‘I have given my secret into these hands alone, fairest Anna,’ he said. ‘You now have the power of life and death
over me. I may be only a lowly courier for Walsingham, but if others came to know …’

Anna was sure Rob could never be a
lowly
anything. There was more to this twisted tale of his, but she was content for the moment. ‘I will not say a word to anyone. If you will assure me of something.’

‘What is that?’

‘Are you in danger—
great
danger, I mean? More than usual? Or is anyone near us in danger?’

‘I promise you, Anna, I will protect you whatever happens. You are in no danger from me.’ He kissed her hands again, soft kisses to each fingertip and the hollow of her palm. He turned them over and touched the pulse pounding at her wrist with the tip of his tongue.

Anna caught her breath at the flood of sensation that washed through her at his touch. It was as if that invisible bond had become all too physical. They clung to each other as if that was all they had left in the world.

‘I know I ask the impossible of you, Anna,’ he said, cradling her palm against his cheek. ‘But believe me when I beg you to trust me. You don’t like me, I know—and with good reason—yet I will make sure nothing touches you in these matters.’

Anna laughed. She bent her head to softly kiss the top of his head, his hair tickling gently at her lips. ‘Don’t like you? Oh, Robert. It’s true that you drive me mad sometimes. Yet I fear I like you all too well—even when I know I should not.’

‘Then we share that. For I like you more than I should.’ Rob rose up on his knees in front of her and gently cradled her face in his hands. He studied her closely, as if he sought to memorise what she looked like, to imprint her features on his memory.

Anna wrapped her fingers around his wrists and studied
him in turn. All traces of his laughter, his recklessness had gone now, and in his eyes she saw the stark seriousness of his true heart. Rob was involved in matters she could scarcely fathom, despite her life lived on the fringes of London’s underworld. She thought she knew greed and desperation, the turning of those masks from one false face to another, but she didn’t know everything. She didn’t know the truest depths.