A Web of Silk

by FIONA BUCKLEY

  But Brockley shook his head. ‘No, madam, thank you. If I felt like that, I would say so. But I don’t. I would rather travel to Greenwich with you and distract my mind.’

  ‘Very well. Then have the horses put to. We can dine on the way.’

  It was always a pleasure to visit Greenwich Palace. It was not as elegant and graceful as Richmond, but it was still beautiful, with its red-brick walls aglow in the evening sunshine. Much of it was only two-storey, except for the gatehouse and a few gables and the buttress towers dotted along its extensive river frontage. Its mullioned windows gave it a friendly look. Unlike buildings such as Windsor Castle, it was not designed to withstand a siege. It was immense, a statement of power, and yet it was a home and not a fortress. I could even appreciate it when perspiring and dusty after travelling for hours in hot weather.

  The rooms we were given were comfortable though not spacious. Dale fetched jugs of warm water so that we could wash the grime of the journey away, and we were able to take a late supper before we retired to sleep, with windows open and bed-hangings looped back. In the morning, we breakfasted together in a wide hall, along with numerous other people, including the entourages of a couple of visiting ambassadors and a trade delegation from Norway. The crowd of guests explained why I had only been offered stabling for two horses.

  We were sharing our table with a master glassmaker from the City, a man who said his name was Taverner. He told us that he had been asked to the court to show the queen a range of glass tableware, for which he was apparently famous. The queen had seen some of his products in Sir William Cecil’s house, and had been impressed.

  He was quite young and not tall, with light brown hair and eyes of the same colour, beneath thin, arched eyebrows, matching a thin nose with high-arched nostrils. He was well dressed, too, all mulberry velvet and cream silk slashings. He also had an unusually confident way of speaking; an air of being mature beyond his years. The mention of glassware reminded me of the Judgement Window and I asked if he worked in stained-glass but he said no, that was a separate skill. His business concerned good quality tableware and ornaments.

  He knew how to sell his wares. Before breakfast was over, I had arranged to view his goods myself and when I did so, later on, I liked them so much that when we got home, our luggage included a blue glass ewer and six blue drinking goblets, wrapped in lambswool.

  I didn’t have to seek Walsingham out, because after breakfast a page arrived to collect me. The Brockleys came with me, but as usual on such occasions they were asked to stay in Walsingham’s anteroom while I went alone into his presence.

  Sir Francis Walsingham had offices in all the palaces, and all the offices were much alike. Since they were in palaces, they all had pleasingly patterned leading in their windows and their walls were panelled, some of them in the charming linenfold style. Walsingham, however, was interested in the Puritan movement that was gradually gaining so much ground. He always wore black and, since he was himself dark of hair and eye and so swarthy of skin that Elizabeth had nicknamed him her Old Moor, it made him look alarmingly sinister.

  I sometimes wondered if attractively patterned window leading and linenfold panelling offended something in his austere nature and was the real reason why his shelves and cupboards – all full of books and files and document boxes – and the maps on which he followed the movement of world events and the blackboard on which he chalked diagrams and instructions for his agents obscured so much of their beauty, even cutting down the daylight.

  His office at Greenwich was no exception, and when I entered I found that as usual it was as dim as a dungeon, with candles to augment the limited sunshine.

  It was also stifling because all his windows were shut. The day was already growing over-warm and on the way through the palace I had inhaled, without pleasure, the usual smell of a royal residence in a heatwave – by which I mean the odour of so many perspiring bodies overlaid with the perfumes, flowery, exotic or sickly, that people use to conceal their own smells. The ornate court clothes were quite unsuitable for warm weather, being so heavy with brocade and velvet.

  I was myself wearing a satin creation in peach and silver, with an open ruff and a foundation of stays and a wide farthingale, and knitted stockings. I longed to be at home in a loose informal gown, with no corsetry, ruff or farthingale, and bare feet pushed into slippers.

  Always polite, Walsingham rose from his seat as the page brought me in, nodded dismissal to the lad, and graciously offered me a chair. I curtsied and accepted.

  ‘You sent for me?’ I said.

  ‘Yes. I have something for you to do.’

  He paused, gazing at me with an air of slight exasperation. Like Edward Heron, Walsingham didn’t consider that women should be involved in state affairs. I suspected that at heart he wished he could serve a king instead of a queen – though his opinions on such things might have been less jaundiced if Elizabeth had liked him. (She didn’t, to the point that sometimes she lost her temper with him and threw things at him.)

  I took a deep breath of stuffy air, laden with the smells of paper, dust and ink, and said: ‘Yes, Sir Francis?’

  ‘It won’t be dangerous. But it will mean spending some time – probably three months – away from home, though you won’t have to go far. Do you know of a place called Knoll House, just south of Guildford?’

  ‘The Earl of Leicester mentioned it to me once,’ I said. ‘Hasn’t it just been leased by someone called Giles Frost? I have seen the place but only from the outside. I pass that way when I visit Kate and Christopher Spelton at West Leys. It’s a tall, narrow house set at the top of a small hill. The nearest village is Brentvale – about a mile further south.’

  ‘Yes, you have it right. Giles Frost has leased it from Leicester and means to move from the Midlands to live there. There’s a small home farm, but he gets most of his income from something else.’

  I said: ‘The Earl of Leicester told me that this man Frost is suspected of passing information to Spain, but that the Council hope to use him to mislead the Spanish, which is why he hasn’t been arrested. Is that so? How does he contact them?’

  Walsingham had resumed his seat, behind his desk. He rested his elbows on the desktop and steepled his fingers. ‘He has a brother,’ he said, ‘who lives in London and is a merchant. This man exports leather goods and ironware to Mediterranean countries and brings back silk and spices, and the like. He doesn’t do the travelling himself. Giles Frost does it for him. Frost is an experienced seaman. He’s been a ship’s captain in the past. Between them the brothers own a small trading vessel, and Giles captains that. He has been at sea recently but is back in England and is now in London, handing over his latest purchases to his brother. He will then arrange the move to Knoll House.’

  There was another pause. I thought: I was right to feel misgivings after Leicester called on me. He was preparing the ground, trying not to alarm me but to plant things in my mind – things like the existence of this man Frost and his activities – so that when this moment came it wouldn’t be a complete surprise.

  ‘When Frost travels to the Mediterranean,’ said Walsingham, ‘he seems to have a regular rendezvous with a Spanish fishing vessel. People such as merchants, travelling players, even some chapmen, who regularly travel to France or to the Mediterranean countries, interest me greatly. I like to keep watch on them. I therefore pay retainers to a number of men who, when opportunity permits, get themselves into the employment of such people or taken on as crew members in their ships. They do the watching.’

  Walsingham sometimes made me shiver. I sometimes thought of him as a spider, waiting at the centre of a vast web. Waiting to pounce whenever an unwary fly … traitor … fell foul of its sticky threads.

  ‘We are particularly interested in such men as Giles Frost,’ he said, ‘because he not only travels regularly to the Mediterranean, ostensibly to visit Venice and other mercantile centres where goods from the East may be found, he is also a Catholic. Oh, he k
eeps the law and attends Anglican services from time to time. He also has a personal chaplain, who we suspect says Mass for him in private. I myself would like to have both of them arrested but, as they have never tried to convert anyone, I have no ground for so doing.’

  He paused, looking irritable. The queen’s insistence that she did not want windows into men’s souls, and that if they kept the letter of the law she would not hound them, really annoyed Walsingham.

  After a moment, he resumed. ‘However,’ he said, ‘we – Sir William Cecil and I, that is – learned, quite soon, that when Frost is near the Spanish coast he regularly encounters a Spanish fisherman. Always, according to reports turned in by a man who is now an established member of his ship’s crew, the same one. On two occasions this so-called fisherman came aboard Frost’s vessel, and once my agent succeeded in overhearing some of the conversation between him and Frost. There is no doubt that Frost is passing information to the Spanish. Mostly he hasn’t been able to tell them very much, but something serious did happen after the meeting that our agent overheard. One of our agents in Spain was nearly arrested. He was warned in time and escaped, but it was a near thing. We have taken great care since then to make sure that Frost doesn’t learn of anything important. But we have left him alone because,’ said Walsingham, with a saturnine grin, ‘Sir William thinks – and he has managed to convince me – that Frost could be useful. He sometimes goes with his brother on autumn trips to Continental fairs, and it’s likely that he meets contacts there as well.’

  I felt as though I too were at sea. I couldn’t think how I came into this. But no doubt Walsingham was about to tell me. I waited.

  ‘Giles Frost is a family man,’ said Walsingham. ‘He married late and was unfortunate enough to lose his wife after only a few years – there was an outbreak of plague – but she left him with twin daughters, now aged seventeen. Their names are Joyce and Jane. He wishes them to learn skilled embroidery, including gold and silver work, and apparently they want this, too. The governess they used to have, who died recently, did her best but she wasn’t a particularly skilled needlewoman and couldn’t teach them gold and silver work at all. You, I know, are quite gifted in such matters and Mistress Jester who lives with you is, I believe, excellent at designing patterns.’

  ‘That is so,’ I said. ‘Do I understand that you wish me to give these two girls a course of instruction, helped by Mistress Jester? But to what end?’

  ‘Master Frost,’ said Walsingham, ‘knows of you by sight, as he has occasionally seen you at court, and by reputation as well. He does not approve of you. He does not approve of women being involved in affairs of state. Any more than I do, but I do recognize the value of the services you have given to Her Majesty. Well, Master Frost has heard – I believe it was from Leicester, some time ago – that you have womanly skills as well, including embroidery. It also seems that Leicester mentioned your companion, Mistress Jester, and her gift for design, which is another skill that the Frost girls would like to learn.’

  ‘I still don’t see …?’

  ‘Let me finish. When he began to look for teachers, he enquired about you personally. And about Mistress Jester. On my instructions, Leicester has told him where to find you both. You and Mistress Jester will probably receive an invitation. Since he also knows of your confidential work, he may well, while you are in his household, try to get information from you. You are to oblige.’

  ‘Er … what am I to tell him?’

  Unexpectedly, in fact, so very unexpectedly that I jumped halfway out of my seat before sinking back into it with my mouth open, Walsingham clasped his hands, raised them in front of him and then crashed them down on to his desk, making a stack of papers leap up and spill and causing an inkpot to lurch and send a trail of ink across the desktop. ‘That bloody woman!’ Walsingham shouted.

  I had never heard him swear before and had heard that he never did so in the presence of a female. Presumably he was no longer counting me as one. I wasn’t even sure which woman he meant. He saw the trail of ink on his desk, groped in a drawer, produced a napkin and mopped it up. Then he wiped his hands on a clean part of the napkin, thrust it back into its drawer, and with slightly shaking hands shuffled the dislodged papers back into a roughly tidy pile.

  He looked at me grimly. ‘I am talking about Mary of Scotland. Mary the serpent of discord, Mary who was thrown out of Scotland after she married the man who in all probability murdered her husband Lord Darnley, Mary who has been in England ever since, as Elizabeth’s guest and prisoner combined, and who if she ever has the chance will conspire with Philip of Spain to bring an army to her aid, either to put her back on the Scottish throne or to kill Elizabeth and put herself on our throne instead. She would do it for her own self-aggrandisement but would claim she was doing it for God and the Catholic faith. She makes my stomach churn. I have long wanted Elizabeth to have her head off. But the queen fears that if she did, that in itself might bring Philip’s army upon us in revenge. Mary is a menace, alive or dead. She makes me sick!’

  I sat still. For the moment I had forgotten the physical discomfort of this sweltering office and my own too-heavy garments. I had never seen Walsingham like this before. He shook his head violently, as if trying to disperse a swarm of flies.

  ‘We have kept Philip of Spain’s shipping busy,’ said Walsingham, ‘by allowing our privateers to harass it. That is the queen’s wish. We’ve intercepted and seized some shiploads of treasure, bound for Spain from the New World, and done the queen’s Treasury a favour. I have not been in favour of this policy; I fear it will provoke Philip of Spain rather than distract him. There is reason to fear that it has done just that already – and if he and Mary establish contact, I wouldn’t like to think of the consequences. We are doing all we can to make sure nothing of that kind happens, but we can’t isolate her completely. She has a household. We can’t shut them totally away from the outside world and, though they can be searched every time they go out, there is no means of looking inside their heads for messages carried in their memories.’

  He sighed. ‘In my opinion, what we need to do is give Philip good reason to feel that attacking England might be a mistake. To do that we need to feed inaccurate information to him, though that isn’t as easy as it sounds. Frost, for instance, is not a fool. He is wary, and clever. He is good at knowing how to check on information casually fed to him. And who to talk to, oh so guilelessly.’

  ‘Won’t he check up on me?’ I asked.

  ‘We intend to make sure that the information you pass to him will be repeated to him if he tries to verify it. I fear,’ said Walsingham, with another demonic grin, ‘that to make what you tell him seem truly convincing, you will need to make yourself appear light-minded and gossipy. Let things out as though you have no idea of their importance.’

  ‘But what is this inaccurate information that I am to pass?’

  ‘Philip of Spain is a danger to England,’ said Walsingham. ‘A very serious danger. We do not, we cannot, know for sure if he really is planning to attack us but we have reason to think that the possibility is there. We do know that preparations for such an attack are not in progress yet. He clearly doesn’t plan to make war on us this year. But our agents have picked up rumours that he is considering plans for the future, next year or the year after. He seems to have been trying to find out what kind of backing he might find within England; how much support there is for the Catholic cause and therefore for Mary’s. There isn’t much – but that alone might encourage him to sail against us. Because he would certainly like to replace Elizabeth, whom he detests, with Mary, and he will eventually grasp – if he hasn’t already done so – that it couldn’t be done without his aid. The one thing above all others that might hold him off is the belief that our navy outnumbers his. His, according to the agents who have courted appalling dangers to find out, consists of somewhere between a hundred and thirty and a hundred and fifty ships of varying sizes. Our warship fleet contains only sixty vessels
.’

  I looked at him in horror. ‘If it came to war, we would be outnumbered! Spain has a fleet more than twice the size of ours …’

  ‘We’ve increased our navy a lot since Elizabeth came to the throne,’ said Walsingham. ‘There were only thirty-nine warships then. More ships are being built, but completing them will take time. They are mostly in shipyards on the Thames and the Medway. All here in the south. It will be for you to let fall that new shipyards have been opened in the north and that eighty vessels are at present under construction, forty of which will be complete within two months while the rest will be ready in stages before Christmas. If that were true – if only! – by Christmas we would have a navy roughly the same size as the Spanish one.

  ‘Well, as I said, we are sure that Philip can’t start an invasion before next year. He has not yet begun to make preparations; such preparations take time, and he couldn’t do it now before the weather turns. Information must reach him that by the time he can be ready to make an attack our navy will be more than capable of taking on his. Frost won’t sail through Spanish waters again this year but he may go to France and may well meet a contact there. I fancy he will see that news of such import gets through. Will you do it? It won’t be dangerous,’ he repeated dryly. ‘You won’t need to wear those open-fronted gowns with a pouch sewn inside so you can carry picklocks and a dagger.’

  ‘I didn’t know you knew about that,’ I said.

  ‘You might be surprised to learn how many things I know,’ said Walsingham. ‘I make a point of knowing things. Well?’

  There was no question of saying no. There never was with Walsingham. Or Cecil. Because all my assignments, no matter which one of them instructed me, were essentially for Elizabeth. And she was my sister as well as my queen, my kin as well as the representative of my country.

  ‘When must I go to Knoll House?’ I asked.