A Tip for the Hangman

by Allison Epstein

  He couldn’t afford to think that way. Twenty minutes ago, the letter had hung brilliant in his hand, the answer he’d needed. It was that still. This was what he’d come to do. Lie, and betray, and kill, and not question.

  He turned away from the table and left the room. He had a message to get to Whitehall before dawn.

  Twenty

  Mary rested her forearms on the windowsill in her bedchamber. Breathing deep, she leaned out to survey Chartley’s grounds, the trees, the river. The faint breeze toyed with the sleeves of her pale blue gown, sending the fabric rippling toward the horizon. She’d seen the pose in a painting somewhere, as a child: the besieged queen of the Chanson de Roland, or some other maudlin lady in a tower. Two weeks ago, she’d have dismissed the comparison as self-indulgent. Two weeks ago, she’d paced this room for nights on end, anxious and wild. Two weeks ago, she’d felt like cut crystal, sharp and ready to shatter.

  Now, her confinement almost felt romantic. Anything would, so close to the end.

  It wouldn’t be long now. Anthony had left Cresswell three weeks ago for a rented house in Lichfield, a spit of a village fifteen miles away. She had arranged to meet his man Poley on the edge of the woods this afternoon, to pass off a letter. Short and to the point—at this stage, no call to waste words.

  Do it, said the letter, behind the screen of cipher. Tell your men to begin.

  It would be over soon.

  And she could endure in the meantime. She could fill a week or two pretending Elizabeth’s men had thwarted her, passing the time somehow, watching the idle dramas that occupied her staff. They thought she didn’t notice, but Mary noticed everything. Noticed how Marlowe’s grief over his sister had faded—not long after Anthony had written of the impending strike. Noticed the way he looked at Anne Cooper with more than an observer’s interest, as if trying to see something essential about her. The young thought they invented these things, but Mary knew their game. Indulging the mood, she thought back to her decades-old wedding night with the dauphin, both of them children still. Sitting beside her in that grand carved bed, both trying not to think about the members of the French court arrayed at the foot of it, waiting to pay witness to consummation. François had looked down at his knees under the bedclothes and asked shyly to kiss her, and without speaking she ran one hand along his cheek and kissed him first. François had smiled then just as Marlowe smiled now. The smile of an anxious lover getting good news.

  Mary stepped back from the window, though she left it open. A sweet boy, François. She’d been ill-starred in husbands since, but at least her first had meant well. And if Marlowe was clever enough to keep pace with Cooper, more happiness to him. The girl was smart, and kind, and easy to talk to: rare qualities in this household. Surrounded by such bores and bureaucrats, Mary even found herself missing Anthony Babington’s inane flattery. At least insulting him gave her something to do.

  Soon enough. When Anthony turned up at Chartley’s door with an army, Mary could insult him with every breath in her body. She pressed one hand against the waist of her skirt, feeling the letter safely folded in the fabric. Then, decided, she swept down the stairs and into Lord Rich’s study. The lord of the manor was under royal command to approve or deny all unplanned excursions, but that didn’t mean she needed to ask politely.

  “I will take a walk on the grounds,” she said, instead of hello. She didn’t sit. Sitting would signal she meant to discuss the matter, which she didn’t.

  Sir Robert Rich looked up from the manor’s account books, spread across the desk in his study. He scowled, round eyes suspicious behind a fussy pair of spectacles. No wonder Lady Rich spent little time with him. A dull businessman, spending his life indoors totaling up ledgers. Not exactly the gallant knight of a woman’s dreams. “Do you think that’s wise, madam?” Rich said.

  “That is not your concern,” Mary said.

  As her jailer, it was in fact his concern, which she expected him to point out. Technically, she was permitted to walk the grounds as well as the manor, but Rich followed rules beyond the letter of the law.

  Rich removed his spectacles and pressed his thumb and middle finger to his closed eyes, circling away a headache. Mary smirked. Sir Robert Rich was the kind of man who inspired headaches in others. Only fair he should take his turn. “You are not to leave the grounds,” he said. “And you will bring Cooper with you, for supervision. No untoward behavior will be tolerated.”

  Mary’s smirk widened. “Untoward behavior? With Cooper? Sir, you mistake my intentions.”

  Rich colored, to her satisfaction. He waved a hand toward the door, intending to get Mary—and the headache she brought into his life—out of his study. “Go, then. Be back within the hour, or I will send the dogs after you.”

  Fair enough, Mary thought. She wouldn’t need the hour. And Cooper could keep a secret.

  Walking the sweep of the grounds, Mary felt the glow of a laugh rise from the base of her ribs. She heard the song of a skylark nesting in the woods, somewhere past the narrow stream. It was beautiful, she thought. The world was beautiful. Made that way by the letter stowed in her skirt, a simple note that would set everything in motion. Reckless, perhaps, to deliver it herself, but Mary was through waiting for others to act. Now, at the end, she would be where she belonged, at the center of it all.

  “You seem happy, madam,” Cooper said, walking beside her.

  Mary laughed. “I am. The strangest feeling in the world.”

  “Good news?” From another person, the question might have been dangerous, a sign of discovery. But Mary trusted Anne Cooper with her life. She’d heard the maid pray, more than once, and watched her make the sign of the cross without pause. Once you’d heard how someone prayed, knowing whether to trust them was easy.

  “The best,” Mary said. “Change is coming soon, my friend. I promise you that.”

  Mary crossed the narrow bridge to the edge of the woods, Cooper close behind. She looked through the trees, whose thin branches and dry leaves had withered in the scorching summer. One note, passed from hand to hand, and in a few weeks, it would be done. She would be free. She would be out.

  She would be queen.

  Poley would come soon, Mary knew. Anthony was an idiot, and his opportunistic man no better, but she trusted them to keep their promises. She walked the length of the woods, listening to the sound of the skylark, to the ripple of the stream.

  To footsteps against the crumbling leaves.

  Mary saw them at once. The uniformed men, emerging from the yellow scrub and brittle trees. Eight? Ten? She didn’t count. It didn’t matter. Each with the same embroidered scarlet-and-gold rose on their lapel. The Tudor rose. Elizabeth’s rose.

  Mary’s hand rose to her throat. She forced herself to lower it.

  The suave, slightly hunched man at the head of the company looked as surprised to see Mary as she to see him. Regaining his composure, he smiled, then extended a hand. Mary stared down at the man like he’d vomited at her feet. Through her alarm, she was glad the diminutive Sir Robert Cecil stood nine inches shorter than she did. There was a petty pleasure to be had in that.

  Cecil’s smile did not dip. “Mary, my dear,” he said, retracting the hand. “How thoughtful. You’ve saved us the trouble of coming all the way to the house.”

  “Sir Robert,” Mary said. Her heart trembled, but her voice held steady. “What a pleasant surprise.”

  It was a marvel Cecil found a way to speak around his smile. “I doubt that very much.”

  “What is the meaning of this?” she said. “We are still on the grounds, as my cousin instructed.”

  “We?”

  Mary looked back. She stood alone. Cooper must have bolted at the first sound of the guards. She’d been right, then, about the maid’s beliefs. Perhaps she’d done more than follow the true faith privately, if Cooper felt the need to flee at the fi
rst sign of danger. Every woman for herself, then. Mary had been surrounded by advisors and conspirators and idiot husbands all her life, but one by one they had left her, and in truth, she had always been alone. It seemed fitting, to face this man one to one.

  “I have done nothing to offend,” Mary said.

  “Mary, my dear,” Cecil said. “The time for that game is up.”

  A soldier stepped forward, drawing his blade. “Mary Stuart, we arrest you on charges of treason, heresy, conspiracy, and intended regicide.”

  If Mary had one asset to her name, it was stoicism. She stood still, the blue of her summer gown fluttering behind like the trappings of some fairy queen. The soldier’s naked sword hovered against her heart. She raised her chin and looked down at Cecil as if the blade weren’t there.

  “A convincing performance,” Cecil said. “I almost want to believe it.”

  Mary didn’t want to lie to Cecil. She wanted to tell him everything. Yes, she hated Elizabeth. Yes, she wanted her cousin dead; her cousin deserved it. Yes, she would put herself on the throne in a heartbeat, and do whatever it took to get there, because it was her throne, her right, her country. Yes, a hundred times yes, to all of it.

  But Mary was righteous, not stupid. She smiled, cold enough to freeze a man’s heart. “You will kill me if I resist.”

  “I expect so, yes,” Cecil said.

  Mary drew herself up to her full height. “Lead on, then,” she said, “where you will.”

  Twenty-One

  Sir Francis Walsingham stood in front of Chartley’s door, watching. He wouldn’t have left this task to Cecil if he’d had any choice: Sir Robert’s enthusiasm for justice made him tend toward unnecessary cruelty in its execution. But there were limits, now, to what Walsingham could do. That summer had been difficult. Though the sickness had struck hardest in London’s piss-stinking alleys and brothels, Walsingham’s habits left him vulnerable. He’d paced Whitehall’s corridors one too many nights, forgotten to eat for one too many days, and illness, sensing an opening, had pounced. He resented the silver-topped cane he relied on now, resented having to delegate the arrest to Cecil, but with God’s grace he would be well again soon. He didn’t have time for illness. Not with so much in motion.

  Mary stood near the woods, surrounded by eight soldiers and Cecil, a naked sword at her breast. Yet she did not flinch. Walsingham respected that. He hated that he respected it.

  Beside him, Marlowe had folded his arms and curled his fingers around his elbows as if to keep warm. He seemed thinner now, the shadows in his face deeper. For the first time, the boy’s reckless confidence had shrunk into something quieter, something afraid and uncertain. Something terribly far from how he’d appeared in Whitehall, delivering the broken cipher with the glint of triumph in his eye. Perhaps he understood, now, what it was for actions to have consequences. None of Walsingham’s agents understood that from the beginning—if they did, they would never sign on. But they all realized, sooner or later, what victory felt like. Hazy and sour, like a half-remembered dream.

  “You’ve done well,” Walsingham said. He didn’t look away from the woods. It was true, what he said, but he wasn’t in the habit of saying it. “Better than anyone expected.”

  Marlowe didn’t blink at the praise, backhanded though it was. “What happens now?”

  The next move on the chessboard. Much as Marlowe might try to deny it, he and Walsingham were just the same. Give him thirty years and the last traces of the boy’s idealism would wash away, leaving him with the same focused efficiency Walsingham wielded at fifty. At Marlowe’s pace, he might not even need that long.

  “The trial will be held at Fotheringhay Castle in Northampton. We will retire there at once to arrange the details.”

  Walsingham heard Marlowe laugh under his breath at the word details. Irony: another indulgence that would erode with time. Mary Stuart was a heretic and a traitor, and she would receive the punishment reserved for heretics and traitors. Any other concerns were details.

  “Sir,” Marlowe said.

  The wind sent a chill through Walsingham, which turned to a stab of pain shooting up his left leg to his hip. He hissed through his teeth and gripped his cane. Marlowe glanced over with something slightly too hard for pity. Walsingham did not look at him, grounding himself instead through the cool metal in his palm. He would be well soon. He had to be.

  “What?”

  “Will you promise me something, sir?” Marlowe said. He turned back to the woods, where two of the soldiers manacled Mary’s wrists behind her back.

  “What is that?”

  “After the trial,” Marlowe said, “I’m finished. The Council sends me on my way. You gave me a job, sir, and I’ve done it. Promise me that’s enough.”

  He’d developed a conscience, then. Walsingham had been right: it was guilt he’d spotted, newly born. The spymaster felt an uncomfortable stab of remorse, which he refused to tolerate. What the boy asked was impossible. Even if Walsingham had sworn on the cross to end Marlowe’s commission after the trial, he’d perjure himself without pause. Marlowe was exceptional. He’d succeeded where every other man in Walsingham’s arsenal had failed, and had done it in time to save a nation. Marlowe could be trusted. And in these times, a trustworthy man was a rare commodity. He couldn’t allow the boy to walk, not with what he’d proven he could do.

  It was a heavy price Walsingham asked of him. Surrendering a corner of your soul. No one knew that better than Walsingham, who’d barely seen his wife in six months, who’d once ducked out of a Privy Council meeting ten minutes early to bury two sons, whose granddaughter wouldn’t have recognized him in a crowd. A heavy price, but a man of talent had no choice but to pay it. Intelligence had always come with a cost.

  Walsingham turned away, toward the manor. The twinge between his ribs had nothing to do with his illness.

  Ten years ago, he’d have felt nothing. Would have lied to the boy through his teeth, then dispatched him overseas the moment the axe fell. By the cross, he’d sent Gregory to Douai the day before the man was to bury his mother, and he’d slept soundly after, too. Perhaps he’d outlived his own nerve. Gone from the queen’s most steadfast advisor to a tired, overworked man past fifty. Graying at the temples, creased between the brows, crumbling from within. Weak. Old. Sentimental.

  “We leave in three hours for Northampton,” Walsingham said, without looking back. “Gather your things.”

  * * *

  —————

  Fotheringhay Castle looked as though it had stood abandoned for decades. Tall grass ranged through the courtyard, unchallenged and unkempt. The lilac-shaped heads atop the boldest stalks bowed in the wind like a priest before an altar. Indoors, statesmen and courtiers had held hushed debates over heresy and treason for weeks, the air heavy and still, close as a confessional. It was almost a relief for Walsingham to stand here in the September chill, watching the wind race across the scaffold. His leg trembled, an overreaction to the cold, but the pain seemed worth it. Mind over matter. There were more important things.

  Things like the two men on the scaffold, hands bound with a rough length of cord, silent as their spectators.

  At first, Lord Chancellor Bromley hadn’t wanted to waste a trial on Anthony Babington and Thomas Morgan. Skip the speeches, straight to the denouement, which after all they had known from the start. It had fallen to Walsingham to explain the value of setting an example, for dissuading tomorrow’s would-be assassins. Never underestimate the power of theatrics. Perhaps Marlowe was rubbing off on him, Walsingham mused. In any case, it hadn’t taken long. There had never been any question what the sentence would be, there in Fotheringhay’s high-ceilinged hall. Babington’s letters—signed in his own hand, the stupid child, he hadn’t even thought to cipher his name—had damned him from the beginning. And Morgan, his accomplice, shared the guilt. The comfort of certainty was worth the
delay.

  Walsingham watched as Morgan looked down the scaffold, toward where Babington stood. The rope collared the young gentleman’s neck already. Babington’s knees trembled; Walsingham could see it from here. He wanted to take the fool by the throat and shake him. Babington would die, fear or no fear. After what he’d done, the least he owed the queen was to die with dignity.

  The hangman draped the noose around Morgan’s neck and slipped the knot tight. The sound that escaped Morgan sounded like an injured bird—soft, yet carrying. Perhaps there was no dignity among traitors.

  Babington looked up from his feet, across the crowd. He’d been crying, it seemed. His wide black eyes were rimmed with red, and splotches of color disfigured his cheeks and nose. But he did not cry now. He stood tall, squaring his shoulders against the noose. He spotted Walsingham, one face among many, and smiled, insolent, peacocking for the crowd. A dandy’s dignity, then, or something close.

  Anthony Babington was young. Walsingham had forgotten that. Twenty-four. Barely older than Marlowe.

  Walsingham glanced over his shoulder, where Marlowe stood near Fotheringhay’s eastern wall, as far as he could get from the scaffold without leaving the courtyard altogether. They were old enough, Walsingham thought, turning back. Old enough to commit treason, attempt regicide. Old enough to unravel a plot across two countries, stabilize a throne. Both men had chosen their sides. And neither youth nor age mattered to the hangman.

  First the platform would fall, and then the rope would tighten. Then the gasp, the snap, the twitch. After that, their living bodies would be cut down and thrown to the grass, where they would be torn open, their insides unlaced from their ribs. They would be cut into four pieces, quartered down the middle, and then their heads removed, which Walsingham supposed, arithmetically, made five. Not that it mattered. Whether it took ten minutes or an hour, both traitors would be dead by sundown. Long before, ideally. Something to be said for theatrics, but Walsingham had work to do, and time was scarce.