by S. J. Parris
Instead of acknowledging this as the flattery it was meant to be, she tilted her head to one side, considering the truth of it.
“Enlightened. Perhaps. Even so, there are limits.” She ran her fingertips over the embossed design on the cover. “Still, it is a brave man who will cling to his ideas in the face of all opposition. We should never have seen the New World were it not for men like that.”
“Your Majesty, my aim is to chart the unknown universe just as your explorers and cartographers have mapped this terrestrial globe,” I said, perhaps too boldly. Behind me, the whispering gradually fell silent.
“I see you are ambitious, whatever else you are,” she said, with a twitch of her brow. “Very well, then, Doctor Bruno—we shall look forward to your dispatches from these unknown territories. What think you, Lord Burghley?” She turned to her left, the strings of pearls around her neck tinkling gently against her jewelled gown with the movement. “Should you like to have infinity mapped for you?”
Beside her, the lord high treasurer smoothed his white hair and looked at me, his round face creased in consternation. I wondered if he were also remembering the murders last year, when we had first met.
“I confess the very thought of infinity makes me a little dizzy,” he said, running a hand over his velvet skullcap. “I have not the mind to comprehend it.”
“Only a fearless mind would attempt it,” the queen said. She was watching me with an expression that was difficult to read, though I fancied the ghost of a smile was hovering around the painted lips. “But remember—there is a fine line between courage and recklessness. Perhaps only time allows us to distinguish the one from the other.” She held up the book and fixed me with a significant look. “England is grateful to you, Doctor Bruno.”
I held her gaze for a moment, understanding that this was the closest she was likely to come to acknowledging the service I had rendered her. Walsingham’s foot soldiers, his army of informers scurrying back and forth across the country carrying their nuggets of intelligence like ants, were supposed to be invisible to her. But I was no longer anonymous; she had seen me, she held my book in her hands. Perhaps my dream of finding a permanent home, and a patron who would understand the scale of my ideas, had moved a step closer. Without quite intending it, I found myself smiling broadly, and the painted line of her mouth curved slightly in response, a maze of tiny filigree cracks appearing in the white veneer like the glaze of antique porcelain.
I felt Castelnau’s fingers lightly on my sleeve; together we knelt again, then backed away into the crowd as the leopard gave another strangled growl and the next dignitary was called forward.
* * *
“SHE ADMIRES YOU,” Walsingham said, some days later at Barn Elms, when Twelfth Night had passed and her courtiers were allowed to return to their own homes and families.
“She said so?” I looked up from the restless dance of the fire. There were pinecones burning among the logs and the room was filled with a warm scent of resin.
“Not in so many words. But she sent this.” He crossed the room and placed into my lap a small wooden chest that chinked as he set it down. Surprised by the weight of it, I lifted the lid cautiously. Inside was a heap of gold sovereigns. I stared at Walsingham.
“Close your mouth, Bruno, you look like a codfish. Thirty pounds. In recognition of services rendered.”
“Not a reward for the book, then?”
He smiled. “Perhaps your reward for that is yet to come. She is reading it, you know. She likes to dabble in controversy. But only in the shallows, mind,” he added, catching my eye. “You have a certain reputation, Bruno. If she would not give John Dee a formal position at court in all the years he served her faithfully, for fear of the rumours of magic that followed him, you should not raise your hopes too high. Not for the present, anyway. Besides,” he said, gathering up a sheaf of papers and crossing to the door, “we need you inside Salisbury Court now more than ever. My sources in France say Mary of Scotland’s agents there are busy recruiting new couriers among the exiled English Catholics, and Mendoza and the Duke of Guise are inseparable. I need to know the contents of every letter that passes through the embassy from now on, understood?”
I nodded. He rested his hand on the latch and a shadow of great weariness passed over his face. “It never ends, Bruno.” He looked drawn and the creases around his eyes seemed deeper. “We must not relax our guard, not even for a moment. For every John Langworth we bring in, a hundred more are waiting out there.” He nodded towards the window, as if he expected hordes of Catholic assassins to breach the garden wall at any moment. He pointed a finger, the dark eyes boring into me. Then he nodded briskly and swept out of the room.
“He has not mentioned Sophia once,” I said to Sidney, when the door had clicked shut behind Walsingham.
“He is exercising diplomatic restraint.” Sidney leaned against the mantelpiece and peered into his wineglass as he swirled its contents.
“Does he even know she was in Canterbury with me?”
“Oh, I should think so. He knows everything. I told him you had decided to go your separate ways. He didn’t press me any further, but I’m sure he has worked it out.”
“That she was behind the murder of her husband?”
“That too. But he won’t bring it up unless you give him reason.”
“He is angry with me,” I said, downcast.
“If anything, I think he is relieved,” Sidney said, draining his glass and examining the dregs. “I think he was afraid you would want to marry and settle down and he would lose you. You have become valuable to him, though he never quite says it.”
I smiled, not meeting his eye. “That is some consolation, I suppose.”
“Will you go after her?”
I made a wry face. “I don’t see how I can go back to Paris unless King Henri recalls me. If Paris is even where she is.” Every day was like this now, a battle of will against desire. A thousand times an hour I vowed not to think about Sophia’s betrayal, and from the moment I woke until I reluctantly submitted to sleep, it was all I thought about. I smacked my fist into the palm of my hand. “But I have to get the book back, Philip. Just that. I have to make her understand she can’t just …” The threat trailed away to nothing.
Sidney sighed. “The book and the girl—they’ve become the same obsession in your mind, Bruno. Something you can’t quite possess, but you won’t rest until you do. You’ve grown thinner,” he added, tracing a circle around the rim of his glass with a forefinger, before looking up, his face serious. “Unless you let them both go you will end by losing your mind. And as Her Majesty pointed out, your mind is unique. It must be preserved for the nation.”
I smiled, shifting position in my chair. “And you? Are you still determined to go to war?”
He shrugged, and pursed his lips. He had grown a beard since the summer and it made him seem more adult, more careworn. “The queen is still havering over whether to intervene in the Netherlands. The Canterbury business made her think twice about the wisdom of depleting her armies here. Meanwhile, I must stay at Barn Elms and see if I can get myself an heir before the year is out. Walsingham will not hear of my going anywhere until that is achieved.” He pushed a hand through his hair. “Sometimes I think I shall have to disregard them all and simply run away.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“How do you know?” He looked at me, eyes flashing dangerously. “You could come with me.” For a moment, something of his old spark seemed to light him up.
“I have been running away for eight years.”
“Sorry, Bruno. I didn’t think.”
For a few moments the only sound was the rhythmic crackle of the flames and the occasional pop and hiss of a log subsiding.
“You know they never found Becket?” Sidney said, at length.
“Langworth couldn’t be persuaded to tell them?”
He shook his head.
“Not a word, despite Walsingham’s best effo
rts.”
I shuddered; we both knew what those efforts would have involved.
“He went to his execution still clutching his secrets. He was a ruthless man, but at least he had the courage of his convictions. You have to admire that.”
I looked up at him. “I don’t have to admire anything about a man like Langworth.”
Sidney shrugged: suit yourself. “Mayor Fitzwalter, on the other hand, pissed himself and blurted out everything he knew before he even got a look at the rack.” The disgust in his voice suggested that, for Sidney, cowardice was more despicable in a man than murdering children.
“Was any of it worth hearing?”
“He confessed to being the fourth guardian, said he had been blackmailed into it, recanted any connection with the Catholic Church, all the usual stuff. But he swore blind he knew nothing about what Langworth had done with Becket’s bones. Walsingham believed him. He had spilled all he knew.”
“So Thomas Becket is still out there somewhere, waiting.”
“We must suppose so. At least the legend will live on. But the English are always waiting for some past hero to come back from the dead and restore a golden age,” he added, with disdain. “Thomas Becket, King Arthur …”
“Christ Himself.”
“Careful, Bruno.” He looked at me from under his brows. “One day your irreverence will land you in real trouble.”
I had been told this before, more than once, but I had never been good at heeding advice. Sidney went on talking—about the war in the Netherlands, the necessity of English intervention—but his words began to wash over me as I continued to stare into the restless flames. I would go after the book. Despite Sidney’s warning, I could not let it end like this. If Sophia had taken the book to Paris with the intention of selling it, I must find a means to hunt it down. Hunt her down. We had unfinished business, and I knew I could have no peace of mind until I had done everything in my power to resolve it. Call it stubbornness, call it pride; I preferred to think of it as tenacity. Whether Queen Elizabeth saw fit to patronise my book or not, I knew that nothing I wrote would ever truly live until I had unravelled the secrets of that book, and I also knew that I was the only one who could do it. I would not rest until I had it in my hands again—and until I had made Sophia understand that she was wrong.
ALSO BY S. J. PARRIS
Heresy
Prophecy
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