Prophecy

by S. J. Parris

  In the silence, the first birds strike up their chorus outside the window. The ambassador wraps his beautiful robe around my muddy, soot-streaked body and crosses to his desk to pour me the last dregs of wine from a decanter. I guess that he must have drunk the rest himself in the long sleepless hours. I clasp the glass between my hands, trying not to spill it as I shiver, while Castelnau comes to stand beside me in front of the glowing ashes. He gives another of those great sighs that suggest he carries the weight of the world on his shoulders.

  ‘There is bad news, Bruno.’ He speaks without looking at me, and before the words are out of his mouth, I know what he is about to tell me. ‘Léon is dead.’

  I bite my lip. Part of me has expected this since Dumas failed to return yesterday, but I have tried to persuade myself that there could be some other explanation. If only Marie had not interrupted, if only I had been more forthright in prising out his story about the ring, if I had paid more attention to his fears instead of dismissing his nervous disposition. I take a sip of wine, feeling sick to the depths of my stomach, but find myself unable to swallow; I cannot avoid the certainty that Léon Dumas, like Abigail Morley, died because of me, and that I should have prevented it.

  ‘What happened?’ I ask eventually, after we have stared together into the hearth for a few minutes.

  ‘The aldermen came last night, after you had all left,’ he says, his voice flat. ‘Some boatmen found his body in the river down by Paul’s Wharf and reported it.’

  ‘Paul’s Wharf?’ I glance at him. ‘By Throckmorton’s house, then?’

  ‘Nearby. They think he was strangled by some cut-purse. It’s a dangerous part of town for that – all the foreign merchants coming off the boats. He had nothing on him but the clothes he was wearing when they pulled him out. He had been in the water some hours, they said.’

  ‘How did they know to come here?’

  ‘They asked the dockhands and boatmen at the wharf. Someone recognised him, knew he was French. Said he was a familiar face down there.’

  So he would have been, from all the trips to Throckmorton, I think. So where was the young courier now? On his way to Mary Stuart in Sheffield? If Dumas was killed near Paul’s Wharf, did his killer follow him there, or lie in wait, knowing that he was a regular visitor to Throckmorton’s house? In fact, the one person who would have known to expect a visit from Dumas was Throckmorton himself. I glance across at the window and recall the day I found Throckmorton in this office unannounced, the way he could not keep his eyes off the ambassador’s desk. Dumas was killed because of the ring. Everything centres around the ring. Dumas stole the ring from Mary’s letter before it reached Howard, someone paid him for it, and the ring ended up with Cecily Ashe. I rub my eyes; my tired brain gropes for connections, but again I come back to Cecily’s mystery lover, the man who gave her the ring as a pledge of their pact, the same man who gave her a vial of poison for Elizabeth Tudor. Dumas had to die because he knew this man’s identity; it is the only explanation. But why now – unless this man had new reason to fear that Dumas was about to expose him? At this thought, my body convulses so violently that the wine in my glass lurches and spills a drop on the flagstones, and the word that springs instantly to my mind is on my lips before I can stop it.

  ‘Marie.’

  ‘What was that?’ Castelnau turns to look at me with redrimmed eyes.

  ‘I – nothing.’ I had not meant to speak her name aloud. ‘Marie – she came home safely last night?’

  ‘Yes, of course. And Courcelles. He was full of stories of how you disgraced yourself and the embassy. Of course, I realised that you must have been putting on a show.’ He inclines his head with a meaningful expression.

  ‘My lord?’ It is fortunate that I am shaking so violently that any show of anxiety is lost.

  ‘I did not say as much to Courcelles, but I guessed that you took to heart my fears that Henry Howard is shifting his loyalties towards the Spanish. I supposed you had decided to take the opportunity to find out what you could while you were under his roof, disarm them into revealing something by a show of drunkenness. Courcelles would not have the subtlety to understand such a strategy.’ He laughs weakly. ‘Besides, last night I had other matters on my mind. Come with me, Bruno. I want you to see him.’

  ‘They brought the body here?’

  ‘He has family in France, poor boy. They’ll want the body back to bury him there, but I don’t know if that can be arranged in time.’ He passes a hand across his brow. ‘I must write to them. In the midst of all this.’ He waves a hand imprecisely, but I understand: he means the invasion.

  ‘I would like to see him,’ I say. The ambassador nods as if his head is too heavy to hold up. I am seized by a sudden urge to confide in him, to tell him of the counter-plots eddying around him, of Henry Howard’s ambitions, of his wife’s machinations, of Dumas and the ring. In my exhaustion, I almost believe for one absurd, fleeting moment, the instant it takes to draw breath, that I might be relieved of this burden if I share it with him, if I tell this upright, fatherly man caught between so many conflicting factions that I am not what he thinks, that I have been deceiving him all this while but that, ultimately, we both desire the same outcome: to prevent a war. I cup my hand over my mouth and lower my eyes to the floor until this insanity has passed and floated away like smoke. I have chosen to live a double life, and I must remain faithful to that choice, even when the strain of it almost fells me.

  ‘You realise how little you know a man, though you sit beside him for the best part of every day,’ Castelnau muses, subdued, as he leads me along the passageway towards the rear door by the kitchen. ‘I never asked him about himself, you know. All I did was bark instructions at him from dawn to dusk. I don’t think he was happy in England, but he never complained.’

  He takes a key from a chain at his belt, unlocks the door and leads me across the small courtyard to the collection of outbuildings and storerooms that surround it on two sides. My feet are bare and so cold that they hurt against the cobbles, but the ambassador seems not to have thought of this and with a great effort of will I force myself to ignore it. The sky is light enough now to do without candles, and when he pushes open the door to one outbuilding I see clearly the form of Léon Dumas laid out on a trestle, his head contorted to one side at an unnatural angle. Castelnau stands in the doorway as if keeping vigil, without looking at the corpse; I pull the robe tighter around myself and approach the table slowly.

  Dumas’s large startled eyes have been closed, but his face is not peaceful. It is bruised and swollen, the lips puffy and parted. Gently, with one forefinger, I pull back the neck of his shirt to see the mark of a ligature around his throat. I picture him walking those streets by the dock, preoccupied with the guilt he had tried unsuccessfully to unburden on me, ambushed by the killer stepping out of the shadows with a cord or a twist of cloth.

  ‘He must have been set upon in broad daylight,’ I murmur. I reach out and lay my fingertips on his cold arm.

  Castelnau shifts his weight from one foot to the other.

  ‘You know what it’s like down at the docks, Bruno, it’s a bad part of town. The boatmen always brawling, half of them drunk in the day. Thieves on the lookout for any opportunity. People turn a blind eye.’

  ‘But Léon did not go about looking as if he would be worth robbing on the off-chance,’ I say, glancing down at Dumas’s worn breeches, now filthy with river silt.

  ‘What are you saying?’

  I hesitate; the ambassador has enough weighing on him at the present time, perhaps it would be kinder to let him persuade himself that Dumas was the victim of a random assault by an opportunistic robber.

  ‘You are wondering, I think, if he was not attacked by a street thief but by someone who knew of his business,’ he says, when I do not reply.

  He glances at the door as he says this, chewing on the knuckle of his thumb, and for an awful moment I wonder if he is hiding something. I stare at him across Dumas�
��s corpse, until he meets my eye.

  ‘What I do not know, Bruno, is whether he got his letter to Throckmorton before he was attacked. The aldermen said they found nothing on him, but that does not mean it couldn’t have been taken. If he was known as a regular visitor, perhaps someone might have guessed . . .’ His voice trails into anxious silence.

  ‘That he was a courier to Mary?’

  ‘They say Francis Walsingham has eyes everywhere,’ he says, pulling at his beard. I turn my own eyes studiously back to the body on the table. ‘Suppose Throckmorton has been indiscreet? We may presume they watch Mary’s servants closely in Sheffield Castle – what if Throckmorton has been recognised up there as he comes and goes? I will confess, Bruno,’ he murmurs, lowering his voice, ‘I have been wondering about Léon’s loyalty since I learned of his death. He wrote out my private letters, as you know – he had access to the secret ciphers, all of it. I never thought to doubt him until tonight, but now I can think of nothing else. What do you make of it, Bruno? Might he have been so desperate for English coins that he would have sold me and the embassy?’

  His eyes grow wide and behind the tiredness I see that he is genuinely eaten up with fear; immediately I see what I must do, though his words strike at my heart and my every instinct is to look away in shame. Instead, I shake my head.

  ‘You have begun to jump at shadows, my lord.’ I make my voice as reassuring as I can manage, remembering the tone my father would use when I was a boy and woke with night-terrors. ‘The burden you must carry would have broken a lesser man by now, and this terrible business has shaken us all.’ I lay a hand gently on Dumas’s frozen body. ‘But Léon was true to you and to France, I am sure of it. Let us not allow fear to distract us from our purpose now. As you said yourself, Paul’s Wharf is a dangerous enough place for a foreigner.’

  He grimaces. ‘But I have been a fool. That letter I wrote to Mary assuring her of my loyalty in the face of Howard’s accusations – I wrote it in haste, to catch Throckmorton before he left, so I did not bother to use the cipher. It has the embassy seal – if it should have fallen into the wrong hands –’

  His eyes are fixed on me, asking for some reassurance. I would like to tell him that I think whoever killed Dumas would not have the slightest interest in his letter, but I can’t be certain of anything any more. My mind is a cat’s-cradle of connections and theories, but this habit of chasing one idea until I begin to believe it is truth has led me into trouble before and I must not repeat the same mistake I made over Henry Howard. Even so, I cannot help returning to my encounter that morning – Dumas’s almost-confession and Marie’s abrupt appearance – like a tongue probing a sore tooth. Marie. Her devotion to the Duke of Guise and his cause; her ruthlessness; her intimacy with Courcelles. If Marie had overheard Dumas in my room before she knocked, if she feared what he might confide – what could that mean? That she was behind the theft of the ring? Dumas had certainly looked stricken when she appeared, though I had assumed that was just the awkwardness of the situation. But Dumas, as I had learned last night, also paid a visit to Arundel House on the day he died, before his errand to Throckmorton; in his agitated state, what might he have said there, and to whom, that could have led someone to fear his loose tongue?

  The thought of Arundel House recalls in an instant the events of the past night, momentarily forgotten in the shock of seeing Dumas dead. I pass my hand across my brow and my knees almost buckle under a sudden wash of exhaustion, so that I have to put out a hand to steady myself against the trestle.

  ‘Are you all right, Bruno?’ Castelnau takes a step forward, offers me his hand. ‘You should go inside. I’ll have the kitchen servants heat you some water to bathe.’

  I rub at my face self-consciously as I begin to walk slowly around the trestle, peering at Dumas’s corpse as if intense scrutiny might yield some clue, as if his poor dead limbs might speak to me of who did this. I pause for a moment by his head and lightly touch his hair, matted and darkened from the river; perhaps out of tiredness, frustration, sorrow or guilt, my eyes are suddenly filled with tears and I have to turn aside to rub them brusquely away with the heel of my hand.

  ‘He was fond of you,’ Castelnau says gently. ‘He was an odd one, Léon – kept to himself. But he spoke highly of you. I think you were the nearest he had to a friend in this country.’

  ‘I should have been a better friend,’ I say, and it comes out as a croak.

  ‘We could all have served him better. The pity is that we never thought of it while he lived. So often the way. Come,’ Castelnau says, gesturing towards the door. I whisper a silent farewell and am about to step away when my eye is caught by a mark on the front of Dumas’s shirt. On the left side, over his heart, a crimson stain blossoms, barely visible under the grime left by the water. Cautiously I peel back his shirt to see the skin beneath cut and matted with blood, just in that one spot, about the size of a gold angel. I spit on my hand and rub it on the dried blood, using the mud-stiffened linen of his shirt to scrape away the scab.

  ‘What are you doing, Bruno?’ Castelnau moves closer, peering now as if his curiosity has overcome his aversion. I find I cannot speak.

  On Dumas’s breast, cut with the point of a knife, is an astrological symbol. A circle with a cross beneath, a semicircle balanced on top, curving upwards. For a moment I can’t fathom it; this sign is out of keeping with the others, it has nothing to do with the apocalypse prophecies or the Great Conjunction. But as I stare at the mark deftly cut into my friend’s flesh, I understand: this is the sign of Mercury, the messenger of the gods. Whoever killed Dumas left this as a signature, a deliberate nod to his connection with the other deaths and surely a mocking reference to his role as courier. I clench my teeth; anger boils up and sticks in my throat. This murderer treats death as a game, carving signs into skin as a private joke – but meant for whom? Unlike the marks of Jupiter and Saturn on the bodies of Cecily and Abigail, this one is discreet, almost an afterthought. Dumas’s death was a matter of necessity, not intended as a public display, and yet this mark stands out as a taunt, a message from the killer to someone he – or she – knew would understand its meaning, just in case they should see it. Is that someone me, I wonder?

  ‘What is that?’ Castelnau points a finger at the raw-edged cut.

  ‘A knife wound, I think.’ I lift the dead man’s shirt back into place and press my palm for a moment over his still heart.

  The ambassador gives me a long look. His eyes are tight and bloodshot, the skin beneath sagging, but he regards me as father might a wayward son.

  ‘You should clean yourself up, Bruno. Later, I want you to tell me your version of what passed last night at Arundel House. But first, I recommend you sleep.’

  ‘And you, my lord?’

  ‘Oh, sleep refuses to keep me company.’ He passes both hands over his face as if washing; it is a gesture of defeat. ‘I must go to see Mendoza this morning. The Spanish grow closer to Mary Stuart by the day and if we are not careful, they will squeeze out even the Duke of Guise once the invasion is underway. I will have Courcelles start the necessary arrangements for Léon’s burial while I am out. The aldermen have the sheriffs making enquiries in the borough, but I do not hold out much hope that we will find the villains who did this.’

  ‘There must always be hope, my lord,’ I say, touching him lightly on the arm as he opens the door for me. But in this instance I am not sure I believe it any longer.

  Bathed and dressed in a fresh shirt and underhose, I lie on the bed of my attic room, staring at the ceiling, a whole choir of pains singing behind my eyes. I have slept fitfully past dinner time, though when I woke a jug of small beer and some bread had been left outside my room, a thoughtful gesture I guessed came from Castelnau. Washing away the layers of soot and Thames mud in a tub of hot water provided by one of the kitchen servants has revealed a colourful array of cuts and bruises, but my exhausted body cannot drag my mind with it into dreams. The shock of seeing Dumas murdered has
made me forget temporarily the seriousness of my own predicament: Henry Howard wants me silenced.

  ‘Rumour travels with winged sandals, like Mercury,’ Howard had said to me at the Whitehall concert, on the night of Abigail’s murder. Mercury, the messenger of the gods. Was that part of his cryptic warning, or merely co incidence? Now our own messenger, Dumas, lies dead with the mark of Mercury cut into his chest. My only protection lies in Howard’s fear for his own reputation and public standing; now that I have deprived him of his chance to kill me in a perfect simulation of an accident, he will at least – I hope – be cautious about anything that would cause a scandal or link my death back to him. Inside Salisbury Court, I ought to be safe, but I have little doubt that as soon as I step into the streets of London it will only be a matter of time before I am the next to be dragged into a side street with a rope around my neck. I could tell Castelnau about the threat from Howard, but what could he do? The ambassador is already too anxious about making an enemy of Howard and pushing him into the arms of Mendoza. I should get a message to Fowler about the genealogy and through him I could alert Walsingham to Howard’s intentions, but here I am torn because I feel an instinctive desire to protect the secret of Howard’s chapel. If Arundel House were to be searched, his experimentation with magic would surely come to light and the Hermes book would be seized by the authorities, who might in their ignorance see fit to destroy it. At least while it is in Henry Howard’s hands I know it will remain protected, even if for the moment it is also out of my reach; though in his eyes we are mortal enemies, we are also curiously bound by this secret and our shared desire for it. I close my eyes and summon to mind the feel of its stiff pages and rough leather binding under my fingertips; the loss of it hits me again like a physical pang. Given time and opportunity, I have no doubt that Dee and I between us could break the Hermetic cipher. It is just a matter of retrieving the book somehow. But if Fowler has already reported the previous night’s meeting to Walsingham, as he surely must, perhaps Master Secretary is already drawing up plans for an official search of Arundel House. I can only trust that Henry Howard, who has taken considerable risks for that book and guarded it for fourteen years, will have the wit to keep it safe from the pursuivants.