Prophecy (2011)

by S. J. Parris

  ‘Put that away,’ Fowler hisses, casting his eyes quickly around the room before squatting by the table. ‘It’s illegal even to possess printed prophecies now - you don’t know who’s watching.’

  ‘These murders are doing our job for us,’ Douglas remarks, ignoring him and prodding the pamphlet, his voice barely raised above a whisper. ‘Undermine the people’s confidence in her, that’s all it needs. You’ll find there’ll be very little resistance to a change of sovereign once they have proof that the Almighty’s set his face against her.’

  ‘You underestimate the stubbornness of the English,’ Fowler mutters, shaking his head. ‘And their dislike for Rome. Remember the discontent in the streets when it was thought the queen might marry a Catholic Frenchman, the pamphlets that appeared then?’

  ‘Oh, aye?’ Douglas straightens, as if squaring up for a fight, then remembers where he is and drops his voice again. ‘And you underestimate the number of simple folk in the kingdom, William. There’s far more of them love Rome than you think. People miss the reassurances of the old faith. They miss their wooden saints and pilgrimages and the comfort of confession, penance and absolution.’ He points a finger in Fowler’s face. ‘They knew where they were with the old faith, and simple people like certainty. You set foot in any of the wee towns and villages around the country - no one’s read bloody Erasmus or Tyndale. They go to church where they’re told because they can’t afford the fines, but in their hearts they’ve never stopped believing the miracle of the Mass. Even the churchmen. And if they hear news that the Devil is cutting a swathe through the court because their sovereign flirts with sorcery, they’ll be glad of the chance for a new one, believe me. There’s enough simple folk to fuel an uprising when the day comes, if they’re encouraged in the right way.’

  He sounds as enthused about this prospect as if he had planned it himself, and he is right that these murders at court, if the news spreads in the right way, can only be useful to the conspirators if there is to be an invasion of Catholic forces. But once again I am brought back to the same question: If the murders are part of the Catholic plot, why dress them up so obviously to look like a Catholic plot? What is to be gained by such an elaborate double bluff?

  ‘I wonder if this murderer knows he is helping our cause,’ I say tentatively, still looking down at the pamphlet. The news must have travelled with wings for a pamphlet to have been written and printed less than a day after the murder. But again, there were enough servants at Whitehall who witnessed the events of the previous night to make this possible, and plenty of people who were sufficiently opposed to Elizabeth to risk their lives by printing such material.

  ‘Of course not.’ Douglas glances around. ‘This is just some lunatic who hates women. But I’m saying we can turn it to our advantage.’

  ‘A lunatic inside the court, it seems,’ Fowler adds, folding his hands together. ‘Everyone was gathered there last night for the concert.’

  Douglas shrugs.

  ‘No better time to break in, then, when all eyes are turned elsewhere,’ he sniffs. ‘Anyway - that’s not my concern. It’s in our interest to ensure this kind of thing -‘ he waves the pamphlet - ‘finds as wide an audience as possible. Spread the fear. Undo her popularity among her subjects first.’ He levers himself out of his seat, pulls his cloak around his shoulders and, almost as an afterthought, empties his second tankard of beer, slamming it down on the table. ‘Which reminds me - I have matters to attend to. A pleasure, gentlemen. Until some other evening, no doubt.’ He replaces his shapeless wool cap, touches the peak of it with a mock bow, and is absorbed into the crowd.

  ‘I take it you’re paying for his, then?’ says the serving girl, appearing at my elbow with her hand out impatiently for coins. Only then do I realise that Douglas, having invited me for a drink, has left without paying, an outcome I probably should have foreseen.

  Fowler smiles ruefully as I count out money for the beer.

  ‘You are not yet familiar with the ways of our friend Douglas, I see.’

  The girl turns the coins over in her palm and looks at me suspiciously, clearly wondering if I might have tried to deceive her with some dubious foreign currency. Satisfied, she gestures towards the tankards. I look at Fowler, who holds up a hand to decline.

  ‘Thank you, no. This place is giving me an aching head. The sky is clearing a little, I think. We could walk.’

  ‘I’m not sure Douglas counts himself much of a friend of yours,’ I say, as we squeeze through to the door. Fowler is right; the sky is still streaked with threatening grey and the wind chivvies leaves along the gutters, but the rain has abated for the moment. The cobbles are slippery with horseshit and sodden straw, and I step carefully to avoid the foul brown stream running down the gutters at the edge of the street.

  ‘No, I don’t suppose he does.’ He pulls up his collar and we fall into step in the direction of Paul’s Churchyard; among the crowds, there is hardly a better place to pass unobserved, though I keep one hand tightly around my purse. ‘I know too much about Douglas, that’s the problem. When a man flees to another country to reinvent himself, the last thing he wants is to find someone from home, who could spill the whole of his history at any moment. Imagine if someone who remembered you from Italy showed up at Salisbury Court.’ He smiles, but I recall Marie de Castelnau’s sly allusion to the dead man in Rome, and wrap my arms tight around my chest to suppress a shiver.

  ‘In any case, we had best be on our guard,’ I say, as we slip through the gates into the shadow of the great cathedral, whose walls rise two hundred feet above us, its broken spire poking like the stump of a finger into the sodden sky. ‘They suspect someone of tampering with the correspondence.’ As we saunter by the booksellers’ stalls, their trestles pulled in out of the earlier rain, I tell him of what passed in Phelippes’s workshop, the missing ring and the conspirators’ growing concern over their communications with Mary. I am struck, in the retelling, by the realisation that Henry Howard did not confide in Douglas about what he believed had been stolen; clearly there are secrets within secrets fermenting behind the closed doors of Salisbury Court. Phelippes’s offhand joke about betrothal floats back into my mind with sudden significance, so that I stop dead for a moment. If Howard is conducting his own private correspondence with Mary Stuart, could it be that he aspires to finish what his brother started? It would be a momentous gamble; if these invasion plans stand even a chance of succeeding, then any man who marries Mary could expect to become king of England when she is crowned. Could he be courting her with his private coded letters? Such an aspiration would not be beyond Henry Howard.

  ‘Bruno?’ Fowler has stopped too and is looking at me with concern. I decide to keep this line of speculation to myself.

  ‘So Howard thinks it is me, it seems, and Douglas wants to believe it is you,’ I say, as we round the apse at the east end of the building and find ourselves at the back of a crowd gathered at the small outdoor pulpit that marks Paul’s Cross. Buffeted by the wind, the people huddle stoically, craning forward to catch the words of the preacher before they are snatched away into the air. I can barely see the man in his domed pepperpot stand over the hats of the crowd, but from the fragments of his sermon that reach us, it seems he is preaching against divination, fortune-telling and, yes, ancient prophecies. He is shouting something about King Saul and the Witch of Endor, his words whipped away by the wind. I presume the sermon has been officially commissioned; aptly, since the churchyard is the prime market for illegal pamphleteers, peddling handbills like the one Douglas just showed us, slipping through the crowd among the men who sell you prohibited holy relics from inside their coats.

  ‘What of your nervous friend Dumas, the clerk?’ Fowler asks. ‘Has anyone pointed the finger at him?’

  ‘Not yet. He has kept his head down.’

  ‘Good. Then at the moment, their suspicions are only born of malice. We may hope to shrug that off easily enough. What matters is that no one should think to look
in Dumas’s direction. If anyone questions him, we are finished.’

  ‘Quite right,’ I say, with feeling. Dumas would fall apart at the first accusation; at all costs, he must remain below their line of sight. Then I recall the figure I thought I saw slipping behind the church on Leadenhall Street when Dumas and I left Phelippes’s house, and the coincidence of Douglas’s sudden appearance at the very place where I was meeting Fowler, and again a sense of unease prickles at the back of my skull. It is impossible to know who to trust.

  ‘What of this new murder, then?’ Fowler whispers, as we tuck ourselves into the fringes of the preacher’s audience. ‘It must have happened right under our noses. Was that why you were called out of the room?’

  In a low voice I tell him all that happened the previous night at Whitehall, including my previous dealings with Abigail, the murder of Cecily Ashe and my suspicions that the murder of both maids is bound up with the plots brewing at Salisbury Court. When I have finished, he gives a brief whistle, shaking his head, his eyes still fixed on the pulpit.

  ‘Sweet Jesus,’ he murmurs. ‘Bruno, this plot is bigger than we imagined. You think they do mean to kill Elizabeth? I had thought the Duke of Guise wanted to take her prisoner, if this invasion succeeds, to try her publicly for heresy, make an example of her.’

  ‘Perhaps they feel it would be more likely to succeed if the country has no sovereign to rally behind,’ I whisper back. ‘It would leave England in disarray, entirely vulnerable. As a prisoner, she would inspire loyalty, the way Mary does now. Dead, she can do nothing.’

  ‘The people would cry out for a strong monarch then.’ Fowler squints into the wind. ‘My God. So you think one of our friends at Salisbury Court is the killer?’

  ‘Behind the killings, at any rate, if not holding the knife himself. I don’t see how it can be otherwise. Cecily Ashe was given the ring Mary Stuart sent Howard, it must be as a token of her part in the conspiracy. And the man who gave it to her has to be the man who killed her, probably out of fear that she would betray the plot.’

  ‘And the same man murdered the girl Abigail?’

  ‘Abigail must have been killed because she was Cecily’s friend, because the killer thought she knew something of his identity or the plot. But it’s my belief that she was killed because he saw her talking to me that day.’ I lower my eyes, take a deep breath. ‘And the one person who was there and saw us was Philip Howard. He fits Abigail’s description too.’

  Fowler frowns.

  ‘But the Earl of Arundel was at the concert last night, I saw him. They all were, now I think of it.’

  ‘He would have only needed a few minutes before it started to find the kitchen boy and make sure she had the message to meet at the kitchen dock. Then his accomplice would have known where to find her.’

  ‘All we really know about this man,’ Fowler says slowly, rubbing his forefinger across his chin, ‘is that he is an eminent figure and young women regard him as handsome. But you might reasonably say that of any of the men who gather around the ambassador’s table. Courcelles, for instance, is of noble birth and considered very attractive to women, I believe. Madame de Castelnau certainly thinks so, you only have to see the way she looks at him. And he’d have ample opportunity to spirit away a package sent to the embassy.’

  ‘By that token, so would Throckmorton, and he is a good-looking boy, I suppose.’

  ‘But Throckmorton is never here for long enough to plot a regicide or two murders, he is always on the road to Sheffield. He could have taken the ring from the package, I suppose, but I don’t believe he has the ingenuity. He’s one of those who will happily obey as long as someone tells him where to go, but he does not invent plots for himself.’ He shakes his head. ‘That only leaves Douglas and Henry Howard.’

  ‘Douglas?’ Incredulous, I forget to keep my voice down; a woman in front turns and pins us with a stern look, her finger to her lips, though how she can hope to hear the sermon over the crowd’s cheerful jeering and whooping, I have no idea. I consider Douglas for a moment, and wonder if Fowler might have a point. He may have that weathered look and greying hair, but he has a strong jaw and a mischievous gleam in his eye that goes with a sense of being at ease in his skin; it’s possible that a green girl might describe him as handsome. And even Henry Howard, with his pointed beard and pointed eyebrows, has a certain commanding presence that might be attractive. In any event, it seems clear that such a subjective description will not be much help to us.

  ‘Who is to say what women find handsome anyway?’ Fowler whispers, as if reading my thoughts. ‘There may even be those who say so of you, Bruno,’ he adds, with a sideways smile.

  ‘Grazie. You’re not so bad yourself,’ I reply with a grin, though my mind flits unavoidably to Marie and her attempt to seduce me. Whatever her motive, I do not think it was my face.

  ‘Listen to us - debating who is handsome and who is not, like a pair of old priests at the Southwark boy-houses.’ Fowler gives a grim laugh. ‘We’ll need better evidence if we are to find this man. But where to start?’

  ‘I know where I mean to look,’ I say, through my teeth.

  The preacher at Paul’s Cross appears to have reached some kind of conclusion; a smattering of applause erupts, as if for a travelling show, then the crowd around us begins to break and dissipate, like ink in water, of its own accord, drifting in twos and threes away from the pulpit. Clouds are scudding up across the sky from the river and the wind has lifted; the air smells of rain again. Fowler pulls his cap down and we turn away, back towards the south side of the cathedral and its bustle of merchants, pedlars and cut-purses. There is a strange kind of relief that comes from talking, even if no solution is found. I feel lighter for confiding in Fowler, and curse myself again for my stubborn desire to find Cecily’s killer without help. Perhaps if I had been less preoccupied with my own success, Abigail might not have paid the price. The weight of remorse sits like stones in my stomach when I picture her body laid out on the cold floor of that storeroom, and the determination to see this man brought to justice burns with a new intensity.

  ‘Listen, Bruno,’ Fowler says gently, laying a hand on my arm. ‘You want it to be one or other of the Howards. I don’t blame you - there is much to dislike about them. But we need to keep our eyes and our minds open. There is something strange about this. If poisoning the queen was always a part of this Guise invasion plan, then why has no one mentioned it at any of Castelnau’s secret meetings? And if the murder of Cecily Ashe was to protect their mission, why do they all behave as if it is news to them?’

  These are questions that touch on my own misgivings. I crane my head skywards; the light is fading and I must make haste if I am to find a boatman who will take me as far as Mortlake this evening.

  ‘One or more of them is dissembling,’ I offer. ‘But the group that gathers at Salisbury Court has been brought together by Castelnau. It does not necessarily follow that all its members will like or trust one another. Perhaps those who are plotting Elizabeth’s death are brewing their own plans and merely using the French invasion as a vehicle.’ Again, I consider the possibility that Henry Howard may be courting Mary Stuart with his eye on the throne, but I say nothing to Fowler. Perhaps it is childish, but I want the credit for suggesting this theory to Walsingham.

  ‘True,’ he says, thoughtfully, squinting up at the sky. ‘I have the impression Henry Howard would rather be directing this enterprise himself, but the authorities are rather too interested in his family’s business for him to take full control without being discovered. He needs the cover of the French embassy to communicate with Mary’s supporters in Paris, but you can see he doesn’t like Castelnau involving the likes of you and me.’

  ‘What’s your relationship with Howard?’ I ask, curious.

  Fowler shrugs.

  ‘He tolerates me because Castelnau has persuaded him I have useful connections at the Scottish court and, as you know, any intelligence about King James’s inclinations with reg
ard to his mother’s claim is worth a great deal to the conspiracy. I do not think Howard mistrusts me as such, but he never seems at ease when I am there. I sense that he doubts the loyalty of anyone who does not share the ferocity of his own motives.’

  ‘Then he must doubt all of us,’ I reflect. ‘No one else has such a personal vendetta against Elizabeth and her government as he.’

  He nods, with feeling.

  ‘What’s more, as you saw the other night, he has lost patience with Castelnau’s insistence on diplomatic relations. With Spanish money committed, Howard may be tempted to dispatch with the French embassy altogether and pursue his course with Mendoza.’ He presses his lips together. ‘In the Spanish ambassador he has found an ally as ruthless as he.’

  I picture Howard huddled with Mendoza at the Whitehall concert, their dark heads bent close together, the contempt they both turned on me when I approached. I am about to reply when a movement catches my eye; I turn, but the churchyard is a constant tide of bodies, eddying around one another, many with their hoods pulled up or hats pulled down against the wind. It is impossible to tell one from another, and yet for a moment there, I sensed that prickling sensation of being watched. Is he here? Or am I growing as skittish as Leon Dumas?