Prophecy

He shakes his head, a nervous, twitching motion.

‘No. But the packet is in his writing desk.’

‘Read them while he is out. If you do not have time to make a copy, at least get the sense so that you can relay it. But it may be that she has sent him a new cipher – they change it often for fear of interception. That we must copy, if it is there.’

Dumas swallows hard and nods, sitting on his hands.

‘If I don’t have time to make two copies of his reply before he wants it sealed . . .?’

I pace the room for a moment, considering.

‘Then we will have to pay a visit to our friend Thomas Phelippes on the way to Master Throckmorton. Don’t look so alarmed, Léon – Phelippes is so gifted in the art of interception, I suspect he may be a wizard. No one will see anything amiss.’

Dumas looks miserable and jiggles on his hands more vigorously.

‘But if we should be caught, Bruno?’

‘Then we will be thrown out into the street,’ I reply solemnly. ‘We will be forced to join a troupe of travelling players. We can offer ourselves to play the ass for Christ’s entry to Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.’

‘Bruno –’

‘Ah – I know what you are going to say. Very well – you can be the front legs.’

‘Must you turn everything to a joke?’

Despite himself, he smiles, while I remember Howard’s sharp insult from last night. A glorified jester. Was that really how they spoke of me in Paris? Queen Elizabeth keeps an Italian fool at court, who goes by the name of Monarcho; am I to be compared with him? It stung because I recognised the truth of it: with no money, land or title to my name, I must make myself indispensable to men of wealth if I hope to thrive, and I have learned the hard way that most men of wealth would rather be entertained than enlightened. But might I not hope to do both? That, at least, was the intention of the book I was now writing, which would set forth my new ideas about the universe in a style that could be read outside the universities, by ordinary men and women, in their own language.

I sit beside Dumas on the bed and put my arm around his shoulder to chivvy him into better spirits.

‘Courage, mon brave. Think of the coins chinking in your purse, if nothing else. You could hop across the river to Southwark and find yourself a willing girl in one of the bawdy-houses. That would put a smile on your face. Besides –’ I turn with a sigh towards the window, where a pale light slides through the gap in the shutters and slants across the bare boards – ‘I don’t yet know what we are involved in here, Léon, but if we do our work carefully, a great many people may end up owing us their lives. Including,’ I add, in a whisper, as the young clerk’s eyes threaten to pop out of his head, ‘the English queen herself.’

I step out at around eleven into a golden autumn morning, as if the half-hearted English sun were belatedly trying to atone for its absence all through the cold, damp summer. In the embassy garden at Salisbury Court, the trees are a riot of colour, almost luminous against the blue with the dusty sunlight behind them: crimson, ochre, burnt amber, delicate greens still lingering from the summer, all gaudy as the coloured silks Sidney and his friends wear to parade around court. I am dressed, today as every other day, in black; a lone sombre shadow in this landscape of colour. For thirteen years I wore the black habit of the Dominican order; later, when I scraped a living teaching in the universities of Europe, I put on the black gown of doctors and academics. Now that I am free of the constraints of a uniform, I still wear black; it saves me the trouble of thinking about it too much. Fashion has never held much interest for me; sometimes I wonder how the young dandies can move about freely in their costumes, puffed up as they are with ballooning breeches and sleeves, slashed so that the rich linings show through in contrasting colours, or choked by their vast ruffs of starched lace. My only indulgence with the retainer Walsingham pays me is to buy clothes of good quality cloth, shirts of fine linen under a black leather jerkin, cut to fit close to my body, no material wasted. Sidney teases me that I am wearing the same clothes every time he sees me. In fact, they are many different copies of the same clothes; I am fastidious about clean laundry, and change my linen far more often than most of the Englishmen I know. Perhaps this comes from those months I spent running from the Inquisition when I first fled the monastery at Naples; when I slept in roadside inns in the company of rats and lice, sometimes walking miles in a day to put enough distance between myself and Rome, with only the clothes on my back. To recall that part of my life even fleetingly makes me start to itch all over and want to change my shirt.

Through the scattered patterns of bright leaves I walk the length of the garden as the morning grows warmer, a book unopened in my hand. Beyond its boundary wall I hear the cries of boatmen on the river, the soft lapping of the waves against the muddy shoreline. Fowler’s note asked me to meet him at three o’clock today at the Mermaid Tavern on Cheapside; there is nothing for me to do until Dumas has finished copying out the ambassador’s secret letters and is ready to take them to young Master Throckmorton. If luck and timing are on our side, we can take the letters to Walsingham’s man Thomas Phelippes in Leadenhall Street on the way, have them opened, copied and resealed, then Dumas can deliver the originals to Paul’s Wharf while I take the copies to Fowler at the tavern.

I have spent the morning in my room, trying to make some progress on my book. Since my return from Oxford in the spring, this has been my chief occupation; the work that I believe will turn all the established knowledge of the European academies on its head. In the same way that Copernicus’s theory that the Sun and not the Earth lies at the centre of the known universe sent ripples through Christendom, forcing every cosmologist and astronomer to reconsider what they believed to be fact, so my treatise is nothing less than a new and enlightened understanding of religion, one that I hope will open the eyes of those men and women who have a mind to comprehend it to the possibility of unity. My philosophy is nothing less than a revolutionary understanding of the relationship between man and that which we call God, one that transcends the present divisions between Catholic and Protestant that have caused so much needless suffering. I have some hope that Queen Elizabeth of England has a mind equal to understanding my ideas, if I could only secure a chance to present them to her. To this end I have been passing my days as often as I can in Dee’s library, immersing myself in the surviving writings of Hermes Trismegistus and the neoPlatonists, as well as other, secret volumes, full of hard-won wisdom and ancient knowledge, books of which Dee holds the only copy.

But since the night of Sidney’s wedding and the murder of Cecily Ashe, I have been drawn back from the world of ideas to the present violence I hope one day to end. My mind will not settle, so I have brought a book out to the garden, where all I do is scuff the scattered leaves and dwell on the image of Cecily Ashe stretched out on a bed in Richmond Palace in her gentleman’s clothes, her bruised and distorted face, the mark cut into her breast. The death is no longer my business, I suppose, and yet the image of her corpse nags at me; last night I dreamed about the murder, dreamed I was chasing a shadowy figure with a crucifix through the mist in an abandoned graveyard until finally he turned around and I glimpsed beneath his hood the face of Doctor Dee.

This murder reminds me too closely of the deaths I witnessed in Oxford in the spring; this was not violence done in the heat of the moment but a cold-blooded killing meant as a symbol, a warning. But of what? And if it had been the young suitor Abigail had mentioned, what calculated planning he must have put into his work! To woo a young woman for the best part of a month with sweet words and expensive presents, with the intention all along of leaving her cold body as a blank page on which he would write his own message in her blood. I picture the girl Cecily, the way Abigail had described her delight in her secret liaison, the innocence of that first love at seventeen, never imagining that she was inviting her own destruction. Perhaps inevitably my thoughts follow this path to another young woman whose life had been destroyed by falling in love: Sophia, the girl I had known in Oxford who had briefly touched my own heart, though I did not know then that she had already given hers to a man who betrayed her and almost killed her. As if to prolong the discomfort, my memory gropes further back, to Morgana, the woman I had loved two years earlier when I lived in Toulouse. She was in love with me, but as I had neither the money nor the position to marry her, I had slipped away quietly one night to Paris without saying goodbye. I had thought I was doing the right thing, leaving her free to make the marriage that would please her father and give her a life of ease, but she too had died before her time. Was her life also cut short because she made the mistake of falling in love?

I will never know, but I remember the look that passed between Walsingham and Burghley across the body of Cecily Ashe and feel a profound wash of relief that I have no daughter to fear for. Despite the unseasonable warmth, I shiver. The fragility of these girls, how vulnerable they make themselves when they put their trust in men. If I were a praying man, I would pray that the maid Abigail remains safe. As it is, all I can do is hope that the killer believes his message has been understood. If not, he may feel the need to write it again.

All this musing has brought me to the end of the garden. Turning back along the path towards the house, I am almost bowled over by a small beribboned dog chasing a ball made of rags and chased in its turn by a girl of about five years who comes flying through the piles of leaves, her hair and her blue gown whipping behind her. The ball rolls to my feet and I snatch it up just before the dog reaches it. I hold it aloft and the dog’s yapping grows frantic as it leaps and twists off the ground, its eyes fixed on my hand. The little girl slows to a halt in front of me, her expression wary; I lob the rag ball to her over the dog’s head and the child is so surprised that she catches it, more by accident than design. The dog flings itself at her and she scoops it up into her arms, giving it the ball, which it worries with a comical growl, as if it had subdued a great enemy.

‘Pierrot, tu es méchant!’ the child scolds.

‘Pierrot?’ I ask, crouching so that I can look her in the eye. ‘He’s a boy?’ She nods, bashful. ‘So, the ribbons?’

‘He likes them.’ She shrugs, as if this should be obvious. A woman’s voice comes from beyond the wall.

‘Katherine! Katherine, viens ici! Où es-tu?’

Marie de Castelnau appears in the archway that divides this part of the garden from the more manicured paths nearer the house. The rich light touches her hair as she brushes a stray curl away from her face, giving her a faint halo; she is frowning but as her gaze alights on me and her daughter, her expression softens and she slows her pace towards us.

‘Ah. Monsieur l’hérétique. Bonjour.’

‘Madame.’ I bow.

She bends to the child and lays a hand on her shoulder. ‘Katherine, take Pierrot inside, look – your shoes are all dirty now and it’s nearly time for your lesson. You can play in the garden afterwards, if you have worked hard.’

Katherine sticks out her bottom lip. ‘I want to have my lesson out here.’ She points at my book. ‘Monsieur l’hérétique is allowed his books outdoors.’

Marie glances at me and smiles, half apologetic, before turning back to her daughter.

‘Well, Monsieur l’hérétique is allowed to do all sorts of things that are not proper and you had better not follow his example. He is very wicked.’ She winks.

The child looks up at me, her mouth open, waiting for confirmation or denial; I make my eyes wide and nod.

‘I’m afraid it’s true.’

She giggles.

‘Go on, off you go,’ Marie says, sharper this time, patting the girl’s back. Katherine scampers away, the little dog bleating at her heels.

‘I’m sorry – my daughter thinks that is your name now.’ Castelnau’s wife laughs and falls easily into step beside me, folding her arms across her chest, as we begin to walk slowly back towards the house. ‘It’s what King Henri calls you. It is meant affectionately. On his part, I mean,’ she adds hastily, glancing quickly sideways and then back to her feet.

‘You spoke to King Henri about me?’

She laughs again, a gentle, fluting sound.

‘No. But your name came up often when I was with Queen Louise. I have known her since we were girls. The king misses you, apparently. He says there are no original thinkers left in Paris now that Monsieur l’hérétique has abandoned him for London.’

‘Well, it is kind of him to say so.’ We walk in silence for a few paces, the sun warm on our faces.

‘I must say, I was intrigued to meet you,’ she continues, after a moment, and there is a silkiness in her voice that sounds a warning note. ‘Queen Louise said you were a great favourite among the ladies in Paris.’

‘Was I?’ This is news to me; there were idle flirtations at the Parisian court, but nothing worth the notice of the queen consort, as I recall. After my experience in Toulouse, I had vowed to devote my energy to writing and to harden my heart against the possibility of love.

‘Oh, yes, indeed,’ Marie says, lightly touching my arm and allowing her hand to rest for a moment, ‘because you were a great enigma, apparently. There were many stories told about you, but no one ever got close enough to sort the truth from the rumours. And of course you frustrated all the ladies by never choosing any of them, which only fuelled the gossip.’

‘I had not the means to marry.’

‘Perhaps you had not the inclination?’ she says, with a sly smile. I pause and look at her. Does she mean what I think?

‘There have been women,’ I say, defensive. ‘I mean to say, I have loved women, in the past. But I have always had the misfortune to fall for the ones I cannot have.’

She smiles, as if to herself. ‘Isn’t it always more interesting that way? But I did not mean to imply what you thought.’ A brief hesitation. ‘You know it is said of Lord Henry Howard, though?’