The Queen's Secret (39 page)

At last he caught sight of Walsingham, standing discreetly behind a row of courtiers to the right of the Queen, apparently absorbed in the proceedings but in fact searching the room in much the same way as Goodluck himself.

Their eyes met for a few brief seconds, and Walsingham stiffened. Then he nodded, almost imperceptibly, and Goodluck slipped out of the great hall and made his way down the stairs to the next floor. Here, he was away from the music and the calling out of names of those to be honoured, and the armed guards patrolling the place who might have asked awkward questions if he had lurked in the doorway any longer.

There was a small communal privy on this floor. Goodluck had never been inside, but he could tell the function of the room by its smell as he approached. A courtier came out, hurriedly adjusting his hose before taking the stairs back up to the hall two at a time. Goodluck stood at the door a moment, listening until he heard the sound of someone quietly descending from upstairs, then slipped inside.

The privy was windowless, very close and hot. There were three narrow cubicles with doors, and an open area for pissing – a shallow, rancid gutter set into the floor sloped away into a chute to the gong farm, presumably for use when the weather was too poor to venture outside in the fresh air. He glanced into a cubicle and saw that the original stone seat had been ‘improved’ with a shiny new wooden frame. In the stifling heat, the smell from the chute below was revolting, and Goodluck’s nose twitched in protest. But at least it meant few people would care to linger in such a place, unless they had come for the obvious.

Thankfully, he did not have to wait long. The door creaked a moment later and Walsingham entered, a look of mild distaste on his face. He hesitated, glanced at the three closed cubicle doors, and raised thin, dark eyebrows in a silent query.

‘We’re alone,’ Goodluck supplied.

‘I cannot be long here. Lord Burghley’s son is to be knighted this morning and my absence will be noted. Besides, his wife has never been one of Her Majesty’s favourites, so I may be called upon to smooth ruffled feathers before the end of the day.’

‘I’m sorry not to have sent a message, sir, but I couldn’t trust the new code you sent. Not for this.’

Walsingham raised a fragrant pomander to his nose, sniffed at it delicately, then let it fall again on the chain about his neck.

‘Go on,’ he murmured.

‘Do you recall the steward’s assistant, Malcolm Drury, the man who drowned? I believe the Italian may be in possession of one of his keys—’

‘This is old news, surely?’

‘Sir,’ Goodluck inclined his head respectfully, ‘I was mistaken there. I thought at first it meant nothing, that holding keys to the inner court would be a useless advantage, since they would inevitably fail to get past the guards posted at every entrance. But there is another possibility I hadn’t considered.’

Walsingham looked at him enquiringly, and raised the pomander to his nose again. ‘I do not consider myself an impatient man. But the privy is perhaps not the best of places for a protracted conversation.’

‘Briefly, sir, there’s a key on the missing set that opens an underground storage room to the north-west of the Queen’s apartments. It fell out of use about eight years ago, and I’ve been told it’s kept permanently locked now. But there may be a way to access the new state apartments through a roof hatch that leads up into the storage room above.’

‘And you believe the Queen’s enemies hold the key to this chamber?’

Goodluck nodded. He felt the blood beating in his throat, his head light, and put a hand on the wall to steady himself. He knew instinctively that the older man was not going to listen. That nothing he said would make any difference. Yet still he had to make the attempt. ‘For all we know, the Queen’s Majesty is in greater danger with every night that we delay. I very much fear that we have been watching the wrong people. I have not yet established who is pulling Massetti’s strings, and the bear-tamer has proved difficult to watch. He is too good at slipping away from those who follow him.’ Goodluck shook his head. ‘Sir, we must act now.’

‘And by act, you mean …?’

‘Make arrests. Starting with Massetti and the bear-tamer, and any other Italians with whom he may have made contact since arriving here.’ Determined to state his case fully, Goodluck added, ‘The dead man they dragged from the mere – I smelt something odd on his breath. I didn’t connect the two at the time, but there was a vial of colourless liquid in Massetti’s room with the same sickly odour to it. I think the man was poisoned by Massetti and then dumped in the mere to make it look like a drowning.’

‘Poisoned by
Massetti
? Let me be clear, my friend. Even if Petruccio Massetti is involved in this latest plot, which I find hard to credit, it is not in him to act so violently. Do not forget how well I know this young man. From what you say, some Catholic sympathizer at the English court may have attempted to recruit him. Or made some overture of friendliness towards him, hoping to turn him against the Queen. No, arresting Massetti and his associates is not the course we should follow. We must watch and wait, in the hope that a greater man is hooked on this particular line. Besides, Her Majesty is concerned that even the hint of a new Catholic plot may precipitate some fresh taste for sedition among our secret Papists here in England. Which it certainly would, of course.’

Francis Walsingham moved to the wall where the stinking gutter ran to the chute, tugged at his hose and began to urinate.

‘You disagree with my decision?’ he asked idly, not looking at Goodluck. ‘Well, no doubt you have reason to do so. The Queen’s life is in danger and her would-be assassins rub shoulders with us here in this castle, a stronghold intended to keep out her enemies, not pamper them with soft beds and fine wines. But nothing is as simple as it appears, my good friend. By making these arrests now, we remove the body of the threat but not the head, and it will merely return in a new and perhaps more deadly form.’

Frustrated though he was, Goodluck had to concede that Walsingham was right. There was a longer game to play than this one, a summer plot too swiftly brought to an end by arresting Massetti. Yet the threat to the Queen remained, and it was Goodluck’s difficult business to ensure that the assassin himself – whoever he was, and wherever he was hiding – could not reach his target. Otherwise everything he and the others had done here
at
Kenilworth, the risks they had run, would have been in vain.

‘What now, then?’

There was a faint sound outside the door, barely audible. Both men fell silent.

Had they been overheard?

Walsingham turned on his heel and left the privy without another word, the scented pomander raised once more to his nose.

Goodluck squeezed into one of the hot, dirty cubicles and closed the door with a noisy clatter, listening to hear if anyone else had entered the room. Sweat rolled down his back in the tight blue livery as he waited. But there was no further sound from outside and, after a few more minutes, he slipped out and down a narrow set of back stairs to the lawn behind the great hall.

His heart was racing as he burst out into the sunlight, gasping at fresh air.

He leaned on the wall for a moment, suddenly sickened, possibly from the relentless heat and stench of the privy. But deep down he knew it was fear, and despised his own weakness.

Goodluck could not help but think this assignment had the stink of disaster about it. His meeting with Walsingham had been not only risky but inconclusive. Walsingham’s affection for the young Italian must be clouding his judgement. He was widely considered the most ruthless man in England, yet he would not have Massetti touched – and why? Because Massetti had once saved his family from a bloody end. What other explanation could there be? Unless it was indeed true that Walsingham was involved in a deeper game, seeking to discover the name of some high-ranking traitor at the English court by leaving Massetti to play out his part undisturbed.

Not that Massetti appeared to be anything but a pawn, a decoy, a dupe who had mistaken his role in this conspiracy. Massetti was clearly the man they were supposed to be watching – no doubt while the true assassin made his way by some secret means into the Queen’s apartments and killed her without a single guard raising the alarm.

And if this true assassin should succeed?

If the Queen were to be assassinated in the safety of her own
rooms,
while they had full knowledge of this plot and knew even the whereabouts of some of its key conspirators, Goodluck might as well hang himself now from the nearest roof beam and have done with it.

Straightening, he hurried down a further flight of steep steps and through a cool, dark archway towards the lakeside. He had an urge to kneel down at the water’s edge and splash his face, wash away the stench of failure. With his gaze fixed on the glint of sunlit water ahead, he almost did not see the dark shadows passing across the mouth of the passage.

Young, slim-hipped shadows in green livery, cracking jokes in Italian, laughed in the fresh sunshine, arms linked warmly about each other’s waists.

As Goodluck emerged from the passageway, one darted ahead of the others and threw herself in a rolling cartwheel across the grass. A burst of laughter followed. Then she rose to her feet and, clear as a warning bell across open fields, called out a name that froze Goodluck where he stood, his heart suddenly a stone.

‘Alfonso!’

One of the Florentine acrobats, a young man with a thin curling moustache and lazy smile, turned to give his friends a mocking little bow before he too launched himself into a cartwheel, knifing through the sunlit air.

Forty-one

LUCY CLIMBED THE
stairs to the royal apartments, the stone walls lit by warm patches of sunlight at every turn. A serving girl ran past her in tears on the first-floor landing, almost tripping down the stairs in her haste to escape. From above, the sound of the Queen’s voice raised in anger made her pause, gripping the rope set into the wall to aid her ascent. If she had not been summoned to attend the Queen for luncheon and then at the hunt, she would have turned round and made her way out to the Brays, where the smoke from the camp fires would leave her eyes smarting but at least she would be free and unwatched. The stuffy, closeted atmosphere of the Queen’s apartments these past few days had felt like a prison, with her smallest misstep noted and censured. More accustomed to the homely, ramshackle chaos of the domestic staff quarters in London, Lucy found herself almost hating the propriety and hush of the Privy Chamber at Kenilworth.

A burly guard was coming down the stairs, broad-shouldered and barrel-chested, taking up almost all the narrow space. As he descended, he was whistling a tune which she recognized as a ribald soldiers’ song about the Queen herself. And in the royal apartments too!

Flattening herself against the wall so this insolent guard could pass, Lucy glanced up to find dark, twinkling eyes and an unmistakable beard.

‘Master Goodluck!’

‘Hush!’ Goodluck lifted her hand to his lips, and she could not help smiling at his mock-gallantry. ‘Don’t give me away. I make a fine soldier, don’t you think?’

He was wearing the badged livery of Leicester’s men, the blue doublet straining across his large body. She stared, perplexed. ‘Yes, indeed. But how did you—?’

‘It helps, when searching a place, to make yourself appear to belong there.’

‘You’ve been searching the Queen’s apartments?’

‘Not her rooms, but the building itself.’ He shot her a smile, then glanced over his shoulder to reassure himself that he was not being followed. ‘Lord Leicester swears there are no secret passages into this building other than the ones we are already aware of, but I like to make sure of such things myself. Though discreetly, of course, to avoid scattering the pigeons.’ He indicated the blue livery. ‘Hence this rather unflattering coat.’

‘But if you are caught?’

‘Then I will spend a few hours languishing in his lordship’s dungeons until someone comes to release me.’

‘Oh, Goodluck,’ she moaned, leaning her head against his broad chest. The steady beat of his heart went some way to comfort her, but she was still afraid for his safety. ‘Why do this dangerous work?’

‘Why, because there is no one else foolish enough to do it for me,’ he replied, his voice level and amused. Gently, he raised her chin and looked down into her face. ‘And you, my little songbird, how is the Queen treating you? Are you still happy at court now that every eye is upon you?’

She grimaced at the difficult question – or rather its answer – then wished she had not, seeing how seriously Master Goodluck watched her.

‘It is hard sometimes,’ she admitted in a small voice. Then she managed a smile of enthusiasm. ‘But I love to entertain the Queen, and now Lord Robert has written a song for Her Majesty and I am to perform it before the court.’

‘Lord Robert?’ he repeated, his brows raised.

Realizing her slip too late, she rushed to correct herself. ‘Lord
Leicester,
I meant to say,’ she stammered, but knew her guardian would not let it go so easily.