A Column of Fire (92 page)

They had a new jailer, Sir Amias Paulet, a Puritan so rigid that he made Walsingham seem like a libertine. Paulet was the first man Alison had known to be immune to Mary’s seductive charm. When Mary touched his arm, or smiled winningly at him, or talked lightly of such things as kisses or bosoms or beds, he stared at her as if she were mad, and gave no reply.

Paulet made no bones about reading all Mary’s letters: he handed them to her opened, without apology. She was allowed to write to her relations and friends in France and Scotland, but under these conditions of course nothing could be said about invading England, rescuing her, executing Elizabeth and putting Mary on the throne.

Alison was invigorated by the ride but, as they turned for home, the familiar depression returned. This was the twentieth successive birthday Mary had passed in prison. Alison herself was forty-five, and had spent all those birthdays with Mary, each time hoping this would be the last for which they would be captives. Alison felt they had spent their lives waiting and hoping. It was a dismally long time since they had been the best-dressed girls in Paris.

Mary’s son, James, was now twenty-one and king of Scotland. She had not seen him since he was one year old. He showed no interest in his mother and did nothing to help her, but then why would he? He did not know her. Mary was savagely angry with Queen Elizabeth for keeping her away from her only child for almost his entire life.

They approached their current penitentiary. Chartley Manor had a moat and battlements, but otherwise it was a house rather than a castle, a timber-framed mansion with many cheerful fireplaces and rows of windows to make it bright inside. It was not quite big enough for Mary’s entourage plus the Paulet family household, so the men-at-arms were all lodged in houses in the neighbourhood. Mary and Alison did not feel perpetually surrounded by guards but, all the same, the place was still a prison.

The riders crossed the bridge over the moat, entered the broad courtyard, and reined in by the well in the centre. Alison dismounted and let Garçon drink from the horse trough. A brewer’s dray stood to one side, and burly men were rolling barrels of beer into the queen’s quarters through the kitchen entrance. Near the main door Alison noticed a little crowd of women. Lady Margaret Paulet was there with some of her maids, clustered around the figure of a man in a travel-stained coat. Lady Margaret was friendlier than her husband, and Alison strolled across the yard to see what was going on.

The man at the centre of the little crowd was holding open a travelling case full of ribbons, buttons and cheap jewellery. Mary came and stood behind Alison. The women were fingering the goods for sale, asking the price and chattering animatedly about which they liked. One of them said archly: ‘Have you got any love potions?’

It was a flirtatious remark, and travelling vendors were usually adept at charming their female customers, but this one seemed embarrassed, and muttered something about ribbons being better than potions.

Sir Amias Paulet emerged from the front door and came to investigate. In his fifties, he was a bald man with a fringe of grey hair and a luxuriant ginger moustache. ‘What is this?’ he said.

Lady Margaret looked guilty. ‘Oh, nothing,’ she replied.

Paulet said to the salesman: ‘Lady Margaret is not interested in fripperies.’ Margaret and her maids moved away reluctantly, and Paulet added scornfully: ‘Show them to the Scottish queen. Such vanities are more her type of thing.’

Mary and the women in her captive entourage ignored his rudeness, which was familiar. They were desperate for diversion, and they quickly crowded around the salesman, replacing the disappointed Paulet maids.

At that point Alison looked more closely at the man and repressed a gasp of shock as she recognized him. He had thinning hair and a bushy red-brown beard. It was the man who had spoken to her in the park at Sheffield Castle, and his name was Jean Langlais.

She looked at Mary and remembered that the queen had never seen him. Alison was the only one he had spoken to. She felt a thrill of excited hope. He had undoubtedly come here to talk to her again.

She also experienced a little spasm of desire. Since meeting him in the park she had entertained a little fantasy in which she married him and they became the leading couple at the court when Mary was queen of a Catholic England. It was silly, she knew, to have such thoughts about a man she had met for only a few minutes; but perhaps a prisoner was entitled to foolish dreams.

She needed to get Langlais away from the too-public courtyard and into a place where he could drop his pretence of being a travelling tinker and speak frankly.

‘I’m cold,’ she said. ‘Let’s go inside.’

Mary said: ‘I’m still warm from the ride.’

Alison said: ‘Please, madam, remember your weak chest, and step into the house.’

Mary looked offended that Alison should dare to insist; then perhaps she heard the hint of urgency in Alison’s voice, for she raised a speculative eyebrow; and finally she looked directly at Alison, registered the message in Alison’s widened eyes, and said: ‘On second thoughts, yes, let’s go in.’

They took Langlais directly to Mary’s private chamber and Alison dismissed everyone else. Then she said in French: ‘Your majesty, this is Jean Langlais, the messenger from the duke of Guise.’

Mary perked up. ‘What does the duke have to say to me?’ she asked him eagerly.

‘The crisis is over,’ Langlais said, speaking French with an English accent. ‘The Treaty of Nemours has been signed, and Protestantism is once more illegal in France.’

Mary waved an impatient hand. ‘This is old news.’

Langlais was impervious to the queen’s dismissiveness. He carried on unruffled. ‘The treaty is a triumph for the Church, and for the duke of Guise and the rest of your majesty’s French family.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘Which means that your cousin, Duke Henri, is free to revive the plan that has been his heart’s desire for so long – to put your majesty on the English throne that is rightfully your own.’

Alison hesitated to rejoice. Too often she had celebrated prematurely. All the same, her heart leaped in hope. She saw Mary’s face brighten.

Langlais went on: ‘Once again our first task is to set up a channel of communication between the duke and your majesty. I have found a good English Catholic boy to be our courier. But we have to find a way to get messages into and out of this house without Paulet reading them.’

Alison said: ‘We’ve done this before, but each time it gets more difficult. We can’t use the laundry girls again. Walsingham found out about that ruse.’

Langlais nodded. ‘Throckmorton probably betrayed that secret before he died.’

Alison was struck by how coldly he spoke of the martyrdom of Sir Francis Throckmorton. She wondered how many others of Langlais’s fellow conspirators had suffered torture and execution.

She put that thought out of her mind and said: ‘Anyway, Paulet won’t let us send our washing out. The queen’s servants have to scrub clothes in the moat.’

Langlais said, ‘We’ll have to think of something else.’

‘No one in our entourage is allowed any unsupervised contact with the outside world,’ Alison said gloomily. ‘I was surprised that Paulet didn’t throw you out.’

‘I noticed barrels of beer being brought in here.’

‘Ah,’ said Alison. ‘That’s a thought. You’re very quick.’

‘Where do they come from?’

‘The Lion’s Head inn at Burton, the nearest town.’

‘Does Paulet inspect them?’

‘And look at the beer? No.’

‘Good.’

‘But how could we put letters in barrels of beer? The paper would get wet, and the ink would run . . .’

‘Suppose we put the papers in sealed bottles?’

Alison nodded slowly. ‘And we could do the same with the queen’s replies.’

‘You could put the replies back into the same bottles and re-seal them – you have sealing wax.’

‘The bottles would rattle around in the empty barrels. Someone might investigate the noise.’

‘You could find a way to prevent that. Fill the barrel with straw. Or wrap the bottles in rags and nail them to the wood to stop them moving.’

Alison was feeling more and more thrilled. ‘We’ll think of something. But we would have to persuade the brewer to cooperate.’

‘Yes,’ said Langlais. ‘Leave that to me.’

*

G
ILBERT
G
IFFORD LOOKED
innocent, but that was misleading, Ned Willard thought. The man seemed younger than twenty-four: his smooth face bore only the adolescent fluff of a beard and moustache, and he had probably never shaved. But Alain de Guise had told Sylvie, in a letter that came via the English embassy in Paris, that Gifford had recently met with Pierre Aumande in Paris. In Ned’s opinion, Gifford was a highly dangerous agent of the enemies of Queen Elizabeth.

And yet he was behaving naively. In December of 1585, he crossed the Channel from France, landing in Rye. Of course he did not have the royal permission required by an Englishman to travel abroad, so he had offered the Rye harbourmaster a bribe. In the old days he would have got away with that, but things had changed. A port official who let in a suspicious character nowadays could suffer the death penalty, at least in theory. The harbourmaster had arrested Gifford, and Ned had ordered the man brought to London for interview.

Ned puzzled over the enigma while he and Walsingham faced Gifford across a writing table at the house in Seething Lane. ‘What on earth made you imagine you would get away with it?’ Walsingham asked. ‘Your father is a notorious Catholic. Queen Elizabeth has treated him with great indulgence, even making him High Sheriff of Staffordshire – but, despite that, he refused to attend a service even when the queen herself was at his parish church!’

Gifford seemed only mildly anxious, for one facing an interrogator who had sent so many Catholics to their deaths. Ned guessed the boy had no idea of how much trouble he was in. ‘Of course I know it was wrong of me to leave England without permission,’ he said in the tone of one who confesses a peccadillo. ‘I beg you to bear in mind that I was only nineteen at the time.’ He tried a conspiratorial smile. ‘Did you not do foolish things in your youth, Sir Francis?’

Walsingham did not return the smile. ‘No, I did not,’ he said flatly.

Ned almost laughed. It was probably true.

Ned asked the suspect: ‘Why did you return to England? What is the purpose of your journey?’

‘I haven’t seen my father for almost five years.’

‘Why now?’ Ned persisted. ‘Why not last year, or next year?’

Gifford shrugged. ‘It seemed as good a time as any.’

Ned switched the line of questioning. ‘Where in London do you plan to lodge, if we do not lock you up in the Tower?’

‘At the sign of the Plough.’

The Plough was an inn just beyond Temple Bar, to the west of the city, frequented by Catholic visitors. The head ostler was in Walsingham’s pay, and gave reliable reports on all comings and goings.

Ned said: ‘Where else in England will you travel?’

‘To Chillington, naturally.’

Chillington Hall was Gifford’s father’s residence in Staffordshire. It was half a day’s ride from Chartley, where Mary Stuart was currently imprisoned. Was that a coincidence? Ned did not believe in coincidences.

‘When did you last see the priest Jean Langlais?’

Gifford did not reply.

Ned gave him time. He was desperate to learn more about this shadowy figure. Sylvie had seen Langlais, briefly, in Paris in 1572 and had learned only that he was English. Nath and Alain had seen him a few times over the following years, and they described a man of slightly more than average height, with a red-brown beard and thinning hair, speaking French with the fluency of long practice but an unmistakable English accent. Two of the illicit priests Ned had interrogated had named him as the organizer of their clandestine entry into England. And that was all. No one knew his real name or where in England he came from.

Ned said: ‘Well?’

‘I’m trying to think, but I’m sure I don’t know a man by that name.’

Walsingham said: ‘I think I’ve heard enough.’

Ned went to the door and summoned a steward. ‘Take Mr Gifford to the parlour and stay with him, please.’

Gifford left, and Walsingham said: ‘What do you think?’

‘He’s lying,’ said Ned.

‘I agree. Alert all our people to be on the lookout for him.’

‘Very good,’ said Ned. ‘And perhaps it’s time for me to pay a visit to Chartley.’

*

A
LISON FOUND
Sir Ned Willard maddeningly nice during the week he spent at Chartley Manor. Now in his forties, he was courteous and charming even while he did the most obnoxious things. He went everywhere and saw everything. When she looked out of the window in the morning he was there in the courtyard, sitting by the well, eating bread and watching the comings and goings with eyes that missed nothing. He never knocked at a door. He walked into everyone’s bedroom, male or female, saying politely: ‘I do hope I’m not disturbing you.’ If he was told that yes, he was disturbing someone, he would say apologetically: ‘I’ll be gone in a minute,’ and then stay just as long as he pleased. If you were writing a letter he would read it over your shoulder. He walked in on Queen Mary and her companions at meals and listened to their conversations. It did not help to speak French as he was fluent. If anyone protested, he said: ‘I’m so sorry – but, you know, prisoners aren’t really entitled to privacy.’ All the women said he was lovely, and one admitted to walking around her room naked in the hope that he would come in.

His meticulousness was particularly frustrating because, in recent weeks, Mary had started to receive letters in barrels from the Lion’s Head in Burton, and it turned out that a huge backlog of secret correspondence had been piling up in the French embassy in London since the arrest of Throckmorton more than a year ago. Mary and her long-time secretary, Claude Nau, worked on the avalanche of mail day after day, updating Mary’s confidential relations with powerful supporters in Scotland, France, Spain and Rome. This was important work: Alison and Mary knew that people could easily forget a hero who dropped out of sight. Now the courts of Europe were receiving lively reminders that Mary was alive and well and ready to take the throne that was rightfully hers.