Love's Labyrinth (21 page)

The dark-haired priest sketched a Benedicte over the head of the woman who scrabbled at his feet in the dust for the coin he’d just tossed her and murmured a garbled Latin blessing as movement on the other side of the street caught his eye. A man and a woman—a well-born man and woman by the looks of them—were stepping off a ship that flew the colors of England. His heart beat a little faster. This was the third day he’d haunted this very spot, hoping for a glimpse of such a pair as this. The man was tall and dark and well-proportioned, the woman, slender and daintily made. A raw-boned servant followed them down the dock, a small iron-bound trunk on one shoulder, a leather pack on the other.

Alphonse Figueroa de Valez, agent of His Majesty King Philip, squinted in the sunlight and muttered a curse as he nearly tripped over the beggar, who’d huddled as close to his legs as possible. He glanced up and down the street looking to see if anyone came forward to greet the pair or if they would simply continue on their way. The man stopped a passing sailor, spoke, and followed the sailor’s nod in the direction of the Gold Angel. Figueroa looked both right and left, crossed the street, and followed the pair up the winding street that led from the quay to the tavern. Was it possible that here was the Englishman at last?

He kept his head down, but observed the couple from a safe distance. The man fit the description well enough, but the wife—hadn’t the description of the wife been of a frail sickly woman? This woman appeared healthy, for her step was as quick and as vigorous as her husband’s, and her face was flushed with a healthy color, even if she seemed a little too thin for Figueroa’s taste. But still, the timing was correct, and they were heading to the place where he’d been told to expect Master Steele to stay.

Figueroa stuffed his arms up his wide sleeves and bent his cowled head. He crept along the street and noticed, not for the first time, a tall man, dressed all in black except for a plain starched linen collar, who strolled down the opposite side of the street. Figueroa eyed the man, another Englishman and a Puritan—here his lips twisted involuntarily at the word—by the looks of him. There was an aspect to the way the man walked that made Figueroa think he was following the couple too. Figueroa allowed himself to pause, ostensibly to throw another blessing on a pair of sailors snoring in the sunlight.

The couple reached the tavern, and Figueroa stifled another curse as a passing wagon flung filth on his priestly disguise. The couple paused briefly, as though reading the sign, then proceeded into the inn. They left the serving boy shuffling his feet outside. The boy set both burdens down as close to the wall as possible, rolled his shoulders back in a stretch, and yawned. His gaze brushed over Figueroa with complete disinterest, but Figueroa was not deterred. After nearly fifty years of Protestant rule, one could hardly expect the English rabble to have the proper respect for a priest.

This appeared potentially promising. Figueroa looked up, but the tall Puritan was nowhere to be seen. Of course he had not been following the English couple. Such fancies were figments of an overheated brain. He dismissed all extraneous thoughts and visualized the leather case of documents he carried in the secret compartment of his own luggage. He adjusted his cowl over his head and made his way to the inn. The blond boy nodded at him as he passed, and he sketched another blessing in the boy’s general direction. He was gratified to see the boy cross himself awkwardly in return. Ah, he thought, perhaps… His thoughts trailed away as he stood for a moment just inside the door.

In the deserted common room, he took a seat in the corner near the fire. The hearth was empty on this warm summer afternoon. He huddled in the chair and waited.

He did not wait long. An Englishman’s voice, well-modulated, but pitched to carry, called out, “Jack! Up here!”

The landlord pounded down the steps, his florid face flushed, even as the blond boy bolted up the steps, the trunk on one shoulder, the pack on his back. The landlord pushed past the boy, bellowing for hot water, and disappeared behind a swinging door directly opposite Figueroa’s seat. The boy hauled his burdens up the stairs and disappeared briefly. A buxom barmaid entered the common room from the same swinging door, which Figueroa presumed led to the kitchen, dragging two buckets of steaming water. She staggered up the steps.

From the depths of his cowl, Figueroa watched the activity in silence. Finally the landlord emerged from the kitchen, wiped beads of sweat off his face, and belatedly noticed the cowled friar sitting by the fire.

With only the suggestion of a surprised frown, he crossed the room and put his hands on his hips. “God’s greetings, Friar.”

“Greetings, my son,” Figueroa replied, motioning the same blessing in the air with a bony finger. “I’d rest here a moment or two, if you’ll be willing.”

“This is a Catholic house, Friar. Rest and be welcome. Will you have a cup of ale?”

“
Sì
,
ale.” He nodded.

At once the landlord retreated to the bar, withdrew a clay cup from someplace beneath, and filled it to the brim with foamy ale. He carried it carefully to the small table and set it gently before Figueroa. Figueroa sipped and smiled his thanks. With another bow, and a murmur of apology, the landlord turned on his heel and disappeared into the kitchen.

For a long moment there was silence, then the sound of heavy steps on the floor above, followed by the whisper of a woman’s skirts on the stairs, told him that the two guests were on their way down once more.

“…to the hostler and see if we can get horses,” the nobleman was saying to his servant, who preceded both the noble and his wife down the stairs.

“Aye, sir.” The boy pulled his forelock and sped out of the inn.

“Stephen,” the woman said as they emerged into the common room, “should we not go and see…”

They were speaking English. Figueroa tightened his grip on the rude clay cup and held his breath. Stephen. Yes, that was the name of the contact. He peered at the two of them from under his cowl, secure in the fact that neither of them had yet noticed him. He frowned again at the woman. All reports of her had been that this waiting woman to Mary, Queen of Scots, had deteriorated greatly when she’d gone into deep mourning upon her mistress’s untimely death. Only the pleading of the husband, and the payment of a sizable bribe, had allowed him to take her away.

But the woman who stood laughing up at her tall husband, who in turn leaned over to kiss the tip of her nose, looked no more sad or sick than a blushing bride on her wedding night. She looked up at her husband with eager, open eyes and soft, slack mouth, the lips slightly upturned in the smallest smile. For an instant, Figueroa was forced to recall the brief months when he, too, had witnessed firsthand that look on a woman’s face, and then to endure the flood of grief that inevitably followed, brought on by the memory of how their sweet short months of wedded bliss had come to a bitter end when his bride died miscarrying their first and final son. Then he coldly dismissed those thoughts and transformed the grief into hatred for the man who pressed a kiss into the open palm of the woman’s hand.

“Come, we must get you outside into the sunshine. You’re much too pale and peaked after all those months confined.”

At that, Figueroa started upright and tried to peer more intently at the woman. She threw back her head, laughed again, and said, “Indeed, my lord, so glad am I to see the sun after all those months abed.”

Hmm, thought Figueroa. Something about that speech didn’t quite ring true. She sounded more like a schoolboy aping a phrase than someone speaking genuinely.

“If I’d my way,” her husband was answering softly, “you’d spend more months abed—more months of nights.” They exchanged a look that twisted Figueroa’s heart and, linking arms, stepped outside into the crowded street.

Figueroa stood up and watched them disappear into the press of human bodies. They were clearly here for a reason. The amount of their luggage suggested they were expecting to make a short trip. The man’s name, Stephen, was the same name as that of his contact. He would return and inquire the full name from the landlord shortly. The wife was all blooming roses and dewy petals, and she looked younger than he expected. But she’d been in the service of the Queen of Scotland for only a brief time, he remembered, for the last eighteen months or so of the Queen’s captivity. And given her relative attractiveness, and the reported wealth of her husband, it would stand to reason that she’d be one of the few of Mary’s servants allowed to leave. The reports of her ill health could have been greatly exaggerated. Figueroa tightened the rough rope belt he wore at his waist and started off. He would return when he was much more presentable.

“Ugh,” Olivia grunted, clinging to Nicholas’s arm as they picked their way through the offal of the fish market. “Don’t they clean the streets?”

“Only when it rains,” he answered with a laugh.

She wrinkled her nose. The stench was overpowering in the sun, and the piles of rotting fish refuse threatened her skirts at every turn. She breathed a loud sigh of relief as they waded through the last of the mess and, turning a corner, found themselves in the vegetable market street. The air was much fresher here, and the streets were only littered here and there with piles of dung from the oxen and donkeys used to bring the vegetables to the market stalls. Only littered with piles of dung! She laughed to herself and shook her head.

“What is it?” asked Nicholas as he guided her around one of the larger piles.

“I was just thinking how much better this street is from the last, and how much more preferable manure is to fish guts. And then I was thinking that before—before coming here through the maze—not only have I never reached that conclusion, but I never dreamt of actually having either opportunity or need to reach it.” She turned her head to look up at him, squinting a little in the bright sunlight. “Does any of that make sense to you?”

“Yes. I think so, yes.” He tightened his hold on her arm, as the cobblestones beneath their feet rose unevenly.

“I mean,” she continued, “I suppose there’re places where you can still walk down a street and have to dodge dung or fish guts, but I’ve never been to one. And in all the places I go, the worst you might see is maybe paper—paper trash, blowing around in the wind.”

At that he paused. stock-still. “Paper trash?”

“Yes.” She waved one hand airily. “Old newspapers, advertisements, candy wrappers—” She broke off, realizing the implications of what he asked. “You never imagined that, either, did you? A world where paper is so worthless we throw it away without thinking…”

“Paper—parchment—it isn’t something you throw away unthinking.”

“I know.” They exchanged another long look of sudden and unexpected communion.

Finally he nodded toward the church spire. “Come, lady. Let’s find the meeting place. We’ll talk more of these marvels in the privacy of our room.” And with another smile, they started off once more.

A POX UPON these whoresons, thought Sir John, as his elbow was jostled by yet another scurvy Catholic. Mass was just ending, and the steady stream of the faithful was at peak tide. He clutched his money belt closer as the crowd pushed by.

Three times now, he’d come to St. Mary-by-the-Sea just as Mass was ending, on the instructions of Christopher Warren. And three times now, he’d endured this human deluge, and so far there’d been no sign of Talcott, or that whore who traveled with him. He flicked away lint and brushed off the fine dust the passing heels had raised. He was just about to retire to his offices above the fish market when he saw a familiar head pass beneath the privet hedge arch. He shrank back into the protection of his niche beneath a stone arch as Nicholas Talcott, and his companion, walked by.

Now in the costume of a Spanish grandee, Figueroa strolled into the common room of the Gold Angel with studied insolence and demanded the landlord in heavily accented French. The barmaid, eyes wide in alarm, hastened into the kitchen, calling, “Papa, Papa!”

A few minutes later, the fat landlord emerged, a scowl on his red, sweating face.