Prophecy (2011) (22 page)

‘Aye. What do you make of him?’

‘Who, Fowler?’ Douglas’s question pulls my attention back; he is tilted forward eagerly, and his eyes are fixed sharply enough on mine. I shrug. ‘I barely know him. He seems like a quiet sort.’

‘Aye.’ Douglas nods, and takes a noisy draught. ‘That’s the thing, though, isn’t it? Keeps to himself, right enough.’ He taps the table with an ink-stained forefinger. ‘My lord Howard suspects someone is tampering with the correspondence. To Queen Mary, I mean.’

‘What makes him say that?’ I am forced to lean nearer to him; between his Scots accent and my Italian one, and the general hubbub of talk in the tavern, the conversation is not easy to follow.

‘He says there are things missing. Disappearing, you know. So he concludes someone has a hand in the packets that come from Sheffield Castle.’

‘What things?’

Douglas shakes his head. ‘Letters and packets that should have come to him from Mary. He didn’t say any more than that. But naturally he’s looking at Salisbury Court.’ He lets this fall casually, glancing away to the next table as he says it, but immediately my sinews stiffen.

‘Howard has no reason to suspect anyone at the embassy,’ I say, trying to keep my voice level. Bitter experience has taught me that when you are accused of anything, regardless of whether you are innocent or guilty, it is almost impossible to deny the accusation without sounding as though you are protesting too hard. It was for this reason that I chose to run away from my monastery rather than stay and face an interrogation by the Father Inquisitor.

Douglas laughs aloud then, a big open-throated guffaw.

‘Come now, Bruno, don’t pretend to be simple. You’re famed for defying the Holy Office. You’re a defrocked monk, for Christ’s sake! As far as Howard is concerned -‘ here he lowers his voice - ‘you’re an enemy of the Catholic faith, not an ally. I’m not saying that’s my view, I just think you should know what Howard feels. He’s furious with Castelnau for allowing you into those meetings at the embassy.’

‘Well, I hate to disappoint him, but my first loyalty now is to whoever puts a roof over my head and bread in my hand.’

‘Aye, I’ll drink to that,’ he says ruefully, raising his tankard.

‘I know nothing of Mary’s letters, save what I learn around the table with the rest of you.’ I look him in the eye as frankly as I know how. ‘Are you of the Catholic faith yourself?’

A smile curves one side of his mouth.

‘Aye. I suppose you could say I’ve thrown my lot in with the Catholics. But I think of myself as a pragmatist. I know how to read the weather, my friend, and I don’t need any stargazer or ancient prophecy to tell me Elizabeth’s star is waning.’ He glances suddenly to each side, but no one appears to be paying attention to our conversation. ‘I know how to make my services indispensable to those on the way up, then I call in the favours when they’re established. Henry Howard has no illusions about my piety, but he knows I wouldn’t jeopardise my own position. Queen Mary vouches for me and that’s good enough for him. No - it’s Fowler I’ve wondered about. He has a lot of friends at court. Castelnau thinks that works in our favour, but I have my doubts.’

‘I heard you already made yourself indispensable to Queen Mary once,’ I say, partly to change the subject. Too much speculation on Fowler’s trustworthiness among the regulars at Salisbury Court could lead to unwelcome attention.

He grins broadly then, slapping his hand on the table and calling across the melee for more drink.

‘You refer to the unfortunate and untimely death of Queen Mary’s late second husband, Lord Darnley, at Kirk o’Field, I take it?’ He drains his tankard and then regards its empty interior with mild disappointment for a moment. ‘It is said they found my shoes at the scene the next morning. Is that proof, I ask you? Could have been anyone’s shoes - it’s not as if I’d embroidered my bloody name on them. But you try telling that to the Privy Council of Scotland. Of course, there was my erstwhile servant who testified against me on the scaffold, but a man will say anything with a rope around his neck, won’t he? Ah, thank you, my lovely.’ He turns the beam of his smile upon the serving girl, who sets down two new pots of beer before us. I have barely touched my first, but he appears not to have noticed.

‘What was the story about the pie?’ I ask.

Another great bark of laughter.

‘Ah, the pie. I’ll tell you. Mary Stuart, when she learned her husband was dead, invited a host of ladies to attend a ball at her court and they danced the night long, all of them
stark naked
,’ he whispers, pausing for effect. ‘And you know what they did next? Cut off all their hair.’

‘Their hair?’ I repeat, frowning.

‘On their quims, you numpty.’ He gestures to his crotch, in case I am in any doubt. ‘Then they put the hair inside a fruit pie and fed it to the gentlemen guests, for their amusement. That’s the woman they want to put on the throne.’ He pushes his fringe out of his eyes and nods, apparently delighted with his tale.

‘Is that true?’

He lays a hand flat over his heart.

‘True as I’m sitting here, son.’

‘Gentlemen. I bid you good afternoon. I thought it was you.’

I start and look up at the unexpected voice; Fowler has appeared through the shifting huddle of damp coats to stand by our table. He smiles uncertainly.

‘Oh, hello. Here’s a coincidence. Master Fowler - good day to you.’ Douglas raises his cup and smiles, politely enough, but it doesn’t touch his eyes. Fowler inclines his head with no obvious warmth. There seems to be some unacknowledged mistrust or animosity between the two Scots, giving the lie to the idea that compatriots far from home will always be drawn to one another. I attempt to convey apology to Fowler with my eyes, but with professional sang-froid he just murmurs, ‘Bruno,’ with a nod, before turning his attention back to Douglas.

‘What brings you here, Archie?’ he asks.

‘Oh, business,’ Douglas says airily. ‘Always business, Fowler, you know me. And our friend Bruno has been browsing for books in Paul’s Churchyard. Speaking of which -‘ he reaches inside his doublet and pulls out a sheet of paper, folded and crumpled - ‘did either of you see this?’ He smooths it out on the table before him; another pamphlet, this time with a woodcut of the astrological sign of Saturn. Douglas pushes it across to me and I open it, with Fowler reading over my shoulder. Inside is a crude drawing of a dead woman, a sword protruding from her breast. The gist of the text is that the second murder of a royal maid must be read as a clear sign from God that Elizabeth’s reign, and with it what the anonymous writer calls the ‘Protestant experiment’, is nearing its end. The killings, with their markings that so clearly refer to the Great Conjunction and its apocalyptic prophecies, are signs of God’s wrath towards the heretic queen, who in her rebellion against God looks for guidance to magicians and servants of the Devil like John Dee rather than to the wisdom of the pope. If it is not the Devil himself carrying out these murders by his own hand, then it is certainly someone moved and guided by Satanic powers.

‘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.