S. Parris - Execution

He pressed his lips together. ‘We have post-horses ready to courier urgent messages to London. But if I may say so again, you do not look fit for the road. If your letter is so important, I should feel safer entrusting it to an experienced fast rider.’ He passed a hand over his beard. ‘Besides, as you have seen, your appearance attracts hostility from some Englishmen. You will have to stop for food and water along the way, and those you encounter will not give two shits for Nicholas Berden’s ring. What then, if your message should be lost, and you the only one in possession of its content?’

‘I know how to fight.’

‘I don’t doubt it. But you are only one man. And you are – forgive me, what age are you?’ He frowned.

‘Thirty-eight. Not quite in my dotage yet, sir.’ I guessed him to be thirty at most, though likely less; sea-winds could age a man beyond his years. I leaned across the table and lowered my voice. ‘I will see this letter delivered into Walsingham’s hands myself, and no one will prevent me, I swear to it.’ I spoke through my teeth, with more confidence than I felt; I knew that everything he said made good sense, better sense than my plan, but this letter was my passport back to Walsingham’s favour and I had not come this far to entrust it to some messenger and lose the opportunity I hoped to gain by it.

Richard Daniel looked at me for a long while, weighing up my words, and finally nodded, a half-smile hovering at the corners of his mouth.

‘I see you are a stubborn fellow,’ he said. ‘Well, then. I shall find you a horse while you change your clothes. But I must insist you take one of my men with you, for protection. He can carry food and water for your journey too.’

I hesitated, but saw this was the best deal I was likely to strike, and I had seventy miles to cover across the Sussex Weald and the Surrey hills; I would not reach London without Daniel’s assistance. I nodded, drained the last of the wine and stood. ‘Let us not lose any more time.’

‘You do not wish to rest?’

‘The enemies of England are not resting.’

He pursed his lips, as if he approved this answer. ‘Then put on dry clothes, if you have them, and I will meet you outside in half an hour with everything you need.’

He clapped me on both shoulders and left. I stood and stretched my back, catching sight of myself in the darkened window. Thirty-eight, and looking haggard with it. Black hair, stiff with salt, curling past my collar; a four-day growth of beard; dark hollows under my eyes and below my cheekbones from lack of sleep, and lack of something else. Purpose? Peace of mind? These last few months in Paris had been melancholy. No wonder those two searchers at the port had suspected me of desperate measures; I looked like a vagrant – which was, I reflected, not so far from the truth. I had been living in exile for a decade now, one eye turned always over my shoulder, as a man with powerful enemies must. The Queen of England could put an end to that, if she chose, once I had proved my worth to her.

I undid my pack and pressed along the stitching of the secret compartment. I could feel the slight ridge of the leather wallet inside containing the documents. But the letter’s contents were committed word for word to my memory, and its cipher too. Let it be stolen; the paper would be useless to anyone without the knowledge I alone carried in my head. I would bring it to the door of Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster and lay it at his feet, to remind him – and his sovereign – what service I had done England in the past.

‘Lady Sidney will see you now.’

The man who grudgingly addressed me wore a steward’s chain of office, a black doublet with a blanched muslin ruff and soft leather indoor shoes; he kept his distance, halfway up the path to the entrance of the red-brick mansion on Seething Lane. I jerked my head up at his voice; we had been waiting half an hour already and I had almost given up hope of a response. I was not exactly surprised; if I had looked like a desperate man when I landed in Rye, it was fortunate I could not see myself in a glass by the time we reached London, on the evening of 29th July, our second day on the road. I must have had the appearance of a lunatic assassin: mad-eyed, unslept, unwashed, unshaven. The guards had had their weapons in my face before I had even dismounted. It fell to my taciturn companion, Richard Daniel’s man, to step forward with his official messenger’s livery and prove that I had not come to murder Queen Elizabeth’s Secretary of State in his own home.

One of the guards held his halberd lowered towards me, the point a foot from my chest, while his colleague unlocked the tall iron gates and nodded me through.

‘Just you,’ the steward added. ‘He can go to the servants’ quarters.’ He motioned to Daniel’s rider, a sturdy Sussex man who had spoken little on the journey, except to mutter occasional resentment at having his progress slowed by an incompetent foreigner half-asleep in the saddle.

Golden evening sun caught the many diamond-paned windows of Walsingham’s town house. The light softened its mellow brick and glazed the tall twisted chimneys like sugar sculptures. It was a house that discreetly announced its owner’s wealth. The Queen had rewarded her spymaster handsomely for his tireless service, as well she might; most of his spare funds were diverted into paying his intelligencers, since Elizabeth’s Treasury was notoriously miserly with resources, preferring not to acknowledge the underground networks of information and interception that protected her realm just as surely as her warships and soldiers, with a great deal less expense.

‘You will find Lady Sidney in a sombre cast of mind,’ the steward informed me, with a pompous air, as the heavy oak door was drawn back by a young woman in a black dress and white coif. ‘I hope it is no bad news you bring, as she should not be troubled further. Perhaps it would be best if I relayed your message to her?’

‘My news is for Lady Sidney’s ears alone,’ I said. His moustache twitched with disapproval, but to my relief he did not press me further, only gestured for me to follow him along a panelled corridor hung with tapestries.

I had guessed Walsingham would not be here; he would likely be at court, at the Queen’s right hand, or at his country house upriver in Barn Elms, near Mortlake. I had gambled on the house at Seething Lane, where his daughter lived, as the quickest way to him, wherever he was currently to be found. I barely knew Frances Sidney, as she now was, and was not at all convinced that my name would mean anything to her; I had only dared hope she might receive me for the sake of her husband, Sir Philip, who had been my closest friend when I lived in England a year ago. Sidney was now away in the Low Countries, fighting with Elizabeth’s forces against the Spanish under the command of his uncle, the Earl of Leicester, but I hoped there would be a vicarious pleasure in hearing news of him from his wife.

I was ushered through a door at the end of the corridor into a wide receiving-room, flooded with light from its west-facing windows. Lady Sidney rose from a chair by the fireplace and held out a hand in greeting. She was as slight as I remembered, in a gown of dark grey satin, though it was barely eight months since her child was born. Her pale face was still almost a girl’s, but as she approached I saw that her smile was brittle and shaky, her eyes puffy with traces of tears. The weight of my journey and lack of sleep seemed to land on me with one blow as I struggled with the import of her appearance. Why had the steward not warned me more clearly? Not Sidney, surely, it couldn’t be? There would have been news in Paris – he was well connected among the English diplomats there – I would have heard, would I not? My knees buckled; I stumbled back a pace as I stared at her, open-mouthed, forgetting all etiquette, unable to form the words I dreaded to speak.