Ken Follett - A Column of Fire

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.’

Gilbert Gifford 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?’