Prophecy - Страница 37

‘I thought your tutelage was supposed to improve her memory?’ He rests a hand on the latch. ‘It seems to be having rather the reverse effect — apparently neither of you remembered that she is a married woman. I wonder what her husband would say to that.’

‘No doubt we will learn when you tell him,’ I say without looking up, folding away the diagram of my memory wheels before he can see it.

‘Oh, it won’t be me who tells him, Bruno. I am discreet as the grave.’ He leaves a pause, perfectly timed. ‘Not unless you give me good reason to think my lord ambassador should be informed.’

‘There is nothing to tell,’ I say bluntly, rising to my feet.

‘I’m sure. But my lord ambassador is a sensitive man on that point, for obvious reasons. By the way, did you hear — there has been another murder at court, just like the first?’

‘So I heard. A great tragedy.’

‘Last night, if you can believe it, while we were all at the concert. Well — all except you, I should say.’

‘An extraordinary coincidence.’

He produces a dry laugh. ‘No such thing as coincidence — isn’t that what you fairground stargazers say?’ With a final toss of his hair, he stalks out, leaving me with the uncomfortable knowledge that I am more vulnerable than ever at Salisbury Court.

Chapter Ten

City of London

1st October, Year of Our Lord 1583

‘Mary Stuart won’t be happy.’

Thomas Phelippes doesn’t raise his eyes as he makes this observation; instead I watch them flicker with quick lizard movements over the lines of numbers written in the letter he has just expertly unsealed. Walsingham once told me that Phelippes only had to read a cipher once or twice to have it by heart; he said this with almost fatherly pride. If he weren’t such a phenomenon as a code-breaker, Walsingham had added, with an indulgent laugh, he could make a fortune in a travelling fair with his feats of memory. Naturally, I am fascinated by the reports of this man’s prodigious powers of recall, but he doesn’t have the kind of demeanour that invites intimate conversation. In fact, he seems singularly ill equipped to deal with other people; he rarely looks directly at you, shifting uncomfortably unless he has been asked to explain some piece of his business, when he holds forth at length in his curious monotone, firing the information at you with barely a pause for breath. Here, in the dim back room of his house on Leadenhall Street, shuttered and lantern-lit even in the day, to protect his secretive work, he seems like a woodland creature, content to hide in its burrow. If Nature has blessed him with exceptional gifts of intellect, she has sought balance by withholding from him any physical charm; the man is short and squat, with a heavy jaw, a flattish nose and the scars of smallpox on his cheeks.

‘Mary Stuart is never happy,’ I remark, as his keen gaze continues to search the letter that I know comes from Lord Henry Howard, and is on its way to Francis Throckmorton for delivery on his next trip to Sheffield Castle. Idly, I pick up a block of sealing wax from Phelippes’s broad desk, examine it, put it back. In the corner of the room, Dumas is making a hasty copy of one of Castelnau’s letters to Mary before he delivers the original, his nib scratching frantically like a mouse trapped behind a panel. Phelippes reaches over without looking up and replaces the wax in the exact spot it had been, a fraction of an inch to the left, with a little irritated click of the tongue. Then he picks up a book from his desk and leafs urgently through the pages, glancing from it to the paper in his hand. As he lifts the book up, I see that it is Henry Howard’s A Defensative Against the Poison of Supposed Prophecies.

‘Good read?’ I ask.

Phelippes lifts his head sufficiently for me to catch the look of disdain on his face.

‘It’s the cipher,’ he mutters, as if it were hardly worth the effort of explaining this to someone so wilfully stupid. ‘The book is the code. It’s one of the most basic devices. That’s why he sends her a copy. See here, where the numbers are set out in groups of three?’ He tilts the paper towards me enough for me to see what he means, the lines of figures squeezed together in Howard’s cramped handwriting. ‘Page, line, word. You see? Meaningless to anyone who doesn’t know the edition the numbers refer to or doesn’t have a copy, and in theory endlessly varied, because one need never use the same reference for the same word twice. But Howard in particular is lazy. He frequently uses the same page reference for common words rather than looking for other examples. Makes my job easier, anyway.’

‘So you have memorised these page references?’

‘A good number of them, yes.’

If he catches the tone of admiration in my voice, he gives no sign of it, nor does he speak with any trace of pride. He is merely stating facts. He crouches closer over the letter, rifling through the pages of the book at the same time.

‘For instance, I will have to double check some of these words against the book but the gist of this letter is Henry Howard saying he knows nothing about any ring. Apparently Mary sent him a valuable ring that belonged to her mother, with a family crest engraved. In a green velvet casket. Weeks ago, this is. She wanted him to use it as a seal to guarantee his letters were genuine, but he protests he never had any such casket nor ring from her. You’d think they were betrothed, all this giving and receiving of rings.’ Phelippes barks out a sudden laugh, the sound unnatural in his throat.

‘Except that Howard never did receive it,’ I murmur, my mind spinning into action. The ring Mary had sent as a gift to Henry Howard had ended up being given as a love-token to Cecily Ashe — it could only be the same one — but by whom? If all Mary’s correspondence to Howard comes through the French embassy, then the package containing the ring could have been intercepted either before it was passed on to Howard — by Throckmorton, say, or someone at Salisbury Court — or else Howard is lying to Mary, and he was the one who gave the ring to Cecily. Or his nephew, Philip Howard, who I have already marked out as fitting the description Abigail gave of Cecily’s lover. I shake my head; again, the question remains: why give a token so clearly identifiable, one which, if found, would point straight back to the conspirators around Mary Stuart? It seemed almost like a deliberate betrayal of Mary.

The room is oddly still; I glance up and realise that Dumas has stopped his scribbling. Instead he is staring at me, his face white and strained, his eyes bulging more alarmingly than usual. I send him a quizzical frown; he only bites his lip and mouths the word ‘time’.

He is right; he must take the packet of letters to Throckmorton and I have Fowler waiting for me at the Mitre. We work as fast as we can in this back room of Phelippes’s house, but there is always the fear that someone from Salisbury Court will have seen Dumas meet me at the Lud Gate or noticed our detour through the city to Leadenhall, particularly now it seems certain that someone is watching my movements. Already the best part of the day is gone, thanks to Marie and her diversions, but I still have hopes of making my way to Mortlake in pursuit of Ned Kelley, or clues to his whereabouts. Phelippes seems to have frozen at his task; I give a small cough behind my fist but he merely blinks.

‘Almost there,’ he says mildly, still staring fixedly at the letter, and I realise he is memorising the numbers. I would love to ask him his technique but do not want to break his concentration. When he has jotted down what he needs, he refolds Howard’s letter and arranges the instruments of his other skill, the forging of seals: several bars of wax, a candle, a selection of small silver-bladed knives, some no bigger than the nib of a quill. He takes a moment to compare the new wax, matching the colour carefully to the original seal. I watch, mesmerised, as his quick fingers deftly reattach it, part heating the underside and adding just enough fresh wax to press it home without cracking the surface or disturbing the cords set into the original wax. Any careless move at this crucial stage could damage Howard’s seal so that the tampering became evident; Mary’s sharp eyes would be looking for any such sign of treachery. I find I am holding my breath in sympathy, anxious not to make any move or sound that might distract Phelippes, but he seems oblivious; for a thick-set man, he has surprisingly delicate fingers, long and white like a seamstress’s. With his little knife he prods and tweaks the soft wax until he is satisfied with its appearance. He replaces the letter inside the oilskin wrapping of the package Dumas must deliver to Throckmorton imminently.

At the edge of my vision I can see Dumas fidgeting; he is anxious to be gone. When he has handed over the letter he has been copying and the packet for Throckmorton has been resealed satisfactorily, Phelippes ushers us out of the back door of his house, bidding us good day with an awkward twitch of his shoulders, eyes still turned to the ground.

We cross a yard and emerge into a side street that leads us out by the little churchyard of St Katherine Cree. A cold gust throws a handful of raindrops into our faces and Dumas shivers, a violent tremor that rattles through his thin body. He seems unusually tense; as we step out into the street, our collars pulled up against the squall, a boy dashes suddenly from the mouth of an alley and Dumas leaps a foot into the air like a rabbit, clutching at my sleeve.