Prophecy - Страница 60

‘Something valuable, I take it?’ Castelnau asks, as I flap the paper uselessly back and forth. When I do not reply, he ushers me gently towards the hearth, where the embers of a fire are quietly dying. He takes the paper from my hand and spreads it out over the flagstones in front of the fire, but I can already see that there is no chance of proving that it once showed an illegal genealogy in Henry Howard’s hand. All I had to offer Walsingham was the report that such a document had once existed; I would need to get this information to Fowler as soon as possible. Perhaps he was already preparing to take his report of last night to Walsingham at first light, to inform him of the invasion plans, the list of Catholic lords and safe havens, and tell him that I had contrived to stay the night, whetting his appetite for whatever further evidence I might bring. Again, I would let them down.

In the silence, the first birds strike up their chorus outside the window. The ambassador wraps his beautiful robe around my muddy, soot-streaked body and crosses to his desk to pour me the last dregs of wine from a decanter. I guess that he must have drunk the rest himself in the long sleepless hours. I clasp the glass between my hands, trying not to spill it as I shiver, while Castelnau comes to stand beside me in front of the glowing ashes. He gives another of those great sighs that suggest he carries the weight of the world on his shoulders.

‘There is bad news, Bruno.’ He speaks without looking at me, and before the words are out of his mouth, I know what he is about to tell me. ‘Leon is dead.’

I bite my lip. Part of me has expected this since Dumas failed to return yesterday, but I have tried to persuade myself that there could be some other explanation. If only Marie had not interrupted, if only I had been more forthright in prising out his story about the ring, if I had paid more attention to his fears instead of dismissing his nervous disposition. I take a sip of wine, feeling sick to the depths of my stomach, but find myself unable to swallow; I cannot avoid the certainty that Leon Dumas, like Abigail Morley, died because of me, and that I should have prevented it.

‘What happened?’ I ask eventually, after we have stared together into the hearth for a few minutes.

‘The aldermen came last night, after you had all left,’ he says, his voice flat. ‘Some boatmen found his body in the river down by Paul’s Wharf and reported it.’

‘Paul’s Wharf?’ I glance at him. ‘By Throckmorton’s house, then?’

‘Nearby. They think he was strangled by some cut-purse. It’s a dangerous part of town for that — all the foreign merchants coming off the boats. He had nothing on him but the clothes he was wearing when they pulled him out. He had been in the water some hours, they said.’

‘How did they know to come here?’

‘They asked the dockhands and boatmen at the wharf. Someone recognised him, knew he was French. Said he was a familiar face down there.’

So he would have been, from all the trips to Throckmorton, I think. So where was the young courier now? On his way to Mary Stuart in Sheffield? If Dumas was killed near Paul’s Wharf, did his killer follow him there, or lie in wait, knowing that he was a regular visitor to Throckmorton’s house? In fact, the one person who would have known to expect a visit from Dumas was Throckmorton himself. I glance across at the window and recall the day I found Throckmorton in this office unannounced, the way he could not keep his eyes off the ambassador’s desk. Dumas was killed because of the ring. Everything centres around the ring. Dumas stole the ring from Mary’s letter before it reached Howard, someone paid him for it, and the ring ended up with Cecily Ashe. I rub my eyes; my tired brain gropes for connections, but again I come back to Cecily’s mystery lover, the man who gave her the ring as a pledge of their pact, the same man who gave her a vial of poison for Elizabeth Tudor. Dumas had to die because he knew this man’s identity; it is the only explanation. But why now — unless this man had new reason to fear that Dumas was about to expose him? At this thought, my body convulses so violently that the wine in my glass lurches and spills a drop on the flagstones, and the word that springs instantly to my mind is on my lips before I can stop it.

‘Marie.’

‘What was that?’ Castelnau turns to look at me with redrimmed eyes.

‘I — nothing.’ I had not meant to speak her name aloud. ‘Marie — she came home safely last night?’

‘Yes, of course. And Courcelles. He was full of stories of how you disgraced yourself and the embassy. Of course, I realised that you must have been putting on a show.’ He inclines his head with a meaningful expression.

‘My lord?’ It is fortunate that I am shaking so violently that any show of anxiety is lost.

‘I did not say as much to Courcelles, but I guessed that you took to heart my fears that Henry Howard is shifting his loyalties towards the Spanish. I supposed you had decided to take the opportunity to find out what you could while you were under his roof, disarm them into revealing something by a show of drunkenness. Courcelles would not have the subtlety to understand such a strategy.’ He laughs weakly. ‘Besides, last night I had other matters on my mind. Come with me, Bruno. I want you to see him.’

‘They brought the body here?’

‘He has family in France, poor boy. They’ll want the body back to bury him there, but I don’t know if that can be arranged in time.’ He passes a hand across his brow. ‘I must write to them. In the midst of all this.’ He waves a hand imprecisely, but I understand: he means the invasion.

‘I would like to see him,’ I say. The ambassador nods as if his head is too heavy to hold up. I am seized by a sudden urge to confide in him, to tell him of the counter-plots eddying around him, of Henry Howard’s ambitions, of his wife’s machinations, of Dumas and the ring. In my exhaustion, I almost believe for one absurd, fleeting moment, the instant it takes to draw breath, that I might be relieved of this burden if I share it with him, if I tell this upright, fatherly man caught between so many conflicting factions that I am not what he thinks, that I have been deceiving him all this while but that, ultimately, we both desire the same outcome: to prevent a war. I cup my hand over my mouth and lower my eyes to the floor until this insanity has passed and floated away like smoke. I have chosen to live a double life, and I must remain faithful to that choice, even when the strain of it almost fells me.

‘You realise how little you know a man, though you sit beside him for the best part of every day,’ Castelnau muses, subdued, as he leads me along the passageway towards the rear door by the kitchen. ‘I never asked him about himself, you know. All I did was bark instructions at him from dawn to dusk. I don’t think he was happy in England, but he never complained.’

He takes a key from a chain at his belt, unlocks the door and leads me across the small courtyard to the collection of outbuildings and storerooms that surround it on two sides. My feet are bare and so cold that they hurt against the cobbles, but the ambassador seems not to have thought of this and with a great effort of will I force myself to ignore it. The sky is light enough now to do without candles, and when he pushes open the door to one outbuilding I see clearly the form of Leon Dumas laid out on a trestle, his head contorted to one side at an unnatural angle. Castelnau stands in the doorway as if keeping vigil, without looking at the corpse; I pull the robe tighter around myself and approach the table slowly.

Dumas’s large startled eyes have been closed, but his face is not peaceful. It is bruised and swollen, the lips puffy and parted. Gently, with one forefinger, I pull back the neck of his shirt to see the mark of a ligature around his throat. I picture him walking those streets by the dock, preoccupied with the guilt he had tried unsuccessfully to unburden on me, ambushed by the killer stepping out of the shadows with a cord or a twist of cloth.

‘He must have been set upon in broad daylight,’ I murmur. I reach out and lay my fingertips on his cold arm.

Castelnau shifts his weight from one foot to the other.

‘You know what it’s like down at the docks, Bruno, it’s a bad part of town. The boatmen always brawling, half of them drunk in the day. Thieves on the lookout for any opportunity. People turn a blind eye.’

‘But Leon did not go about looking as if he would be worth robbing on the off-chance,’ I say, glancing down at Dumas’s worn breeches, now filthy with river silt.

‘What are you saying?’

I hesitate; the ambassador has enough weighing on him at the present time, perhaps it would be kinder to let him persuade himself that Dumas was the victim of a random assault by an opportunistic robber.

‘You are wondering, I think, if he was not attacked by a street thief but by someone who knew of his business,’ he says, when I do not reply.

He glances at the door as he says this, chewing on the knuckle of his thumb, and for an awful moment I wonder if he is hiding something. I stare at him across Dumas’s corpse, until he meets my eye.

‘What I do not know, Bruno, is whether he got his letter to Throckmorton before he was attacked. The aldermen said they found nothing on him, but that does not mean it couldn’t have been taken. If he was known as a regular visitor, perhaps someone might have guessed …’ His voice trails into anxious silence.

‘That he was a courier to Mary?’