‘Does she not understand the extent of the labour? How long does she think it will take us to smoke the last of the Bishop of Rome’s vermin out of their priest-holes?’
Burghley favours his son with a wise but quizzical frown. ‘Does any one of these vermin have a name, perchance?’
‘Aye, John Lumley.’ Robert chews the name like a sour fruit. ‘Perhaps if I make a present of Nonsuch to the queen, she’ll be a little more appreciative of my efforts on her behalf.’
‘Well, we both know how much she likes presents. But remember, greed is a mortal sin,’ warns old Burghley with just the hint of a chuckle. His own piety has not prevented him making a fortune out of serving Elizabeth.
‘Her father built Nonsuch. It was her favourite house when she was a child. Imagine how grateful she’ll be when a Cecil gives it back to her.’
‘And you expect John Lumley simply to hand you the keys?’
‘I live in the hope; but I also plan.’
‘And what of Lumley himself? What do you intend for him?’
‘Cast down for the papist traitor we both know him to be.’ The Burghley barge, a gilded Venetian wonder festooned with silk cushions and curtains, glides up to a flight of stone steps. The barge-master reaches out to help the Lord Treasurer aboard. Robert jumps onto the deck behind him, as agile as a monkey. He likes to show the liveried crew that a crook-back can be as nimble as any waterman.
As the two men settle onto the cushions, a liveried servant brings Robert Cecil a leather satchel. ‘The latest news from our intelligencers, sir,’ he says, handing over the report harvested from the Cecils’ small army of watchers, searchers and informers. Robert Cecil scans the sheets of paper quickly.
‘No plague, no papist plots?’ askes Burghley, whose eyesight is not what it once was.
‘Apparently not today, my lord father. Nothing of import anyway. A wool merchant from Holland has taken lodgings at the sign of the Fox by Aldgate. He may or may not have passed through the Romish seminary at Rouen on his way here. I’ll make sure we keep an eye on him.’
‘Is that all we have for our money?’
‘A carpenter named Fladbury was heard by the West Cheap cross proclaiming he would give the queen a son – if they let him into her privy chamber and paid him five shillings. Drunk, apparently.’ He shuffles the leaves of paper. The barge-master gives the order and six sets of oars break the surface of the river. ‘Oh, and two of our watchers in Southwark have been informed there is a tavern-mistress there who was apparently born in Italy, or possibly Spain. She may be allowing seditious intercourse in her establishment. And the Grocers’ Guild would like her arrested for unlicensed practice of apothecary. Not that that interests us, unless of course she’s planning to poison the queen with an excess of aqua vitae, should Her Grace ever stop by for a jug or two of ale.’ He stuffs the papers unceremoniously back into the satchel.
Old Burghley looks through the cabin window as the riverbank slides past. ‘Judged against what we have faced, Robert, I think we may infer that for the moment the realm is enjoying a considerable measure of tranquillity.’
‘We may,’ agrees Robert through pursed lips. ‘But sometimes the greatest plots hide behind the most ordinary of masks. I think we can safely ignore the drunk carpenter. But the merchant, and the tavern-keeper? Perhaps a stick thrust into the ants’ nest might be in order – see what comes out. Just to err on the safe side.’
Upriver from Greenwich the same damp grey mist wreathes Kat Vaesy’s silent Vauxhall orchard. She walks alone, passing the beehives standing like old headstones in the grass. The orchard is where she comes when the thoughts in her head become so loud that she fears the servants will overhear them and tell her husband: Even in her exile, you have not tamed her, Sir Fulke… she still desires the world to know what sort of man you are, and twenty years is not long enough to quench her thirst for revenge… She has already dismissed one of her cooks because she believed the woman was in Fulke’s pay, though Lizzy Lumley told her she was imagining it.
What does Fulke want to know that he doesn’t already know? Does he think she takes lovers to her bed here at Cold Oak manor? She imagines writing to Nicholas Shelby, inviting him here, even perhaps lying with him. He would understand the grief that’s so thoroughly insinuated itself into every part of her, like holly strangles the bough over which it spreads. But Fulke Vaesy took even that possibility away from her, the day he destroyed their child – the day he almost destroyed her.
At first, when it became clear she was going to survive Fulke’s brutal ineptitude, she’d tried to tell John Lumley how mistaken he was to put his trust in her new husband. But John had just counselled her gently not to let bitterness at losing the child colour her judgement. ‘I’m sure Fulke did everything he could,’ John had told her. She had realized then that if she even hinted that Fulke had been responsible for the deaths of the three Lumley infants – something she could not actually prove, even if her hatred of her new husband clamorously suggested it – she would lose John’s sympathy, and very probably Jane’s friendship with it. And that Kat would never have risked.
When her father had first sent her to Jane, she’d been little more than a child. She’d been expected to serve the baron’s young wife as a lady-in-waiting, learn the arcane mysteries of running a great household. She’d learned fast, watching in awe as Jane deftly played the chatelaine. She’d joined Jane at grand occasions, danced the pavane and the volta in the great hall when John Lumley threw revels for his aristocratic friends. She’d even been in attendance when the queen and the court came to visit. Not for a moment had she been homesick. Who could think of a home such as hers – with a stern Puritan father and a mother so cowed that she barely said a word from dawn till dusk – when all around her was the unimaginable beauty of Nonsuch? Who would not want to live for ever within those gleaming white walls? Who would not be happy playing chase between the statues of gods and heroes, or strolling in the sunshine through the Italian gardens while the gently drifting mist from the fountains cooled your skin?
And to cap it all, as if being set down in the most fabulous place in all England was not enough, Jane had contrived to bring her together with the man she would later fall in love with. A man who was most definitely not Fulke Vaesy. In truth, Mathew was as unlike Fulke as it was possible to be. It was his stoic endurance of suffering that had so overwhelmed her. He was her very own Christ, she his Mary Magdalene bringing spices to anoint his poor body. The way he braved his malady was the most courageous thing she had ever witnessed. She and Jane Lumley had spent long hours in the Nonsuch library searching the volumes for an answer to the questions that tormented her: why had God punished such a good man? Was there anywhere in the world a secret knowledge that would save him? And could she find it?
Before she could get anywhere close to discovering the answers, her father – in an act of astounding indifference to his daughter’s happiness – had ordered her to marry Fulke.
‘Where is the wisdom in loving a man who could die tomorrow from a simple scratch?’ he had asked her, as if Katherine were considering buying a sickly horse. ‘You will marry Lord Lumley’s physician. He will bring the family within the orbit of a man who has the ear of our sovereign lady, which may profit us greatly.’ By us he had, of course, meant me.
Katherine Vaesy imagines herself a girl of fifteen again, standing not in her lonely Vauxhall orchard, but amongst the neat box hedges and Italian-style flowerbeds of the Nonsuch privy garden. She is embracing Jane, weeping uncontrollably like the sole survivor of a massacre. She is so inconsolable that even Jane is unable to comfort her.