‘Someone had to give you some discipline,’ Carlo said. ‘Your mother was a very soft person.’
At that moment she could almost see her mother through her misty eyes, young and beautiful, passing from the hall to the kitchen. ‘I still miss her so much,’ she said.
Her father sniffed defiantly – his way of saying he wasn’t going to let himself succumb to emotion. ‘Of course you do. We all do. If she hadn’t died maybe you wouldn’t have done what you did.’
Elisabetta stiffened. ‘What did I do?’
‘Became a nun.’ She could tell that once it was said that he regretted it but it was clear he meant it.
‘Maybe you’re right,’ she said evenly. ‘Maybe if Marco hadn’t been killed, maybe if mama had been alive, maybe, maybe, maybe. But things happen in a life, God has ways of testing us. My answer to his tests was to find Him. I don’t regret it for a minute.’
Carlo shook his head. ‘You were a beautiful vibrant girl. You still are. And you’ve hidden yourself away behind your nunnery and your habit. I’ve never been happy about this. You should have been a wife and a mother and a scholar. That would have made your mother happy.’
Elisabetta fought the urge to be angry. He was stressed by the events of the past few days and she forgave him. ‘Why have you spent all these years going after Goldbach?’ she asked.
He huffed a laugh. She knew he was smart enough to see where she was going. ‘Because it’s my passion.’
‘And it’s your quest,’ she added. ‘Well, my passion, my quest, is to be with God, to feel Him deeply within my soul. To honor Him with my work with the children. That’s my passion. That’s what makes me happy.’
The door buzzer went off. It was like the bell that signals the end of a boxing round. They both seemed relieved.
‘Have they come back?’ her father said, scanning the room to see if their visitors had left anything behind.
He answered the intercom and came back to the living room to tell Elisabetta that her Mother Superior, Sister Marilena, was here to see her.
Elisabetta rose and hastily put her veil back on. She greeted Marilena at the door.
‘My dear,’ Marilena said with concern, grabbing her hands. ‘I’ve been so worried about you. Word came to us of your ordeal last night.’
‘I’m all right,’ Elisabetta said. ‘God was with me.’
‘Yes, yes, I’ve been giving thanks all day.’
Elisabetta took Marilena to the sitting room. The kettle was whistling again in the kitchen where Elisabetta had sent her father.
‘Such a lovely place,’ Marilena said, glancing around the room.
‘It’s where I grew up,’ Elisabetta said.
‘So warm, so cultured. Everyone at the school has been worried about you.’
‘I hope it’s not a big distraction,’ Elisabetta said.
‘We’re strong enough in our mission and our faith not to lose sight of what we must accomplish with the children and with God.’ Then Marilena laughed. ‘Of course it’s a distraction. You know how we talk! Even my mother can speak of nothing else.’
‘Tell mama I miss her,’ Elisabetta said, realizing with a start that she’d just said something similar.
Suddenly Marilena turned serious. She had the same expression on her face that she wore when preparing to give parents a bad report on their children. ‘Mother-General Maria called me today from Malta,’ she said somberly.
Elisabetta checked her breath.
‘I don’t know where the decision was taken, I don’t know why it was taken and I certainly wasn’t consulted. You’re being transferred, Elisabetta. The Order wants you to leave Rome and report to our school in Lumbubashi in the Republic of Congo. They want you there in one week.’
SEVENTEEN
London, 1586
THE YOUNG MAN cast nervous glances around a walled garden dominated by a mulberry tree which had grown too large for its small patch of greenery.
‘Who did you say owns this house?’ Anthony Babington asked.
‘A widow woman,’ Marlowe answered. ‘Her name is Eleanor Bull. She’s known to Poley. She’s one of us.’
They were in Deptford, on the south bank of the Thames. It was early summer and the preceding weeks had been overly hot and humid. Fetid organic river vapors hung unpleasantly in the air, causing the delicate Babington to sniff at a scented handkerchief for relief. He was twenty-four, fair and beautiful, even with his face scrunched from squinting into the afternoon sun. Marlowe overfilled Babington’s mug with beer and the froth ran onto the oak table.
‘I must say, Kit, that I don’t know how you find the time to do everything you do – engaging in your Master’s at Cambridge, writing your ditties and pursuing, how shall I put it, other activities.’
Marlowe frowned in displeasure. ‘I don’t deny that there scarcely seem to be enough hours in the day. But as to your first point, I have an arrangement with my Master at Benet to be away from college for certain periods as long as I maintain my academic obligations. On the third point, my conscience demands that I pursue these “other activities” and on the second point, I do not write ditties. I write plays.”
Babington showed his sincere mortification. ‘I’ve offended you. I did not mean to do so. I am overwhelmed, sir, at your industry and accomplishments.’
‘You shall come to my opening night,’ Marlowe said magnanimously. ‘Come, let us turn our attention to weightier matters. Let us talk of restoring the true Catholic faith to England. Let us talk of dear Queen Mary. Let us talk of that dry hag Elizabeth and what is to be done with her. We have vast sunshine, we have beer, we have our own pleasant company.’
They had met through Robert Poley, one of Walsingham’s men, not a run-of-the-mill toady but a choice cut of meat. Ruthless and cunning, he had matriculated at Cambridge in 1568 as a Sizar but had not received his degree because as an alleged Catholic he’d been unable to swear the necessary oath of allegiance to the Queen’s religion. Yet apparently he wasn’t so principled as to deflect the entreaties of Walsingham’s recruiters and he quickly became one of the Secretary’s most useful operatives, an informant who easily wheedled himself into Papist plots in England and on the Continent and for the right compensation even permitted himself to be imprisoned time after time. Her Majesty’s jails, he insisted, were the best places to meet Catholic plotters.
During Lent of that year, Poley arranged a supper meeting of young Catholic gentlemen at the Plough Inn, near Temple Bar on the western edge of the City of London. Anthony Babington, an acquaintance of Poley, was invited along with two strangers whom Poley had vouched for, Bernard Maude and Christopher Marlowe. Naive and hapless, Babington was the only one at the table that evening not in Walsingham’s employ.
Over ale, wine and whispers, Babington was made aware of certain plans. Mary, Queen of the Scots, had been imprisoned at Elizabeth’s pleasure for eighteen years for fomenting revolt against Elizabeth’s Protestant reign and for offering herself up as the rightful Queen of England and restorer of the Pope’s primacy. Following the collapse of the Throckmorton plot against the crown, Mary found herself in her strictest confinement yet, at Chartley Hall in Staffordshire, isolated from the outside world by Puritan minders who reported her every twitch to Walsingham.
Here was Poley’s news. Catholic agents in France, Holland and Spain were passing along their assurances that the Catholic League and the great Christian princes of Europe would commit a force of 60,000 men to invade the north of England, free Mary and assert her rule. Thanks to the genius inventions of Kit Marlowe, a brilliant young recusant recently allied to their cause, a method of communicating with Mary had been devised. Marlowe had imagined a way to smuggle letters to Chartley Hall, hidden and sealed waterproof within kegs of beer, and he had also devised a clever cipher to encrypt them in the unlikely event that they were discovered.