Chapter 26: The Blue Door Revisited

The Thames was a grey, crawling beast under the dawn mist, and Edmund Ashworth, Earl of Morland, watched it with the profound resentment of a man who had been robbed of three consecutive nights of sleep. He stood on the wet stones of the private wharf, his doublet damp and his boots squelching with every shift of weight, while a rowboat bobbed impatiently before him.

“Your lordship,” said the boatman, a wiry fellow with a face like cured leather, “the tide waits for no man.”

“The tide,” Edmund replied, “has never once waited for me, and I have yet to hold it against the tide. But I do hold it against Walsingham.”

He stepped into the boat with the careful, graceless motion of a man who would rather be anywhere else, and settled onto the hard wooden bench. The boatman pushed off, and they slid into the murky current, past the looming hulks of merchant ships and the silent, shuttered warehouses of the legal quays. Edmund pulled his cloak tighter, not against the cold, but against the memory of the pistol’s muzzle and the tall, disciplined man with the Spanish accent.

He had told Walsingham everything. The ambush in Dover, the escape through a shattered window, the discovery that Vos was dead—his throat cut, his ledgers burned. And the name the Spaniard had spat before vanishing into the crowd: *La Viuda*. The Widow.

The blue door.

Now, as the boat nudged against a slippery set of stairs near Broken Wharf, Edmund climbed out with a grunt. He paid the boatman double, a gesture of pure self-pity, and trudged up the narrow, reeking lane. The house with the blue door stood at the end of a crooked alley, its paint faded and peeling, its windows dark. It looked like every other forgotten corner of London, which was precisely why it was dangerous.

He knocked. Three times, as he had done before.

The door opened a crack, revealing a sliver of a face—a woman’s face, pale and sharp-eyed, framed by a white coif. She studied him for a long moment, then opened the door wider.

“My lord of Morland,” she said, her voice flat. “I wondered when you would return.”

“Then you have the advantage of me, madam,” Edmund said, stepping inside. The room was modest—a table, two chairs, a hearth with a low fire. A single candle burned on the table, its flame steady in the still air. “You know my name, but I do not know yours. And yet you have been feeding me information that has led me to the Queen’s own cousin.”

The woman smiled, and it was not a warm smile. “I am called Mistress Alice. And I have been feeding you nothing but the truth, my lord. Whether you chose to follow it was your own affair.”

“The man in Dover,” Edmund said, “he called you *La Viuda*. The Widow. That is not the name of an informant. That is the name of a player.”

Mistress Alice’s smile faded. She gestured to the chair opposite her, and Edmund, after a moment’s hesitation, sat. His legs ached. His eyes burned. He wanted nothing more than to close them.

“I was married,” she said, “to a man who served the Queen’s father. He was a Catholic, as I am. But he was loyal to England first. When the old Queen died, and the troubles began, he chose to stay. He chose to serve Elizabeth, even though his faith condemned her. And for that, he was killed.” She said it without inflection, as if she had recited it many times. “By Catholics. By men who thought he had betrayed the cause.”

Edmund said nothing. The fire crackled.

“I have spent twenty years,” Mistress Alice continued, “watching both sides. The Catholics who plot against her, and the Protestants who would burn us all for the crime of prayer. I have no love for Elizabeth Tudor. But I have less love for the men who murdered my husband in the name of a Pope who never knew his name.” She leaned forward, her eyes hard. “I give you information, my lord, because you are the only one who seems to have noticed that the plots are not what they appear. The Spanish are coming, yes. But they are not coming alone.”

Edmund felt a cold thread run down his spine. “What do you mean?”

“The man in Dover,” she said. “You described him. Tall, disciplined, with an accent. You said he spoke of *La Viuda* as if I were a tool to be used.” She shook her head. “I am not his tool. But I know who he serves. He serves a man who is not Spanish, and not English. A man who has been waiting for this moment for years.”

“A name,” Edmund said.

Mistress Alice reached into her sleeve and produced a folded scrap of paper. She slid it across the table. Edmund did not take it.

“You will not like it,” she said.

“I rarely like anything,” he replied, and picked it up.

He unfolded it. The name was written in a neat, precise hand—a hand that had clearly been educated in the finest courts of Europe. Edmund read it, blinked, and read it again.

“This cannot be right,” he said.

“It is right,” Mistress Alice said. “I have seen the correspondence. I have seen the seals. The man who plans to betray England is not Howard, and not Hunsdon, and not Essex. Those are but pieces on his board. The man who plans to betray England is the one who has been closest to the Queen for twenty years. The one who has her ear, her trust, her heart.”

Edmund stared at the paper. The name seemed to burn in his hand.

“Robert Dudley,” he said, his voice barely a whisper. “The Earl of Leicester.”

Mistress Alice nodded slowly. “And he has been planning this since before you were born, my lord. The Spanish Armada is not his end. It is his beginning.”

Outside, the church bells of London began to toll the hour. Edmund folded the paper, tucked it into his doublet, and stood. His body was heavy with exhaustion, but his mind was suddenly, terribly clear.

He thought of the blue door, and of all the blue doors a man might walk through without ever knowing what lay behind them.

He thought of the Queen, alone in her chambers, surrounded by men who smiled and plotted and waited.

And he thought of his bed, and for the first time, it felt like a distant country he might never see again.

“I need to see Walsingham,” he said.

Mistress Alice shook her head. “You need to see the Queen. And you need to see her before Leicester does.”

The bells fell silent.

And somewhere in the distance, Edmund heard the sound of a horse approaching at full gallop.