Chapter 27: The Horse at Full Gallop

Edmund did not wait for the horse to arrive. He was out of Mistress Alice’s chamber and down the narrow stair before the beast’s hooves had ceased their thunder on the cobbles, his lute left abandoned on her table like a discarded mistress. Cecily followed without a word, her skirts gathered in one fist, and he thought, not for the first time, that she moved through danger with the same ease other women moved through a ballroom.

The street was grey with the false dawn of a winter morning. The rider reined in before the house, a boy no older than sixteen, his face raw with cold and his mount lathered white. He wore the livery of Walsingham’s household, and in his hand he clutched a sealed leather pouch.

“My lord Morland,” the boy gasped, sliding from the saddle. “Sir Francis sent me. He said to find you before you reached the palace gates.”

Edmund took the pouch and broke the seal with a thumb that was, he noted with some detachment, entirely steady. The letter within was written in Walsingham’s cramped, meticulous hand, and it contained only six words:

*The cage is empty. The bird has flown.*

He read it twice. Then he folded it carefully and slipped it inside his doublet.

“What does it say?” Cecily asked.

“Hunsdon is gone. Walsingham’s men went to take him at his lodgings, and found only cold ash and a warm bed.” Edmund looked at the boy. “When did Sir Francis send this?”

“Two hours past, my lord. He bade me ride as if the devil himself were behind me.”

“Then Hunsdon has a two-hour start and a kingdom to hide within,” Cecily said. Her voice was calm, but he saw her fingers tighten on her skirts. “He is the Queen’s cousin. He knows every bolt-hole in London, every country house between here and Scotland. He could be anywhere.”

Edmund shook his head slowly. “No. He is not anywhere. He is precisely where he intended to be all along.” He turned to the boy. “Did Sir Francis say anything else? Anything at all?”

The boy hesitated. “Only that the Queen has been told, my lord. And that Her Majesty said—forgive me, I am to repeat it plainly—she said, ‘Let my cousin run. The fox always returns to the henhouse.’” He paused. “And then she asked, my lord, where you were.”

Edmund closed his eyes. He felt the weight of the letter in his doublet, the weight of the Queen’s attention settling upon his shoulders like a shroud. He had wanted only to be left alone, to compose his music and guard his naps. Now he was the man who had unmasked the Queen’s cousin as a traitor, and the Queen herself was asking after him.

“We need to see Vos,” he said.

Cecily looked at him sharply. “The Dutch merchant? He is the reason we came to Dover, and we have yet to find him. We were ambushed in his warehouse, in case you have forgotten.”

“I have not forgotten. But I have been thinking about that warehouse, and about the man who met us there.” Edmund began to walk, not back toward the quay, but away from it, toward the heart of the town. “He was waiting for us. He knew we were coming. But he was not the Vintner, and he was not Hunsdon’s man—or at least, not Hunsdon’s man alone. He had an accent, a Spanish or Italian lilt. He was a professional.”

“A professional what?”

“A professional who is paid to be where secrets are kept.” Edmund stopped before a low, timbered building with a signboard showing a gilded eel. “Vos is a merchant. Merchants have offices. And offices, in my experience, are far less dangerous than warehouses.”

The door to the gilded eel was unlocked. Inside, the taproom was empty, the fire banked low, the smell of stale ale and woodsmoke thick in the air. A man in a leather apron was sweeping the floor, and he looked up at their entry with the dull, incurious gaze of a man who had seen too much to be surprised by anything.

“We are looking for a merchant named Vos,” Edmund said.

The man jerked his head toward a door at the back. “Upstairs. Second door on the left. He does not receive visitors this early.” He resumed his sweeping.

Edmund climbed the stairs, Cecily close behind him. The second door on the left was closed, and he pushed it open without knocking.

The room was small, cluttered with ledgers and maps and a single, narrow bed. A man sat at a desk by the window, a quill in his hand, but he was not writing. He was staring at the door as if he had been expecting it. He was thin, balding, with the sallow complexion of a man who spent his life indoors, and his eyes were the pale grey of a winter sea.

“Lord Morland,” he said. “I wondered when you would find your way here.”

Edmund closed the door behind him. “You know who I am.”

“I know everyone who matters. It is my business.” Vos set down his quill and folded his hands on the desk. “You are here about the warehouse. About the man who met you there.”

“I am here about a great many things,” Edmund said. “But yes, that will do to begin.”

Vos smiled, a thin, precise smile. “The man who met you is called Alfonso de Silva. He is a courier, of sorts, in the employ of the Spanish ambassador. He has been in England for three years, moving gold and letters between London and the coast. He is very good at what he does.”

“And what does he do, exactly?”

“He ensures that certain messages reach certain people. Messages that the ordinary post cannot carry. Messages that must be delivered by hand, to men who would not trust a letter.” Vos glanced at Cecily, then back at Edmund. “He was waiting for you because I told him you were coming.”

Edmund felt the floor shift beneath him. “You told him.”

“I did not know you were coming to arrest me, or to save me, or to do anything at all. I only knew that a man named Morland had been asking questions about me, and that de Silva pays very well for information about men who ask questions.” Vos spread his hands. “I am a merchant. I deal in what is available. That is all.”

Cecily stepped forward, her voice cold. “And what is available now, Master Vos? Where has Hunsdon gone? Where is de Silva? And what, exactly, did the Earl of Effingham have to do with any of this?”

Vos’s smile faded. He looked at her for a long moment, and then he reached into a drawer in his desk and withdrew a folded paper, creased and worn, sealed with a blob of plain wax.

“I was going to sell this to whoever asked first,” he said. “But I think now that it is worth more to you alive than to anyone else dead.” He held out the paper. “It is a list of ships. Spanish ships, carrying Spanish gold, to be delivered to a port on the eastern coast. The port is named. The date is named. And the man who arranged it is named.”

Edmund took the paper. He did not open it. He looked at Vos, and then at Cecily, and he felt the weight of everything he had not wanted to know pressing down upon him like the lid of a coffin.

“The man who arranged it,” he said. “Is it Hunsdon?”

Vos shook his head. “Hunsdon is a traitor, yes. But he is only a hand, my lord. The arm that moves him is higher. Much higher.” He leaned forward. “The name is Leicester. Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. The Queen’s own favourite.”

The room fell silent. Edmund heard the fire crackle in the hearth below, the distant cry of gulls over the harbour. He thought of Leicester, smiling at court, his hand on the Queen’s shoulder, his eyes full of loyalty and love.

He thought of the blue door.

And he thought of the horse, still galloping somewhere in the dark, carrying a traitor toward a ship and a safe haven and a new plot, while the Queen sat alone in her chambers, surrounded by wolves in velvet.

“We need to go to London,” he said.

“No,” Cecily said. “We need to go to the Queen. And we need to go before Leicester hears that we have found Vos.”

Edmund looked at the paper in his hands. Then he folded it, carefully, and put it beside Walsingham’s letter.

“Then I suppose,” he said, “I shall have to postpone my nap.”