Chapter 28: The Widow’s Choice

The night air off the Channel was cold and salt-rimed, and it did nothing to clear the fog of exhaustion that had settled behind Edmund’s eyes. They had left Dover by the first grey light, riding hard along the coast road toward London, with the paper from Vos’s warehouse folded into the lining of his doublet. The Dutch merchant had been found, eventually—bound and gagged in a wine cellar beneath the quay, his ledger missing but his memory intact. The tall man with the Spanish accent had vanished with the tide, and Edmund had chosen not to give chase. A pistol ball, he reasoned, was a poor exchange for a full day of riding.

Now, as the spires of Southwark rose against a bruised evening sky, Cecily reined in beside him. Her hood was drawn low, but he could see the sharp glint of her eyes, the tight line of her mouth.

“You are thinking about the blue door,” she said.

“I am thinking about supper,” Edmund lied.

“You are a terrible liar, my lord.”

“I am a magnificent liar when I am rested. You have never seen me at my best.”

She almost smiled. Almost. Then the look faded, and she nudged her horse forward again, threading through the narrow streets where the smell of tanning pits and river mud fought for dominance. Edmund followed, his bones aching, his mind turning over the same question like a stone in a stream: who was the widow with the blue door, and why did every thread of this conspiracy seem to pass through her hands?

They crossed the river at London Bridge, the heads of traitors blackening on their pikes above the gatehouse. Edmund did not look up. He had learned, in the past months, that looking up only gave you nightmares.

The house was in a lane off Thames Street, tucked between a chandler’s shop and a tobacco seller’s. The door was painted a deep, startling blue, the colour of a summer sea, and it was the only spot of brightness in a street that had long surrendered to soot and shadow. Edmund knocked twice. A maid answered, her face pinched with suspicion, and Cecily stepped forward with the easy authority of a woman who had once run a household of forty servants.

“Tell your mistress that the Earl of Morland and Lady Thorne have come to return her book.”

The maid blinked. “Her what, my lady?”

“Her book. The one about the Spanish gardens. She will know.”

The maid vanished. Edmund leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, affecting a languor he did not feel. Cecily stood straight as a mast, her hands folded, her gaze fixed on the street behind them.

“You are watching for followers,” he said.

“You are not.”

“I am watching for the chance to sit down. It is a far more productive use of my attention.”

The maid returned. “She will see you. But only the earl. The lady must wait below.”

Cecily’s eyes narrowed. “That is not acceptable.”

“It is her house,” the maid said, with the flat finality of a woman who had delivered this message before.

Edmund touched Cecily’s arm. “Wait for me. If I am not out in an hour, assume I have found a comfortable chair and am taking a nap. Do not rescue me until the third hour.”

Cecily did not smile. She looked at him with an expression he could not quite read—fear, perhaps, or something close to it—and then she nodded once and stepped back into the shadow of the chandler’s awning.

The maid led Edmund up a narrow stair, past shelves of bottled preserves and dried herbs, into a parlour that smelled of lavender and old paper. The widow was seated by the window, a book open on her lap, her silver hair pinned beneath a widow’s cap. She was older than he had expected, perhaps sixty, with a face seamed by weather and worry, but her eyes were bright and sharp as cut glass.

“My lord Morland,” she said, without rising. “I wondered when you would come back.”

“You knew I would?”

“I knew you would need to. The question is whether you have come to ask me for help, or to accuse me of treachery.”

Edmund sat, uninvited, in the chair across from her. His body sagged with relief, and he let it. Let her see the exhaustion. Let her think him weak.

“I have come,” he said, “to ask you about Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon. And about the man who tried to kill us in Dover.”

The widow’s hands stilled on the book. For a long moment, she said nothing. Then she closed the volume and placed it on the table between them.

“Hunsdon is a fool,” she said quietly. “A dangerous fool, but a fool nonetheless. He believes that if Mary of Scots sits on the throne, the old families will be restored, and the new men—the Cecils, the Walsinghams—will be swept aside. He does not see that he is a pawn. He does not see the hand that moves him.”

“And whose hand is that?”

The widow looked at him, and for the first time, Edmund saw something like pity in her eyes.

“You are asking the wrong question, my lord. You should be asking why I, the widow of a Catholic merchant, have spent the last ten years feeding information to Sir Francis Walsingham. You should be asking why I have betrayed my own people to save a queen who does not know my name.”

Edmund leaned forward. “Why, then?”

“Because my husband was killed in the northern rising. Because I have seen what the Spanish would do to this country, and it is not the restoration of the old faith—it is the burning of everything we are. I serve the Queen because she is the only thing standing between England and the pyre.”

She reached into her sleeve and drew out a folded paper, worn at the edges, sealed with a blob of red wax that bore no mark.

“This came to me three days ago. It is a list of names. The men who will rise when the Armada comes, the men who have sworn to open the gates of the ports to Parma’s army. Hunsdon is on it. But he is not the first name.”

Edmund took the paper. His fingers trembled, though he willed them still. He broke the seal and unfolded it.

The first name was Leicester.

Robert Dudley, the Queen’s oldest friend, her most trusted favourite, the man who had stood beside her through every plot and peril of her reign.

Edmund looked up. “This cannot be true.”

“It is true,” the widow said. “And it is why I have called you here. Because if you go to Walsingham with this, you will not leave his presence alive. He will not believe you. He will think you have been turned, or that you are trying to protect Hunsdon. You must go to the Queen herself. And you must go alone.”

Edmund stared at the paper. The candle guttered. Somewhere below, he heard the murmur of Cecily’s voice, and then the sound of boots on the cobbles—many boots, moving fast.

The widow rose, her face suddenly pale. “They have found you. Go. Use the back stairs. The garden gate leads to the river.”

Edmund did not move. He looked at her, at the paper in his hands, at the blue door that had opened onto a deeper darkness than he had ever imagined.

“I was supposed to be the lazy one,” he said. “I was supposed to be useless.”

The widow smiled, a thin, sad smile. “So was David, when he faced Goliath. Now go, my lord. And God save the Queen.”