Chapter 29: The River’s Edge

The back stairs were narrow and black as a tomb, and Edmund took them at a pace that would have scandalised his tailor. Cecily was ahead of him, her skirts gathered in one fist, her other hand trailing along the damp wall for balance. She did not look back. He heard the crash of the warehouse door splintering behind them, and the tall man’s voice—calm, accented, unhurried—calling out in a tongue that was not quite Spanish and not quite Italian. Venetian, perhaps. Edmund filed the thought away for the moment when he would have leisure to be frightened.

The garden gate groaned on its iron hinge, and then they were out into the salt air, the river sliding dark and silent before them. A wherry bobbed against the stone steps, its boatman hunched in a tarred cloak, his face invisible. Cecily did not hesitate. She stepped into the boat, and the craft barely rocked. Edmund followed less gracefully, catching his boot on the gunwale and sprawling onto the damp planking.

“Row,” Cecily said to the boatman. “Now. The far bank.”

The man did not move.

Edmund looked up, still on his knees. The boatman’s cloak shifted, and beneath it was a doublet of good Flemish wool, and beneath that, a face he knew. A narrow face, sharp as a ferret’s, with eyes that missed nothing and gave less.

“Master Secretary,” Edmund said, with the weary resignation of a man who has just found a wasp in his boot.

Sir Francis Walsingham inclined his head. “My lord Ashworth. Lady Thorne. I trust you found the warehouse instructive.”

From the quay behind them came the sound of boots on stone, and a shout. The tall man had reached the garden gate. Walsingham did not raise his voice. He simply tapped the boatman’s shoulder, and the wherry slid out into the current, silent as a knife leaving a sheath. The shout faded, swallowed by the fog that rolled off the Channel.

Edmund sat up, brushing river water from his sleeves. “You knew.”

“I knew the Vintner’s letter was a lure,” Walsingham said. “I knew Vos was a name we fed to the Spanish months ago. What I did not know was whether you would take the bait, or whether you would see it for what it was.” He paused. “You came to the warehouse. You walked into the trap. And yet you are alive, and the trap is empty.”

“The trap was not empty,” Cecily said quietly. “There was a man with a pistol.”

Walsingham’s eyes flickered to her, then back to Edmund. “Describe him.”

“Tall. Disciplined. Venetian accent, or near enough. He knew our names.” Edmund met the spymaster’s gaze. “He said, ‘We have been expecting you.’ Not ‘I.’ We.”

For a long moment, the only sound was the lap of water against the hull. Then Walsingham reached inside his doublet and produced a folded paper, sealed with the royal cipher. He did not offer it.

“There is a faction in Venice,” he said, “that has grown tired of the Pope’s hesitations. They have their own plans for England. Plans that do not require the Spanish Armada at all.” He looked at Edmund with something that might, in a more expressive man, have been respect. “You have stumbled onto the second conspiracy before the first has even been buried. I did not expect that. I should have. You have a talent for finding trouble.”

“I have a talent for napping,” Edmund said. “Trouble finds me.”

Cecily made a small sound that might have been a laugh, had she allowed it. Walsingham’s mouth twitched.

“The man in the warehouse was a courier,” Walsingham said. “I have had him watched for three weeks. He was waiting for Vos—who is dead, by the way, found in his counting house with his throat cut two days ago. The courier was to receive a list: the names of every English nobleman who has sworn to support a Venetian-backed invasion. That list is now in the hands of the man who killed Vos, and I do not know who he is.” He paused. “But you do.”

Edmund stared at him. “I do?”

“He is tall, disciplined, and speaks with a Venetian accent. He knew your name. He knew the warehouse. And he is not Spanish, not Italian, not English.” Walsingham’s voice dropped. “He is one of the Queen’s own Gentlemen Pensioners. A man named Giuliano Marchetti. He has been in her service for seven years, and I have just learned that his commission was signed by Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon.”

The name hung in the air like a blade.

Edmund felt the pieces click into place with a sound he could almost hear. Hunsdon, the Queen’s cousin, commander of her guard. Hunsdon, the traitor. And now his own man, a Venetian with a pistol, waiting in a warehouse in Dover. The conspiracy was not one plot but a web of them, spun across courts and countries, and he had walked into the centre of it without even the comfort of a proper breakfast.

“Marchetti will go to ground now that the trap is sprung,” Walsingham said. “But he cannot vanish without a trace. He will need a patron, a safe house, a way out of England. And you, my lord, are going to find him.”

Edmund closed his eyes. He could feel the warmth of his bed at Morland, the weight of a good blanket, the silence of a room with no pistols in it. It was a distant country, and he was very far from its borders.

“And if I refuse?” he asked, more out of form than expectation.

Walsingham smiled, a thin, wintery thing. “Then I will tell the Queen that the man who saved her from Hunsdon is now refusing to finish the work—and that he does so on the eve of the Spanish fleet’s departure from Lisbon. She will not take the news kindly. She will not take it in a way that allows for naps.”

Edmund looked at Cecily. She met his gaze, and for a moment, he saw something in her eyes that was not mockery or mystery, but something closer to concern. Then she looked away, out across the water, and the moment passed.

“Very well,” he said, with the sigh of a man accepting a fate he had always suspected was waiting for him. “Where do we start?”

Walsingham’s smile widened, just slightly. “You start,” he said, “by telling me everything you know about the widow with the blue door.”

The wherry slid on through the fog, and above them, unseen in the grey, a gull cried out—sharp, lonely, and urgent, like a warning that had come too late.