Chapter 43: The Road to Cambridge

The fog had not lifted by dawn, and Edmund Ashworth, Earl of Morland, regarded the murk with the profound resentment of a man who had been robbed of both sleep and visibility. He sat astride his chestnut mare—a placid beast chosen for its unwillingness to startle, a quality Edmund prized above speed—and watched the grey Thames slide past the wharves like a sluggish serpent.

Cecily rode beside him, hood drawn against the damp. She had said little since they left the safety of Walsingham’s river stairs, and Edmund found her silence more disquieting than any of the threats that had pursued them through the night.

“You are brooding,” she said at last, without turning her head.

“I am contemplating,” he corrected. “There is a difference. Brooding implies a certain vigour I cannot presently muster.”

“Then contemplate louder. I would know what occupies that lazy mind of yours.”

Edmund sighed, adjusting his gloves. The motion sent a dull ache through his shoulder, where the Grey Angel’s blade had grazed him two nights past. He had not mentioned the wound to Cecily. He had not mentioned it to anyone. It would heal, or it would not, and either outcome seemed equally tedious to discuss.

“I was thinking of Phelippes,” he said. “And of how a man who deciphered the Queen’s most secret letters might be turned. What coin does a traitor accept? Gold? Vengeance? Fear?”

“Or faith,” Cecily said quietly. “Some men believe they serve a higher throne than Elizabeth’s.”

Edmund glanced at her sharply. “You speak as one who knows.”

She met his gaze without flinching. “I speak as one who has watched men die for such faith. My mother’s house has sheltered many souls who believed Rome’s authority outweighed Westminster’s. Some were fools. Others were saints. Most were simply men who chose a side and prayed they had chosen well.”

“And you? Which side have you chosen?”

Cecily’s lips curved in something that was not quite a smile. “I have chosen to survive, my lord. Everything else is negotiation.”

They rode on in silence, past the huddled tenements of Southwark and onto the open road that wound north through fields still heavy with summer’s last abundance. The fog began to burn away as the sun climbed, revealing a landscape of gold and green that seemed utterly indifferent to the conspiracies festering in the capital behind them.

Edmund found himself watching Cecily as she rode. There was a grace to her bearing that spoke of careful training, and a wariness in her eyes that no training could supply. She had been married once, he recalled—a merchant who had died of fever in Antwerp, leaving her with means and freedom and a knowledge of the world’s cruelty that most ladies of the court would never possess.

“What will we find at Cambridge?” he asked.

“A man named Doctor Peregrine Halse. He was my husband’s tutor at Trinity College, and he corresponds with scholars across Christendom. If anyone knows the provenance of that ledger’s paper or the hand that wrote your name beneath the word ‘Armada,’ it will be he.”

“And he is trustworthy?”

Cecily’s expression flickered. “He was my husband’s friend. That is the closest I come to trust these days.”

They reached Cambridge by late afternoon, the town’s spires rising against a sky of bruised purple and gold. The college courtyards were quiet, the students having dispersed for the harvest, and their knock at Doctor Halse’s chambers was answered by a stooped, white-haired man whose eyes widened with recognition at the sight of Cecily.

“Mistress Thorne,” he said, ushering them inside with surprising alacrity. “I had not thought to see you again in this life. And you bring company.” His gaze swept Edmund with the appraising interest of a scholar encountering an unfamiliar text.

“Lord Ashworth, Earl of Morland,” Cecily said. “He serves the Queen in matters of some delicacy.”

Halse’s eyebrows rose. “Indeed. Then you had best come in and close the door, for delicate matters have a way of listening at keyholes in this town.”

The chamber was lined with bookshelves crammed with volumes in a dozen languages, and the air smelled of old paper, candle wax, and something faintly medicinal. Halse poured them wine from a dusty bottle and listened without interruption as Cecily recounted their discovery of the ledger, the name beneath the date, and the shadow of the Falcon that had dogged their steps.

When she finished, Halse set down his cup and folded his hands. “You ask me to identify the hand that wrote your name. I can tell you this: the paper you describe—heavy, with a watermark of a crowned rose—is manufactured in a mill outside Antwerp that supplies only three clients. The Spanish ambassador. The Papal nuncio. And a merchant house in Rouen that serves as a post office for certain… religious exiles.”

“Then the ledger came from abroad,” Edmund said.

“It came from the continent, yes, but it was annotated here. The ink is English—oak gall and copperas, mixed in a recipe common to the clerks of the Privy Council. Someone in London added your name to that list. Someone with access to the Council’s writing supplies.”

Edmund exchanged a glance with Cecily. “Phelippes again.”

“Or someone who wished to implicate Phelippes,” Halse said mildly. “The most elegant poison is the one that leaves a trail pointing elsewhere.”

The old scholar rose and moved to a shelf, withdrawing a slim volume bound in cracked leather. “I have kept a record of correspondents over the years. Names, dates, and the routes by which letters travel. If your Falcon flies between London and the coast, he must have a perch—a place where messages are left and collected. I believe I may know where that perch is.”

He opened the volume and traced a finger down a column of entries. “There is a house outside Newmarket, a hunting lodge owned by a family that has been absent from England these five years. The property is managed by a steward who corresponds regularly with Rouen. The steward’s name is Barrow. And Barrow, I have reason to believe, is not his true name.”

Edmund leaned forward. “What is his true name?”

Halse closed the book and looked at him with eyes that had seen too much to be surprised by anything. “That, my lord, is the question I have been asking myself for three years. The answer, I suspect, is the same answer you are seeking.”

He paused. “The man you call the Falcon was once known, in certain circles, as Thomas More’s ghost—a servant of the old faith who vanished after the Northern Rebellion. Some say he died at the block. Others say he simply changed his face and his name, and waited.”

“Waited for what?” Cecily asked.

Halse smiled thinly. “For the moment when England’s enemies would need him most. And that moment, I fear, is now at hand.”

Outside, the last light of day bled across the rooftops of Cambridge, and somewhere in the gathering dusk, Edmund fancied he heard the distant beat of wings.