Chapter 44: The Beating of Hidden Wings

The room above the Cambridge tavern smelled of tallow and old secrets. Halse had retreated to a corner, his rheumy eyes fixed on the window as though he expected the Falcon to materialise from the dusk itself. Edmund did not sit. He stood with his back to the chimney, letting the last warmth of a dying fire seep into his bones, and wished, not for the first time, that he were anywhere else.

“Thomas More’s ghost,” Cecily repeated, tasting the words. She had not moved from her stool by the table, her hands folded in her lap with a composure Edmund had come to recognise as the calm before she struck. “That is a name I have not heard since I was a girl at my mother’s knee.”

“Then your mother knows more of him than most,” Halse said quietly. “Mistress Alice has long kept the company of those who remember the old faith’s martyrs. She would not speak of him lightly.”

Edmund turned. “You said he changed his face and name. How does a man do that in England, where every parish knows its own?”

Halse’s smile thinned further. “He does not do it in England, my lord. He does it in Rome, or Madrid, or Paris—wherever the seminaries train their priests and the exiles nurse their grudges. He returns when the time is right, with a new name and a new face, and no one is the wiser save those who sent him.”

“You know his new name,” Cecily said. It was not a question.

The old man was silent for a long moment. Outside, a cart rumbled over the cobbles, and somewhere a dog barked at the fading light. Halse reached into his doublet and drew out a folded scrap of paper, creased and yellowed with age. He held it for a moment, as though weighing its cost, then set it on the table between them.

“I was a clerk in the service of the Bishop of Winchester in ‘69,” he said. “After the Northern Rebellion, many of our number fled. Some went north to Scotland. Others took ship from the eastern ports. I was tasked with copying the names of those who had vanished—so that if they ever returned, we might know them.”

Edmund stepped closer, drawn despite himself. “And the Falcon’s name was among them?”

“Not the Falcon. He was not called that then, nor for many years after. But there was a man—a young gentleman of good family who had served the Duke of Norfolk’s household. When Norfolk fell, he swore he would see the Queen’s head on a pike and her kingdom given to Rome. He took ship from Harwich in the spring of ‘72.”

Cecily leaned forward. “What was his name?”

Halse’s eyes met hers. “In the ledger, he was recorded as Thomas Ashton. But the name he took in exile, the name whispered in the seminaries of Douai and Rheims, was Father Ambrose. He was ordained priest in ‘75, and sent back to England the following year.”

“A priest,” Edmund said slowly. “A man of God who shadows us through the Tower and sets fire to warehouses.”

“The most dangerous kind,” Halse replied. “For he believes he serves a higher cause than any earthly king. He will not be bought, and he will not be frightened. He has waited ten years for this moment—the moment when England’s enemies are ready to strike.”

Edmund picked up the scrap of paper. The ink had faded to a pale brown, but the name was still legible: *Thomas Ashton, late of Norfolk’s household, fled Harwich, April 1572.* Below it, in a different hand, someone had added a single word: *Ambrose.*

“Where is he now?” Edmund asked.

“I do not know,” Halse admitted. “But I know where he will be. There is a house outside Newmarket, a hunting lodge that once belonged to the Duke of Norfolk. It has stood empty since his execution, but I have heard whispers that it is used by those who carry letters between the seminaries and the Catholic gentry. If Father Ambrose is in England, he will pass through that house within the month.”

“Within the month,” Cecily said sharply. “We do not have a month. The Armada gathers even now, and the twentieth of August draws closer with every passing day.”

Halse spread his hands. “I am an old man, Lady Thorne. I can only tell you what I know. What you do with it is beyond my power to shape.”

Edmund folded the paper and tucked it into his doublet. He felt the weight of it against his chest, a new burden added to the many he already carried. He thought of his bed at Morland, of the long afternoons he had once devoted to sleep and music and the gentle art of doing nothing. Those days felt like another man’s life.

“We must ride for Newmarket tonight,” he said, surprising himself with the decisiveness in his voice. “If we wait, the trail will grow cold.”

Cecily rose, her eyes searching his face. “You are certain?”

“I am certain that I am tired, and hungry, and would rather be anywhere else in England than on the road to a dead duke’s hunting lodge in the dark.” He allowed himself a small, wry smile. “Which, I have learned, is invariably the moment when I am most needed.”

She did not smile back. “Then we should go. But I will send word to my mother first. If Father Ambrose is as dangerous as Halse suggests, she may know something more—some weakness we can use.”

Halse shook his head slowly. “Mistress Alice has her own battles, Lady Thorne. Do not drag her into this one.”

Cecily’s expression hardened. “She is already in it. She has been in it since the day she opened her blue door to us.”

The old man said nothing more. He watched them gather their cloaks and make for the door, and as Edmund reached for the latch, Halse spoke once more, his voice barely above a whisper.

“One thing more, my lord. Father Ambrose does not work alone. He has a servant—a woman, they say, who moves ahead of him and prepares the way. She is small and fair, and she sings like an angel.” He paused. “But she is no angel. She is the reason the Falcon always knows where his prey will be.”

Edmund felt a cold hand trace his spine. He thought of the blue door, of the widow who had warned them they were found, of the horse galloping toward a ship in the night. He thought of the list of names in the satchel, and of the Earl of Essex’s ambition burning like a candle in the dark.

“Thank you,” he said simply, and stepped out into the night.

The stars were beginning to appear overhead, scattered across a sky the colour of bruised plums. Somewhere beyond the rooftops, Edmund fancied he heard the distant beat of wings again—not the Falcon’s, but something older and more patient. The wings of a spider’s web, perhaps, or the slow turning of the Queen’s great wheel of fortune.

He did not look back. He had learned long ago that the past was a country best left unvisited, and the road to Newmarket stretched before him like a promise he had never wished to make.