Chapter 52: The Hour of the Unmade Bed

The Queen’s privy chamber at Whitehall was a furnace of silk and candlelight, the air thick with beeswax and the cloying scent of dried lavender strewn across the rushes. Edmund had been admitted on the strength of Walsingham’s signet ring—a thing he had borrowed without permission and would likely be flayed for—and now he stood in the antechamber, watching the last of Elizabeth’s ladies retreat into the inner rooms like hens fleeing a fox.

Cecily pressed close behind him, her breath warm against his collar. “You have the look of a man about to commit treason by accident.”

“That is my natural expression,” he murmured. “I have cultivated it for thirty years.”

The door to the presence chamber opened, and a slender figure emerged—Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, his cheeks flushed with wine and his doublet unlaced at the throat. He stopped short at the sight of Edmund, and his smile was a blade wrapped in velvet.

“Morland,” he said, drawing the name out like a slow poison. “I had heard you were in the country, composing lute songs for the sheep.”

“The sheep are an appreciative audience,” Edmund replied, “and they do not ask me to dance.”

Essex’s eyes flicked to Cecily, and something dark passed across his face. “Lady Thorne. I did not expect to find you in such company. Your late husband was a man of… action.”

“He was,” Cecily said evenly. “He died of it. I have since developed a preference for men who survive.”

Essex laughed, but it was a brittle sound. “The Queen is occupied. You will not see her tonight.”

“Then I shall wait,” Edmund said, and he let his body slump against the wall with such theatrical weariness that even Essex blinked. “I am very good at waiting. It is perhaps my only skill.”

Essex’s lip curled, and he swept past them without another word, his boots striking the floor like accusations. Edmund watched him go, and the lazy mask did not slip for an instant.

“He is afraid,” Cecily said quietly.

“He should be. He is standing in a room full of people who are all better at treachery than he is.”

They did not have to wait long. A lady-in-waiting appeared, her face unreadable, and gestured them forward. The privy chamber beyond was smaller than Edmund remembered, and the Queen sat before her mirror in a plain white shift, her hair unbound and silver-gilt in the candlelight. She looked older than her public portrait, but her eyes were as sharp as broken glass.

“My lord of Morland,” she said, without turning. “You have a talent for arriving at inconvenient hours with inconvenient truths.”

“Your Majesty,” he said, bowing low. “I would apologise, but I find that apologies are usually lies, and I am too tired to lie well.”

Elizabeth laughed—a short, crackling sound—and finally turned to face him. Her gaze swept over Cecily, and her brows rose a fraction. “The widow Thorne. I remember your husband. He was a tedious man, but loyal.”

“He was,” Cecily said. “I have since learned that loyalty and tedium are not the same thing.”

The Queen’s lips twitched. “You have a sharp tongue, Lady Thorne. It will serve you well or hang you.”

“I have been told the same of my wit, Majesty.”

Edmund stepped forward, drawing the Falcon’s ledger from his doublet. It was a slim thing, bound in cracked leather, and he laid it on the table before the Queen with the reverence of a man offering a relic.

“I found this in the possession of a man who has been following me,” he said. “He is called the Falcon. He kills people for a living. And he is answerable to someone who sleeps beside you.”

The Queen’s face went very still. “That is a grave accusation.”

“It is not an accusation, Majesty. It is a fact I have not yet fully deciphered. But the ledger contains names—names of men who have been paid, and men who are marked for death. My own name is in it, beneath the word ‘Armada.’ And the date is the twentieth of August.”

Elizabeth picked up the ledger and turned it over in her thin, ring-laden hands. “This is Walsingham’s work.”

“It is Walsingham’s method,” Edmund said. “But I do not believe it is Walsingham’s hand. The man who wrote this has been careful to copy the spymaster’s style. Too careful. It is the work of someone who knows him well.”

“You suspect Phelippes.”

Edmund said nothing, which was itself an answer.

The Queen set the ledger down and stared into the middle distance. “You are asking me to distrust the man who breaks the codes that keep me alive.”

“I am asking you to consider that the man who breaks the codes may also be the man who writes them,” Edmund said. “There is a difference, Majesty, between the lock and the key. And I have learned that the most dangerous traitor is the one who seems most indispensable.”

A long silence settled over the room. The candles guttered, and somewhere in the palace a clock began to strike the hour. Ten. The Queen should have been in bed by now, but she showed no sign of weariness.

“The Falcon,” she said at last. “What do you know of him?”

“He is tall, scarred, and disciplined,” Edmund said. “He speaks with a foreign accent that he tries to hide. He was trained abroad—perhaps in Spain, perhaps in the Low Countries. He does not act alone. And he is not the one who sleeps beside you.”

Elizabeth’s eyes narrowed. “Then who is?”

Edmund hesitated. He had a theory—a terrible, half-formed thing that had been growing in his mind since Cambridge, since the chapel, since the moment he had looked into his uncle’s dying eyes and seen the shape of a larger betrayal.

“I believe,” he said slowly, “that the one who sleeps beside you is a woman.”

The Queen’s hand went to her throat. “That is a dangerous thing to say.”

“It is a dangerous world, Majesty. And I have learned that the most dangerous weapons are often the ones we hold closest.”

Elizabeth stared at him for a long moment. Then she turned to Cecily. “You have been silent, Lady Thorne. What do you say?”

Cecily met the Queen’s gaze without flinching. “I say that my lord of Morland is the laziest man in England, and that he has spent the last three weeks running from one end of the country to the other, solving riddles that would break a lesser mind. I say that he is not a hero by choice, but he is a hero nonetheless. And I say that if you do not trust him, Majesty, you will have no one left to trust.”

The Queen was silent for a long moment. Then, slowly, she smiled—a thin, dangerous curve of the lips that reminded Edmund of a fox sizing up a henhouse.

“Very well,” she said. “I will hear your theory, my lord. But if you are wrong, I will have you flayed and your skin made into a lute case.”

“A fitting end,” Edmund said, “for a man who has spent his life composing songs he never finished.”

The Queen’s smile did not waver. “Then begin.”