Chapter 69: The Bedchamber's Threshold

The morning air of Plymouth carried the salt of the harbour and the sharper tang of fish being unloaded at the quays. Edmund stood at the window of their lodgings, watching the masts sway against a pale sky, and considered the three names on the ledger with the same enthusiasm he might reserve for a toothache.

He had read them so often the ink had begun to blur before his eyes. Lady Margaret Howard, a widow of the old faith whose son had fled to France. The Countess of Arundel, locked in the Tower for her husband’s treason. And Mistress Anne Vavasour, once a Maid of Honour, now a woman of faded favour but undiminished ambition.

One of them slept beside the Queen. One of them carried secrets to the Falcon. One of them would see him dead if he knocked on the wrong door.

Cecily returned with bread and ale, setting the tray on the table with a decisive thump. She had changed into a plain grey gown, the kind that made her look like a merchant’s widow rather than a lady of intrigue, and her hair was tucked beneath a simple coif.

“You have been staring at that ledger for an hour,” she said. “I expected more progress.”

“Progress requires movement,” Edmund said, turning from the window. “Movement requires energy. Energy requires breakfast.”

He sat and tore a piece of bread, chewing slowly while Cecily took the chair opposite. She did not reach for the ledger, but her eyes flickered toward it, and he knew she had memorised the names as thoroughly as he had.

“Lady Margaret Howard,” Cecily said. “Her son fled after the Northern Rebellion. She has spent the last decade petitioning for his pardon. She is desperate.”

“Desperation makes for poor conspirators,” Edmund said. “They are too eager, too visible.”

“The Countess of Arundel is in the Tower.”

“Which makes her an unlikely bedfellow for the Queen,” Edmund agreed. “Though I have heard the Lieutenant of the Tower is not above allowing visitors.”

Cecily’s lips thinned. “And Anne Vavasour. She was dismissed from court after bearing the Earl of Oxford’s bastard. She has been fighting for her reputation ever since.”

“A woman who has lost everything has little to lose by betrayal,” Edmund said. “But she does not sleep beside the Queen. She is not even admitted to the Presence Chamber.”

“Then it is Lady Margaret.”

“Or it is a name we have not considered,” Edmund said. “The ledger was the Falcon’s. He may have written three names to mislead us, knowing we would find it.”

Cecily was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “There is another possibility.”

Edmund raised an eyebrow.

“The ledger says the woman sleeps beside the Queen,” Cecily said slowly. “But what if it does not mean the bedchamber? What if it means the Queen’s heart? A woman who holds her confidence, her ear, her trust. A woman who is always near.”

Edmund set down the bread. “You are thinking of someone specific.”

“I am thinking of Lady Mary Sidney,” Cecily said. “She was the Queen’s closest friend from childhood. She was at court when the Queen fell ill with smallpox, and she nursed her, and she took the pox herself and was scarred for life. The Queen has never forgotten that devotion. Mary Sidney is the only woman in England who may enter the Queen’s chamber at any hour without announcement.”

Edmund frowned. “But she is not on the ledger.”

“The Falcon may not have known her true name,” Cecily said. “Or he may have written the names of three women who are not the traitor, precisely because the traitor is so close to the Queen that no one would suspect her.”

Edmund considered this. The bread sat heavy in his stomach. “If Mary Sidney is the Falcon’s master, then the conspiracy reaches back to the very heart of the Queen’s childhood. To her earliest memories of trust.”

“Which makes it all the more devastating,” Cecily said. “And all the more plausible.”

There was a knock at the door. Edmund rose, and Cecily moved to the corner where her dagger lay hidden beneath a fold of cloth. But the voice that called through the wood was familiar.

“My lord,” said the messenger, “I have a letter from London. It bears the seal of Sir Francis Walsingham.”

Edmund opened the door. The messenger was a young man with a face red from riding, and he held out a leather satchel with trembling hands. Edmund took it, dismissed him with a coin, and closed the door.

Walsingham’s letter was brief, written in the spymaster’s cramped hand, and Edmund read it twice before he understood its import.

“Phelippes,” he said.

Cecily came to his shoulder. “What of him?”

“He has been arrested.” Edmund handed her the letter. “Walsingham found evidence that Phelippes had been selling decoded messages to the Spanish for over a year. He is in the Tower now, under interrogation.”

Cecily read the letter quickly, her eyes scanning the lines. “Then the Falcon’s master was not Phelippes.”

“No,” Edmund said. “Phelippes was a tool. A broken tool now, but the hand that wielded him is still hidden.”

He looked at the ledger on the bed, at the three names, and then at Cecily.

“We have been chasing the Falcon’s shadow for weeks,” he said. “Perhaps it is time we stopped chasing shadows and started chasing the woman who casts them.”

Cecily folded the letter. “Then we go to London.”

“We go to the Queen,” Edmund said. “And we ask her the one question no one has dared to ask: who sleeps beside her, and whose hand does she trust without thought?”

He felt the weight of the words as he spoke them. The twentieth of August was drawing closer, and somewhere in the Low Countries, iron was being forged into ships that would carry the Armada toward England’s shores.

“I need a horse,” Edmund said. “And a clean shirt.”

Cecily smiled, a thin and dangerous thing. “And a plan.”

“I have a plan,” Edmund said. “It involves asking the Queen a question she may not wish to answer.”

“That is not a plan,” Cecily said. “That is a death wish.”

Edmund reached for his cloak. “Then it is a plan in the finest tradition of my family. We Ashworths have always been magnificent at dying gracefully.”

He paused at the door. “But I would prefer, for once, to disappoint that tradition.”

Outside, the harbour bells began to toll the hour, and somewhere beyond the horizon, the Spanish fleet was gathering its strength. But Edmund Ashworth, Earl of Morland, did not look toward the sea. He looked toward London, and the woman who slept beside the Queen, and the question that would either save England or end him.

He would ask it regardless. After all, he had a nap to protect.