Chapter 70: The Ledger of the Sleeping Woman (II)

The inn at Plymouth was called the Anchor’s Rest, though Edmund had found precious little rest since taking its best room. The bed was adequate—good feathers, clean linen—but sleep had become a stranger who visited only when he stopped chasing her.

He sat at the small writing desk, the laundress’s ledger open before him. The woman’s name was not written there; that would have been too simple. Instead, there was a series of marks, a cipher of laundry days and garment counts that concealed a different arithmetic altogether.

Cecily entered without knocking, as had become her habit, and set a tray of bread and cheese beside his elbow.

“You have been staring at that page since the bells rang matins,” she said. “Your eyes will cross, and then where shall we be?”

“Crossed eyes might improve my aim with a lute,” Edmund murmured, not looking up. “But they will not tell me the name.”

She leaned over his shoulder, and he caught the scent of lavender and salt air. “The laundress said the woman who sleeps beside the Queen has a mark for her linens. A particular mark, because her sheets are changed twice daily.”

“Twice daily,” Edmund repeated. “The Queen herself changes but once. Who among her ladies would presume to require more attention than the sovereign?”

“Someone who sweats in fear,” Cecily said quietly. “Someone whose nights are troubled by what she knows.”

He turned the page. The laundress had been thorough, noting each of the Queen’s ladies by a symbol rather than a name—a prudent habit, given the dangers of committing such lists to paper. The symbols were simple: a rose for the Countess of Warwick, a key for Lady Stafford, a crescent moon for Lady Mary Sidney.

But one symbol recurred with alarming frequency in the margins, always beside the notation for twice-changed sheets, and always with a small cross drawn beneath it, as if in prayer.

A crown.

“A crown,” Edmund said slowly. “Which of the Queen’s ladies uses a crown for her mark?”

Cecily’s face had gone pale. “Only one. The Lady Blanche Parry. She has served Elizabeth since the Queen was a princess. She is the Keeper of the Queen’s Jewels and—more importantly—her chief lady of the bedchamber.”

“The woman who sleeps beside the Queen,” Edmund said, the words falling into place like the final pieces of a puzzle. “Literally. She has a chamber adjoining the Queen’s own, and she has held that position for thirty years.”

“She is the Queen’s most trusted servant,” Cecily protested. “Her mother’s cousin. Elizabeth calls her ‘my good Blanche.’ She would no more betray her sovereign than she would cut off her own hand.”

“Then why does her ledger mark show a crown?” Edmund tapped the page. “And why does she require fresh linens twice nightly, as though she cannot stop sweating through her sheets?”

Cecily was silent for a long moment. Then she said, very quietly, “Because she knows something. Something that terrifies her.”

Edmund rose and began to pace, the way he always did when his mind was working faster than his legs could carry him. “Blanche Parry has access to the Queen’s chambers at all hours. She knows every passage, every servant, every secret entrance. If she were in the pay of the Spanish—or of the Falcon’s master—she could deliver the Queen herself into their hands.”

“But she has been loyal for decades. Why would she turn now?”

“Fear,” Edmund said. “Or faith. The old faith, perhaps. Or—more likely—she has been compromised. There is a reason the Falcon’s ledger called her ‘the one who sleeps beside the Queen.’ She is not the traitor. She is the conduit, the vessel through which the traitor’s poison flows.”

Cecily’s eyes widened. “You think someone is using her. Someone who has access to her, who knows her secrets, who can bend her to their will.”

“I think,” Edmund said slowly, “that we have been looking at this wrongly. We assumed the woman beside the Queen was the traitor’s agent. But what if she is the traitor’s victim? What if she is being blackmailed, threatened, coerced into service?”

He stopped pacing and turned to face Cecily. “And who among the court would have the means to threaten a woman who has served Elizabeth for thirty years? Who would know the secrets she carries?”

Cecily’s voice was barely a whisper. “Someone who has been at court as long as she has. Someone who knows where the bodies are buried—literally.”

“Someone like the Earl of Leicester,” Edmund said. “Or the Earl of Essex. Or Sir Francis Walsingham himself.”

The name hung in the air between them like smoke from a fire that would not be contained.

“We cannot trust anyone,” Cecily said. “Not even the spymaster who recruited you.”

“Especially not him,” Edmund agreed. “Walsingham has his own arithmetic, and I have yet to discover where I fit into his sums. He may be using me as a blade to cut a throat he cannot reach himself—or as a shield to protect someone he holds dear.”

He looked at the ledger again, at the small crown symbol with its cross beneath. “We need to speak with Blanche Parry. But we cannot do it openly, or we will alert whoever holds her leash.”

“Then we do it at court,” Cecily said. “The Queen has summoned you back to London. We can arrive a day early, before the household expects us, and find a way to reach her.”

Edmund smiled, a thin expression that did not reach his eyes. “And there I was, hoping for a quiet week in Plymouth. Perhaps a nap on the beach. A spot of fishing.”

“You hate fishing.”

“I hate espionage more. But the fish will keep, and the kingdom will not.” He closed the ledger and tucked it into his doublet. “We leave within the hour. I shall compose a suitably pathetic letter to the Queen, pleading illness and a desire to die in my own bed rather than in some foreign ditch.”

“And when we arrive early?”

“Then we shall see what the Lady Blanche Parry has to tell us—and whether she is the spider or the fly.”

He paused at the door, looking back at Cecily. “You said once that you would hold me to my promises. I intend to keep that one. But if this goes badly, I want you to know that the past months, for all their danger, have been the first time I have felt truly awake.”

She met his gaze, and something passed between them that neither dared name. “Then stay awake a little longer, my lord. England has need of your wakefulness—and so, perhaps, do I.”

Outside, the harbour bells tolled again, and Edmund Ashworth, Earl of Morland, walked toward the waiting horses with the weight of a kingdom on his shoulders and the name of a sleeping woman burning in his mind.

The game was not yet finished. But the final move was approaching, and he intended to be the one to make it.