Chapter 71: The Keeper of the Queen’s Chamber

The road from Plymouth to London was a ribbon of mud and memory, and Edmund Ashworth, Earl of Morland, spent the better part of it composing a lute piece in his head that he would never play, because his fingers were too cold and his mind too full of sleeping women.

Not in the way that phrase might entertain a tavern. The woman who slept beside the Queen—Blanche, the laundress had named her, a former maid who had vanished after Norfolk’s fall and risen through twenty years of patience to the royal bedchamber. A woman with a spider’s tenure and a ghost’s discretion. A woman who, if the ledger spoke true, had been waiting since before Edmund was born for a signal to open a door.

Cecily rode beside him, her hood drawn against the April drizzle. They had not spoken for three miles, which was its own kind of conversation. When she finally broke it, her voice was low and careful.

“You mean to ask the Queen’s maids.”

“Walsingham suggested it.”

“Walsingham suggested you might also walk into the Thames with stones in your pockets. He suggests many things.”

Edmund allowed himself a thin smile. “He does. But in this instance, the arithmetic is simple. Blanche serves in the privy chamber. The maids who attend Her Majesty know every face that passes through those doors. If Blanche has been placed there, someone placed her. And someone who placed her can be found.”

“And if she is merely a laundress who rose through merit and has no part in any of this?”

“Then I shall apologise handsomely and retreat to Morland to compose a sonnet on the perils of assuming the worst of honest women.”

Cecily’s mouth twitched. “You have never composed a sonnet in your life.”

“I have composed several. I simply slept through the writing of them.”

They arrived in London as the bells of St. Paul’s rang the hour of three, and Edmund went not to Whitehall but to the house of Lady Margaret, the Queen’s former gentlewoman, who had already provided him with details of Cold—the word trailing off in his memory like a half-remembered dream. Lady Margaret received him in a parlour that smelled of lavender and old secrets, her hands folded over a book of hours she did not open.

“You ask about Blanche,” she said, before he had finished the question. “I wondered when someone would.”

“You knew her.”

“I knew of her. She came to court in the year of the Northern Rebellion, recommended by a household in Norfolk that no longer exists. She was quiet. Devout, they said. She rose slowly—too slowly for ambition, too steadily for accident. And then, some five years past, she was given the Queen’s chamber.”

“Who gave her that place?”

Lady Margaret’s eyes were old and very clear. “The Earl of Leicester.”

Edmund felt the floor of his understanding tilt. Leicester. The Queen’s favourite. The man whose fleet was marked in the Falcon’s ledger, whose ships lay bound for Dutch ports with Spanish gold in their holds. The man who had been the first to whisper in Elizabeth’s ear for thirty years.

“Does the Queen know?”

“The Queen knows everything and nothing. She knows Blanche is faithful. She does not know to whom.”

Edmund rode to Whitehall with his heart beating a rhythm he did not like. The palace was a hive of preparation—the Armada was coming, everyone knew it now, and every corridor hummed with the business of war. He found Walsingham in his chamber, bent over a map of the Channel, Phelippes at his elbow.

“You have a name,” Walsingham said, without looking up.

“Blanche. Placed by Leicester.”

The spymaster’s pen stopped. Phelippes looked up sharply, and Edmund watched him—watched the flicker in his eyes, the way his hand moved an inch toward the papers on the table before he stilled it. The codebreaker. The man who could read any cipher but whose own face was a cipher Edmund had not yet cracked.

“Leicester is in the Low Countries,” Walsingham said slowly. “He has been for months.”

“And his ships are bound for Dutch ports with Spanish gold in their holds. The Falcon’s ledger said so. If Blanche is his creature, she has been in the Queen’s bedchamber for five years, listening to every secret, every plan, every fear.”

Walsingham set down his pen. “If you are right, we cannot move against her openly. She sleeps beside the Queen. One word, one gesture, and she could—”

“I know what she could do.” Edmund’s voice was flat. “I have spent months chasing shadows while the real blade sat at the Queen’s pillow. I will not spend another day in the dark.”

“What do you propose?”

Edmund looked at Phelippes, who had gone very still, and then at Walsingham, whose face was a study in exhausted calculation. “I propose to ask the Queen’s maids a question. A simple one. And I propose to watch who answers before I have finished asking.”

He went to the privy chamber at the hour when the Queen took her afternoon rest, when the maids moved softly and the candles were trimmed low. He did not go as the Earl of Morland, but as a messenger with a letter for Her Majesty, and he stood in the antechamber and watched them—the young women who moved like shadows, who knew every face and every secret, who had served Elizabeth since before the Armada was a whisper.

One of them, a girl with red hair and a Norfolk accent, glanced at him twice. The second time, she crossed to him.

“You are the Earl of Morland,” she said quietly. “Blanche spoke of you.”

Edmund’s blood went cold. “Did she.”

“She said you would come. She said—” The girl’s voice faltered. “She said to tell you that the twentieth of August is not the date of the Armada. It is the date of the Queen’s death.”

The words hung in the air like smoke. Edmund did not move. He did not breathe. Somewhere beyond the door, Elizabeth of England slept, and beside her bed, a woman with twenty years of patience was waiting for a signal that had already been given.

“Where is Blanche now?” he asked.

The girl’s eyes were wide and frightened. “She was summoned to the Queen’s bedside an hour ago. She has not come out.”

Edmund turned and ran.