Chapter 81: The Names of the Dead

The morning came grey and salt-scoured, the river running high with the night's rain. Edmund stood at the window of the Gravesend inn, watching the watermen bend to their oars, and thought of his father.

Cecily found him there an hour later, still in his travel-stained doublet, the paper in his hand creased soft as cloth. She did not speak. She set a cup of small beer beside him and waited.

"My father," Edmund said at last, "was not a traitor."

"I know."

"You do not know. You cannot. I did not." He turned the paper over. His father's hand, small and precise, the letters of a man who had been taught to write by monks in the old fashion. A list of eleven names, and beside each a place. Rye. Dover. Plymouth. A village in the Weald he had never heard of. And at the bottom, in different ink, a single line: *If these are read, I am dead, and the thing I guarded is loose.*

"He was Walsingham's man," Cecily said. It was not a question.

"He was Walsingham's man before Walsingham had a name for it. Thirty years ago, when the Queen was a princess under her sister's shadow, my father carried letters between her household and the reformed congregations in the Low Countries. He was good at it. He was so good that when the time came, they gave him the harder task."

"Which was?"

"To be a traitor." Edmund laughed, and the sound was not pleasant. "To seem one. To let himself be taken by the Spanish, to be rescued by them, to earn their trust over years. Phelippes had the ledger. My father's name entered it in 'sixty-nine, and again in 'seventy-two, and again in 'eighty. Each time, a payment to him from the Spanish treasury. Each time, a sum that went nowhere they could find. He was feeding them false names. He was the reason half their agents in England were caught before they could move."

"And the other half?"

"Were real, and he could not save them without breaking his cover." Edmund set the paper down. "He wrote this list in 'eighty-four. The year before he drowned. Eleven names of men who would light a signal when the Armada came. He must have learned them, and he must have known he could not send them by any channel the Spanish did not watch. So he kept them. And then they killed him, or he let them believe they had."

Cecily was quiet. Outside, a bell rang for the hour. "Blanche," she said. "The woman beside the Queen. Is she on this list?"

Edmund looked at the paper. "No. She is not. Which means she is someone else's. Someone who kept his own list."

"Essex."

"Or the Falcon's master. Or the Falcon himself, if the Falcon is not merely a servant." He folded the paper and put it inside his doublet, against his breast. "My father died to keep this list from the light. I will not let it burn unread."

They left the inn before the hour struck nine, taking the road that ran along the river toward the sea. The sky was low and the colour of pewter, and the wind had the taste of storm in it. Cecily rode beside him, her widow's black plain and serviceable, her hood drawn close. They spoke little. There was nothing to say that the road did not say for them.

At noon they came to a village called Higham, where a ferry crossed to the Essex shore. Edmund halted on the rise above the water and looked back the way they had come. The river bent and vanished into haze. Somewhere beyond that haze was London, and the Queen, and a bedchamber where a woman named Blanche had stood for twenty years and listened.

"We cannot reach Plymouth before the twentieth," Cecily said.

"No. But we can reach the men on this list before they light their fires."

"Eleven men, in eleven places, and four days."

"Not all eleven. My father marked three with a cross. Those are the ones who mattered. The others were noise, to confuse any who found the paper." He touched his breast. "The crosses are at Rye, at Dover, and at a place called Wittersham, in the marsh country. The Rye man is dead—we saw to that at the Vintner's. The Dover man is the one who set the scarred agent on us. Which leaves Wittersham."

"Who is he?"

"His name is John Awberry. He keeps an inn called the Chequers, and he has a nephew in the Spanish service. My father wrote a note beside his name: *knows the hour, not the day.* He will light his beacon when he is told, not before."

"Then we must reach him before he is told."

They took the ferry at Higham and rode east through the afternoon, into the flat country where the sea wind never ceased and the dykes ran straight as arrows. The land grew strange: wide skies, drowned fields, sheep standing knee-deep in water, and here and there a church tower rising from the marsh like a mast from a sunken ship. It was a country for secrets. A man could hide a fleet in these creeks and no one on the London road would ever know.

At dusk they came to Wittersham. The Chequers stood at the crossroads, its sign creaking in the wind, its windows lit. Edmund reined in a hundred yards short and sat looking at it.

"He will know me," he said. "My father's face is my face. If Awberry served the Spanish, he will have been shown a likeness."

"Then I will go."

"No."

"I am a widow in mourning, seeking shelter for the night. It is the plainest thing in the world." She dismounted before he could argue and handed him her reins. "Wait at the church. If I am not out by the second bell, ride for the coast and find the *Swiftsure*."

"Cecily—"

But she was already walking toward the door, her black skirts dragging in the mud, her head bowed, a woman with nothing to hide and nothing to fear. Edmund watched her go, and his hand went to the paper against his breast, and he thought: my father did this for thirty years. He wondered how a man bore it—the endless small betrayals, the face that was never quite one's own, the waiting.

He led the horses to the churchyard and tethered them among the yews. The church door was open. Inside, it was dark and cold and smelled of old stone. He sat in a pew and listened to the wind.

The second bell did not come. The first bell came and went, and then a long silence, and then a sound that was not a bell at all: a single shot, flat and distant, from the direction of the Chequers.

Edmund was on his feet before the echo died. He ran.

The inn door stood open. Inside, a lamp had been overturned and was guttering on the floor, and behind the trestle table a man lay on his back with his hands folded on his chest, as if he had lain down to sleep. He was old, and his face was peaceful, and a small hole showed just below his collarbone.

Cecily stood against the far wall. She was pale but steady. In her hand was a pistol she had not had when she left him.

"He knew you," she said. "He had your likeness in his purse. He said he had been waiting for the son to come. He said he would light no fire. And then he reached for the lamp, and I—" She stopped. "I did not know what he meant to do. I still do not."

Edmund knelt beside the body. He found the purse, and in it a folded paper, and on the paper a single line in a hand he did not know.

*The Falcon flies at dawn. The Queen's death is the signal. Let the ships come.*

He looked up at Cecily. "He was not going to light a beacon. He was going to light the Queen's death as the signal. And the Falcon is already flying."

Outside, the wind had shifted. It came now from the west, off the sea, and it carried the smell of rain and salt and something else—something like smoke, far off, where no smoke should be on a night like this.

"The twentieth is tomorrow," Cecily said.

Edmund rose. "Then we have until dawn."