Chapter 83: The Tide at Gravesend

The Falcon’s ship was a hoy of forty tons, her timbers tarred black and her sails furled tight against the rain. She rode the ebb at anchor, her deck slanting as the water fell away, and Edmund climbed the ladder with his father’s paper held flat against his palm, the rain spotting the ink but not yet blurring it. Cecily came behind him, her hand on the rail, her knife where she could reach it.

The Falcon waited by the mast, a lantern hooked above him swinging with the ship’s slow turn. He was older than Edmund had expected—fifty at least, with a grey beard cropped close and eyes that had the flat patience of a man who had watched many men die and had not been moved by it. He wore no sword. That was the most frightening thing about him.

“You have a paper,” the Falcon said. “I have a name. Let us see which buys the other.”

“You offered me a bargain at the crimson door,” Edmund said. “I have come to hear it.”

“Not here.” The Falcon gestured to the low cabin aft. “Below. The tide runs out for another hour. After that we can sail or we can hang. I prefer to know which before I decide.”

The cabin smelled of pitch and old rope. A table was bolted to the deck, a chart upon it weighted at the corners with musket balls. The Falcon sat, and Edmund sat opposite him, and Cecily stood by the door with her back to the bulkhead, watching them both.

“Your father,” the Falcon said, “was not a traitor.”

Edmund said nothing.

“Thomas Ashworth served the old faith, yes. He served it in the way that a man serves a river—he did not command it, he was carried by it. When the Spanish took him from the wreck at Gravelines, they thought they had a peer of England in their hands. They found instead a man who wanted only to go home. They kept him nine years. In the ninth year, they asked him to write a letter. He wrote it. That letter is the one you hold.”

Edmund looked at the paper. His father’s hand—he knew it from the household accounts, from the marginalia in the family Bible. The letters slanted as if written in haste, or in pain.

“What does it say?”

“Read it,” the Falcon said. “You have carried it since Gravesend. You have not read it. Why?”

“Because I feared what it would make me do.”

“Then you are wiser than your father.” The Falcon leaned back. “Read it now. I will wait.”

Edmund unfolded the paper. The rain tapped the deck above. The lamp guttered. He read.

*To my son Edmund, if this reaches him: I am not what they have made me. I have set down here the names of those who took me, and the names of those who paid them, and the manner of the signal they mean to light. It is not a fire on a hill. It is a light in a window—the window of the house where the Queen sleeps at Greenwich. The woman called Blanche will set it. She has waited twenty years. She will not fail. I have written this in the ninth year of my captivity, and I do not know if I shall live to see you. If you read this, do not mourn me. Stop her. —Your father, Thomas Ashworth, who loved you.*

Edmund read it twice. The second time, his hands did not shake.

“The signal is not a beacon,” he said. “It is a candle in a window at Greenwich.”

“Yes.”

“And you have known this.”

“I have suspected it. I did not know the window. Your father knew the window. That is why I wanted the paper.”

“Then why did you not take it at Dover? You had me at the point of your knife.”

The Falcon’s mouth moved, not quite a smile. “Because I do not serve Spain,” he said. “I serve a man who serves Spain, and I have served him long enough to know that when he wins, I am the first loose end he will cut. Your father’s paper is my insurance. You are my insurance. The Queen’s death would make me a rich man for a month and a dead man for the rest of my life.”

Cecily spoke from the door. “Who is your master?”

“The one who sleeps beside the Queen,” the Falcon said. “You have heard the phrase. You do not know the man. He is not a lord. He is not a councillor. He is a groom of the stool, a keeper of the royal chamber, a man so close to her Majesty that he hands her her gloves and hears her prayers. His name is William Sly. He has served three queens and betrayed two. Blanche is his creature. The candle will be lit at his word.”

Edmund set the paper down. “Why tell me?”

“Because I have a ship and no crew I trust, and you have a Queen and no time. Greenwich is forty miles downriver. The tide will not serve you until noon. The twentieth is tomorrow. If you ride, you may reach Greenwich by nightfall. If you sail, you will be too late.”

“And you?”

“I will take my ship to the Nore and wait. If the Queen lives, I will bring you the names of every man who paid me. If she dies, I will be in Antwerp before the news is cold.” He stood. “That is the bargain. Take it or leave it.”

Edmund looked at Cecily. She gave him the smallest nod—the one she gave when the arithmetic was done and the answer was ugly but true.

“I will take it,” Edmund said. “But you will give me something first.”

“What?”

“Your name. The real one. So that when this is over, I know whose throat to find.”

The Falcon was silent a moment. Then he said, “Thomas Phelippes knows it. Ask him. He has been my shadow for ten years.” He opened the cabin door. The grey light of dawn filled the gap. “Now go. The horses are on the quay. The tide is running out.”

They went. The rain had stopped, and the river lay flat and pewter-coloured under the first light. A boy held two horses by the water stairs—not the ones they had ridden from London, but fresh, saddled, and stamped with a brand Edmund did not recognise.

“The Falcon’s?” Cecily asked.

“Or his master’s,” Edmund said. He swung into the saddle. His legs ached, his eyes burned, and somewhere behind his ribs a small, insistent voice was telling him that he had not slept in two days and that a bed existed somewhere in England with his name on it. He told the voice to be quiet.

They rode east along the river, past the Gravesend ferry and the rows of weatherboard houses, past the church where the bell was ringing for matins. The road was good and the horses were strong, and the miles fell away. At Dartford they changed mounts at an inn where the ostler knew Cecily’s face and asked no questions. At Erith the river bent north, and the masts of the Queen’s ships stood up against the sky like a forest stripped of leaves.

It was past noon when they came to Greenwich. The palace lay low and red-bricked beside the water, its windows catching the pale sun. A guard at the gate recognised Edmund’s seal and let them through. In the courtyard, a knot of servants stood talking in low voices. One of them—a girl with a linen cap—saw Cecily and went white.

“My lady,” the girl said. “You are come too late.”

Cecily’s hand went to her knife. “Too late for what?”

“The Queen,” the girl said. “She has taken to her bed. The physicians are with her. They say—” She stopped.

“Say what?” Edmund demanded.

“They say she has been poisoned.”

Edmund looked past the girl, up at the palace windows. One of them, on the second floor, facing the river, was lit with a single candle. It burned steady in the daylight, pale and small, and as he watched, a shadow passed behind it—a woman’s shape, moving with the patience of twenty years.

“Cecily,” he said. “The window.”

She followed his gaze. “Blanche.”

“Find Walsingham,” he said. “Tell him the Falcon’s name is in Phelippes’s keeping. I will go up.”

“Edmund—”

“If I am not down in an hour,” he said, “burn the palace.”

He did not wait for her answer. He went through the door, up the stairs, past the guards who did not stop him, and into the corridor where the candle burned in the window, and where the woman called Blanche was waiting with a taper in her hand and a smile on her face.