Chapter 84: The Taper and the Tide

The corridor was narrow and smelled of tallow and old stone, the kind of passage servants used when they wished not to be seen. Blanche stood at its end, the taper in her hand sending her shadow long and thin across the wall, and she did not run. That was the first thing Edmund noticed. A woman with twenty years of patience does not run when the hour of her labour arrives.

“My lord of Morland,” she said. “You are earlier than I expected.”

“I am later than I wished,” Edmund said. “I had a nap to protect.”

Her smile did not waver. She was perhaps fifty, grey at the temples, with the soft hands of a woman who had spent her life folding linen and warming a queen’s shift before a fire. “You are not what they say you are.”

“They say I am lazy. They are correct. It is the only honest reputation at court.”

“You are clever,” she said. “That is the lie. You pretend to be a fool, and the fools believe you, and the clever ones believe you, and so you walk through walls.”

Edmund took a step closer. The taper’s flame guttered. “The twentieth of August,” he said. “You were summoned to her bedside an hour ago. Why?”

“To attend her,” Blanche said simply. “I have attended her for twenty years. I know the way she takes her wine, the way she turns in her sleep, the way her breath catches when the wind changes. I know the hour she wakes and the hour she sleeps and the hour in between, when she is neither.”

“And in that hour?”

“In that hour,” Blanche said, “a door is left unbarred. A candle is set in a window. A rider goes south. It is a small thing, my lord. It does not look like murder. It looks like a servant doing her duty.”

Edmund’s hand found the wall. The stone was cold. “You are the one who sleeps beside the Queen.”

“I am the one who wakes beside her,” Blanche said. “There is a difference. The Falcon understands it. You do not.”

“The Falcon is dead,” Edmund said. “I left him in the fog at Plymouth.”

“You left a man in a grey cloak,” Blanche said. “The Falcon is not a man. The Falcon is a name that passes from hand to hand, like a cup at table. The man in the cloak was merely the cup.”

The taper dipped. Wax ran down her fingers, and she did not flinch. Edmund thought of Cecily, of the hour he had promised her, of the river at Gravesend and the signal fire that had not yet been lit. He had come up these stairs to find a traitor and instead found a woman who had spent two decades learning the geography of a queen’s body, the better to betray it.

“Why?” he asked. “Twenty years. She trusted you.”

“She trusted a girl who came to her after Norfolk fell,” Blanche said. “That girl had a mother in the north and a brother in the seminary at Douai. The girl was told her mother would be cared for if she served. Then the girl became a woman, and the woman was told her brother would be cared for if she served. Then the brother died, and the woman was told her soul would be cared for if she served. There is always something, my lord. That is how they keep you. They find the thing you love and they hold it over the fire.”

“And now?”

“Now there is nothing left to hold,” Blanche said. “So I will do what I have always done. I will attend her.”

Edmund heard it then—the sound beneath the words, the thing she was not saying. He looked past her, down the corridor, to the door at its end. The door that led to the Queen’s privy chamber. The door that was, by every rule of the household, barred and guarded.

It stood ajar.

“You have already set the candle,” he said.

Blanche inclined her head. “The candle is set. The rider is gone. The signal will be lit at Plymouth by dawn, and the Armada will come, and the Queen will not wake to see it.”

Edmund moved. He did not think about it; his body, which had spent years perfecting the art of doing nothing, chose this moment to do something. He took the taper from her hand, pinched the flame between his fingers, and felt the burn flash up his arm. Then he was past her, through the door, into the chamber where the Queen of England slept.

The room was warm. A fire burned low in the grate. The bed was vast, hung with cloth of gold, and in it Elizabeth lay on her side, her face turned toward the wall, her breathing slow and even. A cup of wine stood on the table beside the bed, half-drunk. A single candle burned in the window, its light a small yellow eye looking out over the river.

Edmund crossed to the bed. He did not know what he expected to find—a pillow over her face, a dagger, a vial of something bitter. What he found was nothing. The Queen slept. Her hand lay open on the coverlet, the fingers curled as if around a pen. She looked old in the candlelight, older than her years, and smaller than the throne she sat upon.

He touched her shoulder. “Your Majesty.”

She did not stir.

He shook her, gently at first, then harder. “Your Majesty. Wake.”

Her eyes opened. They were dark and lucid and entirely awake, and they fixed on his face with the terrible clarity of a woman who had never in her life been surprised by anything except the occasional kindness of men.

“Morland,” she said. “You are in my bedchamber.”

“I am, Your Majesty.”

“You smell of smoke and river water.”

“I have been busy.”

She sat up. The coverlet fell away, and she was dressed, fully dressed, in a plain gown of dark wool, as if she had never intended to sleep at all. “Blanche,” she said. It was not a question.

“She set the candle,” Edmund said. “She says the signal will be lit at Plymouth by dawn.”

Elizabeth looked past him, to the window, to the small flame burning there. Her face did not change. “I know,” she said. “I have known for three days.”

Edmund stared at her. “You knew?”

“I am not a fool, Morland, whatever my councillors believe. I have slept with that woman at my back for twenty years. Did you think I did not notice when she began to pray in Latin?” She swung her legs over the side of the bed. “I let her set the candle. I let her send the rider. I wanted to see who would come running.”

“You used yourself as bait.”

“I used the only thing I have,” Elizabeth said. “My life. It is the one coin my enemies will always accept.” She stood. She was shorter than he remembered, and fiercer. “You came running, Morland. That is something. Walsingham said you would. He said you were the only man at court too lazy to be ambitious and too clever to be honest, and that you would do the right thing simply because it was less trouble than the alternative.”

“Walsingham is a slanderer.”

“Walsingham is a spymaster. It is the same thing.” She crossed to the window and looked out at the candle. “The signal will be lit at Plymouth. We cannot stop that now. But we can make certain that when the Armada comes, it finds a queen who is awake.” She turned back to him. “You have a ship at Gravesend. You have a widow who is cleverer than you are. You have a codebreaker who may or may not be a traitor. And you have until dawn.”

Edmund looked at the Queen, at the candle in the window, at the door where Blanche still stood, her hands folded, her face unreadable.

“Your Majesty,” he said, “I have a request.”

“Name it.”

“When this is over,” Edmund said, “I would like to sleep for a week.”

Elizabeth smiled. It was not a kind smile. “If this is over,” she said, “you may sleep for a year.”