Chapter 89: The Servant's Question

The Queen did not answer at once. She turned the lute over in her hands, tracing the rose in its belly with one long finger, and Edmund understood that she was deciding how much of herself to give him. The river slid past the window, grey as a knife, and somewhere beyond it the twentieth of August had already begun in the east.

"Ask," she said at last.

"Blanche," he said. "You summoned her to your bedside an hour before I reached the chamber. You knew she was false, and yet you kept her close. Why?"

Elizabeth set the lute aside. "Because a poisoner you can see is a poisoner you can watch. I have had twenty years of Blanche. Twenty years of a woman who mended my shifts and knew which of my ladies wept at night and which of my councillors lied about their debts. When she was summoned to my bedside, I let her come. I wanted to see her face when she understood I knew."

"And what did you see?"

"Nothing," the Queen said, and for the first time Edmund heard something like fear in her voice. "She poured my posset and smiled and asked after my headache, and I saw nothing at all. That is the woman you are hunting, my lord. She has no face you can read." She rose and went to the window. "Walsingham's men took her at the water-stair. She has not spoken. She will not speak. She has a daughter in the Low Countries, they tell me, and a brother in Seville, and she has been paid in promises for twenty years. I know her price. I do not know her master."

"That is why I came," Edmund said. "Your maids. All of them. I need to ask them one question, and I need them to answer separately, and I need them not to know the others have been asked."

Elizabeth looked at him sidelong. "You have a talent for this that troubles me."

"I have a talent for wanting to go home," he said. "It is the same thing, Your Majesty. A man who wishes to be abed will notice every reason he cannot be."

She laughed, once, without mirth. "Very well. You shall have them in the long gallery, one by one, and I shall be behind the arras, and God help you if you make a fool of me before my own women."

The first was the keeper of the linen, a woman of fifty who had served since Hatfield and answered every question with the flat patience of a stone. The second was the youngest, a girl of seventeen who wept and could not say why. The third was the one they called Mother Jane, who had been at court since Edmund was a boy and who looked at him as though she had known his father.

It was the fourth, a woman named Alice Grey, who gave him what he needed. She was plain, near forty, with hands red from years of soap and a way of holding her chin that suggested she had once been pretty and had learned to be useful instead. Edmund asked her the question.

"When Blanche was absent from the chamber—for a night, for a day, for a week—was there ever another woman who took her place at the Queen's bedside? Not a lady-in-waiting. A servant. A woman who was not supposed to be there."

Alice Grey's hands went still in her lap. "There was one," she said. "Four years past, when Blanche was sick with the ague. A woman came from the country, or so she said. She wore a plain gown and she knew the Queen's habits, which no stranger should have known. She warmed the Queen's shift before the fire and set the posset at the right hour and knew which side of the bed the Queen rises from. I thought she must have served in some great house. But when Blanche returned, the woman was gone, and no one spoke of her."

"Do you remember her face?"

"I remember her hands," Alice Grey said. "She had a burn on the back of her right hand, shaped like a crescent. I saw it when she poured the wine."

Edmund felt the room tilt very slightly, the way it did when a puzzle-piece slid home. He thanked her and let her go, and when the Queen came out from behind the arras her face was composed, but her eyes were not.

"A crescent burn," she said. "The Grey Lady at Plymouth had such a mark. Walsingham's report described it."

"Then the woman who served you four years past and the woman who waited at Plymouth for the Falcon's sign are the same," Edmund said. "And she is not Blanche's servant. She is her equal, or her better. Your Majesty, Blanche is not the master. She is the hand. The Grey Lady is the mind. And the mind has been sitting at your bedside, in your own chamber, under your own roof."

"Then why did she not kill me?" the Queen asked. "She had a hundred chances."

"Because they did not want you dead until the signal," Edmund said. "A dead queen in April is a Protestant martyr and a war in May. A dead queen on the twentieth of August, with the Armada at the Nore and Mary of Scotland on the throne—that is a different arithmetic entirely. They have been patient twenty years. They could be patient four more months."

Elizabeth sat down heavily, and for a moment she was not the Queen but an ageing woman in a room that had grown cold. "What will you do?"

"Gravesend," he said. "Phelippes gave me my father's name and I do not yet know what it means. But before I go, I need one thing from you. A warrant. Not to arrest. To hold. If I find the Grey Lady, I will not bring her to London. I will take her where no one can reach her, and I will ask her the question I have not yet asked."

"And what question is that?"

Edmund picked up his cloak. "The same one I asked Alice Grey. Who took her place when she was absent? Because whoever has been sitting at your bedside in her stead is the one who will light the signal tonight."

The Queen rose and went to her writing table, and her hand was steady as she took up the pen. Outside, the bells of St. Olave's began to ring the hour, and the sound carried across the water like a summons. Edmund counted them. Six. The twentieth of August was six hours old, and somewhere downriver a taper waited for the dark.