know they’d been infiltrated? That is what I need to know. What did you make of your trip to Southwark?’
‘I don’t understand why I was there.’ I jerked my thumb towards the door. ‘Why did you send him to search the place?’
‘Robin was determined to go, with my permission or without.’ Walsingham walked to the window and peered out over the street. ‘He came to me demanding I give him one of my men to help. Seemed convinced there must be something there to discover that would help him pin the blame. I thought it better to let him feel he was being useful, and I thought of you because you’ll have to get to know each other – you’ll be looking out for one another among the conspirators. And with a stranger his guard might have been down. One must always watch the watchers, eh, Bruno?’
I looked at his back as his meaning became clear. ‘You don’t suspect Poole? Of murdering his own sister?’
Walsingham turned, with a sombre smile. ‘Let us rather say, I hold no one above suspicion in anything. Every man has a price. Even Thomas. Isn’t that right, Thomas?’
‘I would have dispatched her more efficiently,’ Phelippes said, without looking up. There appeared to be no trace of irony in his words. ‘Not with that absurd spectacle. Besides, I was with you at Seething Lane that night.’
Walsingham winked at me, but I could only think of Frances Sidney’s remark that Phelippes had no more human feeling than a clockwork machine. There was something chilling about the man; I had no doubt that he could kill in the Queen’s service if the proposal made logical sense, and that he would plan it to the last detail with a total absence of conscience.
‘But you’re right, it would be a stretch to suspect Poole,’ Walsingham said. He looked even more exhausted than he had the day before. ‘How did he seem to you?’
‘Like a man fighting to remain master of his feelings,’ I said.
‘Which feelings, precisely?’
‘Guilt. Anger. Grief, obviously. I was praying he wouldn’t stumble on a severed ear – it was bad enough trying to reason away the bloodstains he found. He knows you have not told him the whole truth. You can’t seriously think he would have done anything so vicious? He clearly loved her.’
‘Oh, Robin loved Clara a great deal, no question,’ Walsingham said, wandering over to Phelippes’s desk. He let the statement hang, ripe with ambiguity. ‘And this?’ He picked up the locket, dangling it from the broken chain.
‘It was there for the finding. I’d be surprised if that was coincidence.’
‘Interesting. Who planted it, I wonder? Clara? Or her killer? And why?’ He pulled at his beard. ‘Is it a cipher, Thomas?’
Phelippes glanced up from the paper. He wore a pair of magnifying lenses fixed with a silver hinge over his nose; they made his eyes disturbingly fish-like. ‘It’s a series of symbols, very precisely drawn. But it doesn’t fit with any code I recognise from the Babington group. I will need to give it more study.’
‘Quick as you can. If it was meant to be found, someone wants us to read it. Perhaps the victim herself. And have the wine in that bottle tested, see if there is anything to be learned. As for you, Bruno,’ he clapped me on the shoulder, ‘I’m expecting news any day of our Spanish Jesuit’s arrival. Time for you to stop dancing around me like a coy maiden, who may or may not. Will you return to your squabbling undergraduates and a French knife in your back, or will you lend your considerable talents to protecting Queen Elizabeth and the freedom of England?’
He spoke as if he had never doubted my decision.
‘Poole says Ballard and Savage are dangerous fanatics.’
‘You knew that. They wish to assassinate the Queen. You saw what was done to Clara.’
‘They will cut my throat in a heartbeat if they suspect me. That would be no use to you. Or to me.’
‘But we shall make sure they won’t.’ He smiled. ‘Come, Bruno. You lived for two years at the French embassy, trusted associate of the ambassador, protégé of King Henri, all the while working for me and never suspected. You know how to play a part quite as if you were born to it.’
‘But I was at least playing a version of myself. And there were those who suspected my loyalty even then – they just couldn’t prove it. You want me to become someone else entirely – I have no experience of that. What if I should slip up, or be recognised?’
‘No experience?’ The smile grew wider, but there was warmth in it. ‘Philip Sidney told me you spent two years travelling through Italy under a false name after you abandoned the Dominican order without permission, with the Inquisition at your heels. You can become someone else when it suits you.’
‘That was ten years ago. I had a greater appetite for adventure then, and no choice about it.’
‘I don’t believe your craving for adventure has diminished since. Else you would not have caught a midnight boat from France to bring me Berden’s letter. As for choice …’ He laid a hand on my shoulder and the smile vanished. ‘Don’t you see, Bruno – you are the only one who can do this for us. The arrival of the Jesuit makes it the perfect opportunity. No one else has the ability to get inside Babington’s circle and make sure this conspiracy plays out as we need it to.’
‘I feel as if we are reliving history,’ I said, suddenly weary. ‘All this happened three years ago with Throckmorton and his plot.’
‘How do you think I feel?’ He threw his hands up with a mirthless laugh. ‘These plots repeat year after year, and they will keep coming, for as long as Mary Stuart lives to shout her claim to anyone who blames the government for his misfortune. The difference this time is that we have a real chance to cut off the source of them for good.’ He drew the edge of his hand across his throat. It was this, more than anything he said, that betrayed his desperation; Walsingham was not given to dramatic gestures.
I hesitated. That was my mistake. His eyes hardened; I had made him doubt my commitment, and he despised above all a man who wavered.
‘There is another consideration,’ he said. ‘Your friend Sophia Underhill.’
‘What of her?’ The immediacy of my response, and its defensiveness, were enough to show him that he had hit the mark.
‘When did you last see her?’
‘In the spring. I don’t remember. February or March, perhaps.’
March 17th; it was etched in my memory. She had told me she thought it best we did not meet any more. She worried about my reputation in Paris, and hers among the English Catholics there if she should be seen with me. She feared I hoped for too much from her. It was then that I had decided to go to Wittenberg.
‘Did you know she planned to return to England?’
‘She mentioned the possibility, though only as a plan for the distant future.’
‘She arrived in London in – when was it, Thomas?’
‘Third of May,’ Phelippes said, not troubling to look up.
‘May.’ Walsingham fixed me with a stern look. ‘Charles
