Shadow of the Axe (The Queen's Intelligencer Book 1) Read online

  For a moment Elizabeth knew indeed what Richard II must have felt like, confronted by Bolingbroke and the end of his reign. And in two weeks’ time it would be three hundred years since Bolingbroke’s coronation as Henry IV. Dethronement suddenly seemed more than probable. It seemed imminent. A simply terrifying prospect; more so even than death.

  But then, a blessed light of recognition caused the scales of fear to fall from her eyes as though she were St Paul on the road to Damascus. She drew breath to call the interloper by name, for beneath the filth she thought she could still see the wilful boy she had spoiled and indulged ever since he first came to court and refused to take his hat off to her. But immediately Cecil and the Council’s warnings stopped her. Robert Devereux was supposed to be in Ireland, not in Nonsuch. And if he was here, could he have brought that enormous army with him? The Council had half convinced her that Essex was impatient enough, arrogant enough, ambitious enough to reach for the throne himself. Was there in fact an Irish army surrounding the palace? Were Southampton’s troops occupying London? Was Captain of the Guard Raleigh dead or imprisoned and the Council slaughtered or helpless? Were her protectors, friends and advisors lost? Was she, too, after all, lost?

  There was only one way to find out. She sat up straighter. Squared her shoulders. ‘My Lord of Essex,’ she said, pleased to find that her voice was steady and her tone as commanding as ever. ‘What make you here?’

  The stupid, filthy boy gaped around the room as though this were some play of tragedy and revenge and he was being addressed by a spectre rather than his sovereign. The Queen pulled herself onto her feet and one of her quicker-thinking handmaidens draped a robe over her shoulders. Her movement caught his eye and the robe seemed to be a revelation to him. ‘Majesty!’ he said, his voice full of wonder. He fell to his knees in front of her, only thinking to swing the long blade of his rapier back at the last moment. He tore off his gauntlets. Dropped them on the floor. ‘Majesty.’

  Without thinking she extended her hand to him. He had grasped it in both of his and begun to kiss it before she realised how much like a raven’s claw it looked without its usual shield of jewel-encrusted rings. And that realisation brought home to her with stunning force, the fact that the rest of her was equally unmasked. Effectively naked. Only the most loyal of her handmaidens, Ladies of the Bedchamber like Audrey Walsingham, had seen her in this state for years past – as she stood now, unclothed, unadorned. Her face was still bare of its layers of paint and powder and her precious wig lay elsewhere. Even if Essex had come about some other business than her immediate removal from the throne, he must be thinking about the succession most urgently now - confronted as he was with her frailty and all-too obvious mortality.

  But then she drew herself up, thinking, as she had said eleven years ago at Tilbury with the first Armada bearing down upon her ill-prepared country, that if her body was weak, as it most assuredly had become, she nevertheless still possessed the heart and stomach of a king.

  ‘You, sirrah, should be in Ireland,’ she snapped. ‘With your huge and ruinously expensive army. From whence you were most strictly forbidden to return until our business there was well and truly done. Have you brought me the Earl of Tyrone’s head? Or have you come hither that I might box your ears again?’

  ‘Majesty,’ he said once more, and launched into some self-serving gibberish about how he had achieved great victory in Ireland by simply talking to the traitorous rebel Earl of Tyrone. A meeting she already knew about – Cecil had informed her as his spies had informed him. But she let Essex run on while her own mind raced. However he had managed to reach her bedroom unannounced, his behaviour and his garbled words made it obvious to her that he came as supplicant not would-be successor. Her next move seemed quite clear. She had to get him out of here while she got dressed and prepared to face him as a queen. Ideally in company with her Council, preferably also under the protection of Raleigh and his guards. She began to berate herself for her initial fears. Every report that had reached her from Ireland via Cecil and his network of intelligencers, made it clear that, despite his one great success at Cadiz three years ago, Essex could hardly have organised a successful masque let alone an effective coup.

  ‘Of course, My Lord,’ she said softly, placatingly. ‘We will discuss all this at length and in detail. But not here. Not now. Let me complete my preparations for the day and we will discuss your concerns with my Council and you may have every hope that we will listen indulgently and act supportively. Take the opportunity to wash and change, to break your fast, perhaps, and we will meet again by noon, I promise.’

  *

  Cecil’s occasional eyes and ears in the Queen’s most private chambers belonged to Lady Jane Percy, granddaughter of Anne Boleyn’s first suitor the Earl of Northumberland and his wife Lady Mary, daughter to the Earl of Shrewsbury; both long-deceased. The current Earl maintained the family tradition of constant plotting against the powers in the south. At the moment, the main focus of the Percys’ mistrust was the Earl of Essex, because, on the one hand, they inclined towards Hugh O’Neill the Earl of Tyrone’s militant Catholicism, as many of the older families did, for their religion like their land-holdings, went back to the days of the Conqueror. And on the other hand they were concerned that Robert Devereux was plotting either to take the throne into his own fiercely Protestant grasp or facilitating King James of Scotland’s equally Protestant pretentions toward the succession. The second was a more worrying prospect, given James’ oft-proclaimed plans to clear all the most troublesome families out of the Scottish Borders – dangerous enough in a king of Scotland but potentially fatal in a king who ruled both Scotland and England and could therefore clear troublemakers out of both sides of the border. But all of this was balanced by one simple fact. The Earl of Northumberland was married to Essex’s sister Dorothy Devereux.

  Lady Jane, known to one and all as ‘Janet’ as a result of her slight figure and gentle disposition, had arrived in the court as a hostage to keep her wild northern relatives in order, but had stayed because the Queen took a liking to her sweet, open, eternally cheerful disposition. Which suited Janet very well, as she secretly maintained her family’s fierce northern loyalties and was happy, therefore to pass secrets occasionally to Cecil – usually, as now, via his chief intelligencer Robert Poley, for whom she was developing a decided weakness. One which – although she did not know it – he was beginning to reciprocate.

  ‘He strode into the bedroom as though he were king already,’ Lady Janet was saying, he tones ringing with outrage. ‘Covered in filth and still bearing arms! How in the name of all that’s holy did Sir Walter let him pass?’

  ‘A terrible oversight, Lady Janet. I’m sure Master Secretary will take it up with the Captain of the Guard; though Nonsuch is not so heavily manned as the other palaces. Even so, such dereliction cannot pass unnoticed.’ Poley was the very essence of courteous concern. ‘But My Lord of Essex burst in all filthy and still armed, you say?’

  ‘Aye,’ said Lady Janet. ‘And he’s been Esquire of the Body Extraordinary into the bargain. He should never…’

  ‘But if we may proceed, Lady Janet. My Lord of Essex entered the Royal Presence. What then?’

  Janet Percy described the horrific details of the incredible encounter and Poley noted them in his capacious memory, all the while maintaining his façade of shock. ‘But then,’ he prompted after a while, ‘After the Earl retired from the Royal Presence. What thoughts did Her Majesty voice that you might properly recount to me for the notice of Master Secretary and, mayhap, the Council?’

  ‘She sent word to Master Secretary and to the Captain of the Guard and received replies almost at once – that the Earl was attended by no more than half a dozen men; that there was no army at the gate, that there was less than a regiment with Southampton in London. That there was nothing immediate to fear.’ Lady Janet paused.

  ‘And then, my lady?’ prompted Poley gently.

  ‘And then her disposition m
oved as you might expect, from disquiet to outrage. “I will find a way to box his ears for this,” she said. “He will find he is not so easily forgiven this time.” Just as any woman might who had been so abused. To be revealed in her shift. In her shift. To a man who is neither husband or lover! And she a queen to be treated like some drudge or slattern, visited will-she or nill-she. She will never forgive him such a slight. She will punish him, oh she will punish him I swear it.’

  ‘And this rage, the outrage, does it surpass the measure? Will she lose her composure when she sees him? I understand they are to meet soon, more properly and formally. Will she really box his ears again?’

  ‘I think not,’ said Lady Janet. ‘But with Her Majesty you can never be quite certain…’

  *

  Henry Cuffe stood stripped to the waist, in a room full of filthy, stinking, half-naked men. He did not find the experience entirely unpleasant. The rest were all soldiers and used to this kind of thing. He, as an austere academic, was not, but he felt the manly comradeship it could engender. And he approved it, even though this was not a large room and seven men almost crowded it, especially given that palace servants were bustling to and fro bringing more hot water from the kitchens and cloths to wipe away the mud as well as thicker cloths to wipe the clean skin and hair dry.

  The Earl had arrived last having come from his conference with the queen, and was most fully attended. As well as a bevy of palace servants, he brought some Castile soap, which he swore he had taken in the sack of Cadiz, and he used the fragrant white bar to cleanse his hair and beard. Fresh clothes were being laid out for him in the room he usually slept in when attending the Queen here with the rest of the Council, though his companions would have to fend for themselves. But Essex was the sort of leader who was happy to muck in with his men. Though, Cuffe noted, none of the others got offered any soap, nor private rooms or new raiment.

  But it was hard to be vexed with the Earl. He was at his most cheerful and charming, bubbling with the heady excitement that comes with deeply-felt relief. It was almost as though he had cheated death in some great battle. Cuffe had not seen him so ebullient in many a long day. ‘She forgave my intrusion at once,’ Essex was saying to anyone who wanted to listen – though Cuffe calculated he was really talking to himself – to reassure himself. ‘She was most gracious and loving,’ Essex continued blithely, his face white with lather. ‘I said I had suffered much hardship and storms abroad but now I have found myself in safe haven. At which she was very kind and said I had come to safety at last indeed. Concerned that I had got begrimed on my journey hither, Through these hardships and storms as she said, she bade me wash and change! As though she would be mother to me. She has most courteously agreed to see me in her Privy Chamber when we are both properly attired but I am certain she means no harm to me or to my suit!’

  ‘But what of the Council?’ asked Gelly Martin guardedly, lowering his voice, even though the last of the palace servants had left them all alone, their absence freeing his tongue. ‘What of Raleigh and Cecil? They do not wish to mother you, my Lord. They wish to break your influence and see you thrown down. Remember, they are each most anxious to ensure they remain in power whoever succeeds to the throne in due time. And they understand all too well that if it is you who holds supremacy, then it certainly will not be them.’

  ‘I do not fear them!’ said Essex. ‘Let Cecil send his slavish messages to King James in Edinburgh, either under his own seal or that of Thomas Walsingham his acolyte. Who sends his wife the Lady Audrey as his spy and courier I hear! But His Majesty King James is a man who regards men. He does not wish to consort with women or grovelling, twisted toad-eaters. Especially not like Cecil the Toad who also courts the Infanta and is in the pay of Spain. Oh, I have the measure of the Scottish king. He had his tutor George Buchanan, the greatest mind in Scotland, who died seventeen years ago this very day, to teach him love of learning which he has never yet forgot. And I have my Henry Cuffe do I not? A mind to match Buchanan’s and entertain the king with the most abstruse of arguments! The way to King James’s heart is not through the back door of secret spycraft but in the open, matching his passions man to man. And as for Raleigh, he stands torn between his whores Arabella Stuart and the Spanish Infanta. They will never get the strength to succeed! In any case we are done with women on the throne. Whereas I have…’

  Essex stopped mid-sentence, his face folding into a frown. Cuffe turned, abruptly aware of a subtle change in the room. A sudden chill. He followed his master’s gaze and there in the doorway stood a familiar figure, framed against the shadows of the corridor behind him.

  ‘Grey!’ said Essex as though spitting something foul out of his mouth. ‘What does your twisted master want of me?’

  ‘Not Master Secretary, my Lord, but my Queen. She has honoured me with a message to be carried to you.’

  ‘And that message is? The burden, quickly man! I grow cold here!’

  ‘That Her Majesty confirms will see you at noon, my Lord. Alone. She will await you in the Privy Chamber. At noon.’ Grey paused, his cold gaze sweeping over his erstwhile companions. Then he turned and was gone.

  *

  ‘She will see him at noon,’ said Cecil to Raleigh. ‘In the Privy Chamber. Alone.’

  Raleigh was far too quick-thinking to echo that most dangerous word alone. ‘Then I will have the Presence Chamber cleared of suitors and pack it with my guards.’

  ‘No. I think your men would be better employed following my men up to London. Some of your men at least. Following some of my men. We need to achieve several things before dinner at three. We need to have summoned several more members of the Privy Council. An invitation I fear they will only answer if they believe they may come to Nonsuch in safety. Therefore we need to know with some exactness how many of Essex’s men are with Southampton in the City, whether more men have been summoned from the Earl’s Irish army and if so how many and when they might be expected. All the while making sure that nothing occurs here to disturb the Earl’s apparent cheerful certainty that all is well and he stands already forgiven.’

  ‘He believes that, does he?’ Raleigh’s eyebrows rose up his high forehead. ‘How do you know?’ The quick, intelligent blue eyes gleamed in that long, weathered face. Raleigh threw his head back in a characteristic gesture that emphasised at once his height, impatience and arrogance. His beard gleaned with golden threads in the sunlight and seemed to curl as though it had life of its own.

  Cecil inclined his head towards the third man sitting silently in the room. ‘Ah,’ said Raleigh. ‘I might have known. How do you know, Poley?’

  ‘The Earl rarely lowers his voice,’ answered the intelligencer quietly. ‘Especially when he is surrounded by his close companions and particularly when he is cheery or excited. He was both when he came down from Her Majesty’s bedchamber and joined his men in the wash-room. I caused the servants to be obvious when making their exit and waited just outside the door. He was extremely cheerful, even when my Lord Grey was kind enough to pass Master Secretary’s message to him. As I lingered in the shadows without. Unobserved.’

  ‘He’ll be cheery because he was still able to walk, I should imagine,’ said Raleigh shortly. ‘Not having been arrested, chained, crippled or killed outright by my guards. Very well.’ He turned back to Cecil. ‘So I must choose my most reliable men and put them astride the swiftest horses available then send them to discover the size of Southampton’s force and so-forth as you describe. I will also summon my guards from the Palace of Whitehall to make assurance double-sure. And in the mean time?’

  ‘I will advise Her Majesty that the surest way forward at the moment is for her to continue to placate the Earl in their noon-day meeting. My men will ensure nothing untoward occurs…’ he glanced at Poley then turned back to the Captain of the Guard. ‘Then, when the wisest heads in the Council have been assembled, we will allow the tone of the encounter to change during the evening. To become, shall we say, more realistic, given
the nature of the Earl’s failures and offences. But even so, I think a summons to the guards at Whitehall is taking things a little far. Essex only has six companions after all.’

  Walter Raleigh stood. He was tall, lean, still strong after an active life of forty-five years so far, handsome and possessed of that magnetism which the Earl of Essex shared in some measure. The exact opposite of Robert Cecil. The way he looked down at the Secretary emphasised all of this. That gleaming, fashionably heavy, beard almost concealed the slightest of sneers. ‘You may feel responsible for the protection of Her Majesty’s realms,’ he said. ‘But it is I who must guard Her Majesty’s person.’

  He stalked out of the room, his footsteps ringing in the passageway outside. After a moment, Cecil glanced towards Poley once more. The intelligencer stood up and walked silently to the door. His shadow loomed out into the passage moments before he reached the doorway. Suddenly more, quieter, footsteps could be heard walking rapidly away. Poley reached the doorway and glanced out. Sir Walter vanished into a side-corridor. Other than that, the passage was empty. ‘Do you think we should close it, Poley?’ asked Cecil quietly.

  ‘No, My Lord. If you wish to discuss anything sensitive it would be better if we were sure whether or not there was anyone out there. The only way to be more certain is to have a musician play such instruments as drown out the human voice, such as are used in this and many other courts where secrets are exchanged by word-of-mouth.’

  ‘Well, today has been quite busy enough without summoning a consort of viols into the bargain. I am minded to destroy both of those men.’

  Poley waited silently, coming to terms with the abrupt change of subject. Then he queried, ‘Destroy them both, my Lord?’

  ‘Both. Eventually. But we will begin with the Earl of Essex.’