Chapter 6: The List of Names

The Earl of Morland did not go home to his bed. He went, instead, to the house of a widow, which was a great deal more dangerous than any Spanish spy.

Lady Cecily Thorne’s townhouse sat in a narrow lane off the Strand, its brick front unremarkable save for the single white rose carved above the door—a signal, Edmund had learned, that the lady was receiving callers of a particular sort. Not lovers, precisely. Information. Cecily Thorne collected secrets the way other women collected lace, and she had never once failed to pay her debts.

Edmund rapped twice, then once more, and the door swung open before the echo died. A serving girl with a face like a startled hare bobbed a curtsy and stepped aside.

“My lady said you would come, my lord. She’s in the solar.”

“Did she, now.” Edmund handed over his cloak, already regretting the climb. “And did she also say what hour I might be permitted to leave?”

The girl’s cheeks flushed. “She said you would ask that, too.”

The solar was warm despite the October chill, and Cecily Thorne sat in a high-backed chair beside the fire, a book open in her lap. She was not beautiful, not in the way of the court beauties with their painted faces and tower-high ruffs. Her hair was a plain, honest brown, threaded with grey; her nose was too sharp, her mouth too quick to quirk into mockery. But her eyes—grey as winter sea—saw everything, and Edmund had long ago stopped trying to hide from her.

“You look dreadful,” she said, without looking up from her book. “Sit down before you fall down.”

“I have been up all night,” he said, sinking into the chair across from her. “Walsingham’s doing. He has a new game, and I am the piece he’s moving.”

Cecily closed the book with a soft thump. “The cipher,” she said. “The one meant for Mary Stuart.”

Edmund blinked. “How in God’s name—?”

“You are not the only one who reads messages, my lord. I have my own sources. They told me a letter was intercepted at the palace of Westminster, addressed to the Scotch Queen at Chartley, and that it was written in a cipher so clever it took the spymaster’s best men a week to break. And now the Earl of Morland—the man who napped through the Parliament of 1584—is suddenly Walsingham’s favourite. The conclusion writes itself.”

He should have been angry. Instead, he felt a tired sort of admiration. “If you were a man, Lady Cecily, you would be a threat to the realm.”

“If I were a man, my lord, I would be bored to tears.” She leaned forward, and the firelight caught the lines at the corners of her eyes. “What was in the letter?”

Edmund hesitated. Walsingham had sworn him to silence, but Walsingham was not here, and Cecily Thorne had never once betrayed him. More than that—she was clever in ways he was not, and he had the sudden, unwelcome sense that he needed her.

“Names,” he said. “A list of men in England who have sworn to support the Spanish when the Armada comes. Catholics, mostly, but not all. Some are merchants, some are soldiers. One is a peer of the realm.”

Cecily’s expression did not change, but her fingers tightened on the spine of her book. “You know what this means.”

“That I am going to miss a great many naps,” Edmund said, and sighed. “Yes. Someone is preparing to light a beacon, and the names on that list are the ones who will carry the fire.”

She was quiet for a long moment. The fire crackled; outside, a cart rumbled over the cobbles. Then Cecily said, “You are going to have to find them.”

“Walsingham wants me to.”

“And you will.”

It was not a question. Edmund rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. “I am a lazy man, Cecily. I have spent my entire life perfecting the art of doing nothing. I do not investigate. I do not spy. I do not—”

“You do,” she said, and her voice was soft but certain. “You did it for me, when my husband died. You found the man who poisoned him, and you did it by sitting in taverns and listening, by being too idle to be noticed. You have a gift, Edmund. You see what other men overlook because you are never in a hurry to look anywhere else.”

He lowered his hands and stared at her. “You knew.”

“I have always known.” She smiled, a crooked, fond thing. “That is why I am going to help you.”

“No.” He shook his head. “This is too dangerous. If anyone learns you are involved—if anyone learns you are helping me—you will be drawn and quartered alongside the traitors.”

“Then we must make certain no one learns.” She rose from her chair and crossed to a small writing desk in the corner. “I have contacts, my lord. Recusant households that shelter priests, merchants who trade with the Low Countries, a serving girl in the household of the Earl of Arundel. If there is a list, there is a source. And if there is a source, there is a way to find it.”

Edmund watched her, feeling the familiar, unwelcome stir of curiosity. He had wanted to go home. He had wanted to sleep. But Cecily Thorne was offering him a thread, and he knew, with a certainty that made his stomach clench, that if he followed it, he would find a tapestry of treachery so vast it would swallow them all.

“What do you need?” he asked.

Cecily turned, a folded paper in her hand. “This. A letter from the Spanish ambassador, intercepted by a friend in Plymouth. It mentions a man called ‘the Vintner,’ who is to receive goods from a ship arriving at Rye in three weeks’ time. The goods are not wine.”

“Arms,” Edmund said.

“Arms,” she agreed. “If we can catch the Vintner, we can trace the list. And if we can trace the list, we can stop the beacon before it is lit.”

She held out the paper. Edmund took it, feeling the weight of it, the soft crackle of aged parchment. He thought of his bed at Morland House, the goose-down pillows, the heavy velvet curtains that kept out the morning light. He thought of his lute, untouched for a week, gathering dust.

Then he thought of the Queen, old and afraid, her fingers knotted around a cross as she listened to the death warrants read aloud.

“Rye,” he said, and stood. “Three weeks. I will need a horse, a good one, and a reason to be travelling.”

Cecily’s smile widened. “I thought you might. I have already sent word to my cousin in Sussex. She is a widow, like me, and she has a large estate with a hunting lodge that has been empty for years. You can stay there, and no one will think it strange.”

Edmund looked at her. “You planned this.”

“I planned for the possibility.” She stepped closer, and her hand brushed his sleeve, light as a falling leaf. “You are not the only one who sees shapes in the darkness, my lord. I have been waiting for you to walk into this trap for years.”

“It is not a trap,” he said.

“No,” she agreed. “It is a rescue. Yours. Now go.” She pressed the paper into his hand. “And for God’s sake, Edmund—try not to be so lazy that you let the realm burn.”

He laughed, a short, surprised sound, and for the first time in days, he felt something like hope. “I make no promises.”

“You never do,” she said, and turned back to the fire.

Edmund left the house with the letter folded inside his doublet, the weight of it warm against his chest. The street was quiet, the lamps unlit, the grey sky pressing down like a lid. He had three weeks to reach Rye, to find a man called the Vintner, to trace a thread through the labyrinth of Catholic plots and Spanish ambition.

He was tired. He was afraid. And somewhere beneath the exhaustion, beneath the dread, he felt the flicker of something he had not felt in years.

Curiosity.

He was going to miss his naps. But he was, he realised, no longer entirely certain he wanted them.