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  And what of Topcliffe’s belief that the Jesuit Robert Southwell was the killer? Yes, Southwell was a wanted man, perhaps the most hunted man in England, but did that make the priest a murderer? Perhaps Topcliffe had some information of which Shakespeare knew nothing.

  As he stepped into the tiltboat, the smell of the river was rank as the incoming currents pushed up shit and rotting animal bodies from Deptford, Greenwich, and beyond. But it was a good strong tide and it carried the boat speedily upriver on its swell toward Surrey and Barn Elms, country home of Sir Francis Walsingham.

  Dismissed in characteristic fashion by Walsingham as “my poor cottage,” Barn Elms was in fact a fine manor house on a bend of the river, with extensive acreage, both gardens and farmland. In summer the soaring hundred-foot elms that gave the estate its name shadowed the house in fair dappled light, but now they were leafless and dark and hung like black crows over the land. The stabling was remarkable; seventy good-quality horses boxed in fine brick-built quarters that a working man would not be ashamed to call home. Keeping the stables running smoothly was a full-time operation, with a master smithy and his apprentices working all hours to keep the horses shod, while servants fed, worked, and groomed them. There were ten or more permanent post riders, cantering day and night with messages to and from Westminster, London, Greenwich, and farther afield. This was the hub of Walsingham’s intelligence network, which stretched to every capital of Europe and even to the bazaars and seraglios of the Turk.

  By the time Walsingham received John Shakespeare in his office, he had already heard of the death of Lady Blanche Howard and had sent word by messenger to court so that her family, the Privy Council, and the Queen might know of the crime.

  Walsingham’s room was simple, with little furniture or ornamental plasterwork, reflecting his own austerity. This was a room for work and planning, full of books, letters, and vellum parchments in piles and on shelves. In these papers, he stored information from all corners of the world, even the Indies and the heart of the Spanish colonies. Walsingham was privy to it all; he knew what each piece of correspondence and document contained and where it was amid the seeming chaos. He had two large oak tables, one of which was covered with maps and charts, some of them plundered from Spanish ships, others made by his own cartographers. The other table was clear apart from his writing materials and quills.

  Walsingham, dressed as always in dark, sober clothing and the most modest of ruffs, sat stiffly, plagued by his back and his kidneys. He had a small silver cup at his side. He nodded at his chief intelligencer. “This is bad, John.”

  Shakespeare bowed low to him. He knew better than to ask after his master’s health or indulge in other pleasantries. Instead, he removed the paper from his doublet. “There is worse, Mr. Secretary.” He handed him the paper. “This.”

  Walsingham read the paper quickly, then looked up.

  “Does anyone else know of this?”

  “Not what it says, I think. The constable and bellman could not read. Topcliffe turned up; he had heard of it, but by then I had burned the others. I did not tell him of this.”

  “Why not, John?”

  “I considered it to be for your eyes only.”

  Walsingham looked gravely at Shakespeare. His dark, molten eyes could see into men’s secret corners. “Your cloak is muddy and your clothes torn. If you are not careful, you will be dressed as dully as me.”

  Shakespeare laughed at Walsingham’s typically self-deprecating humor. It was pointless dissembling; Mr. Secretary always knew everything. “I was pulled from my horse.”

  “By Topcliffe?”

  Shakespeare nodded.

  “There is bad blood between you, John. I won’t tolerate that. The farm that is riven will fall into disarray; its crops will fail and its beasts sicken and die. We fight a common enemy. With the Spaniard beating at our door, threatening us with her ships out of Lisbon and Parma’s armies out of the low country, we have no time to fight one another. England’s survival depends on our diligence.”

  “I know that …”

  “But you don’t like each other’s ways. Topcliffe thinks you weak. He doubts your commitment to the cause of Christ and England. You think him cruel. Well, I know he is wrong. I know that you are not weak, merely … earnest. But I say this to you, John: needs must in these times when we face a cruel enemy. Topcliffe is effective and the Queen honors and admires him and he will be allowed to go about his business in his own way. If you cross him, it will be at your peril. As for your man with the caliver, I think he has made an enemy for life.…”

  Shakespeare smiled almost imperceptibly. “I don’t think that will cause Boltfoot Cooper too many sleepless nights. A man who has gone around the world entire with Francis Drake and has fought and bested hunger, tempest, and the Spaniard is unlikely to fear the likes of Richard Topcliffe.”

  Walsingham’s voice did not rise, but the tone stiffened. “Perhaps not. But you will take care to obey my wishes. Answer me this, John: why do you think I chose you as my assistant secretary and chief intelligencer?”

  “Sometimes, I confess, I do wonder.”

  “I chose you, John, because I saw something of myself in you. Not that we are the same; you have less … rigor … in religious matters. But you are diligent, John; you are fiercely loyal. And, most important, you worry a lot. It is your anxiety—our anxiety—that leads us to take care of the detail of the work we do. And it is the detail that will achieve results. This is not a task for those who think to solve matters of state with an impassioned speech and a grand gesture. We must toil away in the dark like moles. Each inch of the way through the tunnel will be torment to you, John. If it is not, then I have greatly misjudged you. And remember this always: what we fight for is worth fighting for. The enemy would destroy everything we both believe in.”

  Shakespeare was left in no doubt as to the serious purpose of what the older man said. He bowed low once more to the Principal Secretary of State in acknowledgment. “I understand, Mr. Secretary. But I must protest that I have never disagreed with your methods. I realize that when the security of our sovereign and realm are at stake, extreme measures are necessary. And if that includes torment of the body to obtain information, then so be it. But I cannot stomach a man who breaks men—and women, at times—for the pure pleasure of it.”

  Walsingham silenced him with an angry wave of his hand. “Enough. I will hear no more concerning your feelings on the subject of Mr. Topcliffe.” He signaled for Shakespeare to sit and his voice eased. “There is more, John. I wish I had endless funds to hire an army of true Englishmen to fight this war of secrets, but these are straitened times and we must live within our means. You will continue your inquiries into the affair of Blanche Howard. I fear that far more is at stake here than the death of one woman. Discover her familiars. Had she turned Papist? Who has done this to her and why? What is the meaning of the text and who was behind it? Jesuits? Get Slide involved; use his network. He owes his neck to me and he’ll likely know who’s behind this. Find this Robert Southwell, too. He’s dangerous. Is he responsible for the death of Blanche Howard? I hear Topcliffe thinks so. It would not be the first time a Southwell helped do away with a Howard. Did not this Southwell’s father, Sir Richard, come forward as chief accuser against Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, and bring him to his death? There is no love between these families, John.”

  “But this is different.”

  “Is it? Let us find out, shall we? Within weeks, God willing, the Scots devil will lose her head and then we shall see a reaction. Then the powder will ignite. We must all be prepared. Every scrap of intelligence, every disloyal word in the ordinaries and inns of London and beyond, must be scrutinized. There must be no more attempts on the life of our sovereign Majesty.”

  Shakespeare felt his stomach knotting like cable around a capstan. At times it felt as if the whole future of Elizabeth and her subjects rested on his shoulders alone. How could he, one man, stand against the threat of
the so-called Enterprise of England—Philip of Spain’s growing armada of ships now being assembled with the aim of invasion of England and destruction of the Queen?

  The enemy was everywhere: London and the counties seemed to be awash with priests sent from the seminaries and colleges of Rome, Rheims, and Douai. Their aim? Sedition, insurrection, and the perversion of men’s souls. The common or garden priests were a poor lot. It was the Jesuits, disciplined and determined though few in number, who threatened the stability of the realm: the Devil’s army of the Counter-Reformation.

  “There is another matter, John,” Walsingham continued, his voice quiet, as if the walls would hear him. “The matter of Sir Francis Drake.”

  “What of him?”

  Walsingham sipped sweet Rhenish from his small silver cup. His face was half in shadow in this weak wintry light. There was a fire in the hearth, a single small log glowing without enthusiasm; it did little to dispel the chill. He rose and fetched a paper from a pile near one of the tables, and handed it to Shakespeare, who saw instantly that it was encrypted in a Spanish code.

  “Berden waylaid that in Paris. It was on its way from Mendoza to the Spanish King.”

  Shakespeare was aware that any communication between Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador to Paris, and King Philip was of extreme importance. No one had done more to undermine Elizabeth and the English state than Don Bernardino de Mendoza; he had been expelled from England three years earlier for his endless conspiracies, and even as he left under armed guard, he turned to one of the Council and taunted him that he would return as a conqueror. As for Berden, Shakespeare knew of him as one of Walsingham’s top intelligencers in the field. There would be no reason to doubt the authenticity of this intercept.

  “I assume you have had it deciphered?”

  “It is a subject close to your own heart, John. Phelippes has broken the code and finds this message: ‘The dragon slayer has been dispatched to England.’ It goes on to ask for funds of seventy thousand ducats to be made available in the event of a successful outcome. This note is a warrant for murder, John. It tells us an assassin has been sent to England to kill Drake. We have no way of knowing when he was sent, how long he has been here, or how far his plans are advanced. But there is no question as to the import of the message and the seriousness of the position.”

  Shakespeare nodded assent. He knew that Thomas Phelippes, Walsingham’s cipher expert, would not have made an error in discovering the meaning of such a paper. It was his breaking of the Queen of Scots’s intricate code that had convicted her of treason. And now, if this encoded message was to be believed, a killer had been contracted to murder Sir Francis Drake. All Spaniards feared Drake and called him “El Draque,” meaning Dragon. His title was Vice Admiral of England and yet his repute far exceeded mere titles. In a country of superb mariners—Walter Raleigh, Martin Frobisher, Thomas Cavendish, Humphrey Gilbert, Richard Grenville, John Hawkins, and Howard of Effingham—Drake was peerless. And he was driven by hatred of the Spanish. It was a loathing born of the cruelties meted out to his friends and comrades-at-arms long ago, in 1568, when they were taken by the Inquisition at the debacle of San Juan d’Ulua in the New World. The names of those men still gnawed at Drake’s soul, and he thought of them often: fellow Devonian Robert Barrett, burned to death in the auto-da-fé at Seville; William Orlando, dead in the same town while festering in a dungeon; Michael Morgan, tortured, whipped almost to death, then put to the oars as a galley slave; George Ribley of Gravesend, garroted and his body burned at the stake. This was what infused Drake with feral courage and kept hot his bitter enmity for the Spaniard. It was a hatred that was fueled by every Spanish outrage that occurred: the 1572 massacre of men, women, and children in the Dutch town of Naarden; the slaughter, rape, and sacking of Antwerp. These events seared themselves into Drake’s memory and kept his rage burning like molten iron. His enmity was returned in kind by King Philip II, who had long since decided Drake must die.

  All in England knew that no single man was more important than Drake to the survival of the realm. If anything could prevent an invasion by the rumored armada, it was the fighting skills and strategic brilliance of the Vice Admiral. During twenty years at sea, he had proved his courage and seacraft time and again, capturing scores of Spanish galleons and storming ports with irresistible ferocity.

  No one was in any doubt that Spain’s invasion fleet must be beaten at sea—for if it disgorged its battle-hardened troops on English soil, all would be lost.

  England’s land forces were woefully ill-prepared. They would be swept aside and slaughtered within days. And then the terror would begin: the dread Inquisition.

  Soon, villages, towns, and cities would be ablaze with the burning bodies of tens of thousands of Protestant “heretics.” No one would be safe from torture and execution.

  Shakespeare shuddered at the prospect. He knew what was at stake from his own experience.

  As a junior intelligencer in Walsingham’s service five years earlier, he had helped break another Spanish plot against Drake. The money on offer to kill him then was twenty thousand ducats. Shakespeare had worked to identify the conspirators. It was a simple and amateurish plot: Pedro de Zubiaur, the Spanish agent in London, had recruited a merchant named Patrick Mason to persuade an old enemy of Drake’s to kill him. This enemy was named John Doughty, the vengeful half-brother of Thomas Doughty, who had been executed before his very eyes by Drake on his round-world voyage. A little judicial torture and Mason had named names. As far as Shakespeare knew, Doughty was still rotting in the Marshalsea prison.

  And now King Philip was raising the stakes. Seventy thousand ducats would tempt desperate men.

  Walsingham continued: “Philip plods with feet of lead across the world’s great stage. It is easy to make merry at his expense when he complains like a girl child about Drake and Hawkins and the rest plundering his treasure. But though he plods, he does have weight behind him, thanks to his riches from the New World. And he can crush. I would say that, at sea, my good friend Drake is more likely to die of scurvy than fall to the sword or pistol of a hired killer, but now that he is on land, fitting and supplying the fleets in the reaches of the Thames, he is an easy target. In the shipyards by day he is vulnerable, John, and at court by night he can scarcely be safer. He’s in danger, just when we need him most. Santa Cruz, King Philip’s admiral, is like to sail with his fleet this spring or summer. My spies tell me he conspires to meet up with the Duke of Parma’s armies in the lowlands and carry and protect them as they cross the sea to England. With Drake out of the way, their passage would be a thousand times easier.”

  Shakespeare hesitated. Everything he knew of Drake by repute suggested he would not need anyone’s help to survive. He had been fighting and defeating Spanish fleets for nigh on twenty years now. “Surely Drake can look after himself,” he said at last.

  “Can he, John? At sea, yes, of course. But on land, in the teeming shipyards, full of foreigners of every hue and creed? Who will spot one man with an arquebus or crossbow among the hundreds at work? Drake needs protection—and you will provide it.”

  Shakespeare ran a finger around his ruff. He felt hot, despite the lack of warmth in this cheerless room. “And Lady Blanche Howard?”

  “And Lady Blanche. And all your other duties. We are all stretched like bowstrings. That is the way it is. Anyway, it seems to me you have the perfect servant to assign to Drake—your former sailor, Mr. Boltfoot Cooper. I believe he already knows Sir Francis rather well.”

  Shakespeare almost laughed. There was nothing to be gained from arguing. Walsingham must know that Boltfoot had parted on bad terms with Drake, having protested that he had been cheated of his fair share of the colossal plunder taken aboard the Golden Hind from the Spanish treasure ship Cacafuego. He had also said that after three years at sea in Drake’s company he would never board a ship again and certainly not one of Drake’s. No, Boltfoot would not be happy to be in the Dragon’s company once more.
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  Chapter 4

  NIGHT HAD COME AND GONE WHEN ROSE DOWNIE was startled awake. Topcliffe was standing over her, prodding at her with his blackthorn. She scrabbled to her feet, heart pounding. Her hands were stiff with cold, clutching the baby. The child chose that moment to wail; its piercing, monotonous cry, like the howl of a cat, sent shivers down her spine, but Topcliffe merely smiled.

  “Is it baptized in our church?” he asked, and touched its strange face, with its curious, un-human eyes.

  Rose Downie felt fear in her heart but she needed this man. Her friend had told her that he knew everything about everyone in the city, that he would help her as he had helped others, but that he would demand much in return. “My own baby was baptized, sir, by the Bishop of London himself, but this is not my baby.”

  “Then you have stolen this one.”

  “No, sir, mine has been stolen. This … creature … was left in its place.”

  “Let me see its face by the light.” Topcliffe bent down toward the face of the child in the gloom. He pulled back the swaddling bands from its head and looked intently at it. The child’s face was small and round, its eyes spaced widely. Too widely. There seemed to be no chin to speak of and the ears were curiously low. Any mother, Topcliffe thought, would want to disown such a thing. “Come in with me. My boy Nicholas tells me you have had a long vigil here. I’ll beat his arse raw for leaving you out in weather like this.”

  He pushed back the oak door to his home. Rose hesitated, fearing to enter. The hallway was lit by the flame from a candle, which cast strange shadows in the breeze from the open door. She stepped forward into the unholy gloom.

  On a dark-stained coffer lay a large gilt-bound book, which, though she could not read, she recognized as a Bible. Topcliffe took Rose Downie’s right hand from the baby and held it down hard on the book, as if to ensure there was solid contact. “Do you swear by Almighty God that the baby you are holding is not yours?”