“The Queen sends permission that you should be permitted to walk our grounds.”
She is pleased but will not show it.
“Your grounds? Why, Sir George, I shall scarcely set off before I shall need to turn about.”
“The Queen has given permission for you to take your hawk to the park.”
Now she cocks her head. This is news indeed.
“My hawk? In the park?”
Shrewsbury smiles.
“Today,” he says. “This very afternoon.”
It is no better a pastime than pleasuring herself, she thinks to say, but holds her tongue.
* * *
She is in grosgrain and linen, for it is an oppressively warm day, and she rides on an elegant roan, with red leather saddle and reins. She carries her hawk in its polished leather hood, and Sir George is at her side, though a little behind, as befits his rank. He concentrates on the greenery of the oaks and the elms that fill the far end of his park, perhaps five hundred paces away, whence he supposes the birds will come. The tip of his tongue is very pink between his bearded lips, but he probably has no idea what he looks like. He and Bess of Hardwick? She doubts it.
But she is not interested in birds. She is tensed for something else, and she believes the hawk, a merlin, senses her tension unlike the other men, especially not the pathetic little huntsman who is so eager to please. He hops from foot to foot, trying not to point out the various birds that are even now scattering for their lives. Her hawk’s leather-helmeted head turns this way and that, this way and that. It might almost twist off, she thinks, and for a moment she is seized by the idea of grabbing it in her fist and doing just that. Its head would fill her palm as a satisfying ball. Imagine Sir George’s face!
They ride up onto a ridge like a causeway above the river. The sky is filled with alarm calls and fleeing birds.
“Sir?”
It is the huntsman, following along with all the guards, twenty paces behind. Sir George quiets him with a glare. They all know the hawk should have long ago been set at the birds. Why does she delay?
“Your bird is disposed?” Sir George asks.
She does not answer. Why should she? Why should she tell him she is not in search of any old prey?
At last they come to a promontory overlooking a fat bend in the river, beyond which are thick woods. There is, by now, not a bird in the sky and it seems to all as if she wishes it so. She reins in her horse to stand still and allows it to crop the grass. She is deliberate and slow, almost as if she is putting herself on show. She waits for a long moment and then removes the hawk’s cap.
Instantly the hawk becomes another being.
Its eyes permit no secrets.
It turns its head like the mechanical devices Mary used to see in Paris. This way, that. Now that she can see its eyes, she does not wish to pull its head off. She wishes to let it fly, to give it freedom, just as she wishes it for herself.
Up it goes, to become a distant dot in the sky and there is always the fear that it will never return. And just when she can hardly see it, from the fringes of the wood beyond the river’s bank, comes a fluttering pale bird. A pigeon? A dove! It seems not to have seen the hawk. But the hawk sees it. It returns in screaming vengeful fury, descending with unnatural speed, and then—pluff!—the dove is hit as by a bullet.
Sir George makes a noise of admiration.
The two birds tumble to the ground. The dogs are into the water. The merlin perches above the dove and rips at its breast. The merlin departs from its prey only reluctantly, but one of the dogs retrieves the dove and brings it back in its jaws. The hawk meanwhile returns to Mary’s glove. She replaces its hood and strokes its bloodied chest. The dog drops the dove at the huntsman’s feet.
The huntsman looks puzzled.
“A dove,” he says, as in Where did it come from?
“Bring it to me,” Mary says.
The huntsman picks the bird up by its wingtip and brings it to her with a bow. She grips it in her gloved right hand. Under its feathers it is no more substantial than a mouse. The hawk arches toward it. She takes it away. The dove’s eyeballs are burst, and there is a wound in the feathers from which spring scraps of pink flesh. She taunts the hawk with it. The hawk might bate at any moment, but it does not. She can sense the discomfort of Sir George and the other men, of Margaret, too, and does not care.
She can see it: a tiny ring of mottled silk, wrapped around the dove’s ugly foot.
She turns away, and cuts the silk band with the edge of her ring, and then folds it between her fingers. The she turns back and tosses aside the dove.
“Sir George, I am tired,” she says. “Have your man take my bird.”
The outing is over.
* * *
Back in her room, she dismisses Margaret.
“Be gone from my sight. I will call if I need you.”
Alone, Mary unwinds the silk ring. Within, she finds a folded piece of paper. She lays it next to the ewer, before the mirror. It is blank. Under her bed is her night pot, empty and washed. She crouches over it and urinates. With a puddle of piss in its bottom, she brings it to the table and holds Margaret’s stitching into it for a moment. She cares not that Margaret will find her work stained and pungent. She lifts the stitching out, shakes the excess on the floor, and then places it on the table. She flattens the paper against the piss-soaked thread; the heat of the fresh urine works without her having to breathe on it, and the cipher emerges.
Her eyes are bad. It takes her a moment to read in the mirror the tiny numbers etched onto the scrap of paper, which she copies to another paper.
She rolls the first scrap into a ball the size of a dried pea and puts it in her mouth. Her urine—tinged very slightly purple—is royal urine. She chews once and swallows. The tiny scrap of silk follows the paper.
When this is done, she returns the pot to its place under the bed, and returns the mirror and Margaret’s stitching too. Then she reaches for her Bible. With a pin she pricks out the words. It takes a long time, flipping to and fro, backward and forward. Kings, Judges, Leviticus. Verses 12, 18, 36, 4. With each number the word changes in relation to the word indicated. Before the bell rings the hour, though, she has the message.
She sits back in the window seat, Bible at her side, and she stares through the old glass at the wavering image of the castle’s courtyard. She does not smile, but she breathes quickly, as if panicked. She knows it is hope that kills a prisoner. The hope of freedom, and the hope of triumph. She looks at the little pinpricked piece of paper.
This gives her hope.
Her friends give her hope.
She wishes one or two of them were with her now, so that she might share the news: They have it. They have the very thing for which her cousin of England most hoped, and the very thing her cousin of Spain will make most use of. And all because of that silly bitch Isobel Cochet and the love the woman bears for her whining daughter.
This, Mary thinks, will change everything.
But she will have to bide her time. She will have to be patient.
She chews and swallows the paper.
“Margaret,” she calls, returning to lie on her bed.
* * *
Later that night, in the darkness, she hears Margaret breathing in her sleep. Mary thinks of James Hepburn, and the way he kept that silver membrum virile on his belt, and she wonders again where he got it from, and who made it, and how much it cost him. She thinks about how many women he had used it on, because you don’t just keep a thing such as that about your person, and not make use of it, do you? She wonders: Where is it now? And then: Where did it come from?