Chapter One Blood and Pearls, or How It Began The last day of Shrovetide, a damp February in the year 1585, great Elizabeth's twenty-seventh year upon the throne. A small rain falling. A tender rain, veiling London's scars. The streets and lanes round St. Paul's throbbed with stiltwalkers and fire-swallowers and pancake sellers and herb women and ratcatchers, all frantic to snatch the last bit of pleasure and meat pie they'd get until Lent was over. A delirium of smellsroast goose, Shrove buns, early flowers brought in from the country, cinnamon and cloves in the spice merchants' barrels. Chimney smoke. Sour piss in the gutters.
Sounds, toodamp silk banners flapping from diamond-paned casements, chickens gaggling, dogs barking, a bookseller beating a thief. Street cries, high and low, overlapping each other in a sharp staccato. "Pails! Any pails to mend?" "Buy new broom, buy new broom, sweep and clean!" "Today's broadsides, master! Penny each, latest Irish atrocities!" And music, of course. There was always musicfragile, rowdy, bawdy, tender. Lute players and flute players and little boys with tin whistles. Whores young and old. Beggars. Dwarves.
Gypsies. Giants. Players in fusty wigs and cast-off velvets. Mummers in animal masks and bells on their shoes. In the middle of everything, a gang of apprentices pelting a huge wicker Jack o' Lent with squidgy handfuls of mud. I scanned the revellers and the market stalls, but aside from a long-faced Puritan or two, nobody looked like an assassin. Nobody ever does. A gingerbread seller dropped his tray with a curse and a clatter and I spun round, dagger drawn.
Gabriel's hand touched my arm. "Robbie? What?" "Nothing." The Angel of Panic passing over my house. "Bluddy holy war. 'Kill the heretic queen and earn a thousand extra years in bluddy heaven.' The pope's turned them all loose on us now." In half a dozen cities of France, Catholic seminarians were trained in the latest Italian poisons and the best way to lay an undetectable trail of gunpowder into a queen's bedchamber. Not counting the wax dolls with pins in them and the horoscopes with her birth hour smeared in blood, there had been, by my count, twenty-three serious attempts on Elizabeth's life since her excommunication.
Our master, Lord Secretary Burghley, had sent us out that day to prevent a twenty-fourth. I filched a sugarplum from a sweet stall and popped it into my mouth. Felt the smothering tightness begin to ebb away from my throat. I wonder, does poison soothe before it kills? Does it taste sweet on the tongue? "Our lady queen's past fifty," I told Gabriel. "An heir's out of the question, so the marriage game won't keep France and Spain at bay any longer. They want Mary of Scots on the throne and England back in their Catholic pockets. The rules have changed, that's all. It's a fear game now.
A death game." "So it's still about money." "Idiot. Everything's about money. Including sex and religion." We were fighting unofficial wars in half a dozen places and loyalties at court changed every time there was a royal patent or a monopoly to grab for. Of every three English, one was either an informer or a spy for whoever would pay most. For those in need of money, you spied to help them snatch it.
For those with the chinks in their pockets, you spied on the snatchers. For Burghley and the queen, you spied on everyone at once. Spiders, some called us. Intelligencers. Robert Mowbray is not my real name, as Gabriel North was not his, but they served us well enough. "Christ, I hate games," he said softly, and his grey eyes flickered and went out. We threaded our way deeper into the throng. The rain had stopped, and people climbed walls and scrambled onto slippery rooftops.