6.

YOU’RE A MOUNTAIN of a man, aren’t you, brother?

Belloc knew well (and accounted for in his planning) the necessarily circuitous route of intelligence: from an under-steward to a serving girl to a deliveryman to Gideon to Belloc: The doctor had begun regularly playing chess with James Stuart, nearly every day and sometimes more than once a day. It was the first good news in weeks, and Belloc slept well at last that night, and he dreamed of James’s mother, and he woke thinking again of nearly the last time he had seen her.

Mary had asked that the small room in Chartley Manor be emptied of everyone except for Geoffrey Belloc, who made her laugh, who made her feel safe by his size, who made her feel worthy by his Catholic piety, who made her feel well and lovely by his shy and adoring gaze. “You’re a mountain of a man, aren’t you, brother?” When she was satisfied they were alone, she took his giant hand in her tiny one. “Lean forward now, brother, and kiss my cheek.” Geoffrey did as the exiled, imprisoned Queen of Scotland asked. “Now you may touch my face. With both your hands.” Drawing him close enough to hear her quietest words, she told him to kiss her mouth and let his hands descend into the front of her dress and there find a treasure she had hidden just for him, this mountain of English boy who would do anything for Mary of Scotland or Mary of Nazareth, indistinguishable.

His fingers crept between the hard board of her dress front and the soft flesh of her breast until they touched a tiny folded square of paper, felt the unicorns on the seal that held the packet tight. “Your Majesty’s favors are within my grasp,” growled her favorite. She allowed herself the normal human joy of one more kiss, one more moment of his fingers’ stroll, and she shivered before shouting, “Off me, dog!” and swatting at her attacker’s face and shoulders. “Away from my sight at once!” Bowing low in apology, Geoffrey backed out of the room, and any of Elizabeth’s men who held Mary in house arrest at Chartley would have thought the Scottish harlot had decided to tease one of her followers from the sheer boredom of her endless predicament.

Belloc carried the letter to the kitchens. There, in one of the empty beer barrels awaiting return to the brewer’s for refilling, he pressed his thumb against the corner of a lightly stained section of a hoop and sprung open a small, dry space to wedge the paper. Mary’s correspondence would continue its journey: The barrel would go to the brewer’s; the letter would be retrieved by the brewer, who would see that it reached its intended recipient, Sir Anthony Babington, who would break its seal and decipher its contents. Only later did Geoff learn that in this particular letter, Mary encouraged Babington’s plan to coordinate an invasion of foreign Catholic powers with an uprising of Catholic Englishmen to support the assassination of Elizabeth and the placing of Mary on the English throne.

Geoff learned this because the brewer, too, was an agent of Francis Walsingham. Before delivering the sealed letter to a trusted messenger chosen by one of Mary’s English confederates, the brewer would hand it to Arthur Gregory, waiting patiently at his side in the brewery, sharpening and warming his blades. Gregory was one of the few men on earth who could undetectably break a seal. Having copied the enciphered letter and undetectably resealed it, he returned the original to the brewer, and Mary’s fatal letter continued on its intended path. The copy, meanwhile, was taken to Tom Phelippes, waiting at an inn less than a mile away, polishing his spectacles and studying his cipher sheets. He would decode it, having easily broken Mary’s system weeks before, and send the deciphered plain text on to Walsingham in London by fast rider. The principal secretary would be reading Mary’s letter before it even reached the doomed Anthony Babington, and nearly before Geoff was back in Chartley Manor, gazing like a boy at the splendid beauties of the Scottish queen.

The last time he saw Mary the Queen, she looked him in the eye not sixty seconds before her head was cut from her in a single swing. She did not look like the embodiment of evil. The sight of Geoff in the gallery below her caused her lips to stop shaking for a moment, surprise taking command, for an instant, of fear and sadness, and Geoff recalled the feeling of those lips against his own, and the flesh of her breasts against the backs of his fingers, before he could remind himself of the murders she had gleefully assented to.