Chapter 15: The Torn Hem

The message came in the hand of a kitchen boy, sealed inside a butter churn. Francis read it twice before burning it, and then he found her.

Margot was in the gallery, pretending to examine a tapestry of Mars and Venus. The irony was not lost on her when he approached and stood beside her, equally pretending, and said in a voice that would carry no further than the threads: "There's a man in the tiring room of the Queen's Chamber. Name of Renault. He intercepts correspondence for Alderton. By morning, Alderton will know Renault has been marked. If Renault attempts to leave through the gates, he'll be stopped."

She kept her eyes on the tapestry. "What time?"

"Two hours before dawn. There will be a man watching the gallery stairs, and another at the end of the privy gallery. The route goes through the servants' corridor behind the kitchens, up through the music room, and across the corridor above the Great Hall."

Margot finally turned, and for a moment they looked at each other with something like the thing that had almost happened three nights ago. The almost-kiss. The corridor near the chapel. He had stepped back instead of forward. The way she had let him.

Neither of them had spoken of it. Neither would.

"What happens to him?" she asked.

"A boat is waiting at the water gate. A name for the captain. And from there, Renault disappears."

The simplicity of it was elegant. The danger was enormous. If they were seen together moving through the corridors in the dead of night, if they were found with Renault, if anyone understood what they were doing—the Queen might protect Francis. But Margot would hang for treason.

"I'll bring the cloak with the torn hem," she said. "If anyone glimpses it, they'll think it's one of the ladies who walks at night. No one questions women's restlessness after bedtime."

Francis allowed himself a single nod. Then he stepped away from the tapestry and left her there.

The hours until two in the morning were long and sharp. Margot lay in her chamber in the darkness, listening to the other ladies breathe. She rose without a candle, dressed in the dark, the cloak with its deliberately torn hem folded against her chest. The palace was never fully asleep, but it dreamed. Guards paced in patterns set by years of routine. The night was alive with small sounds—the shift of old wood, the scrape of rats in the wainscoting, the wind pressing against the glass.

She found him in the alcove past the kitchens, where the scent of old cooking fires hung thick. He was a shape in the darkness. She knew him by the way he stood, the specific architecture of his shoulders.

"The guard at the gallery rotates in four minutes," she whispered. "We have the passage clear."

They moved. The darkness was nearly absolute, and they could not use torches. Margot followed the sound of his breathing, the faint scrape of his boot against stone. The servants' corridor was narrow enough that she could almost touch the walls on either side. The air was cold and smelled of onions.

The music room was darker than she expected—he was only a silhouette against the faint window, the night sky visible beyond. He paused there, checking the passageway that led to the gallery. She watched him listening. Waiting. She saw the moment he understood the space was clear.

"The corridor above the Great Hall is thirty paces," he said. His voice was lower than his whisper had been. "The watch changes in three minutes. We will not be seen if we move now."

They climbed the narrow stair. The wood was worn smooth by centuries of feet. At the top, the corridor opened, and for a moment they stood in a space where the darkness seemed to gather weight. Below them, the Great Hall slept like a cathedral. The windows were large and empty, the stars visible through them like something indifferent and eternal.

They had come more than halfway when he moved ahead to check the intersection—the corridor that led toward the privy lodgings. It was the place where guards made their rounds. He moved forward to look, and in that moment of looking, in that moment of his attention turned away from her, she heard something.

The almost-sound of a guard far away, perhaps one corridor over, perhaps the echo of boots on stone that might come toward them or might go away. She couldn't tell. The palace was full of these ambiguous sounds in the night—the movements of men doing their duty, following paths they had walked a thousand times.

She caught his sleeve.

He turned. The corridor was narrow. In his turning, she had not stepped back. He had not stepped back. The distance between them was nothing at all, and the sound that had made her stop him—it had gone. It had been nothing, or it had passed, and now there was only the dark and his shape and the fact that neither of them moved.

She could feel the heat of his body. It was a strange thing to feel, the heat, when everything else was cold and shadow. She was aware of her breath. The smallness of the space. The way the darkness pressed close, as if it were a third presence, a witness.

His hand rose. It came to the side of her jaw—the line from ear to chin—and his touch was warm where he was touching her, and cool everywhere else she was, and she stopped. She did not resume, and he understood something in that stillness, in that moment of her breath held, and he understood that she was not going to step back.

The kiss was not quite desperate and not quite planned. It was something formed in the space between two people who had already been too close for three days, who had not spoken of it, who would not speak of it now. His hand was on her jaw. She felt the pressure of it, warm and specific, and she tilted toward him—not much, barely, just the increment it took to make the kiss deepen from what it had been into what it was.

His other hand came to her waist, pulling her closer. She could feel the strength in him, held back, careful, as if he might break something if he let go of the care. Her own hands found his shoulders. The kiss deepened. There was his breath and her breath and the darkness pressing close and the absolute certain knowledge that they were doing this in the least safe place they could possibly do it, in a moment when any second might bring footsteps, when being found like this would mean both their deaths.

It was that danger that made it real. It was the danger that made her press against him, that made her want to crawl inside this moment and live there. The kiss was full and hot and the dark was full and the night was full and they were full of each other.

Then he broke it. The contact stopped. Both of them understood immediately—without words, without needing to look at a clock or listen for a sound—that this was the moment it had to end.

They separated.

He took her hand. They moved toward the corner where the corridor turned. Below them, the Great Hall breathed on, indifferent. Above them, the night sky held its stars. Behind them, the space where the kiss had been was already becoming a question, already becoming something they would not discuss.

The corridor that led to the tiring rooms was empty. The small window on the eastern wall was still dark—they had perhaps fifteen minutes before the sky began to shift toward dawn. Francis stopped at the fourth door and rapped twice, waited, then rapped three more times.

Renault opened it so quickly he must have been waiting on the other side. He was a thin man with the kind of face that made you not look at it, and he understood the situation immediately.

"The water gate," Francis said. "Captain Anghel. The boat leaves on the tide."

Renault nodded. He was already holding a small bundle—everything he would take from his life here. He stepped out and closed the door, and together, the three of them moved back through the corridors the way they had come.

No one stopped them. No one called out. The palace slept and dreamed and let them pass through its darkness like ghosts.

They reached the water gate, and Francis provided the name of a yeoman guard who could be trusted. Renault moved through the gate and down the slick stairs. The small boat was there, invisible until he was nearly to it—oars already in hand. The captain's name was Anghel, and he had been moving people across the river in the dead of night for longer than England had been Protestant.

"He goes to Calais?" Margot asked quietly.

"And from there, Paris. From there, Rome. From there, wherever an intelligent man with a gift for the hidden knowledge can sell what he knows."

They did not watch the boat disappear. They turned back to the palace, and they climbed the stairs in silence, and they moved through the corridors in silence, and when they reached the place where they had to separate—her toward the ladies' lodgings, him toward the state chambers—neither of them spoke.

He released her hand.

She took three steps. The corridor split before her: left toward the ladies' lodgings, toward the narrow bed and the sleeping women and the simple story she would have to tell herself about what this night had been. Right, where he stood. Where he had not yet moved.

She knew, with the specific clarity that comes only in the dark when one has been too close to a man for too long, exactly what she ought to do.

She did not move.