Chapter 7: The Lady in the Gallery

The evening feast was four hours away. The Queen would be in her private chambers for the next two. Margot had responsibilities: messages to carry to the Keeper of the Privy Chamber, correspondence to organize for the Secretary of State, a torn hem to have sent to the seamstress.

Four hours. Two of those would be occupied with duties. That left two hours for Margot to stand in her room and think about nothing useful.

Three hours later, as the evening feast was being laid out and she was assisting the Queen into her formal dinner gown, Margot noticed that her awareness of Lord Alderton's presence in the room had sharpened to something like pain.

It was not difficult to see what Francis had described. Alderton was standing with the other courtiers, his dark doublet neat, his posture correct. But there was a quality to his stillness that was different from the usual bearing of men who spent their days performing for the Queen. His jaw was set in a way that suggested he was holding something behind his teeth. When someone spoke to him, he replied with a beat too long of a delay, as though he had been listening to a conversation happening in another room.

Margot adjusted the lace at the Queen's collar and watched Alderton watch the people around him with the careful attention of a man who was beginning to understand that he had made a choice that could not be unmade.

The Queen turned to look at her in the mirror. "Your attention is elsewhere, Ashford. Where?"

"Forgive me, madam," Margot said, and she refocused on the task at hand, the Queen's golden hair, the arrangement of pearls at her throat. "I was thinking of the accounts for the new tapestries."

It was a reasonable lie. The Queen seemed satisfied with it. She turned back to her reflection and began to rehearse the expression of dignified attention that she would wear at dinner.

Margot did not think about the tapestries.

She thought about the precise location of the Crown and Rose in Fenchurch Street. She thought about the twenty minutes Alderton had spent there with a man she had not yet met. The pattern of changed behaviors held her next—the testing, the decision the French were making about whether he was worth keeping.

She thought about the fact that Francis had chosen this particular crowded moment, this particular press of people, to communicate something that could not go through any other channel. She thought about the quality of his attention when he was not looking at her. His hand on her arm through a single layer of linen—that thought refused to leave, useless and inconvenient.

She had work to do and a queen to serve and she should not be thinking about a spymaster's hand.

By the time she reached her chamber late that night, she had observed Alderton in three separate moments of unguarded tension. By the time she pulled her laces loose and sat down to write the preliminary report for Catherine, she had a page of notes, all of it useful, all of it urgent.

She did not write anything about the embrasure. She did not write anything about the procession, or the hand, or the twenty minutes she had stood in a window space with intelligence moving between them like water.

Some information was not meant to be written down.

She folded the report and sealed it. The candle had burned a third of the way down. Tomorrow she would watch Alderton again, and the day after, and by the third day she would have enough to send something definitive through Catherine. She had done harder work than this. She would do it cleanly.

There was a sound at the door: a paper slid beneath it. No knock. No footsteps retreating.

She crossed the room and picked it up. No seal. No signature. The hand was not one she recognized.

The lady in the upper gallery. Who sent her?