The Virgin's Spy (Tudor Legacy #2)(50)
“What if Stephen gets into trouble?” Elizabeth fingered her long string of pearls, letting each smooth oval slip through her touch as though it were a rosary.
“Then he will get himself out of it. He is very resourceful, Your Majesty. And committed. Though not perhaps in quite the way he wants us to believe.”
Elizabeth’s hands stilled. “If you are about to tell me that you think Stephen Courtenay will turn against England, then I shall have to remove you as my Secretary of State since clearly you will have lost your mind. Didn’t we have this discussion when he was assigned to Mary Stuart at Tutbury? Where Stephen behaved with perfect correctness in our cause.”
Walsingham, characteristically, took his time answering. It was one of the qualities she most appreciated in her spymaster—his thoughtfulness. That didn’t mean he always gave her the answers she wanted. Which, when she was honest with herself, was the other quality she appreciated.
“Stephen Courtenay is a young man of principle,” Walsingham agreed. “Most of those I work with are more…predictable in their motivations. A man who can be bought—I know where I stand with such a man, and precisely how far I can trust him. I do not know young Courtenay’s limits, and that makes me uneasy. Particularly when we are talking about leaving him undercover for an extended period of time.”
Elizabeth began to pace, her wide skirts brushing the bare brick floor. There was not even a rug, and she made a note to herself to speak sharply to someone about that. “How long do you think?”
“At minimum, through the summer. Perhaps longer. It will take time for him to find his feet among the Kavanaughs. There is no point inserting him there if we are not willing to be patient to see if it pays off. We set up some things with the Earl of Ormond for early summer—English forays that Stephen can share with the Irish. Ormond is agreed with the necessity of losing some land and cattle—hopefully no lives—as the price for future intelligence from Stephen.”
“This had better work, Walsingham,” Elizabeth warned once more. “Last time Stephen was in Ireland, he came back bloodied and near broken. Minuette may say she does not blame me, but if worse happens to her son in my service? I do not wish to bear her that message.”
“Stephen is more canny and careful than I think you recognize, Your Majesty.”
And something in Walsingham’s tone as he said it alerted Elizabeth. “And that is why you are wary—you’re afraid of what he might do on his own.”
“My lot in life,” Walsingham agreed wryly. “For twenty years and more I’ve been afraid of what you might do on your own. It’s why I fuss so much.”
“Like I do with Anabel? I suppose none of us is free from the impulse to control and worry. For now, let us focus on France and Scotland. There is quite enough to fuss about this next month without adding in things beyond our immediate control.”
Wise words—and Elizabeth didn’t believe them in the slightest. She was queen. Everything should be in her immediate control.
Ailis Kavanaugh was not a woman lightly given to trusting any man—and Englishmen not at all. She had learned that lesson in the hardest way possible twelve years ago in Kilmallock. That said, as the days of his imprisonment at Cahir Castle grew to weeks, she watched Stephen Wyatt thoughtfully.
He was generally patient, and when he lost patience at his confined situation, he was neither cruel nor harsh. He seemed to grasp the necessity of being locked up. He answered the questions put to him with only the slight hesitations that might be expected of any man unsure of his future in enemy hands.
Most intriguingly of all, he spoke Gaelic.
Not fluently, by any means, but in a lifetime of rubbing up against the English in Ireland, Ailis had found few not born here who troubled. It made sense if you were an Anglo-Norman lord like Ormond or Desmond to learn the language of the estates you ruled—but Stephen was not one of those. When asked why he’d bothered, Stephen had said simply, “It seemed only fair. We expect travelers to France or Spain to speak the language—or at least Latin as a last resort. Why not Ireland?”
“Because England does not consider us a separate nation. We are their vassals, and as such our language is inferior.”
“I thought, Hibernia Hibernescit.”
Ireland makes all things Irish. “Where did you hear that?” she asked suspiciously. He’d been here just short of a month now, and they had progressed to the point where she would visit with him seated in the chamber poor Father Byrne had sacrificed to the prisoner, with the door open and guards within sound of her voice. She was not afraid of Stephen Wyatt. But she was growing increasingly curious.
For a heartbeat, he hesitated, and there was a flicker of pain in the way his eyes tightened at the corners. “I heard it from a woman. An Irish woman.”
“The Irish woman put to death by your company for a traitor?” she asked bluntly. He had not told her that story directly yet—that had come through Father Byrne, who had borne the brunt of early weeks of questioning their prisoner.
To her surprise, he corrected her. “The Irish woman put to death for nothing more than being unhappily in my company. Her name was Roisin.”
Something in the way he said it, the pain that was still raw when touched, told Ailis that this, at the very least, was the truth.
“So when you protested, you were beaten for your insolence. And when you continued to rail at your commander and at general English policy in Ireland, you were put out into the wilderness to starve.”