“I know, I know,” Charles said. “More fuel to the fire.”

“Not my point. If Ardrey is a Covenanter, as long as he doesn’t know we’ve tumbled him, we have an advantage.”

“What do you suggest?”

“I’ll put a man on him. Follow—ah.”

A knock on the door signaled the return of one of the servants. He’d found a rat somewhere. He carried the animal in a cage, which he placed on the table at Walsingham’s instruction. After he left, the spymaster spooned a pile of powdered sugar between the bars. The rat sniffed at it and began to eat.

“It’s not dying,” the king said.

“Depending on the dose,” Walsingham said, “it may take some time for the poison to work.”

“Am I supposed to sit here and wait?”

“What do you think we should do next?”

It took me a moment to realize Walsingham was asking me. I was startled. “You want me to decide?”

“His Majesty will decide. I asked for a course of action.”

I flushed. “Of course. Sorry.” Lord Ashcombe was already growing impatient; I hurried along. “I think we have a big problem. The first letter I got told us the Covenanters are after the king. And the two murdered servants make it clear: They’ve already infiltrated the palace.”

“Have you discovered why the girls were killed?” the king asked curiously.

“Not for sure. But… well, this is something Sally pointed out when we went to Paris. Nobody ever pays attention to servants. They come and go as if they’re invisible, because—er… forgive me, sire—no one thinks they’re important enough to matter.

“But they see and hear everything. That’s what I think: The murdered girls saw something they shouldn’t have. Someone trying to poison your food at Whitehall, maybe. The killer got rid of the girls, but now the palace is on alert. So they found another way to get to you. There’s a party scheduled for tomorrow at Berkshire House, so they moved the plot to kill you across the park.

“Here’s the problem,” I continued. “Someone had to poison all this sugar. How could they do this? There are guards all over the place, and servants are almost always in the kitchen. It should have been hard to get this poison in. But it wasn’t. That can mean only one thing: The Covenanters have already infiltrated Berkshire House, too.”

Charles frowned. “How is that possible?”

It looked as if he was still asking me. “Um… again, with the greatest respect, sire, that’s the easy part. The plague must have killed many of the old servants. The steward would be desperate to hire new ones. If the Covenanters brought forged references—that’s how the Raven infiltrated Maison Chastellain—they’d have been hired, no question. With the chaos around the sickness, the steward wouldn’t have bothered to check if those references were good.”

Charles looked at Walsingham.

“The analysis is sound,” the spymaster said.

“But that means nowhere is safe,” the king protested.

“Yes,” Lord Ashcombe said. “So we move again, out of London.”