The Queen's Men Read online

  “For burnishing silver,” Hilliard explains. “But these are years old. Ten years, this one. She was still at court then.”

  Teerlinc shrugs. Dee is studying the wall of sagging shelves. After a moment he reaches across to a pewter mug. Within is a coil of paper, quite new compared to those nearly ten years old. He passes the mug to Marcus. Marcus plucks out the roll of paper between two fingers and reads it.

  “Could this be it?” he wonders. “An agreement to paint two portraits in the new style, a man and a woman, separately, for five English pounds each, to be delivered and paid for before St. John’s this last year.”

  “Five pounds?” Hilliard gasps. “May I see?”

  Teerlinc shrugs and passes the bill to Hilliard.

  “Oh,” Hilliard says. “This is Dutch?”

  Teerlinc nods.

  “Moeder was always more comfortable in the old tongue.”

  “Does it say his name?” Frommond asks. “Who is he?”

  “It is written here, I think. John Sterling, is it? Moeder’s hand was never easy, and his mark is even worse.”

  She takes the paper. It is the size of a man’s palm, and the words are written on a slant, in ink faded in parts to become almost unreadable.

  “John Sterling?” she wonders. Perhaps.

  “No.”

  This is from Dee.

  “I remember him now: it is Jan Saelminck.”

  “Jan who?”

  “Saelminck.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “As I can be.”

  “Who is he?”

  “A Fleming. He was one of Cornelius de Lannoy’s assistants. The so-called alchemist. I knew I had seen him before.”

  Just an assistant, Frommond thinks, and she wonders what she had hoped for. That Alice’s lover would prove himself a duke? An earl? Or just a lord? A poet, certainly, but this name seems mired in trade, and steeped in river mud, though she cannot help but be intrigued by his frequent absences. At least he was required here and there. At least he had plans, whatsoever they were. At least he was busy.

  She runs a finger over his name. The writing is unadorned. Functionary. Unthinking. Unrevealing of anything, save, she now cannot help notice, an almost deliberate obscurity. An invisibility.

  And why two portraits?

  “Is there—”

  “Ah,” Dee interrupts, taking from the pewter tankard a clump of cloth. He puts the mug down, and then opens the cloth on the workbench. The content is revealed to him first, and he whistles. Frommond peers over his expensively clad shoulder. She feels a gasp in her throat.

  It is Alice. Beautiful Alice. In perfect miniature, staring back out at the world from a bower of very finely realized lace, a jewel at her pale throat that Frommond has never seen before, and a smile, too, that is now lost. She speaks from the grave, to those willing to hear, but what is she saying?

  “This is her?”

  Frommond nods.

  “Ahh,” Teerlinc says, peering over. He smells strongly musty. “She I remember. Truly beautiful. She sat for Moeder, two or three times. Never for me. Moeder would not let me even ask. She was—”

  Unattainable.

  “But what is she even doing here?” Hilliard asks.

  Teerlinc points to the limning in Frommond’s hand.

  “That is it. The boy! There. Look. They are a pair. A pair of paintings. Identical.”

  He puts them alongside each other to make the point more obvious still.

  “I remember it now. They were painted together, the one for the other, do you see? As keepsakes. But when they were done, the bastard—excuse me, mistress—the bastard refused to pay the full price.”

  “It happens,” Hilliard says.

  “I wish I had been here,” Teerlinc says. “But I was away that morning. Anyway, he offered only half the money agreed, five instead of ten pounds, so Moeder only let him have one of the limnings. She thought he would choose this.”

  He points to the picture of Alice.

  “But he chose that.”

  He points to the one of the boy, to Jan Saelminck.

  “He did not want her likeness, you see? He only wanted his to give to her, so that she thought he cared for her.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER TEN

  Seething Lane, City of London,

  first week of December 1577

  Walsingham and Beale have been in the saddle a week or more, on bad horses, on bad roads, in bad weather, but now they are south of Northampton, returning at last to London, and the comforts of their own beds, their own hearths, their own dogs. An escort of ten heavily armed men led by Sir John Jeffers, newly demoted from the Queen’s Yeomen, follows two abreast behind, and what they think of it—of being out on winter roads in this weather—is not hard to gauge.

  “Well, Robert, at least we have found Cecil his Persian,” Walsingham supposes.

  Beale grunts assent. It has been a fraught journey, with both men bruised and brooding from their confrontation at Walsingham’s house in the Papey the night before their departure, and they had ridden in silence that first day, retracing Her Majesty’s journey through Waltham Forest, stopping at each place the Queen’s carriage had stopped on the way down to London, and finding nothing.

  By late afternoon they were at Hatfield House again and in the fading light, Walsingham had insisted on another tour of the boundaries, as if they were beating the bounds on Ascension Day. There had been nothing new to discover, and they had come in from the cold and begun asking the same old questions to the same old people and getting the same old answers and after supper, both men had forgone their usual conversation and retired to their beds.

  They were up again at first light the next morning, a breakfast of oats and cows’ milk and small beer against a long day in the saddle ahead. They should have taken two days to do the seventy miles to Market Harborough, but they did it in one, and that evening when Walsingham dismounted before the inn in the marketplace, his legs buckled and he needed to be helped into the hall where they sat in silence and could hardly manage their ale.

  The next morning, he was as stiff as a gibbet.

  “I have been here before,” he’d told Beale. “On Privy Council business, to interview a girl called Alice Bowker who may or may not have birthed a cat. A red one about yea long.”

  He’d mimed about two feet, and Beale had laughed, the first sign of a thaw. Then they had ridden together to find Master Anthony Jenkinson, previously of the Muscovy Company, the only Englishman ever to have journeyed to Persia, though his horizons are nowadays shrunk to those of Market Harborough.

  He lived in a fine new-built house of unusual style, in among gardens, also of an unusual style.

  “I thought he was supposed to be ruined?” Beale had asked.

  “He was, a bit, but he got it all back. He is no fool, although—”

  Jenkinson had received them wearing outlandish garb Walsingham guessed was Persian, with flowing silks gathered at his stout waist in a vivid red sash from which hung a curved dagger sheathed in what looked like mother-of-pearl. He wore a length of snow-white linen wrapped many times around his head, and on his feet: beautiful pointed slippers of leather the color of mustard. Under these beautifully shod feet were laid, one atop the other, Turkey carpets of the sort any ordinary man might hang on his wall, while on the wall were spectacularly fine woven silks depicting hunting parties, and elephants, and strange striped cats that were not even in the Queen’s menagerie. While Walsingham and Beale searched in vain for a bench on which to sit, Jenkinson’s servants—all young men, none native to Market Harborough—brought them sherbets and lumps of sweet, sugar-dusted gum that tasted of rosewater.

  Walsingham and Beale had stayed with Jenkinson for two days, hearing tales of his many journeys, the first to meet the sultan of the Ottomans—from whom he extracted trade concessions generous enough to enrage the French and Portuguese ambassadors—and of the two he made while representing the Muscovy Company: down fro
m the White Sea in the frozen north, to Moscow, where he befriended Tsar Ivan of the Russians—and acquired similarly wide trade concessions—and then farther south still, across the Caspian Sea, farther south and farther east than any Englishman was known to have ventured before, to finally reach the Sufi shah’s great imperial capital in Qazvin, where after many months’ wait, he had been granted an audience with Shah Tahmasp.

  “If I am honest,” Jenkinson had told them, “Tahmasp did not impress me greatly, though obviously nor I him, not with that bloody letter of Cecil’s I brought from Her Majesty. You should have seen their faces once they had had it translated. Utterly bewildered. Who were the Carmanarians? The Hyrcians? They died out hundreds of years ago. Thousands! It is worse even than one of them coming to Whitehall and wondering why Her Majesty was not Boadicea of the Iceni, naked and stained in woad.”

  Walsingham had blinked away the image.

  “Mind you, I do not blame her: it was Cecil who gave me the letter. Bloody fool. But I was a fool, too: I should have read what was in it first. Anyway. The shah didn’t find it even slightly funny, you know? When I came before him I was instructed to wear shoes, which no one ever does inside in Persia, so as not to sully his holy ground, and when I left, unsuccessful in my attempts to please him, thanks to that letter, a man followed me with a bucket of sand, scattering it over my tracks so as to expunge them from the face of his earth.”

  At this Jenkinson’s sun-battered face wrinkled into a laugh so hard it shook the jewel that he had placed in the crown of his turban, though Walsingham supposed he must have told that story, what, a thousand times?

  Then they had got down to what Jenkinson had called brass tacks.

  “Greek fire, eh? Well, the Persians called it Roman fire, since the Byzantines used it against the Turks, but I know what you mean. And this Dr. Dee believes he has discovered its parts, does he?”

  They had showed him Dr. Dee’s description, and the old man’s face had wrinkled.

  “I have heard of such stuff. In the south of Persia. They call it naft, which means just ‘wet.’ They use it like resin and set great pots of it aflame along the seashore to guide mariners away from rocks and shoals and so forth. But it gives off a terrible stink. Deadly to both man and beast.”

  “It does not sound overvaluable.”

  Jenkinson’s eyes had narrowed and acquired a crafty mien. He is a merchant, after all, Walsingham had thought, a mercer, and a devotee to God and profit, in revolving order.

  “It is like anything,” Jenkinson had supposed. “It depends on when you want it.”

  Walsingham and Beale had looked at each other.

  “Cecil says it is urgent—” Beale had started.

  “Cecil?” Jenkinson had interrupted. “That little shitsnake!”

  Walsingham had groaned inwardly

  “He only acts in Her Majesty’s interests,” he’d tried. “And it is for the safety of the realm. And he will pay you for your troubles, of course. I would see to that.”

  “Ha! Like last time, you mean?”

  Walsingham had wondered if he should tell Jenkinson that he is not alone in being owed by the Crown? He himself is still paying interest on loans he took out to pay for Her Majesty’s embassy to Paris. Perhaps not.

  “But we are not asking you to go to Persia for us,” Beale had said. “We wondered if you still had any people there? Other merchants with whom you are in touch?”

  Jenkinson had.

  “In Moscow I have many, but at this time of year it is even worse than Scotland, and no man moves farther than the privy. If you are after this naft urgently, then the only way to get it before the ice melts on the White Sea in spring will be through the Middle Sea.”

  “But what about the Turks?”

  Jenkinson had tipped his head and given them a curious, speculative look. Were they joking? he seemed to be asking himself.

  “Now do you begin to see the depth of your problem? First you will need to find a willing supplier of this naft, which will not be easy, for whoever he is will have to either gain the permission of the shah to trade with a Christian—which will require a large sum in gold—or he will have to get around that law, which will also require a large sum in gold—for the risks run by the man who follows this path are very great.”

  Jenkinson had pinched the bridge of his nose, here, and clenched his eyes, as if remembering the sight and sounds of risks unsuccessfully run.

  “And then,” he’d gone on, “whoever your man is will have to find a way to smuggle his cargo—and we have not even discussed how much naft you are after—across lands controlled by the Turk. My God. And then, should that prove even possible, he will need to find a ship willing to sail the length of the Middle Sea, through waters utterly infested by pirates, and if not pirates, then Spanish, Venetian, or Genoese ships, through the gut of Gibraltar.

  “Then,” Jenkinson had continued further, “if your merchant manages to evade the Spanish guns on the island, or the gunboats from Cádiz, then they are into Portuguese waters, where at this time of year the main danger is not pirates or foreign men of war, but the weather: the great storms that rack the ocean, the waves that are taller than a church’s spire that will drive you against every lee shore from Trafalgar to… to… to Tilbury itself.”

  There had been a long silence. Walsingham and Beale had exchanged one of those looks: well, at least we tried. Walsingham had been just about to tell Jenkinson that they were sorry to have bothered him.

  “But that is not to say it cannot be done,” Jenkinson had said. “That is not to say it cannot be done by the right man.”

  “And do you know of the right man?”

  Jenkinson had smiled.

  “Oh yes,” he’d said. “Oh yes. But his price: it will be astronomical.”

  Walsingham had thought of Cecil then, and of what he’d said.

  “Her Majesty is willing to pay any price,” he’d said.

  “Any price?”

  “Within reason.”

  “Hah! What does that even mean?”

  “Any price then. She will cover your merchant with gold. Jewels.”

  “He is a large man, my merchant. A large Turkish man.”

  “A Turk? If the stuff comes from Persia?”

  “Unless it goes through the tsar, it will have to come through the lands of the sultan.”

  Walsingham had thrown up his hands.

  “I don’t know,” he’d said. “Whatever it takes.”

  Jenkinson had nodded. His eyes were very hooded, Walsingham had noted.

  “You will have to pen the letter yourself,” he had told them. “I will tell you what to write.”

  Walsingham had sat there, and Jenkinson’s servants had brought him pen and paper, and Walsingham had written to this man—he was to leave the name blank; Jenkinson did not want to be cut out of any deal—as if he were himself a prince of England, a man of great renown and power.

  “He will read nothing that is not come from an equal.”

  “Not even in the name of the Queen?”

  “A woman? Are you mocking me? Write as if you are the Earl of Leicester. Write as if you are the Earl of Leicester’s father.”

  “And he will like that?” Beale had wondered.

  “He will respect it,” Jenkinson had told them. “That is the only way to deal with this man.”

  So the letter was written in a high, commanding tone that was, Walsingham thought now, guaranteed to offend any man, scotch any deal. Before they left him, Jenkinson gave Beale a curved dagger that he claimed was made by the finest silversmith in the city of Boghar and Walsingham a small silk-bound book written in the language of the shah, which—again he claimed—must be read from right to left.

  “Ingenious, no?”

  Walsingham had thought not, but how would he ever know?

  And so now here they are, riding south and gripped by buyer’s remorse.

  “Cecil will not pay whatever is asked, anyway, so it hardly ma
tters,” Beale consoles his master.

  “That is true,” Walsingham supposes.

  They reach Dunstable that night and take a table in the hall of the inn, quiet at this time of year, with sharp beer and a fatty slab of pie, but a good fire and a keep who knows not to intrude. When they have eaten and pushed aside their dishes, Walsingham asks for another jug of wine and one last log for the fire.

  “Robert,” he says. “I have been thinking. About your scheme.”

  Beale looks at him closely. He says nothing.

  “Who is this woman? This Ness Overbury?”

  Beale is like a puppy.

  “You could see for yourself, if you like? She lives in Suffolk. One of those villages.”

  He gestures eastward.

  “We must be in London tomorrow,” Walsingham says, “but—tell me: Is she even willing? Does she know what she might be letting herself in for?”

  “I did not ask her,” he admits, “in part because how would you put such a question?”

  Walsingham sees what he means.

  “But is she not already aware how much she looks like Her Majesty? Has no one told her?”

  “She has never seen the Queen, or met anyone who has, except for Hilliard. I suppose she might know roughly what Her Majesty looks like, from descriptions given her by someone who might have glimpsed the Queen from the roadside, in a crowd say, but their impressions are always—”

  He moves his hand in a circle in front of his face to signify the Queen’s favored face powder, and her crown, and the rest of her finery, which tend to dominate any first impression.

  Walsingham reverts to stroking his beard.

  “Why do you think she would do it, do you suppose? Will she not see its dangers?”

  “When the idea first occurred, I was unsure, but I could not rest until I had at least seen if it was possible. Then when I met her—she was staying at the Dolphin, by Bishopsgate—I was struck by her person. She is… full of life, full of curiosity. She is so hungry for something other than what she has, for something other than her everyday life.”