The Eyes of the Queen Read online

  “How did Adán put it?”

  “He told me Rose was safe. That she was being well cared for, by a good family. He wished I could see her, even, for she was so enjoying herself. Only if I ever did want to see her again, then I needed to find something that Adán had heard had just come into the English ambassador’s possession.”

  “And you were to bring it to him?”

  “Yes. Bring it here. Paris was impossible at the time, even for the king. All that blood. All those bodies. And the people: still maddened by it all. Anyway. I thought to find Rose here, but no. And when I did not see her, I would not give them what they wanted.”

  “So here you are.”

  “So here I am. But tell me about Rose. The Queen found her? The Queen?”

  “Well. Francis Walsingham. Once they had heard what had happened to Oliver Fellowes. Because of it, he rode to your father’s house. In Kent. And finding the girl, your daughter, missing, he sealed the ports. She was picked up off a cog of smoked mackerel loaded for Antwerp.”

  “And she is safe? She is with Her Majesty? Where?”

  “In Nonsuch.” He is silent for a moment. Gripped with rage at his own riskiness. Why not Greenwich or Hampton Court? Why Nonsuch? Why put even the slightest hint in her mind?

  But Isobel Cochet is in no mood to be swayed by such indicators.

  She sobs with relief.

  “Oh thank God.”

  Her head hangs low, hidden by hanks of loose hair and she weeps quietly for a few moments while Dee curses himself. Christ, this is a dirty business. He imagines that outside the afternoon will be wearing on. The tide: it will be coming in, and coming in fast. He has spent nights in worse places, of course, but as soon as the lieutenant wakes, he will sound the alarm. They will come looking for Father Adán.

  After a while Mistress Cochet wipes her nose on her soiled sleeve.

  “So now there remains me,” she says, “stuck in this thing.”

  He does not know how she can bear it.

  “Get me out, get me to England, and reunite me with my girl, and those numbers will be yours.”

  He will cross each hurdle as it comes, he thinks.

  And getting her out of the cage is the first.

  But the truth is: he cannot.

  Had he a set of jeweler’s tools, or even a blacksmith’s tool, or—wait.

  He steps away, back over the body of the dead Spaniard, Father Adán. He takes out the handgun and studies it a moment. It is a well-worked thing, though simple enough: a small powder pan covered by a sliding silver disk, a length of fuse poised above. If the disk is slid back, and the lever below the barrel is squeezed to the body of the gun, the fuse will come down into the powder, and if the fuse is lit, the powder will catch fire, and, through a small aperture at the sealed end of the barrel, it will ignite the main charge within the barrel, which will then explode. The force of this explosion will propel the ball in the barrel out of the barrel’s end at astonishing force.

  Or so Dee is given to understand.

  “Have you ever done this before, Dee?” Cochet asks.

  “I have seen it done,” he lies.

  “Show me,” she tells him.

  He slides the steel catch off the powder pan and shows her it is full.

  “Is there a ball in the barrel?”

  He doesn’t know, but it’s still worth a try. Both cringe from the gun as he holds its barrel against the chain lock and squeezes the trigger to lower the fuse. There is a crack and a blinding flash. The gun bucks in his hand, tearing the skin of his palm. Smoke fills the air. Something hits the stones and flies away into the darkness.

  “Yes,” he answers her question. “Are you all right?”

  “God, Dee.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Has it worked?”

  The lock is too hot to hold. It has a large silver pock in the corner of its face.

  “You couldn’t even hit it from an inch!”

  “I am not a markman,” he agrees.

  It looks more solidly locked than before. He hits it with the gun. Nothing happens. It is still locked.

  God’s truth.

  Another ball might do it?

  “Did you try Adán’s purse?” Cochet asks.

  “What for?”

  “The key.”

  Ah.

  Dee turns the dead priest over and there is not one key in his purse, but two. Both are as long and as fat as a lady’s forefinger.

  The second one he tries fits in the keyhole, but the lock is made a great deal stiffer for having been shot. Miraculously, though, it opens. He laughs. She laughs. Then she collapses with relief and the cage sways. He starts to unweave the fat chain through the fat iron bars.

  “Come on, come on,” she urges. She pulls at the chain from the other end.

  “It won’t help,” he tells her.

  “It might.”

  After a long frustrating moment, they have the chain rattling through the final bars and the cage crashes apart. Dee leaps back as the heavy iron lattices hammer to the ground around him. Cochet grabs the top rail and hangs.

  “Help me,” she bleats, for she is very weak and racked with cramps. He grips her legs. She is unpleasant smelling. He hardly cares. She lets go of the bars and he carries her a few paces and then places her on the ground, just managing to catch her before she collapses.

  He helps her to a bench by a lectern on which papers are pinned.

  “The other key,” she says. “It will be for the sacristy.”

  Dee hurries to the oak door at which she points. It is plated in parts, and the key seems almost too delicate to open such a thing, but it does, revealing a storeroom into which Dee can walk. On one side are shelves holding a great many books—Bibles and Psalters and nothing of any interest to him, though obviously valuable—as well as various shrouded shapes he assumes will be monstrances, chalices, candleholders, and the various dishes associated with the rites of Mass. On the other, wardrobes for the abbé’s vestments. He holds up a candle and searches the shelves. Everything is thick with dust, except there: a leather folder stuffed with loose papers. Dee takes it down.

  “That’s it,” Cochet tells him. “In there. It might only be a copy.”

  Is that good enough? Probably, if they do not have DaSilva’s second page. He takes it but cannot resist looking at it. It is an astrological chart, he is sure of it. Whose? He cannot say. No wonder Walsingham was puzzled. He takes the rest of the papers and folds them into his doublet, wherein he keeps his passport, along with his notes of ponderings jotted down. Even up here, things get covered in grit from the beach. He drags Father Adán over to the sacristy, and once in, he locks the door behind.

  Isobel Cochet tells him to break the key in the lock.

  “So he’ll ripen, and smell the place out for a month or two. It’ll remind them of their corruption.”

  He does so, snapping it off and sending its broken end skittering into the shadows.

  That is when the church bell starts its ringing. Not a summons, or a peal, but an urgent booming alarm. The lieutenant is awake. Dee senses the rustle of running feet all over the island as men answer its call.

  “Come on.”

  He helps her up the steps and into the nave. She bangs her head and winces. She tries to grip him, to share her weight, but she is very weak. He wonders aloud if he should have brought the handgun?

  “You’d’ve hit me before anyone else.”

  Now everybody is astir. Dee carries Isobel down the south aisle, hurrying from the shadow of one pillar to the next. A young friar steps out in front of them.

  “Master?”

  “He nearly killed her!” Dee says, nodding back the way he had come.

  The friar hurries past: if there is tumult on the island, he wants to be there to bear witness. Out through the door and into the clearing where the bookseller had his stall. Isobel gasps as the rain hits her. A bugle sounds in the distance. Over the edge Dee catches sight of lines of white
horses coming charging across the sands. They are much closer now, and the wind is a force off the sea too.

  They do not have much longer.

  He picks Isobel up again and carries her back down the steps to the wheel room.

  The door is closed. Locked? No. He shoves it open. Deserted. He thanks God.

  He lowers her onto the filthy mat and finds a breaking wedge to jam the wheel-room door. Then he takes a sled from the rack and maneuvers it into its grooves on the floor. Isobel watches in silence.

  “Isobel,” he says, “lie on this.”

  There comes the first shove on the jammed door.

  Isobel calms her doubts and crawls across and levers herself aboard the sled.

  “What is it?”

  Dee hooks the sled to the end of the rope that is wound around the wheel’s spit. There is a net, and a line of hooks on the edge of the sled and he draws the net up over Isobel as he would were he tucking a child into bed. She has not yet seen his plan, because he has not opened the door to the outside yet. When he does, she shouts.

  “No.”

  But it is too late. He is quickly behind the sled and he shunts it out over the edge so that if she struggled free, she’d only fall the hundred or so feet to her death. She clings on, cursing at him in language he did not know women of her kind used.

  Dee takes one last look at the wheel, and the path the rope takes through a series of pulleys that he hopes will at least slow the sled’s descent. He wrote a short treatise on the use of pulleys while he was in the Tower—being so close to the brake does concentrate a man’s mind—and their landing will still be quite a bang, he thinks. He looks up. It is growing dark early. The wind is strong and the rain hits like pebbles against his skin. It lashes his hair, pulls at his hems.

  And now there are shouts from the other side of the door. Someone is pounding on it. An ax is brought to bear. The wedge is holding but soon the door will be mere shards.

  He has no time to linger, or doubt.

  Below him Isobel is clinging to the sled, mewling like a fawn in a fox net.

  “Here we go,” he says.

  He clambers down onto the sled and lifts the knot from its crook. The sled drops. Isobel gasps. The rope stretches.

  “Dee, you fool!”

  Dee grips tight. His feet come away from the sled. He feels very exposed. He tries to press himself to the sled and to the rope, but it flows freely through the pulleys above and the sled picks up speed. It grinds down the side of the castle, rattling on the dressed stones of the ramp. Dee’s vision quakes. His teeth are rattling free. Isobel is shouting his name.

  The sled hits the buffers at the foot of the hill. His fingers are torn from the rope and he is launched into the air and hurled to the ground. His ribs stretch, his brain is shaken loose, and all the air is driven from his lungs. He drags himself a few paces, scrabbling at the tufts of rough grass. Isobel is half off the end of the sled, bagged in the net but alive and coughing.

  He is about to say something when the rope tightens.

  They are dragging her back up to the wheel room.

  He fumbles for his knife.

  The rope is thick, and every slash he makes at it, it pulls away from him. He cuts the net instead. Freeing her and holding her arms as the sled pulls away.

  “Come on,” he urges.

  “Stop saying that.”

  He carries her limp in his arms toward the stables. They are empty with the pilgrims gone home. The gate beyond is open still. The guards are all looking up at the abbey where the bell still rings. Dee straightens his cloak, and resumes his cap, and once more he is M’sieur Dee, pilgrim, come to offer prayers at the shrine of Saint Michael. With his wife.

  “Who is taken ill, masters.”

  The guards look at her doubtfully, but she coughs. Instantly they step back. There have been outbreaks of plague in Italy already this year. It explains why no one tries to stop them leaving, although one guard, so fresh-faced this might be his first day on duty, tells them they will have to rush.

  “It is going to be a high one today,” he shouts above the wind.

  This Dee has anticipated.

  Through the gate, the wind is now stronger still. Dee can hardly hear the bell clanging in the belfry, or the gate booming shut behind them. He puts an arm under Isobel and they set off back along the causeway.

  “Soon be there,” he tells her.

  He knows he must time this absolutely perfectly.

  The sand under their feet has taken on an oily shimmer. The water is rising. Away to his right, he can see the white lines of surf converging. They are tall and tumble over one another in a tossing froth of surf. For the first time, he feels the clutch of fear.

  On they go.

  “You only need to get yourself beyond halfway,” he tells her.

  She is shivering, almost unable to stand.

  “Don’t tell me to come on,” she mutters.

  He doesn’t. He is looking back over his shoulder.

  The gate! It is opening again.

  Soldiers spill out onto the causeway. He hears the pop of a gun. So does she.

  “They’ll have to be better shots than you if they are to hit us in this wind,” she says.

  “I have already admitted I am no markman,” he says. “I am a scientist, a geographer, and an astrologer.”

  “And an espial for Walsingham.”

  “Not if I can help it. Come, save your breath.”

  The soldiers are still shooting.

  They will never—

  “Ach!” Isobel cries out.

  She staggers in his grasp and claps a hand to her hip. She writhes and grunts percussively. Again she curses. She shows him her hand, pink with rain-diluted blood. In her dress, above her right buttock, it is as if someone has stitched a red poppy, with a black center. He might almost see the ball.

  “Can you walk?”

  She is looking back at the soldiers as if they have wronged her.

  “I will have to,” she says.

  They can hear the waves falling now.

  Dee changes sides and she uses him as a crutch. She swears pungently: Walsingham is a coxcomb and a whoreson whelped in a ditch. The sand under their feet is changing character. It stretches and gives, like well-kneaded dough. He looks to her to see what she thinks. She is in pain with every step. Soon he will have to carry her.

  Another pop. Closer this time, and something plucks at his cloak hem. The ball skuffs across the sand, bouncing once, twice. Behind him the soldiers come running.

  He scoops Isobel up.

  She screams with pain.

  He ignores her.

  In the sand, his feet seem caught in a slow bounce.

  Another pop.

  “Put me down,” she tells him. “I can walk.”

  “Just a bit farther!”

  He forces himself on. His arms and legs and shoulders burn with the effort. He looks over his shoulder. Ha! The soldiers have come too far and they know it. The tide is come in, and they are caught. They are throwing away their guns and their weapons, discarding their armor and helmets as they run, not to be weighed down.

  But they are too late. He sees them struggling in the sand, suddenly wading as the earth changes from solid to liquid. Then the waves break around them.

  “Put me down,” she tells him.

  He has to. He takes her hand and drags her along, moving faster now.

  The danger is no longer the men; it is the sand and the sea, and the thing they form together.

  She stumbles and falls. He goes to pick her up. He will have to carry her after all. He throws her over his shoulder. He sinks in to the sand. The waves crash twenty paces away, the first tails of froth washing about his shins. He unsticks his foot. The next one sinks all the deeper.

  “Dee!” she calls. “Dee! Leave me! We will both die!”

  “No!”

  “Dee, you bloody fool!”

  “I won’t!”

  Suddenly he feels a
rough edge across his throat. She has taken his knife and holds it there.

  “Leave me! Leave me!”

  Another step.

  The blade presses.

  “For the love of God, Mistress Cochet!”

  “Leave. Me.”

  One more step.

  He feels his skin part under the blade. He stops. He is sinking. He tries to throw her, but he can get no purchase and drops her. She sits with his knife pointing at his testicles.

  “We can do it!” he shouts.

  “No,” she shouts back at him. The first wave froths across her legs. She’s bleeding heavily.

  He has to flex his legs to keep himself from sinking.

  It is only another bowshot to safety.

  But he knows she is right.

  He can’t carry her. She can’t walk.

  “Oh Christ, Mistress Cochet.”

  “Don’t mourn me, Dee. I go to a happier place. But look to my daughter, Dee! See to her! Make sure she has all she needs. Tell her her mother died out of love for her. No. Tell her—her mother loved her.”

  There are tears in both their eyes.

  There is no sign of the soldiers.

  Dee extracts one foot. Then another. A moment later he stands five paces from her and the waves are breaking about her shoulders. She manages to stand. She turns to him.

  “Dee! Dee!”

  He faces her.

  “Don’t you want to know the numbers?”

  The numbers! The numbers. The thing he most needed. The reason he is there. He stands looking at her. The waves are up to her waist, his knees.

  She holds his gaze while she shouts them out. There are seventeen of them. Five letters, too. She shouts the sequence twice.

  He repeats them back to her.

  She laughs. She can’t move now. She is anchored, and knows it, finally, as a fact.

  “Not much by way of my last words!” she shouts.

  “What?” he calls.

  “I said, look after Rose! Cherish her!”

  This he does hear.

  “I will!” he lies.

  “Go now, Dee. I don’t want you to watch.”

  He himself can hardly move. He plucks his leg from the sucking sand.

  She raises a hand.

  He raises his—and turns away just as the first wave engulfs her.

  CHAPTER NINE