The Queen's Men Page 12

  She has deep amber eyes, and such an honest expression.

  “And I would greatly value your help, for I have no servant to ride with me, nor friend to consult.”

  “Today?”

  “If you are not busy?”

  “But I have no horse,” he points out.

  “I have brought two, if you would care to look at them? Now? They are saddled and have teeth and hooves and so on. From the royal stable at Richmond.”

  As she is talking Dee sees Cooke over her shoulder. His eyes are very round and he is pointing in alarm toward the river. He mouths the name Walsingham.

  “Excuse me one moment, Mistress Frommond,” he asks.

  He goes to the door of the library that offers a view of the orchard down to the river. Through the now bare branches of the trees he sees four or five of Her Majesty’s Yeomen marching staunchly toward his house, following them the saturnine figure of Her Majesty’s master secretary and his right-hand man, Robert Beale. Behind them is one of Her Majesty’s barges, gangplank down, more Yeomen to come.

  “So about these horses, Mistress Frommond,” he says, returning and daring to take one of Her Majesty’s maids of honor by the arm and guiding her more quickly than is polite out of the library, across the courtyard, and through the front gate, which he pulls close behind.

  Two horses, as promised, saddled in red leather.

  “Very handsome,” Dee says.

  He cups his hands on his knee for her boot, and with one hand on his shoulder she is up into the saddle with practiced ease.

  “Should we give them some exercise, do you think?” she asks.

  “Let’s,” he says.

  They both kick on and are out and riding too fast along the road to London before the gate behind them swings open to let spill three of Her Majesty’s Yeomen.

  “You have no cloak, Doctor?” Frommond calls.

  “I have the love of my Queen to keep me warm,” he replies, though a few moments later he is just wondering if that will be quite enough to keep him alive on a journey to and back from Hertfordshire, when he sees, returning from market, Thomas Digges and his mother, both well wrapped against the cold, Digges in the luxurious velvet coat that Dee returned to him instead of his own after his time in the Tower.

  “Thomas!” Dee calls, and he slows his horse to a gentle trot so as not to frighten the old lady. Politenesses are exchanged and blessings conferred and Digges is happy to lend his friend his coat again.

  “Particularly if it comes back all the grander, as last time,” he says.

  Dee and Frommond ride on, eastward, toward Southwark and the bridge.

  “What are we actually doing?” Dee asks.

  “Riding to Hertford,” she says.

  “Did you know Walsingham was coming for me?”

  “I overheard some of their conversation at the palace in Richmond this morning,” Frommond admits. “They have some scheme in mind that involved your person, which I supposed involved your return to the Tower.”

  “Ha! Mistress Frommond, I am in your debt.”

  “I confess I am at a loss, Doctor, why you seem at odds with Master Walsingham, and he with you.”

  “Is that a question, mistress?”

  “If you like.”

  Dee sighs.

  “I do not wish to speak ill of any man, mistress—”

  “But?”

  “But I confess I find him stiff, and unyielding, and he guards the Queen’s person—from me in particular—with unnecessary zeal, even going so far as, I believe, to have blocked my appointment as Astrologer Royal. He feels I am a bad influence on her. That I put notions he thinks foolish in her mind, and stir her up in a manner that does not suit his creeping ambitions.”

  “In what way?”

  Dee is hesitant. He is not sure himself anymore.

  “His mind is like a steel trap,” he starts, “which is a good thing, for some things, but he is so fixated on plots, and intrigue, and all the nasty fingernail-pulling business of his trade that he lacks the time to look up. Or he lacks the imagination to speculate on what might lie over the horizon. The western horizon in particular.”

  “He deals in… what? Harsh reality?”

  Dee looks at her again.

  “You have been talking to him.”

  “He to me,” she admits with a smile.

  Dee laughs.

  “That is a first. Usually he waits in silence for you to incriminate yourself.”

  There is a moment’s silence. Dee thinks about Walsingham for a moment before he goes on.

  “But, if I am honest, I do not think we are such foes as once we were. It is a habit, more than anything. We cannot bring ourselves to admit otherwise. We irritate each other, and oftentimes he flexes his power over my person too strenuously, such as today’s scheme to return me to the confines of the Tower.”

  Frommond shakes her head and smiles. Dee wonders if she has any friendships such as that. Perhaps, he supposes. Less at stake, perhaps, but just as heartfelt.

  “Well, it is a fine morning for a ride,” she says.

  He agrees and they ride on farther in awkward silence for a while until they reach the southern fringes of Southwark, when Dee notices that Frommond is weeping silently.

  “Oh, Mistress Frommond! What is wrong?”

  She tells him that nothing is wrong, but that since Alice Rutherford’s death she has wept uncontrollably at the strangest moments, usually when she is most nearly content.

  “I have cried a bucket’s worth, I daresay,” she admits. “It means nothing.”

  She waves away his attention and starts crying again. Dee thinks to remind her of Margery Kempe, the English mystic who wept all the time and drove everybody around her mad, but sees that story may not serve. At casual glance, Frommond appears so sunny and happy that it is easy to forget that she has recently had her friend die in her arms.

  “And how long has it been since… it happened?”

  “A month. To the day,” she tells him.

  “Ahhh,” he says. “So a sort of personal month’s mind?”

  He pictures those among Alice Rutherford’s friends and relations who were unable to attend the girl’s funeral gathering a month after it, in the churchyard where she is buried, to share their grief and mourn their loss, and here is Jane Frommond, forbidden to join them.

  “Are you certain you want to go back, though? To where it happened?” Dee wonders. “Might not a… a— Something else, be better?”

  His eye falls on the bear-baiting gardens on their left. No, he thinks. Perhaps not that.

  “It sounds foolish, perhaps,” she says, “but I wanted to take the illumination of Jan Saelminck, and bury it. I wanted to bury it where it happened. Where Alice was killed. Now that I know he was not in love with Alice, and would not even stretch to keeping her likeness, I want rid of his. I intend to put it where it will be spoiled, just as she was. Does that seem strange?”

  Does it seem reasonable? He doesn’t know. He can’t say. But either it is the strange wild and sad smell that clings to the area around the bear gardens, or he feels some of her sorrow.

  “No, Mistress Frommond,” he says. “That sounds… appropriate.”

  On they go, into the crowded confines of the bridge that vibrates from the water against the starlings below, and the people are pressed very close. They move up on the left-hand side of the bridge, the only place in the kingdom where there is a rule about this, and it takes them twenty minutes of patient shuffling before they even reach the drawer bridge, in the bridge’s middle, where an old house is being pulled down and they must stop while some beams are detached.

  “What is going on?” Dee asks a workman.

  “Making way for some house they are building over in Holland,” the man tells him while they wait to let the dust blow over from a sack full of daub he has just tipped over the bridge’s side. “Skillful little fuckers, they are, them Hollanders. Begging your pardon, mistress.”

  A
t long length they are let through, and Frommond asks about Saelminck.

  “I did not know him save by sight,” Dee confesses. “He was a sort of assistant, or manager, I suppose, of Cornelius de Lannoy, if that was even his real name, a swindler and false alchemist.”

  From the bridge they can see the Tower on the right; through the occasional gap in the houses. Dee wonders if they have fixed the hole he made. Probably not.

  “Was he a clever little… what that man said back there?”

  “Saelminck? Definitely. Well: they got out of the country together, with all the money they swindled from Bess, didn’t they? But I wonder why he’s back. Or was back, anyway. I wonder how they met. Him and Alice.”

  Frommond has wondered the same thing.

  “They must have known each other more than a year, because of the date on the limning,” she tells Dee. “But I suppose she was three months with child when she was killed, so if he is the father, he must have seen her this summer, when she was on progress with Her Majesty.”

  “That does not refine it much, does it?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Those progresses are very hectic,” she says. “A multitude of people, all the time, and when we reach a place—one of those houses—it can be just like this, only the people are better dressed, and somewhat better washed.”

  She indicates the great jostle of people around the conduit in Gracechurch Street and the marketplace crowds of Eastcheap that stretch as far as Bishopsgate. At length they are out through the city gate, and past Saint Botolph’s and Bedlam Priory, and they ride on, Frommond lost in her own thoughts, Dee treading carefully.

  “What do you remember of the night the Queen was shot at?” he asks.

  He hopes this will help.

  “Every moment,” she tells him. “It is as if I am living it whenever I close my eyes. It never stops.”

  Dee understands. He felt the same for a long while after leaving Mistress Cochet to drown on the sands under Mont Saint-Michel.

  Gray clouds above now, a thin wind in their faces, and the forest ahead. Dee shivers. Frommond looks serious. The road rises and soon they are in the forest, deeper, darker, damper than he remembers, and it is strangely quiet: no birdsong even, and the road is deserted both ahead and behind. Dee shivers again. He is glad he has the coat. Frommond has turned deathly pale.

  “We can go back. Come another day. When it is brighter?”

  She shakes her head in its hood.

  “We are nearly there. It is just—”

  She nods ahead.

  “There.”

  A desolate spot where the road dips into sludge between two high banks of black mud, tangled roots exposed, and above the underbrush is dense with crowded holly and tangled bramble. Dee draws the reins. Frommond slides from her saddle before he is able to offer help. Dee remains in his, watching. The bank still bears the marks of being cut about to get the hay wain out of the road. Other than that, there is nothing here to say what happened that afternoon a month ago. But Dee can see it all. Or almost all. Gunmen on both banks firing down into the road. They would have been waiting in the trees how long? All day? Or were they there every day?

  “Master Walsingham believes someone sent a signal,” Frommond tells him as if she might read his mind. “From Hatfield.”

  She ties her horse’s reins to one of the bank’s exposed roots.

  “Does he have an idea who?”

  “No.”

  Of course not, Dee thinks, or they’d’ve been racked half to death already by now.

  “Anyone could have done it,” Dee supposes. “It needn’t have been anyone in the house. Someone waiting on the road nearby might have done it. On a good horse. He sees the Queen go by, and he rides ahead to alert the rest of them. But that would mean the rest must have been waiting nearby.”

  “They shot only the Queen’s carriage. They knew which one it was, though it is not so very different in appearance from the others.”

  “A guess?”

  She shrugs.

  “And there was more than a dozen of them. A small army.”

  “They’d be conspicuous,” Dee admits. “Someone would have noticed them.”

  “Master Walsingham has found no trace of them. He says he has spoken to every stable in every inn within a hundred miles. He says no one saw anyone on the road that day in any numbers. He is talking to forge masters and gunsmiths in both counties, and watches at every city gate, but no one saw a thing. He is calling them phantoms.”

  Dee dismounts. He scrambles up the right-hand bank and looks down. There is mud on his coat now. Digges will not be pleased, or rather, his mother will not.

  “This is where they stood?” he asks. Frommond looks up at him and nods. She is very pale. She might faint he thinks. But then he imagines what it must have been like to be one of the gunmen up here, waiting, waiting and then the moment arriving and squeezing the lever of the arquebus, touching the match fuse to the pan of powder. Boom. He has never fired an arquebus. He has fired a pistol, but only at a lock. He might have missed that, too.

  “And it was raining?”

  “Heavily,” she confirms.

  Dee wonders how they kept their powder dry. He looks up into the trees’ canopy. Then turns, with his back to the road.

  “This is the way they ran?”

  “I think so, yes. That is the way Jeffers chased them anyway. For all the good it did.”

  Dee helps her up the bank. She grips his wrist and allows him to grip hers.

  “You are very finely dressed for a walk in the woods, Mistress Frommond?” he notes with a question in his voice. She is. Not only is her cloak a beautiful blue, he sees she wears a very tight bodice as they do in the French court, with a stomacher, and even a farthingale. Her sleeves are voluminous, and she has long gloves though no rings.

  “I was at court,” she reminds him. “And had to move fast to beat Master Walsingham to your door in Mortlake.”

  “I am obliged, once again, Mistress Frommond, that you would think of me. It is not uncomfortable?”

  “A little, but please, I am used to them now.”

  He wonders what she means.

  She raps her knuckles against her bodice and produces a hollow sound.

  “Whalebone,” she says.

  “Ah,” he says. Yes. Whalebone stays. What a thing.

  They turn away from each other. Dee feels a slight warmth at the mention of Frommond’s underthings.

  Ahead is a great impassable tangle of holly and bramble.

  “Her Majesty’s Yeomen got all torn up in it,” Frommond tells Dee. He turns his mind to the Queen’s Yeomen. He thinks of them in their breastplates and steel helmets, waving their swords and halberds about. Meanwhile the gunmen had mapped their retreat in advance. He can see it now, in the daylight that Jeffers was not afforded: a cut-through—a foresters’ path, perhaps, or one used by fox and deer. It runs to the right. He sets out along it.

  “And what about the horses?” she wonders.

  “We’ll not go far.”

  The path winds on, discernible only if you are not looking straight at it, even under the new drop of soft autumn leaves. It leads east, drawing him on, through stands of pollarded elm and then coppiced hornbeam; clearings of stunted, spindly hollies; then barren patches under a gathering of tall pine trees already marked with a cross of paint for the cutting of ships’ masts. The ground slopes very gently down.

  “Dr. Dee!” Frommond shouts. “Stop!”

  He is so shocked he spins, as if attacked. She is reared back from something she has seen, at the foot of one of the firs. He hurries back.

  “What? What is it?”

  She says nothing. Her face is crinkled in horror, and something else. She points. Among the roots, tossed on the pine needles, is a scrap of something red. He bends to inspect it closer. A sleeve of scarlet leather, with a twist of fingers.

  “A glove?”

  He is about to pick it up when he survey
s its status more clearly. It sits atop of a sausage length of shit that he knows instinctively can only be human. And there is something about the way the glove is twisted that tells him it can only have been used for one purpose.

  He stands. Frommond is paler than ever. Her eyes are wide and for a moment she makes no sense.

  “It’s hers,” she says. “It is her other glove. Alice’s.”

  He looks at it again.

  “Alice’s?”

  “They were her favorite pair,” she says. “Given to her by… by someone—my God, him?—but Her Majesty would never have allowed her to wear them. So she wore them for fun, when we were on our own. I would recognize them anywhere.”

  Dee uses his toe to flick the glove from its resting place on the by-now-almost-gone-to-powder shit. The leather is faded in parts, but where it has not faded, it is vivid, cerise almost, and particularly striking.

  “You are sure?”

  She nods.

  “I would swear on it.”

  “What in God’s name is it doing here?”

  She cannot say, nor can he. A wind is picking up. The treetops are beginning to whisper, gossiping in an urgent susurrus. Dee wonders, Will trees ever be proven to communicate? Via their roots maybe, touching in the deep damp dark. He wonders what they would tell him now. This puzzle—the mystery of the glove’s appearance—makes his mind spin.

  “We should take it,” he says, though he knows not why. Better than to leave it here, anyway.

  “And return it to her father? He will have noticed it missing, surely.”

  “Will he want it?” Dee wonders.

  “It will clean up,” she supposes.

  After a moment he stoops to pick it up and shake it free of the clinging matter. He bangs it against the trunk and then is at a loss with what to do with it. He rolls it and slides it into his doublet.

  “Let’s go back,” Frommond says. “I am worried about the horses.”

  “Just a moment more,” Dee says.

  There is something about the quality of the light ahead that invites him on. The trees thin ahead, as the forest ends, and he walks on, down the hill. She follows and in all they must have walked two thousand paces from the horses before the canopy opens, and there is gray sky above and willow trees and alders ahead, and underfoot it is squelching wet. He comes to a halt.