The Queen's Men Read online

  Why Dee knows to look for the hook the man had used to move Frommond down at the side of the hatch he has no clue, but there it is, and a moment later it is in his hand, up above his head, and then he brings it down with an iron ring into the man’s face, the curved side down. He wants to beat the man to death slowly, with as many blows as possible. He wants to shatter every bone in his face. He wants to knock out every tooth. He wants to break every rib; both arms; each hand and finger. He swings again and again as the man crumples into a blood-soaked pile of awkward limbs with a head that lolls to his belly. And even then, Dee keeps on beating. He wants to drive the man’s spine into the deck, to shatter every vertebra, to disgust even that hangman of Tyburn with the mess he has made of this man.

  And he screams while he does it.

  And when it is over he stands for a moment, breathing hard, staring down at his repulsive handiwork, before with one last bellow of terrible rage, he flings the hook into the river as far as it will go.

  Then he turns and he climbs back down into his cell.

  It takes every shred of his being to do it. Every ounce of fiber. To descend once more into the black maw.

  And with himself still gore soaked and blood shod, he walks through that foul brew to where Frommond slumps unconscious in her corner.

  “Jane! Jane! Jane!”

  But she does not move.

  He gathers her up with the last of his strength and he carries her to the rungs of the ladder and then, each moment a lifetime, he brings her up into the light.

  * * *

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  London, last week of December 1577

  It is late afternoon when Robert Beale reaches home to find one of Master Walsingham’s men waiting on his step with a message that he must make haste to the Papey.

  “It is Dee,” the message finishes.

  Beale has been on the road for more than a week, to Suffolk and back, and is bone weary, but he turns on his heel, and swings back up into his saddle and rides to Master Walsingham’s house with the messenger mute by his side. He finds Her Majesty’s principal private secretary still in bed, with boils, drooping eyelids, and a bottle of something that smells very foul.

  “Dee,” Walsingham tells him, “has been found.”

  Beale had no idea he had been missing.

  “Oh yes,” Walsingham says. “But no longer: the searchers picked him up in a wherry this morning, coming upriver on the rising tide, and in a very bad way, they say: half dead and screaming his head off.”

  “What about?”

  “None can fathom it, so they are holding him in the Bedlam. For his own good.”

  “Well, that will certainly do for him.”

  “Which is why I sent for you, though to be honest, Robert, you do not look overwell yourself? What is that bruise on your cheek? Did you fall from your horse?”

  “I am tired, that is all,” Beale tells hm. “I will go and find him.”

  “Thank you, Robert. And Mistress Frommond, also, if you’ve a mind.”

  “Mistress Frommond? She is there, too?”

  “She was with Dee in his wherry and is said to be in even worse a state than him. If I am honest, when I heard your knock at the gate I feared it was a messenger to say she has gone out of this world.”

  Beale takes the letters of authority he will need, and four men, and sets a fresh horse north again, retracing his steps up Bishopsgate and causing the watch to let him back out in the name of the Queen. The old priory is up on the left, beyond Saint Botolph’s. It is old, stone-built, and behind a tall stone wall, and though intended as a place of succor for those of addled mind—until God restores them to their wits, or calls them out of this world, and the latter is usually His first choice—it is run for the profit of one of the city’s appointees, often a brewer, or a grocer, and staffed by those who in milder times might well be patients themselves.

  He hammers on the gate, and once again instructs an answering voice to open up in the name of the Queen. Bolts are slid, chains unhooked, and a small door in the greater gate opens to admit him. He stands in what might have been a pleasing courtyard but there is not much to be seen in the lamplight.

  “Where is Dr. Dee?”

  The porter—of the sort who might pull teeth at fairs—guides him into the hall and up a small turning stair to a row of doors that were once the cells of the order’s canons.

  “Hold your nose,” he tells Beale.

  Beale does so.

  They pass to the last doorway where the porter holds his lamp up to a slot in the door and peers in.

  “Asleep,” he says.

  And he unchains the latch.

  “Dee?”

  Dee lies on a pallet, under a blanket. His eyes are open, but they do not follow the lamp, and they seem sightless.

  “Is he dead?”

  “Could be.”

  The tooth puller gives Dee a kick.

  “For Christ’s sake, man! He is not some prisoner. He is Dr. Dee.”

  The tooth puller retreats, crossing himself.

  “Joseph and Mary,” he says.

  “Give me the lamp.”

  Beale takes it and bends over the body. The light reveals Dee as a skeleton, veneered in waxy skin, torn and bloody. He gives off the rotting grave stench you smell on the wind only in a plague year.

  “I’m not gone yet, Master Beale,” Dee says.

  His voice is like the wind in dried reeds.

  Beale almost drops the lamp.

  “I heard you were?”

  “Nearly, but not quite. If I keep absolutely still, and the old woman comes back with more ale, I believe I shall live.”

  “I will find her. Get her to bring some.”

  “No,” Dee says. His voice is as fingernails on a bowstring. “Jane Frommond. They think she is dead. But find her and give her ale by spoonfuls.”

  Beale is glad to step back from Dee. He finds the tooth puller in the corridor. “Where is the other one? The woman?”

  The tooth puller clicks his tongue and half shuts one eye.

  “Think you might be too late with that one,” he says.

  “Take me to her.”

  They descend into the vaults where Jane Frommond is already wrapped in a waxy winding sheet, on a deep stone shelf, in a cold room, ready for the priest and the cart tomorrow. Her feet are icy to the touch and the skin is like that of the bodies they find in the mud below the Isle of Dogs.

  “She had on a nice pair of boots,” the tooth puller tells Beale. “But ruined they were. By the wet.”

  He puts a great spin on the word wet.

  “Help me with her,” Beale tells him.

  “She’ll be stiff as a plank by now,” the tooth puller says.

  But she’s not and together they slide Frommond from her stone shelf.

  “Tchoff!” the tooth puller spits at the smell that rises from her.

  They carry her up to a table in the hall.

  “You can’t put that there!”

  It is an old man, emerging from the darkness with a hoop of keys on his belt and three teeth in his head.

  “Fuck off,” Beale tells him.

  Beale wears a sword on his belt and has written authority from Francis Walsingham. He may do as he pleases.

  “Get me ale,” he tells the tooth puller, “and a spoon. And uncover that fire.”

  The tooth puller stamps away to the pantry while the old man removes the cloche from the embers and puts on a log. Beale peels back Frommond’s rough linen winding sheet. Christ. Jane Frommond is a peeled cadaver. But why isn’t she stiff, as she should be?

  The tooth puller returns with a mug of ale and a spoon.

  Beale feeds Frommond, one drop at a time.

  “Going down, in’ it?” the tooth puller supposes.

  “Have either of them said anything since they came in?” Beale asks.

  “Only him up there,” the old man says. “Something about a cat. All we could make sense of.”

&n
bsp; “Where’ve they been?” Beale wonders aloud. He looks at her hands. They are like bird’s claws, but with what might be coal dust under her broken nails. Soaking-wet boots, coal dust, and the foul smell of putrefaction? Can they have been to Yorkshire?

  He keeps spooning the sweet ale between Frommond’s lips.

  “Good-looking girl, this one was,” the old man says. “And good clothes, what was left of ’em.”

  “Where are they?”

  “Gone to the rag merchant,” he says with a shrug. “They’ll need boiling afore anyone can do anything with ’em, mind, that is for sure. Same with your gent’s up the stairs.”

  They do not hear Dee until he is more or less standing with them. He has blankets wrapped about his naked body, and a faraway look in his eye.

  “Rub her,” he says. “Gently, from the hands and feet. Warm her blood. Her humors must be made to circulate.”

  “What are you doing out?”

  “Shut up.”

  Beale begins to gently rub Frommond’s hand.

  “I ain’t touching them,” the tooth puller says of her feet.

  “Then get out,” Dee tells him, and he takes his place and puts his hands on Frommond’s feet, his thumbs on the soles and he starts gentle circular motions. Skin comes off in his hands in wet, ghostly strips, like the flesh of rotting onions.

  “Come on, Frommond,” he whispers. “Come on. Do not leave me.”

  Then he starts a prayer in a language Beale has never heard. How long they keep up their work Beale does not know. More ale is brought, and more logs are put on the fire, and they keep rubbing, goading the life back into her until in the small hours perhaps, Dee at last says: “There.”

  And he sits on a stool, with his hands between his knees, and his head hung.

  “Well, you tried,” the old man says.

  “You can only hope someone’ll do the same for you, when your time comes,” the tooth puller adds, “but when it comes—”

  “Hush,” Beale says.

  He stares at Frommond’s chest under its shroud.

  “She’s breathing.”

  There is a long moment of silence. Dee does not move. He might be dead himself now. The old man and the tooth puller stand as mute witnesses to a miracle.

  “Get her another blanket,” Dee mutters.

  And then he keels off the stool.

  * * *

  It takes four days before they get any sense out of either of them, but by then reports have already reached the Papey of a man murdered on a barge on the river Lea, “like he was a victim of cannibals.”

  It is a bitterly cold Christmas Eve morning when Beale orders Sir John Jeffers to assemble with ten men to ride with him to Waltham Forest, and then retrace Dee’s and Frommond’s tracks down to the river, and along its west bank to the barge where they are to meet the constables from Enfield whose job it is to identify the dead man and find his murderer.

  “But it is Christmas!” Jeffers reminds him.

  And snow dusts the land, but it matters not.

  “You will be able to pick yourselves out a good yule log,” Beale tells him.

  It is a long ride with which they are already wearily familiar now, but today it is enlivened by an encounter with Sir Christopher Hatton, riding down from Hertford with a guard of perhaps twenty men, well turned out on good horses.

  “You can never be too careful,” he tells Beale. “Not these days.”

  Beale resents the implied slander of Master Walsingham, but says nothing.

  “And yourself, Master Beale?” Hatton goes on, with the sort of smile that ordinarily comes with a tap of the nose. “You are up and down this road daily, it seems. One would think you have a woman stashed away from court somewhere and are become a lotus-eater!”

  Beale flushes.

  “I am busy about Master Walsingham’s business,” he mutters.

  “Of course you are!” Hatton laughs.

  “Not that it is any of yours.”

  “Quite so. Quite so!”

  “Well, we will leave you now, Sir Christopher, and wish you safe passage to the city.”

  “Whatever makes you think I am bound for the city?” Hatton continues with his knowing laughter, and he tugs his horse into action, and Beale and his men, including the much-punished Sir John Jeffers, must make way to let them pass.

  “Twat,” Jeffers mutters. “As if we care where he’s going.”

  But it is a bit of a mystery.

  They carry on up the road and reach the forest where the shots were fired, where they found the horses. From there it is a walk down through the trees to the fringe of the marshes.

  “In daylight I would have seen this path, as God is my witness, Master Beale.”

  Beale wonders if that is true. Probably.

  They find the river, and turn right, and trudge along its sodden margins, crossing ditches and streams that supply various water mills. The river is black, made choppy by the east wind, and there is a constant low susurrus from the rushes. They pass small boats in a pool and then a half-completed lock that reminds one of the yeomen of a gallows. And then, at last, they find the barge. Two men—the constables from Enfield—stand baiting a crow that sits cawing on the barge’s bow, as unwilling to yield its place as the men are to go aboard.

  They greet one another and there are the usual comments as to it being a good day for it and meanwhile the crow keeps up its shrieking, and it is so cold that every time it opens its beak, a second tongue of steam rolls from within. Knowing what it guards, Beale wishes it shot, but a man with a halberd does the job with a stone and the bird flies to settle in a branch of the alder on the other side of the river.

  The constables have scraped as much of the body of the dead man as they could from the barge’s deck, and what they have is taken to Enfield, where it is to be buried, as a Christian.

  “And we spoke to some of the other boatmen on the river,” the older of the two constables tells Beale, “and they confirm the Dutchies doing the lock over yonder were bunking up in her.”

  He nods at the barge.

  “Only they cleared off a while back, and there’s only been one of them here since: a redheaded bloke—not overly friendly apparently—with a beard he wore in a knot under his—you know—chin.”

  He lifts his own, so that Beale will know what he means.

  “Which we found,” the younger continues, “in the front.”

  “So we reckon he’s your dead man.”

  Beale nods. That accords with Dee’s suggestion.

  “Did you search the cabin?”

  Of course they did, if only for what they might make off with.

  “There was a loaf of that horrible black bread,” the old one tells him, “and some orange cheese, which is what Dutchies eat.”

  “And some beer, too, sour with all hops and that.”

  “Nothing else?”

  A blanket and that was it.

  “Really?”

  “He was wearing all his clothes,” the younger constable explains.

  Beale stares at them. The younger one admits there was a spoon they hoped might be silver.

  “No guns?”

  “Guns?”

  They are genuinely at a loss and Beale has to believe them.

  “What about the hold? Have you searched that?”

  The two men shoot each other a glance. No. They have not. They do not know of Dee and Frommond’s ordeal, so they have not thought it worth investigating. It appeared empty, they tell him, and stinks so badly that nothing that might be accounted as living can be down there.

  “Even the rats chuck up.”

  “Nevertheless,” Beale tells them. After you, is their reaction, and they step aside to let him pass. Beale, well wrapped with a cloak and scarf and woolen cap, pauses before he climbs the rough-made gangplank to the barge’s deck. He looks around at the desolate landscape, all mist-shrouded rotting sedge and chill black waters, with that bloody gallows-bird cawing, and a dozen men
in steel helmets gathered watching him as flecks of snow drift down from a goose-gray sky. He shivers, gathers his cloak more firmly about his shoulders, and steps aboard.

  He looks in the cabin first. It stinks of cat and unwashed man. The constables were looking for anything to steal, he knows, rather than anything that might identify whoever lived there as the gunmen who tried to shoot the Queen of England, so they did not take the butt of their knife, as he does, and tap the bulkhead behind the cooking stone, where one plank is paler than its soot-crusted neighbors. Beale hauls the greasy old stone away from the wall and there, behind it, in the junction between deck and bulkhead, the wood is frayed between the planks. He inserts his knife into the wound and levers the plank out. It is as tall as the cabin is high. He can hear the squeak of rats and a sharp reek reminds him of his night with Dee and Frommond in Bedlam Priory.

  He wishes he had a lamp, for within the cavity it is all darkness, and he is not anxious to be bitten by a rat or some such. He pokes his knife in. There is space in there. Quite a bit. He extends his arm into the darkness, all the way to the elbow, when his knifepoint touches something hard, like wood. He knows it is the frame of the boat. He runs the knife down. Nothing. If there were anything there, it has gone. He turns to use his left hand to search the right-hand side of the opening. Here, too— No. His knifepoint touches something that yields fractionally. Not the barge timbers. He withdraws the knife and stretches his hand. Something hard and slick. He grips it and draws out a tall package of greased linen. He knows it is an arquebus. He knows its attendant package will be balls, match fuse, and powder.

  There is only one of them in the cavity, but there is space for many more.

  He stands and carries the gun outside and leans it on the gunwale. The constables suggest that they would have found it had they known they were looking for such a thing, and Beale has some sympathy with that.