The Eyes of the Queen Read online

  Walsingham shakes his head. “All the more reason to get Her Majesty’s person safely to the Tower.”

  “You can say it again,” Dee argues, “but if you put Her Majesty on the boat, you will be signing her death warrant.”

  “Dee! You do not understand! If the Queen stays here, she will be killed! We cannot risk it!”

  There is a rising hubbub of voices raised against his.

  Dee turns to the Queen, who stares at him with tears in her eyes.

  “What is it, John?”

  “Your Majesty,” he says, quietly. She lifts her hand for silence from the other men. It is instant.

  He tells them of his dream: of the dead woman lying in fish bones; of the rotting warehouse with its footings in the water; of the explosive flash of black powder.

  Walsingham is exasperated. “It’s just a dream!” he says.

  “You remember how I knew that Isobel Cochet was on Mont Saint-Michel?”

  Walsingham opens then closes his mouth. He catches Beale’s eye over Dee’s shoulder. He does not have to be able to read minds to know what Beale is thinking: Hamilton.

  “What is it?” the Queen asks.

  Walsingham tells her his fears about her great enemy, James Hamilton, well known for his gift with the gun.

  After a long moment’s silence, the Queen turns to Dee.

  “You are my eyes,” she says.

  Dee notes Walsingham’s wince.

  But the Queen goes on.

  “And so what would you have me do?” she asks him.

  She is placing all her trust in him, publicly, and so everyone must follow suit and do likewise.

  Dee takes a long deep breath. He is struggling, struggling to resist her. Still he says nothing, but he cannot. He looks around the library, at all the books he will never own, most of them useless, and at the paintings, and at the myriad images of the Queen, of himself, Walsingham, Smith, and all the others reflected almost endlessly in the polished glass of all the Venetian mirrors.

  They wait his word, his decision.

  “You must get in the boat,” he says.

  Everyone starts shouting at him all at once.

  * * *

  It does not take the workmen long. Two of them have the mirror down from the wall within the hour, and they carry it—two foot by three foot of polished glass and metal that is worth more than them and their entire families put together—out to the master carpenter’s workshop.

  “Are you certain about this, Dee?” Walsingham nags.

  Dee can see how it might go wrong, but he says nothing.

  “Fetch two more,” he tells the workmen. “The next largest there.”

  The workmen go back to bring another mirror.

  “What are you up to, Dee?”

  “We need a diptych,” he tells Walsingham. “Two mirrors, braced upright and placed at an angle, just so.”

  He indicates with his hands.

  Walsingham is hardly any the wiser, but the master carpenter is at work with his mallet and chisel, creating a mortise and tenon in a frame of wood.

  “Like this?”

  “Perfect. Now one more, identical.”

  While the work goes on, the only sign of the Queen is a glimpse of her in the window, and Walsingham is drawn back to that painful afternoon in Sheffield when he was taught a lesson by Queen Mary. If Dee is right, the lessons have not stopped there. Christ.

  When the frames are done to his satisfaction, the workmen carry them out to the Queen’s barge and place them behind the cabin.

  “No. Move it to the front of the cabin.”

  Then they bring the mirrors and the master carpenter attaches them to the frame with a series of leather straps.

  “Proper job,” he says, though he has no idea what the job is.

  The curtains in the cabin are drawn to one side, rich red velvet, while the windowpanes are removed on both sides, and good beeswax candles are lit and placed on the deck, with smaller mirrors positioned behind them to magnify the light, and throw it into the cabin.

  “I hope you know what you are doing, Dee,” Walsingham says again.

  Dee tells him that while he was a student at Cambridge he once made the audience of a theater believe a golden scarab beetle the size of a man could fly.

  “How?”

  “Just wait, can’t you, Walsingham?”

  “We do not have time, Dee!”

  “We do this, now,” Dee says, “and we catch our gunman. And the Queen can live in peace for some little while. Or we run and hide, stick her in the Tower. And she is there forever.”

  The oarsmen, all eighteen of them, sit in the barge and stare back, bewildered as anyone, as Dee makes young Thomas Digges sit in Her Majesty’s chair in the cabin. Their view is obscured by one of the mirrors, so they cannot see it, but Dee has turned the chair to one side, so that instead of facing forward, as it might usually, it faces the port side of the boat.

  “Stand behind the mirror, will you, Walsingham, and do as I say.”

  Walsingham stands behind them, watching Dee walk up the pathway to the palace, about fifty paces away. Once reaching the walls of the palace, he turns and stares back at the barge.

  “Move the one in the cabin a little to the left,” he calls.

  “For Christ’s sake, Dee.”

  When it is in position, Dee comes over. He has a chalk stone in his pocket, and with it he marks the positions of the frames, and then replica marks on the other side of the boat.

  “Dee! What are you doing?” Walsingham demands as Dee shifts the mirror frames around.

  “Go to where I was standing, and look back.”

  As Walsingham clambers out of the boat he hears Dee tell Thomas Digges to look queenly.

  Walsingham walks, seeing the Queen in her window once more, until he is where Dee was. He turns and stares back at the barge.

  “My God,” he says. “My God.”

  * * *

  James Hamilton kneels in the filth of the old woman’s hovel. He clasps his hands hard and offers up his final prayer, his final amen, and he gets to his feet. He has been praying since the first pink ray of dawn probed through the hole he has made in the wall, and he now approaches it and looks out over the choppy green brew of the Thames.

  It is a beautiful day. On the river are numerous small craft, and one caravel, laden with cloth perhaps, anchored against the waning tide. On the far bank is a small church with a spire, where once the Mass was said; a windmill; a stone wall; three muddy cows in the river; and a boy on a cart. There are some fishermen, too, though, Christ, what would they catch in this soup of human filth?

  He turns to his gun on the ground, kept from the damp and dirt by its sackcloth wrappings, lustrous with rose oil. Alongside it is the ball he will use. He has lost one, he knows, and believes he must have left it with the horse when he panicked and bolted from the inn.

  He knows he will never live to reclaim it.

  He has returned the powder to the horn, the powder in its oyster shell. It flows fine as sand in a timer. He has the tow wads, too, likewise steeped in rose oil.

  The ramming rod, and the stand, are propped against the wall.

  He stands. His heart is beating wildly but when he holds out his hands, they are steady.

  He will eat.

  And then he will be ready.

  * * *

  They say their prayers as a household, as a nation, kneeling where the night before the Queen heard Tallis’s “Lamentations,” and when it is over, they stand in silence and gather themselves.

  The Queen says her farewells, and her courtiers stand pale-faced. Some of the women weep, as if she were mounting the scaffold just as her mother did all those years ago.

  Smith glares, his hands clenching, unclenching.

  There is no sign of Burghley or Leicester.

  Helped by her bargemaster, the Queen steps aboard her barge.

  “I am to sit here? Facing this way?”

  “Yes, Your Majesty.
”

  There is not a lot of room, for gone are her usual ladies-in-waiting, and in their place, crammed into the gloom of the curtained cabin, behind the second mirror, are eight yeomen of the guard, harquebusiers, each nursing the fuse of a gun. Among them sits little Thomas Digges, with his perspective glass ready, and there, too, is Francis Walsingham, as pale and anxious as she has ever seen him.

  “And where is John Dee?” the Queen asks.

  “Here, Your Majesty.”

  He is hidden behind the first mirror, with his back to the oarsmen, roughly in the middle of the boat.

  “Are you certain about this?” she asks.

  There is a long pause while he tries to think clearly.

  “Some of it, Your Majesty.”

  She manages a laugh that stirs up a memory of her in the Tower, when things were at their most precarious for both of them, and he cannot soften a fraction. She is the woman who wanted him dead, and yet, and yet—

  The bargemaster stands by the tiller at the back of the cabin. He looks quizzically at Dr. Dee: Are you sure? Dee is not. Everybody is looking to him, though: those on the boat, and those gathered on the shore.

  Dee looks to the Queen: Ready? She nods. He turns to the bargemaster and nods in turn. The bargemaster sounds his whistle and the boys on the bank let go the ropes while three men with boat poles push the boat out into the river.

  “Ship oars!”

  There is a chorus of moans from the bank as the boat shudders underfoot, as if this is a funeral barque, and the barge drifts for a moment until the oarsmen set about their work. The barge gathers itself and slides forward into the current.

  “Smooth!” the bargemaster calls and a moment later the oarsmen are into their rhythm, pulling the boat through the water northward. The Isle of Dogs is on their right, which the harquebusiers face, though cannot see for the curtains are down, and Deptford on the left, which the Queen faces, and which she can see, for her curtains are up.

  There is a gentle breeze, seagulls screech high above, and it is turning into a day of the sort that tricks you into believing it will be like this all winter. The water thrums on the underside of the hull. The air is freshish, only slightly tinged with rot and spoil.

  No one says anything until at last the Queen speaks.

  “John,” she says. “Why are you so angry with me?”

  For a moment Dee is stunned. Then he laughs. “Because you tried to have me killed?”

  The Queen turns to him.

  “Please, Your Majesty, you must look straight ahead.”

  They are in the middle of the Thames now, fifty paces from each bank. The oarsmen must work hard, for the river is flowing fast against them, but they are strong and well-nourished, unlike most ferrymen, and the creak of their oars in the rowlocks is steady.

  “What did you mean, that I tried to have you killed?”

  “Well, didn’t you?”

  “No.”

  The Queen shakes her head as if to clear her thoughts. What a conversation to be having.

  “Why would I wish you dead?” she asks.

  “You wrote—to that absurd Dutchman—that I was a notorious papist. That I was a heretic and a traitor sent by the pope to kill you. And that you wanted him—the Dutchman—to ensure that I did not survive the voyage home from France to do so. Please! You must keep looking at the southern bank.”

  “But, John, I never wrote such a thing.”

  “I have it. I have the letter.”

  “I don’t care, for the love of God, John. I would never—why would I wish that?”

  “If you believed it?”

  “If I believed it? If I believed you were a papist sent to kill me, then I suppose I should wish you dead before me, yes. But I do not believe it. And even if I did, I should never have you… what? Put over the side of a ship, or murdered on some beach in France.”

  The oarsmen are warming up, and the barge has begun its sweep northward toward the city. Walsingham stands tense. He has his ears on the conversation, his eyes on the right-hand bank of the river. Thomas Digges is likewise peering through his perspective glass. They pass a boat coming the other way, dipping its sail in salute, its crew removing their caps and cheering.

  But the Queen sits stony faced. She is right, Dee supposes. She would have him dragged through the streets, half hanged, then taken down and eviscerated. She’d have his innards and his nethers burned on a fire so he could smell them roast; and then she’d have him beheaded, and his head placed on a pike atop the bridge, while his body would be cut in grisly quarters to be nailed to gate posts in and around Mortlake to warn others off his path. And she’d be right to do that.

  “But I have both letters,” he tells her again.

  “If you do, John, it is a forgery, for it is not in my hand.”

  “It is in the same hand as the other letter you sent him, Van Treslong.”

  “I did not write to Van Treslong.”

  “You sent him word that I was to be picked up from that beach. Then that I was to be killed.”

  “For the love of Jesus, Dee,” Walsingham snaps, “let us sort this out at another time.”

  The Queen is hidden from his view by the mirror in the cabin, but he can see over this and around it and is afforded glimpses of the north shore in the mirror out on deck: blank-sided warehouses and tumbledown hovels, the beaks of cranes, ships’ masts and spars, spools of rope hanging from their hooks. A few men—porters—stop to watch and wave as Her Majesty’s barge goes by.

  The sun is behind now, throwing pale shadows toward the bow, but these are inching around as the barge follows the curve of the river.

  “Keep her in midstream, master,” Dee calls to the helmsman. They are about to turn west in the pool of London. Apart from under the bridge itself, this is where the river is at its narrowest.

  “I have both letters,” he tells the Queen. “I have them here.”

  “I should like to see them.”

  “Coming up Limehouse on starboard!” the bargemaster calls.

  * * *

  First: a disk of oily tow, pushed into the barrel’s end by the clinking rod of steel. Then: the powder, tipped into the eye of the barrel through a loading horn. Then: another disk of tow. This he slides down slowly, gathering all the powder in the barrel into a charge, tamped firm under the tow. Then: the ball. He cannot read the inscription, but he knows it to be from Jeremiah: “The Lord is a God of Retribution.” He palms it into the barrel and it rolls down the barrel in one smooth glide. He follows it with the third and final disk of oiled tow. He tamps the charge and ball together and sets the rod aside.

  Next he uses a horn to fill the hole between the pan and charge with more powder, and last he taps a little powder into the pan. He sets the gun aside and takes up his tinderbox. It consists of a flint, and steel, and a scrap of linen, baked black. A few scrapes of flint on steel, and the linen is aflame. With it, he lights the gun’s fuse. He waves them both in the air: one to extinguish; one to get going.

  The smell of the burning cloth and fuse rope covers that of the belching corpse.

  When that is done, he attaches the fuse to the lever of the gun, and he stands for a few moments, breathing very deeply.

  * * *

  The barge turns slowly through the river.

  Dee passes the Queen both letters.

  But she must not look down, he tells her.

  “Please, Your Majesty, ahead.”

  She does so and unfolds the first of the letters on her lap without looking.

  No one speaks. No one breathes. No one knows what to expect.

  The guards in the cabin are looking to Dee for guidance, while little Thomas Digges uses his perspective glass to examine every shadow on the river’s bank. Walsingham ignores them. He is tensed, eyes closed, pinching the bridge of his nose. Dee waits crouched in the hull, his eyes on the mirror, calculating the turn of the river in relation to the jumbled rooflines of the buildings on the north bank. They are approac
hing Limehouse, the creek where the river Lea flows into the Thames. The Queen sits in her chair, her shoulders hunched, her eyes clenched tight shut.

  Christ. What if he’s wrong?

  The Queen glances down at the letter. A frown crosses her face.

  The shadows are beginning to bleed off the starboard bow as the barge turns to follow the river westward.

  “Dee?”

  But Dee is elsewhere. He is thinking: I was wrong.

  He has misinterpreted his dream.

  And he is just about to look over to say something, to apologize to them all for disturbing them, and for having them tear apart the Palace of Placentia, and the Queen’s barge, to make this absurd frame for the mirror, when—plock!—a hole appears in the mirror above. The Queen gasps and claps a hand over her cheek, and a fraction of a moment later there comes a dull thump from the shore.

  “There!” Thomas Digges shouts, pointing. But the harquebusiers have seen the flash, or the smoke, and now the curtains are drawn aside and they squeeze their levers and apply their fuses. The Queen clamps her hands over her ears as the cabin resounds to the flash and boom of the arquebuses. The noise is tremendous. The boat seems to stagger. The cabin fills with dense smoke. Everybody seems to be shouting. Across the water a small wooden cabin splinters in numerous places as the balls hit.

  Dee and Walsingham collide as they rush to cover the Queen in case of any more shots.

  “Take us in!” Walsingham shouts to the bargemaster. He is deafened by the gunshots and cannot hear his own voice, but the bargemaster leans on the tiller. The barge slews toward the ships moored against the north bank. The bargemaster shouts something and the oarsmen on the starboard lift their oars as the boat thumps against a low-sided fishing vessel with a deadening boom that throws the fishing boat’s boy to his knees. Strong arms clamp the gunwale and hold the barge fast.