The Eyes of the Queen Read online

  The harquebusiers discard their guns and spill out of the back of the cabin. They jump out of the Queen’s barge and scramble across the fishing boat, careless of the fishermen, and vanish over its far side. Walsingham stands and bends over the Queen. She is hunched in her seat. He hesitates to touch her.

  “Your Majesty?”

  She lifts her head.

  There is blood on her hands.

  Walsingham gasps.

  “It’s a scratch. A scratch from the glass. The others will guard me. Go! Go and get him!”

  Dee and Walsingham need no second word. They scramble over the gunwale and up onto the fishing boat where the fisherman stands openmouthed.

  “Stand by to push off!” Dee hears the bargemaster call.

  Dee jumps down from the boat. The mud is gritty and gray. It stinks of shit and butchers’ spoil. He sees the house, the one he saw in his dreams, a hole in its daub, its patchwork of planks shattered by gunshots. It’s the other side of the creek.

  Damn.

  He scrambles back up to the dockside, up a great midden of discarded oyster shells and onto the cobbled dockside above.

  “Dee!”

  Walsingham slips and slides behind him. Dee stops and offers him a hand, hauling him up. There is a dark badge of blood amid the mud.

  “Quick! Come on!”

  They run along the dockside, looping around to the bridge where they see the harquebusiers storming ahead with their swords drawn. Men, women, children, geese, and even pigs move quickly out of their way. Dee and Walsingham cross the bridge over the Lea and are now on the lane at the end of which is the hut they shot at. The harquebusiers arrive as a phalanx and smash the door down.

  Dee and Walsingham keep running.

  The hut is so small it hardly fits the harquebusiers, and by the time Dee and Walsingham reach the step up, they are stepping back out onto the lane again.

  “Go that way!” Walsingham points down the lane, to the east. “Search every building! Everywhere! Find him! He mustn’t get away.”

  Dee steps into the darkness of the stinking hut.

  It is empty, save for a cooking stone, and the dead woman. Flies hum and slice through the beams of light streaming through the various holes that are scattered over the wall.

  Walsingham comes in and gags.

  Dee crosses to the wall. Under the larger hole is a smaller one. On the ground, a scatter of blood.

  He sees the gun’s rest, lying where it has fallen, but there is no sign of the gun, or the ramming rod. Or its owner/master.

  * * *

  Hamilton moves softly through the water. The soldiers are gone, but there are two men up there yet, slow moving, more considered sorts. Perhaps it is Walsingham himself? By the blood of Mary, he thinks, imagine killing both Elizabeth and her chief devil incarnate in one day? His thoughts are broken by a terrible rack of pain in his gut. He knows he is dying. But he has done what he set out to do. He saw the ball strike the Queen, just above her ear. A killing shot, for certain. He was surprised she did not seem to flinch, but that thought was taken no further. It was overtaken by astonishment at the volley of gunshots that sprang from the cabin. The other bullets sprayed everywhere, as you’d expect, and that one of them caught him in the groin was punishment sent down by God upon His imperfect servant.

  To spite the pain, he grips the stock of the gun. He needs to load it. If he cannot, he might as well consign it to the mud.

  * * *

  “Come on, Dee,” Walsingham says. “He will be miles away by now.”

  But Dee remains still.

  The tide is up, and he can hear its slop against the hut’s footings, but it is the smell that bothers him. He bends over the firestone: cold. And yet, even above the spicy sweetness of the woman’s decaying body, there is the smell of burning.

  He is about to use Walsingham’s name but stops himself.

  Instead he gestures. They leave the hut.

  “What are you up to, Dee?”

  “Come with me.”

  The two men skirt back to the creek.

  “By Jesus, Dee, I am not going back down there.”

  Below is the stinking green-gray mud. Walsingham’s leg is bleeding heavily.

  “All right,” Dee says. “Listen to me carefully, Walsingham. Here is what I want you to do. Count to sixty, slowly, and then walk into the hut again.”

  “Why?”

  It is best not to tell him. This is different from the Queen, since Walsingham will not be an image in a mirror.

  “Just do as I say, Walsingham. Sixty, and then back in there.”

  Despite his doubts, Walsingham will do it.

  Dee drops down into the mud. It is glazed with what might be tanners’ spoil, and the cold grip of the mud reminds him powerfully of Mont Saint-Michel. He drags each leg from the slurry’s grip and wades, thigh high in it, along the creek below the dockside wall. Ahead is the open water of the Thames. He rounds the wall and finds himself amid the jumble of the huts’ footings and stilts. They are treacherous with green weed and there is what looks like a dead dog caught in a crook between two beams. Stinking rushes are strewn everywhere and Dee is certain he can hear the constant and close squeak of rats. He presses on. He is counting under his breath.

  Twenty.

  Here the water is deeper, and the mud below scoured away by the Thames’s stronger current. He peers around the stilts. There. Twenty yards away: a fine gauze of fuse smoke. Just as he thought. He lowers himself into the water, up to his chin. It is bracing, not too bad. But Christ! What a stench.

  Thirty.

  He strokes through the water.

  It has a cold, dipping green, clammy grip.

  He sees the bulk of the man, his left shoulder, linen shirt. He is conducting some operation. Loading his gun! A leather bag over his shoulder. The man hesitates a moment. He’s looking for somewhere to put the ramming rod where it won’t sink.

  Forty.

  Dee slithers through a lattice of stilts. Above are latrine holes, as why wouldn’t you? Dee sees the man twist the strap of his bag over his shoulder. His gun is held upright. He’s waiting. Head tipped back, eyes raised. He has good teeth. Waiting.

  Fifty.

  It is a long-barreled gun, and its muzzle must be nearly touching the floor above. No wonder his shot at the Queen was so good. Dee can see him clearly now: tall, very strong, his arms corded with muscle.

  Fifty-five.

  But now the man feels something. He glances down to where Dee was a moment ago. A frown. But then: up above. Some disturbance at the door of the hut. A scrape. He looks back up. He grips the gun, his thumb over the powder pan.

  Sixty.

  Walsingham enters the hut above.

  The man moves the gun to follow his steps, turns his back on Dee, but then—last moment—he glances down, and around, and as if preordained, he and Dee lock gazes. Dee lunges.

  He catches the man from behind, both arms around him as he holds the gun up. The man pulls the trigger. The fuse connects. The powder in the pan flashes. The gun explodes as the damp powder bursts its barrel. Dee presses his face to the back of the man’s neck. Dee’s head is enveloped in a ball of sound and fire. The man’s head cracks back into Dee’s face, sending him against the rails of the footings. He nearly goes under. The man is still upright, still clutching the stock of the ruined gun, but there’s blood everywhere, and something’s wrong. He falls backward into the water, but floats back up again, faceup, though that’s missing: his jaw and cheeks are gone, his nose is a bloody hole, his eyes formless flesh and his forehead and scalp sheared away by coarse shreds of metal that burst from the gun. Blood wells everywhere, winking in every wound, a spreading slick of it.

  Dee clings to the poles of the house above. His face is on fire, and there is blood all over him, his arms, his hands, everywhere. The man spins slowly in the current, and after a while, Dee pushes him out into the river proper. He feels his strength sap. Darkness clouds his vision. His head
spins. He clings to a post, the shaft slick with weed and God knows what else. He presses his cheek to it, feels it slide, cold, up as he goes down. The water rises to meet him.

  “Dee! Dee!”

  It is Walsingham, his face pressed through the privy hole above.

  “Stay awake! Stay awake, Dee!”

  But he is falling, and fading fast.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The White Tower, London, October 17, 1572

  Any number of ailments might afflict a man after his flesh is shredded by pieces of steel that have first passed through the body of another man, and then he is dunked unconscious in the river Thames. But after he is bled a pint or two and plied with various purgatives and emetics that leave him racked with pain and weak as a kitten, Dr. John Dee is left to lie in bed for a few days, heaped with blankets so that he sweats out any further corruptives and pollutants, and so balance his humors.

  He dreams, constantly, the same dream, of the girl whom one part of his mind believes to be Rose Cochet, but whom the other part—the rational part—cannot believe is so. His dreams show her playing again, this time with a battered straw doll, much loved, on a broad swath of grass below a painted dovecote. Once again she is prettily dressed and her cheeks are rosy with good health and there are other children gathered about. He can hear singing and the playing of a reed flute, and the scene is warmed by the golden light of a low sun. Isobel Cochet emerges and calls for her daughter.

  When he wakes to proper consciousness, Dee finds himself unable to move.

  “Don’t move,” the Queen tells him.

  “I can’t,” he tells her.

  He is weighed down by his covers, and bandages over his face, his hands, and his arms.

  “My physician says you are very lucky.”

  Lucky?

  He has a partial view of the room. A physician is holding up to the light of the window a jar of what must be Dee’s urine. The Queen sits in an upright chair at the side of his bed. She is in pearlescent material, with a collar that frames her slender neck, her pretty ears.

  Dust motes in the window light.

  “How long have you been sitting here?” he asks.

  She smiles.

  “A week, no more.”

  He laughs, though it draws up phlegm. She has tears in her eyes. He finds she is holding his hand, and he hers. They clench them together, the gesture of two who have loved and lost and learned to love again.

  After a silence he speaks. “Rose Cochet,” he says.

  The Queen looks away. But she does not seek to break their handhold. She clutches all the harder, her guilt all too clear.

  “I am sorry,” she whispers. “I did not know. I did not know. But I must take responsibility for her mother’s death. I do take responsibility for her mother’s death. Isobel Cochet died for me. I see that. She died for me. And for her daughter. And I will… I will do all I am able, to put that right. Please believe me.”

  He does.

  * * *

  Later Walsingham comes with the man Dee recognizes as Master Beale. There is no sign of the Queen.

  Walsingham asks a few questions, the answers to which he already knows, or could deduce from observation, and which he doesn’t care about anyway. He looks tired, Dee thinks.

  “The Queen has examined the letters,” Walsingham tells him.

  He remembers. The two letters he stole from Van Treslong. He gave them to her the moment before the mirror was shot.

  “And?”

  “Well, we were right about both letters being in the same hand.”

  Dee closes his eyes in resignation, until a strong memory of her, on the ship, clutching these very letters, comes roaring back in protest.

  “But… wait. She said… didn’t she? That she had never written— She didn’t write either of them?”

  Walsingham shakes his head.

  “Who then?” Dee asks.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Hill Hall, Essex, October 25, 1572

  They have all been to Epping Forest before: Dee in search of sites that might yield information on Druidical rituals; Walsingham to see the Queen in her father’s ugly hunting lodge; and Beale with a woman who was married to the master of the Painter-Stainers’ Guild.

  “The hunting is supposed to be very good,” Beale tells them.

  Dee says nothing. He doesn’t care about hunting, good or bad, nor does Walsingham, sitting beside him in the caroche, have an opinion to offer. Dee is well wrapped in heavy worsted, with marten at the collars and cuffs, and soft leather boots, all paid for by the Queen on behalf of a grateful nation. He feels delicate, and though his wounds have healed well, his cheek is flecked with a smooth pink scar that runs counter to the grain of his skin, and from which no beard will ever grow.

  He keeps his gaze directed out of the window, where a faint mist softens the oak and beech trees, leaves already on the turn, and there is a faintly fungal smell in the air. By the wayside, russet pigs rootle in the mast.

  It will soon be Martinmas, and they are traveling with a company of the Queen’s guard to arrest Sir Thomas Smith at Hill Hall.

  It was Margaret Formby’s evidence that has him charged with conspiring to have Dee killed. Walsingham said that if it had been any other man Smith sought to have killed, then perhaps the Queen would have been more anxious to have him charged with the forgery of her signature, and the misuse of her seal, but there is, as Walsingham had admitted, something special between Dee and the Queen. Some bond that he cannot quite fathom. It made Dee very happy to hear that.

  “Does he know we are coming?” he asks.

  Walsingham shakes his head.

  “He might not even be there,” Walsingham supposes, and it turns out he is right. When they reach Hill Hall—late midmorning—they do not stop at the lodge on the track but carry on up to the house. It is built in the new style, and, like Smith’s colony in Ireland, it sits unwelcome and awkward on the land.

  A panicked groom greets them on the steps. He eyes the troop of soldiers, but mostly Walsingham, with something like terror.

  “No, Master Walsingham, sir,” he says. “Sir Thomas is gone north to see to his— He is stocking the estate. Only Master Gethyn is here.”

  Dee wonders what that means: stocking his estate?

  Walsingham curses.

  “Take us to his office,” he tells the groom. There will be papers and so on, Dee supposes. “And have Master Gethyn come to us.”

  Gethyn is already there, standing at the lectern in Sir Thomas’s study, a handsome room, with many windows affording much light, open now to afford a view over a sloping garden wherein the focal point is a very fine stone-built dovecote. The room has painted walls, rather than the usual hanging arras, showing what might be scenes from the life of Nebuchadnezzar, and there is a Turkey carpet underfoot that might in another house be pride of place above the fire.

  He does not seem a bit surprised to see them.

  “God bless you this day, Master Gethyn,” Walsingham starts. “When is Sir Thomas expected back, do you know?”

  “Not now until next week,” Gethyn tells him. “He is away up north again.”

  “Seeing a man about a dog?” Beale asks.

  “Ha.” Gethyn laughs. “Something like that.”

  Only Gethyn knows why this is funny. There is something sad and sardonic about him, Dee thinks. He likes him.

  “But if I am right as to your purpose today,” Gethyn goes on, “then it is not Sir Thomas you seek, Master Walsingham.”

  “Oh?”

  Gethyn is darkly dressed, in the old-fashioned manner, and holds three or four papers in his hands. They tremble slightly. Walsingham slows down now, tilts his head, narrows his eyes, and becomes less brusque. It is as if Gethyn is no longer an obstacle on the road, or a postway, but a destination in his own right. A thing of interest.

  “There is something you wish to tell us, Master Gethyn?”

  Gethyn says nothing but he holds up one of the piec
es of paper. It is irregular, as if someone has cut—

  Walsingham strides across to take it from him. He scans what is written. It is a grant of land from the Queen to Sir Thomas Smith, three hundred and sixty acres in Ulster, sent a few months earlier. It is missing the seal, and its bottom right-hand corner. Walsingham looks up at Gethyn very keenly.

  “Smith?”

  Gethyn shakes his head.

  “You?” Walsingham asks.

  Gethyn nods. He is pale, but also flushed, with glassy eyes. He is suddenly terrified.

  “Why?” Walsingham asks. He is incredulous.

  Gethyn shrugs minutely.

  “I am of the true faith,” he says, as if this explains everything. But Walsingham shakes his head.

  “But—no. Gethyn. Not you. You are—”

  Gethyn’s smile becomes glassier yet. “Reasonable?”

  “Yes.”

  Walsingham turns to Dee.

  Dee feels blank. He is looking at a man confessing to having tried to have him killed, yet he cannot feel any rancor for him. It is not only because he looks like no homicidal firebrand Dee has ever seen, but because… what? Dee cannot say. Only that he is certain there is something odd here. Walsingham feels it too.

  “So,” he stalks, “when the Queen came here on the third to last day of August this year, she asked you to write, in her name, to Master Raleigh, of the Pelican, to instruct him to have this man, Dr. John Dee, collected from the coast of Normandy?”

  Gethyn looks over at Dee with interest. In another time, would they have passed the time in quiet discussion of the ways of the world? Perhaps. Why not?

  “I am sorry,” he says.

  “Nothing to be sorry about,” Dee tells him. “It is the next letter that I found”—he searches for the right word, but can’t—“upsetting.”

  Gethyn acknowledges his point. We are not enemies, Dee thinks.

  “So you wrote the letter?” Walsingham continues with his question.

  “I did. She wanted to write it herself, but she had been traveling two days, and on horseback from the Tower, and so I wrote it out for her, in as close to her hand as I could.”