The Queen's Men Read online

  Christ.

  And what of him? What of Francis Walsingham? He has been one of the eleven thousand foolish virgins, he knows now. While others were feathering alternative nests, he was burning through his stock of candles on the Queen’s behalf, never sparing a thought for himself or his family. He manages a rueful inner smile. One thing to be grateful for: he has run up so much debt on the Queen’s account, paying his intelligencers and smoothing ways in foreign courts, that he is left with nothing a new regime might usefully take from him.

  Save his life, of course, and the lives of his family.

  * * *

  River Thames, London,

  same evening, first week of November 1577

  Dee sits in the thwart of the barge, boat cloak on his shoulders, shirt collar untied, and takes the bottle he is passed.

  “God’s blood, John, what a thing. What a thing.”

  It is Robert Dudley, first Earl of Leicester, who has passed him the bottle that by now, as they approach Whitehall, is only a third full. “Did you predict this? Did you see it in the stars? Is this what that bloody thing means?”

  He gestures in the lamplight toward the stern of his barge, beyond which—though how far beyond? That is a question, though for another time—the Great Comet hangs in the night sky, strangely cold, almost impersonal, and for a moment, Dee imagines it taking pleasure in the catastrophe it has wrought.

  “I’d’ve hoped for a bit more notice, wouldn’t you, John?” Dudley continues, shouting now as if to include the comet into their conversation. “A bit of consideration, given everything. I mean, I appreciate it; you’re a star, or comet, but God damn it, she was a Queen! She was our Queen!”

  Dudley takes the bottle back before Dee has had a drink.

  “It is not that,” Dee says.

  “What?”

  “Forgive me, Robert. I… I do not think the comet has anything to do with Bess’s death.”

  “Don’t call her that, John. Don’t call her that.”

  Dee says nothing. After a while Dudley turns to him.

  “You cast her chart, once, didn’t you?”

  Again, still, Dee says nothing.

  “Did it say she would be shot dead in carriage? In Waltham Forest? In Waltham bloody Forest? Answer me. Dee! Did it say that?”

  “Of course not. Also, such charts, as you surely know, do not work like that.”

  “Why not? Why don’t they work like that? I think they do. You go to anyone else who knows anything about charts—that French man, what is his name, with his stone?”

  “Nostradamus.”

  “Him. You go to him and pay him thirty livres and he will tell you exactly what you can expect. If the Queen had consulted him, he’d’ve told her—I don’t know—not to take a carriage this day, lest some goddamned Catholic shooting party blast her to pieces with iron balls.”

  “Even supposing he could foresee that, which he could not,” Dee says, “he’d not tell her it was so, because he would want it to be so.”

  “There you are. That is my point.”

  “Also, he is dead.”

  Dee is grateful that Dudley pulled his barge into the river’s bank to see if Dee had heard the news, and to offer him a ride downriver if needed.

  “Decisions need be made, John,” he’d said, and Dee supposed this would have to be the same in every household in the land. With Queen Elizabeth gone, and another Queen Mary to come, perhaps it was time to dust off the crucifixes? Dig out the old prayer book and slide the new one into the flames?

  Next to him, Dudley takes another drink.

  “The thing about you, John, do you know? What it is?”

  “No.”

  “Shall I tell you?”

  “No.”

  “The thing about you, John, is that you don’t give people what they want. You cast a chart, and you miss the fact that the person who is paying you to cast their chart is going to be shot dead in the week following All Saints, aged—I don’t know. Do you see what I mean? Such a thing—a man, or a woman’s, death—is a big deal. To them. Maybe not to you. But to them. It is what they want to know. And you do not tell them, do you?”

  Dee wishes Dudley would shut up.

  “So, do you see why someone might not wish to pay you? Or appoint you, say, royal astrologer?”

  “Please,” Dee begins. He does not want to go over this again.

  “It is like your alchemy,” Dudley rolls on. “You are—there is no doubt—the cleverest man alive. You know everything. And yet the Queen gives all her money not to you, but to some dwarfish little Dutchman, a known and blatant swindler. What was his name?”

  “Cornelius de Lannoy.”

  “That is him. That was him. And do you know why she does that?”

  God. Another time and he would be interested to hear Dudley’s insight into that little puzzle.

  “It is because he—that Dutch dwarf—said ‘I can make you thirty-three thousand pounds’ worth of gold. And I can do that every year. Year on year.’ So she gave him everything he wanted! She gave him Somerset House and a pension of a hundred and twenty pounds a year! She gave him a house in the country and all the alembics and pelicans and Dutch glass and so on that a man could ever need.”

  “But he produced nothing!” Dee reacts. “They put him in the Tower!”

  “That’s right! But do you know why they put him in the Tower? It was Cecil. Cecil put him in the Tower not because they thought he was gulling them over his ability to make gold. They put him there because they thought he was stealing all the gold he was making! They thought he was making over eight hundred thousand pounds a year! They believed him, you see? Because he told them what they wanted to hear.”

  “Christ, Robert, this is not the time—”

  “But what do you do when someone asks you to make gold?”

  Dee sighs.

  “It is not that simple,” he says.

  Dudley laughs.

  “Exactly! You witter on about angels, and the kabbalah, and the True Elixir, and you talk about hidden languages and you will tell them that one plus two plus three plus four equals ten, as if that were something special, rather than mere coincidence, but do you know what? All anyone really wants is a practical, practicing magician.”

  “Whitehall coming up, my lord,” the bargemaster calls.

  Thank God, Dee thinks.

  Dudley flings the bottle over the gunwale.

  “Sorry, John. I do not know what has got into me. I just wanted you to know. I wanted to be honest. So that you know why she did not… make your life any easier. But she loved you, John. That is what I mean to say. She loved you almost best of all. Of us all I mean. Of course, it could never be. You know that. She knew that. You are a commoner, and by Christ, look at you, you dress like a bag of shit, but she… she always said, ‘Where is my John Dee? He will know. He knows everything. He is my eyes.’ I envied you. We all did. You spent all that time with her. In the Tower. You were fellow inmates! You were granted the liberty to take to the leads of the Bell Tower, and she— Well… They can’t take that away from you!”

  Dee does not remind Dudley that he, too, was in the Tower at the time. Though he was probably too distracted to follow Dee’s early thoughts on the monad hieroglyph, or in fact pay much attention to Lady Elizabeth as she was then, for at the time Robert’s father and his brother were about to have their heads chopped off, which preoccupies a man, and also he was desperate to avoid sharing their fate.

  Instead, Dee thinks back to that time, those months, some years ago now, when he was appointed tutor to the girl who would one day, against many expectations, go on to become Queen of England. By Christ, she had been bright! Flame haired, and fierce, pursuing all avenues of inquiry, chasing down information, knowledge, wisdom, and insight as if she were a hawk after a plover. He had hardly had to teach her a thing, only point her in the right direction, and she was off. They had spent happy months, side by side, heads craned over books, lapping it up.
/>   It had ended, of course, as these things always do. Well, not always. They do not always end in arrest, or at least not for casting horoscopes. She was eighteen at the time, six years his junior, and old enough to be the mistress of her own home, and perhaps she would have been, had the planets not pulled her in another direction.

  “And then do you remember the time you saved her life?” Dudley goes on. “On her barge off Limehouse? While I was ill. And then—afterward, she spoke to Walsingham. He was to take care of you, she said, forever, but not—maybe not in the way that you would have wished. He was to— Oh I don’t know. A secret service or something. You know what Walsingham is like. You talk to him about it. Christ, John, what is to become of us? What do the stars say about that? About us?”

  Dee thinks he will have to remember all this later, pick it apart. Try to make sense of it. But Dudley is babbling. He is drifting from one sentiment to the next. The boat nudges the jetty and he staggers. Dee catches him.

  “Where’s that bottle. Christ. Did I throw it over?”

  “It was empty anyway.”

  He helps Dudley up onto the gangplank where Dudley remains unsteady on his feet.

  “River legs,” he says.

  He smells very headily of ambergris and alcohol and fresh sweat, but he is not as drunk as he appears.

  “Come,” he says. “Let’s find Cecil. Walsingham. See what in the name of God they have to say about all this.”

  The Yeomen of the Guard all recognize Dudley and stand aside to let him roar past, Dee in his wake.

  “Where is Cecil?” he keeps shouting. “Where is Walsingham?”

  When they are shown into the Privy Chamber, Sir Christopher Hatton is on his feet, haranguing Walsingham for forgetting to call him by his title.

  “Give me my honor, Master Walsingham!”

  Walsingham is rolling his eyes, but there has been some curious shift in the power, Dee sees. Then he remembers what Walsingham has been keen for all to know: about Hatton and Mary, Queen of Scots. He feels a further descent into horror. If Hatton is risen up, then it must be true. Elizabeth must be dead.

  “What is he doing here?” Hatton demands of Dudley, pointing at Dee, who is not sworn in as a Privy Councillor.

  “What are you doing here?” Dudley snaps back. “Still?”

  “W-w-what the devil does that mean, Dudley?” Hatton stammers. “I am sworn in as a Privy Councillor.”

  “Yes, yes, of course you are. Just… whose? I wonder.”

  Across the table, Walsingham smiles. Does everybody know of Hatton’s tryst with the Queen of Scots?

  But Hatton laughs, too.

  “There’s no haste,” he says. “I am enjoying this.”

  Dee hears them bickering, but he is hardly listening. He stands at the far end of the table, and though the light of the candles on the polished surface of the table is not bright, or especially distinctive, within it he feels something extra, some communication. He endeavors to be ever open to such things, to be constantly aware of the possibility of angelic communication at any and all times. It is only a matter of grasp, he oftentimes thinks, and then of interpretation, and of understanding the language in which the archangel chooses to communicate.

  Dee feels unnaturally warm, and he believes that for the first time in his life, he is receiving messages from what can only be the angelic sphere. It is as if the burnished table were become a scrying stone, and Dee’s senses are jangling, as if being roughened by a teasel. Until this moment he has always believed himself in need of an interpolator, someone to relay the angelic communication to him before he would be able to make sense of it, but now the table is concentrating the rays emanating from the angelic sphere and reflecting them back at him. Perhaps this will only ever happen in this time of extreme, cosmic crisis, and when the veil between the living and the dead is at its thinnest, around All Hallows, and when a comet appears, and when the soul of an anointed queen passes from one sphere to another, but now he seems closer than ever to gaining some understanding of the celestial emanations, which seem to be guiding his voice.

  “No,” he says.

  The men stop their arguing for a moment and turn to him. He does not know what he has said, or if he is going to say anything more, or what that will be if he says it. It is as if some other power has taken his tongue, and his body is its instrument. His blood is like warm honey, his body strumming. He is suffused with light.

  “What?” Dudley asks.

  “No,” he repeats. “She is not with them. She is not with the angels. Saint Michael. He— She is—”

  He stops. His body cools. The light has gone. He is abandoned, bereft.

  “Christ,” Hatton says. “What is that fool talking about?”

  The others watch Dee closely, waiting for him to continue.

  But he is lost for words.

  He could weep.

  But then, from a distant part of the palace, some disturbance, and the movement of many feet, and the banging of doors, and then voices, urgent, strident. The men in the Privy Chamber turn to the door as the noise swells. It is like the ocean against a pebbled beach. It fills Dee’s ears.

  They stand as the door is thrown open and light spills in and the room is suddenly heaving with men, ruddy-faced and stinking of wet wool, horse, and sodden leather, who fill the space, burly in their breastplates, helmets, boots, and weaponry, and for a moment Dee believes they must be Elizabeth’s murderers, come to complete the task of their assassination. But the atmosphere is all wrong, and after a moment they step back and there, at their heart, like a pearl revealed, stands none other than the person of the Queen herself: whole and unblemished, though her face is winnowed by care, and with illness, and exhaustion, but she is upright. She is alive.

  “Your Majesty!” It is Cecil who speaks. Her chief treasurer.

  “We thought you dead!” Walsingham almost shouts.

  “Bess,” Dee says.

  Though tired and much shaken, the Queen shoots Dee a weary, warning look, but her attention is taken up by Dudley, who has fallen to his knees, and is shuffling toward Her Majesty, his arms outstretched, suddenly so violently incoherent he cannot say her name properly.

  “Litsh,” he says. “Lssss.”

  The Queen and her woman—is it Lettice Knollys?—step back. They look at him with a species of horror. Is he really intending to wrap his arms about her hips and press his face to her belly? She turns, and the men and women behind her part to let her escape the clutches of this drunk madman, and she retires, to her bedchamber, leaving Dudley on his knees and the room none the wiser.

  “What in the name of God is all this?” Hatton demands of Sir John Jeffers, who has pushed his way into the room as if he belongs therein.

  “They shot at the wrong carriage,” he says, almost mad with relief. “The Queen was traveling in her closestool carriage! She has the flux! The shits!”

  * * *

  CHAPTER THREE

  Whitehall Palace,

  next day, first week of November 1577

  The church bells peal from first light while the city celebrates in confused relief, and in the Privy Chamber of Whitehall Palace Her Majesty’s councillors regather again, now in the gray light of dawn, to commence the inquest. The colored panes of the window lend Dudley’s baggy skin a greenish tinge, and he sits with his eyes shut, sweating. Next to him Cecil is washed at least and appears the freshest of the four, juggling various tubes of paper with the disingenuous self-absorption of a man who has been let off a very big hook. Walsingham takes the seat next to him. He feels more than ordinarily fragile, as if he has fallen from a horse. His teeth pain him grievously, and his joints ache, and he cannot seem to think straight either. Like Cecil, he finds himself arranging and rearranging his papers on the table. Still, however bad he feels, he is instantly cheered by the thought of how bad Sir Christopher Hatton must feel, sitting isolated at the other end of the table, his eyes fixed on the cloth, utterly abashed by last night’s reversal.


  Robert Beale is there, too, Walsingham’s private secretary, but he is much vexed this morning because despite his best efforts to persuade the Privy Council the night before, the chance was missed to keep back the news that the Queen was saved and so observe how the plot was intended to develop.

  “Had we stifled the news of her survival then whoever was behind the attempt would have shown their hand. We could have caught it, gripped it, and traced it back to the heart, to the brain!”

  He is right, of course; Walsingham knows that. They all do. They are each of them much chastened by the events of the previous night, Walsingham because in the face of learning just how much he stood to lose had the Queen died, he panicked, and seemed to forgo all sense. Only Beale, relatively junior, with much less at stake, had kept his head.

  “An opportunity has been missed,” Walsingham now admits.

  “Instead we must now… what? How do we even start after the scent of this plot? Now it is over and its participants have vanished into the night.”

  “This morning we have put out urgent word among every intelligencer in our pay among the papists we are aware of,” Walsingham tells them, “and alerted those charged with watching Mary of Scotland for any unusual activity that might connect her to the gunmen.

  “We’ve sent men up to question all the sheriffs, constables, beadles, night watchmen of both counties, and we will comb the same for any sign of the men. Judging by the holes in Her Majesty’s carriage, there must have been a dozen of them at least. Such a party will have been noticed. It will have left a trace. Innkeepers, blacksmiths, couriers, they will have seen them on the road. Stables. Taverns. That sort of thing. We will find them.”

  “But how did they know to be there, at that very place, just then?” Cecil wonders.

  This is a very good point. It is simple enough to stand by a roadside and blast a passing carriage with an arquebus, Walsingham supposes. A child might do it. But it becomes exponentially more complex the more men you involve in the task, and even more so if you have a particular carriage in mind, and more so again if that carriage is carrying the Queen of England, who is not expected to even be there, and who should not have been traveling that day at all. Were they simultaneously the luckiest—in that they were there, at the roadside, with guns that fired and balls that hit, as the Queen went by—and unluckiest—in that they ultimately failed—assassins alive?