The Eyes of the Queen Read online

  Mortlake, England, August 25, 1572

  Dr. John Dee cannot sleep, but when he does, he dreams of angels, and he wakes with the word biathanatos on his lips.

  “How’s that?” his mother asks, cupping a hand to her ear.

  “Violent death,” he tells her, speaking loudly.

  “That’s not what you want,” she says. “Is it? Not when you’ve got your interview to come?”

  “No,” her son agrees.

  He breaks his bread and dips it in his ale, then chews slowly, thinking about this most recent dream of his. He has become sure, of late, that they are encrypted communications from elsewhere. Angels? Men smile when he suggests this, but Christians are required to credit far more outlandish beliefs, and he is certain that had he the grammar of the communications, or their key, he might prove to be right.

  The river, through the open door, is bad this morning, but the tide is on the turn, and soon its foul cargo will slip back downstream to London, where it belongs. He watches his mother fussing with the bread oven, obsessively sweeping out the ashes, and he wonders further about his dreams. He has many theories about their meanings, but like so many of his other theories, as yet they evade the pins of proof.

  His mother is still sweeping.

  He gets up, crosses to her shoulder, and turns her gently from her task.

  She stares at him, half in terror, half in confusion.

  “All’s well, Mother,” he says. “All’s well. Come now, let us sit awhile.”

  She allows herself to be led to the bench by the door. They are both used to the smell. Lord, they smell that way themselves. Dee sits her down. She mews gently and yields up her brush of hawthorn twigs. He puts it aside. She has forgotten who I am, he thinks.

  Just then, from the front door comes a booming knock.

  His mother bends her head.

  “Is it the Queen?” she whispers, her eyes round as new-minted pennies.

  “Not today, I think,” Dee says, but he does not move to answer the door, to find out who it is, for he knows well enough.

  “Because she’s been before, you know?” his mother continues. “To see my son. My son, John.”

  He listens to her, just as he listens to the voices now raised at the front of the house. Both are painful in different ways. He supposes he has the count of twenty before the men from the front appear at the back.

  “I must leave now, Mother. Don’t answer the door.”

  “Are you in trouble?”

  “I will be, if you answer the door.”

  “I’ll not answer it then!” she says with a smile.

  He kisses her lightly on her cap and then turns and takes up his traveling bag—weighty with lumpen objects—and his green doublet, and he slides through the back door, and a moment later is running down through the orchard to the river beyond.

  When he is gone, the knocking grows louder.

  “All right, all right,” his mother says. “I am coming.”

  The man at the door is big, with a fat round face on a neck so thick it would take three hands to strangle, but with close-set eyes and a head polished to a brilliance. He carries a stout oak staff and, tucked into a thick leather belt that hardly restrains his bulging gut, is a well-used cudgel. The man behind him is slighter, narrower, but lithe and as mean-looking as a blade.

  “This the residence of John Dee?” the first man asks.

  Dee’s mother shakes her head.

  “Never heard of him,” she says.

  “You witless old sow,” the man tells her. “He is your son.”

  She frowns.

  “No,” she says. “You are the witless one, for I have no son.”

  “You do. He is John Dee. And this is his house.”

  And now she remembers.

  “You are right!” she says. “I do. And this is his house.”

  “And is he in?”

  “Oh no. He is not here. He is on his way to the university at Cambridge, there to see the dean of Saint John the Evangelist, whom he says is to offer him a teaching post!”

  The man smiles toothlessly. He thanks her and wishes her God’s blessings, and the two men go on their way, and when she closes the door on them, Widow Dee allows herself the simple, satisfied smile reserved for a proud mother.

  * * *

  Her son meanwhile hails a boat on Mortlake shore, and soon enough is following the tide of bobbing ordure down the river Thames to London. He sits with his bag on his knees, keeping it out of the boat’s lees. It contains a change of linen and three books, an astrolabe, the globe made by his friend Mercator, and another device of his own fashioning, with which he is very careful.

  Fine weather and good luck bring him to Cambridge before sundown two days later, and he passes the lepers’ house just as the bell of Little Saint Mary’s rings curfew. That night Dee stays at the house of his friend James Pewlit, who has a house on Jesus Lane, and who has expended much social capital to get Dee the next day’s interview, but who, despite this, stays up with Dee into the short hours, talking of the rules of proportion and perspective in relation to accurate maps. Much wine is drunk and many sheets of paper are despoiled and set aside before they fall into bed with Mistress Pewlit and their newborn, to snore through what remains of the night, waking the next morning frowsy-headed and malodorous.

  Noon, though, finds Dee well breakfasted and standing at a lectern before the stone-faced master, the dean, and some of the Fellows of the College of St. John the Evangelist. He knows his linen is fit only for the fire, and he wishes he had taken the time to visit a barber, but still, he thinks, they need not sit and stare at him like that.

  Only the dean, the only working brain among a lot of dry old sticks, is following Dee’s thoughts on the subject of the moon’s influence on tidal ebb and flow with nods and murmurs, usually in the right places. The majority are unswayed, particularly by Dee’s device—made himself, somewhat crudely, but what do you expect?—which he holds aloft again to show how it predicts the risings and fallings of tides on any given shore, in any part of the world.

  “You mean to tell us that that thing, that bollock of brass and leather, can predict the height of the tide in far distant Cathay?” the master asks.

  “The height and the time,” Dee reminds him. “And yes, I’d stake my life on it.”

  “I hope there is no need for that,” the dean says.

  Nervous laughter. Queen Mary has only been dead fifteen years or so, and the reality of death at the stake still lingers like smoke in the air.

  “Imagine the advantage it might confer on any nation who possessed such foresight!” Dee rolls on. “Even apart from its scientific use, it has mercantile, exploratory, and of course, military applications that… well… These are dark times for this country, as is well known. Imagine if the Spanish possessed such a benefit.”

  The dean murmurs agreement, but the other Dry Sticks are on the master’s side, and they remain unmoved even when Dee concludes his pitch, and the dean stands to thank him.

  “Dr. Dee,” he starts, “we all know there is hardly a man alive more gifted than yourself in the field of applied mathematics, nor one so well connected to men of great learning across the sea.”

  He nods at Mercator’s globe.

  “And we all know that having you enhance our fellows’ table would be a garland, as well as provide much needed rigor…”

  Dee has felt the “but” coming from the moment the dean opened his mouth.

  “But?” he asks.

  There is an uncomfortable moment. The dean defers to the master, who hauls himself to his feet. He is bulky, gray bristle chopped, with a mouth downturned at each end.

  “But look at yourself, Dr. Dee,” he says. “You appear hardly fit to muck out the pigs, let alone teach some of our country’s finest young minds.”

  “Mere hazards of the road”—Dee waves away his objection—“such as might befall any man coming from Mortlake.”

  He places a hand on his b
reast, in part to suggest sincerity, in the other part to cover a wine stain.

  “Besides, I do not wish to teach, so much as to learn, and to pursue knowledge through the intertraffic of minds.”

  The master’s sneer remains fixed.

  “But there remains your reputation to consider,” he goes on, and Dee feels ice cold and boiling hot at once. It was going so well, or not too badly, and now this.

  “My reputation?”

  “Such as it is.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Dr. Dee, were you, or were you not, imprisoned in the Tower in London on charges of sorcery and treason?”

  “The charges were brought maliciously and were dropped by order of the Queen herself, may God keep her.”

  “Yes, but she then banished you from court!”

  “Over a simple misunderstanding.”

  “You punched the Queen’s Privy councillor Earl of Leicester in the face. You call that a simple misunderstanding?”

  “He dishonored Her Majesty.”

  “Nevertheless.”

  Dee wishes to punch the master, just as he once did punch the Earl of Leicester, but the dean intervenes.

  “Dr. Dee,” he says. “Sir! No one admires your intelligence as much as we, nor your passion for learning and teaching, but—”

  “But?”

  “But it is our judgment that your name is now blackened beyond reclaim!” the master interrupts in return. “And we cannot risk the reputation of this university by having the two yoked once more as one.”

  Dee has heard it all before, expressed more clearly: he is a companion of hellhounds, and a conjurer of wicked and damned spirits, yes, yes. He does not thank them for their time, or wait for an apology, or bid them farewell. He simply turns, collects his orb and his globe, and walks out of the chamber, and the house, into the quadrangle beyond.

  Four days’ travel and an hour’s humiliation and for what?

  God damn it! He needed that job. And he feels bad about his friend Pewlit, who had persuaded the dean to at least interview him in the first place.

  And so what now?

  Sell some books?

  He already has nine hundred and twelve books, and they fill his house in Mortlake so he had to build them another room, but he needs each, and many more, to finish his work.

  Dee empties his purse into his palm: five shillings and thruppence.

  Home in meager comfort, or an afternoon at the Swan with Two Necks?

  The Swan with Two Necks it is.

  * * *

  Dee sits at a table behind a pie of various meats and he has ordered only his second jug of ale when two men enter the inn towing a square dog on a short lead. Every man there recognizes them, if not specifically, then generally. Some as potential friends, but most as men whose eye you do not wish to catch.

  Dr. Dee sighs.

  He knows how it will go.

  Sure enough, it takes only a moment before they identify him and make their way over. This is more proof of his theory that every object in the universe—perhaps a human most of all—emanates a force that influences all other objects—perhaps other humans most of all—without physically touching them. He has developed this theory from watching his lodestone, which can both attract and repel other objects without touching them. He, it turns out, has attracted these two men, all the way from Mortlake.

  “John Dee,” the bullish one begins. “You are under arrest for debts owed to his Grace the Bishop of Bath and Wells amounting to the sum of five marks, eight shillings, and sixpence.”

  That seems far too much.

  “May I at least finish my pie?” he asks. “It has swan in it, I am sure, which I have had before, only once, many years ago.”

  It is a memory, nothing more.

  The bull—who is called Bill, it turns out—agrees. He summons another jug of ale for himself and the narrow-set man, who tells Dee his name is Robert Trunk.

  “I shall call you Bob,” Dee tells him. “It is more pleasing that way, don’t you see? Bill and Bob. Bob and Bill. What about that?”

  He laughs.

  The ale comes, and they sit and watch Dee set about the rest of his pie in silence.

  This could be awkward, Dee thinks, but a bottle of what the landlord swears is French brandy later, and they are firm friends.

  “Do you know what?” he tells them. “Do you know what? They claim—the master, those bastards, all of them—they claim to be… to be men of learning. They probably speak Greek while they are swiving their bumboys. I don’t know. I don’t care. What a man does, you know, is up to him. And his God. That is me. I am like that. But don’t talk to me about learning. About mathematics. About… about. Things. When you have your arse greased like a… like a beaver… and it is stuck in the air for… for a turd in a loaf such as… such as I don’t know what. The Earl of Leicester. And don’t you ever, ever talk to me about reputation!”

  Three hours after this, getting on toward sunset, the bull sleeps with the polished head on the board while the other is leering about the place, hopelessly confused, while the dog is licking his own testicles.

  “Do you have transport?” Dee asks, suddenly sober.

  “Huh?”

  “A cart? A carriage even? Surely you are not proposing we walk back to London? They will want me in the Guildhall looking my best, won’t they?”

  They don’t have a cart, or horses, but once the men are roused enough to buy one more bottle of brandy to take with them—“against the cold”—and have settled the reckoning, they find a sumpterman with space enough to take all three as far as Bishop’s Stortford for a price Bill fumbles in his purse to pay. Dee sits up front while Bob and Bill sleep in the jouncing bed of the cart behind, wrapped in each other’s arms. The sumpterman is silent, but Dee has a nice light baritone and while the cart rolls on into the evening, he sings the songs he learned in Leuven, in Flanders, until the sumpterman asks him to stop. The dog they’ve forgotten in Cambridge.

  Two nights later and they are nearly at Ludgate gaol.

  “One last drink?” Dee suggests.

  And Bob and Bill agree. Their attitude to Dee has softened over the last two days: growls have turned to eye rolls, to laughter, then to thundering pats on the back, depending on the time of day, and the quantity of ale drunk. He has become their pet, he thinks, replacing their dog, and if he could but lick his own testicles then the masquerade would be complete.

  Dee knows the keep at the Bull: a man named Chidiock Tunstal, with a forked red beard and a belly as if he were about to birth a bullock.

  “Bring us ale, Chidiock,” Dee tells him, “and anything you have that is wrapped in greasy pastry.”

  And when he does, Dee tells his companions that it is apt they should be spending their last evening together at the Bull.

  “For you, Bill, seem to me a fellow born under an earth sign, such as Taurus, as, I am bound to say, do you likewise, Bob, though I should say you are more of a Capricorn. Good health.”

  They drink. Neither man is interested in astrology for neither knows in which year he was born, let alone which month, let alone which day, but knowing himself to be a goat or a bull gives each a stake in the conversation, and it takes Dee only a moment to set them on the road to strife. It is basic stuff, and he need only nudge it along now and then—“Mars ascending, I should say: forever a cause of mischief and destruction” and “I see the scorpion’s heart in your chart”—and soon the two have seen the worst in each other. John calls to the fore something that happened with a purse that went missing in the village of Rotherhithe.

  “Is there a star sign for thieves, Doctor?” Bill asks.

  A drink is thrown, then its mug. Stools are kicked back. The whole bench too. Dee snatches up the jug of ale—still half full—just as the table’s legs splay under their grappling weight. He stands to watch for a moment. It is astonishing to see two large men fighting with no restraint. They kick, bite, gouge at each other, rolling off the table and in
among the filthy rushes. Their blows connect with concentrated fury, and the sounds of each set the air rippling.

  Dee steps away, and some time later, he finds himself on Billingsgate steps with five shillings, thruppence, and an empty jug of ale. It is a warm night, with a heavy yellow moon that hardly raises a reflection on the lugubrious river’s surface. A boatman agrees to take him under the bridge and upriver for one of the shillings. He is a nice old fellow, who has been on the river since he was a boy, and he does not mind Dee singing. An hour later, just a little before midnight, Dee is back in Mortlake, wiping the mud from his boots on the long grass of the orchard below his own house.

  “Is that you, John?” his mother calls from the still open door.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Sheffield Castle, August 29, 1572

  Her third husband, James Hepburn, fourth Earl of Bothwell, had shown her how it was done.

  Lightly so there is no bruising of your pretty wee neck, see?

  Once she had overcome the terrors of having his hands around her throat, and of the darkness hazing the edges of her vision, she had to admit the effect was extraordinary.

  It is not the only thing I have to show you, he’d told her.

  And he was right: it was not. But he was dead now, she thinks, or imprisoned somewhere, and so might as well be, and so is she. Sometimes, at night, alone in her bed in Tutbury, or Sheffield, or Chatsworth, or any of the other castles she is shuffled between, she thinks about that.

  But she is spoiled to any other way now, for nothing else delivers her in transport in such a violent fashion, and so she has taught this girl when and where to apply her fingers—just here, and here, when I signal—and she goes at it fairly regularly, though under orders of her confessor, she tries to keep it down to once a day.

  But by Christ she is so bored.

  All she has to look forward to is that, and needlework with Lady Elizabeth Talbot.

  And so now, why not?

  “Margaret?”

  Margaret Formby knows what she wants, and she sets aside her own circle of stitching and crosses the small room while Mary lies back on the large bed. She is a handsome, severe girl, Margaret, who was initially awkward and scared of what she was asked to do, but she has learned well and now her touch is firm at the right time, and delicate when it is not the right time. Mary tips her head back and sees rain on the gray glass of the window behind her. She wishes she might have it opened and that she might have a view of the countryside. She cannot do the first, and nor has she the second, and so she allows Margaret to lift her skirts, and part her braies, and she devotes herself, for the moment, to such pleasures as she can get.