The Queen's Men Read online

  His spirits flag.

  “Greek fire is not the way to defeat the Spanish,” he repeats.

  “But what of Her Majesty’s dream?” Hatton asks. “Surely you do not doubt that.”

  Dee opens his mouth to argue the meaning of her dream, but does not even know where to begin. The room, already gloomy, seems all the more so as Dee’s grander visions fade.

  “But I don’t— I do not have the right chemicals, the right tools, the right flasks.”

  He thinks of his broken pelican.

  “Nor is my workshop set up for… for fire.”

  He thinks further of poor, dear, clumsy Roger Cooke, working in the room next to his library of precious manuscripts—nearly four thousand books, the largest library in England, painstakingly and financially ruinously gathered over the last ten years—with fire.

  “No,” he says. “I cannot—I will not—produce a method of roasting men alive, not even Spanish men.”

  “John,” the Queen starts, her voice wavering. “Consider what they have done to us in these last days. Sent their assassins. But consider what they might yet do. Imagine what five thousand Spanish pikemen landing in Suffolk might achieve. We—whom you profess to love—are asking you to help us, to help this country you also profess to love, to safeguard all our progresses, the progress we have made in all the sciences, in geometry, astronomy, astrology, in religion. Do you wish us to return to the old ways? Worshiping graven images? Hoodwinked by monks? Ruled over by the bishop of Rome? All this progress lost? All this enlightenment that you yourself have helped bring about with your tireless exertions in natural philosophy, extinguished by a Spanish prince? All of us put under the Inquisition?”

  Before Dee can answer, the Queen suddenly grips the arms of her chair and is quick to her feet. Dee and Hatton rise with her.

  “Your Majesty?”

  She looks panicked, as if she has heard something they have not. Suddenly her ladies are by her side, conjured from the shadows. She turns and retreats very quickly through a door in the paneling that Dee did not know existed, her exit covered by her ladies who retreat after her, glaring at Hatton and most especially at Dee, as if forbidding them to follow.

  Dee and Hatton are left alone. They are silent a long moment, each asking himself if the Queen will rejoin them or not.

  Eventually: “Shall we?” Hatton suggests, indicating the chairs.

  “I do not think there is very much left to say, is there?”

  “I am glad we are agreed,” Hatton agrees. “Write up a list of the things you need from your workshop, and your house generally—a new shirt, for instance, would not go amiss—and I will have it all collected and brought to you.”

  “Collected? I don’t need anything collected. I am going home now where I shall either change my shirt, or not, as I see fit.”

  Hatton smiles nastily.

  “Dee,” he says. “I know Her Majesty was asking you, but I am telling you: Her Majesty has tasked me with this, and I will see it is done, so if you do not agree, here, now, to help in this, then I will have you placed under arrest for conjuring treasure contrary to the Witchcraft Act, and from here you will be taken to the Tower, where you will either comply, or die.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER FIVE

  City of London,

  second week of November 1577

  Two days later and it is another gray morning, scented with the first real intimation of the winter to come, and Robert Beale walks eastward from Saint Paul’s along Cheapside, with the gap-toothed bulk of the White Tower filling the end of the road ahead, and he wonders if it can possibly be true that the Dutch alchemist Cornelius de Lannoy bought his way out of its dungeons with gold? Would not the Queen, or Cecil, or Walsingham, or even the Constable of the Tower have thought to ask where he had it from?

  Beale is on his way to Waltham Forest again to continue questioning the various sheriffs and constables of the area to find trace of the men who shot at the Queen, though as it stands he is not even certain how many he is looking for.

  Most striking is the fact that the enterprise was planned in silence, with no word leaking out to alert any of Walsingham’s paid placemen or any concerned subject. Ordinarily a servant might come forward. A groom, say, in the hope of a purse, or a farrier with an unpaid bill. And yet, nothing.

  It is a mystery.

  And something must be done. They cannot go on like this, and they cannot risk another drama such as the other night.

  But what, though?

  He is still tumbling ideas over in his mind when he hears a voice call his name, and there, standing on the corner of Gutter Lane, is an old friend: Nicholas Hilliard, goldsmith turned limner of the very finest miniatures to be found in Christendom. He is a handsome man, turning into his thirties perhaps, and today, surprisingly well-dressed, in sober black with a froth of linen about his chin, and an arch look in his eye. He has been working in Paris, where, from the look and feel of his cloth, he is doing well for himself.

  “You are back?” Beale states the obvious, and, to confirm this, Hilliard makes an elaborate, sweeping bow in the French style.

  “Oui,” he says. “Until Christmas.”

  “And how is it over there?” Beale asks.

  There is a flicker of something between them, a tiny signal both acknowledged and unacknowledged.

  “Difficult,” Hilliard admits. “But we go on.”

  He means for Protestants in France, especially in Paris, but also, that unspoken thing: both men serve Walsingham.

  “Buy you a jug of something?” Hilliard asks. “And a pie? It is nearly dinnertime.”

  Beale has a long ride ahead, but he has never known Hilliard to buy a drink, so…

  “Why not?”

  They repair to the Mitre, much favored by goldsmiths, and Hilliard has to stop by the door to reattach his points, which have come loose suddenly so that his sleeves have slipped, and so Beale must go on ahead, and Hilliard asks for a jack of ale to go with his rabbit pie, and of course Beale must pay, and it is only then that he remembers why Hilliard is known as “Points.” They find a space at the bench, and sit, and in his puzzling, west country accent Hilliard tells Beale how much he misses good English ale. Then he stops and looks more closely at Beale.

  “You look perplexed, Robert? Something bothers you. Yet did not the Queen survive the attempt on her life?”

  “She did,” Beale agrees. “Thank the Lord, but—”

  But the fact is that Beale still can not believe there is no plan in place for when Her Majesty does die, as eventually she must. All these years past they have been trying to solve the succession by trying to persuade her to marry and have a child, preferably male, so that there will be none of the upheaval that had followed after the Queen’s father’s death, and the Queen had given them hope that she might. That she could. That she would. And yet, and yet. The years are passing. She is still young, still beautiful, still able to bear a child, but it will not always be so. She will go the way of all flesh, and at this rate, when she does, her councillors will still be flailing around looking for a suitable successor. Meanwhile the next in line, the Scottish queen, Mary—a Catholic—waits in the wings, just biding her time, or, as is believed, already pulling strings to put herself at the head of a Spanish army marching on Whitehall, ready to reverse the clock and return England to the Church of Rome. All the excruciating birth pangs of modern England will have been for naught.

  And so Beale has come to see that the methods of ensuring the future that men such as Cecil and Walsingham prefer are not working, and will not work, and that their time must soon pass, and that coming men, such as he—Robert Beale—and perhaps a man such as Nicholas Hilliard, need to come up with a radical new solution.

  But what though?

  He asks if Hilliard heard anything of the attempt on the Queen’s life while in Paris. Hilliard shakes his head.

  “But it sounds like a homegrown weed? A thistle perhaps?”

 
; “But the Scottish queen is under constant observation.”

  “There’s a Spaniard, you know, or an Italian, who has devised a method to write a message on the white of a hardboiled egg without first removing its shell.”

  “It is why we coddle hers,” Beale says.

  “Do you? Well. If it can be done to an egg, why not a carrot?”

  “A carrot?”

  “For example.”

  Beale tries to think of Mary, Queen of Scots, with a carrot.

  “Or a turnip,” Hilliard adds quickly.

  “Stop.”

  Details of the ruse that the Scottish queen perpetrated on Master Walsingham in the winter of 1572 are well enough known, and those that aren’t known are freely invented.

  “I forgot,” Beale says. “You once painted her portrait, didn’t you?”

  Hilliard holds his gaze and nods.

  Nothing is said.

  The ale comes. Hilliard takes a deep draft. He shudders slightly.

  “Not so certain I miss it after all,” he confesses.

  Beale asks him what brings him back to London.

  “Ohhh, the usual,” Hilliard admits. “Money.”

  He is probably there to see Master Walsingham, too, of course.

  “You should charge more than three pounds for your work,” Beale tells him.

  “Of course,” Hilliard agrees, “but then folks do say ‘they are so small, Master Hilliard, and so why should they cost so much?’ I had a man in my brother’s workshop up the way there, some red-faced old soldier from Suffolk, whose young wife sits for me, and he tells me she is so beautiful, I should be paying her. I tell him the painting is so small, she should pay me.”

  Beale smiles.

  “And is she? Beautiful, that is?”

  “Ar,” Hilliard says, nodding. “It’s funny. This is her, look.”

  He slides a hand into his doublet and brings out one of his limnings, wrapped in a cocoon of silk and leather. He lays it on the table. Beale looks at it. It is very beautiful, with gilded edge, hardly larger than the ball of his thumb, and a woman in a plain dress, but with beautiful pearls that look so true to life, he might pick one off the painting’s enameled surface, had he tweezers small enough.

  The face, though, is not unfamiliar.

  “Her Majesty,” Beale says. He thinks Hilliard has made a mistake. But Hilliard smiles.

  “I promise you,” he says, “it ain’t. Look. Just there, you see?”

  He has a tiny thick lens with him that he holds over the face of the painting to reveal a tiny dark spot on the woman’s cheek.

  “A birthmark,” Hilliard says, lowering his voice. “It separates her from the Queen, and in my humble opinion, though this is obviously a matter of taste, and secrecy, it makes this girl even more beautiful.”

  Beale stares at the painting through the loupe.

  “Then why not just give her husband one of your old paintings of the Queen, with the mark dotted in?”

  Hilliard pretends to be scandalized.

  “Then it’d be like she were passing herself off as the Queen!” He laughs.

  He pauses before he wraps the portrait up again.

  “And she has the same beautiful hands, too, you know, though of course you cannot see them here. And she is alike the Queen in the rest of her person, too, as peas in a pod, you might say. Honestly, in the dark—”

  He tails off and rolls his eyes.

  “What’s her name?” Beale asks.

  “Ha! And that’s another thing: it is Ness. Ness not Bess, do you see?”

  “I do. Ness what?”

  “Ness Overbury. Her husband is John Overbury.”

  Beale has never heard of him.

  “Nasty old brute. Fought in the Low Countries and has never done anything he enjoyed more since. To think of his fingers on her flesh—”

  “How old is she?”

  In Beale’s mind, a germ of an idea is forming against his will.

  “She? About… I don’t know… that perfect age, you know? Neither old nor young.”

  “Your age?”

  “You put it so well!”

  “And she’s still there? At your workshop?”

  Hilliard lifts up his mug to show he is drinking now, and in no state for fine work.

  “No, they are in the Dolphin, in Saint Botolph’s, waiting for this. I am on my way to deliver it now.”

  “Let me come with you. I would like to see this marvel.”

  Hilliard studies Beale sideways. He is a clever man, Hilliard. He has been able to fool the Valois court that his French is only good enough for the chicken shop, no better, when in fact he spent two years of his childhood in Geneva and is fluent. When he is painting them he sits no more than two yards from men such as King Henry of France, or Francois, the Duke of Orleans, who is the man whom the Queen may or may not marry, straight-faced while they talk with their advisers how strange it is that someone so cunning at his art should come from such a benighted place as England, full of mists, foul brutes, easy women, and vile food. They will soon grow bored and overconfident, and as he does not react, their tongues will loosen and sometimes they will spill that which should remain constrained. Which is part of the reason he is there.

  “What are you up to?” he asks.

  “It is just an… idea.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER SIX

  Whitehall Palace,

  same day, second week of November 1577

  Mistress Jane Frommond used to share the bed with Alice Rutherford, and so it is her whom Mistress Blanche Parry, mother of the maids, asks to gather up the dead girl’s possessions from the coffer chamber they shared with the rest of the maids of honor and have them ready to be sent back to Alice’s father in Lincolnshire, along with her body in its closed coffin.

  “Some homecoming,” Frommond says.

  Mistress Parry lowers her gaze to the bed curtained in patched silk, and tidily made under its linen coverlet.

  “Heartbreaking,” she admits.

  Alice Rutherford’s position has become moot since her death. She is to be much mourned, but also there is no doubt that the Queen, even in her sickness, or perhaps especially in her sickness, ordered the girl out of her presence, and that she threatened that unless Alice admitted the name of the father, she—Alice—would bear the child—rear the child!—in the Tower, and that once the weeping girl had been escorted from the room by the Queen’s ushers and a Yeoman, she had not been permitted back into the presence of the Queen.

  “Why do you think she would not tell us the father’s name?” Mistress Parry now asks Frommond.

  It is a question Frommond had asked Alice herself, of course, many times before news of the girl’s state was generally known: Was it someone we all know? Are you in love with him? Or did he rape you? And at each question Alice had shaken her head, and closed her eyes against the leaking tears, and Frommond told her that so long as she held out against them there was nothing she or anyone could do to help her, and Alice had sobbed and wept against Frommond’s shoulder and said that she knew that, but still she would not—could not—change her course.

  “Had she done so,” Mistress Parry continues, more in the hope than expectation, “then I do believe Her Majesty would have taken pity on her youth, and her foolishness, and would have relented, especially if it were shown she was taken against her will.”

  Mistress Parry, as mother of the maids, wishes to believe that Alice was raped, that she was the victim of a crime committed by a man unknown, for this exonerates her from any failing in her duty of care for the poor girl.

  “Because I did tell her,” Mistress Parry bleats. “I did tell her, just as I told you when you first came to court, just as I tell all Her Majesty’s maids of honor: the Queen is a worthy, chaste, and honorable woman and will tolerate nothing base, nothing wanton. There are temptations aplenty at court—many a fine young man with a shapely leg and a ready smile, always keen to sigh, and moon, and to send you verses an
d so on, but you—we—represent Her Majesty, and if you yield to their charms and debase yourself, if you hold your chastity cheap, then you debase her, you hold her chastity cheap, and if that is the case then God help you for I shall not, no, nor none of us here.”

  All this Jane Frommond knows, for Mistress Parry has been saying it since Alice was proved with child.

  “She never spoke to you about… about what had happened to her, or what she was doing? When you were in bed together?”

  “We never spoke of such things,” Frommond tells her, which is the truth of it in this instance. She has tried to think back to the summer, to think if there was a moment when Alice changed. She tries to remember if she ever saw Alice weeping, as if she had been abused or debased, but there never was. Nor was there a moment when Alice seemed struck by love, as the poets have it. She did not sigh over the moon and there was no suggestion of an absent love.

  “She did not once mention a name?” Mistress Parry asks. “Of any man who might have led her astray? In her sleep, perhaps?”

  Perhaps she did? But what would she have said? John? Every third man in England is John, and if he is not John, he is Thomas. And if he is neither John nor Thomas, then he is William.

  Jane Frommond shakes her head and Mistress Parry draws breath through her teeth.

  “Well,” she says. “I am sorry for you. This must be hard on you.”

  It is, Frommond thinks, and unexpectedly so. To begin with there was the shock of the violence—the gunshots, and the blood—and she remembers the joke she so fearlessly made when addressing Master Walsingham, and Lord Burghley and Sir Christopher Hatton, but now she is suffused with sorrow, and she finds herself overbrimming with tears for her dead friend.

  “Well,” Mistress Parry says, “I will leave you to gather her things, and I shall send a boy to collect her chest.”

  The coffer chamber is on the third floor of the wing of the palace that houses the Queen’s privy apartments. Long and thin, with two windows that give out over the courtyard, there are three curtained beds against one wall, and two presses—wardrobe cupboards—against another. The walls are plain whitewashed lime, but the ceiling is just boards on joists, and dust from the servants’ rooms above drifts down to settle on everything below. Each of the unmarried maids of honor has a part share of one of the presses, and Jane Frommond has a coffer that fits nicely under the strings of her bed, when they are tightened. Alice Rutherford has a taller chest that does not fit under her bed, but sits at its side, and is usually covered in a worn scrap of Turkey carpet, and dust from the boards above.