The Queen's Men Read online

  The Constable and his sergeants begin bellowing at their men to put the flames out with sand and urine in buckets they have been keeping separate from the solids, and after they’ve done that, the sizzling stench that rises up is very foul and catches the back of every throat. Black smoke fills the gray sky.

  Cooke lies stunned as the flames lick along the walkways toward him. Dee can do nothing for him, for the walkway is made impassable with flames and now, also, a sizable hole over which, even if the surrounding parts were not aflame, no man could leap.

  Cooke is a clumsy oaf, but he is a Christian soul, and he has his uses, and Dee does not wish to lose him, especially like this, in what might be said to be an accident caused by his own design. He races down the steps and across the yard into the Cradle Tower. He stamps up those steps and is out onto the battlements just as the flames place their first stealthy lick on the soles of Cooke’s boots. Dee takes him by his leather apron’s shoulder straps and drags him away. Cooke’s soles are smoldering and his toe caps leave tiny traces of fire that pursue him into the doorway of the tower and then peter out in the darkness.

  “Cooke? Cooke?”

  Dee sees there is a sizable triangle of something black sticking from the rear apron, just below Cooke’s right shoulder blade, and already blood stains the leather. But he lives, at least, for he is moving and groaning. Dee removes the shard—it is as hot as hell—and tosses it into the darkness where it lands with a clang.

  “Well,” Dee tells Cooke. “Not too shabby. A few tweaks, here and there, but not too shabby.”

  The Constable is less pleased.

  “You have destroyed my walkway—look.”

  There is the smoking hole in the walkway, and the walls all about are pitted and soot stained, too, but the real damage seems to be on the outside, on the quay, where a crane ordinarily used to unload boats of the Grocers’ Guild burns merrily away. The sand, the dead dog, and the broken bucket remain untouched.

  * * *

  “But it worked, didn’t it?” Dee avers.

  “Exactly as intended?” wonders the Constable. He is a dapper little man, with a shaped gray beard and strongly segmented skin, like a sea captain used to staring into the dazzle of sunlight on water, which is exactly what he was. He has removed his cloak and is in very dark blue worsted, and they are gathered by a fire in the first room of the Bell Tower.

  “Not quite,” Dee has to admit. “Something to do with the delivery system, perhaps? Or the mixture? More pine resin, less alcohol? More tallow perhaps? We will need new hoses, in any event.”

  The Constable cannot help.

  “And how is your man?” he asks. He drinks from a pewter mug of something he has not offered Dee.

  “Cooke? He’s fine.”

  “His boots were smoking when last I saw him.”

  “An occupational hazard,” Dee says. “Look, Constable, I do not want to be here any more than you want me here, and God knows I am sorry to have blasted a length from your walkway and burned a few things beyond your wall—”

  “For which you will receive the bill.”

  “For which I will— Hang on. You can send that one straight on to Hatton, because he is the one who sent me hither to… to do all this… this nonsense.”

  “He is not making you burn down the Grocers’ crane, is he? Not making you stink up this tower—a royal palace, don’t forget—with your noxious emanations, or set our ears to bleed with all your infernal explosions.”

  “Constable,” Dee starts, sounding reasonable, “I am trying to re-create a substance that is known only in myth, in legend, and in hearsay. I have spent days poring over every book to mention it, even in passing, but there is very little written, and certainly no recipe, or guide as to its constituents, and so I am—to a certain extent—feeling my way through five or six centuries of darkness and deliberate obfuscation here, and so given that, I hope you will understand that I cannot chart my path as flies the crow, and that I must, inevitably, err. And given that, I hope you understand that I cannot be held wholly responsible for any unintended damage or the very occasional casualty?”

  The Constable sighs. Both men know they need to cooperate, and to make peace the Constable at last pours Dee some spiced wine.

  “You have come a long way since your first efforts, Dr. Dee, I will grant you that.”

  “Thank you, Constable, and I hope to go further, but I believe we lack a certain element vital to our success.”

  “What is it? Lord Burghley has commanded me to supply you with all you need.”

  “Burghley? What is he to do with this? I thought it was Hatton who’d ordered me here?”

  “Sir Christopher has been given responsibility for organizing Her Majesty’s birthday celebrations, and in his stead, Lord Burghley has taken an interest in your… your doings.”

  Dee laughs. Of course: Hatton the party planner. But he is not sure he likes the idea of Burghley being involved in this Greek fire business. Burghley is altogether more effective an operator. He might actually be able to find the particular ingredient Dee does not want him to find.

  “Well,” he says. “It may not be easy. I do not think what I need can be found in this country. Nor indeed in all of Christendom.”

  The Constable is taken aback.

  “Then what is it, and where can it be found?”

  “It is something like an ore,” Dee tells him, “but in liquid form, and is reputed to seep to the earth’s surface in parts of Persia.”

  “Persia?”

  Dee nods.

  “And what is it called?”

  “The scriptures call it ‘thick water’ and it is written—in Maccabees—that it is used in sacrifices for it ignites when the sun shines on it, which tallies with all that is written elsewhere, but that is as close to a name as I can find.”

  “Then… how will I even ask Lord Burghley for it?”

  “He will need to find a Persian,” Dee says.

  “And where in all of Christendom will we find one of them?”

  Dee smiles. Exactly, he thinks.

  * * *

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  River Thames, east of London,

  next day, fourth week of November 1577

  Walsingham is in a barge with Robert Beale, being rowed upriver to see William Cecil at Whitehall, to break the news they have long expected from Piedmont: the Duke of Parma is marching his tercios north to the Low Countries and will be in Brussels or Antwerp within the month. Once the news reaches Croÿ and Orange, Walsingham gives the Dutch alliance a week at best. After that, the Low Countries will fall. And then: England.

  By Christ, if only Her Majesty had not changed her mind. If only she had sent money, and soldiers! A gesture then, while the matter hung in the balance, and things might have tipped their way. Now… Well.

  Now all they have is this Greek fire business, dreamt up by Her Majesty and entrusted to Dr. Dee to produce, and about which Walsingham is in two minds. On one hand he recognizes Dee’s talents and believes the man ought to be put to work, but on the Continent, taking the fight to the enemy, rather than toiling in the dungeons of the Tower. On the other hand, however, as Her Majesty says: let loose over the Narrow Sea, there is no telling the trouble he will drag the country into.

  “Best keep him on a tight leash, Francis,” is Cecil’s refrain, and perhaps that is right, but how many attempts on Her Majesty’s life will Walsingham need to foil or to fail before one succeeds?

  If only they would let him take active measures!

  Instead he has Robert Beale, and his various other agents, combing Hertfordshire and Essex for information about the gunmen of Waltham Forest, of which there is nothing, not one single trace of either hide or hair.

  And nor has there been anything about the attack, not one single mention of it anywhere across Walsingham’s entire network of informers and paid placemen: it has not been written about in any letter sent to France or in France; it has not been spoken of by any notable fir
eside in Spain; the emperor in Prague is ignorant of it, and the likewise Scottish queen remains in the dark. It can only be homegrown, then, even though he—Walsingham—has men in all the old households in England and knows everything about them: when they say Mass, and the names of the priests who say it, and the whereabouts of the holes in which they will hide when his men come knocking.

  But there has still been nothing, and now, a week later, he and Beale are on their way to give this gloomy report to Cecil, whom they find not in his office, but in the palace gardens, taking in the frigid November air against the advice of his doctors. He is as broad as a house in his furs, and he carries a stick as if he were some burgher on his way to chapel in a Flemish painting, though his has a very fine silver knob on its end. He looks grim, and his face falls further at the news from Holland and from Hertfordshire.

  “Well, we still have Dr. Dee,” he says with a sigh, his breath visible in the air. “Though he has presented us with a pretty problem, too: Do either of you know of a Persian, by the way? I am in need of one. Or rather, he is. Dee, that is.”

  Beale manages a laugh.

  “I sometimes feel like that, too.”

  Cecil looks at him doubtfully. Walsingham has three men working for him in the Ottoman court, but none in Qazvin.

  “Why?” he asks.

  “Dee requires some substance that can only be found, he says, in Persia.”

  “Persia?” Beale wonders. He makes it sound like the moon.

  “Exactly,” Cecil agrees.

  Walsingham sighs.

  “Anthony Jenkinson,” he says. “He is all I can suggest.”

  “I did think of him,” Cecil admits, “but is he still alive?”

  “In Lincolnshire somewhere, but he may not wish to help. You, I mean.”

  “Oh, he’s not still brooding about that letter, is he? Great God above, that was nearly twenty years ago.”

  This was when Anthony Jenkinson, then an agent for the Muscovy Company, had worked his way down from Moscow across the Caspian Sea and presented himself before the shah of Persia. He was the first Englishman ever to do so, and he carried with him a letter from Her Majesty greeting the shah as emperor over all the Persians, as well as the Medes, the Parthians, the Hyrcians, and the Carmanarians. This had caused no little offense among the Persians, for the shah had not been called the emperor since the days of Cyrus the Great, nearly five hundred years before the birth of Christ. Jenkinson, already on the wrong foot, never found the right one and came home after three wasted years, ruined.

  “The Queen was ill-advised,” Cecil admits. “Our information was out of date.”

  “You took it from the Old Testament!” Walsingham allows a rare laugh.

  “He should have read the letter before he handed it over,” Cecil defends himself. “Checked it against the observable facts.”

  “And break Her Majesty’s Great Seal?”

  “It has been done before. Anyway, Francis, will you send word for him? Or send someone to him, wheresoever he is washed up, to pick his brains? Master Beale, perhaps? Or go yourself?”

  Cecil holds out a note.

  “From Dee, via the Constable,” he explains. “It is what he is after.”

  Walsingham sighs, takes it, and puts it in his sleeve. A cold rain starts spitting and Walsingham cannot face taking to the river again, so they take horses from the Queen’s stable and ride instead, to the Papey, where there is the promise of gammon pie, warm wine, and a truckle bed for Master Beale. On the way they pass along Cheapside again, past the Mitre tavern, and Beale brings up the subject of Nicholas Hilliard.

  “A very shrewd observer of the human condition,” Walsingham agrees.

  “He has been painting a woman named Ness Overbury,” Beale tells him. Walsingham has never heard of Ness Overbury. He wonders how long those paintings of his take. Ten minutes?

  “Have you seen the size of his paintbrush? It is this thin.”

  Hard to describe in thick leather gloves, but Walsingham takes his meaning.

  “Anyway. What of this Ness Overbury?” he asks.

  “Do you know of her? I met her and her husband the other day.”

  “I don’t. Why? Should I?”

  “I think you should.”

  Walsingham is aware that Beale is up to something, and they say nothing more of it until they are back by the fire, in the same seats they took when they heard the Queen had been shot. Some of that atmosphere lingers, Walsingham thinks, for Beale is looking very sober and anxious, despite the coming in from the cold giving him ruddy cheeks.

  “Go on then, Robert, what is it?”

  Beale reaches into his leather bag and after a bit of fiddling around produces a lozenge-shaped limning of the Queen, though she wears none of the finery of the other portraits that Hilliard has limned for her—the “Pelican portrait,” for example—but a simple black dress with a ruff and a double strand of pearls and, do you know what? She looks all the better for it.

  “Hilliard’s, I presume?” Walsingham asks.

  “Yes, I borrowed it from him the other day.”

  “Hmph. Very fine, but what of it? What has this to do with this Ness Overbury of yours, or her husband?”

  “This is Ness Overbury.”

  Beale indicates the limning. Walsingham looks again.

  “Hah. She is the spit of Her Majesty,”

  “Except she has a birthmark,” Beale tells him. He passes him the good magnifying lens from his table. Walsingham peers.

  “Well, well,” he says. He looks up. He is aware of Beale circling him, stalking him, pondering the best way to launch whatever it is he is about to launch.

  “I was thinking,” Beale starts, “about the other night. When we believed the Queen was dead, and Sir Christopher Hatton was all set to bring us down Queen Mary.”

  Walsingham suppresses a shudder.

  “Go on.”

  “And I was thinking about the various thwarts that Her Majesty sometimes puts across your—our—various designs to ensure the safety of the realm, in the future.”

  Walsingham understands him to mean settling the succession. He gets to his feet to check the door. This sort of talk is unwise, even in a household such as Walsingham’s. He checks the shutters and draws the hangings tighter.

  “What I am proposing,” Beale goes on, “is not a permanent solution to the problem, but a… a…”

  He struggles to find the right word.

  “A bandage,” he lands on. “A dressing, such as soldiers use on battlefields, on wounds, until after, when they may perhaps show their hurt to a sawbones.”

  Walsingham is not yet the wiser.

  “Well, let us say, for instance, the other night, when we thought the Queen was dead, and we were paralyzed. The only option was the very last thing any of us save Hatton wished to do, wasn’t it?”

  Walsingham agrees.

  “We were lucky that night, because the Queen survived, but when it happens the next time—and there will be a next time—and there is still no better claimant to the throne than Mary of Scotland, what then?”

  “We cannot conjure a successor, Robert, merely because we need one. Did the Queen’s father not go to some lengths to find one, and—well, they do not just grow on trees. And we cannot just choose someone—not this Ness Overbury of yours, just because she happens to look like the Queen—”

  He stops. The two men look at each other.

  “Unless—”

  Beale nods.

  “Unless you mean not a successor, should the Queen, may God bless her, die, but a replacement? A continuation?”

  Beale sits back.

  “Exactly. Someone to give us time.”

  Walsingham throws himself back into his chair now. The possibilities and advantages of the scheme scroll before his eyes. The Queen but not the Queen. Someone they can get to marry; to produce a son; to send troops to the Dutch; to sanction money spent on the fortification of Plymouth and Southampton; to authorize the sel
ling of guns to the Barbary Moors; to finally rid him of the thorn in his side that is the Queen of Scots, and take the war to Spain!

  But no! It cannot be!

  “Stop!” Walsingham cries. “Stop!”

  He stands.

  “Robert,” he says, “for the love of God. Breathe no more of this. Put it from your mind. What you are practicing is against the life of the Queen. What you are suggesting is the blackest kind of treason.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER NINE

  Whitehall Palace,

  the next day, last week of November 1577

  The next morning the Queen eats some clear soup, and at last there is good news from the physicians who have been smelling her breath and her urine and have pronounced her person to be on the mend. Bells ring out, and there is much joy, though that is confined to the Palace of Whitehall, for outside there is snow in the air, and London is now shuttered against the winter.

  Jane Frommond is in worsted and lambskin and a fine fur hat, and she is on a pony, a gray, and being led from the palace by the less-than-well-wrapped stableboy who had collected Alice Rutherford’s coffer those weeks before. His name is John.

  “Are you certain, mistress?”

  “I am.”

  “Because it is mighty cold to be out and about on such a day,” John tells her.

  He has boots that are too large for him—surely his father’s—but no gloves of course, and he cleaves to the pony, palms pressed flat against its neck for the warmth. They join the stream of traffic heading into the city: the odd cart with iron-hooped wheels, but mostly packhorses and donkeys laden with great sacks of muddy roots. Heads are bowed, shoulders are hunched, and body steam smogs the air.