The Eyes of the Queen

by Oliver Clements

  Walsingham places his fingertip on the map: Lisbon. A courtier, Beale thinks, at the São Jorge palace, perhaps. Beale follows Walsingham’s finger as it runs north over the map to Santiago de Compostela. A priest then, Beale supposes, or an idolater at the shrine of Saint James the Great. From there Walsingham’s finger moves north again, across the sea, to La Rochelle on the French coast. A sailor, with the Italian admiral Strozzi, perhaps, involved in the sea blockade of the city. Then Walsingham runs his finger upward across the Bay of Biscay, through the Western Approaches to the Narrow Sea and then past Calais and into the North Sea, where it settles briefly on the Dutch city of Den Brill. So a Sea Beggar, Beale thinks; one of the Dutch pirates who have broken the blockade of La Rochelle, and who are holding out against the Spanish up there. From Den Brill the finger slides south to the French city of Rheims. Rheims! An English priest then. A Catholic. A recusant, God save us. From Rheims: a short stab westward across the map to Paris. That could literally be anyone.

  “So,” Beale prompts, “where is the weak link?”

  In the gloom, Walsingham’s eyes seem to sweat with the effort of thought. His fingertip hovers as he retraces the document’s journey. It stops over Rheims.

  “If there is compromise, it is here,” he says.

  “And Isobel Cochet?”

  Walsingham taps the map.

  “Paris, of course. The Louvre.”

  “And is there a connection to the handover in Rheims?”

  “De Guise,” Walsingham says.

  “The duke?”

  Beale refers to the Duke of Guise, the leader of the Catholic League in France, the man who perhaps ordered the first attempt on Gaspard de Coligny’s life, and the man who hates Protestants above all else.

  “The bishop,” Walsingham corrects.

  The bishop—of Rheims—is the duke’s brother. He is the Cardinal of Lorraine, the man whom Walsingham thinks of as the Minister for Mischief, whom Isobel Cochet herself suggested might be to blame for ordering the second, final, and successful attempt on Coligny’s life, and the massacre that followed. Both are uncles to Mary of Scotland, and each would stop at nothing to have her returned to a throne, any throne, but particularly that of England, to which—whisper it only—she has a good claim.

  “A powerless prince all right,” Beale agrees.

  “And one who would not wish England to know the whereabouts of the Straits of Anian, that is for certain.”

  Beale and Walsingham look at each other in surmise.

  “But who knowing it himself,” Walsingham continues, “will use it to force King Philip’s hand in any matter. Any matter at all.”

  Both are thinking of Mary of Scotland, and of the Spanish fleet sailing under Quesada. Walsingham feels the wolves circling ever closer. Why cannot the Queen just have her cousin put to death? A stain on her hands, yes, but while she lives… He sighs in frustration.

  “So,” Beale asks. “Do we have anyone inside the bishop’s palace?”

  Walsingham shakes his head.

  “No longer,” he says. “Betrayed. They cut him open, wound his guts around a spinning wheel, and burned them from the far end.”

  Beale shuts his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose.

  “Could we get someone in to find Cochet?” he asks.

  “We could, I suppose, but in to where? Where will she be? The cardinal will know we need to find her and will not keep her in Rheims. He will keep her close, surely, but he has properties all over France.”

  He taps from west to east, north to south.

  “It is impossible. Like the needle from the proverb.”

  “And yet it is what Her Majesty commands we must do.”

  “But even if we should ever locate her, who could we send to get her out?”

  After a moment’s thought, Walsingham adjusts the lantern so that its beam switches to fall on the table before his writing stool, and on which sits a simple clothbound book, the sort in which any wool merchant might keep his figures of profit and loss. He opens it and reveals column after column of names.

  “We need someone with something a little out of the ordinary,” Walsingham says. He flicks over the pages until he comes to a back page on which is written a short list of names and numbers. He reaches for a freshly sharpened nib and runs it down the page. Beale can see the names and their attendant numbers, some crossed out, and he knows what that means. But some are clear and legible: 003 – Christopher Marlowe; 004 – Walter Raleigh; 006 – Francis Drake. Walsingham comes to the column’s end, unhappy.

  He shakes his head. “What do we know about the bishop?” he asks.

  “He is a de Guise, first; a man of the cloth, second; and a Frenchman, third. In and out of favor with the French king and likewise the pope, fanatically dedicated only to his family’s advance, most especially his niece Mary. He is believed to be trying to introduce the Inquisition to France, yet has an interest in the occult, and is an advocate of what he calls the intertraffic of the human mind.”

  Walsingham is silent for a moment.

  “The intertraffic of the human mind, eh? Well, well, I believe I know just the man after all.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Mortlake, England, September 2, 1572

  “John! Wake up, John! There’s two men at the door.”

  It is his mother, and he knows there are two men at the door. Two men and a dog. Bill and Bob. Bob and Bill.

  “Don’t answer it, Mother.”

  Are we in trouble? she will ask.

  Only if you answer the door, he will answer.

  He is tying his breeches, lacing his doublet, his gaze roving the shelves in search of what to take, what to leave. His books—all nine hundred and twelve of them? Or his astrolabes, his globes, and all the various mechanisms of his own device? Hurry. Hurry.

  “They say they want a word with you.”

  “I bet they do.”

  His hand falls on Mercator’s globe. He is not likely to see his old friend again for a while, he supposes, and if he leaves it here, it is just the sort of thing a fool will melt to make a trinket for an even larger fool. He wraps it in a shirt, pushes it within his bag, and then makes for the rear window. The roof of his library abuts the house just below his window, and he balances himself on its apex, spreads his arms, and wobbles his way to the gable end. Below is an apple tree, fat with green fruit. A five-foot drop. Bang. Always more painful than he imagines. Apples thud to the ground. He is about to join them when the dog—last seen licking its own testicles in Cambridge—appears.

  Dear Christ, it is an ugly beast. Of the sort that brooks no argument and will not let go. He knows that he will have to sacrifice his left forearm to its jaws and beat it to death with his right fist. But his moment’s hesitation has cost him time he does not have, and now Bill appears in the orchard. He has a black eye and a puffed lip.

  “John Dee,” he says. “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. Plus expenses.”

  Plus expenses? Dee clambers along a branch. He is only a few feet above Bill’s head, but it is enough. If he can make it into the next tree and the one after that, and the one after that, then he might be near enough the river’s edge to make a run for it. Can these sorts of dog swim? It does not look as if it might.

  There follows a standoff.

  Now Bob comes too. And he now also has a dog, of the same sort. White, but so short haired as to be almost pink, with red eyes and a lolling scarf of a tongue.

  “Come on down, Dee,” Bob calls.

  “What are you going to do? Throw the dog at me?”

  There is some head scratching.

  “Could do,” Bob says.

  It is curious to look down and see his own shape among shadows thrown by the latticework of the apple branches.

  His mother watches from the back door.

  “Come down, John,” she calls. “You’ll only hurt yourself
.”

  Bill and Bob below agree.

  “They’ll hurt me more if I do,” he tells his mother.

  “I’m sure they won’t, will you?”

  “ ’Course not.”

  But they will, so he shifts his weight and prepares to slide over to the next tree. At times like this he wishes he could fly like the angels. At times like this he wishes his mother did not have his trees pruned so carefully. The bough bends under him, slowly lowering him toward Bob’s grasp, he being the taller of the two men. Both dogs growl. Dee makes a calculation. He leaps. His bag, with Mercator’s globe in it, catches on a branch. He is pulled short, bouncing back. The branch gives and he slides and crashes to the ground, scattering dog and man below. But they are on him straightaway. One dog has his boot. The other his wrist. The strength they bring! They pull against each other, and he is pulled between them as if he were a bone to be tussled over. The two men stand watching with pleasure.

  “Come on, then,” Bill says, and he takes Dee’s other heel, the one without the dog, and turns him, dragging him toward the orchard doorway. Funny to think Queen Elizabeth once stood exactly there. Different days perhaps.

  Bob calls off his dog, and Dee’s sleeve is released. It aches to the very bone, but there is no blood.

  “Where are you taking him?” comes a voice. It is not Dee’s mother.

  “Marshalsea,” Bill answers.

  “I am afraid I have greater need of him than the Marshalsea,” the voice continues, and both Bill and Bob look up and about.

  Down by the river: two boats, oars up, nudging to land, each carrying men of the sort it is unwise to resist. At the bow of the first: a well-dressed man in good black cloth.

  “Put him down, will you.” It is not a question.

  Even Bill and Bob know not to argue, though they try.

  Dee looks up at the sun. He says nothing. He knows that voice.

  “He is ours,” Bill starts.

  “He is a subject of Her Majesty the Queen,” the voice reminds him. “And I claim his person in her name. Now put him down or I will shoot your dogs, and then you.”

  One by one all three let go of Dee’s limbs, and a moment later, he is sitting up, rubbing his ribs, ruing his fall.

  “You all right, John?”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  “You’ll have to pay us for him,” Bill says. “Five marks, eight shillings, and sixpence.”

  “Plus expenses,” Bob adds.

  Francis Walsingham pulls a face and shakes his head.

  “You’ll have to invoice the Treasury.”

  “I think I’d rather go with these two gentlemen to the Marshalsea, if it is all the same with you, Master Walsingham,” Dee says.

  A spasm of irritation crosses Walsingham’s face.

  “You’ll do as you are told, Dee,” he says.

  * * *

  The two men and their dogs, and his mother, watch John Dee climb into the boat with Master Walsingham and settle himself on a thwart next to another man, who will turn out to be Robert Beale, Master Walsingham’s right-hand man.

  The oarsmen push off, and they row against the tide eastward, toward London. Little is said. Dee’s arm aches, and there is a hole in his boot. It is a close morning, and a mist haunts the river, left over from yesterday’s rain. After perhaps an hour, the boat brings them into the steps below the Tower, and despite himself, Dee shudders.

  “Nothing to fear, Dr. Dee.” Beale smiles. He seems reasonable enough.

  “Not yet,” Walsingham adds, with a rictus grin of his own.

  His teeth must trouble him, Dee thinks.

  They walk up past the Tower and up Seething Lane, escorted by five halberdiers.

  “What is all this about, Walsingham?” Dee asks.

  They are standing in Walsingham’s curious garden, filled with knee-high hedges cut in geometrical patterns signifying nothing that Dee can determine. He knows he should be modestly impressed, but he has been all over Europe, so he is not.

  Walsingham starts by admitting that they have not always seen eye to eye in the past, and that Dee’s current predicament owes something to him, but, he suggests, they need to put all that behind them.

  “Why?”

  After much diversion, Walsingham eventually explains how he came to have, only to lose, the DaSilva paper.

  Dee, being a keen cartographer, presses Walsingham on the whereabouts of the Straits of Anian and removes an object from his bag.

  “Do you always carry a globe with you wherever you go?”

  “Just show me,” Dee demands.

  But Walsingham cannot.

  “The page was in code,” he tells him.

  “And you lost it? Everybody says how clever and careful you are, Walsingham, but I have always known you as a bloody fool. Do you know how valuable that information is? The Northwest Passage! By Christ, that could have been the saving of our country! We could have broken the papist stranglehold on Christendom! The things we might have learned! And you lost it! Why, tell me, does the Queen permit you even to breathe? Your head should be on the bridge even now, providing thin sustenance for the crows! Dear God! How could you?”

  “I did not plan it that way, Dee,” Walsingham snaps. “I did not plan to have it stolen.”

  “Well, what are you going to do about it now?”

  There is a moment’s silence before Walsingham answers, as eloquent as any set of words.

  Dee smiles at him.

  “So,” he says, “now you need my help.”

  Walsingham is momentarily disconcerted by the easy offer. But he is grateful.

  “Yes,” he agrees.

  Dee almost laughs. How long has this been coming, he wonders, and he cannot help but recall the last conversation he had with Walsingham, after Walsingham had played a part in sabotaging his standing as the Queen’s adviser on astronomy and astrology because he had a name as a sorcerer, a man who practiced magic. Dee had told him that it was not magic that he practiced, but technology.

  “There is a divine force,” he had told Walsingham, “created and controlled by God, that turns the planets, causes the sun to rise and set, the tide to wax and wane. The ancients understood this power, and they understood how to access it. But we have lost that knowledge, and all we are left with is superstition and ignorance, prey to easy exploitation. With time, and money, I could find the lost third book of Johannes Trithemius’s Steganographia and with it regain that knowledge, and so come to an understanding of the use of that divine power.”

  This had cut no ice with Walsingham, who had told him the Queen had no need of any companion of hellhounds, or a conjurer of wicked and damned spirits, and he was backed up by that fool, Sir Thomas Smith, with whom Dee had argued about his pathetic and dangerous colony in Ireland, which was just then sucking up all his money, and all that he could borrow from the Queen. It would have been far better for the Queen to spend her money elsewhere: specifically, in the New World. That was where the future lay, Dee had said, not Ireland.

  Sir Thomas Smith never forgave him that.

  And as for the unfortunate fracas with the Earl of Leicester, well, that was always going to happen. The man wore a mail shirt, for the love of God, because so many people wanted to kill him. Anyway, Dee was sent to pack his bags. He had returned to Mortlake unemployed and humiliated, never, he thought, to see the Queen again.

  He had also thought that he would never forgive any of the men their spite, their machinations, and yet now here is Walsingham, begging for help, and Dee despite himself, gives him his ear and his time.

  You will pay a hefty price for that, Dee thinks.

  “I will need chambers,” Dee begins, “and all my books brought from Mortlake. And my various instruments: my astrolabes; my cross-staffs, all three of them. And I will need to consult widely, with men such as—”

  But now Walsingham puts a hand on Dee’s arm as if he were trying to stop a friend embarrassing himself.

  “No, Dee, listen,”
he says. “It is not that sort of help I need.”

  So it is Dee’s turn to be taken aback.

  “You do not need me to find the Northwest Passage?”

  “No, I need you to find the pages. I need you to go and reclaim them for me.”

  Dee stares, unbelieving.

  “You want me to go and reclaim them? To steal them back?”

  “Yes,” Walsingham agrees. “I am in need of your access to the parts of the world where I have none.”

  Dee is glad it is only Beale who stands as witness to his foolish hopes of tardy recognition. Meanwhile Walsingham ignores the expression on Dee’s face and continues on. He tells him of how DaSilva’s packet of pages was taken from an intelligencer named Fellowes, whom he says he loved like a son, and of Mistress Cochet, who murdered the man.

  “And she was my best, and my brightest,” Walsingham confesses. “Of great beauty, and with an astonishing brain, for a woman, and many other skills besides.”

  He leaves it vague what these might be. Dee is hardly listening. His core is molten with shamed anger. Yet Walsingham babbles, as if he believes Dee’s agreement to help still applies. He tells him about the English College at Rheims, and how Isobel Cochet might have been forced to act as she has by the Bishop of Rheims, Cardinal de Guise. Guise and his interest in the intertraffic of the mind.

  Dee is silent. He wishes with all his heart that he was alone. He would welcome a cell in the Marshalsea.

  “I believe that is most likely where the document has gone,” Walsingham concludes. “I believe you will find it with the cardinal. Since you spent time with Bishop Bonner, you are known to have Catholic sympathies. You may pass among them and know to ask the right questions.”

  He finally registers Dee’s dismay.

  “What is wrong?”

  “No,” Dee tells him. “No. I will not do it. Not your dirty work, Master Walsingham. You do that yourself.”

  “But Dr. Dee—”

  There follows a torrent of promises: money for more books, money to found the national library Dee has always wanted, money to fund his speculative digs in the Welsh Marches for the buried treasure of the late King Arthur, a position at Trinity. Then come the appeals: to his better nature, to his patriotism, to his Reformist beliefs.