The Eyes of the Queen

by Oliver Clements

  None of them work.

  “No, Master Walsingham. I will not pretend I do not wish you had not lost DaSilva’s charts to the Spanish, and that the benefits of such an advantage are not to come England’s way, but you deserve to hang for this, and I will not be the one who moves to save you. You will have to find some other fool.”

  Walsingham hangs his head. He knows Dee has his points, and that there is no reason he should risk his life on his behalf.

  “But for the Queen? Your Queen?”

  Dee is briefly disconcerted. What does Walsingham know? What does Walsingham think he knows? He regains balance.

  “This has nothing to do with her,” he says. “Go on. You can take me back home now. Or, no. I see. The Marshalsea. I should have known. Still, I thank you for sparing me a no doubt uncomfortable journey with my bailiff friends and their dogs.”

  “I am afraid it will not be the Marshalsea, Dr. Dee. Not for you.”

  Dee looks skeptical, but Walsingham is flushed with purpose.

  * * *

  The guards are almost sympathetic as they hurry Dee down Seething Lane, past the well-kept houses of the aldermen, and out into the clearing around the Tower’s moat. He starts to resist as they cross the bridge to the Byward Tower, but it is a totem, and before a man can say the Our Father, he is bundled up the steps of the Beauchamp Tower and into his old cell with a view, should he wish it, of the bluff side of the White Tower and of the scaffold in its keep. The door booms shut. The key turns. Dee is plunged in darkness.

  “Oh fuck,” he says.

  Dee clenches his eyes and his hands. He sits with his back to the wall and waits. He has been here before, many years ago now. He is attuned to the rhythms of the place: the bells that ring, the doors that close, the clack of keepers’ heels as they pass, the dismal caw of the ravens in the keep. He knows when the food will come; when the buckets will be emptied; he knows when the Queen’s officers will start to circulate, and when he will have to muffle his ears against the screams.

  At least he is not manacled.

  If only they had let him keep his globe, he might usefully study that. Instead, though, he is without resource other than his mind. He might use this time for thought, but without pen or paper, and without reference, he finds his mind wandering. He thinks about Walsingham. Dee had only told him half the truth: everybody knows him to be clever and thoughtful, that much was true. What was not true is that Dee has ever thought him a fool. Which is what makes the loss of the DaSilva’s paper so astonishing. It is disastrously out of character. If only they had them! If English mariners such as Frobisher, or Hawkins, or even Drake, could find their way through the Straits of Anian, then they might find Cathay, and conquer those lands just as the Spaniards had conquered New Spain. From this, untold wealth would pour back to fill England’s coffers, enough to pay for more warships than Hawkins could even dream of, manned by a navy professional enough to see off every Spanish galley at sea, with enough left over to pay for the books to fill the library he—Dee—had been attempting to persuade the Queen to establish.

  This would ensure England was forever ahead of her competitors in the fields of astrology, astronomy, navigation, mechanics, mining, and of course alchemy. She would take her place in the New World, to impose her own values and ethics, in place of those demented papists, and in time, even the Reformed religion would wither, as people relearned the wisdom of the ancients and learned to reach God through knowledge of the self.

  But he refuses to think about Walsingham’s ineptitude any further. He knows how a man can drive himself mad this way, without even the need to put him in the room with the brake or the rack, as they do in the Wakefield Tower. He thinks instead of his friends in Germany, and in Holland, and he thinks again about that third volume of Johannes Trithemius’s Steganographia, which if he could only find it would permit him to communicate with men such as Gerardus Mercator, whose great map shows the rough whereabouts of the Straits of Anian, or Gemma Frisius, who had re-created the known world in a series of segments fashioned in copper and bronze. What would such men make of DaSilva’s claim to have found the Northwest Passage?

  At length, and at last, he falls into what his keeper, peering through the loophole in his door, believes to be sleep. But Dee is in a state of what he calls lucid wakefulness, in which he is able to see all past and sometimes even future events as present happenings. He dreams now of the events that led to his first incarceration here, under Queen Mary, more than fifteen years ago, when he had just finished his studies in the Low Countries and returned to England.

  He had managed to secure the patronage of the young King Edward, which permitted him time to study the cause of tides, and the movement of the heavenly bodies, and he was enjoying some renown—along with his friend Jerome Cardan—casting horoscopes for those who knew their birthdates.

  Among those whose chart Dee cast was the young princess Elizabeth.

  She had, at that time, been in a strange limbo as the bastard half sister of the King, kept away from court in Woodstock. Yet, through various skeins of obligation, Dee had been summoned, and, intrigued by what he had heard of her, he went, in his scholar’s gown and a fresh collar. He was first struck by her slim, flickering, and ethereal beauty, for her hair was fiery red like her father’s, and her skin was so pale you might almost see through it. It was the acuity of her mind, however, and the clarity of her gaze that most impressed. My God, he had thought, here is a mind!

  She had grown up in a strained fashion, and her predicament remained dangerous, but while others might have sought gentler comforts to soothe their isolation, Elizabeth chose to numb her pains with the acquisition of knowledge. She never ceased asking questions of him, from the moment of his first bow, until he was backing out of the door of her rooms. She was hungry for anything he could tell her about anything, and so it began: a system of writing that did away with individual letters, knowledge of the fortifications of the lock gates at Antwerp, familiarity with the medicinal herbs the Romans had planted on the wall in the northern parts, a device for moving heavy weights using levers and pulleys, flightless birds in certain islands off Africa.

  She was above all fascinated by his astrolabe, and in every aspect of astronomy, as well as astrology and clairvoyance, and so, naturally enough, he offered to cast her horoscope. She was Virgo, he told her, the Ministering Angel, practical and hardworking, fastidious in her health, and mistrusting of fiery displays of emotion, though, in fact, this last characteristic did not apply.

  But also: likely to be a spinster.

  Does that upset you? he had asked.

  She took a mouthful of the roasted swan they were served for supper.

  We shall see, she’d said.

  She was eighteen at the time, six years his junior, and any physical impulses he felt toward her were overcome by the thought of what her sister might do to his person were he to act upon them, and so he contained himself and worked to temper the girl into something he thought would one day be of very great use.

  But what, though?

  Meanwhile Jerome Cardan was invited to cast the King’s horoscope, for the King was a sickly child, and the chart would help his physicians choose the correct course of treatment. Cardan divined the boy was threatened with a grave illness—which any man with eyes might see—but if he could survive it, he would live to a grand old age.

  But the boy could not, and the next week he died.

  Cardan fled the country, though it has always puzzled Dee how he managed it in time.

  Despite the best efforts of some, Queen Mary took the throne, and set about reversing the religious reforms her predecessors had made.

  For a few months, all was well.

  Queen Mary even appointed Dee the court astrological adviser, and in this capacity he cast her horoscope: Sun in Pisces, Moon in Virgo, Mars in Capricorn. She was a fist, cold and efficient, occasionally impetuous when it came to enacting plans. These details he sugared. She was a dreary lov
er, and he did not see children. These details he kept to himself.

  But then he made his mistake.

  Princess Elizabeth asked to see her sister’s chart, and he showed it to her.

  What did it mean? Nothing, he thought. Or rather, he did not think. Elizabeth was just interested in it, as she was in everything.

  But that is not how it appeared to all. Rumor spread, and it was soon believed Dee’s intent was infinitely sinister; that he had bewitched children; that he had cast spells on a goodwife; that he was plotting to kill the Queen and replace her with Princess Elizabeth.

  Spies placed in the princess’s house informed the Queen that he and the princess had discussed the Queen’s horoscope and within the week Dee found himself snatched from the garden at Hampton Court, bundled aboard a boat, and rowed downstream to the Tower. His lodgings were sealed and searched, and it was then that those wild accusations were first leveled: that he was a summoner of hellhounds, and a conjurer of damned spirits, unfit to be part of her household.

  And so his reputation was broken, though not, unlike many, his body, for while others were racked and then burned, he—Dee—was held for weeks on end, and then summoned before the Star Chamber, where he was questioned almost endlessly about his intentions and practices, and he was held in various prisons in and around London, mostly in the Bishop’s Palace, but for one strange week here, in this very room, in the Beauchamp Tower.

  His bowels had turned liquid as they had brought him upriver that first time, in the falling dark, and to the sound of a tolling bell.

  “I am no traitor!”

  “Right.”

  He had prayed all through that first night and in the morning the guards had found him still kneeling.

  “Thought you were godless?”

  “No one is godless in the Beauchamp Tower,” Dee told him. “Besides, it is more complicated than that.”

  They had taken him to the Star Chamber again that day, to be cross-questioned by judges and clerics, and with every question he had feared for his life, for even from the river, he had seen the sky to the north of the city smudged with the pyre smoke of burning martyrs. The air had seemed to crackle with their pain.

  It was on the second day, returning after a morning in Westminster, that Dee saw her again. Elizabeth. She was walking on the wall between the Bell Tower and his Beauchamp Tower. She was dressed very darkly, and she looked ill, but there was no mistaking her. He effected a bow as best he could with his hands manacled, and his guards—four of them—were sympathetic to the princess’s plight. She had been imprisoned not because she had asked to see her sister’s future, but she was a party to Wyatt’s rebellion against Queen Mary’s marriage to Philip of Spain.

  She had turned and watched Dee being marched to his tower, and she had raised a fist in solidarity. Once in his cell, with the door shut in on him, he had hurried to the window that, if he pressed his face through its aperture, also gave him a view of the wall on which she still stood.

  “My lady!” he had called “My lady!”

  And she had smiled at him, and wept with joy that he was still alive, and he wished he might extend a hand, just to touch the tips of her fingers again, but it was not to be.

  They had, though, in spite of everything, passed the days often just as before; in long discussion, and even some laughter, and what might have been hellish became bearable because she would often call to him from her post on the wall, and though she was a prisoner, she was also the Queen’s sister, and the guards would look the other way.

  “Dr. Dee! Dr. Dee!”

  The voice is insistent. But it comes not from the past, not from his wakeful dreaming, but from the present.

  “Dr. Dee!”

  It is a woman’s voice, one that he has not heard for some time but cannot forget. His Queen. She is framed by the open doorway, in very dark blue linen, a tall collar, her hair under a jeweled net.

  Dee stands. He dusts himself down. He bows.

  “Your Majesty,” he says.

  “We didn’t disturb you?” she asks, allowing him to take her hand and press his lips to the ridge of gloved knuckles. She is wearing four rings: diamond, two rubies, and one plain gold. She smells of myrrh.

  “I was just this moment coming to the whereabouts of the philosopher’s stone,” he tells her.

  “While snoring?”

  “A ruse to ensure I go undisturbed.”

  “And how well does that work for you?”

  “Not awfully,” he agrees. “Though I did not expect houseguests. I should have baked a cake.”

  “We should have liked that.” She smiles, but her smile is strained. “It will be better fare than I can expect at Hill Hall.”

  “Hill Hall? You are to see Thomas Smith?”

  “Yes,” she says with a sigh. “I need show myself to the men of Essex, they say, and so, to Hill Hall it is. I’d almost rather stay here, if I were able.”

  There is a pause. Dee can feel his eyebrow creeping up: Yes?

  Elizabeth sighs. She is carrying a fan of meadowsweet against jail rot. Dee is suddenly conscious of the bucket stinking in the room’s corner. The Queen crosses the room to the window, looking out over the bailey, over the scaffold toward the church.

  “So,” she says.

  “So,” he says.

  “I regret to find you once more so constrained, John. It was not my intention.”

  “No? Master Walsingham exceeding his orders again?”

  She sighs.

  “He does what he must,” she says.

  “Must he threaten me with death?”

  She smiles vaguely.

  “Did he do that?”

  Dee growls. Not really, he supposes.

  “But I am,” Elizabeth says. “I am daily threatened with death.”

  He sees that she has aged. Her skin, once lustrous, has thinned, cracked, dried. She wears powder under her eyes.

  “You do look tired, Bess,” he tells her.

  She turns to him, a scribble of anger across her face.

  “You are not to call me that again.”

  She glares at him, her eyes very blue even in the dark, and he remembers how those same eyes used to look at him, before she was queen, and they were fellow prisoners together.

  “Preoccupied, then,” he corrects himself. “Your Majesty.”

  She stares at him, and for a moment, he thinks he may have lost her. They have been strangers too long for such jokes, and to forge herself a queen, she has had to remake herself entire. Sadness and fear almost overwhelm him.

  But at last she smiles and lets out a long sigh.

  “It has been too long, John.”

  “It has, Your Majesty.”

  She nods. Her eyes dart around the room. She licks her lips.

  “I am sorry to come to you only in this hour of my need,” she starts, dropping the royal “we” and shape-shifting to become more like the Bess of old whom he might distract with descriptions of the kingdom of Prester John where milk and honey flowed freely; where poison could do no harm and nor did noisy frogs croak.

  “But calamity has struck, and this country, our nation, and my very life hang in the balance. I know Master Walsingham has explained the threat that now hangs over us, and that he has made his appeal, and that you have found it… wanting.”

  He feels this painfully. He tries to frame the words that will explain his contempt for Walsingham that will not make him sound petty, but he cannot do so, though she divines the answer, of course.

  “I know you have your reasons—good reasons—to dislike and mistrust Master Walsingham, but there is something about this business with Mistress Cochet that he is not telling you, which explains why he did not anticipate her as a threat to what otherwise might have been an intelligencer’s coup.”

  Dee waits.

  “Mistress Cochet. Isobel Cochet. The woman who took the document: she has a daughter. Rose. Rose is about six, and her father is dead. Dead in Walsingham’s—and so m
y—service. By every account, Rose is all to her mother.”

  Elizabeth—who had just three winters when her father ordered her mother’s head to be struck from her shoulders just yards from where she now stands—looks so infinitesimally sad as she says this that Dee almost crosses the room to put his arm around her. How badly would that go? Very, he thinks. Instead he waits for her to finish.

  “But Rose has been taken,” the Queen continues.

  “Dead?”

  “No. Taken. By someone. After the pages were taken, Master Walsingham sent men to the girl’s house and found she had been taken from her bed in the night. Her grandfather—who is a warden of one of the Cinque Ports—hoped she might have gone wandering and sent men after her, in the hope she had perhaps fallen in a sawpit or pond, but closer inspection revealed a note.”

  “A note? Where was this? Where was the child?”

  “Near Sandwich. Where the girl stayed when her mother was working for Master Walsingham.”

  From Sandwich across the Narrow Sea to France is nothing.

  “What did the note say?”

  “That the girl was safe, but they were to tell no one she had gone, save confirm it was so, should the mother send message to ask.”

  “When was this?”

  “Two weeks ago.”

  “And the mother did send message to ask?”

  “Yes.”

  Dee scratches his chin. Clever, he thinks. Or lucky. Or perhaps Walsingham should have done more to protect the girl if he was putting her mother in such jeopardy? Where would that end though? The mistake was that someone had discovered that Isobel Cochet was working for Walsingham. If one could find out who that might be, then one would know who had the girl, and with that, who had forced her mother into stealing the DaSilva documents.

  “We do not know,” Elizabeth tells him. “Walsingham believes it may be the work of the Cardinal of Lorraine, the Bishop of Rheims, who is our cousin of Scotland’s uncle, and who has much to gain were she on England’s throne in my stead.”