The Eyes of the Queen

by Oliver Clements

  Auderville, Normandy, Eve of the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, September 13, 1572

  The churches in this part of Normandy do not have spires. They are solid and squat, and largely unadorned, much like the people hereabouts, but when their bells ring, they are very intimate, and close, and rouse a man from his deepest sleep. Dr. John Dee is not asleep though. He has slept very little in the last four days, not since he left Isobel Cochet to drown on the sands below Mont Saint-Michel.

  Since then he has ridden a horse half to death, and wept a great deal, which surprised him, for he did not believe himself the sort given to tears, especially for a woman he hardly knew, and now he sits at this table in this inn in Auderville—a stone-built cottage, barely, with a thatched roof and branch hanging above the door to signal its offer—tormented with guilt at having left her so.

  He shakes so badly with the ague that he can hardly read what he has written, but he carries on working through night, lighting each fresh candle from the stump of the last, his shivering body and wretched soul fueled by warm cider laced with butter. The innkeeper-cum-fisherman has covered the fire and rolled out his bed and sleeps on the rushes below with four greyhounds, the dogs’ three-quarter-closed eyes occasionally catching the firelight, soft and companionable. The wind is in the chimney and the fisherman whimpers, dreaming perhaps of the perils of the sea, while Dee tries to make sense of the document retrieved from the sacristy of the Abbey of Mont Saint-Michel, and of the numbers Isobel Cochet gave him before she died.

  He owes her that, at least.

  The chart is as she described: a series of circles, some infilled with letters and numbers. Dee had recognized it as being an unusual astrological chart, round rather than square, with its twelve houses of the heavens, and true node signs. Some of the chart is filled in with signs that Dee recognizes—Leo, Libra, Capricorn, as well as the familiar exaltation and triplicity points and so on, though for some reason Neptune in Aquarius is emboldened in red—but certain key pieces of information are missing.

  Obviously these must be the numbers that Isobel Cochet gave him before she died. Once those are entered, then a skillful caster might read the chart backward: to take from what is written here not, as would be usual, the chances of a man’s success and happiness, and so on, but to find the place of birth of the man whose chart this might be.

  When he first divined this was the chart’s secret, Dee was gripped by intellectual excitement. He believed that he might imminently gain knowledge of the whereabouts of the mouth of the Straits of Anian.

  But it has not been as easy as that.

  The numbers—they do not make sense.

  He has tried every combination, in every house of the zodiac, and so far has drawn latitudes that range from the very farthest south any man has yet dared to sail, to those very far north, which, if he can believe it, would put the mouth of the strait somewhere very far to the north, where the ice is so extensive and the cold so deep that no man could suffer it. Where Admiral Willoughby and his expedition had vanished, eaten up by the ice.

  This cannot be the opening of the Straits of Anian.

  Admiral DaSilva cannot have sailed so far north and returned alive.

  It is just not possible.

  After trying every permutation of the numbers in the chart with no more plausible results, he began to wonder if DaSilva has further encrypted the numbers. So he has tried to decrypt them, subjecting them to every process he knows—which is every one yet devised by man, from the simple letter frequency analysis technique as described by the Arab mathematician Alkindus, up to the tabula recta system devised by Johannes Trithemius, as well as various polyalphabetic ciphers as have been devised by Blaise de Vigenère in Paris and Leon Alberti in Genoa—but with numbers, and so very few of them, it is impossible to be certain.

  And even then, each time he puts his decryptions into the chart and attempts to interpret the result in this strange backward fashion, he still comes up with nothing that is remotely plausible, and he is left wondering if the numbers are either in a cipher of which he has never heard tell—which he cannot believe for surely Baltazar DaSilva is a navigator, not a cryptographer?—or, worse, that Isobel Cochet got the numbers wrong.

  And so he sits thinking about this, reliving those last terrible moments on the sands below Mont Saint-Michel, and the more he does so, the more certain he is that she was not wrong. She did not make a mistake. She repeated the numbers perfectly. Twice.

  Nor did he make a mistake either. He has a mnemonic system he developed with Petrus Ramus—may God assoil his soul—and even now, days after the event, he is able to rattle the numbers off just as if he had heard them but moments ago.

  And yet… and yet. He holds Mercator’s globe in his palm and he studies the lines of latitude so carefully scribed through its continents, so much of it still terra incognita, and at the top, almost at the pole, is the line of latitude that DaSilva has identified.

  Can it be DaSilva who has gotten it wrong?

  That is possible. But very improbable. An admiral’s logbook is a sacred thing. This page will have been a fair copy of a fair copy, held almost as a reliquary on board the ship.

  So where was the mistake introduced?

  On he goes, around and around, a dog chasing its own tail.

  He will try one last process, he thinks, of which he very recently heard tell by a Neapolitan (the same who showed him the secret mix of plant dyes and alum needed to write on the shell of an egg, so that when it is boiled, the message becomes invisible on the outside, but transfers itself to the hard-boiled yolk). It is a form of the digraphic substitution cipher, applied to the numbers once they are rotated by seven, the number of the chart’s emboldened Neptune, first into Latin, and then into Hebrew.

  Dee works solidly for a candle’s length, and at the end of it, it still makes no sense, and he is about to give up, when he decides to rotate the letters once more, again by seven, this time back into Latin, which he will turn back into numbers to put into the chart.

  Before he can complete this final step, though, before he can turn the Latin back into numbers, he finally sees something. Something that leaps out at him amid the jumble of nonsense. Something no one else in the world would ever find: a message. He freezes. He sits back. The shock of discovery shortens his breath. His hair stirs as if someone has just breathed upon his neck.

  But what is it? A communication. A communication from someone, or something, at many stages removed.

  My God, he thinks. My God.

  Ecce Cardan. Here is Cardan.

  Jerome Cardan. The great horoscope caster of the late King Edward, forced to flee the country. And to where? Paris.

  Dee lays his hands on the table.

  The midnight bell rings.

  It is the Catholic Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, and by dawn he must be on the headland with a muffled lamp, ready to answer a signal from out at sea.

  But for a further candle’s length of time he sits in frozen silence.

  Yes. He sees it now. Oh yes. He sees it now.

  He knows only what Walsingham has told him as to how the document ended up in Isobel Cochet’s hands, and she confirmed that she had killed Walsingham’s espial, Oliver Fellowes, but Dee also knows Walsingham of old. Walsingham is a man who weighs every word. He knows its value, not just on the mouth, but to the ear, too. He knows how much a man hears what he wants to hear. And so Dee must go back and analyze every word said, and what was meant, and what Walsingham intended that Dee should think it meant.

  As he is in this state of lucid dreaming, thinking about Walsingham and his various machinations that see within the scheme of things, a further possibility, a deeper layer emerges. It makes sense of everything that has happened and makes sense of the chart and of Isobel Cochet’s numbers and of her death.

  He stands.

  He looks down at his papers.

  Yes, he thinks, yes. Now he sees it. And he finds he has clenched h
is fists so hard he must unstick his nails from the palms of his hands.

  Bloody goddamned bloody butcher Walsingham.

  Dee gathers his papers, all the various versions of the horoscope wheel with the numbers applied, and he picks out the one that suggests the mouth of the straits is in the very far frozen north. This is the version in which the numbers are unencrypted. He lays this on his table, held down with his mug and inkpot, and takes the others in a pile and steps around his table, over the innkeeper-fisherman, to the fire. He uses his sleeve to lift the fire cover and sets it aside. Then, one by one, he feeds the slips of paper into the embers and holds them while they burn. He thinks of Isobel Cochet as he does it, how she must have burned the numbers in just such a fashion, and then, when they are burned, properly, he stirs the ashes with the poker and replaces the cover.

  He wipes the soot from his fingers on his breeches and shakes the innkeeper-fisherman awake.

  “Where is the Nez Bayard?” he asks.

  The man is confused. Dee repeats himself twice. Finally, the man understands and tells him.

  “North,” he says, gesturing. “A thousand paces. Maybe more.”

  Dee leaves him and returns to his seat at the table and his long-cooled cider, and he sits looking at the single paper—the original stolen from the abbey—and dark tendrils of blackest thought twist up through his body and soul. They wrap themselves about his mind, and they pull tight. But still he does not move for a long moment, and then, when he does, it is to remove his hands from the document, and he leaves it there, with his pen and his bag, and his extra candles.

  He waits.

  It will not be long now, he thinks. They will be here soon.

  A moment later all four greyhound heads rise as one.

  Dee pinches the candle wick.

  In the dark he reaches for Mercator’s globe.

  He crosses to the door on soft feet. He knows the innkeeper has a crossbow in the rafters, but is it nocked? Probably not. The bolt though. Dee stretches up and finds it and plucks the bolt from its groove. Thick as his finger, long as his hand, a rough iron spike on one end, stubby fletches the other. He slips it up his left sleeve and presses his ear to the planks of the door.

  A thin whistle of wind at the cracks. Can he hear the sea? He’s not sure. He stands there a good long while. He supposes his eyes would be used to the dark now, if it wasn’t so absolute. He steps back to let the door sigh open on the breeze. Gray starlight falls through the opening and he is quickly through and out into the recondite yard.

  Overhead, stars. He is facing west.

  Ahead is the stable, but a horse snickers to his left, to the south.

  Then a voice, a man’s in a low murmur, ahead, by the stable.

  Dee ducks below the stone course so that his shape is not obvious against the whitewashed wattle, and he moves softly north. The sea is half a league beyond the scrubby trees, and he can hear it now, breaking on the rocks, but Walsingham’s instructions were very specific: ask for, find, stand on, and send signal from Nez Bayard at first light on the morning of the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross.

  How he will do that without a lamp is another matter.

  First, though, he needs to be out of the trap of the house.

  There is a midden to be negotiated, filled with mussel shells, and then he is into untilled pasture where he stops by the sheepfold filled with pale shapes. He thinks, for a moment, of wolves. Then he turns to watch the house. The night is blue black, and inky shapes writhe in his imagination. Or do they? He needs to look twice. Two men, coming around the north end of the house. A moment earlier and he would have met them head-on.

  He crouches and waits a moment. He can smell the sheep, but they are very quiet. Are there wolves in this part of France?

  How long has he got?

  Dee moves around the fold. He sees into the courtyard from here but cannot be seen. A lamp is lit at the third attempt and lights up five figures. Its yellow light catches on steel plate and sharp-edged weapons. Mustard and plum. They gather at the door to smash it open and they vanish within. The dogs go mad, but they are greyhounds, nothing more. There is a period of confused bellowing from inside. Dee can’t hear what is said over the barking. At least two men are shouting at someone: he supposes it will be the fisherman.

  He waits a little longer. Another lamp is lit. The fire uncovered. The dogs hushed. Things calm down. They must know Dee is gone, but how long has he been gone? He hopes someone knows what they are doing. Yes. Horses. Four or five of them, coming slowly into the courtyard now. It means a commander of sorts. He will have been told what to look out for.

  Dee smiles in the darkness.

  But there is another role these men must play.

  He watches the commander’s party dismount and enter the inn. A single man is left holding the horses. Dee unhitches the gate of the sheepfold, takes a stone from the wall, and lobs it over into the midden. There is a slithering crash of empty shells and the dogs start barking again. Men charge from the hall. The sheep react in panic: they spill out of the fold and fill the yard, blocking it perfectly.

  Dee sets off northward, toward the sea, toward Nez Bayard.

  The others curse the sheep as they set off after him in pursuit. The dogs are on him in moments, but they are still just greyhounds, and nothing more, and they know him from before. They are, Dee thinks, companionable.

  The ground here is rocky, covered in springy turf, unlike the sand and mud of Mont Saint-Michel. He is pleased. He stops a moment to make sure they are following him. They are. Five men perhaps. No horses yet. But they are bringing the lamp! It is almost too good to be true. The dogs race back to their masters.

  Dee stumbles on. Someone is growing cabbages and onions, but he can smell the tang of woodsmoke; horses and the playful dogs, also the sea, clean and cleansing. He feels his head clearing of the fug induced by trying to interpret the chart and numbers.

  And now Dee finds even greater luck: a stream. He ducks low and steps into its cool waters and wades back upstream, shin deep, its waters bracingly cold. He moves as quietly as he can, cutting back south, so that soon he is alongside the cardinal’s men on their way to Nez Bayard, unseen in the dark.

  He watches the leader carrying the lamp up high.

  The men and dogs pass.

  Dee waits a moment, until they have crossed the stream, and then he sets off after them. If the fisherman is right, Nez Bayard cannot be much farther.

  From the darkness to the left comes a sudden flash of light, then the ragged boom of a gunshot. The man with the lamp goes down with a cry and the lamp falls extinguished.

  By Christ!

  There is much barking and shouting. The cardinal’s men did not expect Dee to have a gun, so they have not brought any, either, and now, with their leader wounded—Dee can hear his cries—they do not know what to do. Then there is another gunshot from another spot. Too soon after the first to be the same gun loaded. Two guns.

  Whose? Dee remains stock-still, his night sight ruined by the flash, his mind reeling in horror: Can these newcomers really have been shooting at the man they thought was him?

  The cardinal’s men come running back, leaving their leader wounded in the grass. There is yet a third gunshot.

  Three gunmen? Dear Christ! They really wanted him dead!

  The third bullet hits a dog. Its yelp cuts through Dee more than the man’s. The dog rolls in a curl and whimpers piteously.

  Dee breathes hard and waits in the shadow of a wind-twisted tree. The wounded man is calling out to his mother and his God, and he can hear the dog dragging itself after its fleeing master, but he cannot hear the gunmen. He needs to know who they are, and what tongue they speak.

  He starts his careful steps toward them, keeping low in the stream’s course. The wounded man is still calling out, though his voice is fading as the light grows. Dee sees that they are on a headland, and the sea is almost all around them. This must be Nez Bayard.

&n
bsp; The stream peters out, vanishing into the scrubland before the beach. A small boat is drawn up, a pinnace, watched over by a boy. Dee lies flat.

  The men with guns are approaching now, talking to one another.

  Dutch. The knowledge turns Dee’s blood to ice.

  Someone holds the lamp over the wounded Frenchman.

  “Is it him?” one of them asks.

  “He signaled, didn’t he?”

  “Are you Doctor Dee?” one of them asks the man in French.

  The Frenchman moans something. It is not clear if it is a denial.

  “Must be him,” one of the Dutchmen says.

  There is a fourth gunshot.

  The wounded man is killed.

  “Just didn’t expect him to have a dog.”

  A fifth gunshot.

  “He doesn’t now.”

  There is some rueful laughter. No one likes to shoot a dog.

  “Search him,” the leader says. “Captain says he should have some papers.”

  There is a rustling. A grunt of effort as they turn him over.

  “Nothing.”

  “Well, bring him then. Come on. Wind is getting up.”

  They carry the dead body down toward the pinnace. They pass quite close to Dee, and he cowers from the lamplight. He can smell the sailors’ usual stench of rotting teeth and unwashed bodies. They must have been at sea a fair while, Dee supposes. Come up from trying to break the blockade of the Huguenot city of La Rochelle, perhaps? The dead man has lost his hat, and his head hangs low enough to graze the rocks on the beach. The sailors fling him in the pinnace.

  “What are you looking at?” one of them asks the boy by the boat.

  Dee watches them through some thrift and a clump of sea kale. They put their guns on top of the dead man, then push the boat down the beach and into the sea. The boy holds the boat’s bow while the men clamber in. They ship their oars and the boy pushes them out farther, and then, nimble as a cat, he is up over the bow and in after them. They begin rowing, smooth and easy, out to sea, where Dee sees there is a light, hanging in the skeleton masts of a ship.

  Dee lies dead still and waits. Unfamiliar birds are greeting the dawn. He still holds Mercator’s globe. After a while he looks up again. The boat is quite far out to sea now.