The Eyes of the Queen

by Oliver Clements

  Downstream is what? Fifty miles of nothing, then the sea.

  He feels as if he is falling. He struggles to breathe.

  My God. My God.

  Walsingham turns.

  In the thick glass window of the tower, the pale smudge of a face.

  Is she laughing at him?

  PART | THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Seething Lane, City of London, October 9, 1572

  “Come on! Coming through! Clear the way now!”

  The porter at the gate uses the butt of his staff to nudge an old man away from the gates. He’s been there a couple of days now, fruitlessly holding out a stained cap, his shaved head abraded with scratches and cuts. A horribly stained bandage over one eye. He smells strongly of fish, as if he sleeps on the Billingsgate steps.

  The porter clears enough space to allow Master Walsingham through, with Master Beale by his side, and six of Queen Elizabeth’s guards behind. Walsingham looks grim, but Beale at least greets the porter with a nod as they ride into the courtyard.

  When he closes the gate, the old beggar is gone, leaving only his cap, in which sits a rotting fish.

  Walsingham is slow off his horse. Disgrace, disappointment, and age have stiffened his body, and he can hardly move after the long ride, but he is pleased to be home. His daughter comes running and she throws her arms around him. She knows nothing of this. None of it. Then his wife, too, and the nurse, and there is much fussing over the new baby, and he knows he has done nothing to deserve all this. After a while his wife divines his self-disgust.

  “Did it not go according to plan, Francis?”

  “I believe she played me for a fool,” he says.

  Her face falls.

  “But Quesada? His fleet is not sighted?”

  “No. True. The trick saved England, but at what cost? And for how long?”

  He genuinely does not know. With whom did Queen Mary communicate while his attention was misdirected elsewhere? King Philip? The pope? James Hamilton? Or one of her many firebrands? Young men who’d consider it martyrdom to lay down their lives for their Catholic queen, the sort who have pictures of her drawn on a card, and then stitched into their flesh.

  He leaves his wife then and goes to his office, springing his three locks, his turbulent thoughts elsewhere.

  It is not until he opens the door and closes it behind him that he smells the whiff of burning fuse rope.

  By then it is too late.

  He stops stock-still.

  A man sits in his chair, two glowing fuses and two barrels pointing straight at Walsingham’s face. His heart nearly ruptures.

  “Dee!” he shouts.

  “Don’t move, Walsingham,” Dr. Dee tells him. “I have discovered I may not be much of a shot, but even I cannot miss from here, and if you move so much as a muscle I will take great pleasure in blowing your bloody head clean off your accursed fucking shoulders.”

  Walsingham doesn’t move.

  “Dee?” he says. “How? How did you—”

  “Survive?” Dee wonders. “Yes, it must be somewhat of a surprise to see me alive.”

  “I… I admit I had given up some hope.”

  “Hope? You had given up some hope?”

  “Yes.”

  “By the blood of Christ, Walsingham, you have nerve.”

  As he becomes used to the gloom, Walsingham looks at him more carefully.

  “Christ, Dee, you look terrible. Why are you dressed like a beggar?”

  “Shut up, Walsingham. Don’t even speak or so help me God I will put a bullet in your stupid fat brains before I get to the bottom of this. You don’t get to ask me questions, do you hear me? Not while I have these. Do you understand?”

  He waves the guns. Walsingham can see how dangerous he is, deliberately or not.

  “Understood.”

  Can he reach the alarm wire he has installed under his desk to alert the guards? Dee, as if reading his mind, shakes his head. He gestures one gun at the severed wire. A silence settles between them, as if Dee does not know where to begin. Then he does, but his voice, when it comes, is unmodulated, a croak, a squeak.

  “So did Bess know?” he asks.

  “Bess?”

  “Her Majesty. The Queen.”

  “Did she know what?”

  Dee sighs. Walsingham can see his finger tighten on the trigger.

  “About the papers,” Dee prompts. “Admiral DaSilva’s papers. Did she know they were falsified?”

  Walsingham feels the blood rushing in his ears. “How did you know?”

  Dee cannot resist it.

  “I spent a day with them, in a horrible inn with a fisherman who smelled like a seal sleeping by my feet. I went through every aspect of them, all the figures, every permutation of every encryption I know, and then through them all again in Hebrew, Latin, Greek, English, Scots, Spanish, and French. I tried Dutch and Saxon. I tried Genoese. For a while I supposed—hoped!—the admiral had discovered the language known to Adam, for nothing worked. Nothing made sense. All my calculations put the Straits of Anian where they could not possibly be, or where I knew them not to be, or where they cannot have been found by mortal man, and I was almost in despair, but then I saw, buried within, a clue. A mark. A little curlicue you’d never have spotted unless you half expected to find it, because you had begun to suspect you were looking at the work of an old friend who could never resist that sort of thing: Jerome Cardan.”

  Hearing Cardan’s name, Walsingham starts.

  “Yes,” Dee says, seeing it. “It was his mark that gave it all away: your scheme. If I hadn’t seen it, I daresay I’d’ve been shot as planned.”

  Walsingham thinks that if he gets out of this alive, he will be paying Jerome Cardan a visit, even if it means another trip to Catholic Paris to winkle the little bastard out of whichever wine shop he is spending his fee for the work.

  He says nothing though. Dee continues: “So I thought of Isobel Cochet—”

  At the mention of her name Walsingham cries out.

  “You found her? You found Isobel? How is she?”

  Dee looks at him with nothing but disgust.

  “I found her”—he spits out the words—“I found her and I lost her, and she’s dead.”

  Walsingham cannot suppress a mew of horrified shame.

  “Yes,” Dee says. “That’s right. That is on you, Walsingham. Her death. You sent her to die.”

  “No!” Walsingham shouts. He is passionate about this.

  Dee raises the guns. Walsingham subsides.

  “As God is my witness,” he says. “I did not. I did not know they would take her child! I thought it was Oliver Fellowes the cardinal had turned. I thought Oliver was a Catholic! His father was, and I thought he might be one, too. So I took a risk—one that nearly saw us both killed—to prove to him the faked DaSilva pages were genuine, and I gave him his chance to take them to the cardinal, but… but he did not. I admit, I made a mistake. A mistake. I did not know they had taken Isobel’s child. I did not know it would be her the cardinal would turn. But I did not send her to die.”

  “And have you done anything to get the girl back?” he asks. “Isobel’s daughter?”

  Walsingham is brought up short. Guilt feels like a cold wet eel winding around his innards. It carries the smell of death and decay.

  “I have been busy,” he says.

  Dee stares at him, and he—Walsingham—shares his disgust.

  “So tell me this, Walsingham, so that when you’re dead I can tell everyone how your mind worked: When you let the Cardinal of Lorraine know you had documents relating to the whereabouts of the Straits of Anian, how did you know he would try to steal them? Then having stolen them, how did you know he would take them to the Spanish?”

  Walsingham hates telling anyone anything, but he owes Dr. Dee this, he supposes, or, in fact, if he does not tell him, then Dee will put a ball in his brainpan. He also hopes the longer he talks, the less likely it is that Dee will shoot him.<
br />
  “It was a risk,” he admits. “But I knew the cardinal was in dispute with King Charles of France—the de Guises and the Valois remain mortal enemies—and that he was trying to reach out to King Philip of Spain, so I believed if knowledge of the straits fell into his hands, he would be sure to use that knowledge to buy King Philip’s favor. Had the cardinal known Quesada was already at sea, sailing to attack us, he might have sat on his hands, and let it play out, but he did not, thank the Lord, and I was certain that if Philip learned of the whereabouts of the straits, he would move heaven and earth to get this far larger prize before we did, or the French.”

  “So you let him know you had them?”

  Walsingham nods.

  “Easy enough,” he says. “Paris is—was—full of espials. I half suspected Jerome Cardan himself was in the cardinal’s pay.”

  “But then how to get the papers to him, eh?” Dee muses rhetorically. “In a way that looked as if you had lost them?”

  Walsingham looks down at the floor. One of Dee’s feet is bare.

  “I told you,” he says. “I made a mistake. I thought Oliver Fellowes would take them to him, but… but he wasn’t what I thought he was. He was loyal. And the cardinal devised some lever to get Isobel Cochet to take them. So. Rose. Her daughter. Yes.”

  The air has seeped out of the room. The twin jewels of the pistols’ fuses are dimming too. Dee reinvigorates them.

  “But,” Dee presses, “that wasn’t enough, was it? You needed to prove that the DaSilva papers were genuine, and that you wanted them back, or perhaps the cardinal, or King Philip would think they’d come by them too easily and smell a rat. So you sent me, in the certain hope that I would fail to get them. In fact, you needed me to fail, didn’t you? Which was why you sent those Dutch sailors to shoot me dead—”

  “Wait— No.”

  “Yes. So that in the unlikely event I did manage to steal them back, I would never get off that beach but would be killed with them still about my person, there to be found by the cardinal’s men.”

  “No!” Walsingham says. “That much, no. I did not do that.”

  Christ, he thinks, why didn’t I think of that? It is what I should have done.

  But then it occurs to him: “But… then, if you did manage to steal the papers, and you decrypted them, what made Quesada change course for New Spain?”

  Dee lets out a long, frustrated sigh.

  “Because at the time, Walsingham, what I thought of you was that for all your evil intent, you do not act, as far as I then understood it, for your own benefit, but for the benefit of one whom I love, and for one I thought loved me.”

  Here Dee falters and his voice cracks a moment, just as Walsingham’s had, and a silence follows.

  “So what did you do?” Walsingham asks. “With the documents?”

  “I left them on the table of that inn, just as if I’d been surprised by the cardinal’s men. I left them unencrypted, too, so the cardinal would see only what he wanted to see, and King Philip likewise. And what they wanted to see was a reason to send Quesada beating across the ocean and up into the ice fields from where, God willing, he may never return.”

  “Dee,” Walsingham begins, holding his hands out. “You have saved England, and I can only begin to—”

  Dee waves the pistols.

  “Stow it, Walsingham. Your thanks are no good to me. Get back over there. At the end of this I am still going to shoot you, you do know that, don’t you?”

  Walsingham takes his step back.

  “Look, Dee,” he starts. “It was… a bloody shabby business, I agree. But I was desperate, and by Christ, I did not do it lightly. Both Isobel Cochet and Oliver Fellowes were dear to me and their deaths will weigh heavily on me as long as I live—”

  “Not very much longer then.”

  “—But it was all we had against Quesada. It was a gamble: their lives for the lives of countless others; their lives for our country, our Queen, our religion. Surely you understand that?”

  Dee kisses his teeth. He blows on one of the fuses to keep it glowing.

  “There must have been other ways,” Dee mutters. “And to send someone to kill me—”

  “I did not do so, Dee. So help me God. I did not send anyone to kill you.”

  “Then who did? Someone did. Those Dutch copulators didn’t just start shooting for fun. They were there for a purpose.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because they shot the man whom they thought was me.”

  Walsingham is pulling his beard. He is thinking.

  “Do you know a man named Van Treslong?” he asks. “Willem van Treslong. A Dutch Sea Beggar.”

  “Who helped take Den Brill from the Spanish? I know of him. Why? Was it him? Were they his men?”

  “Who knows? Maybe. I hired him to keep an eye on Quesada’s fleet, and then to pick you up from Nez Bayard. Apart from you, and me, and Beale, of course, and the Queen, he was the only man who knew you would be there that night.”

  “You three. I see. And did he… what? Misunderstand you? When you said ‘pick up John Dee’ he heard you say ‘shoot John Dee in the head’?”

  Walsingham regains a measure of moral composure. He no longer believes Dee will shoot him. He lowers his hands.

  “I am still going to shoot you, Walsingham.”

  Walsingham raises his palms again.

  “If confusion arose, it cannot have done so in that way,” Walsingham tells Dee, “for I did not speak to him. He was already at sea, off La Rochelle, and so I sent message through the established channels. He will have destroyed the codes but you can ask him yourself.”

  “He will be somewhere in the Bay of Biscay, I dare say, looking for men to shoot, things to steal.”

  “No,” Walsingham says. “His ship was badly mauled by Quesada’s fleet, just before he came to find you. Her Majesty afforded him use of the dry dock at Limehouse to fix the rudder. He is still there.”

  Dee looks at Walsingham for a long time. His eyes are very brown and steadfast, Walsingham thinks, but they are filled with a benign, forgiving intelligence. At length, Dee lowers just one of the pistols.

  “Well then,” he says. “We’d best go and find him, hadn’t we?”

  Walsingham agrees. He would like a word with Van Treslong too.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  City of London, October 9, 1572

  A little after four of the clock, James Hamilton leads his horse through Bishopsgate. It is raining. His collar is turned up, and his brim bent down, and he is careful not to catch the eyes of the watch. He stables his horse at the Bull, with a fat keep with a forked red beard, just south of the gate, and carries his saddlebags over his shoulder and down the road toward Cheapside. He is so long unused to passing among the populace that the crowds make him testy, and he finds himself jostled by men who cannot speak his language, and who have queer colored skin, and dress in outlandish clothes that no true Englishman would ever wear upon their backs, and it is as if he—an Englishman in his own country—counts for nought. He must bite his tongue and restrain his fist and boot.

  Still though. It is what he wants. To pass unobserved, unnoticed, down Gracechurch Street to the Church of Saint Magnus the Martyr. The smells intensify as he approaches the river. He has always hated London. There is no sky, no earth, nothing but the river that is not made by man. Its rich fetid air stops up his nose and mouth.

  He stands in the agreed place and after a moment a man takes his elbow.

  “Walk with me, sir,” he says.

  This is he, the Roman priest, who will pray with him, and hear his confession, and bless him for the task that lies ahead. He is as tall as Hamilton, but cadaverous. His cap hangs around his ears and his teeth are jumbled like tombstones.

  They walk eastward, away from the bridge, along Billingsgate, past Wool Wharf, through a maze of piled wool sarplers waiting to be weighed on the tron, with the river glimpsed between the houses on their right.

  But Hamil
ton only has eyes for the edifice that looms ahead: the Tower.

  He is suddenly terrified. This is where his journey will end. In a welter of blood, viscera, pain. The faces of the men he passes seem to loom up at him, as if from under water, each uglier than the next, contorted, scarred, fissured by age and debauchery. They know. They know. They are waiting. He is in a circle of hell.

  They walk toward it.

  They are about to cross a road running down to the river when the priest sees something to his left. He flinches and turns. He snatches at Hamilton’s elbow. His fingers are pincers Hamilton cannot shake off.

  “He comes,” he says, hissing the words. “Master Walsingham.”

  The priest jerks him into the shadows on the corner of Seething Lane and Tower Street.

  “Keep walking,” he tells him.

  They do, retracing their steps toward the bridge.

  “Don’t let him see your face. Once he has seen it he will never forget it.”

  Yet Hamilton cannot help it. He turns and looks and there he is again: Master Francis Walsingham, marching swiftly down the street toward the river with a crowd of others and some armed guards.

  Hamilton wonders what it means, that their paths should so nearly cross so often? First in Paris, and then twice in this week: on the London Road, and now here in Seething Lane. It is a sign, he thinks, sent from above. If God did not wish his mission to succeed, he would have engineered those meetings to end very differently.

  Now Hamilton feels himself swell with ecclesiastic fervor.

  God wills it. Deus Vult.

  When they return to the street, they pause again. Stepping out into its various ruts and potholes feels a terrible risk, but they do, and cross it unmolested. Then they feel safer, in the warren of darkened alleys north of the Tower, an area of leatherworkers, where the upper stories are so close a man might lean from his own window to shake the hand of his neighbor opposite. Within, it smells of rats and of rotting leather. They climb a ladder in the dark, and Hamilton must feel his way. His heart pounds, his breathing uneven. It is very close and noisome. Like breathing ancient cloth.