The Eyes of the Queen

by Oliver Clements

  Above them, she believes the star in Cassiopeia is brighter than ever.

  * * *

  As Francis Walsingham and Dr. John Dee make their way back up Seething Lane there comes the hue and cry.

  “What is it?”

  “A murder!” a bedel tells them. “Some fucker’s been slit from bollocks to chops.”

  It is not a matter for them, but for the various watchmen, bailiffs, and bedels such as this one, who are gathered on corners threatening passersby with their clubs and their questions, looking for someone to blame.

  “He’ll be fucking covered in blood,” the bedel tells them once Walsingham has identified himself. “He’s made a right mess in there. Gralloched the fucker he has, begging your pardon, sirs, like a butcher.”

  They are looking for a tall man with a long parcel, the bedel tells them, “like a longbow, but heavier.” Neither Walsingham nor Dee have noticed a man fitting that description, so they leave him to it.

  As they walk Dee feels he may faint.

  “By Christ, Walsingham, I have not eaten for three days.”

  They stop at the Angel. Once seated, Walsingham orders them ale and a greasy pigeon pie to share and they find a corner with only one dog. Dee has stolen both Van Treslong’s letters and he produces them now. He looks down at them with head-hung, sorrowful incredulity. Walsingham thinks he says, “Bess, how could you?,” but he hopes not.

  After a moment Dee looks up. He has stumbled on something.

  “Look at the edges,” he says, passing Walsingham the smaller of the two, the second one instructing Van Treslong to kill Dee. When Walsingham looks at it, he sees what Dee means: the cuts of the four edges of the document do not match; two are old, blurred by time and touch, two are new, still pale.

  “It is a corner,” Walsingham says. “Cut from a larger letter.”

  Which explains the off-set seal. But so what? Saving paper is only prudent, and the Queen is nothing if not that. But then, the more he looks at it, the more he sees the disconnect between this matter of saving paper on one hand, and an unconditional offer of seventy ryals on the other, in advance—and with no mechanism for refund should Van Treslong fail to kill Dr. Dee. He would expect the first of Her Majesty, but the second is entirely out of character.

  “Put them together,” Walsingham tells Dee. “Side by side.”

  They study the handwriting. There is one less ornate underlining of the word Elizabeth in the second one, but that might easily be explained by the limitations of space. And it is the same with the date. Written on this day the first day of September, in this the year of our Lord, 1572. The second is dated the day after.

  “Both are in the same hand,” he says.

  Walsingham nods.

  “Where was she when she wrote these letters?” Dee asks.

  “What difference does it make?”

  “Someone must have slandered me,” Dee says.

  That makes sense, Walsingham supposes. He has heard many accusations leveled against Dee—he has been the author of some himself—but never that Dee is an agent of Rome, sent to kill the Queen. That is a new one.

  “It was whoever the Queen listened to between writing that first letter, and the second letter; they must have told her I was a… a papist and so on.”

  Again, Walsingham agrees.

  “Then who was it? Where was she? Surely you keep her diary, Walsingham?”

  Walsingham nods. Of course there’s a diary of the Queen’s movements. It’ll be there in black-and-white, secretary hand.

  “Well, where is it?”

  “Whitehall,” Walsingham tells him. “Or wherever she is.”

  “Let’s go there now then.”

  He shakes his head.

  “Dee,” he says, “I have been on the road for two weeks. I hardly had chance to say hello to my wife before you pointed your guns at me. Can I just have one night’s sleep in my own bed?”

  “Walsingham! This is important!”

  “I know, Dee. Believe me, I know. But the diary will still be there in the morning. It is safe under lock and key, and there are any number of copies that can be found. I do not happen to have one to hand, that is all.”

  “Back at your house?”

  “No, Dee. You go back to Mortlake. I will send for you tomorrow when I have the diary.”

  Dee has no choice. He sighs loudly again.

  They can hear running feet and much shouting in the street outside.

  “Have they caught him?” Walsingham wonders.

  “Doesn’t sound like it,” Dee says. “Listen, shall we get something stronger?”

  A bottle of French brandy, the best in the inn, appears before them.

  “So I suppose you have to wonder if she still wants you dead?” Walsingham asks.

  Dee drinks very deeply and shudders. “Can we talk about something else?”

  Walsingham tells him about Mary Queen of Scots, and how she saw through the second part of Walsingham’s plan to lure her into disclosing her means of communication, and perhaps even the whereabouts of Hamilton. He tells him how she turned it to her own advantage. Dee laughs the bitter laugh of a man who hardly cares anymore. He drinks more brandy, listening to Walsingham’s story of his wild-goose chase up to Scotland, and about the silver shaft. Dee spits brandy onto the table and laughs as if brought back to life.

  “But who was she communicating with?” Walsingham wonders to himself. “And what was she saying?”

  “You think she was tipped over into something… what? Rash? When she learned Quesada wasn’t coming?”

  “Of course, but what?”

  Dee shrugs. They both know what.

  “That’s it? A shrug? Christ, Dee, we are talking about someone trying to kill the Queen!”

  “Well, she has just tried to have me killed, Walsingham, so I hope you will pardon me when I tell you I am not too bothered by what happens to her now.”

  Walsingham is shocked, though he does not altogether blame Dee for thinking that, at the moment. He hopes it will pass though.

  “What will you do?” he asks.

  “I will finish this bottle of brandy—hup!—and then I will go home, as you suggest, to my mother, my books, my instruments. You will have noticed the new star in Cassiopeia. I should like to have a moment to myself to study that.”

  Dee downs the rest of the brandy and bangs his cup on the table.

  “Come on then,” he says.

  But outside they are met with a great shout.

  “There you are!”

  It is a guard made up of the Queen’s troop, sent by Robert Beale to find Master Walsingham and bring him home.

  By now Dee is very drunk, Walsingham less so. Dee reels off into the night, about his own business, and Walsingham bids him a good night.

  At home Beale takes him to see Margaret Formby, still tear-heavy in Mistress Walsingham’s arms. His arrival starts her sobbing again, and he does his best to be soft-footed and patient, but he needs to know what he is up against, and he needs to know now.

  “With whom was Queen Mary communicating?”

  The girl is reluctant to spit it out, and he sees he frightens her. What must she have heard about him? That he breathes fire? Has a forked tongue? His wife gives him a stern look.

  He sees her lips forming the start of words that do not come, and he is not sure what he expects.

  Eventually, she speaks.

  * * *

  The Queen’s bargemaster orders his men on the starboard side to lift their oars, and the barge buffs against the lamp-lit dock with a gentle bump that flutters cloth, but sends no one staggering.

  Elizabeth gives thanks to God and pays the bargemaster a small coin to share among his men (he won’t) (and nor does she expect him to) and she walks with her ladies up the gangplank and across the gravel path where the dew is already falling.

  Sir Thomas Smith is there to meet her with a deep bow, pleased to have her to himself. He will want money, she thinks tiredly.


  The star in Cassiopeia is now very bright.

  “Whatever can it mean?” she asks.

  Smith has no idea. He thinks only of himself and of his scheme in Ireland.

  How she misses John Dee.

  * * *

  James Hamilton props his sackcloth-wrapped gun against a wall and washes the blood from his hands and face in the horse trough behind Limehouse wharves. He thrusts his arms deep into the cold water, then splashes his doublet, breeches, and boots clean of blood. He smells it, feels it stiff in the wool and in his linens, between his toes in his right boot. For such a desiccated stick of a man, Father Simon gave up much blood, and Hamilton had had to clamp his mouth ghastly shut for fear his girlish screams would summon the neighborhood.

  When he is done, he collects the gun, and moves swiftly into the shadows before the night watch guards come stamping around the corner.

  * * *

  While the boatman pulls hard against the running river, Dr. John Dee sits athwart the skiff and allows himself to slip into lucid dreams of Rose Cochet, Isobel’s girl. He sees her playing a game in which she wears a blindfold, with other children running around her, and she must touch them all to win the game. Everyone laughs, including Rose, and her little teeth are like seed pearls. She has dimpled cheeks and pretty clothes. She is happy, and in another time, the sight would be one to bring a tear of joy to any man’s eye.

  But the image starts Dee awake, for it is false. It cannot be. He knows it cannot be: on his way back from France, the boat on which he had stowed away—a single-masted trader in all-sorts from the port of Damme—had docked in Sandwich, and Dee had walked to the house of Sir John Pinkney, Isobel Cochet’s father. He found the old man hollowed out with grief at his missing granddaughter, like an oak tree in a field struck by lightning. News of his daughter’s death would have killed him. So Dee lied and played the part of a traveling minstrel, down on his luck, and the old man gave him a penny, but he was too sad to hear him play.

  * * *

  “Smith? Sir Thomas Smith?”

  “It is what she says.”

  Beale and Walsingham are back on Seething Lane, striding ahead of the nightwatchman with his swinging lantern, followed by five of the Queen’s yeomen. The hue and cry has been successful, and some Italian tailor with a cast in his eye has proved to be what was needed and is now unlikely to live to see sunset next. Walsingham cannot concern himself with that sort of injustice. He cannot rid himself of the heat that thrums through his body since hearing Margaret Formby confess.

  Smith?

  Walsingham thinks of the efforts he has gone to, the risks he has taken, the lives he has sacrificed, only to find out that it is Smith, Sir Thomas Smith, Privy councillor and Queen Elizabeth’s close confidant, who provides the conduit between Queen Mary and the outside world! Smith who is feeding her all she needs to know, who takes her messages to England’s enemies abroad.

  “What messages did they send to each other?” Beale asks.

  The girl did not have all the details, of course.

  “Queen Mary sent her away whenever she was at her secrets, so she never saw what was written, and Margaret only heard the odd word when Mary spoke to her priest, or sometimes Mary Seton.”

  “What in particular?”

  “She heard Queen Mary tell Mistress Seton that Smith had begged her to remember his services when she came to be Queen of England. Mistress Seton asked her what she thought he had in mind, and Mary told her that Smith was in need of money to save Ireland.”

  To save Ireland. My God. Smith’s colony in Ireland. A constant thorn in everyone’s side, not just the Ulstermen’s. How much money can he have sunk in it to be so desperate as to conspire with a foreign power against his own Queen!

  “Fucking Smith,” Beale mutters.

  He does not usually use farmyard language in front of Walsingham, but there is sometimes a time and a place for this sort of thing.

  “Yes,” Walsingham agrees, “but that’s not the worst of it. The girl overheard Queen Mary laughing—a rare enough event apparently—saying that she’ll not have need of Smith much longer, and that soon after Michaelmas she will be able to talk to her uncle directly.”

  “Her uncle? Which one? Cardinal de Guise?”

  “I suppose.”

  “And she used the word ‘directly’?” Beale asks.

  “Well, she said, ‘to his face, as befits a Christian prince,’ ” Walsingham tells Beale. It is this detail that confirms—to Walsingham’s mind—that Smith is Mary’s conduit to the outside world in general, and to de Guise in particular. But it takes a moment before Beale sees that is not the most important thing about what was said.

  “ ‘Soon after Michaelmas’?” he asks. “Michaelmas was two weeks ago.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Did she believe Quesada would be the one to set her free?”

  “That is the thing,” Walsingham says. “Mary said this after she had learned we’d diverted Quesada’s fleet.”

  Beale looks away.

  “My God,” he says. “You mean, whatever she set in motion, it is still in motion?”

  It is.

  * * *

  Tears cling like diamonds on Queen Elizabeth’s eyelashes as she listens to the Children of the Chapel Royal bring Master Tallis’s exquisitely sorrowful “Lamentations of Jeremiah” to its haunting, ethereal conclusion. Ordinarily, such beauty is a great consolation, but today it leaves her aflutter. It is more than this new star in Cassiopeia, she thinks. She feels on the verge of some great change, one that has been ushered in by the death of Dr. Dee, whom she misses with greater intensity with the passing of each day.

  It is not supposed to be that way.

  “Walk with us, Sir Thomas,” she tells her Privy councillor, “and tell us such things that will reassure us of God’s love, for this evening we feel atremble at the world, as if we were on the threshold of some new and awful design.”

  Sir Thomas Smith holds his arm out for Her Majesty to take should she wish it, but he is out of words, and so they pass out of the chapel and along the corridor in candlelit silence.

  * * *

  It is gone midnight when Dee walks with sober purpose down through the apple trees toward the river. He carries the largest of his cross-staffs and is accompanied by Thomas Digges, a boy of fourteen winters the son of his late neighbor, Leonard Digges, who is passed out of this world. The boy carries a bull’s-eye lamp and has an acute scientific mind, being much interested in mirrors and in glass lenses, with which, when placed in certain ways, he can make the sun, moon, and stars descend to here below.

  “I am pleased you are back, Doctor,” the boy tells him. “I have been trying to measure it myself but lack your expertise.”

  He indicates a ruler as tall as a man that he has placed in an apple tree.

  “I am sure you lack only a good-size cross-staff,” Dee says with a laugh.

  The night is cold and clear, but a mist has risen from the river. Dee has been looking forward to this moment since he first saw the star, in Picardy, what seems like months ago now.

  “What do you think it can mean?” the boy asks.

  “We must first discover if it is fixed,” Dee tells him, “or if it moves in relation to the other stars about it. If that is the case, then it is a comet, with a tail so small we cannot see it, and… well. Who knows? They portend many things.”

  “I heard a woman in Putney gave birth to a child with the feet of a goose,” the boy tells him.

  “Did she now?”

  They set up the cross-staff and spend the next hour in pleasurable contemplation of what they come to believe is a star. Thomas reminds Dee there are only two well-known appearances of stars: one that caused much commotion among the Jews of Hipparchus’s day and the star of Bethlehem.

  “It is a sign of great change,” Dee supposes. “Remember the words of Tiburtina: ‘the firmament of Heaven shall be dissolved, and the planets be opposed on contrary courses; th
e spheres shall justle one another, and the fixed stars move faster than the planets.’ ”

  They are both silent for a good long while. At length the eastern sky brightens, and the stars dim, and Dee and the boy return, dew soaked and shivering now, to their separate houses to sleep, and to dream.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  London, October 11, 1572

  It is not yet dawn, and still quiet in Limehouse, when he kills the widow. Her lips tremble and turn blue, and she soils herself. When it is done, he rolls her body into a corner. Her hovel sits on stilts above the mud of the river, a few stinking yards downriver from where the river Lea meets the Thames. It smells of rot and fish guts, and there is a privy hole in the floor that sticks out over the river when it is at high tide. He opens up another hole the size of his fist in the sodden daub of the wall that gives out onto the river. It is at its narrowest here, and through the hole he can see all the way across it to Rotherhithe, on the southern bank, perhaps a hundred yards away. It is perfect, just as he knew it would be.

  He jams the door shut and settles down to wait.

  * * *

  Francis Walsingham has not slept all night, and now, as gray dawn breaks, he walks into the Queen’s newly planted garden in Greenwich, among a lattice of hedges as high as his shins, watching the skeins of mist drift across the placid surface of the Thames.

  He had not expected Sir Thomas Smith to be with the Queen at Greenwich, and the night before, when he and Beale had debouched from his barge to find it so, his heart had sunk. Without the explicit support of Lord Burghley and the Earl of Leicester, he cannot hope to bring any sort of accusation against Smith, but without doing so—without revealing that he knows Smith to be a traitor—he cannot admit the origins of his information about the threat to the Queen’s life.

  He had asked that she be moved to the Tower that very night.

  “It is the safest stronghold we have,” he’d told Smith.