The Eyes of the Queen

by Oliver Clements

  “How dare you come here, Walsingham,” Smith had shouted, “upsetting Her Majesty with your absurd scare stories.”

  “Please let me see the Queen, Sir Thomas,” he’d asked.

  “No, Walsingham, I will not, for I do not trust you.”

  There was nothing Walsingham could do save keep close and remain vigilant. He and Beale had passed the night in the guardroom, doing what could be done: sending word to Burghley and to Leicester, summoning them to come urgently with as many troops of their own as was possible.

  “Before then we have to move her to the Tower,” he tells Beale.

  Beale nods. It is the thing they have most feared about the Queen passing time in Greenwich: a few ships filled with Spanish troops landing on the river’s bank, and bringing bloody murder to the palace.

  “You saw how easily Van Treslong made his way upriver,” Walsingham says. “What if four hundred well-trained troops mobilized in Greenwich at dawn tomorrow? What would we do? Shout for the yeomen of the guard? There are a hundred of them, and the only fighting they are trained for is for their ale, and their pensions. The Queen’s household—all her gallant gentlemen, with all their gallant talk—would take flight at the first whiff of powder and be in Blackheath before the Spanish stepped ashore.”

  It was an exaggeration, but not by much.

  Beale has a worse fear though. Of a single assassin, a man with one of the new guns from the Italian city of Milan that can shoot accurately over a hundred paces. He supposes if he were the pope, and he wanted the Queen dead, then that is what he would do: send a battalion of such men to come over here and lie in wait. Why haven’t other princes done so? He puts it down to the fact they believe one another anointed by God, and to plot to kill one is a plot to kill them all. It is why Queen Elizabeth will not have Queen Mary put to death. Such things are contagious.

  He had opened his mouth to say something to Master Walsingham, but he had refrained. It is dangerous to be overheard even countenancing the death of the Queen.

  So they had returned to their letter writing.

  At dawn Walsingham rises and goes outside, heedless of the night miasma that rises from the river and from the meager fields and broad marshes beyond. He ordered the Queen’s barge to be made ready earlier and now she is tied up against the jetty, and the bargemaster’s boys are busy about polishing the glass of her windows. A handful of Her Majesty’s yeomen prowl the foreshore in the dawn, at least, but they are more familiar with bullying beggars and river gypsies.

  A bell rings.

  The mist slowly lifts. Eight geese land on the water. From the river’s north bank a merchant’s ship is foresail up, just getting under way. Walsingham wonders where she is bound. Antwerp? Le Havre? Cádiz? He thinks of Dr. John Dee again, poor Dr. John Dee, and he wonders why the Queen would ever want him dead in the first place.

  One day he will have to ask her.

  When she is awake.

  In the meantime, there is still Sir Thomas Smith.

  * * *

  In Mortlake, John Dee wakes with the word Bess on his lips. He has dreamt of a dirty river snaking by under a dipping gray mist; of a dead woman with no teeth lying in a filth of fine fish bones and human mud; of a rotting hovel with its footings in the water; and of the flash of black powder.

  He walks down to the orchard to relieve himself in the river.

  Thomas Digges is there, likewise engaged.

  When they are finished and dressed again, Digges shows him his perspective glass.

  “What can you see through it?” Dee asks.

  “Nothing much.”

  It is a fat tube of smooth bark with a polished lens at one end. Dee holds it up and looks through it. It is not that he can see nothing much, only that there is nothing much to be seen. A stretch of riverbank, a few houses to the north. A boat under a murky green sail, a boy in the bow, approaching the dock. It is all within touching distance.

  He lowers the perspective glass, and suddenly he is filled with a terrible, fateful certainty.

  “Come with me, Thomas, now.”

  “Why? Where?”

  “To see Master Walsingham,” Dee tells him. “The world depends on it.”

  * * *

  The black powder cannot be even slightly damp, or it will clump and explode with unpredictable force, even destroying the barrel, and likely to be more dangerous to the marksman than his target. So Hamilton lights a fire of damp wattle on the stone and tips a fat pinch of the powder into as clean an oyster shell as can be found, and he places that as close to the meager flames as he dares. Smoke fills the hovel, sifting out through the many gaps in the walls and the ceiling.

  He takes the gun out of the oiled linen. It is a thing of great elegance and beauty, made all the more so in these surroundings. He places it on its stand, with its barrel through the hole in the wall. He has a perfect view of the river, here at its narrowest point, and he can with no difficulty imagine the Queen’s barge coming upriver toward him, two perfect banks of oars: dipping, pulling, dipping, pulling. Then the boat will turn through the course of the river, exposing one long length to this bank for a stretch of perhaps one hundred yards.

  That is where he will shoot her.

  * * *

  “What do you want?”

  It is the porter on Francis Walsingham’s gate, looking Dr. Dee up and down, trying to remember where he has seen him before. But Dee is properly dressed this time, washed, even, and with what looks like a servant, and no eye patch.

  Dee tells him who he is and what his business is.

  “Well, you’re out of luck, Doctor, for he is gone to Greenwich with Master Beale.”

  Damn.

  As he is walking away, Dee is hailed by a rough voice.

  “Why, Dr. Dee! Fancy seeing you around these parts. Thought you’d still be in the tun?”

  It is, of all people, Chidiock Tunstall, the keeper of the Bull on Bishopsgate, leading a very fine horse.

  Dee shakes his hand and apologizes for leaving him with the debt collectors breaking up his inn. It feels a very long time ago now.

  “Water under the bridge, Master Dee,” Chidiock tells him. “And I made them pay handsome like, so no harm done. Did I just see you knocking up Master Walsingham?”

  “I was, though I am told he is in Greenwich.”

  “Christ on his cross,” Chidiock swears. “I am in search of him, too.”

  “Well, we are on our way there, if we can help?”

  “Mebbe you can,” Chidiock says. “A gent stabled this horse two, three days ago, but only paid for the day. My lad went through the saddlebags to see if there were anything that’d cover what’s owed.”

  Dee is thinking: I have no time for this. But Chidiock is untying the bag and delving within.

  “And the lad found this, just a letter like, I thought, only when I got an old bloke what used to be a friar to cast it over it and—”

  Dee claps a hand on his arm.

  “By Christ, Chidiock! Put it away.”

  It is a copy of the papal bull Regnans in Excelsis. Mere possession of it will lead a man to his death on a pyre.

  “There was more; look.” He holds out a very small crucifix designed to be secreted within some other thing, but also: small clumps of black powder and there, sitting in the folds of the innkeeper’s calloused palm, is a ball of lead.

  Christ.

  “Walsingham likes to pay us to keep a bit of an eye out for this kind of thing, see?” Chidiock is saying. “And I reckon this looks quite interesting.”

  There is a gleam of greed in his eye.

  “Come with us, Chidiock,” Dee tells him.

  “What about the horse?”

  “Forget the bloody horse.”

  “I can’t just leave it, and besides, I ain’t got time for going to no Greenwich. I’ll just take it back and wait for him another day.”

  In the end he decides he trusts Dee to give Walsingham a full and fair account of the matter, and he pa
sses him over the bag, complete with the papal bull, black powder, and ball. The leather is good, and the bags are well made, clearly expensive, and within are linens far finer than those worn by Dee or the boy Thomas. On the inside of the flap is a small imprint of a sun in splendor. A heraldic device used by—well, any number of families.

  But a well-known family, nonetheless, and alongside the obvious quality of the horse, this means whoever left it there did not do so because they could not afford to return and collect it. They meant to do so, or, rather, they did not care that they had done so. Which means, what? That they did not expect to have use for the horse in future?

  Which leaves what?

  Someone, with a gun, on an errand for the pope from which they do not expect to return alive.

  Dear God.

  “Come, Thomas,” Dee says. “To Greenwich.”

  * * *

  Sir Thomas Smith controls access to the Queen, and so despite the urgency, Francis Walsingham must stand with all other suitors in the great hall of Greenwich Palace and watch Sir Thomas Smith carefully serving Queen Elizabeth her breakfast: a loaf of the finest white bread; three baked herring; a dish of sprats, as well as a cup of beer and another of wine, each poured from a silver ewer. Smith performs his task at an aching, tortuous pace, no less grave than he had been at her coronation, save that every now and then he will glance up at Walsingham and catch his gaze.

  He seems to think what he does is amusing.

  Walsingham does not react. He counts almost every pace—there and back again—between here and Lord Burghley’s house on the Strand; every pace—there and back again—between here and the Midlands, where it is believed the Earl of Leicester is overseeing some improvements to his castle of Kenilworth.

  He has given up hope of the latter coming in time, but surely the former will rouse himself from his sickbed?

  Finally, the meal is ended and the Queen stands to have her hands washed in warm rose water, then dried on snow-white linen. When this is done, her whole household—ten gentlemen of various ranks, none of whom are of the slightest interest to Walsingham, and perhaps fifteen women-in-waiting, likewise of no import—proceed very slowly toward the great mirrored library.

  But even then Walsingham must wait his turn to address Her Majesty, and still he has no idea how to couch it without directly accusing Sir Thomas Smith—who will be standing at her side—of treason. So he waits, lingering by that same window through which he saw Van Treslong’s Swan what seems like months ago now.

  Below him, in that garden, he has at least managed to prod Her Majesty’s yeomen into some action, and they are gathered there in what their captain—a boy of about twenty whose cheeks flush when he speaks—calls “warlike array.” Walsingham cranes his neck to look eastward, downriver, whence he fears the Spanish will come, when they come. Then he peers westward, upriver, whence he hopes Burghley will come, if he comes.

  He can hear murmurings and the occasional forced laugh from the throne to his right as the business of the court proceeds.

  “Come on, come on.”

  Eventually his hopes are answered before his fears are confirmed.

  Burghley’s barge makes its way through the river traffic coming down from the city. Five oars on each side, but its flags are not raised. Odd, he thinks. He slips away from his place by the window. He needs to intercept the Lord High Treasurer before he speaks to the Queen or most especially Smith, so he is out into the garden before Burghley’s bargemaster gives the order to up oars and a boy in the barge’s bow tosses a rope ashore. Walsingham notices a slight slackness among the bargemen, though, and the reason soon becomes clear: their passenger is not Lord Burghley, but another man, and a boy.

  “Dee, what in God’s name are you doing here?”

  “Couldn’t find a regular ferryman,” Dee tells him, “but listen, Walsingham, I have had a dream.”

  “Oh Christ, Dee! I don’t have time for this.”

  But then he thinks: The Queen will wish to see Dee. Sir Thomas Smith will not be able to prevent that.

  “Come on,” he says, without asking what Dee’s dream might be.

  * * *

  The Queen remains in her great mirrored library, with Sir Thomas Smith, and a small audience of the loose affiliation of lords and ladies from her court. She wears russet silks today, in keeping with the slight autumnal chill.

  “Where is Master Walsingham?” she asks. “He was much agitated earlier.”

  Smith laughs dismissively. “There is always something to agitate Master Walsingham.”

  “But he is gone?”

  “He will be back, Your Majesty, I have no doubt.”

  She thinks Smith would like to keep her in aspic. But he is sweating, she notes, and forever dithering on the cusp of asking some favor he fears she will only decline. His colony in Ireland—he tries to hide the reports that come in, but the others in her council talk of the disasters quite freely. She wonders how much money he has lost, and what personal costs he bears too.

  An usher in plum velvets comes and stands before both, looking ruffled, and seems, for that moment, unable to find his words. It is Sir John Ivesy.

  “Sir John?” she prompts.

  “Dr. Dee, Your Majesty, he is arrived this minute, in Lord Burghley’s barge, and seeks—”

  Elizabeth cannot believe it. She gets to her feet.

  “Dr. Dee? Our Dr. Dee? Dr. John Dee?”

  “No!” Smith shouts.

  The Queen finally glares at him and Sir John looks from one to the other in mute confusion.

  “Send for him,” the Queen says.

  When the man has gone, she turns to Sir Thomas.

  “You forget yourself,” she says.

  He can only bow his head.

  She lacks the heart to scold him further, for she is too taken up with the idea that Dee lives. She crosses to the window. Sure enough: Lord Burghley’s barge is moored against the bank, and her yeoman, too, are astir about something.

  She turns as she hears the footsteps and the grounding of her guardsmen’s halberds. The doors open, and in comes first Francis Walsingham, and then her own, entirely beloved, John Dee.

  She almost runs to him, but she sees his face. His expression is cold and haggard, entirely and actively repelling any friendship between them. She cannot even stifle a gasp. She returns, stunned, to sit in her throne under her cloth of state. She feels as if staring down from a height. The floor moves of its own accord, and she is fraught at her lack of control, at her inability to predict what will happen next.

  Dee bows without looking at her.

  “Dr. Dee,” she says.

  “Your Majesty.”

  “We believed you dead,” she says. “We heard rumors.”

  “Premature, I am afraid, your Majesty.”

  Walsingham is hopping up and down, anxious to unburden himself. She turns to him.

  “But Master van Treslong—” she starts. “He told us. He told us you were dead?”

  “Your Majesty,” Walsingham interjects, “we can discuss the whys and wherefores at some later date.”

  “Hold your tongue, Walsingham!” Smith barks.

  “What is amiss, Master Walsingham?” the Queen overrules.

  “Your Majesty, I believe your life is in immediate and grave danger if you remain here in Greenwich. You should prepare to move to the safety of the Tower.”

  “What nonsense is this, Walsingham?” Smith demands.

  “Sir Thomas, please, silence, we pray.”

  She stands and comes down the steps. She wishes to stand close and look Dee in the eye.

  “John,” she says.

  “Your Majesty,” he replies.

  His voice is cold, and his face is closed, like a gripped fist.

  Walsingham speaks, low and urgent. “Please, Your Majesty, we can discuss this matter later. I have reliable information that Spanish troops will land—in the garden, not a hundred paces from here—today. We need to move your person to the s
afety of the Tower.”

  It is an exaggeration, perhaps, a lie, but intended for good effect. It snaps the Queen from her intense concentration on Dee and brings her up short.

  “How do you know this?” she asks.

  “Again, Your Majesty, I will tell you all, but we need to move you, and move you now.”

  “No,” Dee cuts across, addressing Walsingham. “That is not right. That is what they want you to do. They want you to take to the river, Your Majesty. They will shoot you in your barge.”

  Smith scoffs.

  “With a gun? Impossible.”

  Dee holds up the ball.

  “Look at this,” he says.

  The Queen takes it.

  “It is very beautiful,” she says, for it is: almost black, silken smooth, and perfectly round. It has a lovely, heavy feel in her palm, but it feels utterly deadly, and it makes her shudder.

  Dee summons Thomas Digges from the shadows.

  “What is it now, Dee?” Smith asks.

  “Show Her Majesty your lens, please, Thomas.”

  Thomas takes the small lens from the back of his perspective glass and passes it to the Queen. She holds it as one might a coin.

  “Hold it like so,” Dee instructs, “and look through it, at the ball.”

  She does so, and then takes a second look.

  “What does it say?” she asks.

  Engraved in the ball, in letters so minute they are not visible to the naked eye, are the words “The punishment of your iniquity is completed, daughter of Zion.”

  “From the book of Lamentations,” the Queen murmurs.

  “What sorcery is this?” Smith demands.

  “It was found in the saddlebag of a man come to town, two days ago, along with some black powder, and this.”

  Dee shows them the copy of the papal bull.

  The Queen blanches.

  “Burn that thing,” she mutters, looking away.

  “I believe there is an assassin sent to kill you, Your Majesty,” he says. “Someone gifted with a gun.”

  She places her hand on her throat. This is utterly chilling. Kings and Queens have always been prey to assassins’ blades, of course, and so have always taken care to surround themselves with loyal bodyguards. The invention, and improvement in accuracy, of the gun brings with it a terrible new threat, which no one yet knows how to counter, including Francis Walsingham.