The Eyes of the Queen

by Oliver Clements

  “Why? Why imitate her hand?”

  Gethyn shrugs again.

  “I wanted to please her,” he says. “And to show her I could. And I had a template.”

  He indicates the grant with the section cut from its bottom corner.

  “So you showed it to her, and she signed it? Is it her signature on the first letter?”

  “Yes. And her seal. She impressed that sitting there.”

  He points at a bench.

  “Smith watched?”

  “Oh yes,” Gethyn agrees.

  “And then what?”

  “Master Walsingham,” Gethyn starts, “before I go on, I want you to know everything that happened, everything I did, and everything I did not do. Because I am not a brave man. You might put me in a room with the rack or the brake, and I would tell you everything you need to know, but I also want you to know that I will say nothing of this at any trial.”

  “Trial? Trial? What makes you think there will be a trial?”

  Only now does Gethyn begin to look terrified.

  “Please, Master Gethyn,” Dee interrupts. “Go on. About the second letter.”

  There is a moment while Gethyn gathers himself.

  “The second letter,” he says. “The second letter. Yes. I did not understand everything that was afoot, of course, but I knew that the Queen had just come from seeing you, Doctor, in the Tower. She told Sir Thomas, while she was impressing her seal, that the fate of the nation now depended on you. Sir Thomas disagreed. He is not of first-rate intelligence, Sir Thomas, I hope you will forgive me for saying so?”

  Walsingham agrees, as does Dee. Beale, too, murmurs that he has always thought it so.

  “So that made you write the second letter? Just to get rid of Dee as an agent of Her Majesty?”

  For the first time Gethyn looks uncertain. Beale takes out some paper and has an ingenious inkpot. He will take notes.

  “I knew that the doctor was sent to retrieve some documents that had fallen into the hands of the Cardinal of Lorraine.”

  This is not an answer, really, Dee thinks, but a lure. And Walsingham seizes upon it like a hawk.

  “Was it Smith who told you that?” Walsingham asks.

  Gethyn shakes his head slowly.

  “Then—?” Walsingham presses.

  “A man in Rheims,” Gethyn says. “One in the cardinal’s pay.”

  There is a thick silence.

  “So you are in contact with the Cardinal of Lorraine?”

  There is a pause before Gethyn nods very slowly.

  That is all they need, Dee thinks. He dreads to think what will now happen to Gethyn.

  “Go on,” Walsingham instructs.

  “An Englishman,” Gethyn says.

  “Named?”

  “Edmund Campion.”

  Beale shrugs slightly, scrubs over his previous note, and writes the name down. None of them have ever heard the name before.

  “But still why?” Dee asks. “Why did you want me killed?”

  This is the real question.

  Gethyn opens and closes his mouth. Then he starts coughing again, long and hard, into his kerchief. It racks his body. His face reddens, veins spring up, and his eyes stream. It is like watching someone tear their own self apart. When it is over, he hides the kerchief.

  Dee looks at him very closely. Gethyn’s eyes are fugitives now and will not be caught. There is something amiss here. As if Gethyn did not know why he wanted Dee killed. Did he want Dee killed? The longer Dee looks at him, the more certain he is that Gethyn didn’t want him killed, and so then, why?

  He thinks back to those days after Van Treslong’s men had shot the cardinal’s man on Nez Bayard: how he had struggled through Normandy and Picardy, sleeping in hedgerows, living off sweet cider and green apples; how he had found first Boulogne then Calais being watched, so too Dunkirk, and he had to make his way through countryside to the north that was crawling with Spanish and French troops, until he finally found passage in that cog from Damme. Every moment of every day had been given over to rage and confusion, and guilt, too, which threatened to prostrate him, for leading Isobel Cochet to her death. He can still taste the bitter rancor that had seeped through him, staining him from within.

  That it turns out to be the fault of this man is—impossible to believe.

  After a moment, Gethyn recovers enough to speak.

  “When I heard what you had found, the location of the mouth of the Straits of Anian, I thought, I believed, that it would be a sin against God were a Protestant nation to gain access to the riches of Cathay.”

  He speaks as if he has rehearsed this line. He is changing the subject, Dee thinks. He does not wish to talk about why he wanted me killed, because he has no very good reason, because he did not do it! Dee is certain, but Walsingham has caught hold of the lure. He has swallowed it whole.

  “So you did what?” Walsingham asks.

  “I devised the way to get Isobel Cochet to retrieve the documents that you had stolen from Admiral DaSilva.”

  That is a nice way of putting it, Dee thinks, and he is about to intervene with a question of his own, when he hears, distantly, a woman’s voice summoning someone whose name Dee does not catch. But the sound takes Dee elsewhere, to his dream, and he walks across the Turkey carpet to where the window lets in a long stripe of light. Outside on the grass, in a garden not unlike Her Majesty’s in Greenwich—save this one has a rather fine dovecote, newfangled, on a wooden post—under the watchful eye of two nurses and a man leaning on a nocked longbow, is gathered a number of children. They are having what looks to be a party. A game is in progress. Blind man’s buff? Is that its name? One child in a blindfold, the rest racing around.

  Gethyn joins him, and they stand shoulder to shoulder, their backs to Walsingham and Beale. It is a very pleasant scene.

  “Are they all Smith’s?” Dee asks.

  “None of them,” Gethyn says. “Smith had a boy, George. Killed in Ulster this last year.”

  “Yours?”

  “Mostly,” Gethyn says with a smile. He turns to Dee, waiting. Dee looks back at the children. His eye settles on one of the girls. She is dimpled, in a pretty dress, and one of the older girls is tying a length of linen around her eyes.

  “You see, Dr. Dee?” Gethyn says. “No harm came to her.”

  * * *

  The Queen’s guard take Gethyn to the Tower, while Dee and Walsingham and Beale wonder what to do with Rose Cochet.

  “Leave her with Gethyn’s family,” Dee suggests. “She is happy here, for the while. I will go to her grandfather. Swap his misery for his granddaughter’s death with that of his daughter’s.”

  Walsingham has the decency to look sick with guilt.

  They ride back through the forest, having given up the caroche for Gethyn and two guardsmen. Dee is so weary he might fall from his saddle and they stop fairly often. Walsingham and Beale are deflated that it is not Smith on his way to the Tower.

  “Gethyn seemed like a good man,” Beale says.

  He places him in the past tense.

  “Perhaps he is?” Dee supposes. “Perhaps he is doing what he believes to be good?”

  “He tried to have you killed,” Beale says.

  “Yes,” Dee agrees. “That was bad, but he did it for reasons he thought were good. You two: you are the same as him. You risked Isobel Cochet’s life for reasons you thought good. But what if they are bad?”

  As he says this, Dee wonders if he is right: Does Gethyn really think what he is doing is right? He does not seem zealous in any way. And why did he stand and admit his guilt? He could have run? Taken a horse and ridden to the docks at Tilbury. A ship to Spain. France even. Easy. Why did he stay and take the blame?

  He thinks of the blood in the man’s cough.

  Of course.

  He is going to die anyway.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Westminster Hall, Westminster, October 30, 1572

  Dee attends the trial. He still feels
weak, but a chair is brought for him and he is pointed out with some respect by those who know. He hopes for answers to his questions, and he gets them, but they come—or it comes, for there is only one big answer to the plethora of questions—not in the way he expects, in words, but in silence.

  Gethyn refuses to speak. He keeps dabbing his mouth with a kerchief. That’s it, Dee thinks. He is going to die anyway.

  “Do you know what it is you are bringing upon yourself?” Leicester asks.

  Gethyn still says nothing.

  “It is contempt,” Leicester says.

  Gethyn just looks at Smith. Smith cannot hold his gaze but looks away and fiddles with something on his lap.

  Walsingham arrives late, and somewhat flustered. He sits alongside Dee.

  “What’s he said?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I knew it,” Walsingham mutters. “This is a nonsense.”

  “Meaning?”

  “It means he will die in peine forte et dure but he implicates no one, you see? And it means the Crown will not confiscate his estate: his children will inherit. They will be left provided for.”

  Dee looks once more at Gethyn, poor dying Gethyn. He is doing this for love. For love of his God, and for love of his wife and children, of Romilly, the faded beauty. But also: Smith? It is him they must look at now.

  “Why have you not put him to the rack, Walsingham?” Dee asks. “Why not get him to confess he is doing this to cover Smith?”

  Walsingham looks at Dee beadily.

  “You think I did not want to?”

  “I’m surprised you did not want to.”

  Walsingham nods. “The Queen will not grant a license to do it,” he admits. “Smith has…”

  He gestures to show that Smith has gotten into the Queen’s ear.

  “I am glad,” Dee says, “that Gethyn will be saved somewhat.”

  Walsingham nods.

  “Me, too, in a way.”

  The thought of putting Gethyn to the rack is horrible. The popping of his cartilage, ligaments, and bones. All because he is a loving father.

  “But Smith?”

  Walsingham says nothing. Dee understands though; there is nothing anyone may do about Smith, for the moment at least.

  Burghley has no choice, and anyway even takes some pleasure in announcing the death sentence. Hearing it, Gethyn clenches his eyes and then opens them and nods once, because what did he expect? The guards are gentle with him, and as he turns, he nods to Dee and even Walsingham.

  Smith sits glaring at the floor.

  * * *

  He dies two days later, on the last good day that year, at Smithfield. There’s a lively crowd, for this kind of thing doesn’t happen too often, and the day’s atmosphere reminds Francis Walsingham of that day in Paris, all those weeks ago, when the celebrants danced through blood-red streets.

  Dee refuses to come.

  “No,” he had said. “I’ve had enough of this stinking business, Walsingham, and I’ve had enough of you.”

  Walsingham had managed a laugh.

  “So your recovery is now complete, eh, Dee? Back to your old self?”

  “Fuck off, Walsingham.”

  So it is just Walsingham and Beale who come to see Gethyn die. They stand alone, in a roped-off area reserved for dignitaries from court, and together they watch Gethyn brought up Giltspur Street from Newgate tied to a hurdle dragged by an ox. When he is untied he is helped to his feet and he rubs his wrists, but he seems unharmed by the ordeal even though someone has flung every sort of excrement at him.

  He climbs up the steps to the scaffold and the executioner shakes him by his hand, and Gethyn looks about him for a priest of his own religion, but he finds only the grim-faced visage of a priest of the new faith, who is quoting a verse from the Bible, shouting above the crowd and still unable to make himself heard.

  Walsingham watches Gethyn’s gaze slide past the priest, to the rocks that lie piled like ship’s ballast at the back of the scaffold. The executioner has two men to help him this day, and a lad, too, to carry the plank. Gethyn gives the executioner his doublet and then is persuaded to hand over his shirt to the boy, from whom it will hang like a nightdress.

  Then he kneels and says his prayers and now the crowd would ordinarily bellow and throw offal and whatever was to hand, but there is something about Gethyn that stills their malice, and they calm into a placid sea of coinlike faces, and only the priest’s voice can be heard.

  “… Princes in her midst are like wolves tearing the prey, shedding blood, and destroying lives to get dishonest gain.…”

  When Gethyn has crossed himself, he stands and puts himself into the hands of the executioner, who leads him to the front of the scaffold where he lies him down on his back. It is strange to think he will never get up again. It is also strange to see how the executioner is solicitous of Gethyn’s comfort.

  “Get him a fucking bolster why don’t you!” a wit shouts.

  The executioner summons his boy, who passes him the plank. It is as tall as the executioner, not as tall as Gethyn, and he lies it on him so that his head and feet are clear. Again he checks his comfort, and the people in the crowd laugh. But his concern does not prevent him placing a first layer of rocks on the plank, two hundredweight, Walsingham supposes: the weight of two heavy men. Under them Gethyn is flushed and puffing. A second layer of rocks is piled upon the first, and Gethyn’s face turns purple. He sucks and blows like a horse at a trough.

  “What actually kills them?” Beale asks.

  “I think breathing,” Walsingham says. “Or perhaps the heart? It cannot beat when it is so…”

  He mimes compression.

  It is difficult not to talk nonsense in a moment like this.

  The third layer of stones.

  Gethyn sweats blood. His eyes boil red, too, and then something gives. His rib cage, maybe, and that’s that. The plank jolts. Blood froths from every orifice. The people cheer. The executioner’s men scramble to keep the rocks from sliding from their perch.

  “Fuckin’ rubbish!” is one opinion.

  Walsingham agrees. Hang a man, burn bits of him, and then chop him up. Let them bathe in his blood. That is what you really want.

  “Well,” Beale says. “A martyr’s death. I suppose that is what he wanted.”

  Walsingham agrees.

  “A martyr, yes,” he says, “but a martyr for whom?”

  * * *

  Walsingham dines alone with his wife that evening and listens when she tells him of Frances, his eldest daughter, who is as clever as any boy, and of Mary, his youngest, who sleeps well, which is a gift to all concerned.

  But what is it that bothers him about Gethyn?

  That he was innocent, he thinks, that was it.

  He stood in another man’s place and took the punishment for the future of his family.

  Bloody Smith. Bloody Smith and his bloody Irish project.

  But how to get him? How to expose him now that Gethyn is dead and his secrets are taken to the grave?

  * * *

  In Sheffield, Queen Mary watches the sun blink out over the hills beyond the western range of the castle, and she thinks of the wide open spaces, and of the endless black sea across which she now understands that Admiral Quesada’s fleet tacks.

  It grows quite dark before she hears Mary Seton come up the steps with a candle, and she turns to watch her bob her sleek little head. She feels a sort of weary fondness for the woman.

  “How long have I known you, Mary?”

  “Twenty-five years, Your Grace.”

  “We are old friends.”

  “I hope so.

  “I am melancholic tonight,” she admits.

  “You are tired, after today’s hunting.”

  “Perhaps.” She sighs. There is an ugly pause. Queen Mary knows that Mary Seton expected her to rage and rant, having heard the news of Gethyn’s arrest and death through the usual route from Sir Thomas. But she is not angry. She is sad. She kn
ows nothing of this Nicholas Gethyn, but she supposes him to be just another beautiful young man who would willingly go out of this world for the love of her.

  She may have failed this time, she thinks, and Master Walsingham has succeeded perhaps, but she can fail as many times as necessary, whereas Master Walsingham need only fail once.

  And then she shall be queen.

  “And there is a new girl come?” she asks.

  “Yes, Your Grace, from Paris.”

  “Not one of Walsingham’s stooping whores then? I am glad.”

  “She is as demure as a dove.” Mary Seton laughs. It is a silvery tinkle, nervous.

  A thought crosses Queen Mary’s mind.

  “A virgin?”

  There is a tiny intake of breath.

  “Of course, Your Grace.”

  Queen Mary’s blood, thick and cold, stirs.

  * * *

  John Dee and Thomas Digges are back in Dee’s orchard, measuring the movement of that star again, this time with Digges’s perspective glass.

  “None,” Dee says.

  “It is definitely fading, Doctor,” Digges says.

  “I believe you are right, Thomas. But what does it mean?”

  Digges is silent for a long moment. Then he says: “I wonder if the stars we see at night are just a fraction of those that exist? Perhaps there are many millions more of them, running off from our sight in numbers we cannot imagine, into eternity?”

  That night Dee dreams of doves in a dovecote, and of Gethyn laughing when Beale joked that Smith was up north to see a man about a dog, and of Sir Thomas Smith himself, but at dawn, before he’s able to make much sense of his dream, he is woken by thunderous knocking at his door.

  “John Dee! Open up! We know you are in there! You are under arrest for debts owed to His Grace the Bishop of Bath and Wells amounting to the sum of five marks, eight shillings, and sixpence. Plus interest.”

  * * *