The Queen's Men
Page 2
He leans forward.
“Sir Christopher,” he says, “is there not somewhere you need to be?”
Hatton looks at him defiantly.
“No, my lord.”
Cecil sits back, satisfied he has caused offense.
“My Lord of Leicester should be with us shortly,” Cecil tells him. “And Master Walsingham.”
Hatton clicks his tongue against his teeth.
“Good. Perhaps Master Walsingham will be able to enlighten us as to how this can have been allowed to happen? All his devilish plotting and planning, his placemen in every great household in the land, his breaking of seals and meddling in other princes’ affairs, and all for what? Naught!”
“But it is not such a disaster for you, is it, Sir Christopher?” Cecil goads. “Your only regret can be that you will not be afforded the chance to twirl and jig at the masque to mark Her Majesty’s birthday, will you? Or perhaps you have in mind a different sort of dance—of a horizontal nature—with the new queen? Is that it?”
To his credit, Hatton appears genuinely startled by Cecil’s suggestion.
“M-m-y Lord Burghley,” he stammers. “I am… my objection to helping the Hollanders is not so… I would never countenance… Her Majesty’s life… You accuse me of—”
Hatton is so shocked that he cannot form the words. Nor can he be sure of what exactly Cecil is accusing him. Nor, in truth, is Cecil, exactly, but he feels he has suffered a great wrong—England has suffered a great wrong—and that because of this infamous night, a woman is dead, and Cecil’s lifework is in ruins. And there, on the other side of the table, with a handsome beard, gold-foiled pearls, and gold thread in his doublet, sits the man in whose favor the wind suddenly seems to be blowing.
* * *
Mortlake, west of London,
same evening, first week of November 1577
Dr. John Dee stands in his orchard with his friend and neighbor Thomas Digges, spyglass pressed to his eye, watching the fiery orb of red with its long, blazing tail of furious white.
“Whatever can it mean, sir?” Thomas Digges asks.
Dee does not take his eye from the glass.
“Perhaps, Thomas,” he says, “one of its first tasks is to signal that since we have known each other for twenty years or more, and I count you as my friend and believe you to consider me likewise, it is time you called me by my Christian name?”
Digges thinks about this for a moment.
“Would the heavens expend such power on such a trifle, do you suppose?”
Dee lowers the glass to look at Digges.
“Now that is an interesting question, Thomas. How much power might it cost God to send a comet such as this? If He has infinite power—and He does—then might He not send any number of these comets, to remind mankind of any number of trifling things: to turn our shoes over at night so that the darkness does not pool within; to shut up our geese, too, less they fall prey to the fox; to—”
“—to pay the bookseller what he is owed,” Digges interrupts, “so that he need have no recourse to the services of bailiffs?”
“Yes, that, too,” Dee agrees. “But He doesn’t do so, does He?”
“But if He did?”
“Then I would, of course, remember to pay the bookseller so that He need have no recourse to… to all the rest of it.”
Dee passes Digges back the spyglass, and they are comfortably silent awhile, each tied up in his own thoughts. After a moment, Digges speaks, more serious this time.
“What do you think it really portends, John? Is it the End of Times, as Luther predicts?”
Dee exhales. Luther has made much of the coming of the end of the world. They all have, those Germans. It is as if they have a taste for it: fire, brimstone, sudden violent death. Odd, he thinks.
“Perhaps, perhaps,” he says. “And look; its tail points eastward, toward the Low Countries.”
Digges waits.
Dee goes on: “Johannes Trithemius reminds us that the angelic spirits rule the planets each for a period of 354 years, and it may be that this comet signals the end of one period and the beginning of another. So it may not signal the End Times such as Luther imagined, but the beginning of a new order, overseen by a virtuous angel. It may be that the world is set to become unified spiritually, and politically, under one Last Ruler. A time when all sins are wiped away, and we return to a state of purity such as we have not seen since Adam first ate of the forbidden fruit.”
He is being optimistic. Digges is not: “But was a comet not also seen in the year of the Battle of Hastings?”
Digges refers to the comet seen above England in the year 1066, which presaged the death in battle of the last English king, Harold, and arrival on the throne of the French conqueror, William. Immediately the atmosphere clenches. Both men think of the throne’s current incumbent: Queen Elizabeth, life and limb already threatened on all sides, and how she must feel seeing such a sign.
“Will you go to her?” Digges asks. “Go to Her Majesty?”
Dee has been wondering the same thing since he first saw the comet. He cannot for a moment believe that she is not studying it this very moment, just as he is—though in greater comfort perhaps, wrapped in sable, without the odorous Thames lapping at her toe caps—and he cannot for a moment believe she is not thinking of him, just as he thinks of her.
“If she calls for me, I will go, of course,” Dee says, without needing to add the “but.”
Digges says nothing. Dee passes him back his spyglass and the young man puts it to his eye.
“Or it might just as easily portend some great discovery,” Dee goes on, trying to sound ever more hopeful. “Some treasure, perhaps? Or even, God willing, the end to our Great Work, the thing what we have been seeking all these years.”
Digges lowers the glass.
“You mean the ore that Frobisher has brought?”
“Well, yes, that, too,” Dee says, having forgotten the ore—nearly two hundred tons of it—which the admiral has brought back from the New World, from a sample of which Dee has had his alchemical assistant, Roger Cooke, try—with no joy, alas, yet—to extract gold.
“But I was thinking of something even closer to home.”
He means, of course, the lapis philosophorum, the philosophers’ stone.
Digges draws breath.
“Are you that near?”
“I am this close!” Dee laughs. “One more distillation, perhaps.”
By which he really means ten times ten times ten. Digges is almost distracted from the comet by the news.
“But John,” he says. “That is marvelous news! Congratulations, my friend! You will never need worry about booksellers’ bills again!”
Dee smiles. Should it be so surprising, he wonders, that a man so interested in spyglasses should also seek to reduce the mighty to a trifle?
“The gold would be useful,” Dee admits, “but it is the elixir of life, of eternality, that would be my chief delight.”
Just then there comes a shout from the river. A barge.
“Who can that be at this time of night?” Digges wonders.
* * *
CHAPTER TWO
Whitehall Palace, London,
same evening, November 1577
The Queen’s carriage has not yet reached Whitehall by the time Master Francis Walsingham, Her Majesty’s principal private secretary, and his own private secretary, Robert Beale, are escorted into the Privy Chamber by four grim-faced Yeomen. Cecil and Hatton sit opposite each other at the end of the table in a pool of candlelight, and the atmosphere is sour.
“At last,” Cecil says, lumbering to his feet. He comes to embrace Walsingham, and although he’s a fat man with short arms, his fur-fronted grip is comforting, and at this moment, Walsingham needs comfort.
“God keep you, Francis,” Cecil says. “Christ. God keep us all, for I fear we will have need of His grace soon enough.”
“So it is true?” he asks quietly. Cecil nods. Walsingha
m steals a glance at Hatton, who sits in silence, face turned away.
“She is not yet brought in, but we have spoken to the boy. She is shot here and here.”
He indicates.
“Enough to satisfy us only a miracle will save her.”
Christ.
Hatton still does not so much as even look at Walsingham.
“Sir Christopher,” Walsingham greets him. “God give you good evening. I am surprised you are not on your way to Sheffield Castle?”
It was Walsingham who discovered Hatton had been to see Mary, Queen of Scots, when she was in Tutbury. They had been permitted a private audience, Hatton’s servant of the body later reported, two days after which Hatton sent out for an apothecary to come and dress his buttocks with certain salves, for his skin was much torn, “like he was one of them flagellants.” Hatton has never, as far as Walsingham has yet been able to discover, been back to Tutbury, but that is only as far as he knows. Walsingham has, though, with his own eyes read Hatton’s follow-up letter to Mary, pledging to be the first to be by her side, should Queen Elizabeth’s last day dawn. Every man must live with one eye on the future, of course—there is no harm in that—but it has always puzzled Walsingham why Hatton thought Elizabeth might predecease Mary, given that they were roughly similar in age. Unless he knew something?
Only now does Hatton turn on him, furious.
“God damn it, Master Walsingham,” he spits, “how could you let this happen? You are supposed to be a mole catcher! You are supposed to catch the bloody things before they come up! With your traps and your intrigues; your spies and your piss-sniffing seal breakers! But they have all been for nothing, haven’t they? And by Christ so have you. All for nothing.”
Walsingham sits.
“You wax passionate, Hatton,” he says, “for someone who has conspired at this eventuality.”
Now Hatton bolts to his feet. The stool falls back behind him. His fists bunch on the table.
“It is Sir Christopher Hatton to you, Master Walsingham!” he shouts. “And how dare you! How dare you accuse me of such a thing! I have never conspired at anything of the sort.”
“You’ve envisaged it then. Go on, admit it, why don’t you?”
“There is no one more loyal to the Queen than I. No one.”
“Which Queen, though?” Walsingham counters. It is easy enough, he supposes, and if Hatton and Queen Mary have already come to an arrangement, then this evening might well be Walsingham’s last chance to land such a cheap blow.
Cecil coughs.
“This is to little profit, gentlemen,” he says. “We need to find what has happened, why it has happened, and now what to do about it.”
“Ask him how it happened! Ask him why it happened!” This is from Hatton.
Walsingham opens his mouth to ask Cecil to ask Hatton why it happened, but Cecil’s glare silences him. Besides, with a terrible lurch, Walsingham realizes that Hatton is right: he—Walsingham—has failed. He places his hands on the table before him. They feel like someone else’s, those of a dead man. Perhaps they are?
“Do you know anything about it yet, Master Secretary?” Cecil asks. “On whose orders the murder is committed? On whose design the deed is done?”
And for the first time in many years as Her Majesty’s spymaster, Walsingham has to admit he has no clue, and the realization makes him reel. He is nauseated, dizzy. He feels his guts turn, and vinegar sweat beads his brow.
“No,” he says.
“No?” Cecil is incredulous. “Nothing?”
He shakes his head minutely. If he opens his mouth he will burp vomit onto the table.
Hatton half sighs, half laughs.
“By Christ,” he says. “What have you been doing?”
Walsingham holds steady. Hatton is wrong to call him a mole catcher. He is a spider. He is a spider who has on Her Majesty’s behalf spent thousands of his own pounds and many years laying over the land a web of gossamer, woven of many hundreds of strands of communication, between many hundreds of men and women, high and low, near and far, so that there is not a stirring in the realm that goes undetected, not a turning the tremors of which do not reach his office.
He knows everything.
Or so he thought.
Now he knows he does not.
And, by Christ, what else does he not know?
But now here is Cecil looking at him as if he hardly knows him. Cecil! Cecil who has relied on him as a cripple relies on his crutch. And Hatton, Hatton who comes to court to turn his gavottes, his sarabandes, his saltarellos; Hatton who eats sugar-crusted almonds and drinks Rhennish wine from silver cups while watching fresh-writ masques in the palace gardens at Greenwich; Hatton who strolls in shady bowers and sings songs of thwarted love while the Queen plucks plangently at her lute.
And meanwhile there are other men on the road in all weathers, in all seasons, in linen that at day’s end must needs be peeled from saddle sores, and only so that they may work through the night so as to be back on the road again at dawn. There are other men who have to order disembowelings and beheadings; ligaments to be pulled and bones to be crushed. There are other men whose nights are racked by foul dreams, who wake half drowned in their own sweat. There are other men who have kidney stones, who walk with limps, who have gone nearly half-blind for the years they have spent poring over inky scribbles in bad light. There are other men such as Master Francis Walsingham.
And now they look to him to ask: What have you done?
“Failing, that is what you have been doing, Master Walsingham,” Hatton continues on. “You’ve failed in your primary duty, which was to keep the Queen alive. And in failing her, you have failed the country; you have failed the reformed religion of which you claim to be so attached; and you have failed us. The only satisfaction to be gained from this is that you have also, and most crucially, failed yourself. Failed yourselves.”
He includes Cecil in this, and Walsingham sees the temper of the room has changed. Hatton himself seems to puff up in size, like a gold-threaded toad, as if he is attracting all the power from Cecil and Walsingham. He wishes Dudley would arrive now, wearing some yet finer golden thread in his own doublet.
“Do you think Mary Stewart will thank any of you for all your hard work these last few years, keeping her under lock and key?” Hatton presses on, stating what is already all too well known. “Do you think she will forget the indignities and cruelties and even deaths you have inflicted on those who supported her and her cause while she waited to take her rightful place on the throne? Or do you suppose, either of you, that perhaps, instead, she will want your heads on spikes?”
It is strange, Walsingham thinks, that we who tried so hard to save Queen Elizabeth’s life, in every way possible; we who upheld the law; we who upheld order: we will be the ones who will pay the price for her death, while those men—those wayside assassins—will soon be raised up to every honor. The only scrap of satisfaction he can cling to is that in having her cousin murdered, Queen Mary has opened a personal, private Pandora’s box. When she is crowned queen, every Protestant in the land will wish her dead, and be licensed, by example, to see to it that so she becomes. Then he thinks: Ah, no. Mary will not reward the men who murdered her cousin. She will distance herself from them, publicly regret their actions, while reaping their reward, and she will probably have their necks stretched. At least, that is what he would do. Before moving on to settling scores with those loyal to Elizabeth.
But Hatton is still talking.
“And so the first thing we must do is bring Queen Mary down from Sheffield or from wherever you have her imprisoned, in state, with all the honor due the rightful Queen of England.”
It is galling to see that Hatton has moved from low to high, from weak to strong, thanks to just one, albeit painful, afternoon spent with the Queen of Scots, and the promise that might have seemed rash at the time—or might have been given to facilitate his own escape—but now appears to be standing him in good stead.
Cecil’s ordinarily plump and ruddy face has slumped on the bones of his skull, and his flesh looks like an old wall hanging: dusty, faded, and pocked with the depredations of moth.
“Well,” he supposes, “we always knew it would happen one day, that we would be made to pack our bags.”
“Bags?” Hatton laughs. “Bags? That doesn’t begin to cut it. You will have to pack more than that. You will have to pack away your lives! Each one of you! And all your dark-cloaked espials and your foul, slinking intelligencers! Every grubby placeman on your Judas payroll! Because I tell you now that the revenge of the men whom you’ve oppressed and wronged, twisted, tortured, and killed these past years will be truly magnificent!”
Walsingham must get home, he thinks, back to the Papey. He must destroy all trace of the network he has spent ten years creating. He must above all destroy that ledger of names of his secret service: Drake; Raleigh; Marlowe; Frobisher; even John Dee. If those names should fall into the hands of Mary’s agents, or even, God forbid, the Inquisition, then even the most awful days of the first Queen Mary’s reign—when the very air of London bloomed savory with the taste of cooked meat, and Smithfield was spotted black with rings of fatty ash that dogs licked by night—that will come to seem like a day in May.
Cecil still looks gray, but not as gray as Walsingham feels. Has he any contingency plans? Walsingham wonders. A bag of gold under his bed? I bet he has, Walsingham thinks. I bet he has a house in the Poitou perhaps: from the time of old King Harry’s wars, encircled by a wall three-foot-thick, with a fish-stocked moat; and deep vaults stuffed with enough powder and shot, and that German wine he likes, to last him a year. He imagines sacks of dried peas hanging from the rafters, along with smoked meats, and sausages.