The Queen's Men

by Oliver Clements

  “Some signal perhaps? Sent from Hatfield, to alert them that she was leaving?”

  It is possible.

  “I will send for the Steward of the Household for a list of all those under him,” Beale tells them. “But we must also think of Her Majesty’s people.”

  “We will have to question her women,” Hatton supposes. “I am happy to pursue that for you.”

  Walsingham thanks Hatton. He is grateful for the help, because the Queen travels with enough men, women, and children to people a large village, complete with everyone from chaplain—four of them—to lackey, of whom she has perhaps twenty. That is quite some list to get through.

  “In the meanwhile, to whom would she have first communicated her desire to leave for Whitehall?” Cecil asks.

  “One of her women,” Walsingham supposes. “Lettice Knollys is chief lady of the bedchamber. She will know.”

  They send an usher for Lettice Knollys, and while they wait, Walsingham’s thoughts turn to the woman who was shot, who died in place of the Queen, in Her Majesty’s carriage, even before they had reached the palace.

  “Who was she?” he now asks. “Do we know?”

  “Alice Rutherford,” Beale tells them. “Daughter of Sir John Rutherford.”

  Walsingham knows of Rutherford. Of somewhere in Lincolnshire. Member of Parliament, unimpeachable gospel man, and now deserving of the nation’s thanks and condolences.

  “And she was but seventeen, eighteen.”

  There is a silence. Walsingham thinks of his own daughters. They are ten and five years old.

  “Mother?” he asks.

  “Dead in childbed with her brother. Rutherford never remarried.”

  “Poor bastard,” Cecil mutters.

  “We’ll send her body up there before the weather turns. Closed coffin, agreed?”

  There is a series of curt nods just as the usher returns from Her Majesty’s privy apartments not with Lettice Knollys, who claims the Queen is too distressed to spare her, but with Jane Frommond, the girl in whose arms Alice Rutherford died. She is young—twenty perhaps—and taller than Walsingham, almost as tall as Hatton, and pretty in a clever-looking way, with hair just darker than honey. She is unaffected; one of those girls with chapped lips, and with skirts and sleeves of silk the color of polished gun barrels, a core of something less lustrous, with two strings of modest-sized pearls about her throat, and a miniature of the Queen on a gold chain around her waist that may be, but probably isn’t, the work of Nicholas Hilliard. Standing at the head of the table, she looks each man in the eye as if she were equal to all. She has been crying.

  “Please, Mistress Frommond, sit,” Walsingham suggests. He would prefer his eyes not to be at the same height as her breasts, which are pressed upward by her new French-style bodice, reinforced, if his sources tell him no lie, by strips of whalebone and a thin line of star-bright linen that runs atop her bodice, leading the squirming mind where his has no time or right to drift at this present moment.

  She does so, opposite him, and she seems shorter than them all when she sits. An optical illusion, Walsingham wonders, or more likely her legs are the longest part of her. She must make a very fine horsewoman. She is not so grand as some of the other ladies of the court, being only a maid of honor, rather than a lady of the bedchamber, or of the Privy Chamber, and Walsingham is somewhat relieved. The thought of trying to subject Lettice Knollys to questioning brings him out in a cold sweat.

  He starts by asking after the Queen.

  “She is much distressed by Alice Rutherford’s death. More so than by the attempt on her life, I believe.”

  This does not surprise Walsingham. The Queen has always believed herself immortal, or unlikely to die any time soon, at any rate.

  “But how was she before you came down from Hatfield?” Cecil asks. “It is understood she was not well.”

  Frommond nods.

  “And still not. She can stray no more than thirty feet from the closestool, lest she must answer to her laundry maid.”

  “Really?” Hatton demands. He means: Might she really have to answer to a laundry maid?

  “No,” Frommond says. “A joke. Sorry. It is too soon.”

  She starts to cry again. It is, a bit, Walsingham silently agrees, though he smiles at the thought of it. He finds himself liking Frommond. Cecil passes her his kerchief. When she has dried her eyes and wiped her nose, and handed it back, Walsingham goes on.

  “Was it something she ate?”

  “Perhaps,” Frommond agrees. “An oyster? They defy examination, for we cannot taste each one to see if it is sound.”

  Walsingham makes a note to forbid Her Majesty any more. Stick to salmon. He makes a mental note to have some sent to Sheffield, to Mary, Queen of Scots. See how she likes them. For the future.

  * * *

  They ask Frommond a series of questions about the household’s activities that morning, and whether anyone might have had the chance to send some sort of signal to alert the gunmen of Waltham Forest that the Queen was leaving Hatfield that day. Frommond answers succinctly, and as she speaks Walsingham notes the clarity of her gaze, and for a reason he will not later be able to explain, he wonders what it would be like to wake up next to such a woman. He imagines a slice of sunlight falling from between the shutters and the curtains, refracting through one amber-hued iris. Afterward he supposes he must be getting old, because his mind does not touch on what might have happened the night before.

  “And was there anything unusual about your preparations for departure?” he asks.

  Frommond thinks for a moment, then shakes her head.

  “You mean, did I see any… what? Men in capes disappearing through holes in the fence?”

  She makes such a thing sound foolish, and Walsingham smiles, because that is almost exactly what he had in mind. Cecil, too, obviously.

  “That is not so very farfetched a thing,” he mumbles.

  “So we are given to understand why the Queen decided to travel in her closestool carriage,” Walsingham asks, “but why was Alice Rutherford traveling alone in the Queen’s carriage?”

  For the first time Jane Frommond looks ill at ease.

  “There was no reason,” she says. “It was the way things turned out. Four women in the back carriage, one with Her Majesty in the closestool carriage, and so one woman extra. Alice had been in the Queen’s second carriage, but the horse was lame, and so the carriage was left at Waltham Cross, and Alice… well. The Queen would not have her in the closestool carriage alongside Her Majesty and Mistress Knollys, and there was no space in the back carriage, so it only made sense that she should travel in the Queen’s.”

  Walsingham believes she is lying.

  But why?

  After that there seems not very much more to say. Walsingham thanks her and stands to show her through the door. He follows her through and closes the door behind.

  “May I?” he asks as she pauses before setting off across the courtyard to the Queen’s privy apartments.

  “I hoped you would,” she admits.

  “Why?”

  She continues walking in the cold November air. It smells strongly of coal smoke, and unless the comet really does signify the end of the world, it will soon be winter, he thinks. Winter. Christ, how he hates winter.

  The courtyard is a pretty place, with low hedges shaped in an ornate pattern around graveled paths, and at its center, a sundial on a large stone plinth, as useless now as it is most of the time. They follow one of the paths, and he can hear her feet on the gravel, but not see them for her skirts. She is only a little taller than me, he thinks. I mean; we do not look ridiculous walking together. Her hair is neatly tricked in woven plaits and she wears no wedding ring. Walsingham wonders if she is betrothed to anyone and then wonders why it is he knows so precious little about the Queen’s women. It is tempting to believe they sit all day stitching, or learning new dances, and yet that cannot be, can it? He waits for her to speak. At length, when they are
farthest from any window, she does.

  “Alice Rutherford,” she says.

  “Mmmm?”

  “She was with child.”

  Walsingham stops. Ah.

  “That is very unfortunate,” he says, taking a pace to rejoin her side. “Did the Queen know?”

  “She had just learned,” Frommond now tells him. “It is why Alice was traveling alone in the Queen’s carriage. Her Majesty had forbidden Alice into her presence. That is what I did not wish to tell you, before those other gentlemen.”

  “And Her Majesty was vexed?”

  Frommond rolls her eyes.

  “It is a mercy she was too ill to move.”

  Walsingham can believe it. It is well known that the Queen can barely stand when one of her ladies asks to take a husband, and she has been known to refuse permission if she believes the girl too young, or the marriage not advantageous enough, or if she has a personal dislike of the groom. And that is when things are done in accordance with correct procedure, but when they are not, her temper is legendary. Only this last year she broke Mary Shelton’s finger with a candlestick when it was discovered she had secretly married Sir John Scudamore. But what would that rage be like if she discovered one of her ladies had fornicated out of wedlock?

  “And how did she learn of the girl’s state?”

  “Alice used to be slender as a reed, which angered Her Majesty, anyway, but in recent days her laces needed to be loose tied, and she was oftentimes very green about the gills.”

  Jane stops and flutters her hands by her cheeks. It is a touching, obscure gesture. They resume their steps.

  “And do we know the father?” Walsingham asks.

  Frommond shakes her head.

  “She would not even tell me, and I share a bed with her.”

  “So she was being sent home?”

  “Not home. No. I think the Tower.”

  “The Tower?”

  “It is what the Queen told her. Because she would not admit the name of the father.”

  Christ. What a thing. But he cannot see what this might have to do with the ambush. They walk on. Ahead two Yeomen guard the entrance to the Queen’s chambers.

  “Do you have any suspicion? As to the father. It will go no further, I promise.”

  Frommond shakes her head.

  “But you must,” he says, “if you share a bed?”

  She shakes her head again.

  “When do you think it happened?”

  “How are you with an abacus, Master Walsingham?” Frommond asks.

  “Tolerable,” he supposes. “Oh. So about August?”

  “It is just a guess.”

  “She would not even tell you when?”

  Frommond shakes her head.

  “Or where? But she would have been with Her Majesty, yes? And Her Majesty was—”

  “On progress,” they say together.

  Walsingham sighs. Yet another reason to hate these yearly progresses, when each summer Her Majesty rouses her entire household, and they quit London and take to the road—three hundred wagons; more than two thousand horses; nearly four thousand men, women, and children, costing nearly eight hundred pounds a week in wages and horse fodder alone—to meander through the countryside, from house to house, castle to castle, like a biblical plague of locusts. They hunt. They dance. They enjoy masques and every other kind of entertainment. Last year they were at Bramshott with Edmund Mervyn, then at Brockhampton with John Caryll, then at Portsmouth with the Earl of Sussex, and then Her Majesty led them on up into the Midlands, leaving a swath of destruction and bankruptcies in their wake.

  “So it could be… anyone?”

  He gestures to include the whole world, or every man in it, anyway, and after a moment’s thought, Frommond more or less nods.

  “At any other time, I would find this man,” Walsingham tells her. “And if I found that he had wronged the girl, harmed her in any way, other than the obvious, then, Mistress Frommond, please know that I would make sure he swung for it.”

  “But?” Frommond wonders.

  “But—”

  And Walsingham shrugs. He feels unutterably weary. She understands and gives him a long sad look.

  “Yes,” she says. “Perhaps I am a fool to care. I will leave you here, Master Walsingham.”

  He thanks her for her time and care and is wondering what else he might say to give her comfort when Robert Beale appears from across the courtyard. He is clutching some paper or other, his face very grim.

  “Master Walsingham,” he calls, holding up the paper. “A message sent down from Her Majesty.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Mortlake, west of London,

  second week of November 1577

  In his sleeping hours, even four days later, John Dee surprises himself, for he does not dream of comets, nor of gunfire, nor even of his communication with the Archangel Michael, but of rivers, riverbanks, rills, weirs, and locks. He dreams of dams and watermills. On waking he is surprised to find himself having dreamed these dreams, and he wishes he would dream more of those golden moments when he was in the Privy Chamber in Whitehall, in communication at last with the Archangel Michael, but he knows it is fruitless to argue with his unconscious: the sleeping mind is resolute in its priorities. So he enters these dreams into his book of dreams, and interprets them to mean that his gifts and his talents are being checked from their true destination, and that some other force is using his power for their own purpose.

  But what is this force? And what could their purpose be?

  It is not hard to guess: Sir William Cecil; Francis Walsingham; Sir Christopher Hatton, all working against him seeing the Queen, against him seeing Bess.

  But with the appearance of the comet, and with this communication from the Archangel Michael, it is now all the more important that he does see her. All his work, all his years poring through the tangled esotericisms of Johannes Trithemius’s Steganographia, the triple thickets of Heinrich Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy, and even Paracelsus’s darkly impenetrable Astronomia Magna tell him that such signs are no mere coincidence. They mean something. They point to something.

  And it can only be one thing: the coming of a last great age, when the world will be finally unified under one last Great Empress: Queen Elizabeth of England. To achieve this, for the sake of the whole world, she must begin by reclaiming her lost empire, Arthur’s lost empire, in the Netherlands to begin with, with Holland and Zealand, and also Picardy, of course, but also she must show the world the genealogy that proves her to be the rightful heir to the throne of Castile; of Aragon, and of Jerusalem itself. Through these titles, she is heir to the rest of the world entire. The Last Empress ruling over the Last Empire. The British Empire.

  Dee has spoken of this to Elizabeth before, of course, many times, and her reaction usually depends on who has her ear at court at that time. If it is Cecil, or Dudley, or Walsingham, she is more enthusiastic, but if it is this new man, this Sir Christopher Hatton, then she scoffs at him, and he becomes angry. But none of that matters now. The Great Comet, and the fact that the archangel is talking to him, if only briefly, means that the hour is at hand. She can delay no longer.

  He must go to her. He must tell her this.

  He closes his book of dreams and stops for a moment to watch—through the open doorway into his workshop—his alchemical workshop assistant, Roger Cooke, take up a tiny flake of cinnabar on the very tip of a spatula and hold it over the very last piece of glassware that survives from Dee’s time in Leuven. It is his favorite—his only—pelican, so called because its shape is supposed to resemble that of the bird, beak lowered to peck at its own breast to draw forth blood to feed its young, and it is set over a crucible, in which burns a piece of charcoal soaked in lamb fat. The flame is yellow and smoky, but steady, and the contents of the flask are bubbling nicely, even though Cooke has removed the glass lid, and vapor escapes. The cinnabar must be damp, though, or the spatula is, for the powder, so car
efully measured out, will not slide off the metal and into the flask’s open throat.

  Careful, Dee says silently. Do not for the love of God tap it on the side of the pelican for— Cooke does so. The pelican cracks very gently. A tiny, high-pitched ping. Cooke looks up. Their eyes meet. Cooke puts the spatula down and comes to close the door in Dee’s face. Dee is grateful to be spared the sight of the flask being emptied into the slops and thrown away with all the other glass that Cooke has broken over the years.

  He remembers what Dudley had said about the Dutchman Cornelius de Lannoy, to whom the Queen paid all that money. De Lannoy had had the most beautiful glassware from the finest Dutch glassmakers, Dee recalls, beautifully clear, through which could be seen each successive change of the alchemical process, far superior to anything the English can yet manage, which he’d been back to the Low Countries to buy himself, wasting much time and probably much money. Perhaps there is still some of it knocking about in Somerset House or even the Tower perhaps? Though things tend not to last so very long there. He will ask the Queen.

  He is looking for his coat when his mother brings him six coddled eggs in an earthenware dish.

  “You must have your breakfast,” she says.

  He stops and smiles at her and sits back at his table. She watches him dip his spoon into one of the eggs. The broken yolk is very yellow.

  “Knew you’d soon find gold, John,” she says with her shortsighted, near toothless smile. It is not clear if she is joking, or not. Just as time has robbed her of her teeth, so it is with her wits, and oftentimes she speaks no sense.

  “Not this time, Mother,” he admits. “Next time perhaps.”