The Queen's Men

by Oliver Clements

  “That’s the spirit. Like your father, you are. Never give up.”

  But he is tiring of it now; tiring of his dire need of money, he has to admit, and he thinks if he could just conjure up one ingot, his life would be much eased. He might even be able to afford a scrying stone, such as that fat fraud Nostradamus owned. He has seen one, as fine an example as he has ever laid eyes on, that he believes might suit him, in a goldsmith’s in Cheapside. It costs eight pounds, though, and where is he going to get eight pounds?

  “Those men were back the other day,” his mother tells him. “With the dog. You know?”

  He thinks he does. Bob and Bill. Bill and Bob. Bailiffs.

  “Did they say what they wanted?”

  “They said they were collecting money for books,” she goes on with another of her smiles. Her gums are as pink as a baby’s, and her smile charming. He wonders what she thinks “collecting money for books” actually means.

  “Were they, in fact, collecting money for a book dealer?”

  She nods and smiles.

  “As I said, dear.”

  “And did they say when they would be back?”

  “This morning,” she says, just as there is a thunderous hammering on the gate. “That will be them.”

  Dee puts his hand on her arm.

  “Let me,” he says. He supposes there will only be one of them at the door, while the other, with the dog, will have made his way to the orchard, to cut off Dee’s path to the river. It will be slightly awkward, but if he is quick—he is up the stairs, into his bedchamber, and hauling himself out through the window and up onto the roof feeling just as nimble as the monkey that Bess used to keep, and with one lurching drop, he clatters onto the roof of the laboratory—tiled against fire—and claps his hands to the top ridge. His teeth rattle and pigeons take noisy flight, but he stays put.

  “Ha,” he says and clambers up onto the roof’s spine. He sits astride it and shuffles along. It runs away from the house, almost to the wall separating his property from Thomas Digges’s herb garden.

  “Is that you up there, Dr. Dee?”

  It is Roger Cooke, returning from the privy.

  Dee holds his finger to his lips. Cooke, while clumsy, is not an absolute idiot, and knows—through bitter experience of oftentimes going unpaid himself—of his master’s somewhat occasional finances.

  The boom of Bob or Bill knocking on the gate comes again.

  “We know you’re in there, Dee!”

  “He’s not here!” Cooke shouts. “He’s in Wales!”

  “Yes, he is!” his mother calls. “I just this moment gave him his breakfast. Six eggs. And he has eaten but one!”

  “Is that you, Goodwife Dee?” Bill or Bob calls. “Would you care to let us in so as we may see these eggs?”

  Dee does not have much time. He gathers his cloak about his waist, wondering, again, why he wears it when a doublet and breeches would be much more convenient, and he stands, perched atop the spine of the roof, looking about him for a moment. It is one of those false autumn days that make you think the winter will be all right, with sunlight and light airs. From here he is able to see most of Mortlake: the clutch of the roofs gathered around the tower of Saint Mary’s; the breadth of the river, her waters striped with all the weirs and the nets of trinkermen, and he pauses for a moment to consider if this is what his dream was referring to.

  Too late he notices he can now be seen by Bill or Bob, whichever one it is in the orchard, and the man starts shouting and waving, and the bloody dog starts its barking, keen to reclaim Dee’s wrist from which its jaws had to be pried the last time it was here. Dee sees he will have to hurry. He is in soft shoes, thankfully, and able to balance on the top beam of the roof, and even gain a little impetus as he runs. At its end is a drop as high as two men, but ahead is the branch of an ash tree that Digges himself used to use, when he was a boy, to climb over into Dee’s garden to watch him as he went about his work.

  Dee leaps, and for a moment he is airborne, like an angel he supposes, albeit one in black wool. He flies over the stone wall, and then drops, his palms smacking in the bough of the ash—grasping it, just—as his shoulders are wrenched almost out of joint. The branch shivers and yields, and Dee descends six feet or more before he is shook free and, with a certain amount of grace, delivered into a broad bed of late-cropping onions.

  “Why, Dr. Dee! John!”

  It is Thomas Digges himself, with a spade. Dee tries to find a joke about Digges and digging, but nothing good comes to mind.

  “God give you good day, Thomas,” he says. “Did you hear? The Queen was saved! The shooters targeted the wrong carriage!”

  Digges smiles broadly. He had. Late-autumn sunlight warms his handsome young face. Behind Dee’s shoulder, over the wall, it sounds like the chickens are scattering.

  “Dee?” a voice floats over, “you can’t run forever. We are taking your samples today, pending your return of the two pounds, six shillings, and eightpence owed to Master Inglestone of Gutherons Lane.”

  “The bookseller?” Digges asks.

  “A misunderstanding,” Dee explains.

  “Another one?”

  “Another one.”

  “And which samples?” Digges wonders.

  “Frobisher’s, I hope,” Dee says.

  He wishes them more luck in finding gold therein than he has had.

  “Can I assist you in any way this morning, John?” Digges asks.

  “A coat, Thomas, if you have it, would certainly help, and some small coin or other?”

  Thomas Digges lends Dee a coat, and a few pennies, and after somewhat open-ended further discussion as to the meaning of the Great Comet, Dee leaves his friend’s property by the side gate that gives out onto a slipway down to the Thames, much favored by cowherds and their charges.

  “Where are you going?” Digges asks.

  “To see the Queen,” Dee tells him.

  “Like that?”

  “Oh, she’s seen me in worse.”

  Digges knows Dee and the Queen passed some time in the Tower together. A wherryman is drifting past on the river’s flow, and steers over to collect Dee, who removes his shoes to keep them dry and climbs in. It is Jiggins, keen to discuss the attempt on the Queen’s life—“aliens or foreigners”—and the Great Comet, which he thinks foretells the end of the world.

  Dee disagrees.

  “Well, what about that boy in Lincoln?” Jiggins counters. “Who is born with the face of a duck?”

  “Why is it always a duck?” Dee asks.

  Jiggins takes offense, believing you will get no sense out of Dr. John Dee, and the rest of the journey is conducted in silence save for the grind of the oars against the rowlocks, and the slap of malodorous river water against the wherry’s planks. It is a busy morning on the Thames, but Dee takes note of every little craft on the move, and those that are not, including those still moored, taking on passengers from Hammersmith, and then the old bishop’s palace in Fulham. As they round the bend, and turn northeast again, the river widens and Dee sees one of the Queen’s smaller barges moving purposefully toward them, rowing against the tide. Not the Queen, surely? No. One of her household men on some official duty, accompanied by a half-dozen halberdiers in helmets. Dee watches them pass. He thinks about Bill and Bob carting away Frobisher’s samples. What if they do find gold? Good luck to them.

  The guards at the Watergate are very doubtful.

  “You are never Dr. Dee,” they say, and “What, the Dr. Dee?” and “Well, go on then, show us some magic.” The one who asks to see some magic is the youngest, and most foolish, and the others step away from him. Dee likes to think they believe his reputation as a conjurer comes from his days at Cambridge, when he made a gold-painted beetle the size of a man appear to fly, but he knows, too, there is word put around about him being a conjurer of fiends, and a companion of hellhounds, and that his rivals—such as that Dutch fraud de Lannoy—point to his arrest in 1555, and how in the week a
fter it, one of his accuser’s sons went blind, and his other died.

  News of his presence, and his person, too, is shuffled through steadily grander rooms, up a line of command, and eventually word returns from some distant privy room that the Queen will see Dee in her library, a room he knows well, though dislikes for having only one door. He is not trusted to make his way there, and four stern Yeomen conduct him to where he is met by a beautifully dressed gentleman usher who is startled to see him in his ill-fitting coat and mud-splattered shoes.

  “It is what we wear in Mortlake,” Dee tells the man.

  “But Her Majesty—”

  “Has seen him in worse. Come in, John.”

  She stands in pale silks in the middle of the gloomy room, alcoves of shelves piled with tomes to her left and right. Two ladies whom he does not recognize wait to catch her if she should fall, for she looks not much recovered from her ordeal on the road from Hatfield, or perhaps, Dee thinks, some longer-term malady. He makes his bow and she holds out a gloved hand for him to kiss.

  “Please, John, may we—?”

  She indicates a table and a bench in one of the alcoves and, standing behind it, hidden, with his back to the window, of all people: Sir Christopher Hatton, beautifully dressed in bloodred velvet, with a star-bright ruff. Oil in his beard.

  “Hatton,” Dee says.

  “Sir Christopher to you, Dr. Dee.”

  “Oh yes yes.”

  Dee flaps a dismissive hand and turns back to the Queen, who has taken a seat a little distant, as if flagging at some inner effort. She appears diaphanous today, almost see-through, like the best porcelain from Cathay, held up to the sun.

  “Bess—”

  “John,” she says, with a glint of steel. “Please don’t. Please don’t call me that.”

  He bows again.

  “I’m sorry, Your Majesty,” he says. “Forgive me.”

  He sees Hatton is about to say something, so Dee launches right in.

  “But I have a proposal for you, Your Majesty. A plan. A plan to put an end to all these attempts on your life. Once and for all.”

  “Her Majesty is not in the market for any of your Last World Empire nonsense, Dee,” Hatton interrupts.

  Dee ignores him. So does the Queen.

  “Go on,” she says.

  “The truth, Your Majesty,” Dee continues, “is that all across Christendom, millions of virtuous men and women are content to pass their days herding their sheep, raising their children, and singing songs to their sweethearts as the sun goes down, but in among the virtuous many are a wicked few—of whom there are just as many in London as in Madrid, or Rome, or Paris, or Prague, upon my honor—who are not content to pass their days in God-given harmony, but must actively scheme to enrich themselves, to gain themselves more power, prestige, possession, heedless of the great cost in both health and wealth and happiness of the virtuous many.”

  “Pshaw!” Hatton barks. “A pretty speech. It is stuff and nonsense!”

  But the Queen is listening, however discomfited, so Dee goes on.

  “These wicked men will stop at nothing,” he tells her, “and will stoop to anything to achieve their aims. Their preferred ploy is to trick the virtuous man into believing his neighbor is his enemy; that his neighbor means him harm. To distract the many from their knavish tricks, they whip up frenzies of hate and fear. They divide to conquer. They raise armies, send fleets, conjure up Inquisitions.”

  “It was ever so, John,” the Queen murmurs. “Surely?”

  “But that does not mean it should be forever.”

  The Queen and Hatton exchange a look. They know he is talking about men—and women—such as themselves.

  “So what are you suggesting?” the Queen asks.

  “I am suggesting we do not fight Spain. We do not fight the Empire. We do not even fight Catholics. We practice against their king, against their emperor, against their pope.”

  “I will not procure the deaths of princes, John. You know that.”

  Dee does.

  “I am sorry, Your Majesty. I do not mean to practice against their bodies. I mean to practice against their minds.”

  Another pshaw from Hatton.

  “Their minds?” the Queen prompts.

  “We use their own greed and their own ambition against their own selves.”

  “And how do you propose to do that, Dee?” Hatton splutters. “Some of your magical powders? Or by telling on them to the angels? Or will you cow them with one of your giant golden beetles that can also fly? Lord save us, Your Majesty, this man’s a clown.”

  Dee finds himself disliking Hatton, but that is quite an image, he thinks, and despite himself, he smiles.

  “No, Your Majesty,” he says. “We use science.”

  “Science! Ha!”

  “Sir Christopher,” the Queen growls.

  Hatton bows, and remains silent.

  “What do you propose, John?”

  He takes a deep breath.

  “There exists a book,” he begins, “or a manuscript, rather, that is so secret it goes without name.”

  And he tells them of the manuscript of which he has heard, written in the most extraordinary cipher, and filled with the most astonishing illustrations, that holds the key to the secret language of the angels, the knowledge of which will permit the adept not only to learn the nature of all the God-hidden structures of the world and skies beyond, but also to know—and influence—the thoughts of men, whosoever and wheresoever they may be.

  “With this book in our possession,” he tells them, “not only will England be preserved forevermore, but we will change the course of history.”

  Both stare, skeptical.

  “Where is this book?” Hatton asks.

  “Somewhere in Poland.”

  “Somewhere in Poland?” Hatton interrupts with a laugh. “Do you know the size of Poland, Dee?”

  “And how much will it cost?” Her Majesty adds. She is ever careful with money, of course.

  “I will get it for whatever I can,” he promises.

  Still she hesitates.

  “Anyway,” he goes on. “The point is not that we have the book. The point is that the book is known to exist.”

  “And—does it? Exist, I mean?” the Queen asks.

  “I am not certain,” Dee admits.

  “Dammit, Dee!” Hatton exclaims.

  “Dammit, Dr. Dee,” Dee reminds him.

  “Dr. Dee!” Hatton laughs. “We are under siege, hard-pressed on all sides. Her Majesty cannot spare a single man to go wandering off about the continent, looking for books that may or may not exist. Not even you!”

  The Queen raises her hand.

  “You overreach yourself, Sir Christopher!” she says.

  He bows his head. Dee says nothing. He can hear the Queen breathing quickly. At last she speaks.

  “It is not even you, John, whom we cannot spare: it is most especially you whom we cannot spare. We cannot stand to have you out of our realm. Without you by our sides we cannot rest easy.”

  “But Your Majesty! I cannot merely stand idle while men plot to kill you!”

  “But you will not be standing idle, Dee,” Hatton interrupts. “We have a task for you. Which is why we sent for you. We are in need of your particular talents.”

  Dee is about to interrupt, to tell them that it was his idea to come and see Her Majesty but he says nothing, and instead is taken over by a deep inner tingling. A strong, almost irresistible desire to help, but also deep caution: the last time a member of the Privy Council asked for his help, it led to his very near death on the sands under Mont Saint-Michel.

  He therefore directs his question at the Queen, rather than to Hatton.

  “So, how may I be of use, Your Majesty?”

  He imagines that in view of their past friendship, she will know of his gifts, and call on his vast resources of recondite knowledge as to the movement not only of the planets, moons, and stars, but also of the communication of angels. O
r will it turn on his interpretive ability to predict the future?

  But she falters. A hand creeps to her belly and her face seems to change shade, to gray green.

  “Tell him, please, Sir Christopher.”

  Hatton steeples his fingers.

  “Her Grace,” he says, “has had a dream.”

  A dream. Dreams are another area of his special interests.

  “Go on,” he says. He is keen to hear the Queen’s, just as he is keen to tell her of his own: of rivers, watermills, locks, dams. Diversions, blockages, and checked potential. But Her Majesty will not meet his eye, and instead her gaze flits about the room as if looking for somewhere comfortable to rest.

  “Her Majesty dreamt,” Hatton answers for her, “of Greek fire.”

  He says it in a peculiar way, rolling the consonants. It sounds mocking and Dee wonders if he would do that were Her Majesty fully well?

  “Greek fire?” Dee asks. Just that? He is disappointed.

  “Yes,” Hatton says. “Greek fire. Her Majesty dreamt that our navies made use of it to… to defeat the Spanish. In Her Majesty’s dream Spanish ships are set afire, and the Spanish troops are made to burn in hell.”

  What kind of woman dreams of that? Dee wonders. Someone unwell, he supposes. Someone who has just this week survived being shot at. Someone who is perpetually besieged with worries and cares.

  “It would do that,” Dee supposes.

  “What do you know of Greek fire, Dr. Dee?” Hatton asks. He is sneering. Dee wonders why.

  “Well,” he says with a shrug. “It was invented by the Jews of Syria, sometime before the fall of Jerusalem, and has been used by the Byzantines since to defend themselves against the Turk, both on land and at sea. It is a liquid, that once afire sticks to whatever it touches: wood, water, or skin, and it cannot be put off or out save with sand or—is it old urine? It is delivered using a pump and hose, though how those do not catch fire remains a mystery. The formula was lost with the Byzantines themselves, and no one has been able to re-create it since. Even those who captured supplies of it.”

  Hatton shoots the Queen a conspiratorial glance. She ignores it, but Dee sees where this is going: Hatton wants to use Dee’s skills in some grubby little alchemical investigation into re-creating Greek fire. Greek fire: a substance that would no more bring in a new golden age of Adamic innocence, as to cause men to be roasted alive.