The Queen's Men

by Oliver Clements

  “You sound—”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Nothing.”

  There is a moment’s silence.

  “But you do realize what you are suggesting, don’t you?” Walsingham goes on a moment later. “You sit here and tell me you are hoping to get someone to impersonate the Queen in the event of her death, and I know you, and I know what you mean, and I know that you mean nothing but good. But imagine what Hatton will think if he hears of this. Or imagine if the Queen herself hears of it. She will believe you aim to replace her with an altogether more docile character whom you may shape to your will. Have her marry you, why not, and you become king. Do you see? Do you see how your intent is open to misinterpretation?”

  Beale does. He is not foolish.

  “But that would be willful misinterpretation,” he says.

  Walsingham laughs at him. Perhaps he is foolish after all.

  “That is what enemies do!”

  “They need never know. Until it is too late.”

  “You— How would you even do it?”

  “I have thought about it. We teach her everything the Queen is known to know.”

  “Every thing? Every one? Every where?”

  “I do not say it will be easy. But she need not know everything. She need not fool everyone, completely. She need only fool us, do you see?”

  Walsingham is stunned.

  “Us?”

  “You. You on the Privy Council. So long as she is plausible enough for you to maintain the lie, for as long as need be, then who else is there to challenge her?”

  “Any number of people! Her entire court! Her ladies of the bedchamber, and their husbands; her women of the privy apartments, and their husbands; her maids of honor; her ushers; her chaplains; her physicians!”

  “Most of them are already sympathetic to the cause,” Beale claims. “And those who aren’t can be sent away. Or changed. New ladies, new women, new maids, new ushers, even, or most especially, new physicians.”

  Walsingham is speechless.

  “It need only be for a month,” Beale presses. “A year. Or, if it is working, however so long she is needed for.”

  “And at the end of it?”

  Beale sits back.

  “It is not intended as the end of the matter. It is a thing to give us time. Or it may be—it may be that the Queen does marry Dudley, say—”

  “Christ, perish that thought!”

  “Or Anjou.”

  “Hang on, isn’t she already married?”

  “Ness Overbury is, yes.”

  “Will her husband not have something to say?”

  “He is sixty if he is a day. A brute. If she… vanishes… one night, say, it can be pressed upon him that she ran off into the greenwoods a-maying with some young buck.”

  “Really?”

  “Such things happen all the time in Suffolk.”

  “Do you recall what happened to Lady Jane Grey? She attempted to disrupt the lawful succession and was queen for nine days before—”

  He mimes the ax blow.

  “But we are not setting Ness up as a new queen. We are keeping the one we have. Think about what happened this last time when the Queen was shot at: the whole of London believed her dead, with good reason, but the next morning we sent out word that she was not, and she was seen—within the confines of her own rooms, remember—and so life at court and in the city resumed as usual.”

  That is true, Walsingham supposes.

  “But what if she had died? You heard Hatton: we would all now be under Mary, Queen of Scots, Rome, and in all probability the Inquisition. Unless we had someone like Ness Overbury to take the Queen’s place among her women, a veil over her face, and restore and maintain calm for as long as needs be.”

  Walsingham lets out a long sigh.

  “But the risks! And where would you conduct this exercise in high treason where men such as Hatton would not discover it? Because he will smell something is up. And this scheme is aimed at his heart, you know? It goes against everything he has pinned his hopes on.”

  “It would need be somewhere out of the way. One of those small priories given up in the Queen’s father’s reign.”

  “Pfft. Plenty of them.”

  “And it would need someone to guide her, to educate her in as much as she would need to know, and how to act, to give you faith in presenting her as Her Majesty. I thought perhaps one of the Queen’s tutors, someone who knows her as well as she can be known, and who knows what she knows, as well as a lady-in-waiting, or a maid of honor, to instruct her in court etiquette. Whom she is supposed to know and so on. Her little nicknames for people. That sort of thing.”

  Walsingham says nothing.

  He thinks of Jane Frommond.

  And then, oh Christ, of John Dee.

  * * *

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Richmond Palace, west of London,

  following day, first week of December 1577

  It is still dark, and Sir William Cecil is still to have his breakfast, yet he finds himself once more in the Presence Room of Richmond Palace, once more on bended knee before Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth of England.

  “He has what?”

  “Escaped,” Cecil admits.

  “From our Tower of London? How?”

  “He blasted a hole through the wall between the Cradle and the Well Towers.”

  She ought to be outraged, but the Queen cannot supress a smile.

  “And how did he do that?”

  “An alchemical experiment, Your Majesty, in search of Greek fire. I am yet to determine if it is judged a success or a failure.”

  “Ha. No one killed?”

  “A swan.”

  “A swan?” the Queen repeats. She sits then, on the very edge of her throne, as if it were some bench in a hallway, and turns to look through the window, lost in momentary thought. Cecil stands in silence, his gaze directed at the steps before her. Thank God we are alone, he thinks, and no one is here to witness this shame.

  “And where is he now?” she asks.

  “It is unknown.”

  “Find him. We need him here by our side.”

  “But Your Majesty—”

  “Lord Burghley, it has been a month since Alice Rutherford was killed, and we still know nothing about the men who killed her. They might have been phantoms for all we know of them. I understand you have your methods and Master Walsingham is pulling on every strand of the web you two have woven around our realm, but there are still more than a dozen men out there, armed with arquebuses who are ready, willing, and, for all we know, able to kill us. You have had a month and there has not been a single arrest. Not a single suspect. Not even a reasonable understanding of how it was organized, or how it happened. It is beginning to look to us as if you are prepared to tolerate attempts on our life.”

  Cecil throws up his fluttering little hands in alarm.

  “Your Majesty,” he begins again, “nothing could be further from the truth. We are doing all we can. We are following every trace. Combing every thicket. There is nothing more we may humanly do. It is just that—”

  “It is just that you need a different way of looking for whoever did this monstrous thing. Which is why we now command you find John Dee; you are to consult him.”

  “But Your Majesty—”

  “We know what you will say, Lord Burghley: you say it every time his name is mentioned. We agree some of his schemes are unorthodox, but he has shown many times that his way of doing things—anathema to men such as you and Sir Christopher Hatton—works. Was it not he who told you we were not dead, the night we were shot at? Sir Christopher Hatton told us it was so.”

  Hatton? My God, Cecil thinks. That snake has been having private audiences with the Queen behind my back. Perhaps he has been at her bedside these last weeks. Why have I not been told of this? Perhaps he has been nursing her back to health with vegetables he has had brought up from his own gardens. Special tinctures? Soups? Infusions? He will ha
ve to put a stop to that. Talk to Lettice Knollys.

  “He did seem to have some inkling,” Cecil admits. “He believed the unpolished table acted as a makeshift scrying stone.”

  “You see? Do you have such a gift, Lord Treasurer?”

  Cecil admits that he does not.

  “Do you even have a scrying stone?”

  “I have a polished table. Two or three of them, Your Majesty.”

  He has many more, in his many houses.

  “But in yours you only see the reflection of your face, Lord Treasurer, at dinner. Dee sees the truth. The future. That is why I call him ‘my eyes.’ ”

  Cecil bows his head.

  “So go out and find him, and then with his help find the men who shot at us. Find the men who killed our maid of honor, the men who killed our coachman.”

  Cecil bows as low as his padded old frame permits and reverses out of the door of the Presence Room into the company of Walsingham, waiting for him.

  “You look frozen to the bone, Francis.”

  “A long trip,” Walsingham tells him. He tells him about Anthony Jenkinson and his Turkish merchant. Cecil is pleased.

  “Progress at least,” he says. “And were you to tell me you have caught the men who shot at Her Majesty, that you’d already had them racked and hanged and drawn and that their bodies are now quartered, salted, and dipped in tar, ready to be sent out to be nailed to various city gates to serve as a treat for provincial crows, then I would kiss you.”

  “Not quite,” Walsingham confesses, stepping back. “There is still nothing. They are like phantoms. They have come and seem to have gone.”

  Cecil sighs.

  “And now Her Majesty is asking after Dee, Francis, to come and help, but he has recently blasted his way out of the Tower, and the only trace I have of him is a report from an irate Cheapside tailor swindled with gold that has turned green overnight. Have you, by any chance, eyes on him?”

  Walsingham shakes his head.

  “I also find myself in the peculiar position of having need of him,” Walsingham admits.

  “Great God above, why?”

  Walsingham is shifting from foot to foot. He only does this when he is uncertain of his course.

  “For a reason I need discuss with you, if you have a moment?”

  Cecil understands the need for discretion and inclines his head.

  “The garden?”

  It is chilly, but away from the river, and in the thin sunshine, not so bad. Dew sparkles on the yew, and underfoot the stones are dark. As they walk in the inner courtyard, out of the wind, below the windows of the Queen’s privy rooms, Walsingham tells Cecil about Beale’s scheme. When Walsingham has finished his explanation, Cecil thinks while they pace, just their breath before them, and the sound of their shoes on the stones.

  “The benefits are clear,” is Cecil’s opinion. “But it is laden with risk.”

  “Overladen?”

  “Yes. But…”

  More thought.

  “We might,” Cecil goes on, “apportion the risk.”

  Walsingham swings his dark eyes to Cecil.

  “Go on.”

  “How well do you like Robert Beale?” he asks.

  “Very much,” Walsingham says.

  “Pity.”

  Four or more paces. He waits for Walsingham to comprehend.

  “Ah,” Walsingham says. “But it is his suggestion, isn’t it? His scheme.”

  Cecil nods.

  “And if he wishes to pursue it, then—”

  Cecil shrugs.

  “You have committed nothing to paper?” he asks. “Nothing to prove your part in this?”

  “Part in what?”

  Cecil allows a flicker of a smile.

  “And set a man to watch him, too. Someone you trust. To see this thing does not exceed proportion.”

  Walsingham agrees.

  “And you might warn him,” Cecil goes on. “Warn him that if the scheme is exposed, and if there is anything that comes close to implicating you, then the best you can do is give him a day’s notice. Make it clear you cannot spare him, and that he must feel the full force of Her Majesty’s wrath, as exercised through your offices.”

  Walsingham nods. He has the decency to look fretful.

  “And there is a way we might make use of it, too,” Cecil supposes. “Or at least, if the scheme goes awry, and we lose Robert Beale, a balm to ease the pain.”

  “Mmm?”

  “You were suggesting Dee as a tutor?”

  Walsingham looks up at him, and a moment later, a slow smile eases to the surface of his face.

  “Thank you, Sir William,” he says. “Wise counsel as ever. I will go and find him now: see if he is not up to something cabalistic in Mortlake.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Mortlake, west of London,

  same day, first week of December 1577

  Dee wakes before dawn surprised, once more, that he has dreamed again of water, and of a barge—a coal black one that lies moored in soft flowing water, amid wisps of autumnal mist—and in his dream he approaches it across the same dipping green water to find himself unable to scale its sides, and then he tries to think if he has seen the barge before. Is it an inkling of the future, or a reminder of the past? Some undone thing? Did he see it in the polders, perhaps, when he was traveling across the Low Countries, and in a trice he is distracted again by thoughts of Leuven, and of the friends he made there from all over Christendom.

  He thinks of poor old Gemma Frisius, who died so young, but achieved so much, and who gave him a beautifully made set of his rings, in brass, just before he died, and which Dee has to this day; and he thinks of Gerardus Mercator, with whom he is still in touch, and whose maps he used to direct Frobisher across the Ocean, not only to collect the ore, samples of which Bob and Bill have carted off, but the Northwest Passage. And he thinks of Abraham Ortelius, who believed the continents drifted about the planet, and who is now appointed mapmaker to King Philip of Spain. Perhaps if Philip is patient enough, Dee had once laughed, Spain will bump into England, and there will be no need for an invasion fleet. Ortelius was always a dry old stick, though, and he hadn’t thought that particularly funny. Nor was it, in further view.

  Dee wonders what is happening in Leuven right now. Are the Spanish back in control? Will they enforce their placards against what they consider heresy? Will they impose the Inquisition on the university? What he would not give to be able to take a barge over there now—the coal black one from his dreams—and load it with all the books that will soon be burned, and all the men, too, if that is the case.

  He is sickened by the waste of it, this diabolic war on knowledge, and he resolves, once more, to do something about it. He will go to Her Majesty again. Ask to be excused from the horror of making this Greek fire and petition to be allowed to pursue his other idea, a scheme that would not see men roast alive, but bring peace and enlightenment. He has in mind that his plan will persuade Her Majesty’s enemies to beat their swords into plowshares, to meld their spears into pruning hooks. If only men such as Hatton and Cecil would listen, and let him talk to Her Majesty alone, he could persuade her, he is certain of it.

  He swings his legs from the bed and picks his way across the teetering piles of books in his room. His eye falls on the scrying stone that has so far yielded him up not a single clue as to what the angels might have in mind. He is beginning to think perhaps the goldsmith might have rooked him, just as he rooked the goldsmith.

  “John?”

  It is his mother.

  “What is it, Mother?”

  “Do you want an egg?”

  “Why not? If the hens are laying.”

  It is a beautiful, still morning, the river burnished, on the turn, reflecting the sky to the east in vivid indigo, but not yet too cold. That will come in January, and stay through February, feinting to withdraw in March, until finally April arrives to drive it away in a furze of new growth. That is
a long way off, he thinks. Winter to get through first.

  “You were out late again last night?” his mother asks as she tips an egg onto his bread.

  “The comet,” he says, indicating over his shoulder.

  “Oh, that old thing.”

  He smiles, but then ponders her meaning. That old thing.

  “It is a comet, Ma; the Great Comet.”

  “So long as the chickens are laying,” she says, “it can call itself what it likes.”

  It is an admirable philosophical position, of course, though it seems limiting. He is about to take another bite when there is a thumping on the gate. His heart spurts, but he does not believe it can be Bob or Bill, unless they have adopted a new, less forthright approach, nor can it be the Queen’s guard, come to haul him back to the Tower. They would come by boat and invest the orchard. You’d hear them from miles away. He listens as Roger Cooke goes to the gate and asks over its top who might be there.

  “Huh?” he asks again, cupping his ear to the gate.

  Cooke has gone a bit deaf, Dee thinks, and he wonders if exposure to explosions can deafen a man in the long term. Probably. He gets to his feet, egg spreading atop his bread, and steps out into the yard.

  “Who is it, Roger?”

  “It’s a woman, Doctor,” Cooke tells him. He looks panicked.

  “Well, let her in,” Dee suggests. Cooke opens the gate and there, of all people, stands Mistress Frommond, beautifully dressed in good boots and a dark riding cloak.

  “Doctor,” she says. “I hope I am not disturbing you?”

  She is, of course, and the whole household, all three of them at least, who each insist she come in and then Widow Dee insists she take an egg, and ale, too, but Frommond regrets she has already eaten at Richmond Palace, from where she has just ridden. She is distracted, Dee determines, and after a moment she blurts out the reason for her visit.

  “Will you come with me to Hertfordshire?”

  “Hertfordshire?”

  That is a day’s walk, he thinks.

  “You will think me strange but I have been wishing to revisit the scene of Alice Rutherford’s death. Where she was shot.”