The Queen's Men

by Oliver Clements

  “What is it?” Frommond asks him.

  “A river,” he tells her. “It is a river.”

  A broad ribbon of soupy brown water, five yards across, fringed with desiccated rushes and teasels on either side.

  They stare at it, and then at each other in surmise.

  “Do you suppose Master Walsingham knows it is here?” Frommond wonders.

  Dee supposes he has never even been up here. Why should he have thought to? Walsingham is a spider, he thinks, not a bloodhound, and then he wonders why Walsingham did not bring bloodhounds up to the forest the day after the shooting. Too much rain? Too much confusion? Too many footprints of Jeffers and his men, perhaps? And also, remember how Walsingham was that night? Almost mad with anxiety and fit for nothing the next day.

  “The gunmen… they could have come up here by a boat?” Frommond wonders. “And left in it.”

  He hardly hears her. He walks on.

  “Are you all right, Dr. Dee?” she asks.

  The truth is that he is not. His head spins, or the world does, for he has been here before: in his sleep. This is what he has been dreaming about. This river. He turns to his right, and begins following it downstream, walking south, through marsh and sedge bog where teasels compete with bulrushes, and in the wind their dry husks and stalks and strange heads rub and hiss. Something is making a deep groaning whoop in the eye-high grass. After a moment a small barge—scarcely bigger than a wherry—steals up from behind, floating down the river under a much-patched russet sail.

  Dee hails the pilot.

  “What river is this?”

  “River Lea,” the man calls back in twangy English.

  “Where does it go?”

  “Stays where it is.”

  The man laughs at his own joke. There’s a boy on board who also laughs. And a four-square dog that growls, whom Dee hopes cannot swim.

  “Where does it flow from?” Dee risks. “Where does it flow to?”

  “From up north,” the man indicates. “Broxbourne and beyond. Runs into the sea at Leamouth, Isle of Dogs way.”

  The dog barks.

  “Shut it.”

  Dee has never heard of the river Lea. The pilot isn’t surprised.

  “You will, though,” he calls, beginning to have to shout as he drifts out of earshot. “If they ever finish that fucking lock.”

  “Which fu— Which lock?”

  “Lock downstream. Them Dutch fuckers’ve been at it for months, but they’ve fucked off home now.”

  Those are his last words before he is gone and Dee and Frommond are left alone on the river’s sodden margin. Frommond pulls a face.

  “The Dutch are unpopular?”

  “Well, there are a lot of them over here just now. Refugees from the war, but also they are marvelously industrious, and ingenious engineers. They know how to drain fens, for example, and build bridges and mills and weirs and locks and so on.”

  Dee tapers off and becomes transfixed by what he sees: the watermill, its wheel turning in the current. Downstream he can see more of them, undershot wheels turning slowly in the dawdling flow. Can it be here that his dreams have led him?

  He sets off south, after the boat, stumbling along the river’s uneven bank.

  Frommond calls him back, but he walks on, heedless. He distantly notes her following him.

  “Dr. Dee!” she calls. “I am only worried about the horses!”

  “They will be fine!” he calls over his shoulder. “They are from the Queen’s stable. Someone will take them back.”

  He is not completely sure about that.

  “You would make a horse thief of me!” Frommond tells him. She has caught him up.

  “I will vouch for you,” he tells her.

  Nothing seems so urgent as this.

  “I have seen all this,” he tells her. “In my dreams. Canals. Watermills. Locks. A barge.”

  At length they come to a pool where the same small barges are tethered to the stump of a tree.

  “Are those your barges?” Frommond asks.

  Dee shakes his head.

  “Mine was black. And large. For coal maybe? And closed.”

  This is the tidal reach, and the tide is rising. Dee and Frommond walk on, and a little farther downstream they come to the towpath on the river’s western bank, which they follow in silence for half a league or so. It is getting on for midafternoon now. They should definitely be turning for home yet still Dee presses on, with Frommond indefatigable in his wake, until they reach what he has been looking for: the site of the lock the Dutch are making.

  Dee has an interest in this and admires the scheme: two tall frames are being built either end of a straight reach, with various winches and pulleys of the sort you see on boats, through which will run, one day, Dee supposes, ropes thick enough to lift and lower the huge wooden gates that are halfway through being laminated on the river’s bank. Today though, work has stopped, and there is no one about.

  Dee stares at the water.

  “Is this your canal?” Frommond asks.

  “It is,” he says. “Or will be. Dreams are oftentimes more suggestive than indicative.”

  But there, a hundred paces further down the river’s bank, moored to the trunk of an alder, is the barge. Forty paces long; dusty black save for an oiled pine mast that is laid the length of the roof of the cabin, thick as a man’s torso. Loops of stained rope hang from stanchions and along the top there are piled presumably the sails in stained green canvas bags on which a man might happily sleep. It is one of those that service the trade in coal between Newcastle and Calais, Dee supposes, the sort that creep up and down England’s east coast and then linger waiting for the right wind and water to cross the Narrow Sea. It looks repelling, but from its stovepipe curls the faintest wisp of pale smoke.

  They stare at it for a long moment.

  “The gunmen. Could they have lived here, waiting until they got the signal Her Majesty was coming?” Dee wonders. “They could have worked on the lock and no one would have thought anything of them. No one would have even mentioned them to any of Master Walsingham’s searchers, would they?”

  My God, he thinks, that is a deep plan.

  “But are they still here? The boatman said they’d gone,” Frommond reminds him.

  “Maybe they have,” Dee replies. He walks toward the barge, drawn to it as if in a dream. He swims in air thick as water.

  “Hello!” he calls. “Hello?”

  There is a curious moment of sudden stillness, as if someone has stopped doing whatever it was they were doing, but they had heard nothing being done anyway. Is it that someone has stopped breathing? No. It is a cat, turned from its private ablutions on the cabin hood, to stare at them over its shoulder.

  “What an ugly brute,” Frommond says.

  “Hello,” Dee calls again. No movement. They look at each other. Dee raises his eyebrows. There is a log propped against the bow into which someone has adzed steps to make a rough gangplank. He climbs it and steps up on the little deck at the back of the barge. The cat rolls onto its feet and hisses at him. Gray tortoiseshell, its ear is ripped, and its eyes are yellow.

  “Hello, boy,” Dee tries to reassure it. More hissing.

  “Bloody cat.”

  There are two doors over a hatch, with rope handles. Dee tugs them. Locked.

  “Hello,” he calls again. Still nothing.

  He shuffles along toward the bow, along the footwide walkway until as he passes the stovepipe, he removes his cap and rolls it in a ball and stuffs it in the mouth of the tube. From the shore Frommond laughs in silence. Dee moves on to the bow of the barge, where there is another hatch, ingrained with dirt, and much scratched, that must lead to the hold. Two doors, wedged closed with an iron bar between two iron handles. He slips the iron bar and opens one of the doors. It is heavy, barred oak. The smell is a mix of bilge water and coal dust—very foul—and Dee feels his guts turn. He peers in. It is very dark, but with the hatch open, enough light sifts d
own into the hold and he believes he sees— Can it be? A pile of long canvas-shrouded tubes hanging like long sausages from the rafters of the cabin.

  He looks up and takes a lungful of clean air.

  “What is it?” Frommond calls from the shore.

  Dee admits he does not know. He does not want to say they are the guns used to shoot her friend until he is sure they might be. He puts one foot on the rung of a ladder and looks up to see Frommond stepping up onto the deck. Alice was her friend. She wants to see what is to be seen.

  “No,” he starts to say; it is only a rope.

  He stands, disappointed.

  But then there is some violent percussive swirl of movement in the cabin below, a sudden drumbeat of action. The cabin doors burst open in a cloud of smoke, and a man looms on the deck behind Frommond. She turns to him in fright. He has in hand some fearful curved spike, some tool for turning logs perhaps, and he comes at her in pink-eyed rage. She turns and starts to run up the side of the barge, but he moves faster. The hook comes around under her chin, and she is yanked off her feet. The man lets the hook drop with her. She hammers to the deck, legs thrust forward, head twisted in the iron noose, its barbed point a finger’s width from her ear.

  “Who are you?” he yells at Dee. “Who are you? What you doing here?”

  “Stop it!” Dee shouts. “You’re hurting her. Let her go.”

  “Who the fuck are you tell me what to do? On this boat. Who are you? What you doing here?”

  He sounds Dutch. Or is it Flemish? Or French. Not one of the Dutch fuckers, then? Or maybe it is the boatman’s mistake. Very tall, with narrow shoulders and a rough red beard knotted under his chin, he is in a homespun shirt that reaches to his naked knees.

  “Just let her go,” Dee tells him. “Just let her go and we’ll be gone.”

  But now the man has in his other hand a blade of something more than just an eating knife.

  “Tell me what you doing!” he yells again.

  Dee has to react. Find some way to pacify him. Perhaps ask him a question.

  “Are you working on the lock? We are looking for your foreman.”

  The man looks at him with contempt.

  “There’s no fucking foreman.”

  “We’re sorry,” Dee says. “We’ve made a mistake.”

  “Big mistake. You—get in the hold. Now.”

  “I’m not—”

  The man puts the blade to Mistress Frommond’s cheek. Dee sees her skin part in a line of blood. She hisses and her boot heels scrape on the deck. Blood marks her linen collar.

  “Get in hold,” the man says. “Or I put out eye.”

  Dee backs to the bow, to the hatch of the hold. He is about to tell the Dutchman that he is not going down in that, but one look at the knife pressed below the jellied orb of Mistress Frommond’s eyeball and he finds the top rung. He turns and steps down to find another, and another. The stench rises up around him to coat his tongue and fur his teeth. It tastes like crypt water. Down he goes. Four or five more steps. He turns and looks along the deck. The man is wrangling Mistress Frommond with his knees, as you might a sheep to the shearing cradle. She has both hands around the hook, keeping it from choking her, but it’s the knife that’s the real danger.

  “Get down,” the man shouts at Dee.

  Dee slips and clatters down the last few steps. His feet sink in a kind of icy clinging ooze. He can hear the river thrumming softly against the barge timbers, and there come tiny high-pitched squeaks of protest to let him know he is not alone. Now the sky above is reduced to a square. He can hear the man’s grunting, and Frommond’s suppressed screams and her boots scrabbling on the deck. Then the shape of her blocks the square of light above and the man pulls the hook from her neck. It is a savage thing, and for a moment Dee believes he has cut her throat and he bellows with horror, expecting a shower of blood on his upturned face, but as Frommond is pitched into the hold, her throat is intact, and her head connected. She crashes into Dee. Her outstretched hands pummel him, her head cracks against his cheek. Dee staggers. Three steps in the stinking ooze. But he does not fall. He holds her up, keeps them both out of the swill.

  The hatch above is filled with the man and his hook and his knife. He is breathing heavily, his eyes mad and desperate.

  Then it slams shut and Dee and Frommond are left alone in the stinking dark.

  * * *

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Old North Road, Essex,

  second week of December 1577

  It is the middle of December, when the days are near their shortest, and after seven hours in the saddle Robert Beale and Nicholas Hilliard reach the little town of Great Dunmow, where they stay in an inn just off the marketplace. They must share a bed with Sir John Jeffers, and the room with the other two yeoman who ride as escort, one of whose snoring shakes the timbers and wakes every kind of vermin imaginable. The next day they take fresh horses, along with the two from the royal stable they found on the road up through the forest below Waltham Cross. Their finding them there, just where the Queen had been shot at, has been a subject of conjecture that kept them occupied all the rest of the previous day, but to no profit, and the farther away they rode from it, the less likely they felt they were to get to the root of the business.

  “Tangled full of mysteries, that forest,” Jeffers says now as they set out to follow the old Roman road toward Bury St. Edmunds through rolling hills quartered with hedged pastures and hamlets clutched around well-appointed churches of lichen gray stone. Each man is wrapped against the east wind that blows in their faces.

  “Remind me why we are doing this again, will you, Robert?” Hilliard asks.

  Beale has some sympathy for his old friend.

  “You regret showing me your limning of Mistress Overbury?”

  “Bitterly.”

  Beale laughs.

  “I will make it worth your while, I promise.”

  He has not told Hilliard anything about his proposed scheme, and Hilliard maintains the fiction that Beale has fallen very desperately in love with Ness Overbury, which, in point of fact, he has. When he first laid eyes on her in the Dolphin, she was laughing at something someone had said, or something that she’d said, perhaps, and her face was turned in profile. When she turned to him, their eyes had locked, and Beale’s breath was driven from his body as if by a huge, pillowed blow to the heart.

  “I can’t take your money for this, Robert,” Hilliard tells him now, though they both know he will: first for having to endure John Overbury’s aggressive, insulting jokes when he took Beale to the Dolphin to pretend he had not finished the limning as agreed; second for having then to lend the limning to Beale, for reasons Beale would not share; third, for having to make a copy of the original; and fourth, worst of all, for having now to ride six or seven days to deliver the thing because he had pretended it had been late finished.

  “And I hate horses,” he’d told Beale.

  “All this is my fault,” Beale had admitted, “but not that she lives in the middle of Suffolk.”

  And so on they go. The second day ends with overwatered ale in a falling-down inn south of Bury; the third, final, short day at John Overbury’s hall in a small village with connections to the disgraced Howards. The hall has seen better days, and the dogs are very thin. Overbury is surprised Hilliard has turned up so well escorted, but takes boorish pleasure being in the company of fighting men, and when he hears Sir John Jeffers fought in Flanders, he is more welcoming.

  “Come to see my Ness, have you?” he barks. “You’ll have to get up earlier in the day than that!”

  He’s not sixty, as Hilliard had once claimed, maybe not even fifty, but a soldierly, bluff man, of the sort to pride himself on telling it as he sees it through the calculating eyes of a clever pig. He owns Ness as he would an acre of woodland and resents every penny he must spend on her to see her flourish for other men’s delight.

  “We are on our way to King’s Lynn, master,” Jeffers has been tol
d to lie. “And have ensured Master Hilliard’s safe passage to your door.”

  The halberdiers believe they are Norfolk bound, too, and that they have been escorting Hilliard as a favor.

  “You can stay in the barn for nothing,” Overbury offers. “And there is room for your horses in there, too, though you’ll pay for feed. Yours, too. Shut up!”

  He cuffs a barking hound. As he is talking Ness appears at the doorway of the hall, framed by its light. She sees in an instant what she wants to see: a crowd of young men all turning to her, as daisies to the sun, among them Beale, and she knows why he is there, or believes she does, and there is a moment’s catlike hesitation, as if she realizes she is on the threshold of something, and that if she pulls back now, if she takes a step back, then something will pass her by, be gone along the road, leaving her—where? But if she steps forward… She is wearing a loose linen hood, though her fine, sprung auburn hair escapes it, and she strokes a stray frond of it back behind her ear. Then she gathers herself and she steps forward, as if from the shadows, and into the light. As if from the past to the present, to the future. From what was, to what will be.

  “Why, Master Hilliard, Master Beale”—she smiles—“may God grant you a good evening.”

  Overbury growls, like a watchdog, deep inside his chest. Move not a muscle, it means, or I will rip out your throat.

  That night Hilliard shows them the limning.

  “But I ordered a large one,” Overbury says with a laugh.

  Hilliard barely masks his sigh.

  The haggling over the limning’s price resumes the next day. Overbury has drunk too much wine the night before, swapping stories with Sir John Jeffers, and he is choleric this morning. He knows there is some other thing involved, and guesses that Beale wishes to see his Ness, and he will pay no more than two-thirds the price. Beale encourages Hilliard to hold out, and to string the negotiations out, for he cannot find a moment to be alone with Ness, and meanwhile the day is sliding by and Ness is busy about her tasks: in the buttery; in the dairy; in the smokehouse; and if they linger beyond tomorrow, it will come to seem like an occupation.