“I may have got my verbs muddled there,” Cecil admits.
“And ‘heaven’s sacred cipher.’ That sounds— Oh Christ. That sounds like Dr. Dee’s territory. Though I do not have him down as a wise man.”
“Well,” Cecil says, “I have set one of my clerks going through Her Majesty’s jewels, in case some idea occurs, and I will leave this with you to have a think about. Jenkinson says we must divine his meaning, and be ready to pay the full price on delivery, or the naft will go elsewhere.”
“Elsewhere?”
“Elsewhere.”
He means, perhaps, Spain.
* * *
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
River Lea, Essex,
third week of December 1577
There is a cell in the lowest level of the White Tower known as Little Ease that is so short and narrow that a man can neither lie, nor sit, nor stand in it, but must crouch in the darkness for days, weeks even, until he is dragged out to be tortured or taken to be hanged from Tyburn Tree. Dee, bent in the darkness with foul bilge water up to his ankles for he knows not how many days, has been thinking about this cell a great deal. He is wondering what it might be like to have the hatches of the hold flung open by some merciful gaoler and to be dragged across London to be half hanged, taken down, then eviscerated and butchered into quarters.
There are times when he would welcome it.
Somewhere in the darkness nearby is Frommond, and he believes she might welcome it, too.
“Perhaps that will come to pass, anyway,” he muses. “Her Majesty takes as dim a view of horse theft as she does of coin-clipping.”
Frommond usually says nothing during these attempts at lightheartedness. In fact, she has started to say less and less as the hours have turned to days and dragged on through nights of shuddering cold when they have had to cling to each other for warmth and huddle with teeth chattering, their bodies racked with shivers. Now though, with so little food for so many days, and with only half a canvas bucket of river water lowered into the hold each dawn, Dee can feel his own mental as well as physical strength beginning to wane.
He will have to do something very soon, but what?
“Why not just kill us?” Frommond had shouted in those early days. “Get it over with!”
During that first day they stood together, side by side, faces lifted, waiting under the hatch, gradually becoming used to their world of four lines of light, interrupted by six fat hinges, which they expected to expand at any moment as the hatch was lifted and they be let out. But as the light had faded, so had hope, to be replaced by outraged incredulity and then self-fueling, contagious rage. Dee had had to pull Frommond from bloodying her nails scrabbling at the underside of the hatch, just as she later had had to pull him from the bulkhead where he was bloodying his fists.
Both swore and drove each other to swear more, greater, more terrible oaths. Such blasphemies as might see either swing.
Accommodations had to be made. The realization they were trapped with each other came with that first dawn. Dee had to take a shit. Then Frommond.
“Look away!” She’d managed to laugh.
“I can’t see a thing, Mistress Frommond,” he’d promised, and it was true, though he could smell it and later something bumped his ankle, though that might easily have been his own turd.
That was then, though, when they hoped for a reaction from their gaoler: that he might speak to them; share his reasonings; create—or dash—hopes for a time when their world was not just this almost complete darkness of bilge water and slimy timbers, teeming with rats, but he has said not one word to them. They hear him going about his business in the cabin through the bulkhead: they hear his snoring through the night, him voiding his bladder and his bowels into the river at dawn; occasionally he talks to what must be the cat, though in what language they cannot tell.
At times there are no sounds, none of the subtle rocking of the barge to tell them their gaoler was even on board, and this was the time, to begin with, that Dee attacked the doors with his eating knife, to little profit save a broken blade. If only the arquebuses that he had imagined might be slung in the hold had not turned out to be ropes attached to what his tentative fumblings have revealed to be a sea anchor half submerged in the gritty stinking ooze of the bilge, then he might have— Might have done what? Shot the man as he lowered the daily bucket of water? With what powder, shot, or flame? Now the only things they have by way of weapons are the stubby handle of his broken knife, and Frommond’s, which is so delicate it is hardly worthy of the name of knife.
He thinks about throwing the stub of his knife at the man when he opens the hatch at dawn. He could do that if he could stand upright, but the hold is too shallow to allow him to draw his arm back for that, and he could never get enough power throwing it underarm; and now that he has lost the actual blade somewhere in the bilge, it is useless anyway.
What he really needs is a crossbow, he thinks. That would be the answer. That would be the weapon of choice here. But who these days has one of them?
Early on the second day they felt the cat brush by them, come in through some secret way in the bulkhead timbers to set about the rats. Their screeching alarm was terrible to hear, and both Dee and Frommond lashed out in a frenzy as the rats scrambled over their faces and in their hair, but it was as nothing to the shrieks of the rat the cat caught, and both Dee and Frommond had to clap their hands over their ears until it was over. Dee wonders how it comes and goes. It will be some tiny gap between rib and timber scarcely big enough for its head. If it ate the rat in the hold, it would surely need to digest it before being able to slip back into the cabin.
“It is a strange thing to think of envying a ship’s cat,” Frommond says.
By the third day their spikes of rage had become intermittent, like flashes of lightning in a summer storm: sudden, intense, and then gone in moments, leaving behind a throbbing bruise of sorrow in their tow. Despair and the realization that they were being starved to death broke on them during the fourth day.
“We will die,” Frommond had said.
“We are lucky to still be alive,” Dee had suggested.
And this morning, when he wakes from his strange deathly sleep, wedged into one corner of the bulkhead and the hull, the fact that he is alive surprises and depresses him.
“Jane?” he whispers.
“Mmmm,” she says.
“Listen.”
There are voices. Two of them. On the bank maybe. He and Frommond throw themselves at the timbers of the hull side, hammering and shouting for help.
“We’re here! We’re trapped! Help! Help us!”
“Stop! Stop!”
Dee extends an arm to Frommond’s.
They listen.
Nothing.
Silence.
Christ. Dee sinks to his knees in the murk, his face pressed to the timbers.
Frommond screams.
She has been bitten by a rat.
“I can’t stand it! I can’t stand it!”
Dee sloshes over to her and takes her in his arms. They hold each other not for warmth this time, but for human comfort. This is what it is like to die, Dee supposes, and he wonders why he miscast his chart so badly so as not to see this is the where and the when of his final days. He had for himself a long, long life, with much more travel, and a wife, and children. Perhaps that was wishful thinking? And yet—
The rats start screaming in alarm again and so the cat is back.
And it is only now that Frommond weeps. It is a tiny noise, no louder than a rat’s squeak, but low and heartrending. Dee holds her clumsily in his arms. She still wears her cloak, for warmth, but his fingers press her back, and he feels for the hundredth time the vertical ridges of her bodice—loosened now, of course—and he finds his fingers tracing the whalebone from top to bottom.
He stops.
“Jane,” he starts. “What is this whalebone like?”
She tells him.
“Hmmmm,”
he says aloud. “Do you mind?”
“It depends.”
From there it is only a moment before he has her cloak off, and he is fiddling with the points of her bodice.
“Dee? What… are… you doing?”
“I need your bodice. Please.”
“But I need it,” she says.
He understands she has lost some of her wits.
“It is not for warmth, Jane, I promise. It will get us out of here.”
When it is passed over, still warm, bearing Jane’s smell, and while she huddles in her undershirt and cloak, Dee borrows her knife to slice the strips of bone from their fabric holds. One would break under any pressure, but there are ten, each about a foot long, and which, if bundled together, might be fashioned into a spring just strong enough for what he has in mind.
He sets to work, slicing his own coat into strips. He has become adept at knowing exactly where he put things, so has a strange sense of seeing in the dark, and he works fast before the four faint lines of light fade for the night. When it is done, he binds the whalebones together and when that is done, he has in his hands a foot-and-a-half-long spring.
“Ha,” he says.
Frommond says nothing.
She is asleep. He hopes. Christ. What if she’s dead?
He wakes her.
Thanks be to God.
He returns her bodice, or what remains of it, and makes her put it back on, with her cloak on top. She slumps back in her corner of the hold. He places the whalebone spring in his shirt.
But now he needs to retrieve the blade of his own, which when it first fell in the bilge he did not believe he would need. Now that foul bilge water is become even worse, but so is he. He is so depraved and filthy he is equal to it. He doesn’t care now: he plunges both arms into the stew of bilge and their own waste. He fumbles and feels things he will not try to identify. It is an exercise in anti-imagination, he thinks, such as the Russians use to cure hiccups when they run around their houses twice, not thinking of their word for wolf. It takes him a long while. He gags and lets spit trickle from his lips and gags again. His stomach clenches as if squeezed by a giant hand, and he vomits bile but he continues. There is nothing else for it. And at last his efforts are rewarded: the slip of the clumsy blade that he knows so well. Between his fingers.
“Got it!” He shows Frommond. “Jane! Jane! I’ve got it.”
She says nothing.
He splashes over to her.
He shakes her. She flops.
“Come on, Jane. Come on! We will get out of this.”
He does not add if it is the last thing we do, for if they do not—he does not even bother to finish that thought.
She mumbles something.
“Jane!” he shouts. “Jane!”
She moves. She reaches out, feels his face. Places her hand on his shoulder.
“I am all right,” she says. Christ. She is like a drunk. She just wants to be left in peace to sleep it off, but she will not sleep this one off. He slaps her gently on the cheek.
“Jane! Jane! Keep awake! Keep alive. For the love of God! They cannot beat us! We must survive this night! Jane!”
“All right! All right, John Dee. All right.”
He must leave her.
“Keep talking to me,” he tells her. “Tell me something. Tell me something about Bess. About the Queen. How is she?”
“She’s fine. Fine. All right.”
Now he has two knife blades. It is not perfect, by a long straw, but it will do. It will surely work. Surely.
“Do you enjoy being a maid of honor?”
Dee sets to. Using the handle of his own broken knife he starts to tap his blade into the nose of one of the worn rungs of the ladder.
“It is not very interesting. I do not like sewing, or dancing, particularly, although I do not mind that. I do not like Sir Christopher Hatton though he is a very good dancer. He can spin on the spot and he does not grow dizzy. But he is—”
Tap tap. Tap tap. He stops. Listens for movement from beyond the bulkhead. He laughs.
“What is he?” Dee presses.
“Very agile. He can place his hands anywhere and everywhere all at once.”
Dee continues his work. Tap tap. Tap tap.
When his own blade is firmly dug into the wood, he starts on Frommond’s knife. Tap tap. Tap tap.
“Is that a good thing?” he asks.
Tap tap.
“Not always,” she admits. “He can also position himself so that wherever you hold your own hands, you find you are cupping his cods.”
Tap—
“That is clever,” Dee admits.
After a while that knife, too, is dug in. He makes careful adjustments. Then he digs out the length of whalebone from his shirt, and to each end he knots a long piece of the hem of his beautiful velvet coat, leaving enough to tie the strips of ten-folded whalebone to the two knives.
He has, he believes, fashioned a sort of crossbow. But will it work? He pulls the cloth. The whalebone flexes then slides. He pulls the cloth tighter. Tries again. This time it thrums like the string of a lyre. But will it be enough?
He tests it first with a small piece of coal he finds in the stew by his feet.
He tries it as much as he dares and then releases it. The coal cracks into something above. The hatch? He can’t say. He fiddles for another piece of coal and pulls harder this time. The coal hits something up by the hatch, harder this time, and ricochets back to clip him on the shoulder. It doesn’t exactly sting, he thinks.
He finds the hilt of his own knife and places it in the string. He tugs the sling back a few inches farther than before, risking the whalebone bonds, and lets it fly. The handle leaps from his hands. It flies up and cracks into the rung two above the one in which he has dug the knives and falls and he hears it splash under the rung. He is past caring. He sloshes around and begins the search. He could drink this water now, he thinks. The stump of his knife handle is easier to find than its broken blade. He thinks to swap them over. Handle in the step: blade in the sling? He has time.
“Jane,” he says. “Jane. Tell me more about dancing with Sir Christopher!”
“I danced with— He danced with me. He danced with me. A few months ago. He told me he was about to become very rich. Very rich. With money.”
“Money, you say?”
He swaps the blade for the handle and makes further adjustments.
“Something to do with what he called getting into the alchemy game.”
“The alchemy game? The alchemy game? Alchemy is no game.”
She manages a laugh.
“His words. He has… has an admiral who had brought back gold nuggets from the New World.”
Dee laughs absently. Frobisher’s ore!
“Good luck with that one,” he mutters.
Then he draws the sling back. This time the missile flies up and there is a curiously final thud in the wood of the hatch. No splash. Dee reaches up and there on the underside of the hatch, there is the knife blade, hanging—just—from the underside of the wood. He plucks it out and tries one more time, pulling the gut back and releasing it again. This time the flung blade digs into the hatch door by its corner. He needs all the strength in his fingers to pluck it out.
“Hah,” he says.
He turns to her.
“Jane! Jane! Wake up!”
She will not.
He shakes her.
“Jane!” he shouts at her. “I am not about to let you die on me! Do you hear? Wake up! Keep talking!”
She does, very slightly, and all through the night he cajoles and nags her. In part because he wishes her to talk, and in part because he wishes to know more about Hatton and his alchemical games. It actually warms him. Makes him laugh. Gives him a gleeful reason to live. But Frommond keeps slipping away, and he must prod and goad and tease. He makes her hate him, but he keeps her alive, and she is still sensible the moment he hears the snoring through the bulkhead behind stop, and when, achin
gly slowly, the lines around the hatch begin to emerge from the darkness to show dawn is upon them. Now Dee must set her down and wait at the bottom of the steps for his last—his only—chance to get them out of here.
“You stay there,” he whispers. “Say nothing. He must believe we are finally dead.”
That will not be hard, he thinks. He crouches at the bottom of the stairs, half submerged in water, his beautiful green coat worn back to front to cover the white of his shirt, and he waits. The water makes him shudder, but he stays submerged in the silent dark, watching, waiting, attuned to every movement of the man in the cabin beyond the bulkhead. At last there is movement. The man is getting up, and there is always a long time while he says his prayers before he emerges on deck. Dee joins in, murmuring his own prayers that this will work. Then he hears the man come up on deck. He hears the man walking to the deck at the front of the boat to urinate loudly into the river. Dee supposes he must have had quite a bit of beer the night before, for the stream is long and loud. He does not take a shit this morning, thank God, but drops the bucket into the water then hauls it up and holds its rope in one hand while he scrapes the hold hatch door latch back with his foot. Dee can hardly breathe. He slowly stretches the cloth strap back, and he hears the whalebones creak. The man lifts the hatch, light falls into the hold, almost blinding him, but through the thinnest slits of his half-closed eyelids, he sees the man’s shape as he stands with the bucket, and when he does not receive the usual barrage of abuse from Dee and Frommond, he grunts in surprise, and holding the bucket’s rope in his right hand, and the hatch door in his left, he bends to peer down into the hold to see if, perhaps, at long last, his prisoners are dead.
And that is when Dee looses his homemade crossbow.
He does not see where the missile goes, but perhaps he hears something, a fleshy snick, and a cry that is cut off with the light as the hatch crashes shut in his upturned face. But Dee is on his feet the next instant, hauling himself up the rungs, nearly tripping on the whalebones, and he thrusts the hatch cover up and it moves and suddenly he is in dazzling gray light that seems to burn his eyes, but he can see just enough to make out a man staggering in the bow of the barge writhing with his hands clapped to his face.
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