The Queen's Men

by Oliver Clements

  “Hang on! It was not my fault!”

  “No? You let them know you had identified them.”

  “And I tried to tell you then but you would not listen!”

  “If we listened to every Tom, Dick, or Harry’s reason as to why he she or it should be allowed to walk free, Doctor, then we’d never get any work done.”

  He’s a fat man, in a leather jerkin, with arms like boiled hams, eating an onion.

  “What work do you even do?” Dee cries in exasperation.

  “Enough,” the warden says. “Now off you toddle.”

  He waggles his fat fingers.

  Dee could bite them, but he tries to think. What to do? Walsingham must learn that Saelminck was here and is now roving about London. He must learn that his accomplices are with him and have been since… since when? Dee doesn’t know. They were able to pay for preferential treatment, that is for sure, since they were not in the gaol’s sewer room, and they did not need to fight for space at the window from which to beg. Dee knows that the upper rooms of Ludgate are supposed to be almost palatial and that these gatehouse prisons are as stratified as some of Roger Cooke’s more successful distillations. Saelminck and his men could have been holed up here for months, years even, happily undetected, and it was only when he caught Dee’s shocked stare, and knew he’d been identified, that he paid whatever his debt was and left. Dee decides that if he ever gets out of here alive, he will not let on to Walsingham that it was he who alerted Saelminck that he had been spotted.

  But Dee needs to get out, or he needs word to get out to Francis Walsingham.

  He scrapes the message from his last piece of paper, smelling strongly of onion now, and with the scrapings of the ink from its pot, he changes his words and pens the letter to Walsingham, telling him that Saelminck has left Ludgate, with at least five men, and they are now at liberty in the city. He signs it, wraps it back around the onion, and ties it in strips of linen torn from the sleeve of his shirt. He is about to go back up onto the leads, to try to launch it onto Fleet Street when his way is barred by one of the wardens.

  “Not you.”

  His credit is up. He must return to the cellar. Christ.

  Dee opens his mouth to tell the warden that he has cursed the children of the man who sends him to the cellar, but something stops him. There is danger in this sort of thing, he feels. Also, does this oaf have children?

  The warden pushes him toward the stairs that lead down to the sewer room and from which wafts the thick stench.

  “I can’t,” he says.

  “ ’Course you can.”

  “I have to see Francis Walsingham, right now.”

  “Stow it. The only thing you’re going to see is my fucking fist.”

  Dee would class himself as a lover rather than a fighter, but he is not having this. He can’t. Vivid imagery of the man on the barge comes to him, and he wishes he had a boat hook with which to dispatch this one. But no. Instead the warden pushes him sharply. He must run to keep his balance. Then he turns and lets the warden come at him, and then slides out of his way, catching his ring of keys and tugging the man past his outstretched boot. But the warden is set foursquare, solid as a bullock, and does not move.

  He carries a club, too, against just such an event, and he raises it now. Dee backs away. The warden advances.

  Just then there is a barked shout.

  “You there!”

  Both men stop dead still. The passageway behind the warden’s cocked right arm is suddenly filled. Five men, well dressed, led by the senior warden, the very man who dismissed Dee a moment earlier.

  “Here he is.” The senior warden is smirking. “Safe and sound, just like I told you.”

  Dee recognizes none of the five men exactly, but he knows their type. Walsingham’s? Cecil’s?

  “You Dr. Dee?”

  “I am.”

  “I’m sent by Sir Christopher Hatton to see you safely delivered from this… this place.”

  Hatton? Hatton?

  “What does he want with me?”

  “Daresay you’ll find out.”

  Both wardens step back. Dee straightens his much-soiled doublet.

  “Right,” he says. “Lead on. I bid you farewell, my friends. Master Warden, and junior warden. I will mention how helpful you have been when I see Master Walsingham.”

  It is on the tip of his tongue to predict for them that their lives will be short, blighted by violence, death, and disease, and end in miserable poverty, but perhaps they know all that anyway. And, after all, they are only doing their jobs.

  * * *

  The leader of Hatton’s men is John Buckfast. He is a Northampton man with great presence, but little curiosity.

  “I don’t care what your business with Francis Walsingham is. I serve Sir Christopher Hatton and as far as I am concerned, that is that. You are coming with me.”

  He has a very firm grip on Dee’s arm, just above the elbow, and they march out of Ludgate, and along to one of the houses on the Strand, beyond Saint-Dunstan’s-Without.

  “Mind your backs there. Coming through.”

  At the gate the porter admits them, and Dee is taken across the gravel past the door of a very fine, brick-built house in the new style, with gables and very good glass in the windows. Behind the house is a garden, likewise newly laid out, and slightly sparse where the lawn and hedges are yet to fill out. New trees are planted and beyond is a long pink brick wall, punctured by a gate that leads, Dee must suppose, through to the river. Hatton stands to one side, on the lawn, with a knot of gentlemen in riding boots, watching some sort of workman fiddling with various contraptions that appear at first glance vaguely alchemical. Dee can smell gunpowder. As he is being led to them, there is a flurry of movement, and a hissing sound, like an angry goose, that sets Dee’s hair on end, and then something shoots up into the air, a hundred foot above, and explodes with a riot of red stars. Everybody in the garden flinches, but when nothing seems damaged and no one is hurt, they are delighted, and congratulate Hatton as if it is he who has done something marvelous. The noise of the explosion was so sharp Dee can still hear it echoing, and a flock of pigeons is awhirl about the garden, shadows flitting on the grass as the smoke dissipates.

  Hatton notices Dee.

  “Well, well,” he says, stepping back, as if he might catch something from Dee. As well he might, Dee supposes. Hatton is in blue linen and vermilion silk, while Dee has been wearing the same clothes for a week or more.

  Dee thanks him for getting him out of Ludgate.

  “I hope you prove worth it,” Hatton tells him.

  Whatever is he talking about? Dee wonders. Anyway, there is no time for that. He tells Hatton he must find Francis Walsingham, urgently, to tell him about Jan Saelminck. At the news that Saelminck is in London, Hatton seizes up. He is like a rat faced with two traps, Dee thinks, and trying to plot his own best interest gives his eyes an animal quicksilveryness. Should he alert Walsingham, and perhaps save the Queen, but go uncredited? Or should he look for Saelminck himself and claim credit that way? Or should he just sit on his hands and see how this develops?

  Dee has never quite shared Walsingham’s view of Hatton: Can he really wish the Queen gone? When she raised him from nothing? Surely he can expect nothing greater from the Queen of Scots? Unless—?

  “I will send word to Master Walsingham,” Hatton decides. But his voice is too loud. He wants it broadcast, Dee thinks, like seeds of truth, when it’s obvious he’s lying.

  “I can go myself,” Dee presses. “Let me through the gate and I can be at the Tower within the hour.”

  “No, no. No need. I will send one of my own men. In the meantime, I have something else I need from you. Something important.”

  “What can be more important than the life of the Queen?”

  Hatton grows petulant.

  “I have said I will send word, and so send word I shall. I did not spring you from Ludgate to have you argue with me, Dr. Dee. Now, there is
something I need you to see.”

  “What is it?”

  Dee is suddenly in no mood for this. He needs to be gone, but Hatton’s men linger, and he feels the shadow of their grip on his arms. He has no choice but to follow Hatton across the nascent lawn and through some trees to find—picturesquely half hidden under a smock of climbing ivy—a small building set against one of the side walls. It would make a perfect laboratory, Dee thinks. But that is not what Hatton wishes him to see. He wishes him to see something piled against its wall, covered in green sailcloth. A guard in blue stands over it. Not much of a job, Dee thinks. Hatton nods, and the guard puts aside his halberd to pull the cloth back.

  Dee smiles.

  “Well, well,” it is his turn to say.

  Frobisher’s ore.

  “Where did you get that?” he asks.

  “A bailiff’s sale or something. I am not certain.”

  Dee thinks of Bill and Bob. They will have kept some to sell, he supposes, and dumped the rest back at his gate. Then, when the first lot sold, they would have been around to reclaim the rest. It will have gone some way to expunge his debt he hopes, and he wonders, idly, how much they would have got for it.

  “What do you make of it?” Hatton asks.

  What do I make of it? Dee thinks but does not say. Nothing.

  “I am familiar with it” is as far as he will commit. “I have been working on it for some weeks now, trying to extract gold.”

  “With no luck?”

  “These things take time.”

  He cannot see where Hatton is going with this. Then something triggers a memory: Frommond, in the barge, telling him that besides being a fine dancer with a shapely calf, Sir Christopher Hatton was also a buttock-cupper and a breast-squeezer, and that he was also going into what she had called “the alchemy game.”

  “I have a man,” Hatton confesses, “who tells me he can do it.”

  Dee is taken aback.

  “Who?”

  “His name is Cornelius de Alneto.”

  Dee laughs.

  “Cornelius de Alneto? A Dutchman about this high?”

  He holds out a level hand. Five foot perhaps. Unusual for a Dutchman.

  “With eyeglasses?”

  “He is— Yes.”

  “His real name is de Lannoy,” Dee tells Hatton, “and he is also a charlatan and a fraud.”

  Hatton rears back. No man likes to admit that he has been rooked, which is how de Lannoy got away with it the first time.

  “He is not! He is not! He has already shown me what he has extracted from this small sample: over ten pounds’ worth of gold!”

  Dee knows the old phrase: you cannot accumulate if you do not speculate. De Lannoy will have fronted the ten pounds’ worth of gold to prove his worth, and now Hatton is digging into his purse—probably looking to borrow more even—to buy more ore, and soon he will be bled white.

  But Dee hardly cares about this. He is now thinking of Saelminck. Perhaps he has slotted back into his old master’s intrigue? Imagine that: hiding from Walsingham in Hatton’s household! The Hebrews have a word for that.

  “Does he have an assistant? This de Alneto?”

  “How should I know? Christ, Dee, I do not look at, let alone talk to, let alone know, if someone has an assistant. Yes. He must have hundreds.”

  “May I meet him?”

  “De Alneto? No. He is gone back to Flanders, to buy the specialist glass that he needs. He tells me English glass is not clear enough to see through.”

  Dee smiles to himself. Oh yes, that is de Lannoy all right.

  “So what is it you want from me, Sir Christopher?”

  “I am told, or rather de Alneto has been told—by your man Roger Cooke—that you have access to a great deal more of this ore. And since you are unable to extract the gold, it is no good to you.”

  Dee wonders: Is that quite how this sort of thing works? And as soon as Hatton has finished speaking he, too, seems to realize the mistake he has made in telling Dee the amount of gold de Alneto/Lannoy extracted from it.

  “I do have some,” Dee says with a laugh, “as it happens.”

  This is probably no longer true. He does, though, know where to find it—a lot, lot more: two hundred tons of it, in a warehouse in Deptford. That it is not his, yet, and more properly belongs to the Board of Ordnance is neither here nor there.

  “How much are you willing to sell it for?”

  Dee has no clue.

  “How much are you willing to buy it for?”

  That, to him, sounds mercantile.

  But before Hatton can shape his answer, a man bursts from the watergate, ruddy-faced and urgent. One of Hatton’s. He comes running to Hatton and thrusts a tube of paper at his master, who opens it, reads it, grips it in his fist, and then curses and hurries away, following the man back through the watergate, and onto the river, leaving Dee standing with the guard and his pile of worthless rocks.

  * * *

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Hampton Court Palace, Hampton, west of London,

  same day, last week of August 1578

  Robert Beale and Arthur Gregory buried the baby themselves. They had to. No priest would have done it on hallowed ground, for there was never the time to baptize the boy before he was murdered, and so they stopped in one of those small villages with a flint-faced church and a square tower, and they dug the hole themselves, the second grave he and Arthur Gregory have dug together, though this time with tears in their eyes, and they laid the boy down as best they could, and then covered him with warm red soil and Beale was choked with the misery of it. Ness could not get out of the carriage and Gregory said it was better that way.

  Then they continued south, until they saw London again, and they rode past the Dolphin, the inn where they had first seen each other, a lifetime ago, and to the Papey, only to discover Master Walsingham was not there, but in Hampton Court, and so they rode west, and now here they are, arriving at the palace, her bricks glowing ruby red in the sunset, and they are hardly off their horses before Walsingham emerges to greet them.

  “Robert!” he cries, and he comes down the steps before Beale has dismounted, and Beale cannot stop himself weeping to see his old master, and for once Walsingham’s spine unstiffens and he holds Beale and Beale feels the prodigal son and cannot help weeping silently. When it is over, for now, they stand apart, but still holding each other.

  “Robert,” Walsingham says, “someday, there will be a time to mourn for all this, and a time of silence when we can sit and think and talk about what has happened, but that time is not now. Matters are pressing.”

  They turn to the carriage in which Ness remains unmoving.

  “How is she?” Walsingham asks.

  Beale shakes his head.

  “She is broken beyond words. I have taken her from everything. This time last year she was one thing; today she is another.”

  Walsingham nods.

  “She is certainly that. Hatton is combing Christendom for her. Did you see any of his men on the road?”

  Beale did. Gregory took the reins of the coach, and with authority borrowed from Her Majesty’s principal private secretary, he was able to defy their questioning, while Beale rode the long way around, riding alone through the fields and woods, weeping, mostly, and wishing there were a way to undo the last year, to forget he ever met Nicholas Hilliard and ever saw that accursed limning.

  “I have to tell you, Robert, that she will never be safe.”

  Beale is desperate. He had hoped Master Walsingham would have a solution.

  “We can change her appearance,” he pleads against the sense of what he’s saying. “She is much changed already.”

  And she is, but the awful thing about it is that in these last months she has lost much of the fulsomeness of her figure, and of her character, and with them gone, she has become even more like the Queen.

  The coach comes to a stop. Beale moves to open the door, to reassure Ness, but Walsingham stops h
im.

  “She cannot stay here, Robert. You know that, don’t you? She cannot stay with you. Or you cannot stay here. You must take her away. Where I do not know. She has no home. Nor will you have a home, so long as you are with her. She is a danger to herself, a lethal, excruciating danger to herself, and the same to anyone who seeks to assist her.”

  Beale feels himself emptied like a husk. Hollowed out, cored. He feels so dirty, and guilty, deserving, even, of a traitor’s death for what he has dragged her into.

  “What… what do I say to her?”

  Walsingham does not know.

  “Do you love her?”

  Beale is startled by the question.

  “What has that to do with it?”

  “Everything.”

  “I do,” he says.

  “And she you?”

  Beale shakes his head. That ended, when? When she saw him standing by, watching while Gregory murdered the constable? Or during the months that followed, in that house while she was too sick to move, and they broiled in the heat? Or when he could do nothing to stop her baby being dashed to the floor of Mistress Vernier’s house? Or perhaps it was not just a single event, but something that unfolded slowly over the last year. The way these things do. Was it when his promises of life and adventure were revealed as lies, and bit by bit came down to her being holed up in a house that was like an oven from which she was not permitted to venture because men were combing the countryside looking for her, so that they could take her, and torture her, and put her on a pyre and burn her to death as a traitor? Or was it ever really there in the first place? She was ever jealous of Frommond and Dee, and their easy companionship. Why do we always have to fuck each other? she had asked him, and he had had no answer, other than to try to fuck her.

  Oh, Christ. He might vomit at any moment.

  “What shall I do? What shall I do?”

  “There is a solution?” Walsingham tells him.

  “Anything.”