One by one all three let go of Dee’s limbs, and a moment later, he is sitting up, rubbing his ribs, ruing his fall.
“You all right, John?”
“Yes, Mother.”
“You’ll have to pay us for him,” Bill says. “Five marks, eight shillings, and sixpence.”
“Plus expenses,” Bob adds.
Francis Walsingham pulls a face and shakes his head.
“You’ll have to invoice the Treasury.”
“I think I’d rather go with these two gentlemen to the Marshalsea, if it is all the same with you, Master Walsingham,” Dee says.
A spasm of irritation crosses Walsingham’s face.
“You’ll do as you are told, Dee,” he says.
The two men and their dogs, and his mother, watch John Dee climb into the boat with Master Walsingham and settle himself on a thwart next to another man, who will turn out to be Robert Beale, Master Walsingham’s right-hand man.
The oarsmen push off, and they row against the tide eastward, toward London. Little is said. Dee’s arm aches, and there is a hole in his boot. It is a close morning, and a mist haunts the river, left over from yesterday’s rain. After perhaps an hour, the boat brings them into the steps below the Tower, and despite himself, Dee shudders.
“Nothing to fear, Dr. Dee.” Beale smiles. He seems reasonable enough.
“Not yet,” Walsingham adds, with a rictus grin of his own.
His teeth must trouble him, Dee thinks.
They walk up past the Tower and up Seething Lane, escorted by five halberdiers.
“What is all this about, Walsingham?” Dee asks.
They are standing in Walsingham’s curious garden, filled with knee-high hedges cut in geometrical patterns signifying nothing that Dee can determine. He knows he should be modestly impressed, but he has been all over Europe, so he is not.
Walsingham starts by admitting that they have not always seen eye to eye in the past, and that Dee’s current predicament owes something to him, but, he suggests, they need to put all that behind them.
“Why?”
After much diversion, Walsingham eventually explains how he came to have, only to lose, the DaSilva paper.
Dee, being a keen cartographer, presses Walsingham on the whereabouts of the Straits of Anian and removes an object from his bag.
“Do you always carry a globe with you wherever you go?”
“Just show me,” Dee demands.
But Walsingham cannot.
“The page was in code,” he tells him.
“And you lost it? Everybody says how clever and careful you are, Walsingham, but I have always known you as a bloody fool. Do you know how valuable that information is? The Northwest Passage! By Christ, that could have been the saving of our country! We could have broken the papist stranglehold on Christendom! The things we might have learned! And you lost it! Why, tell me, does the Queen permit you even to breathe? Your head should be on the bridge even now, providing thin sustenance for the crows! Dear God! How could you?”
“I did not plan it that way, Dee,” Walsingham snaps. “I did not plan to have it stolen.”
“Well, what are you going to do about it now?”
There is a moment’s silence before Walsingham answers, as eloquent as any set of words.
Dee smiles at him.
“So,” he says, “now you need my help.”
Walsingham is momentarily disconcerted by the easy offer. But he is grateful.
“Yes,” he agrees.
Dee almost laughs. How long has this been coming, he wonders, and he cannot help but recall the last conversation he had with Walsingham, after Walsingham had played a part in sabotaging his standing as the Queen’s adviser on astronomy and astrology because he had a name as a sorcerer, a man who practiced magic. Dee had told him that it was not magic that he practiced, but technology.
“There is a divine force,” he had told Walsingham, “created and controlled by God, that turns the planets, causes the sun to rise and set, the tide to wax and wane. The ancients understood this power, and they understood how to access it. But we have lost that knowledge, and all we are left with is superstition and ignorance, prey to easy exploitation. With time, and money, I could find the lost third book of Johannes Trithemius’s Steganographia and with it regain that knowledge, and so come to an understanding of the use of that divine power.”
This had cut no ice with Walsingham, who had told him the Queen had no need of any companion of hellhounds, or a conjurer of wicked and damned spirits, and he was backed up by that fool, Sir Thomas Smith, with whom Dee had argued about his pathetic and dangerous colony in Ireland, which was just then sucking up all his money, and all that he could borrow from the Queen. It would have been far better for the Queen to spend her money elsewhere: specifically, in the New World. That was where the future lay, Dee had said, not Ireland.
Sir Thomas Smith never forgave him that.
And as for the unfortunate fracas with the Earl of Leicester, well, that was always going to happen. The man wore a mail shirt, for the love of God, because so many people wanted to kill him. Anyway, Dee was sent to pack his bags. He had returned to Mortlake unemployed and humiliated, never, he thought, to see the Queen again.
He had also thought that he would never forgive any of the men their spite, their machinations, and yet now here is Walsingham, begging for help, and Dee despite himself, gives him his ear and his time.
You will pay a hefty price for that, Dee thinks.
“I will need chambers,” Dee begins, “and all my books brought from Mortlake. And my various instruments: my astrolabes; my cross-staffs, all three of them. And I will need to consult widely, with men such as—”
But now Walsingham puts a hand on Dee’s arm as if he were trying to stop a friend embarrassing himself.
“No, Dee, listen,” he says. “It is not that
