So it is Dee’s turn to be taken aback.
“You do not need me to find the Northwest Passage?”
“No, I need you to find the pages. I need you to go and reclaim them for me.”
Dee stares, unbelieving.
“You want me to go and reclaim them? To steal them back?”
“Yes,” Walsingham agrees. “I am in need of your access to the parts of the world where I have none.”
Dee is glad it is only Beale who stands as witness to his foolish hopes of tardy recognition. Meanwhile Walsingham ignores the expression on Dee’s face and continues on. He tells him of how DaSilva’s packet of pages was taken from an intelligencer named Fellowes, whom he says he loved like a son, and of Mistress Cochet, who murdered the man.
“And she was my best, and my brightest,” Walsingham confesses. “Of great beauty, and with an astonishing brain, for a woman, and many other skills besides.”
He leaves it vague what these might be. Dee is hardly listening. His core is molten with shamed anger. Yet Walsingham babbles, as if he believes Dee’s agreement to help still applies. He tells him about the English College at Rheims, and how Isobel Cochet might have been forced to act as she has by the Bishop of Rheims, Cardinal de Guise. Guise and his interest in the intertraffic of the mind.
Dee is silent. He wishes with all his heart that he was alone. He would welcome a cell in the Marshalsea.
“I believe that is most likely where the document has gone,” Walsingham concludes. “I believe you will find it with the cardinal. Since you spent time with Bishop Bonner, you are known to have Catholic sympathies. You may pass among them and know to ask the right questions.”
He finally registers Dee’s dismay.
“What is wrong?”
“No,” Dee tells him. “No. I will not do it. Not your dirty work, Master Walsingham. You do that yourself.”
“But Dr. Dee—”
There follows a torrent of promises: money for more books, money to found the national library Dee has always wanted, money to fund his speculative digs in the Welsh Marches for the buried treasure of the late King Arthur, a position at Trinity. Then come the appeals: to his better nature, to his patriotism, to his Reformist beliefs.
None of them work.
“No, Master Walsingham. I will not pretend I do not wish you had not lost DaSilva’s charts to the Spanish, and that the benefits of such an advantage are not to come England’s way, but you deserve to hang for this, and I will not be the one who moves to save you. You will have to find some other fool.”
Walsingham hangs his head. He knows Dee has his points, and that there is no reason he should risk his life on his behalf.
“But for the Queen? Your Queen?”
Dee is briefly disconcerted. What does Walsingham know? What does Walsingham think he knows? He regains balance.
“This has nothing to do with her,” he says. “Go on. You can take me back home now. Or, no. I see. The Marshalsea. I should have known. Still, I thank you for sparing me a no doubt uncomfortable journey with my bailiff friends and their dogs.”
“I am afraid it will not be the Marshalsea, Dr. Dee. Not for you.”
Dee looks skeptical, but Walsingham is flushed with purpose.
The guards are almost sympathetic as they hurry Dee down Seething Lane, past the well-kept houses of the aldermen, and out into the clearing around the Tower’s moat. He starts to resist as they cross the bridge to the Byward Tower, but it is a totem, and before a man can say the Our Father, he is bundled up the steps of the Beauchamp Tower and into his old cell with a view, should he wish it, of the bluff side of the White Tower and of the scaffold in its keep. The door booms shut. The key turns. Dee is plunged in darkness.
“Oh fuck,” he says.
Dee clenches his eyes and his hands. He sits with his back to the wall and waits. He has been here before, many years ago now. He is attuned to the rhythms of the place: the bells that ring, the doors that close, the clack of keepers’ heels as they pass, the dismal caw of the ravens in the keep. He knows when the food will come; when the buckets will be emptied; he knows when the Queen’s officers will start to circulate, and when he will have to muffle his ears against the screams.
At least he is not manacled.
If only they had let him keep his globe, he might usefully study that. Instead, though, he is without resource other than his mind. He might use this time for thought, but without pen or paper, and without reference, he finds his mind wandering. He thinks about Walsingham. Dee had only told him half the truth: everybody knows him to be clever and thoughtful, that much was true. What was not true is that Dee has ever thought him a fool. Which is what makes the loss of the DaSilva’s paper so astonishing. It is disastrously out of character. If only they had them! If English mariners such as Frobisher, or Hawkins, or even Drake, could find their way through the Straits of Anian, then they might find Cathay, and conquer those lands just as the Spaniards had conquered New Spain. From this, untold wealth would pour back to fill England’s coffers, enough to pay for more warships than Hawkins could even dream of, manned by a navy professional enough to see off every Spanish galley at sea, with enough left over to pay for the books to fill the library he—Dee—had been attempting to persuade the Queen to establish.
This would ensure England was forever ahead of her competitors in the fields of astrology, astronomy, navigation, mechanics, mining, and of course alchemy. She would take her place in the New World, to impose her own values and ethics, in place of those demented
