And so his reputation was broken, though not, unlike many, his body, for while others were racked and then burned, he—Dee—was held for weeks on end, and then summoned before the Star Chamber, where he was questioned almost endlessly about his intentions and practices, and he was held in various prisons in and around London, mostly in the Bishop’s Palace, but for one strange week here, in this very room, in the Beauchamp Tower.
His bowels had turned liquid as they had brought him upriver that first time, in the falling dark, and to the sound of a tolling bell.
“I am no traitor!”
“Right.”
He had prayed all through that first night and in the morning the guards had found him still kneeling.
“Thought you were godless?”
“No one is godless in the Beauchamp Tower,” Dee told him. “Besides, it is more complicated than that.”
They had taken him to the Star Chamber again that day, to be cross-questioned by judges and clerics, and with every question he had feared for his life, for even from the river, he had seen the sky to the north of the city smudged with the pyre smoke of burning martyrs. The air had seemed to crackle with their pain.
It was on the second day, returning after a morning in Westminster, that Dee saw her again. Elizabeth. She was walking on the wall between the Bell Tower and his Beauchamp Tower. She was dressed very darkly, and she looked ill, but there was no mistaking her. He effected a bow as best he could with his hands manacled, and his guards—four of them—were sympathetic to the princess’s plight. She had been imprisoned not because she had asked to see her sister’s future, but she was a party to Wyatt’s rebellion against Queen Mary’s marriage to Philip of Spain.
She had turned and watched Dee being marched to his tower, and she had raised a fist in solidarity. Once in his cell, with the door shut in on him, he had hurried to the window that, if he pressed his face through its aperture, also gave him a view of the wall on which she still stood.
“My lady!” he had called “My lady!”
And she had smiled at him, and wept with joy that he was still alive, and he wished he might extend a hand, just to touch the tips of her fingers again, but it was not to be.
They had, though, in spite of everything, passed the days often just as before; in long discussion, and even some laughter, and what might have been hellish became bearable because she would often call to him from her post on the wall, and though she was a prisoner, she was also the Queen’s sister, and the guards would look the other way.
“Dr. Dee! Dr. Dee!”
The voice is insistent. But it comes not from the past, not from his wakeful dreaming, but from the present.
“Dr. Dee!”
It is a woman’s voice, one that he has not heard for some time but cannot forget. His Queen. She is framed by the open doorway, in very dark blue linen, a tall collar, her hair under a jeweled net.
Dee stands. He dusts himself down. He bows.
“Your Majesty,” he says.
“We didn’t disturb you?” she asks, allowing him to take her hand and press his lips to the ridge of gloved knuckles. She is wearing four rings: diamond, two rubies, and one plain gold. She smells of myrrh.
“I was just this moment coming to the whereabouts of the philosopher’s stone,” he tells her.
“While snoring?”
“A ruse to ensure I go undisturbed.”
“And how well does that work for you?”
“Not awfully,” he agrees. “Though I did not expect houseguests. I should have baked a cake.”
“We should have liked that.” She smiles, but her smile is strained. “It will be better fare than I can expect at Hill Hall.”
“Hill Hall? You are to see Thomas Smith?”
“Yes,” she says with a sigh. “I need show myself to the men of Essex, they say, and so, to Hill Hall it is. I’d almost rather stay here, if I were able.”
There is a pause. Dee can feel his eyebrow creeping up: Yes?
Elizabeth sighs. She is carrying a fan of meadowsweet against jail rot. Dee is suddenly conscious of the bucket stinking in the room’s corner. The Queen crosses the room to the window, looking out over the bailey, over the scaffold toward the church.
“So,” she says.
“So,” he says.
“I regret to find you once more so constrained, John. It was not my intention.”
“No? Master Walsingham exceeding his orders again?”
She sighs.
“He does what he must,” she says.
“Must he threaten me with death?”
She smiles vaguely.
“Did he do that?”
Dee growls. Not really, he supposes.
“But I am,” Elizabeth says. “I am daily threatened with death.”
He sees that she has aged. Her skin, once lustrous, has thinned, cracked, dried. She wears powder under her eyes.
“You do look tired, Bess,” he tells her.
She turns to him, a scribble of anger across her face.
“You are not to call me that again.”
She glares at him, her eyes very blue even in the dark, and he remembers how those same eyes used to look at him, before she was queen, and they were fellow prisoners together.
“Preoccupied, then,” he corrects himself. “Your Majesty.”
She stares at him, and for a moment, he thinks he may have lost her. They have been strangers too long for such jokes, and to forge herself a queen, she has had to remake herself entire. Sadness and fear almost overwhelm him.
But at last she smiles and lets out a long sigh.
“It has been too long, John.”
“It has, Your Majesty.”
She nods. Her eyes dart around the room. She licks her lips.
“I am sorry to come to you only in this hour of my need,” she starts, dropping the royal “we” and shape-shifting to become more like the Bess of old whom he might distract with descriptions of the kingdom of
