“I hoped you would help recover what is lost,” she goes on, remembering their closeness. “If not for Master Walsingham’s sake, then for your country, and if not for your country, then for mine. For me.”
She stares at him for a long, comfortless moment. And Dee is lost for words. Then she leaves.
When she is gone, he finds his words, but by then it is too late to undo all that he has done, to do all that he has left undone.
That night Dee dreams of tides washing over broad sands, of a mountain, of a ringing bell, and of the Archangel Michael.
In the morning he calls out: “Fetch me Walsingham!”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Beauvoir, Normandy, September 9, 1572
John Dee does not dislike horses, but this one is slender, and pin buttocked, and he is pleased to be down from its saddle. He shields his eyes from the evening sun and looks south across the sea toward a distant pimple of rock, set far from the seashore— isolated; lonely; impregnable, castellated, and atop: an abbey spire pointing to God.
Mont Saint-Michel.
Property of the Cardinal of Lorraine.
He stands awhile waiting, watching the tide come in. It moves, he has been told, faster than any horse in Christendom, and when it comes, the landscape transforms into seascape at a frightening speed. He shivers and leads the horse along the newly engorged river’s north bank, wishing he had come by boat after all.
“I don’t like linear journeys,” he’d told Walsingham, when they had stood by the wharfside in Sandwich, watching the boat being loaded with wools for the markets in Antwerp.
Walsingham had rolled his eyes.
“But are you sure about this, Dee? Revealed to you in a dream? We are… we are staking the nation’s future on something you saw in your sleep?”
“Walsingham,” Dee had said. “You will have to trust me.”
The exact noise Walsingham had made could not be rendered in letters of any known alphabet.
“It is not me who trusts in you and your dreams, Dee,” he’d said. “It is the Queen. All your dreams and intuitions. Tcha.”
“They have never yet let me down,” Dee had told him, not absolutely certain this was the case. But he had been absurdly pleased to hear of the faith Bess still put in him.
“We’ll see,” Walsingham had said. “So. Go with God, and we will send a ship to meet you off Nez Bayard in—”
“Yes, yes, Walsingham. On the old Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, I know. I shall expect the finest luxury: maidens, swans, samite, and so forth.”
Walsingham had growled, and when at length the boat had docked in Calais, Dee was quickly into a saddle, brandishing the passport Walsingham had forged for him, and on the road to Avranches as soon as could be managed. If Dee’s dream was wrong, then it would be best to find that out sooner rather than later. After five days’ riding only the fleetest horses, he was at the Lion D’Or, saddle sore and sick of salty mutton.
“You are a pilgrim, m’sieur?” the innkeeper had asked, pouring him a big jolt of calvados and pushing it over the counter.
“I am,” he had confirmed and had required another cup.
And now here he is, his boots tied and slung around his neck, waiting at dawn in the marketplace with the party of perhaps twenty French pilgrims, each one likewise barefoot. Their guide is a sullen Norman with a mustache the color of wet straw, in thigh-length boots of sealskin and an oiled hat, who tells them first how the abbey came to be built after the Archangel Michael appeared to the Bishop of Avranches, likewise in a dream.
“The bishop ignored the archangel not once, nor twice, but three times, until the archangel burned a hole in his forehead—like this, see?—after which Bishop Aubert thought he had best do as ordered.”
And so the abbey was founded on an uncompromising rock in the middle of a sea of muddy sand and water, where the tides were fast, vast, and unpredictable.
“It is the most treacherous place in the world after London,” the guide continues. “Most days the water rises three times the height of a man, and sometimes as much as five times. It comes in faster than a horse can gallop, and there are times in the day when the land you think you are standing on turns to water, and down you go. Pop Pop.”
Despite the nervous laughs it is not funny, he says. Many pilgrims have died: drowned or sucked down by the liquid sand. This is why they must pay him to guide them through the mudflats to the rock itself, where the abbey spire dominates the land as far as the eye can see.
“You try to cross one moment too early: you drown. You try it one moment too late: you drown.”
They set off through the dawn, the donkeys very strong smelling. A sea mist pleats and gathers in the wind. Dee shivers. He is not well. He nudges his donkey forward.
“Is the abbé here?” he asks, nodding forward into the mist.
“Of course,” the guide tells him.
“Anybody else?”
The guide gives him a snide look.
“My sister,” he says. “She is very busy.”
He stretches the word very: ve-e-rry. A cook? A whore? He hopes she is better looking than her brother. Of course she must be. But what does it mean? They ride through the low marshland. Tall grasses sough in
