“It is a pleasure to have such conversation,” he tells the man, “after coming from Paris.”
“Have you come with the cardinal?” the bookseller asks.
Dee is evasive but tells him he has just arrived on the island. “At my master’s orders.”
“Is it true what they say, that the cardinal is waiting for a Spanish fleet?” the bookseller wonders. “Leastways, that’s what one of the Spanish gentlemen told me.”
“Ah, that would be Señor—”
“Not a señor: a padre. Like yourself. Padre Adán.”
“Padre Adán? I had not realized he was a book lover.”
“Oh yes, Father,” the bookseller assures Dee. “He was after books about hidden writings, what he calls steganography, from the Greek, you know. He found my offerings far too humble for his esoteric tastes.”
The man has a high-pitched nervous laugh. Dee smiles. He is closing in, he thinks.
“And where will I find Padre Adán?”
“He stays in the abbé’s quarters, with the cardinal.”
The bookseller gestures. Dee turns. Above is a handsome stone building, its heavy door guarded by two more halberdiers in mustard and plum, and one of those curly-haired hunting dogs.
“I daresay he will be too busy to have much time for study, anyway,” Dee prods.
The bookseller looks blank.
“With the Englishwoman?”
The bookseller shakes his head. He has heard of no Englishwoman.
“The cardinal’s companion?”
Again, no. Dee hesitates and then uses Walsingham’s money to buy a book, a Psalter, bulky enough, and with a brass catch that looks better than it is, which is what he is after. He doesn’t bother haggling.
A Spanish fleet. A priest with a newfound interest in cryptography. But no knowledge of Isobel Cochet. His mind is a swarming hive of bees.
As he is walking away, he hears the bookseller call to him.
“Oh sir! She is not an Englishwoman. She is French! From your city, sir. From Paris!”
Dee raises his arm in a good-willed gesture of farewell.
Ahead are the abbé’s quarters, and Dee’s approach is watched by the bored guards and their intelligent-looking dog. Dee removes his cap. He calls them “masters” and shows them the book he has bought Padre Adán.
“Very fine,” he assures them. “Padre Adán is expecting it.”
He speaks French with a strong Venetian accent, though it is wasted on the two men and the dog, who stare at him with lifeless eyes. Rust blooms on their helmets and breastplates, and their ungloved hands are raw around their halberds. They must hate it here. The dog barks softly.
“He’s at Mass,” one of them tells Dee.
“I know, master, it is that I wanted to leave it as a present. As a surprise for his return.”
Dee is managing to look very old and hapless. The guards let him through and into the abbé’s hall where a servant is rearranging the rushes. There’s another small dog asleep in a ball under a low table on which stands a ewer and a mirror. Dee is more upright when he tells the servant the cardinal has asked him to bring the book to the Englishwoman.
“To help her on the path to righteousness,” he simpers.
The servant looks blank.
“The Englishwoman? You won’t find her here.”
“No? I… ah. Then there is a mistake. Where is she?”
The servant looks at him as if he is witless.
“Still under lock and key,” the servant tells him. “Where she belongs.”
Christ, he thinks.
“My apologies, sir.”
He backs out.
But the servant is suspicious.
“Wait.”
Dee thrusts the book into his hands and turns and is back out and through the guards and scuttling back down the steps before he hears another word. Christ. The dungeons. They are keeping her there.
He meets his pilgrims coming up the slope, and he diverts into the bookseller’s again and watches them pass. Up above, the abbé’s servant has come out and is talking to the bored guards and their dog. There is much shrugging of the “no-harm-done” variety, and the servant is left with a book, so the matter is let drop. Despite only just arriving, the bookseller has already begun to pack away.
“Looks like rain again, sir,” he says. “You never can be sure in this part of the world.”
Dee apologizes and buys a poorly produced pamphlet concerning the everlasting nature of the Trinity.
“You know quality when you see it!” the bookseller tells him.
In fact, he knows thick paper when he feels it. He lets the pilgrims pass, then retraces their tracks back down the hill. He passes an open door, from within which he hears that coarse grinding scrape. He cannot resist stepping inside. Two guards sit watching a bare-chested, wild-looking man trapped within a huge treadmill, walking within its center as if against an incoming tide. A winding rope stretches from the treadmill’s hub out through a doorway that frames a view of the salt marsh and a clutch of low roofs in the distance. Another guard stands peering out over this doorway’s edge, waiting for the sledge to come grinding up its rail. On board is a sheep’s carcass and a sack of cabbages.
“What do you want?” one of the sitting guards asks. “A go in the wheel?”
He has an arquebus, which lends him extra swagger.
Dee retreats and continues down the hill until he finds a soldier on the corner, eating a lump of bread from the nearby bakery.
Dee tells him he is looking for the lieutenant.
The guard gestures up the road.
Dee asks if he will accompany him.
After a moment, the guard supposes he must.
They walk together—Dee takes
