“You will miss Mass!”
In the guardroom, just before the abbé’s house, the lieutenant sits at a table eating an onion and is in no mood to listen to Père Whoever complaining that some of his men are drunk and playing dice in a house below.
“And they have a woman with them,” Dee tells him.
“A woman?”
Now he is on his feet.
“Show me to her,” he says. Dee leads him back down the pathway, to the bottom of those steps. He rolls the pamphlet tightly.
The bell in the abbey begins its ringing for Mass. Seagulls take wing almost as noisily.
“Putain!” the man shouts as his shoulder is splashed with bird dropping. It is an easy enough trick. While he is off balance brushing it from his cloak, Dee moves fast. He spins the man into a dark corner and drives the blade of his hand very hard, just below his ear. It hurts like hell, but the man is instantly as if without bones, and Dee must clutch him to himself, chest to chest. He lets him down gently, and then drags his body behind a cistern. He has no idea how long the man will be out. An hour? A day? He pulls off his coat and takes up his hat. Not a bad fit, considering.
A moment later, Lieutenant Dee emerges from the shadows.
The road is crowded now, with men and women hurrying to Mass. The guardsman who’d taken him to the lieutenant salutes him as he passes. He walks up the road following the blood-beaded tracks of the pilgrims and back into the guardroom. There is now only one man there, half asleep on a bench.
Dee stalks across the room and through the far door into the darkness. He slams the door behind him. It takes a moment for his eyes to adjust. There is lamp glow along a corridor. Dee steps out, but instantly staggers. The corridor slopes down, and there is a lamp farther along, in a sconce, smelling strongly of fish oil. He lifts it from its shelf and carries it down with him. He has the lieutenant’s sword belted about his middle, but a shorter knife ready, just in case. The smell and the chill rise to meet him. He can feel a putrid draft in his face.
The corridor soon levels out. Gray light sifts through a series of doors set in the weeping rock of the island, all barred in iron. Dee passes along them. Within are men, who shrink from the meager light thrown by his upheld lamp. They are pitifully dressed and the stench is foul. He wishes he had brought the Queen’s nosegay of meadowsweet. He feels chilled to the bone, disgusted to his core.
“Mistress Cochet! Mistress Cochet?” he calls.
There are muttered curses and he is foully insulted, but Dee passes on. Hands come at him through one barred door. A woman with no teeth and rat-tails for hair offers him her use for some bread.
He walks on.
At the end of the corridor is one last door, unbarred.
He lifts the lamp and it is nearly extinguished in the draft.
This is it, he thinks, the cell with the sea view.
The steps are slick and green with weed, and very treacherous. An iron rail is affixed to the wall. He takes it.
“Mistress Cochet?”
He holds the lamp high. Another step. His breath is a cloud before him, even on a late summer’s day. He feels racked in cold and fear, and the walls press in on him. Seaweed covers their lower half and he is still only a short way down the steps. Down he goes, to the last step. Ahead is another iron door. The line of seaweed reaches up the wall to within a hand’s span of the dungeon roof. Put a man in here, and in a high tide, he will drown. What horror would go through his mind when the water started in over the sill? It is effortlessly cruel.
“Mistress Cochet?”
No answer.
Dee clutches the still damp, much-rusted iron bars.
“Mistress—”
The door swings open and he is forced to cling to its bars. The window to the sea is likewise barred against escape, but Dr. Dee sees the dungeon is empty.
He retraces his steps back up the corridor where the prisoners implore him for release. It is like being in London, he thinks, when old soldiers beg for coins, and a man must admit he has none.
“No keys,” he tells them, clutching his empty purse. “Sorry.”
The wailing is pitiful, but Dee must hurry away from the stink. He feels as if he is coming up from the darkness in search of air and light. He replaces the lamp in a sconce and marches through the guardroom where the same guard now stares at him openmouthed.
He walks out and turns left.
The lieutenant is not yet awake, obviously.
But where then is Mistress Cochet?
He will have to find this Father Adán and follow him. Where will he be? At Mass. Dee reclaims his persona of M’sieur Dee and sets off toward the abbey back at the top of the Mont, where bells are still ringing. His steps take him out onto the castle walls. To the north the view of the sea is framed by a series of forelands. Funny to think that far away, beyond even the Spanish fleet that might—or might not—be beating toward them across the Bay of Biscay, elemental forces are gathering, shifting their powers to send the seawater rolling back over the mud, breaking the causeway and cutting the isle off from the land. He supposes he must have been on the island for an hour.
He quickly becomes lost in a maze. Some stairways lead only to locked doors, and when he retraces his steps he finds himself somewhere he has never been before. The streets seem to narrow, and he loses his bearings.
More guards are gathered along the walkway. Dee holds his nerve and passes
