Nothing.
“Up here.”
Above is a tall cube, hanging in midair about a man’s height off the ground. It is too dark to see what it really is. Dee returns for a candle and brings it over. Hot wax on his fingers is nothing: the cube is a lattice of iron bars, hanging from the roof, and within: a woman. Isobel Cochet.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Mont Saint-Michel, September 9, 1572
“My God,” she says, “you took your time.”
He stares. The cage. The guide mentioned it: the iron cage the size of which can be changed to fit any man. Only now Dee sees what he meant: its size can be changed to unfit any man. Too short to stand in upright, too narrow to sit or lie, the cage holds Isobel Cochet crouching with her knees and neck bent. It might be tolerable for the length of time it takes to say the Our Father, but longer than that and it would drive you mad. The sea coming in through your window every day, which he endured, would be bad enough, but this?
“Who are you?” she asks.
“John Dee,” he tells her. “Dr. John Dee.”
He holds the candle up to light her face. Her eyes are sunken and feverish. Her dress—the color of dried sage leaves—is ragged and filthy, her linens gray and ringed with stains, and her nails are like talons. He can feel the heat of desperation coming off her.
“Walsingham sent you?” she asks. She does not seem quite as pleased to see him as he had supposed.
He studies the cage. Six sheets of iron bars, each edge stitched together with a fat iron chain ending in a lock as large as a man’s fist. He reaches up to rattle it. It might hold back an elephant.
“Why do they keep you in this?” he asks.
“Because I have only given them half of what they want.”
Dee wonders if he is missing something. Then he sees it.
“And you will not let them have the other half until you see your daughter safe.”
“Exactly.”
“What have you given them so far?” he wonders.
“The first of the two pages,” she tells him. “It is nothing but a strange geometrical drawing, square, like this, with circles within.”
“Who has it?”
“Father Adán,” she says. “He keeps it locked in there.” She gestures at what might be a sacristy door. “He asked me questions about it all day. Most nights, too.”
“And the page you did not give him?”
“Burned. Ashes in a sluice.”
Dee is alarmed.
“Christ,” he says. “What was it?”
“A list of numbers. Some letters.”
“That is all? Not a map? Do you recall any of the numbers? The letters?”
She looks at him.
“Do you know anything about me, Dr. Dee?”
“I know Walsingham values you more highly than anyone else in his employ.”
Isobel laughs bitterly.
“Why do you think that was? Because I am able to suck on a man’s pizzle until he falls faint for lack of strength?”
Dee hesitates. “Can you?”
She sighs. “It was because, among other things, I need only look at a thing once to memorize it forever.”
“That is useful,” Dee concedes.
She is silent, waiting.
“So?” she asks.
“So I am here, to retrieve the document.”
“Ah,” she says. “A dilemma.”
A dilemma of her own device: now she is become the document he must rescue.
They smile at each other.
“If you were to give me the figures?” he suggests, pointlessly.
She just laughs. “It is a little more complicated than that.”
“In what way?”
“My daughter.”
Dee stands as if on a threshold. He knew this would happen. He had come to no decision what he would say when she asked. Now he does.
“Mistress Cochet,” he says. “That is why I am sent: the Queen has Rose in her care.”
There is a long silence. Dee feels the world bending to look at him. Even the abbey’s stones. He can hear their screams. He has committed an outrage against God. Isobel Cochet looks at him, too, and she should scream in bloody horror, but she wants to believe him. She wants to believe her child is safe. She does not want to believe she has just been condemned to death.
“How do you know?” she asks. A residue of suspicion.
“She told me before I set out.”
“Have you seen her with your own eyes?”
“No,” Dee admits.
“But she told you? The Queen?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Walsingham believed it was the only thing that would make you kill his intelligencer in Paris.”
Cochet closes her eyes.
“He is right,” she says. “May God defend me, I had no choice.”
She tells him how she was taken in the Louvre.
“Or, not taken, just spoken to, in one of those rooms they have there, with a huge fire, and mirrors instead of wainscoting. One of the cardinal’s men, this man, Father Adán, he caught me unawares. He had a doll of hers. Of Rose’s. A little thing my husband had once given her.”
“So you never spoke to the cardinal?”
She shakes her head. “Not until later. Until they brought me here.”
“How did Adán put it?”
“He told me Rose was safe. That she was being well cared for, by a good family. He wished I could see her, even, for she was so enjoying herself. Only if I ever did want to see her again, then I needed to find something that Adán had heard had just come into the English ambassador’s possession.”
“And you were to bring it to him?”
“Yes. Bring it here. Paris was impossible at the time, even for the king. All that blood. All those bodies. And the people: still maddened by it all. Anyway. I thought to find Rose here, but no. And when I did not see her, I would not give them what they wanted.”
“So here you are.”
“So here I am. But tell me about Rose. The Queen found her? The Queen?”
“Well. Francis Walsingham. Once they had heard what had happened to Oliver Fellowes. Because of it, he rode to your father’s house. In Kent. And finding the girl, your daughter, missing, he sealed the ports. She was picked up off a cog of smoked mackerel
