“And she is safe? She is with Her Majesty? Where?”
“In Nonsuch.” He is silent for a moment. Gripped with rage at his own riskiness. Why not Greenwich or Hampton Court? Why Nonsuch? Why put even the slightest hint in her mind?
But Isobel Cochet is in no mood to be swayed by such indicators.
She sobs with relief.
“Oh thank God.”
Her head hangs low, hidden by hanks of loose hair and she weeps quietly for a few moments while Dee curses himself. Christ, this is a dirty business. He imagines that outside the afternoon will be wearing on. The tide: it will be coming in, and coming in fast. He has spent nights in worse places, of course, but as soon as the lieutenant wakes, he will sound the alarm. They will come looking for Father Adán.
After a while Mistress Cochet wipes her nose on her soiled sleeve.
“So now there remains me,” she says, “stuck in this thing.”
He does not know how she can bear it.
“Get me out, get me to England, and reunite me with my girl, and those numbers will be yours.”
He will cross each hurdle as it comes, he thinks.
And getting her out of the cage is the first.
But the truth is: he cannot.
Had he a set of jeweler’s tools, or even a blacksmith’s tool, or—wait.
He steps away, back over the body of the dead Spaniard, Father Adán. He takes out the handgun and studies it a moment. It is a well-worked thing, though simple enough: a small powder pan covered by a sliding silver disk, a length of fuse poised above. If the disk is slid back, and the lever below the barrel is squeezed to the body of the gun, the fuse will come down into the powder, and if the fuse is lit, the powder will catch fire, and, through a small aperture at the sealed end of the barrel, it will ignite the main charge within the barrel, which will then explode. The force of this explosion will propel the ball in the barrel out of the barrel’s end at astonishing force.
Or so Dee is given to understand.
“Have you ever done this before, Dee?” Cochet asks.
“I have seen it done,” he lies.
“Show me,” she tells him.
He slides the steel catch off the powder pan and shows her it is full.
“Is there a ball in the barrel?”
He doesn’t know, but it’s still worth a try. Both cringe from the gun as he holds its barrel against the chain lock and squeezes the trigger to lower the fuse. There is a crack and a blinding flash. The gun bucks in his hand, tearing the skin of his palm. Smoke fills the air. Something hits the stones and flies away into the darkness.
“Yes,” he answers her question. “Are you all right?”
“God, Dee.”
“Sorry.”
“Has it worked?”
The lock is too hot to hold. It has a large silver pock in the corner of its face.
“You couldn’t even hit it from an inch!”
“I am not a markman,” he agrees.
It looks more solidly locked than before. He hits it with the gun. Nothing happens. It is still locked.
God’s truth.
Another ball might do it?
“Did you try Adán’s purse?” Cochet asks.
“What for?”
“The key.”
Ah.
Dee turns the dead priest over and there is not one key in his purse, but two. Both are as long and as fat as a lady’s forefinger.
The second one he tries fits in the keyhole, but the lock is made a great deal stiffer for having been shot. Miraculously, though, it opens. He laughs. She laughs. Then she collapses with relief and the cage sways. He starts to unweave the fat chain through the fat iron bars.
“Come on, come on,” she urges. She pulls at the chain from the other end.
“It won’t help,” he tells her.
“It might.”
After a long frustrating moment, they have the chain rattling through the final bars and the cage crashes apart. Dee leaps back as the heavy iron lattices hammer to the ground around him. Cochet grabs the top rail and hangs.
“Help me,” she bleats, for she is very weak and racked with cramps. He grips her legs. She is unpleasant smelling. He hardly cares. She lets go of the bars and he carries her a few paces and then places her on the ground, just managing to catch her before she collapses.
He helps her to a bench by a lectern on which papers are pinned.
“The other key,” she says. “It will be for the sacristy.”
Dee hurries to the oak door at which she points. It is plated in parts, and the key seems almost too delicate to open such a thing, but it does, revealing a storeroom into which Dee can walk. On one side are shelves holding a great many books—Bibles and Psalters and nothing of any interest to him, though obviously valuable—as well as various shrouded shapes he assumes will be monstrances, chalices, candleholders, and the various dishes associated with the rites of Mass. On the other, wardrobes for the abbé’s vestments. He holds up a candle and searches the shelves. Everything is thick with dust, except there: a leather folder stuffed with loose papers. Dee takes it down.
“That’s it,” Cochet tells him. “In there. It might only be a copy.”
Is that good enough? Probably, if they do not have DaSilva’s second page. He takes it but cannot resist looking at it. It is an astrological chart, he is sure of it. Whose? He cannot say. No wonder Walsingham was puzzled. He takes the rest of the papers and folds them into his doublet, wherein he keeps his passport, along with his notes of ponderings jotted down. Even up here, things get covered in grit from the beach. He drags Father Adán over to the sacristy, and once in, he locks the door behind.
Isobel Cochet tells him to break the key in the lock.
“So he’ll ripen, and smell the place out for a month or two. It’ll remind them of their corruption.”
He does so, snapping it off and sending its broken end skittering into
