That is when the church bell starts its ringing. Not a summons, or a peal, but an urgent booming alarm. The lieutenant is awake. Dee senses the rustle of running feet all over the island as men answer its call.
“Come on.”
He helps her up the steps and into the nave. She bangs her head and winces. She tries to grip him, to share her weight, but she is very weak. He wonders aloud if he should have brought the handgun?
“You’d’ve hit me before anyone else.”
Now everybody is astir. Dee carries Isobel down the south aisle, hurrying from the shadow of one pillar to the next. A young friar steps out in front of them.
“Master?”
“He nearly killed her!” Dee says, nodding back the way he had come.
The friar hurries past: if there is tumult on the island, he wants to be there to bear witness. Out through the door and into the clearing where the bookseller had his stall. Isobel gasps as the rain hits her. A bugle sounds in the distance. Over the edge Dee catches sight of lines of white horses coming charging across the sands. They are much closer now, and the wind is a force off the sea too.
They do not have much longer.
He picks Isobel up again and carries her back down the steps to the wheel room.
The door is closed. Locked? No. He shoves it open. Deserted. He thanks God.
He lowers her onto the filthy mat and finds a breaking wedge to jam the wheel-room door. Then he takes a sled from the rack and maneuvers it into its grooves on the floor. Isobel watches in silence.
“Isobel,” he says, “lie on this.”
There comes the first shove on the jammed door.
Isobel calms her doubts and crawls across and levers herself aboard the sled.
“What is it?”
Dee hooks the sled to the end of the rope that is wound around the wheel’s spit. There is a net, and a line of hooks on the edge of the sled and he draws the net up over Isobel as he would were he tucking a child into bed. She has not yet seen his plan, because he has not opened the door to the outside yet. When he does, she shouts.
“No.”
But it is too late. He is quickly behind the sled and he shunts it out over the edge so that if she struggled free, she’d only fall the hundred or so feet to her death. She clings on, cursing at him in language he did not know women of her kind used.
Dee takes one last look at the wheel, and the path the rope takes through a series of pulleys that he hopes will at least slow the sled’s descent. He wrote a short treatise on the use of pulleys while he was in the Tower—being so close to the brake does concentrate a man’s mind—and their landing will still be quite a bang, he thinks. He looks up. It is growing dark early. The wind is strong and the rain hits like pebbles against his skin. It lashes his hair, pulls at his hems.
And now there are shouts from the other side of the door. Someone is pounding on it. An ax is brought to bear. The wedge is holding but soon the door will be mere shards.
He has no time to linger, or doubt.
Below him Isobel is clinging to the sled, mewling like a fawn in a fox net.
“Here we go,” he says.
He clambers down onto the sled and lifts the knot from its crook. The sled drops. Isobel gasps. The rope stretches.
“Dee, you fool!”
Dee grips tight. His feet come away from the sled. He feels very exposed. He tries to press himself to the sled and to the rope, but it flows freely through the pulleys above and the sled picks up speed. It grinds down the side of the castle, rattling on the dressed stones of the ramp. Dee’s vision quakes. His teeth are rattling free. Isobel is shouting his name.
The sled hits the buffers at the foot of the hill. His fingers are torn from the rope and he is launched into the air and hurled to the ground. His ribs stretch, his brain is shaken loose, and all the air is driven from his lungs. He drags himself a few paces, scrabbling at the tufts of rough grass. Isobel is half off the end of the sled, bagged in the net but alive and coughing.
He is about to say something when the rope tightens.
They are dragging her back up to the wheel room.
He fumbles for his knife.
The rope is thick, and every slash he makes at it, it pulls away from him. He cuts the net instead. Freeing her and holding her arms as the sled pulls away.
“Come on,” he urges.
“Stop saying that.”
He carries her limp in his arms toward the stables. They are empty with the pilgrims gone home. The gate beyond is open still. The guards are all looking up at the abbey where the bell still rings. Dee straightens his cloak, and resumes his cap, and once more he is M’sieur Dee, pilgrim, come to offer prayers at the shrine of Saint Michael. With his wife.
“Who is taken ill, masters.”
The guards look at her doubtfully, but she coughs. Instantly they step back. There have been outbreaks of plague in Italy already this year. It explains why no one tries to stop them leaving, although one guard, so fresh-faced this might be his first day on duty, tells them they will have to rush.
“It is going to be a high one today,” he shouts above the wind.
This Dee has anticipated.
Through the gate, the wind is now stronger still. Dee can hardly hear the bell clanging in the belfry, or the gate booming shut behind them. He puts an arm under Isobel and they set off back along the causeway.
“Soon be there,” he tells her.
He knows he must time this absolutely perfectly.
The sand under their feet has taken on an oily
