On they go.
“You only need to get yourself beyond halfway,” he tells her.
She is shivering, almost unable to stand.
“Don’t tell me to come on,” she mutters.
He doesn’t. He is looking back over his shoulder.
The gate! It is opening again.
Soldiers spill out onto the causeway. He hears the pop of a gun. So does she.
“They’ll have to be better shots than you if they are to hit us in this wind,” she says.
“I have already admitted I am no markman,” he says. “I am a scientist, a geographer, and an astrologer.”
“And an espial for Walsingham.”
“Not if I can help it. Come, save your breath.”
The soldiers are still shooting.
They will never—
“Ach!” Isobel cries out.
She staggers in his grasp and claps a hand to her hip. She writhes and grunts percussively. Again she curses. She shows him her hand, pink with rain-diluted blood. In her dress, above her right buttock, it is as if someone has stitched a red poppy, with a black center. He might almost see the ball.
“Can you walk?”
She is looking back at the soldiers as if they have wronged her.
“I will have to,” she says.
They can hear the waves falling now.
Dee changes sides and she uses him as a crutch. She swears pungently: Walsingham is a coxcomb and a whoreson whelped in a ditch. The sand under their feet is changing character. It stretches and gives, like well-kneaded dough. He looks to her to see what she thinks. She is in pain with every step. Soon he will have to carry her.
Another pop. Closer this time, and something plucks at his cloak hem. The ball skuffs across the sand, bouncing once, twice. Behind him the soldiers come running.
He scoops Isobel up.
She screams with pain.
He ignores her.
In the sand, his feet seem caught in a slow bounce.
Another pop.
“Put me down,” she tells him. “I can walk.”
“Just a bit farther!”
He forces himself on. His arms and legs and shoulders burn with the effort. He looks over his shoulder. Ha! The soldiers have come too far and they know it. The tide is come in, and they are caught. They are throwing away their guns and their weapons, discarding their armor and helmets as they run, not to be weighed down.
But they are too late. He sees them struggling in the sand, suddenly wading as the earth changes from solid to liquid. Then the waves break around them.
“Put me down,” she tells him.
He has to. He takes her hand and drags her along, moving faster now.
The danger is no longer the men; it is the sand and the sea, and the thing they form together.
She stumbles and falls. He goes to pick her up. He will have to carry her after all. He throws her over his shoulder. He sinks in to the sand. The waves crash twenty paces away, the first tails of froth washing about his shins. He unsticks his foot. The next one sinks all the deeper.
“Dee!” she calls. “Dee! Leave me! We will both die!”
“No!”
“Dee, you bloody fool!”
“I won’t!”
Suddenly he feels a rough edge across his throat. She has taken his knife and holds it there.
“Leave me! Leave me!”
Another step.
The blade presses.
“For the love of God, Mistress Cochet!”
“Leave. Me.”
One more step.
He feels his skin part under the blade. He stops. He is sinking. He tries to throw her, but he can get no purchase and drops her. She sits with his knife pointing at his testicles.
“We can do it!” he shouts.
“No,” she shouts back at him. The first wave froths across her legs. She’s bleeding heavily.
He has to flex his legs to keep himself from sinking.
It is only another bowshot to safety.
But he knows she is right.
He can’t carry her. She can’t walk.
“Oh Christ, Mistress Cochet.”
“Don’t mourn me, Dee. I go to a happier place. But look to my daughter, Dee! See to her! Make sure she has all she needs. Tell her her mother died out of love for her. No. Tell her—her mother loved her.”
There are tears in both their eyes.
There is no sign of the soldiers.
Dee extracts one foot. Then another. A moment later he stands five paces from her and the waves are breaking about her shoulders. She manages to stand. She turns to him.
“Dee! Dee!”
He faces her.
“Don’t you want to know the numbers?”
The numbers! The numbers. The thing he most needed. The reason he is there. He stands looking at her. The waves are up to her waist, his knees.
She holds his gaze while she shouts them out. There are seventeen of them. Five letters, too. She shouts the sequence twice.
He repeats them back to her.
She laughs. She can’t move now. She is anchored, and knows it, finally, as a fact.
“Not much by way of my last words!” she shouts.
“What?” he calls.
“I said, look after Rose! Cherish her!”
This he does hear.
“I will!” he lies.
“Go now, Dee. I don’t want you to watch.”
He himself can hardly move. He plucks his leg from the sucking sand.
She raises a hand.
He raises his—and turns away just as the first wave engulfs her.
CHAPTER NINE
Auderville, Normandy, Eve of the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, September 13, 1572
The churches in this part of Normandy do not have spires. They are solid and squat, and largely unadorned, much like the people hereabouts, but when their bells ring, they are very intimate, and close, and rouse a man from his deepest sleep. Dr. John Dee is not asleep though. He has slept very little in the last four days, not since he left Isobel Cochet to drown on the sands below Mont Saint-Michel.
Since then he has ridden a horse half to death, and wept a great deal, which surprised him, for he did not believe himself the sort given to
