But what is it? A communication. A communication from someone, or something, at many stages removed.
My God, he thinks. My God.
Ecce Cardan. Here is Cardan.
Jerome Cardan. The great horoscope caster of the late King Edward, forced to flee the country. And to where? Paris.
Dee lays his hands on the table.
The midnight bell rings.
It is the Catholic Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, and by dawn he must be on the headland with a muffled lamp, ready to answer a signal from out at sea.
But for a further candle’s length of time he sits in frozen silence.
Yes. He sees it now. Oh yes. He sees it now.
He knows only what Walsingham has told him as to how the document ended up in Isobel Cochet’s hands, and she confirmed that she had killed Walsingham’s espial, Oliver Fellowes, but Dee also knows Walsingham of old. Walsingham is a man who weighs every word. He knows its value, not just on the mouth, but to the ear, too. He knows how much a man hears what he wants to hear. And so Dee must go back and analyze every word said, and what was meant, and what Walsingham intended that Dee should think it meant.
As he is in this state of lucid dreaming, thinking about Walsingham and his various machinations that see within the scheme of things, a further possibility, a deeper layer emerges. It makes sense of everything that has happened and makes sense of the chart and of Isobel Cochet’s numbers and of her death.
He stands.
He looks down at his papers.
Yes, he thinks, yes. Now he sees it. And he finds he has clenched his fists so hard he must unstick his nails from the palms of his hands.
Bloody goddamned bloody butcher Walsingham.
Dee gathers his papers, all the various versions of the horoscope wheel with the numbers applied, and he picks out the one that suggests the mouth of the straits is in the very far frozen north. This is the version in which the numbers are unencrypted. He lays this on his table, held down with his mug and inkpot, and takes the others in a pile and steps around his table, over the innkeeper-fisherman, to the fire. He uses his sleeve to lift the fire cover and sets it aside. Then, one by one, he feeds the slips of paper into the embers and holds them while they burn. He thinks of Isobel Cochet as he does it, how she must have burned the numbers in just such a fashion, and then, when they are burned, properly, he stirs the ashes with the poker and replaces the cover.
He wipes the soot from his fingers on his breeches and shakes the innkeeper-fisherman awake.
“Where is the Nez Bayard?” he asks.
The man is confused. Dee repeats himself twice. Finally, the man understands and tells him.
“North,” he says, gesturing. “A thousand paces. Maybe more.”
Dee leaves him and returns to his seat at the table and his long-cooled cider, and he sits looking at the single paper—the original stolen from the abbey—and dark tendrils of blackest thought twist up through his body and soul. They wrap themselves about his mind, and they pull tight. But still he does not move for a long moment, and then, when he does, it is to remove his hands from the document, and he leaves it there, with his pen and his bag, and his extra candles.
He waits.
It will not be long now, he thinks. They will be here soon.
A moment later all four greyhound heads rise as one.
Dee pinches the candle wick.
In the dark he reaches for Mercator’s globe.
He crosses to the door on soft feet. He knows the innkeeper has a crossbow in the rafters, but is it nocked? Probably not. The bolt though. Dee stretches up and finds it and plucks the bolt from its groove. Thick as his finger, long as his hand, a rough iron spike on one end, stubby fletches the other. He slips it up his left sleeve and presses his ear to the planks of the door.
A thin whistle of wind at the cracks. Can he hear the sea? He’s not sure. He stands there a good long while. He supposes his eyes would be used to the dark now, if it wasn’t so absolute. He steps back to let the door sigh open on the breeze. Gray starlight falls through the opening and he is quickly through and out into the recondite yard.
Overhead, stars. He is facing west.
Ahead is the stable, but a horse snickers to his left, to the south.
Then a voice, a man’s in a low murmur, ahead, by the stable.
Dee ducks below the stone course so that his shape is not obvious against the whitewashed wattle, and he moves softly north. The sea is half a league beyond the scrubby trees, and he can hear it now, breaking on the rocks, but Walsingham’s instructions were very specific: ask for, find, stand on, and send signal from Nez Bayard at first light on the morning of the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross.
How he will do that without a lamp is another matter.
First, though, he needs to be out of the trap of the house.
There is a midden to be negotiated, filled with mussel shells, and then he is into untilled pasture where he stops by the sheepfold filled with pale shapes. He thinks, for a moment, of wolves. Then he turns to watch the house. The night is blue black, and inky shapes writhe in his imagination. Or do they? He needs to look twice. Two men, coming around the north end of the house. A moment
