“Dee,” Walsingham begins, holding his hands out. “You have saved England, and I can only begin to—”
Dee waves the pistols.
“Stow it, Walsingham. Your thanks are no good to me. Get back over there. At the end of this I am still going to shoot you, you do know that, don’t you?”
Walsingham takes his step back.
“Look, Dee,” he starts. “It was… a bloody shabby business, I agree. But I was desperate, and by Christ, I did not do it lightly. Both Isobel Cochet and Oliver Fellowes were dear to me and their deaths will weigh heavily on me as long as I live—”
“Not very much longer then.”
“—But it was all we had against Quesada. It was a gamble: their lives for the lives of countless others; their lives for our country, our Queen, our religion. Surely you understand that?”
Dee kisses his teeth. He blows on one of the fuses to keep it glowing.
“There must have been other ways,” Dee mutters. “And to send someone to kill me—”
“I did not do so, Dee. So help me God. I did not send anyone to kill you.”
“Then who did? Someone did. Those Dutch copulators didn’t just start shooting for fun. They were there for a purpose.”
“How do you know?”
“Because they shot the man whom they thought was me.”
Walsingham is pulling his beard. He is thinking.
“Do you know a man named Van Treslong?” he asks. “Willem van Treslong. A Dutch Sea Beggar.”
“Who helped take Den Brill from the Spanish? I know of him. Why? Was it him? Were they his men?”
“Who knows? Maybe. I hired him to keep an eye on Quesada’s fleet, and then to pick you up from Nez Bayard. Apart from you, and me, and Beale, of course, and the Queen, he was the only man who knew you would be there that night.”
“You three. I see. And did he… what? Misunderstand you? When you said ‘pick up John Dee’ he heard you say ‘shoot John Dee in the head’?”
Walsingham regains a measure of moral composure. He no longer believes Dee will shoot him. He lowers his hands.
“I am still going to shoot you, Walsingham.”
Walsingham raises his palms again.
“If confusion arose, it cannot have done so in that way,” Walsingham tells Dee, “for I did not speak to him. He was already at sea, off La Rochelle, and so I sent message through the established channels. He will have destroyed the codes but you can ask him yourself.”
“He will be somewhere in the Bay of Biscay, I dare say, looking for men to shoot, things to steal.”
“No,” Walsingham says. “His ship was badly mauled by Quesada’s fleet, just before he came to find you. Her Majesty afforded him use of the dry dock at Limehouse to fix the rudder. He is still there.”
Dee looks at Walsingham for a long time. His eyes are very brown and steadfast, Walsingham thinks, but they are filled with a benign, forgiving intelligence. At length, Dee lowers just one of the pistols.
“Well then,” he says. “We’d best go and find him, hadn’t we?”
Walsingham agrees. He would like a word with Van Treslong too.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
City of London, October 9, 1572
A little after four of the clock, James Hamilton leads his horse through Bishopsgate. It is raining. His collar is turned up, and his brim bent down, and he is careful not to catch the eyes of the watch. He stables his horse at the Bull, with a fat keep with a forked red beard, just south of the gate, and carries his saddlebags over his shoulder and down the road toward Cheapside. He is so long unused to passing among the populace that the crowds make him testy, and he finds himself jostled by men who cannot speak his language, and who have queer colored skin, and dress in outlandish clothes that no true Englishman would ever wear upon their backs, and it is as if he—an Englishman in his own country—counts for nought. He must bite his tongue and restrain his fist and boot.
Still though. It is what he wants. To pass unobserved, unnoticed, down Gracechurch Street to the Church of Saint Magnus the Martyr. The smells intensify as he approaches the river. He has always hated London. There is no sky, no earth, nothing but the river that is not made by man. Its rich fetid air stops up his nose and mouth.
He stands in the agreed place and after a moment a man takes his elbow.
“Walk with me, sir,” he says.
This is he, the Roman priest, who will pray with him, and hear his confession, and bless him for the task that lies ahead. He is as tall as Hamilton, but cadaverous. His cap hangs around his ears and his teeth are jumbled like tombstones.
They walk eastward, away from the bridge, along Billingsgate, past Wool Wharf, through a maze of piled wool sarplers waiting to be weighed on the tron, with the river glimpsed between the houses on their right.
But Hamilton only has eyes for the edifice that looms ahead: the Tower.
He is suddenly terrified. This is where his journey will end. In a welter of blood, viscera, pain. The faces of the men he passes seem to loom up at him, as if from under water, each uglier than the next, contorted, scarred, fissured by age and debauchery. They know. They know. They are waiting. He is in a circle of hell.
They walk toward it.
They are about to cross a road running down to the river when the priest sees something to his left. He flinches and turns. He snatches at Hamilton’s elbow. His fingers are pincers Hamilton cannot shake off.
“He comes,” he says, hissing the words. “Master Walsingham.”
The priest jerks him into the shadows on the corner of Seething Lane and Tower Street.
“Keep walking,” he tells him.
They do, retracing their steps toward the bridge.
“Don’t let him see your face. Once he has seen it
