“But who was she communicating with?” Walsingham wonders to himself. “And what was she saying?”
“You think she was tipped over into something… what? Rash? When she learned Quesada wasn’t coming?”
“Of course, but what?”
Dee shrugs. They both know what.
“That’s it? A shrug? Christ, Dee, we are talking about someone trying to kill the Queen!”
“Well, she has just tried to have me killed, Walsingham, so I hope you will pardon me when I tell you I am not too bothered by what happens to her now.”
Walsingham is shocked, though he does not altogether blame Dee for thinking that, at the moment. He hopes it will pass though.
“What will you do?” he asks.
“I will finish this bottle of brandy—hup!—and then I will go home, as you suggest, to my mother, my books, my instruments. You will have noticed the new star in Cassiopeia. I should like to have a moment to myself to study that.”
Dee downs the rest of the brandy and bangs his cup on the table.
“Come on then,” he says.
But outside they are met with a great shout.
“There you are!”
It is a guard made up of the Queen’s troop, sent by Robert Beale to find Master Walsingham and bring him home.
By now Dee is very drunk, Walsingham less so. Dee reels off into the night, about his own business, and Walsingham bids him a good night.
At home Beale takes him to see Margaret Formby, still tear-heavy in Mistress Walsingham’s arms. His arrival starts her sobbing again, and he does his best to be soft-footed and patient, but he needs to know what he is up against, and he needs to know now.
“With whom was Queen Mary communicating?”
The girl is reluctant to spit it out, and he sees he frightens her. What must she have heard about him? That he breathes fire? Has a forked tongue? His wife gives him a stern look.
He sees her lips forming the start of words that do not come, and he is not sure what he expects.
Eventually, she speaks.
The Queen’s bargemaster orders his men on the starboard side to lift their oars, and the barge buffs against the lamp-lit dock with a gentle bump that flutters cloth, but sends no one staggering.
Elizabeth gives thanks to God and pays the bargemaster a small coin to share among his men (he won’t) (and nor does she expect him to) and she walks with her ladies up the gangplank and across the gravel path where the dew is already falling.
Sir Thomas Smith is there to meet her with a deep bow, pleased to have her to himself. He will want money, she thinks tiredly.
The star in Cassiopeia is now very bright.
“Whatever can it mean?” she asks.
Smith has no idea. He thinks only of himself and of his scheme in Ireland.
How she misses John Dee.
James Hamilton props his sackcloth-wrapped gun against a wall and washes the blood from his hands and face in the horse trough behind Limehouse wharves. He thrusts his arms deep into the cold water, then splashes his doublet, breeches, and boots clean of blood. He smells it, feels it stiff in the wool and in his linens, between his toes in his right boot. For such a desiccated stick of a man, Father Simon gave up much blood, and Hamilton had had to clamp his mouth ghastly shut for fear his girlish screams would summon the neighborhood.
When he is done, he collects the gun, and moves swiftly into the shadows before the night watch guards come stamping around the corner.
While the boatman pulls hard against the running river, Dr. John Dee sits athwart the skiff and allows himself to slip into lucid dreams of Rose Cochet, Isobel’s girl. He sees her playing a game in which she wears a blindfold, with other children running around her, and she must touch them all to win the game. Everyone laughs, including Rose, and her little teeth are like seed pearls. She has dimpled cheeks and pretty clothes. She is happy, and in another time, the sight would be one to bring a tear of joy to any man’s eye.
But the image starts Dee awake, for it is false. It cannot be. He knows it cannot be: on his way back from France, the boat on which he had stowed away—a single-masted trader in all-sorts from the port of Damme—had docked in Sandwich, and Dee had walked to the house of Sir John Pinkney, Isobel Cochet’s father. He found the old man hollowed out with grief at his missing granddaughter, like an oak tree in a field struck by lightning. News of his daughter’s death would have killed him. So Dee lied and played the part of a traveling minstrel, down on his luck, and the old man gave him a penny, but he was too sad to hear him play.
“Smith? Sir Thomas Smith?”
“It is what she says.”
Beale and Walsingham are back on Seething Lane, striding ahead of the nightwatchman with his swinging lantern, followed by five of the Queen’s yeomen. The hue and cry has been successful, and some Italian tailor with a cast in his eye has proved to be what was needed and is now unlikely to live to see sunset next. Walsingham cannot concern himself with that sort of injustice. He cannot rid himself of the heat that thrums through his body since hearing Margaret Formby confess.
Smith?
Walsingham thinks of the efforts he has gone to, the risks he has taken, the lives he has sacrificed, only to find out that it is Smith, Sir Thomas Smith, Privy councillor and Queen Elizabeth’s
