“What messages did they send to each other?” Beale asks.
The girl did not have all the details, of course.
“Queen Mary sent her away whenever she was at her secrets, so she never saw what was written, and Margaret only heard the odd word when Mary spoke to her priest, or sometimes Mary Seton.”
“What in particular?”
“She heard Queen Mary tell Mistress Seton that Smith had begged her to remember his services when she came to be Queen of England. Mistress Seton asked her what she thought he had in mind, and Mary told her that Smith was in need of money to save Ireland.”
To save Ireland. My God. Smith’s colony in Ireland. A constant thorn in everyone’s side, not just the Ulstermen’s. How much money can he have sunk in it to be so desperate as to conspire with a foreign power against his own Queen!
“Fucking Smith,” Beale mutters.
He does not usually use farmyard language in front of Walsingham, but there is sometimes a time and a place for this sort of thing.
“Yes,” Walsingham agrees, “but that’s not the worst of it. The girl overheard Queen Mary laughing—a rare enough event apparently—saying that she’ll not have need of Smith much longer, and that soon after Michaelmas she will be able to talk to her uncle directly.”
“Her uncle? Which one? Cardinal de Guise?”
“I suppose.”
“And she used the word ‘directly’?” Beale asks.
“Well, she said, ‘to his face, as befits a Christian prince,’ ” Walsingham tells Beale. It is this detail that confirms—to Walsingham’s mind—that Smith is Mary’s conduit to the outside world in general, and to de Guise in particular. But it takes a moment before Beale sees that is not the most important thing about what was said.
“ ‘Soon after Michaelmas’?” he asks. “Michaelmas was two weeks ago.”
“Exactly.”
“Did she believe Quesada would be the one to set her free?”
“That is the thing,” Walsingham says. “Mary said this after she had learned we’d diverted Quesada’s fleet.”
Beale looks away.
“My God,” he says. “You mean, whatever she set in motion, it is still in motion?”
It is.
Tears cling like diamonds on Queen Elizabeth’s eyelashes as she listens to the Children of the Chapel Royal bring Master Tallis’s exquisitely sorrowful “Lamentations of Jeremiah” to its haunting, ethereal conclusion. Ordinarily, such beauty is a great consolation, but today it leaves her aflutter. It is more than this new star in Cassiopeia, she thinks. She feels on the verge of some great change, one that has been ushered in by the death of Dr. Dee, whom she misses with greater intensity with the passing of each day.
It is not supposed to be that way.
“Walk with us, Sir Thomas,” she tells her Privy councillor, “and tell us such things that will reassure us of God’s love, for this evening we feel atremble at the world, as if we were on the threshold of some new and awful design.”
Sir Thomas Smith holds his arm out for Her Majesty to take should she wish it, but he is out of words, and so they pass out of the chapel and along the corridor in candlelit silence.
It is gone midnight when Dee walks with sober purpose down through the apple trees toward the river. He carries the largest of his cross-staffs and is accompanied by Thomas Digges, a boy of fourteen winters the son of his late neighbor, Leonard Digges, who is passed out of this world. The boy carries a bull’s-eye lamp and has an acute scientific mind, being much interested in mirrors and in glass lenses, with which, when placed in certain ways, he can make the sun, moon, and stars descend to here below.
“I am pleased you are back, Doctor,” the boy tells him. “I have been trying to measure it myself but lack your expertise.”
He indicates a ruler as tall as a man that he has placed in an apple tree.
“I am sure you lack only a good-size cross-staff,” Dee says with a laugh.
The night is cold and clear, but a mist has risen from the river. Dee has been looking forward to this moment since he first saw the star, in Picardy, what seems like months ago now.
“What do you think it can mean?” the boy asks.
“We must first discover if it is fixed,” Dee tells him, “or if it moves in relation to the other stars about it. If that is the case, then it is a comet, with a tail so small we cannot see it, and… well. Who knows? They portend many things.”
“I heard a woman in Putney gave birth to a child with the feet of a goose,” the boy tells him.
“Did she now?”
They set up the cross-staff and spend the next hour in pleasurable contemplation of what they come to believe is a star. Thomas reminds Dee there are only two well-known appearances of stars: one that caused much commotion among the Jews of Hipparchus’s day and the star of Bethlehem.
“It is a sign of great change,” Dee supposes. “Remember the words of Tiburtina: ‘the firmament of Heaven shall be dissolved, and the planets be opposed on contrary courses; the spheres shall justle one another, and the fixed stars move faster than the planets.’ ”
They are both silent for a good long while. At length the eastern sky brightens, and the stars dim, and Dee and the boy return, dew soaked and shivering now, to their separate houses to sleep, and to dream.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
London, October 11, 1572
It is not yet dawn, and still quiet in Limehouse, when he kills the widow. Her lips tremble and turn blue, and she soils herself. When it is done, he rolls her body into a corner. Her hovel sits on stilts above the mud of the river, a few stinking yards downriver from where the river Lea meets the Thames.
