He jams the door shut and settles down to wait.
Francis Walsingham has not slept all night, and now, as gray dawn breaks, he walks into the Queen’s newly planted garden in Greenwich, among a lattice of hedges as high as his shins, watching the skeins of mist drift across the placid surface of the Thames.
He had not expected Sir Thomas Smith to be with the Queen at Greenwich, and the night before, when he and Beale had debouched from his barge to find it so, his heart had sunk. Without the explicit support of Lord Burghley and the Earl of Leicester, he cannot hope to bring any sort of accusation against Smith, but without doing so—without revealing that he knows Smith to be a traitor—he cannot admit the origins of his information about the threat to the Queen’s life.
He had asked that she be moved to the Tower that very night.
“It is the safest stronghold we have,” he’d told Smith.
“How dare you come here, Walsingham,” Smith had shouted, “upsetting Her Majesty with your absurd scare stories.”
“Please let me see the Queen, Sir Thomas,” he’d asked.
“No, Walsingham, I will not, for I do not trust you.”
There was nothing Walsingham could do save keep close and remain vigilant. He and Beale had passed the night in the guardroom, doing what could be done: sending word to Burghley and to Leicester, summoning them to come urgently with as many troops of their own as was possible.
“Before then we have to move her to the Tower,” he tells Beale.
Beale nods. It is the thing they have most feared about the Queen passing time in Greenwich: a few ships filled with Spanish troops landing on the river’s bank, and bringing bloody murder to the palace.
“You saw how easily Van Treslong made his way upriver,” Walsingham says. “What if four hundred well-trained troops mobilized in Greenwich at dawn tomorrow? What would we do? Shout for the yeomen of the guard? There are a hundred of them, and the only fighting they are trained for is for their ale, and their pensions. The Queen’s household—all her gallant gentlemen, with all their gallant talk—would take flight at the first whiff of powder and be in Blackheath before the Spanish stepped ashore.”
It was an exaggeration, but not by much.
Beale has a worse fear though. Of a single assassin, a man with one of the new guns from the Italian city of Milan that can shoot accurately over a hundred paces. He supposes if he were the pope, and he wanted the Queen dead, then that is what he would do: send a battalion of such men to come over here and lie in wait. Why haven’t other princes done so? He puts it down to the fact they believe one another anointed by God, and to plot to kill one is a plot to kill them all. It is why Queen Elizabeth will not have Queen Mary put to death. Such things are contagious.
He had opened his mouth to say something to Master Walsingham, but he had refrained. It is dangerous to be overheard even countenancing the death of the Queen.
So they had returned to their letter writing.
At dawn Walsingham rises and goes outside, heedless of the night miasma that rises from the river and from the meager fields and broad marshes beyond. He ordered the Queen’s barge to be made ready earlier and now she is tied up against the jetty, and the bargemaster’s boys are busy about polishing the glass of her windows. A handful of Her Majesty’s yeomen prowl the foreshore in the dawn, at least, but they are more familiar with bullying beggars and river gypsies.
A bell rings.
The mist slowly lifts. Eight geese land on the water. From the river’s north bank a merchant’s ship is foresail up, just getting under way. Walsingham wonders where she is bound. Antwerp? Le Havre? Cádiz? He thinks of Dr. John Dee again, poor Dr. John Dee, and he wonders why the Queen would ever want him dead in the first place.
One day he will have to ask her.
When she is awake.
In the meantime, there is still Sir Thomas Smith.
In Mortlake, John Dee wakes with the word Bess on his lips. He has dreamt of a dirty river snaking by under a dipping gray mist; of a dead woman with no teeth lying in a filth of fine fish bones and human mud; of a rotting hovel with its footings in the water; and of the flash of black powder.
He walks down to the orchard to relieve himself in the river.
Thomas Digges is there, likewise engaged.
When they are finished and dressed again, Digges shows him his perspective glass.
“What can you see through it?” Dee asks.
“Nothing much.”
It is a fat tube of smooth bark with a polished lens at one end. Dee holds it up and looks through it. It is not that he can see nothing much, only that there is nothing much to be seen. A stretch of riverbank, a few houses to the north. A boat under a murky green sail, a boy in the bow, approaching the dock. It is all within touching distance.
He lowers the perspective glass, and suddenly he is filled with a terrible, fateful certainty.
“Come with me, Thomas, now.”
“Why? Where?”
“To see Master Walsingham,” Dee tells him. “The world depends on it.”
The black powder cannot be even slightly damp, or it will clump and explode with unpredictable force, even destroying the barrel,
