Smith scoffs.
“With a gun? Impossible.”
Dee holds up the ball.
“Look at this,” he says.
The Queen takes it.
“It is very beautiful,” she says, for it is: almost black, silken smooth, and perfectly round. It has a lovely, heavy feel in her palm, but it feels utterly deadly, and it makes her shudder.
Dee summons Thomas Digges from the shadows.
“What is it now, Dee?” Smith asks.
“Show Her Majesty your lens, please, Thomas.”
Thomas takes the small lens from the back of his perspective glass and passes it to the Queen. She holds it as one might a coin.
“Hold it like so,” Dee instructs, “and look through it, at the ball.”
She does so, and then takes a second look.
“What does it say?” she asks.
Engraved in the ball, in letters so minute they are not visible to the naked eye, are the words “The punishment of your iniquity is completed, daughter of Zion.”
“From the book of Lamentations,” the Queen murmurs.
“What sorcery is this?” Smith demands.
“It was found in the saddlebag of a man come to town, two days ago, along with some black powder, and this.”
Dee shows them the copy of the papal bull.
The Queen blanches.
“Burn that thing,” she mutters, looking away.
“I believe there is an assassin sent to kill you, Your Majesty,” he says. “Someone gifted with a gun.”
She places her hand on her throat. This is utterly chilling. Kings and Queens have always been prey to assassins’ blades, of course, and so have always taken care to surround themselves with loyal bodyguards. The invention, and improvement in accuracy, of the gun brings with it a terrible new threat, which no one yet knows how to counter, including Francis Walsingham.
Walsingham shakes his head. “All the more reason to get Her Majesty’s person safely to the Tower.”
“You can say it again,” Dee argues, “but if you put Her Majesty on the boat, you will be signing her death warrant.”
“Dee! You do not understand! If the Queen stays here, she will be killed! We cannot risk it!”
There is a rising hubbub of voices raised against his.
Dee turns to the Queen, who stares at him with tears in her eyes.
“What is it, John?”
“Your Majesty,” he says, quietly. She lifts her hand for silence from the other men. It is instant.
He tells them of his dream: of the dead woman lying in fish bones; of the rotting warehouse with its footings in the water; of the explosive flash of black powder.
Walsingham is exasperated. “It’s just a dream!” he says.
“You remember how I knew that Isobel Cochet was on Mont Saint-Michel?”
Walsingham opens then closes his mouth. He catches Beale’s eye over Dee’s shoulder. He does not have to be able to read minds to know what Beale is thinking: Hamilton.
“What is it?” the Queen asks.
Walsingham tells her his fears about her great enemy, James Hamilton, well known for his gift with the gun.
After a long moment’s silence, the Queen turns to Dee.
“You are my eyes,” she says.
Dee notes Walsingham’s wince.
But the Queen goes on.
“And so what would you have me do?” she asks him.
She is placing all her trust in him, publicly, and so everyone must follow suit and do likewise.
Dee takes a long deep breath. He is struggling, struggling to resist her. Still he says nothing, but he cannot. He looks around the library, at all the books he will never own, most of them useless, and at the paintings, and at the myriad images of the Queen, of himself, Walsingham, Smith, and all the others reflected almost endlessly in the polished glass of all the Venetian mirrors.
They wait his word, his decision.
“You must get in the boat,” he says.
Everyone starts shouting at him all at once.
It does not take the workmen long. Two of them have the mirror down from the wall within the hour, and they carry it—two foot by three foot of polished glass and metal that is worth more than them and their entire families put together—out to the master carpenter’s workshop.
“Are you certain about this, Dee?” Walsingham nags.
Dee can see how it might go wrong, but he says nothing.
“Fetch two more,” he tells the workmen. “The next largest there.”
The workmen go back to bring another mirror.
“What are you up to, Dee?”
“We need a diptych,” he tells Walsingham. “Two mirrors, braced upright and placed at an angle, just so.”
He indicates with his hands.
Walsingham is hardly any the wiser, but the master carpenter is at work with his mallet and chisel, creating a mortise and tenon in a frame of wood.
“Like this?”
“Perfect. Now one more, identical.”
While the work goes on, the only sign of the Queen is a glimpse of her in the window, and Walsingham is drawn back to that painful afternoon in Sheffield when he was taught a lesson by Queen Mary. If Dee is right, the lessons have not stopped there. Christ.
When the frames are done to his satisfaction, the workmen carry them out to the Queen’s barge and place them behind the cabin.
“No. Move it to the front of the cabin.”
Then they bring the mirrors and the master carpenter attaches them to the frame with a series of leather straps.
“Proper job,” he says, though he has no idea what the job is.
The curtains in the cabin are drawn to one side, rich red velvet, while the windowpanes are removed on both sides, and good beeswax candles are lit and placed on the deck, with smaller mirrors positioned behind them to magnify the light, and throw it into the cabin.
“I hope you know what you are doing, Dee,” Walsingham says again.
Dee tells him that while he was a student at Cambridge he once made the audience of a theater believe a golden scarab beetle the size of a man could fly.
“How?”
“Just wait, can’t you, Walsingham?”
“We do not have time, Dee!”
“We do this, now,” Dee says, “and we catch our gunman. And the Queen can live in peace for some little while. Or we run and hide, stick her in the Tower. And she is there forever.”
The oarsmen, all
