“Stand behind the mirror, will you, Walsingham, and do as I say.”
Walsingham stands behind them, watching Dee walk up the pathway to the palace, about fifty paces away. Once reaching the walls of the palace, he turns and stares back at the barge.
“Move the one in the cabin a little to the left,” he calls.
“For Christ’s sake, Dee.”
When it is in position, Dee comes over. He has a chalk stone in his pocket, and with it he marks the positions of the frames, and then replica marks on the other side of the boat.
“Dee! What are you doing?” Walsingham demands as Dee shifts the mirror frames around.
“Go to where I was standing, and look back.”
As Walsingham clambers out of the boat he hears Dee tell Thomas Digges to look queenly.
Walsingham walks, seeing the Queen in her window once more, until he is where Dee was. He turns and stares back at the barge.
“My God,” he says. “My God.”
James Hamilton kneels in the filth of the old woman’s hovel. He clasps his hands hard and offers up his final prayer, his final amen, and he gets to his feet. He has been praying since the first pink ray of dawn probed through the hole he has made in the wall, and he now approaches it and looks out over the choppy green brew of the Thames.
It is a beautiful day. On the river are numerous small craft, and one caravel, laden with cloth perhaps, anchored against the waning tide. On the far bank is a small church with a spire, where once the Mass was said; a windmill; a stone wall; three muddy cows in the river; and a boy on a cart. There are some fishermen, too, though, Christ, what would they catch in this soup of human filth?
He turns to his gun on the ground, kept from the damp and dirt by its sackcloth wrappings, lustrous with rose oil. Alongside it is the ball he will use. He has lost one, he knows, and believes he must have left it with the horse when he panicked and bolted from the inn.
He knows he will never live to reclaim it.
He has returned the powder to the horn, the powder in its oyster shell. It flows fine as sand in a timer. He has the tow wads, too, likewise steeped in rose oil.
The ramming rod, and the stand, are propped against the wall.
He stands. His heart is beating wildly but when he holds out his hands, they are steady.
He will eat.
And then he will be ready.
They say their prayers as a household, as a nation, kneeling where the night before the Queen heard Tallis’s “Lamentations,” and when it is over, they stand in silence and gather themselves.
The Queen says her farewells, and her courtiers stand pale-faced. Some of the women weep, as if she were mounting the scaffold just as her mother did all those years ago.
Smith glares, his hands clenching, unclenching.
There is no sign of Burghley or Leicester.
Helped by her bargemaster, the Queen steps aboard her barge.
“I am to sit here? Facing this way?”
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
There is not a lot of room, for gone are her usual ladies-in-waiting, and in their place, crammed into the gloom of the curtained cabin, behind the second mirror, are eight yeomen of the guard, harquebusiers, each nursing the fuse of a gun. Among them sits little Thomas Digges, with his perspective glass ready, and there, too, is Francis Walsingham, as pale and anxious as she has ever seen him.
“And where is John Dee?” the Queen asks.
“Here, Your Majesty.”
He is hidden behind the first mirror, with his back to the oarsmen, roughly in the middle of the boat.
“Are you certain about this?” she asks.
There is a long pause while he tries to think clearly.
“Some of it, Your Majesty.”
She manages a laugh that stirs up a memory of her in the Tower, when things were at their most precarious for both of them, and he cannot soften a fraction. She is the woman who wanted him dead, and yet, and yet—
The bargemaster stands by the tiller at the back of the cabin. He looks quizzically at Dr. Dee: Are you sure? Dee is not. Everybody is looking to him, though: those on the boat, and those gathered on the shore.
Dee looks to the Queen: Ready? She nods. He turns to the bargemaster and nods in turn. The bargemaster sounds his whistle and the boys on the bank let go the ropes while three men with boat poles push the boat out into the river.
“Ship oars!”
There is a chorus of moans from the bank as the boat shudders underfoot, as if this is a funeral barque, and the barge drifts for a moment until the oarsmen set about their work. The barge gathers itself and slides forward into the current.
“Smooth!” the bargemaster calls and a moment later the oarsmen are into their rhythm, pulling the boat through the water northward. The Isle of Dogs is on their right, which the harquebusiers face, though cannot see for the curtains are down, and Deptford on the left, which the Queen faces, and which she can see, for her curtains are up.
There is a gentle breeze, seagulls screech high above, and it is turning into a day of the sort that tricks you into believing it will be like this all winter. The water thrums on the underside of the hull. The air is freshish, only slightly tinged with rot and spoil.
No one says anything until at last the Queen speaks.
“John,” she says. “Why are you so angry with me?”
For a
