Christ. What if he’s wrong?
The Queen glances down at the letter. A frown crosses her face.
The shadows are beginning to bleed off the starboard bow as the barge turns to follow the river westward.
“Dee?”
But Dee is elsewhere. He is thinking: I was wrong.
He has misinterpreted his dream.
And he is just about to look over to say something, to apologize to them all for disturbing them, and for having them tear apart the Palace of Placentia, and the Queen’s barge, to make this absurd frame for the mirror, when—plock!—a hole appears in the mirror above. The Queen gasps and claps a hand over her cheek, and a fraction of a moment later there comes a dull thump from the shore.
“There!” Thomas Digges shouts, pointing. But the harquebusiers have seen the flash, or the smoke, and now the curtains are drawn aside and they squeeze their levers and apply their fuses. The Queen clamps her hands over her ears as the cabin resounds to the flash and boom of the arquebuses. The noise is tremendous. The boat seems to stagger. The cabin fills with dense smoke. Everybody seems to be shouting. Across the water a small wooden cabin splinters in numerous places as the balls hit.
Dee and Walsingham collide as they rush to cover the Queen in case of any more shots.
“Take us in!” Walsingham shouts to the bargemaster. He is deafened by the gunshots and cannot hear his own voice, but the bargemaster leans on the tiller. The barge slews toward the ships moored against the north bank. The bargemaster shouts something and the oarsmen on the starboard lift their oars as the boat thumps against a low-sided fishing vessel with a deadening boom that throws the fishing boat’s boy to his knees. Strong arms clamp the gunwale and hold the barge fast.
The harquebusiers discard their guns and spill out of the back of the cabin. They jump out of the Queen’s barge and scramble across the fishing boat, careless of the fishermen, and vanish over its far side. Walsingham stands and bends over the Queen. She is hunched in her seat. He hesitates to touch her.
“Your Majesty?”
She lifts her head.
There is blood on her hands.
Walsingham gasps.
“It’s a scratch. A scratch from the glass. The others will guard me. Go! Go and get him!”
Dee and Walsingham need no second word. They scramble over the gunwale and up onto the fishing boat where the fisherman stands openmouthed.
“Stand by to push off!” Dee hears the bargemaster call.
Dee jumps down from the boat. The mud is gritty and gray. It stinks of shit and butchers’ spoil. He sees the house, the one he saw in his dreams, a hole in its daub, its patchwork of planks shattered by gunshots. It’s the other side of the creek.
Damn.
He scrambles back up to the dockside, up a great midden of discarded oyster shells and onto the cobbled dockside above.
“Dee!”
Walsingham slips and slides behind him. Dee stops and offers him a hand, hauling him up. There is a dark badge of blood amid the mud.
“Quick! Come on!”
They run along the dockside, looping around to the bridge where they see the harquebusiers storming ahead with their swords drawn. Men, women, children, geese, and even pigs move quickly out of their way. Dee and Walsingham cross the bridge over the Lea and are now on the lane at the end of which is the hut they shot at. The harquebusiers arrive as a phalanx and smash the door down.
Dee and Walsingham keep running.
The hut is so small it hardly fits the harquebusiers, and by the time Dee and Walsingham reach the step up, they are stepping back out onto the lane again.
“Go that way!” Walsingham points down the lane, to the east. “Search every building! Everywhere! Find him! He mustn’t get away.”
Dee steps into the darkness of the stinking hut.
It is empty, save for a cooking stone, and the dead woman. Flies hum and slice through the beams of light streaming through the various holes that are scattered over the wall.
Walsingham comes in and gags.
Dee crosses to the wall. Under the larger hole is a smaller one. On the ground, a scatter of blood.
He sees the gun’s rest, lying where it has fallen, but there is no sign of the gun, or the ramming rod. Or its owner/master.
Hamilton moves softly through the water. The soldiers are gone, but there are two men up there yet, slow moving, more considered sorts. Perhaps it is Walsingham himself? By the blood of Mary, he thinks, imagine killing both Elizabeth and her chief devil incarnate in one day? His thoughts are broken by a terrible rack of pain in his gut. He knows he is dying. But he has done what he set out to do. He saw the ball strike the Queen, just above her ear. A killing shot, for certain. He was surprised she did not seem to flinch, but that thought was taken no further. It was overtaken by astonishment at the volley of gunshots that sprang from the cabin. The other bullets sprayed everywhere, as you’d expect, and that one of them caught him in the groin was punishment sent down by God upon His imperfect servant.
To spite the pain, he grips the stock of the gun. He needs to load it. If he cannot, he might as well consign it to the mud.
“Come on, Dee,” Walsingham says. “He will be miles away by now.”
But Dee remains still.
The tide is up, and he can hear its slop against the hut’s footings, but it is the smell that bothers him. He bends over the firestone: cold. And yet, even above the spicy sweetness of the woman’s decaying body, there is the smell of burning.
He is about to use Walsingham’s name but stops himself.
Instead he gestures. They leave the hut.
“What are you up to, Dee?”
“Come with me.”
The two men skirt back to the creek.
“By Jesus, Dee, I am not going
