Below is the stinking green-gray mud. Walsingham’s leg is bleeding heavily.
“All right,” Dee says. “Listen to me carefully, Walsingham. Here is what I want you to do. Count to sixty, slowly, and then walk into the hut again.”
“Why?”
It is best not to tell him. This is different from the Queen, since Walsingham will not be an image in a mirror.
“Just do as I say, Walsingham. Sixty, and then back in there.”
Despite his doubts, Walsingham will do it.
Dee drops down into the mud. It is glazed with what might be tanners’ spoil, and the cold grip of the mud reminds him powerfully of Mont Saint-Michel. He drags each leg from the slurry’s grip and wades, thigh high in it, along the creek below the dockside wall. Ahead is the open water of the Thames. He rounds the wall and finds himself amid the jumble of the huts’ footings and stilts. They are treacherous with green weed and there is what looks like a dead dog caught in a crook between two beams. Stinking rushes are strewn everywhere and Dee is certain he can hear the constant and close squeak of rats. He presses on. He is counting under his breath.
Twenty.
Here the water is deeper, and the mud below scoured away by the Thames’s stronger current. He peers around the stilts. There. Twenty yards away: a fine gauze of fuse smoke. Just as he thought. He lowers himself into the water, up to his chin. It is bracing, not too bad. But Christ! What a stench.
Thirty.
He strokes through the water.
It has a cold, dipping green, clammy grip.
He sees the bulk of the man, his left shoulder, linen shirt. He is conducting some operation. Loading his gun! A leather bag over his shoulder. The man hesitates a moment. He’s looking for somewhere to put the ramming rod where it won’t sink.
Forty.
Dee slithers through a lattice of stilts. Above are latrine holes, as why wouldn’t you? Dee sees the man twist the strap of his bag over his shoulder. His gun is held upright. He’s waiting. Head tipped back, eyes raised. He has good teeth. Waiting.
Fifty.
It is a long-barreled gun, and its muzzle must be nearly touching the floor above. No wonder his shot at the Queen was so good. Dee can see him clearly now: tall, very strong, his arms corded with muscle.
Fifty-five.
But now the man feels something. He glances down to where Dee was a moment ago. A frown. But then: up above. Some disturbance at the door of the hut. A scrape. He looks back up. He grips the gun, his thumb over the powder pan.
Sixty.
Walsingham enters the hut above.
The man moves the gun to follow his steps, turns his back on Dee, but then—last moment—he glances down, and around, and as if preordained, he and Dee lock gazes. Dee lunges.
He catches the man from behind, both arms around him as he holds the gun up. The man pulls the trigger. The fuse connects. The powder in the pan flashes. The gun explodes as the damp powder bursts its barrel. Dee presses his face to the back of the man’s neck. Dee’s head is enveloped in a ball of sound and fire. The man’s head cracks back into Dee’s face, sending him against the rails of the footings. He nearly goes under. The man is still upright, still clutching the stock of the ruined gun, but there’s blood everywhere, and something’s wrong. He falls backward into the water, but floats back up again, faceup, though that’s missing: his jaw and cheeks are gone, his nose is a bloody hole, his eyes formless flesh and his forehead and scalp sheared away by coarse shreds of metal that burst from the gun. Blood wells everywhere, winking in every wound, a spreading slick of it.
Dee clings to the poles of the house above. His face is on fire, and there is blood all over him, his arms, his hands, everywhere. The man spins slowly in the current, and after a while, Dee pushes him out into the river proper. He feels his strength sap. Darkness clouds his vision. His head spins. He clings to a post, the shaft slick with weed and God knows what else. He presses his cheek to it, feels it slide, cold, up as he goes down. The water rises to meet him.
“Dee! Dee!”
It is Walsingham, his face pressed through the privy hole above.
“Stay awake! Stay awake, Dee!”
But he is falling, and fading fast.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The White Tower, London, October 17, 1572
Any number of ailments might afflict a man after his flesh is shredded by pieces of steel that have first passed through the body of another man, and then he is dunked unconscious in the river Thames. But after he is bled a pint or two and plied with various purgatives and emetics that leave him racked with pain and weak as a kitten, Dr. John Dee is left to lie in bed for a few days, heaped with blankets so that he sweats out any further corruptives and pollutants, and so balance his humors.
He dreams, constantly, the same dream, of the girl whom one part of his mind believes to be Rose Cochet, but whom the other part—the rational part—cannot believe is so. His dreams show her playing again, this time with a battered straw doll, much loved, on a broad swath of grass below a painted dovecote. Once again she is prettily dressed and her cheeks are rosy with good health and there are other children gathered about. He can hear singing and the playing of a reed flute, and the scene is warmed by the golden light of a low sun. Isobel Cochet emerges and calls for her daughter.
When he wakes to proper consciousness, Dee finds himself unable to move.
“Don’t move,” the Queen tells him.
“I can’t,” he tells her.
He is weighed down by his covers, and bandages over his face, his hands, and his arms.
“My physician says
