Lucky?
He has a partial view of the room. A physician is holding up to the light of the window a jar of what must be Dee’s urine. The Queen sits in an upright chair at the side of his bed. She is in pearlescent material, with a collar that frames her slender neck, her pretty ears.
Dust motes in the window light.
“How long have you been sitting here?” he asks.
She smiles.
“A week, no more.”
He laughs, though it draws up phlegm. She has tears in her eyes. He finds she is holding his hand, and he hers. They clench them together, the gesture of two who have loved and lost and learned to love again.
After a silence he speaks. “Rose Cochet,” he says.
The Queen looks away. But she does not seek to break their handhold. She clutches all the harder, her guilt all too clear.
“I am sorry,” she whispers. “I did not know. I did not know. But I must take responsibility for her mother’s death. I do take responsibility for her mother’s death. Isobel Cochet died for me. I see that. She died for me. And for her daughter. And I will… I will do all I am able, to put that right. Please believe me.”
He does.
Later Walsingham comes with the man Dee recognizes as Master Beale. There is no sign of the Queen.
Walsingham asks a few questions, the answers to which he already knows, or could deduce from observation, and which he doesn’t care about anyway. He looks tired, Dee thinks.
“The Queen has examined the letters,” Walsingham tells him.
He remembers. The two letters he stole from Van Treslong. He gave them to her the moment before the mirror was shot.
“And?”
“Well, we were right about both letters being in the same hand.”
Dee closes his eyes in resignation, until a strong memory of her, on the ship, clutching these very letters, comes roaring back in protest.
“But… wait. She said… didn’t she? That she had never written— She didn’t write either of them?”
Walsingham shakes his head.
“Who then?” Dee asks.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Hill Hall, Essex, October 25, 1572
They have all been to Epping Forest before: Dee in search of sites that might yield information on Druidical rituals; Walsingham to see the Queen in her father’s ugly hunting lodge; and Beale with a woman who was married to the master of the Painter-Stainers’ Guild.
“The hunting is supposed to be very good,” Beale tells them.
Dee says nothing. He doesn’t care about hunting, good or bad, nor does Walsingham, sitting beside him in the caroche, have an opinion to offer. Dee is well wrapped in heavy worsted, with marten at the collars and cuffs, and soft leather boots, all paid for by the Queen on behalf of a grateful nation. He feels delicate, and though his wounds have healed well, his cheek is flecked with a smooth pink scar that runs counter to the grain of his skin, and from which no beard will ever grow.
He keeps his gaze directed out of the window, where a faint mist softens the oak and beech trees, leaves already on the turn, and there is a faintly fungal smell in the air. By the wayside, russet pigs rootle in the mast.
It will soon be Martinmas, and they are traveling with a company of the Queen’s guard to arrest Sir Thomas Smith at Hill Hall.
It was Margaret Formby’s evidence that has him charged with conspiring to have Dee killed. Walsingham said that if it had been any other man Smith sought to have killed, then perhaps the Queen would have been more anxious to have him charged with the forgery of her signature, and the misuse of her seal, but there is, as Walsingham had admitted, something special between Dee and the Queen. Some bond that he cannot quite fathom. It made Dee very happy to hear that.
“Does he know we are coming?” he asks.
Walsingham shakes his head.
“He might not even be there,” Walsingham supposes, and it turns out he is right. When they reach Hill Hall—late midmorning—they do not stop at the lodge on the track but carry on up to the house. It is built in the new style, and, like Smith’s colony in Ireland, it sits unwelcome and awkward on the land.
A panicked groom greets them on the steps. He eyes the troop of soldiers, but mostly Walsingham, with something like terror.
“No, Master Walsingham, sir,” he says. “Sir Thomas is gone north to see to his— He is stocking the estate. Only Master Gethyn is here.”
Dee wonders what that means: stocking his estate?
Walsingham curses.
“Take us to his office,” he tells the groom. There will be papers and so on, Dee supposes. “And have Master Gethyn come to us.”
Gethyn is already there, standing at the lectern in Sir Thomas’s study, a handsome room, with many windows affording much light, open now to afford a view over a sloping garden wherein the focal point is a very fine stone-built dovecote. The room has painted walls, rather than the usual hanging arras, showing what might be scenes from the life of Nebuchadnezzar, and there is a Turkey carpet underfoot that might in another house be pride of place above the fire.
He does not seem a bit surprised to see them.
“God bless you this day, Master Gethyn,” Walsingham starts. “When is Sir Thomas expected back, do you know?”
“Not now until next week,” Gethyn tells him. “He is away up north again.”
“Seeing a man about a dog?” Beale asks.
“Ha.” Gethyn laughs. “Something like that.”
Only Gethyn knows why this is funny. There is something sad and sardonic about him, Dee thinks. He likes him.
“But if I am right as to your purpose today,” Gethyn goes on, “then it is not Sir Thomas you seek, Master Walsingham.”
“Oh?”
Gethyn is darkly dressed, in the old-fashioned manner, and holds three or four papers in his hands. They tremble slightly. Walsingham slows down now, tilts his head, narrows his eyes, and becomes less brusque. It is as if Gethyn
