“There is something you wish to tell us, Master Gethyn?”
Gethyn says nothing but he holds up one of the pieces of paper. It is irregular, as if someone has cut—
Walsingham strides across to take it from him. He scans what is written. It is a grant of land from the Queen to Sir Thomas Smith, three hundred and sixty acres in Ulster, sent a few months earlier. It is missing the seal, and its bottom right-hand corner. Walsingham looks up at Gethyn very keenly.
“Smith?”
Gethyn shakes his head.
“You?” Walsingham asks.
Gethyn nods. He is pale, but also flushed, with glassy eyes. He is suddenly terrified.
“Why?” Walsingham asks. He is incredulous.
Gethyn shrugs minutely.
“I am of the true faith,” he says, as if this explains everything. But Walsingham shakes his head.
“But—no. Gethyn. Not you. You are—”
Gethyn’s smile becomes glassier yet. “Reasonable?”
“Yes.”
Walsingham turns to Dee.
Dee feels blank. He is looking at a man confessing to having tried to have him killed, yet he cannot feel any rancor for him. It is not only because he looks like no homicidal firebrand Dee has ever seen, but because… what? Dee cannot say. Only that he is certain there is something odd here. Walsingham feels it too.
“So,” he stalks, “when the Queen came here on the third to last day of August this year, she asked you to write, in her name, to Master Raleigh, of the Pelican, to instruct him to have this man, Dr. John Dee, collected from the coast of Normandy?”
Gethyn looks over at Dee with interest. In another time, would they have passed the time in quiet discussion of the ways of the world? Perhaps. Why not?
“I am sorry,” he says.
“Nothing to be sorry about,” Dee tells him. “It is the next letter that I found”—he searches for the right word, but can’t—“upsetting.”
Gethyn acknowledges his point. We are not enemies, Dee thinks.
“So you wrote the letter?” Walsingham continues with his question.
“I did. She wanted to write it herself, but she had been traveling two days, and on horseback from the Tower, and so I wrote it out for her, in as close to her hand as I could.”
“Why? Why imitate her hand?”
Gethyn shrugs again.
“I wanted to please her,” he says. “And to show her I could. And I had a template.”
He indicates the grant with the section cut from its bottom corner.
“So you showed it to her, and she signed it? Is it her signature on the first letter?”
“Yes. And her seal. She impressed that sitting there.”
He points at a bench.
“Smith watched?”
“Oh yes,” Gethyn agrees.
“And then what?”
“Master Walsingham,” Gethyn starts, “before I go on, I want you to know everything that happened, everything I did, and everything I did not do. Because I am not a brave man. You might put me in a room with the rack or the brake, and I would tell you everything you need to know, but I also want you to know that I will say nothing of this at any trial.”
“Trial? Trial? What makes you think there will be a trial?”
Only now does Gethyn begin to look terrified.
“Please, Master Gethyn,” Dee interrupts. “Go on. About the second letter.”
There is a moment while Gethyn gathers himself.
“The second letter,” he says. “The second letter. Yes. I did not understand everything that was afoot, of course, but I knew that the Queen had just come from seeing you, Doctor, in the Tower. She told Sir Thomas, while she was impressing her seal, that the fate of the nation now depended on you. Sir Thomas disagreed. He is not of first-rate intelligence, Sir Thomas, I hope you will forgive me for saying so?”
Walsingham agrees, as does Dee. Beale, too, murmurs that he has always thought it so.
“So that made you write the second letter? Just to get rid of Dee as an agent of Her Majesty?”
For the first time Gethyn looks uncertain. Beale takes out some paper and has an ingenious inkpot. He will take notes.
“I knew that the doctor was sent to retrieve some documents that had fallen into the hands of the Cardinal of Lorraine.”
This is not an answer, really, Dee thinks, but a lure. And Walsingham seizes upon it like a hawk.
“Was it Smith who told you that?” Walsingham asks.
Gethyn shakes his head slowly.
“Then—?” Walsingham presses.
“A man in Rheims,” Gethyn says. “One in the cardinal’s pay.”
There is a thick silence.
“So you are in contact with the Cardinal of Lorraine?”
There is a pause before Gethyn nods very slowly.
That is all they need, Dee thinks. He dreads to think what will now happen to Gethyn.
“Go on,” Walsingham instructs.
“An Englishman,” Gethyn says.
“Named?”
“Edmund Campion.”
Beale shrugs slightly, scrubs over his previous note, and writes the name down. None of them have ever heard the name before.
“But still why?” Dee asks. “Why did you want me killed?”
This is the real question.
Gethyn opens and closes his mouth. Then he starts coughing again, long and hard, into his kerchief. It racks his body. His face reddens, veins spring up, and his eyes stream. It is like watching someone tear their own self apart. When it is over, he hides the kerchief.
Dee looks at him very closely. Gethyn’s eyes are fugitives now and will not be caught. There is something amiss here. As if Gethyn did not know why he wanted Dee killed. Did he want Dee killed? The longer Dee looks at him, the more certain he is that Gethyn didn’t want him killed, and so then, why?
He thinks back to those days after Van Treslong’s men had shot the cardinal’s man on Nez Bayard: how he had struggled through Normandy and Picardy, sleeping in hedgerows, living off sweet cider and green apples; how he had found first Boulogne then Calais being watched, so too Dunkirk, and he had to make his way through countryside to the north that was crawling with Spanish and French troops, until he finally found passage in that cog from
