That it turns out to be the fault of this man is—impossible to believe.
After a moment, Gethyn recovers enough to speak.
“When I heard what you had found, the location of the mouth of the Straits of Anian, I thought, I believed, that it would be a sin against God were a Protestant nation to gain access to the riches of Cathay.”
He speaks as if he has rehearsed this line. He is changing the subject, Dee thinks. He does not wish to talk about why he wanted me killed, because he has no very good reason, because he did not do it! Dee is certain, but Walsingham has caught hold of the lure. He has swallowed it whole.
“So you did what?” Walsingham asks.
“I devised the way to get Isobel Cochet to retrieve the documents that you had stolen from Admiral DaSilva.”
That is a nice way of putting it, Dee thinks, and he is about to intervene with a question of his own, when he hears, distantly, a woman’s voice summoning someone whose name Dee does not catch. But the sound takes Dee elsewhere, to his dream, and he walks across the Turkey carpet to where the window lets in a long stripe of light. Outside on the grass, in a garden not unlike Her Majesty’s in Greenwich—save this one has a rather fine dovecote, newfangled, on a wooden post—under the watchful eye of two nurses and a man leaning on a nocked longbow, is gathered a number of children. They are having what looks to be a party. A game is in progress. Blind man’s buff? Is that its name? One child in a blindfold, the rest racing around.
Gethyn joins him, and they stand shoulder to shoulder, their backs to Walsingham and Beale. It is a very pleasant scene.
“Are they all Smith’s?” Dee asks.
“None of them,” Gethyn says. “Smith had a boy, George. Killed in Ulster this last year.”
“Yours?”
“Mostly,” Gethyn says with a smile. He turns to Dee, waiting. Dee looks back at the children. His eye settles on one of the girls. She is dimpled, in a pretty dress, and one of the older girls is tying a length of linen around her eyes.
“You see, Dr. Dee?” Gethyn says. “No harm came to her.”
The Queen’s guard take Gethyn to the Tower, while Dee and Walsingham and Beale wonder what to do with Rose Cochet.
“Leave her with Gethyn’s family,” Dee suggests. “She is happy here, for the while. I will go to her grandfather. Swap his misery for his granddaughter’s death with that of his daughter’s.”
Walsingham has the decency to look sick with guilt.
They ride back through the forest, having given up the caroche for Gethyn and two guardsmen. Dee is so weary he might fall from his saddle and they stop fairly often. Walsingham and Beale are deflated that it is not Smith on his way to the Tower.
“Gethyn seemed like a good man,” Beale says.
He places him in the past tense.
“Perhaps he is?” Dee supposes. “Perhaps he is doing what he believes to be good?”
“He tried to have you killed,” Beale says.
“Yes,” Dee agrees. “That was bad, but he did it for reasons he thought were good. You two: you are the same as him. You risked Isobel Cochet’s life for reasons you thought good. But what if they are bad?”
As he says this, Dee wonders if he is right: Does Gethyn really think what he is doing is right? He does not seem zealous in any way. And why did he stand and admit his guilt? He could have run? Taken a horse and ridden to the docks at Tilbury. A ship to Spain. France even. Easy. Why did he stay and take the blame?
He thinks of the blood in the man’s cough.
Of course.
He is going to die anyway.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Westminster Hall, Westminster, October 30, 1572
Dee attends the trial. He still feels weak, but a chair is brought for him and he is pointed out with some respect by those who know. He hopes for answers to his questions, and he gets them, but they come—or it comes, for there is only one big answer to the plethora of questions—not in the way he expects, in words, but in silence.
Gethyn refuses to speak. He keeps dabbing his mouth with a kerchief. That’s it, Dee thinks. He is going to die anyway.
“Do you know what it is you are bringing upon yourself?” Leicester asks.
Gethyn still says nothing.
“It is contempt,” Leicester says.
Gethyn just looks at Smith. Smith cannot hold his gaze but looks away and fiddles with something on his lap.
Walsingham arrives late, and somewhat flustered. He sits alongside Dee.
“What’s he said?”
“Nothing.”
“I knew it,” Walsingham mutters. “This is a nonsense.”
“Meaning?”
“It means he will die in peine forte et dure but he implicates no one, you see? And it means the Crown will not confiscate his estate: his children will inherit. They will be left provided for.”
Dee looks once more at Gethyn, poor dying Gethyn. He is doing this for love. For love of his God, and for love of his wife and children, of Romilly, the faded beauty. But also: Smith? It is him they must look at now.
“Why have you not put him to the rack, Walsingham?” Dee asks. “Why not get him to confess he is doing this to cover Smith?”
Walsingham looks at Dee beadily.
“You think I did not want to?”
“I’m surprised you did not want to.”
Walsingham nods. “The Queen will not grant a license to do it,” he admits. “Smith has…”
He gestures to show that Smith has gotten into the Queen’s ear.
“I am glad,” Dee says, “that Gethyn will be saved somewhat.”
Walsingham nods.
“Me, too, in a way.”
The thought of putting Gethyn to the rack is
