“We need someone with something a little out of the ordinary,” Walsingham says. He flicks over the pages until he comes to a back page on which is written a short list of names and numbers. He reaches for a freshly sharpened nib and runs it down the page. Beale can see the names and their attendant numbers, some crossed out, and he knows what that means. But some are clear and legible: 003 – Christopher Marlowe; 004 – Walter Raleigh; 006 – Francis Drake. Walsingham comes to the column’s end, unhappy.
He shakes his head. “What do we know about the bishop?” he asks.
“He is a de Guise, first; a man of the cloth, second; and a Frenchman, third. In and out of favor with the French king and likewise the pope, fanatically dedicated only to his family’s advance, most especially his niece Mary. He is believed to be trying to introduce the Inquisition to France, yet has an interest in the occult, and is an advocate of what he calls the intertraffic of the human mind.”
Walsingham is silent for a moment.
“The intertraffic of the human mind, eh? Well, well, I believe I know just the man after all.”
CHAPTER SIX
Mortlake, England, September 2, 1572
“John! Wake up, John! There’s two men at the door.”
It is his mother, and he knows there are two men at the door. Two men and a dog. Bill and Bob. Bob and Bill.
“Don’t answer it, Mother.”
Are we in trouble? she will ask.
Only if you answer the door, he will answer.
He is tying his breeches, lacing his doublet, his gaze roving the shelves in search of what to take, what to leave. His books—all nine hundred and twelve of them? Or his astrolabes, his globes, and all the various mechanisms of his own device? Hurry. Hurry.
“They say they want a word with you.”
“I bet they do.”
His hand falls on Mercator’s globe. He is not likely to see his old friend again for a while, he supposes, and if he leaves it here, it is just the sort of thing a fool will melt to make a trinket for an even larger fool. He wraps it in a shirt, pushes it within his bag, and then makes for the rear window. The roof of his library abuts the house just below his window, and he balances himself on its apex, spreads his arms, and wobbles his way to the gable end. Below is an apple tree, fat with green fruit. A five-foot drop. Bang. Always more painful than he imagines. Apples thud to the ground. He is about to join them when the dog—last seen licking its own testicles in Cambridge—appears.
Dear Christ, it is an ugly beast. Of the sort that brooks no argument and will not let go. He knows that he will have to sacrifice his left forearm to its jaws and beat it to death with his right fist. But his moment’s hesitation has cost him time he does not have, and now Bill appears in the orchard. He has a black eye and a puffed lip.
“John Dee,” he says. “You are under arrest for debts owed to His Grace the Bishop of Bath and Wells amounting to the sum of five marks, eight shillings, and sixpence. Plus expenses.”
Plus expenses? Dee clambers along a branch. He is only a few feet above Bill’s head, but it is enough. If he can make it into the next tree and the one after that, and the one after that, then he might be near enough the river’s edge to make a run for it. Can these sorts of dog swim? It does not look as if it might.
There follows a standoff.
Now Bob comes too. And he now also has a dog, of the same sort. White, but so short haired as to be almost pink, with red eyes and a lolling scarf of a tongue.
“Come on down, Dee,” Bob calls.
“What are you going to do? Throw the dog at me?”
There is some head scratching.
“Could do,” Bob says.
It is curious to look down and see his own shape among shadows thrown by the latticework of the apple branches.
His mother watches from the back door.
“Come down, John,” she calls. “You’ll only hurt yourself.”
Bill and Bob below agree.
“They’ll hurt me more if I do,” he tells his mother.
“I’m sure they won’t, will you?”
“ ’Course not.”
But they will, so he shifts his weight and prepares to slide over to the next tree. At times like this he wishes he could fly like the angels. At times like this he wishes his mother did not have his trees pruned so carefully. The bough bends under him, slowly lowering him toward Bob’s grasp, he being the taller of the two men. Both dogs growl. Dee makes a calculation. He leaps. His bag, with Mercator’s globe in it, catches on a branch. He is pulled short, bouncing back. The branch gives and he slides and crashes to the ground, scattering dog and man below. But they are on him straightaway. One dog has his boot. The other his wrist. The strength they bring! They pull against each other, and he is pulled between them as if he were a bone to be tussled over. The two men stand watching with pleasure.
“Come on, then,” Bill says, and he takes Dee’s other heel, the one without the dog, and turns him, dragging him toward the orchard doorway. Funny to think Queen Elizabeth once stood exactly there. Different days perhaps.
Bob calls off his dog, and Dee’s sleeve is released. It aches to the very bone, but there is no blood.
“Where are you taking him?” comes a voice. It is not Dee’s mother.
“Marshalsea,” Bill answers.
“I am afraid I have greater need of him than the Marshalsea,” the voice continues, and both Bill and Bob look up and about.
Down by the river: two boats, oars up, nudging to land, each carrying men of the sort it is unwise to resist. At the bow of the first: a well-dressed man in good black cloth.
“Put him down, will you.” It is not a question.
Even Bill and Bob know not to argue, though they try.
Dee looks up at the sun. He says nothing. He knows that voice.
“He is ours,” Bill starts.
“He is a subject of Her Majesty the Queen,” the voice reminds him. “And I claim his person in her name. Now put him down or I will shoot your dogs, and then you.”
One by one all three let go of Dee’s limbs, and a moment later, he is sitting up, rubbing his ribs, ruing his fall.
“You all right, John?”
“Yes, Mother.”
“You’ll have to pay us for him,” Bill says. “Five marks, eight shillings, and sixpence.”
“Plus expenses,” Bob adds.
Francis Walsingham pulls a face and shakes his head.
“You’ll have to invoice the Treasury.”
“I think I’d rather go with these two gentlemen to the Marshalsea, if it is all the same with you, Master Walsingham,” Dee says.
A spasm of irritation crosses Walsingham’s face.
“You’ll do as you are told, Dee,” he says.
* * *
The two men and their dogs, and his mother, watch John Dee climb into the boat with Master Walsingham and settle himself on a thwart next to another man, who will turn out to be Robert Beale, Master Walsingham’s right-hand man.
The oarsmen push off, and they row against the tide eastward, toward London. Little is said. Dee’s arm aches, and there is a hole in his boot. It is a close morning, and a mist haunts the river, left over from yesterday’s rain. After perhaps an hour, the boat brings them into the steps below the Tower, and despite himself, Dee shudders.