“Nothing to fear, Dr. Dee.” Beale smiles. He seems reasonable enough.
“Not yet,” Walsingham adds, with a rictus grin of his own.
His teeth must trouble him, Dee thinks.
They walk up past the Tower and up Seething Lane, escorted by five halberdiers.
“What is all this about, Walsingham?” Dee asks.
They are standing in Walsingham’s curious garden, filled with knee-high hedges cut in geometrical patterns signifying nothing that Dee can determine. He knows he should be modestly impressed, but he has been all over Europe, so he is not.
Walsingham starts by admitting that they have not always seen eye to eye in the past, and that Dee’s current predicament owes something to him, but, he suggests, they need to put all that behind them.
“Why?”
After much diversion, Walsingham eventually explains how he came to have, only to lose, the DaSilva paper.
Dee, being a keen cartographer, presses Walsingham on the whereabouts of the Straits of Anian and removes an object from his bag.
“Do you always carry a globe with you wherever you go?”
“Just show me,” Dee demands.
But Walsingham cannot.
“The page was in code,” he tells him.
“And you lost it? Everybody says how clever and careful you are, Walsingham, but I have always known you as a bloody fool. Do you know how valuable that information is? The Northwest Passage! By Christ, that could have been the saving of our country! We could have broken the papist stranglehold on Christendom! The things we might have learned! And you lost it! Why, tell me, does the Queen permit you even to breathe? Your head should be on the bridge even now, providing thin sustenance for the crows! Dear God! How could you?”
“I did not plan it that way, Dee,” Walsingham snaps. “I did not plan to have it stolen.”
“Well, what are you going to do about it now?”
There is a moment’s silence before Walsingham answers, as eloquent as any set of words.
Dee smiles at him.
“So,” he says, “now you need my help.”
Walsingham is momentarily disconcerted by the easy offer. But he is grateful.
“Yes,” he agrees.
Dee almost laughs. How long has this been coming, he wonders, and he cannot help but recall the last conversation he had with Walsingham, after Walsingham had played a part in sabotaging his standing as the Queen’s adviser on astronomy and astrology because he had a name as a sorcerer, a man who practiced magic. Dee had told him that it was not magic that he practiced, but technology.
“There is a divine force,” he had told Walsingham, “created and controlled by God, that turns the planets, causes the sun to rise and set, the tide to wax and wane. The ancients understood this power, and they understood how to access it. But we have lost that knowledge, and all we are left with is superstition and ignorance, prey to easy exploitation. With time, and money, I could find the lost third book of Johannes Trithemius’s Steganographia and with it regain that knowledge, and so come to an understanding of the use of that divine power.”
This had cut no ice with Walsingham, who had told him the Queen had no need of any companion of hellhounds, or a conjurer of wicked and damned spirits, and he was backed up by that fool, Sir Thomas Smith, with whom Dee had argued about his pathetic and dangerous colony in Ireland, which was just then sucking up all his money, and all that he could borrow from the Queen. It would have been far better for the Queen to spend her money elsewhere: specifically, in the New World. That was where the future lay, Dee had said, not Ireland.
Sir Thomas Smith never forgave him that.
And as for the unfortunate fracas with the Earl of Leicester, well, that was always going to happen. The man wore a mail shirt, for the love of God, because so many people wanted to kill him. Anyway, Dee was sent to pack his bags. He had returned to Mortlake unemployed and humiliated, never, he thought, to see the Queen again.
He had also thought that he would never forgive any of the men their spite, their machinations, and yet now here is Walsingham, begging for help, and Dee despite himself, gives him his ear and his time.
You will pay a hefty price for that, Dee thinks.
“I will need chambers,” Dee begins, “and all my books brought from Mortlake. And my various instruments: my astrolabes; my cross-staffs, all three of them. And I will need to consult widely, with men such as—”
But now Walsingham puts a hand on Dee’s arm as if he were trying to stop a friend embarrassing himself.
“No, Dee, listen,” he says. “It is not that sort of help I need.”
So it is Dee’s turn to be taken aback.
“You do not need me to find the Northwest Passage?”
“No, I need you to find the pages. I need you to go and reclaim them for me.”
Dee stares, unbelieving.
“You want me to go and reclaim them? To steal them back?”
“Yes,” Walsingham agrees. “I am in need of your access to the parts of the world where I have none.”
Dee is glad it is only Beale who stands as witness to his foolish hopes of tardy recognition. Meanwhile Walsingham ignores the expression on Dee’s face and continues on. He tells him of how DaSilva’s packet of pages was taken from an intelligencer named Fellowes, whom he says he loved like a son, and of Mistress Cochet, who murdered the man.
“And she was my best, and my brightest,” Walsingham confesses. “Of great beauty, and with an astonishing brain, for a woman, and many other skills besides.”
He leaves it vague what these might be. Dee is hardly listening. His core is molten with shamed anger. Yet Walsingham babbles, as if he believes Dee’s agreement to help still applies. He tells him about the English College at Rheims, and how Isobel Cochet might have been forced to act as she has by the Bishop of Rheims, Cardinal de Guise. Guise and his interest in the intertraffic of the mind.
Dee is silent. He wishes with all his heart that he was alone. He would welcome a cell in the Marshalsea.
“I believe that is most likely where the document has gone,” Walsingham concludes. “I believe you will find it with the cardinal. Since you spent time with Bishop Bonner, you are known to have Catholic sympathies. You may pass among them and know to ask the right questions.”
He finally registers Dee’s dismay.
“What is wrong?”
“No,” Dee tells him. “No. I will not do it. Not your dirty work, Master Walsingham. You do that yourself.”
“But Dr. Dee—”
There follows a torrent of promises: money for more books, money to found the national library Dee has always wanted, money to fund his speculative digs in the Welsh Marches for the buried treasure of the late King Arthur, a position at Trinity. Then come the appeals: to his better nature, to his patriotism, to his Reformist beliefs.
None of them work.
“No, Master Walsingham. I will not pretend I do not wish you had not lost DaSilva’s charts to the Spanish, and that the benefits of such an advantage are not to come England’s way, but you deserve to hang for this, and I will not be the one who moves to save you. You will have to find some other fool.”
Walsingham hangs his head. He knows Dee has his points, and that there is no reason he should risk his life on his behalf.
“But for the Queen? Your Queen?”