Dee is briefly disconcerted. What does Walsingham know? What does Walsingham think he knows? He regains balance.
“This has nothing to do with her,” he says. “Go on. You can take me back home now. Or, no. I see. The Marshalsea. I should have known. Still, I thank you for sparing me a no doubt uncomfortable journey with my bailiff friends and their dogs.”
“I am afraid it will not be the Marshalsea, Dr. Dee. Not for you.”
Dee looks skeptical, but Walsingham is flushed with purpose.
* * *
The guards are almost sympathetic as they hurry Dee down Seething Lane, past the well-kept houses of the aldermen, and out into the clearing around the Tower’s moat. He starts to resist as they cross the bridge to the Byward Tower, but it is a totem, and before a man can say the Our Father, he is bundled up the steps of the Beauchamp Tower and into his old cell with a view, should he wish it, of the bluff side of the White Tower and of the scaffold in its keep. The door booms shut. The key turns. Dee is plunged in darkness.
“Oh fuck,” he says.
Dee clenches his eyes and his hands. He sits with his back to the wall and waits. He has been here before, many years ago now. He is attuned to the rhythms of the place: the bells that ring, the doors that close, the clack of keepers’ heels as they pass, the dismal caw of the ravens in the keep. He knows when the food will come; when the buckets will be emptied; he knows when the Queen’s officers will start to circulate, and when he will have to muffle his ears against the screams.
At least he is not manacled.
If only they had let him keep his globe, he might usefully study that. Instead, though, he is without resource other than his mind. He might use this time for thought, but without pen or paper, and without reference, he finds his mind wandering. He thinks about Walsingham. Dee had only told him half the truth: everybody knows him to be clever and thoughtful, that much was true. What was not true is that Dee has ever thought him a fool. Which is what makes the loss of the DaSilva’s paper so astonishing. It is disastrously out of character. If only they had them! If English mariners such as Frobisher, or Hawkins, or even Drake, could find their way through the Straits of Anian, then they might find Cathay, and conquer those lands just as the Spaniards had conquered New Spain. From this, untold wealth would pour back to fill England’s coffers, enough to pay for more warships than Hawkins could even dream of, manned by a navy professional enough to see off every Spanish galley at sea, with enough left over to pay for the books to fill the library he—Dee—had been attempting to persuade the Queen to establish.
This would ensure England was forever ahead of her competitors in the fields of astrology, astronomy, navigation, mechanics, mining, and of course alchemy. She would take her place in the New World, to impose her own values and ethics, in place of those demented papists, and in time, even the Reformed religion would wither, as people relearned the wisdom of the ancients and learned to reach God through knowledge of the self.
But he refuses to think about Walsingham’s ineptitude any further. He knows how a man can drive himself mad this way, without even the need to put him in the room with the brake or the rack, as they do in the Wakefield Tower. He thinks instead of his friends in Germany, and in Holland, and he thinks again about that third volume of Johannes Trithemius’s Steganographia, which if he could only find it would permit him to communicate with men such as Gerardus Mercator, whose great map shows the rough whereabouts of the Straits of Anian, or Gemma Frisius, who had re-created the known world in a series of segments fashioned in copper and bronze. What would such men make of DaSilva’s claim to have found the Northwest Passage?
At length, and at last, he falls into what his keeper, peering through the loophole in his door, believes to be sleep. But Dee is in a state of what he calls lucid wakefulness, in which he is able to see all past and sometimes even future events as present happenings. He dreams now of the events that led to his first incarceration here, under Queen Mary, more than fifteen years ago, when he had just finished his studies in the Low Countries and returned to England.
He had managed to secure the patronage of the young King Edward, which permitted him time to study the cause of tides, and the movement of the heavenly bodies, and he was enjoying some renown—along with his friend Jerome Cardan—casting horoscopes for those who knew their birthdates.
Among those whose chart Dee cast was the young princess Elizabeth.
She had, at that time, been in a strange limbo as the bastard half sister of the King, kept away from court in Woodstock. Yet, through various skeins of obligation, Dee had been summoned, and, intrigued by what he had heard of her, he went, in his scholar’s gown and a fresh collar. He was first struck by her slim, flickering, and ethereal beauty, for her hair was fiery red like her father’s, and her skin was so pale you might almost see through it. It was the acuity of her mind, however, and the clarity of her gaze that most impressed. My God, he had thought, here is a mind!
She had grown up in a strained fashion, and her predicament remained dangerous, but while others might have sought gentler comforts to soothe their isolation, Elizabeth chose to numb her pains with the acquisition of knowledge. She never ceased asking questions of him, from the moment of his first bow, until he was backing out of the door of her rooms. She was hungry for anything he could tell her about anything, and so it began: a system of writing that did away with individual letters, knowledge of the fortifications of the lock gates at Antwerp, familiarity with the medicinal herbs the Romans had planted on the wall in the northern parts, a device for moving heavy weights using levers and pulleys, flightless birds in certain islands off Africa.
She was above all fascinated by his astrolabe, and in every aspect of astronomy, as well as astrology and clairvoyance, and so, naturally enough, he offered to cast her horoscope. She was Virgo, he told her, the Ministering Angel, practical and hardworking, fastidious in her health, and mistrusting of fiery displays of emotion, though, in fact, this last characteristic did not apply.
But also: likely to be a spinster.
Does that upset you? he had asked.
She took a mouthful of the roasted swan they were served for supper.
We shall see, she’d said.
She was eighteen at the time, six years his junior, and any physical impulses he felt toward her were overcome by the thought of what her sister might do to his person were he to act upon them, and so he contained himself and worked to temper the girl into something he thought would one day be of very great use.
But what, though?
Meanwhile Jerome Cardan was invited to cast the King’s horoscope, for the King was a sickly child, and the chart would help his physicians choose the correct course of treatment. Cardan divined the boy was threatened with a grave illness—which any man with eyes might see—but if he could survive it, he would live to a grand old age.
But the boy could not, and the next week he died.
Cardan fled the country, though it has always puzzled Dee how he managed it in time.
Despite the best efforts of some, Queen Mary took the throne, and set about reversing the religious reforms her predecessors had made.
For a few months, all was well.
Queen Mary even appointed Dee the court astrological adviser, and in this capacity he cast her horoscope: Sun in Pisces, Moon in Virgo, Mars in Capricorn. She was a fist, cold and efficient, occasionally impetuous when it came to enacting plans. These details he sugared. She was a dreary lover, and he did not see children. These details he kept to himself.