“I know you have your reasons—good reasons—to dislike and mistrust Master Walsingham, but there is something about this business with Mistress Cochet that he is not telling you, which explains why he did not anticipate her as a threat to what otherwise might have been an intelligencer’s coup.”
Dee waits.
“Mistress Cochet. Isobel Cochet. The woman who took the document: she has a daughter. Rose. Rose is about six, and her father is dead. Dead in Walsingham’s—and so my—service. By every account, Rose is all to her mother.”
Elizabeth—who had just three winters when her father ordered her mother’s head to be struck from her shoulders just yards from where she now stands—looks so infinitesimally sad as she says this that Dee almost crosses the room to put his arm around her. How badly would that go? Very, he thinks. Instead he waits for her to finish.
“But Rose has been taken,” the Queen continues.
“Dead?”
“No. Taken. By someone. After the pages were taken, Master Walsingham sent men to the girl’s house and found she had been taken from her bed in the night. Her grandfather—who is a warden of one of the Cinque Ports—hoped she might have gone wandering and sent men after her, in the hope she had perhaps fallen in a sawpit or pond, but closer inspection revealed a note.”
“A note? Where was this? Where was the child?”
“Near Sandwich. Where the girl stayed when her mother was working for Master Walsingham.”
From Sandwich across the Narrow Sea to France is nothing.
“What did the note say?”
“That the girl was safe, but they were to tell no one she had gone, save confirm it was so, should the mother send message to ask.”
“When was this?”
“Two weeks ago.”
“And the mother did send message to ask?”
“Yes.”
Dee scratches his chin. Clever, he thinks. Or lucky. Or perhaps Walsingham should have done more to protect the girl if he was putting her mother in such jeopardy? Where would that end though? The mistake was that someone had discovered that Isobel Cochet was working for Walsingham. If one could find out who that might be, then one would know who had the girl, and with that, who had forced her mother into stealing the DaSilva documents.
“We do not know,” Elizabeth tells him. “Walsingham believes it may be the work of the Cardinal of Lorraine, the Bishop of Rheims, who is our cousin of Scotland’s uncle, and who has much to gain were she on England’s throne in my stead.”
“Yes, Walsingham mentioned de Guise.”
“You know him?”
“A sly fox. He and Walsingham are of a pair, ever keen to have others do their dirty work for them.”
“In this case the dirty work he envisages is to bend the might of Spain to turf me from my seat.”
Levers, Dee thinks. Levers to move a heavy object.
“And where is he now? Rheims?”
Elizabeth shakes her head.
“Walsingham has someone in the English College. The cardinal has not been seen for a month or more. No one knows where he is.”
So that is the problem, Dee thinks. The old fox has gone to ground, dragging his prey with him. They’ll only know where he is when he is the Archbishop of Canterbury.
“You once told me,” Elizabeth tells him now, “that there existed a force that mediated between all things in the cosmos. A power that has always existed, and the ancients understood, but we now give to God.”
Dee nods. That is more or less it.
“You told me that a German meister believed that it might one day be possible to rediscover this power, a man might somehow insert himself into that power, and let it become him, and he it, and in so doing, influence that power to his own ends.”
He knows what she will go on to ask.
“I will disappoint you, Bess, I mean, Your Majesty, but since our disputations at Woodstock I have spent a decade or more reading books that talk of books that talk of other books that are said to hold the key to such things. But though I have sought these books through all Christendom, from Cracow to Cádiz, from Paris to Poznan, I have met no joy. It is true I am yet to despair of ever finding them, for I am of an optimistic disposition, as you know, but I cannot see how I will ever do so while I am so constrained under the orders of Master Walsingham.”
She is disappointed, obviously.
Seeing this, Dee goes on.
“Do you think if I could change the world I would not already have done so? Is not my being here in the Tower proof that I am unable to influence its mechanics? Who, Bess, would choose to shit in an old bucket?”
She laughs now, a sad laugh. She sees her hope was foolish.
“There are worse things,” she tells him.
And he believes she knows them. Oh yes. She knows them all right. But now is not the time for that.
“Not if the bucket has not been emptied since the last guest,” he jokes.
She looks away.
The church bell rings. She has lingered too long. She shucks her cloak about her shoulders.
“I was not such a fool to imagine you might change the world’s course,” she tells him. “But I always think of you as my eyes, John, able to see clearly in the night where others only saw darkness.”
He looks down when she says this. He remembers. She used to call him her eyes, she said, because he had seen so much more of the world than she had—then—and she believed he knew how it all worked. Not just the planets and the stars and so on, but the world’s men and women, too, and the ways of power and privilege, its uses and abuses. He had scratched a symbol on his wall for her, a silly thing: a pair of eyes shaded from the sun by a hand with the thumb sticking down. It had looked more like two zeroes and a seven. It was probably still there.
“I hoped you would help recover what is lost,” she goes on, remembering their closeness. “If not for Master Walsingham’s sake, then for your country, and if not for your country, then for mine. For me.”
She stares at him for a long, comfortless moment. And Dee is lost for words. Then she leaves.
When she is gone, he finds his words, but by then it is too late to undo all that he has done, to do all that he has left undone.
* * *
That night Dee dreams of tides washing over broad sands, of a mountain, of a ringing bell, and of the Archangel Michael.
In the morning he calls out: “Fetch me Walsingham!”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Beauvoir, Normandy, September 9, 1572
John Dee does not dislike horses, but this one is slender, and pin buttocked, and he is pleased to be down from its saddle. He shields his eyes from the evening sun and looks south across the sea toward a distant pimple of rock, set far from the seashore— isolated; lonely; impregnable, castellated, and atop: an abbey spire pointing to God.
Mont Saint-Michel.
Property of the Cardinal of Lorraine.
He stands awhile waiting, watching the tide come in. It moves, he has been told, faster than any horse in Christendom, and when it comes, the landscape transforms into seascape at a frightening speed. He shivers and leads the horse along the newly engorged river’s north bank, wishing he had come by boat after all.
“I don’t like linear journeys,” he’d told Walsingham, when they had stood by the wharfside in Sandwich, watching the boat being loaded with wools for the markets in Antwerp.