Walsingham had rolled his eyes.
“But are you sure about this, Dee? Revealed to you in a dream? We are… we are staking the nation’s future on something you saw in your sleep?”
“Walsingham,” Dee had said. “You will have to trust me.”
The exact noise Walsingham had made could not be rendered in letters of any known alphabet.
“It is not me who trusts in you and your dreams, Dee,” he’d said. “It is the Queen. All your dreams and intuitions. Tcha.”
“They have never yet let me down,” Dee had told him, not absolutely certain this was the case. But he had been absurdly pleased to hear of the faith Bess still put in him.
“We’ll see,” Walsingham had said. “So. Go with God, and we will send a ship to meet you off Nez Bayard in—”
“Yes, yes, Walsingham. On the old Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, I know. I shall expect the finest luxury: maidens, swans, samite, and so forth.”
Walsingham had growled, and when at length the boat had docked in Calais, Dee was quickly into a saddle, brandishing the passport Walsingham had forged for him, and on the road to Avranches as soon as could be managed. If Dee’s dream was wrong, then it would be best to find that out sooner rather than later. After five days’ riding only the fleetest horses, he was at the Lion D’Or, saddle sore and sick of salty mutton.
“You are a pilgrim, m’sieur?” the innkeeper had asked, pouring him a big jolt of calvados and pushing it over the counter.
“I am,” he had confirmed and had required another cup.
And now here he is, his boots tied and slung around his neck, waiting at dawn in the marketplace with the party of perhaps twenty French pilgrims, each one likewise barefoot. Their guide is a sullen Norman with a mustache the color of wet straw, in thigh-length boots of sealskin and an oiled hat, who tells them first how the abbey came to be built after the Archangel Michael appeared to the Bishop of Avranches, likewise in a dream.
“The bishop ignored the archangel not once, nor twice, but three times, until the archangel burned a hole in his forehead—like this, see?—after which Bishop Aubert thought he had best do as ordered.”
And so the abbey was founded on an uncompromising rock in the middle of a sea of muddy sand and water, where the tides were fast, vast, and unpredictable.
“It is the most treacherous place in the world after London,” the guide continues. “Most days the water rises three times the height of a man, and sometimes as much as five times. It comes in faster than a horse can gallop, and there are times in the day when the land you think you are standing on turns to water, and down you go. Pop Pop.”
Despite the nervous laughs it is not funny, he says. Many pilgrims have died: drowned or sucked down by the liquid sand. This is why they must pay him to guide them through the mudflats to the rock itself, where the abbey spire dominates the land as far as the eye can see.
“You try to cross one moment too early: you drown. You try it one moment too late: you drown.”
They set off through the dawn, the donkeys very strong smelling. A sea mist pleats and gathers in the wind. Dee shivers. He is not well. He nudges his donkey forward.
“Is the abbé here?” he asks, nodding forward into the mist.
“Of course,” the guide tells him.
“Anybody else?”
The guide gives him a snide look.
“My sister,” he says. “She is very busy.”
He stretches the word very: ve-e-rry. A cook? A whore? He hopes she is better looking than her brother. Of course she must be. But what does it mean? They ride through the low marshland. Tall grasses sough in the salt-laden breeze. He can hear gulls but no sound of the sea. Then at last they emerge out of the mist and onto the flats. There, ahead, at the end of the long low causeway, is the mount itself. In certain lights it is magical, but this morning, daunting. A clutch of gray slate spires reach up to God, skirted around by a forbidding castle wall.
It is the only castle in Normandy not to fall to King Harry’s English armies, and there is little wonder why. But the guide is more interested in the great swath of sand that surrounds the castle.
One of the French pilgrims—the least pious of the party, there to impress a woman, Dee surmises—asks if it is true that King Louis built a prison on the island.
The guide agrees.
“I heard there is one dungeon that floods at high tide,” the pilgrim says.
It makes the Tower sound palatial.
“Certainly,” the guide says. “And an iron cage, too, the size of which they can change to suit any man. Now, behind me in a single file. And keep up.”
They ride out through the swath of sandy mud. Two bowshots, perhaps three, and to the south the surface seems to shimmer like potters’ slip. It even looks lethal, Dee thinks. Behind him everyone is silent. They are stunned by the place, perhaps, or are thinking of their cold feet, and the dangers of the quickening sand that surrounds them.
They ride on until they reach the castle’s outer gate, manned by five soldiers in steel helmets and traveling cloaks. A brazier of sea coal throws up a quantity of smoke, and for a moment Dee cannot see their colors. If they are not de Guise, then he has misinterpreted his dream. He steels himself to have been wrong in this, and to have to turn back, back across the sands, to beat the tide, and to ride for Calais, after two weeks’ wasted effort, but mostly: wasted time. Time he does not have. He feels his heart screwing with anxiety.
At last one of the soldiers moves. His cloak swings open. No colors on show, because he is wearing a breastplate. Dee feels hopeful. Who wears a breastplate to protect a mere abbé? But then another man emerges with no cloak: his jacket is parti-colored, mustard and plum, the colors of de Guise.
Dee lets out a long plume of breath.
He is right: the cardinal is here.
But is Isobel Cochet?
The soldiers are bored enough to be interested in a party of barefoot pilgrims and stand watching them dismount outside the gates. Dee knows how to pass as a much older man and he huddles close to a pair of women from Angoulême as they pass through the first gate into a yard. More men in helmets. Ten so far. All in the colors of de Guise.
The guide tells them that they must keep their prayers short, and be back at these gates within three hours if they wish to ride back in safety.
“Stay any longer and you will be staying all night.”
The guide waits with the first set of soldiers, sourly chewing the ends of his mustache, but the pilgrims must pass another gate, where stand another five or six. The pilgrims get down on their knees and begin the long crawl up the hill. The road winds around the mount, through a few tight-packed houses. It is cobbled, but cleanish, and there are more soldiers and a few of the abbey’s servants up and about their business who stand aside to let the pilgrims pass with tuts and sighs of irritation. Dee feels a fool, but thank Christ they are not flagellants. Walsingham would have liked that.
The road leads them, winding through various buildings, and up numerous flights of steps. The higher he climbs, the further he works himself into the snare, and of course: the abbé’s quarters—where they will be holding Isobel Cochet, for she is, as Walsingham said, a personable young woman—will be right at the very top. She will be locked in some antechamber with barred window and a long drop to the sea. Probably a peephole too.