He moves around his pillar and begins up the south aisle. The abbey is crowded, and he cannot see the altar, but he works his way down, assuming the cardinal will be at the front, and his Spanish priest nearby. He sees his pilgrims, still on their knees, along with many others besides, and there are a hundred friars and priests of every color. At the front is the cardinal: elderly and sallow, but there is something intensely lively about his face, and Dee is reminded that Walsingham calls him Minister of Mischief. He wears red silk, with a white chasuble and a red zucchetto, and his expression—perhaps Dee imagines it—is that of a man on the cusp of winning a long, long game of chess against an evenly matched opponent.
Next to him is the abbé, in burgundy silks, frail and silvery, perhaps a simpleton from a good family. Both are surrounded with men in mustard and plum velvet, but there is no sign of Father Adán or Isobel Cochet.
Dee plans his next move. He will have to wait until the Mass is finished, he thinks, and then follow the cardinal, but the service is at least moving quickly: it must be because the pilgrims need to get back down the hill to their donkeys and the trip back to the mainland before the tide comes in.
Time seems to stretch and yaw. It always does in Mass. But then he feels it. Or hears it. Or tastes it. Something at odds with an abbey. An atmosphere. Dee is silent and still, every sense alert. He has ever been open to this form of communication, though he has yet to formulate the terminology to describe it. It is not unlike his lucid dreaming, but it is more than that: it is an engagement with the world in four dimensions. It is the perception of a message from beyond the usual twenty senses. Dee is yet to fully understand it, but has long been certain such a thing is possible.
Now he knows what to do.
The crypt, of course.
He waits until Mass concludes, and the blessing is given, and the congregation hurries about their business and the choir members troop out after them while the priest and his acolytes snuff the candles and clear the altar. All through this, Dee remains hidden, kneeling in his own private prayers, and when it is done, and the last of the echoing footfall fades, he leaves it for the length of sixty heartbeats, and then rises on soft feet, and slips into the south transept.
At a staircase, he descends. Candles are lit below and their warmth greets him. As does a man: small, dark-eyed, not expecting him. Dee rushes him in a few steps. He repeats his attack on the lieutenant, but this time he cannot catch him, and the man drops backward, down the steps, and cracks his head on the stones with the sound of a sparrow’s egg on a brick floor. Dee feels his own pulse in his teeth; he might vomit. There is something very dreadful about ending a man’s life, whomsoever it may be. But look, there: the man has a gun—one of the short, one-handed sorts that assassins favor—crammed in his sash. He would have killed Dee had Dee not killed him. It is true that the fuse is not lit, nor likely to be, but still: it is the principle. He who deals in death must buy as well as sell.
But… wait. He is a priest. So. Father Adán then.
The candles flicker in their sconces, as if to mark the departure of his immortal soul, and the communication Dee had felt in the nave halts, but there is still something. Some emanation, as if from the stones themselves. He stands still, looking around. Nothing. Only the candles in their sconces. Huge pillars of well-dressed stone. What masons these men were!
Was it the dead man talking to him? Summoning him down here? He thinks not. He hears a creak, from beyond the pillars, in the gloom. It reminds him of being aboard ship. Rope. Above his head. He slips to the shadowed side. Behind a pillar. His breath comes fast. There is not much air down here. Then he hears a voice.
“Well, come on then.”
A woman. Slightly strangulated, again from above. He steps around the pillar, ready for what he cannot begin to guess.
Nothing.
“Up here.”
Above is a tall cube, hanging in midair about a man’s height off the ground. It is too dark to see what it really is. Dee returns for a candle and brings it over. Hot wax on his fingers is nothing: the cube is a lattice of iron bars, hanging from the roof, and within: a woman. Isobel Cochet.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Mont Saint-Michel, September 9, 1572
“My God,” she says, “you took your time.”
He stares. The cage. The guide mentioned it: the iron cage the size of which can be changed to fit any man. Only now Dee sees what he meant: its size can be changed to unfit any man. Too short to stand in upright, too narrow to sit or lie, the cage holds Isobel Cochet crouching with her knees and neck bent. It might be tolerable for the length of time it takes to say the Our Father, but longer than that and it would drive you mad. The sea coming in through your window every day, which he endured, would be bad enough, but this?
“Who are you?” she asks.
“John Dee,” he tells her. “Dr. John Dee.”
He holds the candle up to light her face. Her eyes are sunken and feverish. Her dress—the color of dried sage leaves—is ragged and filthy, her linens gray and ringed with stains, and her nails are like talons. He can feel the heat of desperation coming off her.
“Walsingham sent you?” she asks. She does not seem quite as pleased to see him as he had supposed.
He studies the cage. Six sheets of iron bars, each edge stitched together with a fat iron chain ending in a lock as large as a man’s fist. He reaches up to rattle it. It might hold back an elephant.
“Why do they keep you in this?” he asks.
“Because I have only given them half of what they want.”
Dee wonders if he is missing something. Then he sees it.
“And you will not let them have the other half until you see your daughter safe.”
“Exactly.”
“What have you given them so far?” he wonders.
“The first of the two pages,” she tells him. “It is nothing but a strange geometrical drawing, square, like this, with circles within.”
“Who has it?”
“Father Adán,” she says. “He keeps it locked in there.” She gestures at what might be a sacristy door. “He asked me questions about it all day. Most nights, too.”
“And the page you did not give him?”
“Burned. Ashes in a sluice.”
Dee is alarmed.
“Christ,” he says. “What was it?”
“A list of numbers. Some letters.”
“That is all? Not a map? Do you recall any of the numbers? The letters?”
She looks at him.
“Do you know anything about me, Dr. Dee?”
“I know Walsingham values you more highly than anyone else in his employ.”
Isobel laughs bitterly.
“Why do you think that was? Because I am able to suck on a man’s pizzle until he falls faint for lack of strength?”
Dee hesitates. “Can you?”
She sighs. “It was because, among other things, I need only look at a thing once to memorize it forever.”
“That is useful,” Dee concedes.
She is silent, waiting.
“So?” she asks.
“So I am here, to retrieve the document.”
“Ah,” she says. “A dilemma.”
A dilemma of her own device: now she is become the document he must rescue.