They smile at each other.
“If you were to give me the figures?” he suggests, pointlessly.
She just laughs. “It is a little more complicated than that.”
“In what way?”
“My daughter.”
Dee stands as if on a threshold. He knew this would happen. He had come to no decision what he would say when she asked. Now he does.
“Mistress Cochet,” he says. “That is why I am sent: the Queen has Rose in her care.”
There is a long silence. Dee feels the world bending to look at him. Even the abbey’s stones. He can hear their screams. He has committed an outrage against God. Isobel Cochet looks at him, too, and she should scream in bloody horror, but she wants to believe him. She wants to believe her child is safe. She does not want to believe she has just been condemned to death.
“How do you know?” she asks. A residue of suspicion.
“She told me before I set out.”
“Have you seen her with your own eyes?”
“No,” Dee admits.
“But she told you? The Queen?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Walsingham believed it was the only thing that would make you kill his intelligencer in Paris.”
Cochet closes her eyes.
“He is right,” she says. “May God defend me, I had no choice.”
She tells him how she was taken in the Louvre.
“Or, not taken, just spoken to, in one of those rooms they have there, with a huge fire, and mirrors instead of wainscoting. One of the cardinal’s men, this man, Father Adán, he caught me unawares. He had a doll of hers. Of Rose’s. A little thing my husband had once given her.”
“So you never spoke to the cardinal?”
She shakes her head. “Not until later. Until they brought me here.”
“How did Adán put it?”
“He told me Rose was safe. That she was being well cared for, by a good family. He wished I could see her, even, for she was so enjoying herself. Only if I ever did want to see her again, then I needed to find something that Adán had heard had just come into the English ambassador’s possession.”
“And you were to bring it to him?”
“Yes. Bring it here. Paris was impossible at the time, even for the king. All that blood. All those bodies. And the people: still maddened by it all. Anyway. I thought to find Rose here, but no. And when I did not see her, I would not give them what they wanted.”
“So here you are.”
“So here I am. But tell me about Rose. The Queen found her? The Queen?”
“Well. Francis Walsingham. Once they had heard what had happened to Oliver Fellowes. Because of it, he rode to your father’s house. In Kent. And finding the girl, your daughter, missing, he sealed the ports. She was picked up off a cog of smoked mackerel loaded for Antwerp.”
“And she is safe? She is with Her Majesty? Where?”
“In Nonsuch.” He is silent for a moment. Gripped with rage at his own riskiness. Why not Greenwich or Hampton Court? Why Nonsuch? Why put even the slightest hint in her mind?
But Isobel Cochet is in no mood to be swayed by such indicators.
She sobs with relief.
“Oh thank God.”
Her head hangs low, hidden by hanks of loose hair and she weeps quietly for a few moments while Dee curses himself. Christ, this is a dirty business. He imagines that outside the afternoon will be wearing on. The tide: it will be coming in, and coming in fast. He has spent nights in worse places, of course, but as soon as the lieutenant wakes, he will sound the alarm. They will come looking for Father Adán.
After a while Mistress Cochet wipes her nose on her soiled sleeve.
“So now there remains me,” she says, “stuck in this thing.”
He does not know how she can bear it.
“Get me out, get me to England, and reunite me with my girl, and those numbers will be yours.”
He will cross each hurdle as it comes, he thinks.
And getting her out of the cage is the first.
But the truth is: he cannot.
Had he a set of jeweler’s tools, or even a blacksmith’s tool, or—wait.
He steps away, back over the body of the dead Spaniard, Father Adán. He takes out the handgun and studies it a moment. It is a well-worked thing, though simple enough: a small powder pan covered by a sliding silver disk, a length of fuse poised above. If the disk is slid back, and the lever below the barrel is squeezed to the body of the gun, the fuse will come down into the powder, and if the fuse is lit, the powder will catch fire, and, through a small aperture at the sealed end of the barrel, it will ignite the main charge within the barrel, which will then explode. The force of this explosion will propel the ball in the barrel out of the barrel’s end at astonishing force.
Or so Dee is given to understand.
“Have you ever done this before, Dee?” Cochet asks.
“I have seen it done,” he lies.
“Show me,” she tells him.
He slides the steel catch off the powder pan and shows her it is full.
“Is there a ball in the barrel?”
He doesn’t know, but it’s still worth a try. Both cringe from the gun as he holds its barrel against the chain lock and squeezes the trigger to lower the fuse. There is a crack and a blinding flash. The gun bucks in his hand, tearing the skin of his palm. Smoke fills the air. Something hits the stones and flies away into the darkness.
“Yes,” he answers her question. “Are you all right?”
“God, Dee.”
“Sorry.”
“Has it worked?”
The lock is too hot to hold. It has a large silver pock in the corner of its face.
“You couldn’t even hit it from an inch!”
“I am not a markman,” he agrees.
It looks more solidly locked than before. He hits it with the gun. Nothing happens. It is still locked.
God’s truth.
Another ball might do it?
“Did you try Adán’s purse?” Cochet asks.
“What for?”
“The key.”
Ah.
Dee turns the dead priest over and there is not one key in his purse, but two. Both are as long and as fat as a lady’s forefinger.
The second one he tries fits in the keyhole, but the lock is made a great deal stiffer for having been shot. Miraculously, though, it opens. He laughs. She laughs. Then she collapses with relief and the cage sways. He starts to unweave the fat chain through the fat iron bars.
“Come on, come on,” she urges. She pulls at the chain from the other end.
“It won’t help,” he tells her.
“It might.”
After a long frustrating moment, they have the chain rattling through the final bars and the cage crashes apart. Dee leaps back as the heavy iron lattices hammer to the ground around him. Cochet grabs the top rail and hangs.
“Help me,” she bleats, for she is very weak and racked with cramps. He grips her legs. She is unpleasant smelling. He hardly cares. She lets go of the bars and he carries her a few paces and then places her on the ground, just managing to catch her before she collapses.
He helps her to a bench by a lectern on which papers are pinned.
“The other key,” she says. “It will be for the sacristy.”