A thin whistle of wind at the cracks. Can he hear the sea? He’s not sure. He stands there a good long while. He supposes his eyes would be used to the dark now, if it wasn’t so absolute. He steps back to let the door sigh open on the breeze. Gray starlight falls through the opening and he is quickly through and out into the recondite yard.
Overhead, stars. He is facing west.
Ahead is the stable, but a horse snickers to his left, to the south.
Then a voice, a man’s in a low murmur, ahead, by the stable.
Dee ducks below the stone course so that his shape is not obvious against the whitewashed wattle, and he moves softly north. The sea is half a league beyond the scrubby trees, and he can hear it now, breaking on the rocks, but Walsingham’s instructions were very specific: ask for, find, stand on, and send signal from Nez Bayard at first light on the morning of the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross.
How he will do that without a lamp is another matter.
First, though, he needs to be out of the trap of the house.
There is a midden to be negotiated, filled with mussel shells, and then he is into untilled pasture where he stops by the sheepfold filled with pale shapes. He thinks, for a moment, of wolves. Then he turns to watch the house. The night is blue black, and inky shapes writhe in his imagination. Or do they? He needs to look twice. Two men, coming around the north end of the house. A moment earlier and he would have met them head-on.
He crouches and waits a moment. He can smell the sheep, but they are very quiet. Are there wolves in this part of France?
How long has he got?
Dee moves around the fold. He sees into the courtyard from here but cannot be seen. A lamp is lit at the third attempt and lights up five figures. Its yellow light catches on steel plate and sharp-edged weapons. Mustard and plum. They gather at the door to smash it open and they vanish within. The dogs go mad, but they are greyhounds, nothing more. There is a period of confused bellowing from inside. Dee can’t hear what is said over the barking. At least two men are shouting at someone: he supposes it will be the fisherman.
He waits a little longer. Another lamp is lit. The fire uncovered. The dogs hushed. Things calm down. They must know Dee is gone, but how long has he been gone? He hopes someone knows what they are doing. Yes. Horses. Four or five of them, coming slowly into the courtyard now. It means a commander of sorts. He will have been told what to look out for.
Dee smiles in the darkness.
But there is another role these men must play.
He watches the commander’s party dismount and enter the inn. A single man is left holding the horses. Dee unhitches the gate of the sheepfold, takes a stone from the wall, and lobs it over into the midden. There is a slithering crash of empty shells and the dogs start barking again. Men charge from the hall. The sheep react in panic: they spill out of the fold and fill the yard, blocking it perfectly.
Dee sets off northward, toward the sea, toward Nez Bayard.
The others curse the sheep as they set off after him in pursuit. The dogs are on him in moments, but they are still just greyhounds, and nothing more, and they know him from before. They are, Dee thinks, companionable.
The ground here is rocky, covered in springy turf, unlike the sand and mud of Mont Saint-Michel. He is pleased. He stops a moment to make sure they are following him. They are. Five men perhaps. No horses yet. But they are bringing the lamp! It is almost too good to be true. The dogs race back to their masters.
Dee stumbles on. Someone is growing cabbages and onions, but he can smell the tang of woodsmoke; horses and the playful dogs, also the sea, clean and cleansing. He feels his head clearing of the fug induced by trying to interpret the chart and numbers.
And now Dee finds even greater luck: a stream. He ducks low and steps into its cool waters and wades back upstream, shin deep, its waters bracingly cold. He moves as quietly as he can, cutting back south, so that soon he is alongside the cardinal’s men on their way to Nez Bayard, unseen in the dark.
He watches the leader carrying the lamp up high.
The men and dogs pass.
Dee waits a moment, until they have crossed the stream, and then he sets off after them. If the fisherman is right, Nez Bayard cannot be much farther.
From the darkness to the left comes a sudden flash of light, then the ragged boom of a gunshot. The man with the lamp goes down with a cry and the lamp falls extinguished.
By Christ!
There is much barking and shouting. The cardinal’s men did not expect Dee to have a gun, so they have not brought any, either, and now, with their leader wounded—Dee can hear his cries—they do not know what to do. Then there is another gunshot from another spot. Too soon after the first to be the same gun loaded. Two guns.
Whose? Dee remains stock-still, his night sight ruined by the flash, his mind reeling in horror: Can these newcomers really have been shooting at the man they thought was him?
The cardinal’s men come running back, leaving their leader wounded in the grass. There is yet a third gunshot.
Three gunmen? Dear Christ! They really wanted him dead!
The third bullet hits a dog. Its yelp cuts through Dee more than the man’s. The dog rolls in a curl and whimpers piteously.
Dee breathes hard and waits in the shadow of a wind-twisted tree. The wounded man is calling out to his mother and his God, and he can hear the dog dragging itself after its fleeing master, but he cannot hear the gunmen. He needs to know who they are, and what tongue they speak.
He starts his careful steps toward them, keeping low in the stream’s course. The wounded man is still calling out, though his voice is fading as the light grows. Dee sees that they are on a headland, and the sea is almost all around them. This must be Nez Bayard.
The stream peters out, vanishing into the scrubland before the beach. A small boat is drawn up, a pinnace, watched over by a boy. Dee lies flat.
The men with guns are approaching now, talking to one another.
Dutch. The knowledge turns Dee’s blood to ice.
Someone holds the lamp over the wounded Frenchman.
“Is it him?” one of them asks.
“He signaled, didn’t he?”
“Are you Doctor Dee?” one of them asks the man in French.
The Frenchman moans something. It is not clear if it is a denial.
“Must be him,” one of the Dutchmen says.
There is a fourth gunshot.
The wounded man is killed.
“Just didn’t expect him to have a dog.”
A fifth gunshot.
“He doesn’t now.”
There is some rueful laughter. No one likes to shoot a dog.
“Search him,” the leader says. “Captain says he should have some papers.”
There is a rustling. A grunt of effort as they turn him over.
“Nothing.”
“Well, bring him then. Come on. Wind is getting up.”
They carry the dead body down toward the pinnace. They pass quite close to Dee, and he cowers from the lamplight. He can smell the sailors’ usual stench of rotting teeth and unwashed bodies. They must have been at sea a fair while, Dee supposes. Come up from trying to break the blockade of the Huguenot city of La Rochelle, perhaps? The dead man has lost his hat, and his head hangs low enough to graze the rocks on the beach. The sailors fling him in the pinnace.
“What are you looking at?” one of them asks the boy by the boat.
Dee watches them through some thrift and a clump of sea kale. They put their guns on top of the dead man, then push the boat down the beach and into the sea. The boy holds the boat’s bow while the men clamber in. They ship their oars and the boy pushes them out farther, and then, nimble as a cat, he is up over the bow and in after them. They begin rowing, smooth and easy, out to sea, where Dee sees there is a light, hanging in the skeleton masts of a ship.