Gethyn! In among the comings and goings, Walsingham remembers that when last they met Gethyn had something to tell him but was too diffident to spit it out. He was going to ask Beale to look into it. He makes a note of it.
He wonders if his wife has given birth to that eleventh child yet? Or is it about Ireland? Walsingham has already heard that Smith’s venture to colonize the north with Englishmen is not going according to plan. It has cost many lives and much money and will continue to do so for how long? Years, at least.
When Gethyn returns, coughing with a kerchief to his lips, he is escorting the Dutch sea captain, Meneer Willem van Treslong. Unlike his ship, Van Treslong looks very fine, as if he has had time to visit a tailor, or planned for such an entrance. He wears a light almost silvery doublet and airy rose-colored breeches quite as large as any of them have ever seen.
“He might have used them to patch his sails,” Beale jokes.
Up close his collar and cuffs are bright and starchy white, but his eyes are rimmed red and made Walsingham want to rub his own.
Van Treslong bows very low when he makes his obeisance to the Queen.
She greets him with some familiarity, and ambiguity, for it was she who had evicted him and his kind from English ports to placate King Philip of Spain, whose life they made a misery. It was a lesson in being careful of what you wish for, though, because the Dutchmen sailed across the North Sea to seize from the Spanish their ports of Den Brill and of Flushing, from where they still sail to harass their erstwhile masters.
“I dare say King Philip wishes you were still our guests?” The Queen laughs, removing her hand from Van Treslong’s grip.
“What is the meaning of this, Master van Treslong?” Smith demands. He is very discontented, for Van Treslong is everything he is not: small, dapper, and Dutch, while Smith is baggy, saggy, and English. He further remains furious that the Dutchman’s arrival has allowed Walsingham to wriggle from the Queen’s hook.
“Ach, Your Majesty, gents, lords, sirs, I bring news,” Van Treslong says. He speaks wonderfully mangled English, slicing across his words as if he held in his mouth a cupful of wet pebbles. “I have just sailed the Western Approaches, from La Rochelle, and I tell you we sighted your Spanish fleet. Quesada’s fleet. That sailed out of Bilbao this last month.”
“You saw her?” Burghley asks.
“Sure. Fifteen ships, sir, galleons and carracks, all well-armed. As you see.”
He indicates his battered ship.
“She caught us off Ushant three days ago. Wind died, then veered. Long story. Anyway. We get away by skin of teeth. Two dead, including Piet the pilot. We think, my God, us next, but then, before we reach Guernsey, they veer southeast, and leave us to beat northeast. Prayers answered I’m saying. I think, sure, they putting into Saint-Malo. Maybe not enough fodder for horses, eh?
“So we wait off Alderney. Repairs, you know. Cut the mast away, put in a spar, and got the rudder answering. But always, with eyes out, you know?”
He points at his eyes.
“Two days. No sign of fleet, day or night. We start to think maybe she slipped by in the dark? But then, third day, we see her. Sailing…”
He holds up a finger and smiles.
“… west!”
The others—Smith, Leicester, Burghley—are confused, but Walsingham almost laughs. West! West! He feels a great weight lifted. Suddenly he can hear birds sing.
“West,” he repeats.
It means Quesada is heading out into the Atlantic.
The Privy councillors look at one another in confusion.
“Then we are—saved?” Burghley wonders with a dawning smile.
“For the moment,” Leicester cautions.
Derby, Walsingham notes, very nearly crosses himself before remembering where he is.
“Why?” Smith wants to know. “Why has he sailed west?”
“Why?” Van Treslong repeats. “How should I know?”
“Ireland?” Burghley wonders.
That is always a risk: that the Spanish would land troops in Waterford, or Wexford, and so have a base from which to attack England at their leisure.
Van Treslong thinks not. “West,” he says, cutting the blade of his palm down. “Out into the ocean, to catch the trade winds.”
“To New Spain?”
“Sure. Maybe. Why not?”
But his venture in Ireland excepted, Smith is no fool.
“It is not New Spain he is heading for! It is the Northwest Passage! That’s where he is sailing to! They’ve decrypted DaSilva’s pages! They know where it is! By Christ, Walsingham, you have put us out of the pan and into a fire that will roast us for a very long time!”
Walsingham opens and closes his mouth. At some point he knows he is going to have to tell them: that the DaSilva documents were elaborate forgeries of his own device, made with the help of an old exile, Jerome Cardan, whom he recruited in Paris, and who claimed—with some justification, clearly—to know his way around a natal chart. But he will not tell them yet. Not until this scheme has run its course. Not perhaps until Quesada’s fleet is wrecked upon the shores of Newfoundland or gripped fast in the ice farther north.
Van Treslong looks incredulous.
“The Northwest Passage?” he wonders. “You found it?”
Smith will not share the tale with a mere Dutch Sea Beggar.
“We almost did,” he snaps. “Until Master Walsingham here lost it in one of his foolhardy schemes of espial.”
Gratitude does not last long, Walsingham thinks.
“Pity,” is Van Treslong’s opinion.
“If what you say of the state of our defenses is true,” the Queen says, “then it is a blessing that Quesada has been diverted, even if it is to find the Northwest Passage. It will allow us time to make reparations. To recruit men. To fetch masts from Sweden. Bend your energies that way, Sir Thomas, rather than waste time in fruitless recrimination.”
Smith is incandescent but can say nothing further.
“But Meneer van Treslong,” the Queen continues. “What of the other task with which we entrusted you? What news of our most trusted and entirely beloved Dr. Dee?”
Later, Francis Walsingham will think about this moment, and think that Willem van Treslong was panicking, but at the time, when the Dutchman stands about to say something, only to stop and close his mouth with a snap, he thinks only that Willem van Treslong is regretful. He is stoppered up, Walsingham believes. He wishes himself elsewhere so that he need not be the one to pass on bad news. Only his eyes move as his gaze roves about the glade, looking for safe berth.
It dawns on Walsingham what Van Treslong cannot bring himself to say.
“He is dead?” Walsingham asks.
Van Treslong nods once, very slowly.
Walsingham cannot believe it. Dee—dead? Another soul to stain his conscience. But then he thinks, if Dee is dead, then how did Quesada come to decrypt the chart, or so they believed? And what is Van Treslong even doing here? Can he wish to bring the good news so dearly? Ah no: his ship. He wants the Queen to offer use of the dry dock.
Meanwhile all look to the Queen, who has shut her eyes, and tilted her head back to prevent the tears leaking down her powdered cheeks. She is utterly, unexpectedly grief-stricken.
“Oh, John,” she says. “Whatever will I do without my eyes?”