“Are you—what? Carving an egg?”
The boy holds it in his palm.
“Queen Mary likes them.”
Beale and Walsingham lock alarmed gazes. Is this another thing?
“No,” the boy says, reading their minds.
“Then what?”
The boy shrugs.
Walsingham asks to see it. It is very light, soft wood, pine. There is a little hole in the side.
“Can’t be easy, that,” Beale suggests.
“Have to do it with an awl,” the boy agrees. He mimes the action needed.
“Whatever for?”
The boy shrugs again. Walsingham rubs his thumb over the notch. It reminds him of a dead-letter drop that he once used in Leuven. That was a notch at the base of a wringing post in which one of his agents—was it Willem van Treslong?—placed a note rolled in a wax ball.
The boy is watching him, as is Beale, too. Walsingham tosses the egg into the air like a trainee juggler. It has little heft. He throws it to Beale, who catches it.
The boy holds out his hand for it.
Beale gives it to him.
“Well,” Beale says, ready to finish things up.
But Walsingham hears that jangling inner bell again. He feels he is atop something. But what? What is it?
“Can I see it again?” he asks.
The boy passes him the egg.
Walsingham stares at it for a long moment. In the silence, a flight of geese slice through the gray sky not twenty feet above, their wings creaking. Walsingham looks up to watch them pass, across the bailey, and over the low wall, making to land on the river beyond.
My God, he thinks. My God.
He walks across the bailey, rests his hands on the wall. Damp gray stone, chest high perhaps, and beyond, haunted by a faint mist, is the choppy broth of the river Don.
He weighs the wooden egg in his hand.
My God.
It comes perfectly natural to him, the obvious thing to do.
He throws the egg into the waters. He loses it for a moment, and then, there it is, bobbing along.
Downstream is what? Fifty miles of nothing, then the sea.
He feels as if he is falling. He struggles to breathe.
My God. My God.
Walsingham turns.
In the thick glass window of the tower, the pale smudge of a face.
Is she laughing at him?
PART | THREE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Seething Lane, City of London, October 9, 1572
“Come on! Coming through! Clear the way now!”
The porter at the gate uses the butt of his staff to nudge an old man away from the gates. He’s been there a couple of days now, fruitlessly holding out a stained cap, his shaved head abraded with scratches and cuts. A horribly stained bandage over one eye. He smells strongly of fish, as if he sleeps on the Billingsgate steps.
The porter clears enough space to allow Master Walsingham through, with Master Beale by his side, and six of Queen Elizabeth’s guards behind. Walsingham looks grim, but Beale at least greets the porter with a nod as they ride into the courtyard.
When he closes the gate, the old beggar is gone, leaving only his cap, in which sits a rotting fish.
Walsingham is slow off his horse. Disgrace, disappointment, and age have stiffened his body, and he can hardly move after the long ride, but he is pleased to be home. His daughter comes running and she throws her arms around him. She knows nothing of this. None of it. Then his wife, too, and the nurse, and there is much fussing over the new baby, and he knows he has done nothing to deserve all this. After a while his wife divines his self-disgust.
“Did it not go according to plan, Francis?”
“I believe she played me for a fool,” he says.
Her face falls.
“But Quesada? His fleet is not sighted?”
“No. True. The trick saved England, but at what cost? And for how long?”
He genuinely does not know. With whom did Queen Mary communicate while his attention was misdirected elsewhere? King Philip? The pope? James Hamilton? Or one of her many firebrands? Young men who’d consider it martyrdom to lay down their lives for their Catholic queen, the sort who have pictures of her drawn on a card, and then stitched into their flesh.
He leaves his wife then and goes to his office, springing his three locks, his turbulent thoughts elsewhere.
It is not until he opens the door and closes it behind him that he smells the whiff of burning fuse rope.
By then it is too late.
He stops stock-still.
A man sits in his chair, two glowing fuses and two barrels pointing straight at Walsingham’s face. His heart nearly ruptures.
“Dee!” he shouts.
“Don’t move, Walsingham,” Dr. Dee tells him. “I have discovered I may not be much of a shot, but even I cannot miss from here, and if you move so much as a muscle I will take great pleasure in blowing your bloody head clean off your accursed fucking shoulders.”
Walsingham doesn’t move.
“Dee?” he says. “How? How did you—”
“Survive?” Dee wonders. “Yes, it must be somewhat of a surprise to see me alive.”
“I… I admit I had given up some hope.”
“Hope? You had given up some hope?”
“Yes.”
“By the blood of Christ, Walsingham, you have nerve.”
As he becomes used to the gloom, Walsingham looks at him more carefully.
“Christ, Dee, you look terrible. Why are you dressed like a beggar?”
“Shut up, Walsingham. Don’t even speak or so help me God I will put a bullet in your stupid fat brains before I get to the bottom of this. You don’t get to ask me questions, do you hear me? Not while I have these. Do you understand?”
He waves the guns. Walsingham can see how dangerous he is, deliberately or not.
“Understood.”
Can he reach the alarm wire he has installed under his desk to alert the guards? Dee, as if reading his mind, shakes his head. He gestures one gun at the severed wire. A silence settles between them, as if Dee does not know where to begin. Then he does, but his voice, when it comes, is unmodulated, a croak, a squeak.
“So did Bess know?” he asks.
“Bess?”
“Her Majesty. The Queen.”
“Did she know what?”
Dee sighs. Walsingham can see his finger tighten on the trigger.
“About the papers,” Dee prompts. “Admiral DaSilva’s papers. Did she know they were falsified?”
Walsingham feels the blood rushing in his ears. “How did you know?”
Dee cannot resist it.
“I spent a day with them, in a horrible inn with a fisherman who smelled like a seal sleeping by my feet. I went through every aspect of them, all the figures, every permutation of every encryption I know, and then through them all again in Hebrew, Latin, Greek, English, Scots, Spanish, and French. I tried Dutch and Saxon. I tried Genoese. For a while I supposed—hoped!—the admiral had discovered the language known to Adam, for nothing worked. Nothing made sense. All my calculations put the Straits of Anian where they could not possibly be, or where I knew them not to be, or where they cannot have been found by mortal man, and I was almost in despair, but then I saw, buried within, a clue. A mark. A little curlicue you’d never have spotted unless you half expected to find it, because you had begun to suspect you were looking at the work of an old friend who could never resist that sort of thing: Jerome Cardan.”