Hearing Cardan’s name, Walsingham starts.
“Yes,” Dee says, seeing it. “It was his mark that gave it all away: your scheme. If I hadn’t seen it, I daresay I’d’ve been shot as planned.”
Walsingham thinks that if he gets out of this alive, he will be paying Jerome Cardan a visit, even if it means another trip to Catholic Paris to winkle the little bastard out of whichever wine shop he is spending his fee for the work.
He says nothing though. Dee continues: “So I thought of Isobel Cochet—”
At the mention of her name Walsingham cries out.
“You found her? You found Isobel? How is she?”
Dee looks at him with nothing but disgust.
“I found her”—he spits out the words—“I found her and I lost her, and she’s dead.”
Walsingham cannot suppress a mew of horrified shame.
“Yes,” Dee says. “That’s right. That is on you, Walsingham. Her death. You sent her to die.”
“No!” Walsingham shouts. He is passionate about this.
Dee raises the guns. Walsingham subsides.
“As God is my witness,” he says. “I did not. I did not know they would take her child! I thought it was Oliver Fellowes the cardinal had turned. I thought Oliver was a Catholic! His father was, and I thought he might be one, too. So I took a risk—one that nearly saw us both killed—to prove to him the faked DaSilva pages were genuine, and I gave him his chance to take them to the cardinal, but… but he did not. I admit, I made a mistake. A mistake. I did not know they had taken Isobel’s child. I did not know it would be her the cardinal would turn. But I did not send her to die.”
“And have you done anything to get the girl back?” he asks. “Isobel’s daughter?”
Walsingham is brought up short. Guilt feels like a cold wet eel winding around his innards. It carries the smell of death and decay.
“I have been busy,” he says.
Dee stares at him, and he—Walsingham—shares his disgust.
“So tell me this, Walsingham, so that when you’re dead I can tell everyone how your mind worked: When you let the Cardinal of Lorraine know you had documents relating to the whereabouts of the Straits of Anian, how did you know he would try to steal them? Then having stolen them, how did you know he would take them to the Spanish?”
Walsingham hates telling anyone anything, but he owes Dr. Dee this, he supposes, or, in fact, if he does not tell him, then Dee will put a ball in his brainpan. He also hopes the longer he talks, the less likely it is that Dee will shoot him.
“It was a risk,” he admits. “But I knew the cardinal was in dispute with King Charles of France—the de Guises and the Valois remain mortal enemies—and that he was trying to reach out to King Philip of Spain, so I believed if knowledge of the straits fell into his hands, he would be sure to use that knowledge to buy King Philip’s favor. Had the cardinal known Quesada was already at sea, sailing to attack us, he might have sat on his hands, and let it play out, but he did not, thank the Lord, and I was certain that if Philip learned of the whereabouts of the straits, he would move heaven and earth to get this far larger prize before we did, or the French.”
“So you let him know you had them?”
Walsingham nods.
“Easy enough,” he says. “Paris is—was—full of espials. I half suspected Jerome Cardan himself was in the cardinal’s pay.”
“But then how to get the papers to him, eh?” Dee muses rhetorically. “In a way that looked as if you had lost them?”
Walsingham looks down at the floor. One of Dee’s feet is bare.
“I told you,” he says. “I made a mistake. I thought Oliver Fellowes would take them to him, but… but he wasn’t what I thought he was. He was loyal. And the cardinal devised some lever to get Isobel Cochet to take them. So. Rose. Her daughter. Yes.”
The air has seeped out of the room. The twin jewels of the pistols’ fuses are dimming too. Dee reinvigorates them.
“But,” Dee presses, “that wasn’t enough, was it? You needed to prove that the DaSilva papers were genuine, and that you wanted them back, or perhaps the cardinal, or King Philip would think they’d come by them too easily and smell a rat. So you sent me, in the certain hope that I would fail to get them. In fact, you needed me to fail, didn’t you? Which was why you sent those Dutch sailors to shoot me dead—”
“Wait— No.”
“Yes. So that in the unlikely event I did manage to steal them back, I would never get off that beach but would be killed with them still about my person, there to be found by the cardinal’s men.”
“No!” Walsingham says. “That much, no. I did not do that.”
Christ, he thinks, why didn’t I think of that? It is what I should have done.
But then it occurs to him: “But… then, if you did manage to steal the papers, and you decrypted them, what made Quesada change course for New Spain?”
Dee lets out a long, frustrated sigh.
“Because at the time, Walsingham, what I thought of you was that for all your evil intent, you do not act, as far as I then understood it, for your own benefit, but for the benefit of one whom I love, and for one I thought loved me.”
Here Dee falters and his voice cracks a moment, just as Walsingham’s had, and a silence follows.
“So what did you do?” Walsingham asks. “With the documents?”
“I left them on the table of that inn, just as if I’d been surprised by the cardinal’s men. I left them unencrypted, too, so the cardinal would see only what he wanted to see, and King Philip likewise. And what they wanted to see was a reason to send Quesada beating across the ocean and up into the ice fields from where, God willing, he may never return.”
“Dee,” Walsingham begins, holding his hands out. “You have saved England, and I can only begin to—”
Dee waves the pistols.
“Stow it, Walsingham. Your thanks are no good to me. Get back over there. At the end of this I am still going to shoot you, you do know that, don’t you?”
Walsingham takes his step back.
“Look, Dee,” he starts. “It was… a bloody shabby business, I agree. But I was desperate, and by Christ, I did not do it lightly. Both Isobel Cochet and Oliver Fellowes were dear to me and their deaths will weigh heavily on me as long as I live—”
“Not very much longer then.”
“—But it was all we had against Quesada. It was a gamble: their lives for the lives of countless others; their lives for our country, our Queen, our religion. Surely you understand that?”
Dee kisses his teeth. He blows on one of the fuses to keep it glowing.
“There must have been other ways,” Dee mutters. “And to send someone to kill me—”
“I did not do so, Dee. So help me God. I did not send anyone to kill you.”
“Then who did? Someone did. Those Dutch copulators didn’t just start shooting for fun. They were there for a purpose.”
“How do you know?”
“Because they shot the man whom they thought was me.”
Walsingham is pulling his beard. He is thinking.
“Do you know a man named Van Treslong?” he asks. “Willem van Treslong. A Dutch Sea Beggar.”