“Who helped take Den Brill from the Spanish? I know of him. Why? Was it him? Were they his men?”
“Who knows? Maybe. I hired him to keep an eye on Quesada’s fleet, and then to pick you up from Nez Bayard. Apart from you, and me, and Beale, of course, and the Queen, he was the only man who knew you would be there that night.”
“You three. I see. And did he… what? Misunderstand you? When you said ‘pick up John Dee’ he heard you say ‘shoot John Dee in the head’?”
Walsingham regains a measure of moral composure. He no longer believes Dee will shoot him. He lowers his hands.
“I am still going to shoot you, Walsingham.”
Walsingham raises his palms again.
“If confusion arose, it cannot have done so in that way,” Walsingham tells Dee, “for I did not speak to him. He was already at sea, off La Rochelle, and so I sent message through the established channels. He will have destroyed the codes but you can ask him yourself.”
“He will be somewhere in the Bay of Biscay, I dare say, looking for men to shoot, things to steal.”
“No,” Walsingham says. “His ship was badly mauled by Quesada’s fleet, just before he came to find you. Her Majesty afforded him use of the dry dock at Limehouse to fix the rudder. He is still there.”
Dee looks at Walsingham for a long time. His eyes are very brown and steadfast, Walsingham thinks, but they are filled with a benign, forgiving intelligence. At length, Dee lowers just one of the pistols.
“Well then,” he says. “We’d best go and find him, hadn’t we?”
Walsingham agrees. He would like a word with Van Treslong too.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
City of London, October 9, 1572
A little after four of the clock, James Hamilton leads his horse through Bishopsgate. It is raining. His collar is turned up, and his brim bent down, and he is careful not to catch the eyes of the watch. He stables his horse at the Bull, with a fat keep with a forked red beard, just south of the gate, and carries his saddlebags over his shoulder and down the road toward Cheapside. He is so long unused to passing among the populace that the crowds make him testy, and he finds himself jostled by men who cannot speak his language, and who have queer colored skin, and dress in outlandish clothes that no true Englishman would ever wear upon their backs, and it is as if he—an Englishman in his own country—counts for nought. He must bite his tongue and restrain his fist and boot.
Still though. It is what he wants. To pass unobserved, unnoticed, down Gracechurch Street to the Church of Saint Magnus the Martyr. The smells intensify as he approaches the river. He has always hated London. There is no sky, no earth, nothing but the river that is not made by man. Its rich fetid air stops up his nose and mouth.
He stands in the agreed place and after a moment a man takes his elbow.
“Walk with me, sir,” he says.
This is he, the Roman priest, who will pray with him, and hear his confession, and bless him for the task that lies ahead. He is as tall as Hamilton, but cadaverous. His cap hangs around his ears and his teeth are jumbled like tombstones.
They walk eastward, away from the bridge, along Billingsgate, past Wool Wharf, through a maze of piled wool sarplers waiting to be weighed on the tron, with the river glimpsed between the houses on their right.
But Hamilton only has eyes for the edifice that looms ahead: the Tower.
He is suddenly terrified. This is where his journey will end. In a welter of blood, viscera, pain. The faces of the men he passes seem to loom up at him, as if from under water, each uglier than the next, contorted, scarred, fissured by age and debauchery. They know. They know. They are waiting. He is in a circle of hell.
They walk toward it.
They are about to cross a road running down to the river when the priest sees something to his left. He flinches and turns. He snatches at Hamilton’s elbow. His fingers are pincers Hamilton cannot shake off.
“He comes,” he says, hissing the words. “Master Walsingham.”
The priest jerks him into the shadows on the corner of Seething Lane and Tower Street.
“Keep walking,” he tells him.
They do, retracing their steps toward the bridge.
“Don’t let him see your face. Once he has seen it he will never forget it.”
Yet Hamilton cannot help it. He turns and looks and there he is again: Master Francis Walsingham, marching swiftly down the street toward the river with a crowd of others and some armed guards.
Hamilton wonders what it means, that their paths should so nearly cross so often? First in Paris, and then twice in this week: on the London Road, and now here in Seething Lane. It is a sign, he thinks, sent from above. If God did not wish his mission to succeed, he would have engineered those meetings to end very differently.
Now Hamilton feels himself swell with ecclesiastic fervor.
God wills it. Deus Vult.
When they return to the street, they pause again. Stepping out into its various ruts and potholes feels a terrible risk, but they do, and cross it unmolested. Then they feel safer, in the warren of darkened alleys north of the Tower, an area of leatherworkers, where the upper stories are so close a man might lean from his own window to shake the hand of his neighbor opposite. Within, it smells of rats and of rotting leather. They climb a ladder in the dark, and Hamilton must feel his way. His heart pounds, his breathing uneven. It is very close and noisome. Like breathing ancient cloth.
The priest strikes a light. They are surrounded by cured leather skins, as if in a bed at home, save the stench is so powerful. There is a crucifix on a low table, covered in a cloth, and what looks like a very small tabernacle. In one corner is a chamber pot.
The priest takes off his hat. His skull is shaved and dented with old scars, small pox, and worse.
“I am called Father Simon,” he says.
He moves as if to take Hamilton in his arms.
Hamilton thrusts him back. “Do you have it?” he asks.
“All in good time, my child.”
“No. No. Now.”
The priest’s eyes catch the rushlight’s glow. He looks like no one Hamilton has ever seen before. A fervor rises from him, like a miasma. He has a perverted zealotry of purpose. Every fiber of Hamilton’s body revolts against him.
But he is a priest.
“Father,” he adds.
The priest’s breath is cold, as if from a crypt.
“Very well,” he says.
He turns and is gone for some little while. When he comes back, he carries a long tube of waxed linen. Hamilton takes it, feeling the familiar heft of the gun, muffled by padding and sackcloth. He cuts through the bindings to reveal the gun within, a sister to that he spent so many days shooting in Ferniehirst. With her he could shoot the head off a wren at fifty paces. A woman’s from a hundred will be easy.
A woman’s from two hundred remains to be seen.
It is an object of great beauty, longer than any ordinary arquebus by a cubit or so, slender where she can be, beefy where she need be, the work of the finest smiths in Lombardy. In its stock, an ivory lozenge with a verse from the book of Numbers: “The Avenger of Blood shall put the Murderer to Death.”
There is fine black powder and there are balls, each blessed by the pope himself, with words from the Old Testament engraved by the best Venetian craftsmen upon their silken surfaces. He runs his fingers through the powder, searching for larger crumbs that will blow with too much force, and then he rolls each ball between finger and thumb. Even the slightest irregularity will send it awry.