By now Dee is very drunk, Walsingham less so. Dee reels off into the night, about his own business, and Walsingham bids him a good night.
At home Beale takes him to see Margaret Formby, still tear-heavy in Mistress Walsingham’s arms. His arrival starts her sobbing again, and he does his best to be soft-footed and patient, but he needs to know what he is up against, and he needs to know now.
“With whom was Queen Mary communicating?”
The girl is reluctant to spit it out, and he sees he frightens her. What must she have heard about him? That he breathes fire? Has a forked tongue? His wife gives him a stern look.
He sees her lips forming the start of words that do not come, and he is not sure what he expects.
Eventually, she speaks.
* * *
The Queen’s bargemaster orders his men on the starboard side to lift their oars, and the barge buffs against the lamp-lit dock with a gentle bump that flutters cloth, but sends no one staggering.
Elizabeth gives thanks to God and pays the bargemaster a small coin to share among his men (he won’t) (and nor does she expect him to) and she walks with her ladies up the gangplank and across the gravel path where the dew is already falling.
Sir Thomas Smith is there to meet her with a deep bow, pleased to have her to himself. He will want money, she thinks tiredly.
The star in Cassiopeia is now very bright.
“Whatever can it mean?” she asks.
Smith has no idea. He thinks only of himself and of his scheme in Ireland.
How she misses John Dee.
* * *
James Hamilton props his sackcloth-wrapped gun against a wall and washes the blood from his hands and face in the horse trough behind Limehouse wharves. He thrusts his arms deep into the cold water, then splashes his doublet, breeches, and boots clean of blood. He smells it, feels it stiff in the wool and in his linens, between his toes in his right boot. For such a desiccated stick of a man, Father Simon gave up much blood, and Hamilton had had to clamp his mouth ghastly shut for fear his girlish screams would summon the neighborhood.
When he is done, he collects the gun, and moves swiftly into the shadows before the night watch guards come stamping around the corner.
* * *
While the boatman pulls hard against the running river, Dr. John Dee sits athwart the skiff and allows himself to slip into lucid dreams of Rose Cochet, Isobel’s girl. He sees her playing a game in which she wears a blindfold, with other children running around her, and she must touch them all to win the game. Everyone laughs, including Rose, and her little teeth are like seed pearls. She has dimpled cheeks and pretty clothes. She is happy, and in another time, the sight would be one to bring a tear of joy to any man’s eye.
But the image starts Dee awake, for it is false. It cannot be. He knows it cannot be: on his way back from France, the boat on which he had stowed away—a single-masted trader in all-sorts from the port of Damme—had docked in Sandwich, and Dee had walked to the house of Sir John Pinkney, Isobel Cochet’s father. He found the old man hollowed out with grief at his missing granddaughter, like an oak tree in a field struck by lightning. News of his daughter’s death would have killed him. So Dee lied and played the part of a traveling minstrel, down on his luck, and the old man gave him a penny, but he was too sad to hear him play.
* * *
“Smith? Sir Thomas Smith?”
“It is what she says.”
Beale and Walsingham are back on Seething Lane, striding ahead of the nightwatchman with his swinging lantern, followed by five of the Queen’s yeomen. The hue and cry has been successful, and some Italian tailor with a cast in his eye has proved to be what was needed and is now unlikely to live to see sunset next. Walsingham cannot concern himself with that sort of injustice. He cannot rid himself of the heat that thrums through his body since hearing Margaret Formby confess.
Smith?
Walsingham thinks of the efforts he has gone to, the risks he has taken, the lives he has sacrificed, only to find out that it is Smith, Sir Thomas Smith, Privy councillor and Queen Elizabeth’s close confidant, who provides the conduit between Queen Mary and the outside world! Smith who is feeding her all she needs to know, who takes her messages to England’s enemies abroad.
“What messages did they send to each other?” Beale asks.
The girl did not have all the details, of course.
“Queen Mary sent her away whenever she was at her secrets, so she never saw what was written, and Margaret only heard the odd word when Mary spoke to her priest, or sometimes Mary Seton.”
“What in particular?”
“She heard Queen Mary tell Mistress Seton that Smith had begged her to remember his services when she came to be Queen of England. Mistress Seton asked her what she thought he had in mind, and Mary told her that Smith was in need of money to save Ireland.”
To save Ireland. My God. Smith’s colony in Ireland. A constant thorn in everyone’s side, not just the Ulstermen’s. How much money can he have sunk in it to be so desperate as to conspire with a foreign power against his own Queen!
“Fucking Smith,” Beale mutters.
He does not usually use farmyard language in front of Walsingham, but there is sometimes a time and a place for this sort of thing.
“Yes,” Walsingham agrees, “but that’s not the worst of it. The girl overheard Queen Mary laughing—a rare enough event apparently—saying that she’ll not have need of Smith much longer, and that soon after Michaelmas she will be able to talk to her uncle directly.”
“Her uncle? Which one? Cardinal de Guise?”
“I suppose.”
“And she used the word ‘directly’?” Beale asks.
“Well, she said, ‘to his face, as befits a Christian prince,’ ” Walsingham tells Beale. It is this detail that confirms—to Walsingham’s mind—that Smith is Mary’s conduit to the outside world in general, and to de Guise in particular. But it takes a moment before Beale sees that is not the most important thing about what was said.
“ ‘Soon after Michaelmas’?” he asks. “Michaelmas was two weeks ago.”
“Exactly.”
“Did she believe Quesada would be the one to set her free?”
“That is the thing,” Walsingham says. “Mary said this after she had learned we’d diverted Quesada’s fleet.”
Beale looks away.
“My God,” he says. “You mean, whatever she set in motion, it is still in motion?”
It is.
* * *
Tears cling like diamonds on Queen Elizabeth’s eyelashes as she listens to the Children of the Chapel Royal bring Master Tallis’s exquisitely sorrowful “Lamentations of Jeremiah” to its haunting, ethereal conclusion. Ordinarily, such beauty is a great consolation, but today it leaves her aflutter. It is more than this new star in Cassiopeia, she thinks. She feels on the verge of some great change, one that has been ushered in by the death of Dr. Dee, whom she misses with greater intensity with the passing of each day.
It is not supposed to be that way.
“Walk with us, Sir Thomas,” she tells her Privy councillor, “and tell us such things that will reassure us of God’s love, for this evening we feel atremble at the world, as if we were on the threshold of some new and awful design.”