Sir Thomas Smith holds his arm out for Her Majesty to take should she wish it, but he is out of words, and so they pass out of the chapel and along the corridor in candlelit silence.
* * *
It is gone midnight when Dee walks with sober purpose down through the apple trees toward the river. He carries the largest of his cross-staffs and is accompanied by Thomas Digges, a boy of fourteen winters the son of his late neighbor, Leonard Digges, who is passed out of this world. The boy carries a bull’s-eye lamp and has an acute scientific mind, being much interested in mirrors and in glass lenses, with which, when placed in certain ways, he can make the sun, moon, and stars descend to here below.
“I am pleased you are back, Doctor,” the boy tells him. “I have been trying to measure it myself but lack your expertise.”
He indicates a ruler as tall as a man that he has placed in an apple tree.
“I am sure you lack only a good-size cross-staff,” Dee says with a laugh.
The night is cold and clear, but a mist has risen from the river. Dee has been looking forward to this moment since he first saw the star, in Picardy, what seems like months ago now.
“What do you think it can mean?” the boy asks.
“We must first discover if it is fixed,” Dee tells him, “or if it moves in relation to the other stars about it. If that is the case, then it is a comet, with a tail so small we cannot see it, and… well. Who knows? They portend many things.”
“I heard a woman in Putney gave birth to a child with the feet of a goose,” the boy tells him.
“Did she now?”
They set up the cross-staff and spend the next hour in pleasurable contemplation of what they come to believe is a star. Thomas reminds Dee there are only two well-known appearances of stars: one that caused much commotion among the Jews of Hipparchus’s day and the star of Bethlehem.
“It is a sign of great change,” Dee supposes. “Remember the words of Tiburtina: ‘the firmament of Heaven shall be dissolved, and the planets be opposed on contrary courses; the spheres shall justle one another, and the fixed stars move faster than the planets.’ ”
They are both silent for a good long while. At length the eastern sky brightens, and the stars dim, and Dee and the boy return, dew soaked and shivering now, to their separate houses to sleep, and to dream.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
London, October 11, 1572
It is not yet dawn, and still quiet in Limehouse, when he kills the widow. Her lips tremble and turn blue, and she soils herself. When it is done, he rolls her body into a corner. Her hovel sits on stilts above the mud of the river, a few stinking yards downriver from where the river Lea meets the Thames. It smells of rot and fish guts, and there is a privy hole in the floor that sticks out over the river when it is at high tide. He opens up another hole the size of his fist in the sodden daub of the wall that gives out onto the river. It is at its narrowest here, and through the hole he can see all the way across it to Rotherhithe, on the southern bank, perhaps a hundred yards away. It is perfect, just as he knew it would be.
He jams the door shut and settles down to wait.
* * *
Francis Walsingham has not slept all night, and now, as gray dawn breaks, he walks into the Queen’s newly planted garden in Greenwich, among a lattice of hedges as high as his shins, watching the skeins of mist drift across the placid surface of the Thames.
He had not expected Sir Thomas Smith to be with the Queen at Greenwich, and the night before, when he and Beale had debouched from his barge to find it so, his heart had sunk. Without the explicit support of Lord Burghley and the Earl of Leicester, he cannot hope to bring any sort of accusation against Smith, but without doing so—without revealing that he knows Smith to be a traitor—he cannot admit the origins of his information about the threat to the Queen’s life.
He had asked that she be moved to the Tower that very night.
“It is the safest stronghold we have,” he’d told Smith.
“How dare you come here, Walsingham,” Smith had shouted, “upsetting Her Majesty with your absurd scare stories.”
“Please let me see the Queen, Sir Thomas,” he’d asked.
“No, Walsingham, I will not, for I do not trust you.”
There was nothing Walsingham could do save keep close and remain vigilant. He and Beale had passed the night in the guardroom, doing what could be done: sending word to Burghley and to Leicester, summoning them to come urgently with as many troops of their own as was possible.
“Before then we have to move her to the Tower,” he tells Beale.
Beale nods. It is the thing they have most feared about the Queen passing time in Greenwich: a few ships filled with Spanish troops landing on the river’s bank, and bringing bloody murder to the palace.
“You saw how easily Van Treslong made his way upriver,” Walsingham says. “What if four hundred well-trained troops mobilized in Greenwich at dawn tomorrow? What would we do? Shout for the yeomen of the guard? There are a hundred of them, and the only fighting they are trained for is for their ale, and their pensions. The Queen’s household—all her gallant gentlemen, with all their gallant talk—would take flight at the first whiff of powder and be in Blackheath before the Spanish stepped ashore.”
It was an exaggeration, but not by much.
Beale has a worse fear though. Of a single assassin, a man with one of the new guns from the Italian city of Milan that can shoot accurately over a hundred paces. He supposes if he were the pope, and he wanted the Queen dead, then that is what he would do: send a battalion of such men to come over here and lie in wait. Why haven’t other princes done so? He puts it down to the fact they believe one another anointed by God, and to plot to kill one is a plot to kill them all. It is why Queen Elizabeth will not have Queen Mary put to death. Such things are contagious.
He had opened his mouth to say something to Master Walsingham, but he had refrained. It is dangerous to be overheard even countenancing the death of the Queen.
So they had returned to their letter writing.
At dawn Walsingham rises and goes outside, heedless of the night miasma that rises from the river and from the meager fields and broad marshes beyond. He ordered the Queen’s barge to be made ready earlier and now she is tied up against the jetty, and the bargemaster’s boys are busy about polishing the glass of her windows. A handful of Her Majesty’s yeomen prowl the foreshore in the dawn, at least, but they are more familiar with bullying beggars and river gypsies.
A bell rings.
The mist slowly lifts. Eight geese land on the water. From the river’s north bank a merchant’s ship is foresail up, just getting under way. Walsingham wonders where she is bound. Antwerp? Le Havre? Cádiz? He thinks of Dr. John Dee again, poor Dr. John Dee, and he wonders why the Queen would ever want him dead in the first place.
One day he will have to ask her.
When she is awake.
In the meantime, there is still Sir Thomas Smith.
* * *
In Mortlake, John Dee wakes with the word Bess on his lips. He has dreamt of a dirty river snaking by under a dipping gray mist; of a dead woman with no teeth lying in a filth of fine fish bones and human mud; of a rotting hovel with its footings in the water; and of the flash of black powder.