He walks down to the orchard to relieve himself in the river.
Thomas Digges is there, likewise engaged.
When they are finished and dressed again, Digges shows him his perspective glass.
“What can you see through it?” Dee asks.
“Nothing much.”
It is a fat tube of smooth bark with a polished lens at one end. Dee holds it up and looks through it. It is not that he can see nothing much, only that there is nothing much to be seen. A stretch of riverbank, a few houses to the north. A boat under a murky green sail, a boy in the bow, approaching the dock. It is all within touching distance.
He lowers the perspective glass, and suddenly he is filled with a terrible, fateful certainty.
“Come with me, Thomas, now.”
“Why? Where?”
“To see Master Walsingham,” Dee tells him. “The world depends on it.”
* * *
The black powder cannot be even slightly damp, or it will clump and explode with unpredictable force, even destroying the barrel, and likely to be more dangerous to the marksman than his target. So Hamilton lights a fire of damp wattle on the stone and tips a fat pinch of the powder into as clean an oyster shell as can be found, and he places that as close to the meager flames as he dares. Smoke fills the hovel, sifting out through the many gaps in the walls and the ceiling.
He takes the gun out of the oiled linen. It is a thing of great elegance and beauty, made all the more so in these surroundings. He places it on its stand, with its barrel through the hole in the wall. He has a perfect view of the river, here at its narrowest point, and he can with no difficulty imagine the Queen’s barge coming upriver toward him, two perfect banks of oars: dipping, pulling, dipping, pulling. Then the boat will turn through the course of the river, exposing one long length to this bank for a stretch of perhaps one hundred yards.
That is where he will shoot her.
* * *
“What do you want?”
It is the porter on Francis Walsingham’s gate, looking Dr. Dee up and down, trying to remember where he has seen him before. But Dee is properly dressed this time, washed, even, and with what looks like a servant, and no eye patch.
Dee tells him who he is and what his business is.
“Well, you’re out of luck, Doctor, for he is gone to Greenwich with Master Beale.”
Damn.
As he is walking away, Dee is hailed by a rough voice.
“Why, Dr. Dee! Fancy seeing you around these parts. Thought you’d still be in the tun?”
It is, of all people, Chidiock Tunstall, the keeper of the Bull on Bishopsgate, leading a very fine horse.
Dee shakes his hand and apologizes for leaving him with the debt collectors breaking up his inn. It feels a very long time ago now.
“Water under the bridge, Master Dee,” Chidiock tells him. “And I made them pay handsome like, so no harm done. Did I just see you knocking up Master Walsingham?”
“I was, though I am told he is in Greenwich.”
“Christ on his cross,” Chidiock swears. “I am in search of him, too.”
“Well, we are on our way there, if we can help?”
“Mebbe you can,” Chidiock says. “A gent stabled this horse two, three days ago, but only paid for the day. My lad went through the saddlebags to see if there were anything that’d cover what’s owed.”
Dee is thinking: I have no time for this. But Chidiock is untying the bag and delving within.
“And the lad found this, just a letter like, I thought, only when I got an old bloke what used to be a friar to cast it over it and—”
Dee claps a hand on his arm.
“By Christ, Chidiock! Put it away.”
It is a copy of the papal bull Regnans in Excelsis. Mere possession of it will lead a man to his death on a pyre.
“There was more; look.” He holds out a very small crucifix designed to be secreted within some other thing, but also: small clumps of black powder and there, sitting in the folds of the innkeeper’s calloused palm, is a ball of lead.
Christ.
“Walsingham likes to pay us to keep a bit of an eye out for this kind of thing, see?” Chidiock is saying. “And I reckon this looks quite interesting.”
There is a gleam of greed in his eye.
“Come with us, Chidiock,” Dee tells him.
“What about the horse?”
“Forget the bloody horse.”
“I can’t just leave it, and besides, I ain’t got time for going to no Greenwich. I’ll just take it back and wait for him another day.”
In the end he decides he trusts Dee to give Walsingham a full and fair account of the matter, and he passes him over the bag, complete with the papal bull, black powder, and ball. The leather is good, and the bags are well made, clearly expensive, and within are linens far finer than those worn by Dee or the boy Thomas. On the inside of the flap is a small imprint of a sun in splendor. A heraldic device used by—well, any number of families.
But a well-known family, nonetheless, and alongside the obvious quality of the horse, this means whoever left it there did not do so because they could not afford to return and collect it. They meant to do so, or, rather, they did not care that they had done so. Which means, what? That they did not expect to have use for the horse in future?
Which leaves what?
Someone, with a gun, on an errand for the pope from which they do not expect to return alive.
Dear God.
“Come, Thomas,” Dee says. “To Greenwich.”
* * *
Sir Thomas Smith controls access to the Queen, and so despite the urgency, Francis Walsingham must stand with all other suitors in the great hall of Greenwich Palace and watch Sir Thomas Smith carefully serving Queen Elizabeth her breakfast: a loaf of the finest white bread; three baked herring; a dish of sprats, as well as a cup of beer and another of wine, each poured from a silver ewer. Smith performs his task at an aching, tortuous pace, no less grave than he had been at her coronation, save that every now and then he will glance up at Walsingham and catch his gaze.
He seems to think what he does is amusing.
Walsingham does not react. He counts almost every pace—there and back again—between here and Lord Burghley’s house on the Strand; every pace—there and back again—between here and the Midlands, where it is believed the Earl of Leicester is overseeing some improvements to his castle of Kenilworth.
He has given up hope of the latter coming in time, but surely the former will rouse himself from his sickbed?
Finally, the meal is ended and the Queen stands to have her hands washed in warm rose water, then dried on snow-white linen. When this is done, her whole household—ten gentlemen of various ranks, none of whom are of the slightest interest to Walsingham, and perhaps fifteen women-in-waiting, likewise of no import—proceed very slowly toward the great mirrored library.
But even then Walsingham must wait his turn to address Her Majesty, and still he has no idea how to couch it without directly accusing Sir Thomas Smith—who will be standing at her side—of treason. So he waits, lingering by that same window through which he saw Van Treslong’s Swan what seems like months ago now.
Below him, in that garden, he has at least managed to prod Her Majesty’s yeomen into some action, and they are gathered there in what their captain—a boy of about twenty whose cheeks flush when he speaks—calls “warlike array.” Walsingham cranes his neck to look eastward, downriver, whence he fears the Spanish will come, when they come. Then he peers westward, upriver, whence he hopes Burghley will come, if he comes.