They say their prayers as a household, as a nation, kneeling where the night before the Queen heard Tallis’s “Lamentations,” and when it is over, they stand in silence and gather themselves.
The Queen says her farewells, and her courtiers stand pale-faced. Some of the women weep, as if she were mounting the scaffold just as her mother did all those years ago.
Smith glares, his hands clenching, unclenching.
There is no sign of Burghley or Leicester.
Helped by her bargemaster, the Queen steps aboard her barge.
“I am to sit here? Facing this way?”
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
There is not a lot of room, for gone are her usual ladies-in-waiting, and in their place, crammed into the gloom of the curtained cabin, behind the second mirror, are eight yeomen of the guard, harquebusiers, each nursing the fuse of a gun. Among them sits little Thomas Digges, with his perspective glass ready, and there, too, is Francis Walsingham, as pale and anxious as she has ever seen him.
“And where is John Dee?” the Queen asks.
“Here, Your Majesty.”
He is hidden behind the first mirror, with his back to the oarsmen, roughly in the middle of the boat.
“Are you certain about this?” she asks.
There is a long pause while he tries to think clearly.
“Some of it, Your Majesty.”
She manages a laugh that stirs up a memory of her in the Tower, when things were at their most precarious for both of them, and he cannot soften a fraction. She is the woman who wanted him dead, and yet, and yet—
The bargemaster stands by the tiller at the back of the cabin. He looks quizzically at Dr. Dee: Are you sure? Dee is not. Everybody is looking to him, though: those on the boat, and those gathered on the shore.
Dee looks to the Queen: Ready? She nods. He turns to the bargemaster and nods in turn. The bargemaster sounds his whistle and the boys on the bank let go the ropes while three men with boat poles push the boat out into the river.
“Ship oars!”
There is a chorus of moans from the bank as the boat shudders underfoot, as if this is a funeral barque, and the barge drifts for a moment until the oarsmen set about their work. The barge gathers itself and slides forward into the current.
“Smooth!” the bargemaster calls and a moment later the oarsmen are into their rhythm, pulling the boat through the water northward. The Isle of Dogs is on their right, which the harquebusiers face, though cannot see for the curtains are down, and Deptford on the left, which the Queen faces, and which she can see, for her curtains are up.
There is a gentle breeze, seagulls screech high above, and it is turning into a day of the sort that tricks you into believing it will be like this all winter. The water thrums on the underside of the hull. The air is freshish, only slightly tinged with rot and spoil.
No one says anything until at last the Queen speaks.
“John,” she says. “Why are you so angry with me?”
For a moment Dee is stunned. Then he laughs. “Because you tried to have me killed?”
The Queen turns to him.
“Please, Your Majesty, you must look straight ahead.”
They are in the middle of the Thames now, fifty paces from each bank. The oarsmen must work hard, for the river is flowing fast against them, but they are strong and well-nourished, unlike most ferrymen, and the creak of their oars in the rowlocks is steady.
“What did you mean, that I tried to have you killed?”
“Well, didn’t you?”
“No.”
The Queen shakes her head as if to clear her thoughts. What a conversation to be having.
“Why would I wish you dead?” she asks.
“You wrote—to that absurd Dutchman—that I was a notorious papist. That I was a heretic and a traitor sent by the pope to kill you. And that you wanted him—the Dutchman—to ensure that I did not survive the voyage home from France to do so. Please! You must keep looking at the southern bank.”
“But, John, I never wrote such a thing.”
“I have it. I have the letter.”
“I don’t care, for the love of God, John. I would never—why would I wish that?”
“If you believed it?”
“If I believed it? If I believed you were a papist sent to kill me, then I suppose I should wish you dead before me, yes. But I do not believe it. And even if I did, I should never have you… what? Put over the side of a ship, or murdered on some beach in France.”
The oarsmen are warming up, and the barge has begun its sweep northward toward the city. Walsingham stands tense. He has his ears on the conversation, his eyes on the right-hand bank of the river. Thomas Digges is likewise peering through his perspective glass. They pass a boat coming the other way, dipping its sail in salute, its crew removing their caps and cheering.
But the Queen sits stony faced. She is right, Dee supposes. She would have him dragged through the streets, half hanged, then taken down and eviscerated. She’d have his innards and his nethers burned on a fire so he could smell them roast; and then she’d have him beheaded, and his head placed on a pike atop the bridge, while his body would be cut in grisly quarters to be nailed to gate posts in and around Mortlake to warn others off his path. And she’d be right to do that.
“But I have both letters,” he tells her again.
“If you do, John, it is a forgery, for it is not in my hand.”
“It is in the same hand as the other letter you sent him, Van Treslong.”
“I did not write to Van Treslong.”
“You sent him word that I was to be picked up from that beach. Then that I was to be killed.”
“For the love of Jesus, Dee,” Walsingham snaps, “let us sort this out at another time.”
The Queen is hidden from his view by the mirror in the cabin, but he can see over this and around it and is afforded glimpses of the north shore in the mirror out on deck: blank-sided warehouses and tumbledown hovels, the beaks of cranes, ships’ masts and spars, spools of rope hanging from their hooks. A few men—porters—stop to watch and wave as Her Majesty’s barge goes by.
The sun is behind now, throwing pale shadows toward the bow, but these are inching around as the barge follows the curve of the river.
“Keep her in midstream, master,” Dee calls to the helmsman. They are about to turn west in the pool of London. Apart from under the bridge itself, this is where the river is at its narrowest.
“I have both letters,” he tells the Queen. “I have them here.”
“I should like to see them.”
“Coming up Limehouse on starboard!” the bargemaster calls.
* * *
First: a disk of oily tow, pushed into the barrel’s end by the clinking rod of steel. Then: the powder, tipped into the eye of the barrel through a loading horn. Then: another disk of tow. This he slides down slowly, gathering all the powder in the barrel into a charge, tamped firm under the tow. Then: the ball. He cannot read the inscription, but he knows it to be from Jeremiah: “The Lord is a God of Retribution.” He palms it into the barrel and it rolls down the barrel in one smooth glide. He follows it with the third and final disk of oiled tow. He tamps the charge and ball together and sets the rod aside.
Next he uses a horn to fill the hole between the pan and charge with more powder, and last he taps a little powder into the pan. He sets the gun aside and takes up his tinderbox. It consists of a flint, and steel, and a scrap of linen, baked black. A few scrapes of flint on steel, and the linen is aflame. With it, he lights the gun’s fuse. He waves them both in the air: one to extinguish; one to get going.