There is a moment while Gethyn gathers himself.
“The second letter,” he says. “The second letter. Yes. I did not understand everything that was afoot, of course, but I knew that the Queen had just come from seeing you, Doctor, in the Tower. She told Sir Thomas, while she was impressing her seal, that the fate of the nation now depended on you. Sir Thomas disagreed. He is not of first-rate intelligence, Sir Thomas, I hope you will forgive me for saying so?”
Walsingham agrees, as does Dee. Beale, too, murmurs that he has always thought it so.
“So that made you write the second letter? Just to get rid of Dee as an agent of Her Majesty?”
For the first time Gethyn looks uncertain. Beale takes out some paper and has an ingenious inkpot. He will take notes.
“I knew that the doctor was sent to retrieve some documents that had fallen into the hands of the Cardinal of Lorraine.”
This is not an answer, really, Dee thinks, but a lure. And Walsingham seizes upon it like a hawk.
“Was it Smith who told you that?” Walsingham asks.
Gethyn shakes his head slowly.
“Then—?” Walsingham presses.
“A man in Rheims,” Gethyn says. “One in the cardinal’s pay.”
There is a thick silence.
“So you are in contact with the Cardinal of Lorraine?”
There is a pause before Gethyn nods very slowly.
That is all they need, Dee thinks. He dreads to think what will now happen to Gethyn.
“Go on,” Walsingham instructs.
“An Englishman,” Gethyn says.
“Named?”
“Edmund Campion.”
Beale shrugs slightly, scrubs over his previous note, and writes the name down. None of them have ever heard the name before.
“But still why?” Dee asks. “Why did you want me killed?”
This is the real question.
Gethyn opens and closes his mouth. Then he starts coughing again, long and hard, into his kerchief. It racks his body. His face reddens, veins spring up, and his eyes stream. It is like watching someone tear their own self apart. When it is over, he hides the kerchief.
Dee looks at him very closely. Gethyn’s eyes are fugitives now and will not be caught. There is something amiss here. As if Gethyn did not know why he wanted Dee killed. Did he want Dee killed? The longer Dee looks at him, the more certain he is that Gethyn didn’t want him killed, and so then, why?
He thinks back to those days after Van Treslong’s men had shot the cardinal’s man on Nez Bayard: how he had struggled through Normandy and Picardy, sleeping in hedgerows, living off sweet cider and green apples; how he had found first Boulogne then Calais being watched, so too Dunkirk, and he had to make his way through countryside to the north that was crawling with Spanish and French troops, until he finally found passage in that cog from Damme. Every moment of every day had been given over to rage and confusion, and guilt, too, which threatened to prostrate him, for leading Isobel Cochet to her death. He can still taste the bitter rancor that had seeped through him, staining him from within.
That it turns out to be the fault of this man is—impossible to believe.
After a moment, Gethyn recovers enough to speak.
“When I heard what you had found, the location of the mouth of the Straits of Anian, I thought, I believed, that it would be a sin against God were a Protestant nation to gain access to the riches of Cathay.”
He speaks as if he has rehearsed this line. He is changing the subject, Dee thinks. He does not wish to talk about why he wanted me killed, because he has no very good reason, because he did not do it! Dee is certain, but Walsingham has caught hold of the lure. He has swallowed it whole.
“So you did what?” Walsingham asks.
“I devised the way to get Isobel Cochet to retrieve the documents that you had stolen from Admiral DaSilva.”
That is a nice way of putting it, Dee thinks, and he is about to intervene with a question of his own, when he hears, distantly, a woman’s voice summoning someone whose name Dee does not catch. But the sound takes Dee elsewhere, to his dream, and he walks across the Turkey carpet to where the window lets in a long stripe of light. Outside on the grass, in a garden not unlike Her Majesty’s in Greenwich—save this one has a rather fine dovecote, newfangled, on a wooden post—under the watchful eye of two nurses and a man leaning on a nocked longbow, is gathered a number of children. They are having what looks to be a party. A game is in progress. Blind man’s buff? Is that its name? One child in a blindfold, the rest racing around.
Gethyn joins him, and they stand shoulder to shoulder, their backs to Walsingham and Beale. It is a very pleasant scene.
“Are they all Smith’s?” Dee asks.
“None of them,” Gethyn says. “Smith had a boy, George. Killed in Ulster this last year.”
“Yours?”
“Mostly,” Gethyn says with a smile. He turns to Dee, waiting. Dee looks back at the children. His eye settles on one of the girls. She is dimpled, in a pretty dress, and one of the older girls is tying a length of linen around her eyes.
“You see, Dr. Dee?” Gethyn says. “No harm came to her.”
* * *
The Queen’s guard take Gethyn to the Tower, while Dee and Walsingham and Beale wonder what to do with Rose Cochet.
“Leave her with Gethyn’s family,” Dee suggests. “She is happy here, for the while. I will go to her grandfather. Swap his misery for his granddaughter’s death with that of his daughter’s.”
Walsingham has the decency to look sick with guilt.
They ride back through the forest, having given up the caroche for Gethyn and two guardsmen. Dee is so weary he might fall from his saddle and they stop fairly often. Walsingham and Beale are deflated that it is not Smith on his way to the Tower.
“Gethyn seemed like a good man,” Beale says.
He places him in the past tense.
“Perhaps he is?” Dee supposes. “Perhaps he is doing what he believes to be good?”
“He tried to have you killed,” Beale says.
“Yes,” Dee agrees. “That was bad, but he did it for reasons he thought were good. You two: you are the same as him. You risked Isobel Cochet’s life for reasons you thought good. But what if they are bad?”
As he says this, Dee wonders if he is right: Does Gethyn really think what he is doing is right? He does not seem zealous in any way. And why did he stand and admit his guilt? He could have run? Taken a horse and ridden to the docks at Tilbury. A ship to Spain. France even. Easy. Why did he stay and take the blame?
He thinks of the blood in the man’s cough.
Of course.
He is going to die anyway.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Westminster Hall, Westminster, October 30, 1572
Dee attends the trial. He still feels weak, but a chair is brought for him and he is pointed out with some respect by those who know. He hopes for answers to his questions, and he gets them, but they come—or it comes, for there is only one big answer to the plethora of questions—not in the way he expects, in words, but in silence.
Gethyn refuses to speak. He keeps dabbing his mouth with a kerchief. That’s it, Dee thinks. He is going to die anyway.
“Do you know what it is you are bringing upon yourself?” Leicester asks.