The Eyes of the Queen

by Oliver Clements

  “Yes, Walsingham mentioned de Guise.”

  “You know him?”

  “A sly fox. He and Walsingham are of a pair, ever keen to have others do their dirty work for them.”

  “In this case the dirty work he envisages is to bend the might of Spain to turf me from my seat.”

  Levers, Dee thinks. Levers to move a heavy object.

  “And where is he now? Rheims?”

  Elizabeth shakes her head.

  “Walsingham has someone in the English College. The cardinal has not been seen for a month or more. No one knows where he is.”

  So that is the problem, Dee thinks. The old fox has gone to ground, dragging his prey with him. They’ll only know where he is when he is the Archbishop of Canterbury.

  “You once told me,” Elizabeth tells him now, “that there existed a force that mediated between all things in the cosmos. A power that has always existed, and the ancients understood, but we now give to God.”

  Dee nods. That is more or less it.

  “You told me that a German meister believed that it might one day be possible to rediscover this power, a man might somehow insert himself into that power, and let it become him, and he it, and in so doing, influence that power to his own ends.”

  He knows what she will go on to ask.

  “I will disappoint you, Bess, I mean, Your Majesty, but since our disputations at Woodstock I have spent a decade or more reading books that talk of books that talk of other books that are said to hold the key to such things. But though I have sought these books through all Christendom, from Cracow to Cádiz, from Paris to Poznan, I have met no joy. It is true I am yet to despair of ever finding them, for I am of an optimistic disposition, as you know, but I cannot see how I will ever do so while I am so constrained under the orders of Master Walsingham.”

  She is disappointed, obviously.

  Seeing this, Dee goes on.

  “Do you think if I could change the world I would not already have done so? Is not my being here in the Tower proof that I am unable to influence its mechanics? Who, Bess, would choose to shit in an old bucket?”

  She laughs now, a sad laugh. She sees her hope was foolish.

  “There are worse things,” she tells him.

  And he believes she knows them. Oh yes. She knows them all right. But now is not the time for that.

  “Not if the bucket has not been emptied since the last guest,” he jokes.

  She looks away.

  The church bell rings. She has lingered too long. She shucks her cloak about her shoulders.

  “I was not such a fool to imagine you might change the world’s course,” she tells him. “But I always think of you as my eyes, John, able to see clearly in the night where others only saw darkness.”

  He looks down when she says this. He remembers. She used to call him her eyes, she said, because he had seen so much more of the world than she had—then—and she believed he knew how it all worked. Not just the planets and the stars and so on, but the world’s men and women, too, and the ways of power and privilege, its uses and abuses. He had scratched a symbol on his wall for her, a silly thing: a pair of eyes shaded from the sun by a hand with the thumb sticking down. It had looked more like two zeroes and a seven. It was probably still there.

  “I hoped you would help recover what is lost,” she goes on, remembering their closeness. “If not for Master Walsingham’s sake, then for your country, and if not for your country, then for mine. For me.”

  She stares at him for a long, comfortless moment. And Dee is lost for words. Then she leaves.

  When she is gone, he finds his words, but by then it is too late to undo all that he has done, to do all that he has left undone.

  * * *

  That night Dee dreams of tides washing over broad sands, of a mountain, of a ringing bell, and of the Archangel Michael.

  In the morning he calls out: “Fetch me Walsingham!”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Beauvoir, Normandy, September 9, 1572

  John Dee does not dislike horses, but this one is slender, and pin buttocked, and he is pleased to be down from its saddle. He shields his eyes from the evening sun and looks south across the sea toward a distant pimple of rock, set far from the seashore— isolated; lonely; impregnable, castellated, and atop: an abbey spire pointing to God.

  Mont Saint-Michel.

  Property of the Cardinal of Lorraine.

  He stands awhile waiting, watching the tide come in. It moves, he has been told, faster than any horse in Christendom, and when it comes, the landscape transforms into seascape at a frightening speed. He shivers and leads the horse along the newly engorged river’s north bank, wishing he had come by boat after all.

  “I don’t like linear journeys,” he’d told Walsingham, when they had stood by the wharfside in Sandwich, watching the boat being loaded with wools for the markets in Antwerp.

  Walsingham had rolled his eyes.

  “But are you sure about this, Dee? Revealed to you in a dream? We are… we are staking the nation’s future on something you saw in your sleep?”

  “Walsingham,” Dee had said. “You will have to trust me.”

  The exact noise Walsingham had made could not be rendered in letters of any known alphabet.

  “It is not me who trusts in you and your dreams, Dee,” he’d said. “It is the Queen. All your dreams and intuitions. Tcha.”

  “They have never yet let me down,” Dee had told him, not absolutely certain this was the case. But he had been absurdly pleased to hear of the faith Bess still put in him.

  “We’ll see,” Walsingham had said. “So. Go with God, and we will send a ship to meet you off Nez Bayard in—”

  “Yes, yes, Walsingham. On the old Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, I know. I shall expect the finest luxury: maidens, swans, samite, and so forth.”

  Walsingham had growled, and when at length the boat had docked in Calais, Dee was quickly into a saddle, brandishing the passport Walsingham had forged for him, and on the road to Avranches as soon as could be managed. If Dee’s dream was wrong, then it would be best to find that out sooner rather than later. After five days’ riding only the fleetest horses, he was at the Lion D’Or, saddle sore and sick of salty mutton.

  “You are a pilgrim, m’sieur?” the innkeeper had asked, pouring him a big jolt of calvados and pushing it over the counter.

  “I am,” he had confirmed and had required another cup.

  And now here he is, his boots tied and slung around his neck, waiting at dawn in the marketplace with the party of perhaps twenty French pilgrims, each one likewise barefoot. Their guide is a sullen Norman with a mustache the color of wet straw, in thigh-length boots of sealskin and an oiled hat, who tells them first how the abbey came to be built after the Archangel Michael appeared to the Bishop of Avranches, likewise in a dream.

  “The bishop ignored the archangel not once, nor twice, but three times, until the archangel burned a hole in his forehead—like this, see?—after which Bishop Aubert thought he had best do as ordered.”

  And so the abbey was founded on an uncompromising rock in the middle of a sea of muddy sand and water, where the tides were fast, vast, and unpredictable.

  “It is the most treacherous place in the world after London,” the guide continues. “Most days the water rises three times the height of a man, and sometimes as much as five times. It comes in faster than a horse can gallop, and there are times in the day when the land you think you are standing on turns to water, and down you go. Pop Pop.”

  Despite the nervous laughs it is not funny, he says. Many pilgrims have died: drowned or sucked down by the liquid sand. This is why they must pay him to guide them through the mudflats to the rock itself, where the abbey spire dominates the land as far as the eye can see.

  “You try to cross one moment too early: you drown. You try it one moment too late: you drown.”

  They set off through the dawn, the donkeys very strong smelling. A sea mist p
leats and gathers in the wind. Dee shivers. He is not well. He nudges his donkey forward.

  “Is the abbé here?” he asks, nodding forward into the mist.

  “Of course,” the guide tells him.

  “Anybody else?”

  The guide gives him a snide look.

  “My sister,” he says. “She is very busy.”

  He stretches the word very: ve-e-rry. A cook? A whore? He hopes she is better looking than her brother. Of course she must be. But what does it mean? They ride through the low marshland. Tall grasses sough in the salt-laden breeze. He can hear gulls but no sound of the sea. Then at last they emerge out of the mist and onto the flats. There, ahead, at the end of the long low causeway, is the mount itself. In certain lights it is magical, but this morning, daunting. A clutch of gray slate spires reach up to God, skirted around by a forbidding castle wall.

  It is the only castle in Normandy not to fall to King Harry’s English armies, and there is little wonder why. But the guide is more interested in the great swath of sand that surrounds the castle.

  One of the French pilgrims—the least pious of the party, there to impress a woman, Dee surmises—asks if it is true that King Louis built a prison on the island.

  The guide agrees.

  “I heard there is one dungeon that floods at high tide,” the pilgrim says.

  It makes the Tower sound palatial.

  “Certainly,” the guide says. “And an iron cage, too, the size of which they can change to suit any man. Now, behind me in a single file. And keep up.”

  They ride out through the swath of sandy mud. Two bowshots, perhaps three, and to the south the surface seems to shimmer like potters’ slip. It even looks lethal, Dee thinks. Behind him everyone is silent. They are stunned by the place, perhaps, or are thinking of their cold feet, and the dangers of the quickening sand that surrounds them.

  They ride on until they reach the castle’s outer gate, manned by five soldiers in steel helmets and traveling cloaks. A brazier of sea coal throws up a quantity of smoke, and for a moment Dee cannot see their colors. If they are not de Guise, then he has misinterpreted his dream. He steels himself to have been wrong in this, and to have to turn back, back across the sands, to beat the tide, and to ride for Calais, after two weeks’ wasted effort, but mostly: wasted time. Time he does not have. He feels his heart screwing with anxiety.

  At last one of the soldiers moves. His cloak swings open. No colors on show, because he is wearing a breastplate. Dee feels hopeful. Who wears a breastplate to protect a mere abbé? But then another man emerges with no cloak: his jacket is parti-colored, mustard and plum, the colors of de Guise.

  Dee lets out a long plume of breath.

  He is right: the cardinal is here.

  But is Isobel Cochet?

  The soldiers are bored enough to be interested in a party of barefoot pilgrims and stand watching them dismount outside the gates. Dee knows how to pass as a much older man and he huddles close to a pair of women from Angoulême as they pass through the first gate into a yard. More men in helmets. Ten so far. All in the colors of de Guise.

  The guide tells them that they must keep their prayers short, and be back at these gates within three hours if they wish to ride back in safety.

  “Stay any longer and you will be staying all night.”

  The guide waits with the first set of soldiers, sourly chewing the ends of his mustache, but the pilgrims must pass another gate, where stand another five or six. The pilgrims get down on their knees and begin the long crawl up the hill. The road winds around the mount, through a few tight-packed houses. It is cobbled, but cleanish, and there are more soldiers and a few of the abbey’s servants up and about their business who stand aside to let the pilgrims pass with tuts and sighs of irritation. Dee feels a fool, but thank Christ they are not flagellants. Walsingham would have liked that.

  The road leads them, winding through various buildings, and up numerous flights of steps. The higher he climbs, the further he works himself into the snare, and of course: the abbé’s quarters—where they will be holding Isobel Cochet, for she is, as Walsingham said, a personable young woman—will be right at the very top. She will be locked in some antechamber with barred window and a long drop to the sea. Probably a peephole too.

  While they are shuffling around a tight turn, Dee hears a coarse scraping and looks up to watch a sled packed with provisions being hauled up the side of the castle on an almost vertical ramp of stone. His curiosity is piqued. The sled ascends the ramp just as did the beetle he once designed for a play when he was at Cambridge, though here the lifting device is left obvious: a rope as fat as a man’s arm. He imagines it must work on some sort of pulley system, though how is it powered?

  The pilgrims’ fervor increases as they approach the level of the abbey. Dee has crawled perhaps a thousand paces and the tops of his feet are now skinned, but he believes he has seen the lay of the island now. He can see the shortcuts through the dorters and refectories, the offices and the kitchens.

  At some point he knows he is going to have to slip aside and set about finding Isobel Cochet and that will not be best achieved as a barefoot pilgrim on his knees. He allows the other pilgrims to overtake him, accepting their encouragement, refusing their offers of help, until he is at the back of the line. He steals away.

  Ahead, under an archway, a flight of steps goes up to the left, a noisome little alley continues flat to the right. Dee pauses at the foot of the steps. He slips his bleeding feet into his shoes. His knees feel like eggs. He straightens himself, changes his hat so that he is wearing a biretta, and turns his cloak.

  He is Père Dee.

  He follows the alley into a courtyard, crosses that, and then walks through another doorway. Down some steps, and out through another arch onto the road he has just crawled up. Beads of blood in the dust.

  He walks up as if he is making his way to the almonry, on business perhaps, and people nod and greet him politely as he goes. He passes his party of pilgrims and blesses them absently, before finding what he is looking for: a bookseller—shabby, and pale, with a very dark beard that covers his cheekbones—in the process of setting up his stall under an arch. He deals in religious tracts for the pilgrims and has some old scallop shells for sale to those who wish to pretend they are on their way to Santiago. Dee engages him in dunderheaded nonsense about the quality of his books—which are bad in every sense.

  “It is a pleasure to have such conversation,” he tells the man, “after coming from Paris.”

  “Have you come with the cardinal?” the bookseller asks.

  Dee is evasive but tells him he has just arrived on the island. “At my master’s orders.”

  “Is it true what they say, that the cardinal is waiting for a Spanish fleet?” the bookseller wonders. “Leastways, that’s what one of the Spanish gentlemen told me.”

  “Ah, that would be Señor—”

  “Not a señor: a padre. Like yourself. Padre Adán.”

  “Padre Adán? I had not realized he was a book lover.”

  “Oh yes, Father,” the bookseller assures Dee. “He was after books about hidden writings, what he calls steganography, from the Greek, you know. He found my offerings far too humble for his esoteric tastes.”

  The man has a high-pitched nervous laugh. Dee smiles. He is closing in, he thinks.

  “And where will I find Padre Adán?”

  “He stays in the abbé’s quarters, with the cardinal.”

  The bookseller gestures. Dee turns. Above is a handsome stone building, its heavy door guarded by two more halberdiers in mustard and plum, and one of those curly-haired hunting dogs.

  “I daresay he will be too busy to have much time for study, anyway,” Dee prods.

  The bookseller looks blank.

  “With the Englishwoman?”

  The bookseller shakes his head. He has heard of no Englishwoman.

  “The cardinal’s companion?”

  Again, no. Dee hesitates and then u
ses Walsingham’s money to buy a book, a Psalter, bulky enough, and with a brass catch that looks better than it is, which is what he is after. He doesn’t bother haggling.

  A Spanish fleet. A priest with a newfound interest in cryptography. But no knowledge of Isobel Cochet. His mind is a swarming hive of bees.

  As he is walking away, he hears the bookseller call to him.

  “Oh sir! She is not an Englishwoman. She is French! From your city, sir. From Paris!”

  Dee raises his arm in a good-willed gesture of farewell.

  Ahead are the abbé’s quarters, and Dee’s approach is watched by the bored guards and their intelligent-looking dog. Dee removes his cap. He calls them “masters” and shows them the book he has bought Padre Adán.

  “Very fine,” he assures them. “Padre Adán is expecting it.”

  He speaks French with a strong Venetian accent, though it is wasted on the two men and the dog, who stare at him with lifeless eyes. Rust blooms on their helmets and breastplates, and their ungloved hands are raw around their halberds. They must hate it here. The dog barks softly.

  “He’s at Mass,” one of them tells Dee.

  “I know, master, it is that I wanted to leave it as a present. As a surprise for his return.”

  Dee is managing to look very old and hapless. The guards let him through and into the abbé’s hall where a servant is rearranging the rushes. There’s another small dog asleep in a ball under a low table on which stands a ewer and a mirror. Dee is more upright when he tells the servant the cardinal has asked him to bring the book to the Englishwoman.

  “To help her on the path to righteousness,” he simpers.

  The servant looks blank.

  “The Englishwoman? You won’t find her here.”

  “No? I… ah. Then there is a mistake. Where is she?”

  The servant looks at him as if he is witless.

  “Still under lock and key,” the servant tells him. “Where she belongs.”

  Christ, he thinks.

  “My apologies, sir.”

  He backs out.