The Eyes of the Queen

by Oliver Clements

But the servant is suspicious.

  “Wait.”

  Dee thrusts the book into his hands and turns and is back out and through the guards and scuttling back down the steps before he hears another word. Christ. The dungeons. They are keeping her there.

  He meets his pilgrims coming up the slope, and he diverts into the bookseller’s again and watches them pass. Up above, the abbé’s servant has come out and is talking to the bored guards and their dog. There is much shrugging of the “no-harm-done” variety, and the servant is left with a book, so the matter is let drop. Despite only just arriving, the bookseller has already begun to pack away.

  “Looks like rain again, sir,” he says. “You never can be sure in this part of the world.”

  Dee apologizes and buys a poorly produced pamphlet concerning the everlasting nature of the Trinity.

  “You know quality when you see it!” the bookseller tells him.

  In fact, he knows thick paper when he feels it. He lets the pilgrims pass, then retraces their tracks back down the hill. He passes an open door, from within which he hears that coarse grinding scrape. He cannot resist stepping inside. Two guards sit watching a bare-chested, wild-looking man trapped within a huge treadmill, walking within its center as if against an incoming tide. A winding rope stretches from the treadmill’s hub out through a doorway that frames a view of the salt marsh and a clutch of low roofs in the distance. Another guard stands peering out over this doorway’s edge, waiting for the sledge to come grinding up its rail. On board is a sheep’s carcass and a sack of cabbages.

  “What do you want?” one of the sitting guards asks. “A go in the wheel?”

  He has an arquebus, which lends him extra swagger.

  Dee retreats and continues down the hill until he finds a soldier on the corner, eating a lump of bread from the nearby bakery.

  Dee tells him he is looking for the lieutenant.

  The guard gestures up the road.

  Dee asks if he will accompany him.

  After a moment, the guard supposes he must.

  They walk together—Dee takes strength from the guard’s ignorance—up past the crawling pilgrims. The guard encourages them to crawl faster.

  “You will miss Mass!”

  In the guardroom, just before the abbé’s house, the lieutenant sits at a table eating an onion and is in no mood to listen to Père Whoever complaining that some of his men are drunk and playing dice in a house below.

  “And they have a woman with them,” Dee tells him.

  “A woman?”

  Now he is on his feet.

  “Show me to her,” he says. Dee leads him back down the pathway, to the bottom of those steps. He rolls the pamphlet tightly.

  The bell in the abbey begins its ringing for Mass. Seagulls take wing almost as noisily.

  “Putain!” the man shouts as his shoulder is splashed with bird dropping. It is an easy enough trick. While he is off balance brushing it from his cloak, Dee moves fast. He spins the man into a dark corner and drives the blade of his hand very hard, just below his ear. It hurts like hell, but the man is instantly as if without bones, and Dee must clutch him to himself, chest to chest. He lets him down gently, and then drags his body behind a cistern. He has no idea how long the man will be out. An hour? A day? He pulls off his coat and takes up his hat. Not a bad fit, considering.

  A moment later, Lieutenant Dee emerges from the shadows.

  The road is crowded now, with men and women hurrying to Mass. The guardsman who’d taken him to the lieutenant salutes him as he passes. He walks up the road following the blood-beaded tracks of the pilgrims and back into the guardroom. There is now only one man there, half asleep on a bench.

  Dee stalks across the room and through the far door into the darkness. He slams the door behind him. It takes a moment for his eyes to adjust. There is lamp glow along a corridor. Dee steps out, but instantly staggers. The corridor slopes down, and there is a lamp farther along, in a sconce, smelling strongly of fish oil. He lifts it from its shelf and carries it down with him. He has the lieutenant’s sword belted about his middle, but a shorter knife ready, just in case. The smell and the chill rise to meet him. He can feel a putrid draft in his face.

  The corridor soon levels out. Gray light sifts through a series of doors set in the weeping rock of the island, all barred in iron. Dee passes along them. Within are men, who shrink from the meager light thrown by his upheld lamp. They are pitifully dressed and the stench is foul. He wishes he had brought the Queen’s nosegay of meadowsweet. He feels chilled to the bone, disgusted to his core.

  “Mistress Cochet! Mistress Cochet?” he calls.

  There are muttered curses and he is foully insulted, but Dee passes on. Hands come at him through one barred door. A woman with no teeth and rat-tails for hair offers him her use for some bread.

  He walks on.

  At the end of the corridor is one last door, unbarred.

  He lifts the lamp and it is nearly extinguished in the draft.

  This is it, he thinks, the cell with the sea view.

  The steps are slick and green with weed, and very treacherous. An iron rail is affixed to the wall. He takes it.

  “Mistress Cochet?”

  He holds the lamp high. Another step. His breath is a cloud before him, even on a late summer’s day. He feels racked in cold and fear, and the walls press in on him. Seaweed covers their lower half and he is still only a short way down the steps. Down he goes, to the last step. Ahead is another iron door. The line of seaweed reaches up the wall to within a hand’s span of the dungeon roof. Put a man in here, and in a high tide, he will drown. What horror would go through his mind when the water started in over the sill? It is effortlessly cruel.

  “Mistress Cochet?”

  No answer.

  Dee clutches the still damp, much-rusted iron bars.

  “Mistress—”

  The door swings open and he is forced to cling to its bars. The window to the sea is likewise barred against escape, but Dr. Dee sees the dungeon is empty.

  He retraces his steps back up the corridor where the prisoners implore him for release. It is like being in London, he thinks, when old soldiers beg for coins, and a man must admit he has none.

  “No keys,” he tells them, clutching his empty purse. “Sorry.”

  The wailing is pitiful, but Dee must hurry away from the stink. He feels as if he is coming up from the darkness in search of air and light. He replaces the lamp in a sconce and marches through the guardroom where the same guard now stares at him openmouthed.

  He walks out and turns left.

  The lieutenant is not yet awake, obviously.

  But where then is Mistress Cochet?

  He will have to find this Father Adán and follow him. Where will he be? At Mass. Dee reclaims his persona of M’sieur Dee and sets off toward the abbey back at the top of the Mont, where bells are still ringing. His steps take him out onto the castle walls. To the north the view of the sea is framed by a series of forelands. Funny to think that far away, beyond even the Spanish fleet that might—or might not—be beating toward them across the Bay of Biscay, elemental forces are gathering, shifting their powers to send the seawater rolling back over the mud, breaking the causeway and cutting the isle off from the land. He supposes he must have been on the island for an hour.

  He quickly becomes lost in a maze. Some stairways lead only to locked doors, and when he retraces his steps he finds himself somewhere he has never been before. The streets seem to narrow, and he loses his bearings.

  More guards are gathered along the walkway. Dee holds his nerve and passes them with a polite greeting. Now he cannot come back that way. The streets close in on him, filling with pilgrims, shopkeepers, and guides, but also soldiers, priests, and friars in their black.

  Dee finds himself in a cloister, and then back outside, and here finally is the abbey precinct. The rain is coming in hard now, on the edge of a blustering wind, and a line of raindrops cling quivering from
the brim of his hat. Over the wall he can see the gray sea is etched in the distance with lines of white surf. He has a while yet, he thinks.

  The doors of the abbey are closed but a latecomer might be forgiven for creeping apologetically and silently in. The smell of incense and wet wool grip him by the throat.

  It is a childhood memory, of terrifying times, when the Mass was one thing one day, and another the next, when what you believed one day might have you burned on a pyre the next—a time of terrible fear among the adults when all certainties were no longer so.

  A creeping shudder passes through his body and he must bite a finger to stop himself giving voice to the old fears.

  Instead he looks around: it is a high-vaulted church, sparsely decorated, with columns that soar unadorned to a plain roof. He finds a hidden part of him regretting that it is not filled with the ornate iconography of the papist rite.

  But he has no time for this. He is in search of Father Adán, or, better still, Isobel Cochet herself, for surely they would let her celebrate Mass?

  He moves around his pillar and begins up the south aisle. The abbey is crowded, and he cannot see the altar, but he works his way down, assuming the cardinal will be at the front, and his Spanish priest nearby. He sees his pilgrims, still on their knees, along with many others besides, and there are a hundred friars and priests of every color. At the front is the cardinal: elderly and sallow, but there is something intensely lively about his face, and Dee is reminded that Walsingham calls him Minister of Mischief. He wears red silk, with a white chasuble and a red zucchetto, and his expression—perhaps Dee imagines it—is that of a man on the cusp of winning a long, long game of chess against an evenly matched opponent.

  Next to him is the abbé, in burgundy silks, frail and silvery, perhaps a simpleton from a good family. Both are surrounded with men in mustard and plum velvet, but there is no sign of Father Adán or Isobel Cochet.

  Dee plans his next move. He will have to wait until the Mass is finished, he thinks, and then follow the cardinal, but the service is at least moving quickly: it must be because the pilgrims need to get back down the hill to their donkeys and the trip back to the mainland before the tide comes in.

  Time seems to stretch and yaw. It always does in Mass. But then he feels it. Or hears it. Or tastes it. Something at odds with an abbey. An atmosphere. Dee is silent and still, every sense alert. He has ever been open to this form of communication, though he has yet to formulate the terminology to describe it. It is not unlike his lucid dreaming, but it is more than that: it is an engagement with the world in four dimensions. It is the perception of a message from beyond the usual twenty senses. Dee is yet to fully understand it, but has long been certain such a thing is possible.

  Now he knows what to do.

  The crypt, of course.

  He waits until Mass concludes, and the blessing is given, and the congregation hurries about their business and the choir members troop out after them while the priest and his acolytes snuff the candles and clear the altar. All through this, Dee remains hidden, kneeling in his own private prayers, and when it is done, and the last of the echoing footfall fades, he leaves it for the length of sixty heartbeats, and then rises on soft feet, and slips into the south transept.

  At a staircase, he descends. Candles are lit below and their warmth greets him. As does a man: small, dark-eyed, not expecting him. Dee rushes him in a few steps. He repeats his attack on the lieutenant, but this time he cannot catch him, and the man drops backward, down the steps, and cracks his head on the stones with the sound of a sparrow’s egg on a brick floor. Dee feels his own pulse in his teeth; he might vomit. There is something very dreadful about ending a man’s life, whomsoever it may be. But look, there: the man has a gun—one of the short, one-handed sorts that assassins favor—crammed in his sash. He would have killed Dee had Dee not killed him. It is true that the fuse is not lit, nor likely to be, but still: it is the principle. He who deals in death must buy as well as sell.

  But… wait. He is a priest. So. Father Adán then.

  The candles flicker in their sconces, as if to mark the departure of his immortal soul, and the communication Dee had felt in the nave halts, but there is still something. Some emanation, as if from the stones themselves. He stands still, looking around. Nothing. Only the candles in their sconces. Huge pillars of well-dressed stone. What masons these men were!

  Was it the dead man talking to him? Summoning him down here? He thinks not. He hears a creak, from beyond the pillars, in the gloom. It reminds him of being aboard ship. Rope. Above his head. He slips to the shadowed side. Behind a pillar. His breath comes fast. There is not much air down here. Then he hears a voice.

  “Well, come on then.”

  A woman. Slightly strangulated, again from above. He steps around the pillar, ready for what he cannot begin to guess.

  Nothing.

  “Up here.”

  Above is a tall cube, hanging in midair about a man’s height off the ground. It is too dark to see what it really is. Dee returns for a candle and brings it over. Hot wax on his fingers is nothing: the cube is a lattice of iron bars, hanging from the roof, and within: a woman. Isobel Cochet.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Mont Saint-Michel, September 9, 1572

  “My God,” she says, “you took your time.”

  He stares. The cage. The guide mentioned it: the iron cage the size of which can be changed to fit any man. Only now Dee sees what he meant: its size can be changed to unfit any man. Too short to stand in upright, too narrow to sit or lie, the cage holds Isobel Cochet crouching with her knees and neck bent. It might be tolerable for the length of time it takes to say the Our Father, but longer than that and it would drive you mad. The sea coming in through your window every day, which he endured, would be bad enough, but this?

  “Who are you?” she asks.

  “John Dee,” he tells her. “Dr. John Dee.”

  He holds the candle up to light her face. Her eyes are sunken and feverish. Her dress—the color of dried sage leaves—is ragged and filthy, her linens gray and ringed with stains, and her nails are like talons. He can feel the heat of desperation coming off her.

  “Walsingham sent you?” she asks. She does not seem quite as pleased to see him as he had supposed.

  He studies the cage. Six sheets of iron bars, each edge stitched together with a fat iron chain ending in a lock as large as a man’s fist. He reaches up to rattle it. It might hold back an elephant.

  “Why do they keep you in this?” he asks.

  “Because I have only given them half of what they want.”

  Dee wonders if he is missing something. Then he sees it.

  “And you will not let them have the other half until you see your daughter safe.”

  “Exactly.”

  “What have you given them so far?” he wonders.

  “The first of the two pages,” she tells him. “It is nothing but a strange geometrical drawing, square, like this, with circles within.”

  “Who has it?”

  “Father Adán,” she says. “He keeps it locked in there.” She gestures at what might be a sacristy door. “He asked me questions about it all day. Most nights, too.”

  “And the page you did not give him?”

  “Burned. Ashes in a sluice.”

  Dee is alarmed.

  “Christ,” he says. “What was it?”

  “A list of numbers. Some letters.”

  “That is all? Not a map? Do you recall any of the numbers? The letters?”

  She looks at him.

  “Do you know anything about me, Dr. Dee?”

  “I know Walsingham values you more highly than anyone else in his employ.”

  Isobel laughs bitterly.

  “Why do you think that was? Because I am able to suck on a man’s pizzle until he falls faint for lack of strength?”

  Dee hesitates. “Can you?”

  She sighs. “It was because, among other things, I need only look at
a thing once to memorize it forever.”

  “That is useful,” Dee concedes.

  She is silent, waiting.

  “So?” she asks.

  “So I am here, to retrieve the document.”

  “Ah,” she says. “A dilemma.”

  A dilemma of her own device: now she is become the document he must rescue.

  They smile at each other.

  “If you were to give me the figures?” he suggests, pointlessly.

  She just laughs. “It is a little more complicated than that.”

  “In what way?”

  “My daughter.”

  Dee stands as if on a threshold. He knew this would happen. He had come to no decision what he would say when she asked. Now he does.

  “Mistress Cochet,” he says. “That is why I am sent: the Queen has Rose in her care.”

  There is a long silence. Dee feels the world bending to look at him. Even the abbey’s stones. He can hear their screams. He has committed an outrage against God. Isobel Cochet looks at him, too, and she should scream in bloody horror, but she wants to believe him. She wants to believe her child is safe. She does not want to believe she has just been condemned to death.

  “How do you know?” she asks. A residue of suspicion.

  “She told me before I set out.”

  “Have you seen her with your own eyes?”

  “No,” Dee admits.

  “But she told you? The Queen?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Walsingham believed it was the only thing that would make you kill his intelligencer in Paris.”

  Cochet closes her eyes.

  “He is right,” she says. “May God defend me, I had no choice.”

  She tells him how she was taken in the Louvre.

  “Or, not taken, just spoken to, in one of those rooms they have there, with a huge fire, and mirrors instead of wainscoting. One of the cardinal’s men, this man, Father Adán, he caught me unawares. He had a doll of hers. Of Rose’s. A little thing my husband had once given her.”

  “So you never spoke to the cardinal?”

  She shakes her head. “Not until later. Until they brought me here.”