Saint Antony's Fire

by Steve White

  "I can see why you attracted the Gray Monks' attention," Walsingham remarked with a frosty chuckle. "Your prophecy of violent storms in the northern seas this year made it difficult for Phillip of Spain to get enough sailors for his Armada."

  "I merely reported what the stars foretold," Dee declared loftily. "The storms will indeed come to pass. If our fleet had forced the Armada into the North Sea, with no way home to Spain save around Scotland and Ireland, its fate would have been sealed." He shook his head, dismissing the might-have-beens. "But yes, Parma doubtless considered the location of Mortlake when he planned his line of march. The location of Barn Elms, too," he added in a gracious aside to Walsingham. "I believe the Spanish ambassador once wrote, 'This Walsingham is of all heretics the worst.' "

  "So he did. Seldom have I received a more valued compliment." Walsingham didn't need to add that he had read the diplomatic correspondence before King Phillip had. He laid his hands flat on the table in a getting-down-to-business gesture. "Well, they didn't catch either of us, did they? And now it is time to confer on the course of action for which God has spared us." He reached behind his chair and pulled a cord. A servant entered silently. "Ask Sir Walter and his companion to join us."

  Winslow started, for he knew who "Sir Walter" must be: Sir Walter Raleigh, favorite of the Queen and Vice-Admiral of the West Country, responsible for the defense of the counties of Cornwall and Devon near whose common boundary they sat. More and more, he understood the veritable phalanx of guards around this inn. He also began to feel acutely conscious of his own modest social status. "Uh, with your permission, Mr. Secretary, I'll take my leave."

  "No, Thomas." It was the first time Walsingham had ever addressed him by his Christian name, but it did nothing to soften his habitual understated tone of command. "You will remain. I know how weary you must be, but you are a full member of our council of war."

  "I, Mr. Secretary?" Winslow's voice rose to an incredulous squeak.

  "You." Walsingham adjusted a paper on the table as though adjusting his thoughts. "First of all, I must take you into my confidence. As I told you, the Queen escaped from London. I failed to mention that she is here."

  "Here? In Plymouth?"

  "Yes. It was the logical place to bring her. Of all parts of the kingdom, this is the most loyal. First of all, Devon is Protestant to the marrow. Secondly, the seafaring families that control Plymouth are Her Majesty's strongest supporters—and with good reason, since her 'Letters of Reprisal' gave legal immunity to Hawkins and Drake and—" Walsingham's lips quirked upward as he regarded Winslow "—other sea dogs." He paused significantly. "Haven't you wondered why I required you to keep your ship here at Plymouth, when you wanted with all your heart to sortie out with Lord Howard and Drake and the rest, and bring the Spaniards to battle?"

  "I have, Mr. Secretary. I know now that if you hadn't I'd be dead and the Heron would be less than ashes, consumed by the fires of Hell. So I know I should feel gratitude to you—and maybe someday I'll be able to feel it. But I still don't understand."

  I really must, Winslow thought, be drunk with exhaustion, to speak so to Mr. Secretary. But what does it matter, now? What does anything matter?

  "Then understand this, Thomas. I needed to hold a stout ship, with a captain I knew I could trust, in reserve." Walsingham leaned forward, and Winslow could look nowhere but into those dark-gray eyes. "You are going to be the agent of Her Majesty's escape from England."

  Winslow gulped the rest of his wine.

  Three

  Winslow had never met Sir Walter Raleigh, but there was no mistaking him as he strode through the door. He was renowned for being extraordinarily tall—a full six feet—and handsome, with his wavy dark hair and exquisitely pointed beard. He was also a noted fashion plate even by the standards of Elizabeth's court, and while he now wore a cuirass in token of his active military status he managed to make it look like something for a courtly parade, especially with the splendid cloak that half-covered it. Winslow didn't know how much credence to give the story that he'd once spread a cloak like that over a mud puddle for the Queen to walk on. But be that as it might, it was easy to see why he had become a favorite of hers.

  The man who accompanied him was nondescript by comparison—actually, most people were nondescript by comparison to Raleigh. He was of average height and build, plainly dressed, with a short beard and hair that was beginning to recede even though he looked to be only in his early forties. That hair was partially hidden by a bandage around his head, and Winslow's first thought was that he must have been wounded in the fighting against the Armada. But there was no blood in evidence; this was not a fresh wound.

  Walsingham introduced Raleigh, and Winslow bowed as was proper. As he did so, he risked a surreptitious look at the exchange of glares that seemed to freeze the air of the room with the chill of a well-known animosity.

  Walsingham and Raleigh were living proof that opposites did not always attract. Everything about the flamboyant courtier was an affront to the Puritan in Walsingham. Not that Raleigh was a mere playboy. He was a poet and friend to poets, and a founder of the "School of Night," devoted to the study of natural philosophy . . . including, some whispered, occult matters and the anatomy of stolen corpses. Walsingham wasn't narrow-minded in the way of those carping, arrogantly ignorant Puritan preachers who so often drove the Queen to exceed even her usual legendary capacity for profanity. Far from it: he was a patron of the theater (which most Puritans regarded as an antechamber of Hell) and an associate of John Dee. But the odor of atheism that clung stubbornly to the School of Night stank in his nostrils. And lately his distaste for Raleigh had acquired a very tangible basis.

  Walsingham's greatest triumph in his self-assumed role as the Queen's watchdog had been the foiling of the Babington plot a year earlier. Hanging, drawing and quartering Anthony Babington and his equally dreamy co-conspirators had been secondary to the obtaining of conclusive evidence that Mary Stuart had been an accessory to their plot to assassinate Elizabeth. Ten years before, the Queen of Scots had fled to England to escape the judgment of that country's nobles for her complicity in the murder of her admittedly contemptible husband Darnley and the attempted coup of her lover Bothwell. Ever since, she had repaid her cousin Elizabeth's hospitality by compulsively intriguing against her, and serving as an all-too-willing focus for the discontent of Catholics who regarded her as the legitimate claimant to the English crown. As long as she lived and plotted, Walsingham had known Elizabeth could never sit securely on her throne. But Elizabeth—understandably reluctant to set a precedent for the execution of an anointed Queen—had temporized and vacillated until her "Moor," as she called the swarthy Walsingham, had provided her with Mary's blatantly treasonous correspondence with Babington. Even then, Elizabeth's inner conflicts had been enough to cast Walsingham out of favor after three strokes of the executioner's axe had sent Mary's head thudding to the scaffold at Fotheringay Castle.

  The royal disfavor couldn't have come at a worse time for him. The death in the Netherlands of his son-in-law and close friend Sir Phillip Sidney had dealt a body-blow to his personal finances, which were as chronically unsettled as his health. (It was said that neither had ever fully recovered from his ambassadorship in Paris, when mobs of murderous Catholic fanatics had run amok on Saint Bartholomew's Day and it had been far from certain that diplomatic status could shield a Protestant from them.) He had counted on receiving at least part of Babington's forfeited estates from the Queen whose assassination he had prevented. Instead, she had given the lot to Raleigh.

  Now Walsingham wore a carefully neutral expression as he resumed the introductions. "And, this," he said, indicating Raleigh's companion, "is Master John White of London."

  "Master White!" Winslow exclaimed. "Of course I know of you. I've seen your marvelous paintings of the lands and peoples of America."

  "Atlantis," John Dee corrected irritably. "Only the ignorant have fallen into the fad of naming the western continent aft
er that Italian charlatan Amerigo Vespucci! I have conclusively identified it as the Atlantic island described by Plato."

  "Didn't Atlantis sink?" Winslow inquired, all bland innocence.

  For an instant, Dee seemed to expand as though gathering his forces for a crushing retort, and Walsingham smothered a chuckle. But then Raleigh intervened with an indulgent smile for his old associate in the School of Night. "Well, Dr. Dee, whatever we call the continent as a whole, I've named the province discovered by my expedition of four years ago 'Virginia,' after our beloved Virgin Queen. Master White was on that first expedition, and also the second one I dispatched the following year, as artist."

  "Yes," said White, with a faraway look. "Nothing in my life can ever equal my first sight of that world, where all was new and untouched. I recorded everything: the plants, the animals, and the life of the Indians we encountered and befriended. But then . . ." His voice trailed off, and Winslow recalled what he had heard about the savagery and incompetence of Ralph Lane, military commander of the 1585 expedition, who had so antagonized the local Secotan Indians that the expedition had been left isolated in its fort on the island of Roanoke, grateful to be evacuated by Sir Francis Drake the following year. "Last year, when Sir Walter made me governor of the colony he dispatched to Virginia, I knew I couldn't undo the harm that had been done. But I hoped for a fresh start, for we were to settle further north, on the shores of the great bay the Indians call Chesapeake. But thanks to our treacherous pilot, Simon Fernandez, we were led into one difficulty after another, and finally left stranded on Roanoke Island, the last place we wanted to go. And then . . ." Once again White could not continue. He had, Winslow thought, the look of a man who had known too much sorrow and disappointment.

  "Yes," Winslow prompted after a moment. "I heard stories—things went wrong, and you had to return to England for help. But weren't you supposed to return with a rescue expedition?"

  "Oh, yes. Early this year I managed to obtain permission to try with two small ships. We departed in April. French pirates attacked us off Madeira. I received two wounds in the head, by sword and pike, from which I am still recovering." White gestured at his bandaged head. "At that, I suppose I should be grateful to God. The Frenchmen stole our cargo but spared those of us who had survived the fight, leaving us to limp back to England. By then, the Armada was expected and no ships could be spared for a second attempt. So the colonists still await rescue . . . including my daughter Eleanor Dare, and her daughter Virginia, the first English child born in that land."

  "A sorry tale," nodded Walsingham. "Which, as it happens, is very pertinent to our discussion today. This is why you are here, Master White, in case you'd wondered."

  "Actually, Mr. Secretary, I had," White acknowledged in his diffident way.

  "Then let us proceed. Please be seated, everyone." The four of them pulled chairs up to the long table at whose head the Principal Secretary sat.

  "I have," Walsingham began, "apprised Captain Winslow of what the rest of us already know. But to recapitulate: nothing in England can stop the Spaniards now—"

  "The men of Devon and Cornwall will fight them all the way to Land's End!" Raleigh interrupted indignantly. "We will make them pay in blood for every foot of English earth! If they take the Queen, it will only be because not a man of the West Country still lives who can lift a sword or draw a bow!"

  Walsingham waited out the dramatics, then resumed as though they had never occurred. "My sources of information indicate that Phillip of Spain plans to bestow the English crown on his daughter Isabella. We must not deceive ourselves. We are facing another reign like that of Mary Tudor. Only this time it will be even worse, because the Gray Monks will now extend their reach into England."

  Everyone, even Raleigh, was silenced by Walsingham's usual pitiless realism. They all remembered the bad times of Bloody Mary when the air of England had reeked with the charred flesh of hundreds of Protestants. And they had all heard stories of the things that happened to those who opposed or even inconvenienced the Order of Saint Antony in countries under the rule or influence of Spain. The Puritans rejected the traditional Catholic demonology as a vestige of paganism, but they insisted that the Gray Monks were not men, if only because the Bishop of Rome—the Antichrist, in their eyes—had declared that they were. And it was said that both Spain and the See of Rome were becoming more and more the instruments of those weird beings.

  "And this time," Walsingham continued inexorably, "there will be no Protestant heir for the godly to pin their faith on, as we did on the Princess Elizabeth in the days of Bloody Mary. If Her Majesty dies—as she will, if the Gray Monks and their Spanish puppets capture her—then all hope is gone. She must be taken to a refuge beyond England. The only question is where."

  When no response emerged from the miasma of depression in the room, Winslow spoke up. "Uh, surely not the States of the Netherlands, Mr. Secretary. Without the support of a Protestant England, they cannot hold out much longer, stubborn though they are."

  "No, they cannot. Likewise, the Protestant party in Scotland will never keep control over young King James without our backing, especially with a Spanish army just over the border."

  "All too true," agreed Raleigh. "She must go to one of the Protestant principalities of Germany."

  "But how long can they endure?" inquired Walsingham. "Phillip of Spain will surely aid his Austrian Hapsburg relatives in stamping out the true religion in the Holy Roman Empire. The Gray Monks already operate freely there, as Dr. Dee can attest. He was fortunate to leave the Empire inside his whole skin."

  "The Cantons of Switzerland, then! Or the Lutheran kingdoms of Denmark or Sweden."

  "That, too, only postpones the inevitable. Phillip has made clear his intention of exterminating Protestantism throughout Europe. And he has correctly identified England as the chief obstacle to his plans. Now, with that obstacle gone . . ."

  "Well, what do you have to offer us?" demanded Raleigh, exasperated. "You seem to have ruled out all possibilities."

  "Not quite all," Walsingham demurred. "I will now ask Dr. Dee to address the meeting."

  Dee, like many other polymaths, had used a lucrative profession to finance the not-so-lucrative studies that really interested him. In his case, the profession was that of astrologer to the rich and powerful. Success in that field required a convincing show of authority. He had accordingly developed a style of hieratic portentousness, which he now let flow in full force. But the sorcerer's words were, by his standards, matter-of-fact.

  "While I was still able to travel and work freely in Krakow and Prague, I made it my business to study the Gray Monks. I could not penetrate into the deepest secrets of their origin and nature; they have made it a point to conceal these matters. But, at the cost of considerable toil and danger, I was able to learn one thing: their real reason for desiring a Spanish conquest of England."

  "What?" Raleigh leaned forward with a kind of truculent incomprehension. "But Dr. Dee, we all know Phillip's motives. Our sea dogs have raided his colonies and treasure ships, and our money and arms have kept the Spaniards bleeding away into the open wound of the Dutch rebellion. And he's convinced himself that he has a claim to the English throne on his mother's side—some nonsense about forebears who married daughters of John of Gaunt two hundred years ago. For a long time, all that stopped him was the knowledge that if he unseated the Queen from her throne he would have had to put Mary Stuart on it. Every papist in Europe, from Pope Sixtus on down, would have demanded it. And her family connections were with the French royal house, which Phillip couldn't love any less if they were Protestant. But then he got a promise from her to disinherit her son James and support his claim. And now, with the Scots Queen dead—"

  "Ahem!" Dee gave Raleigh the kind of look customarily bestowed by a schoolmaster on a boy who had made an obvious mistake in his Greek construes. "If you will recall, I referred not to Phillip's motives for conquering England, but to those of the Gray Monks for enabling him to
do so."

  "Well . . ." Raleigh had the baffled look of a man who thought the answer to a question almost too obvious to put into words. "God's teeth, Doctor! They're papists, aren't they?"

  "Are they, truly? I have reason to wonder about the genuineness of their Catholicism. I sometimes think they are silently laughing at all religion, while using it to manipulate humans. Be that as it may, I am quite certain that they don't care a fig for Phillip's political interests, much less his dynastic claims. They support him simply because he has the desire—and, with their help, the means—to destroy England."