The Queen's Men

by Oliver Clements

  But now he must look in the hold.

  He lifts the hatch and, even in this cold, is forced back by the stench. He claps his scarf to his face, and then steps down onto the first rung, and finds the makeshift slingshot of Dee’s—still in place, dug into the nose of one of the rungs—but he steps over it, and climbs down to the bottom rung, for he has come for something else, on Jane Frommond’s command. He waits on the bottom rung, scarf pressed to face, listening to the alarmed shrieks of the rats, until his eyes are more used to the dark, and then he steps gingerly into the stinking bilge brew and walks as carefully as he can to the far corner, the place he now thinks of as Frommond’s corner, and, reaching up, he finds, just as she whispered he might, a small package jammed tight into the gap between the ribs and the bulkhead. Then he walks back and climbs the steps, pulling from the wood as he does so Frommond’s knife but leaving Dee’s, and her whalebones, where they are.

  When Beale is back on deck he stops and looks down at the stained timbers in the bow, where Dee admits he battered the man to death. It has rained and snowed even in the last few days and hours, and much of the blood and gore has been washed away, but here and there are tannic splashes and stains to prove its passage, and in the gaps between the planks he is certain there must linger yet matter of interest to the crow.

  He shudders again and looks down at the package Mistress Frommond has asked him to retrieve. A scarlet glove, balled tight, and within it, a tiny limning of a man in a fancy collar.

  “All right,” he says. “Let’s go home.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  London, last week of December 1577

  John Dee and Jane Frommond are moved from the Bedlam that afternoon. It is a slow process on carts with wheels swagged in horsehair, she to the coffer chamber in the Palace of Whitehall, he on a litter to Her Majesty’s barge, in which he is rowed upriver to his house in Mortlake, to be met at the river’s edge by his mother and Roger Cooke, with his eyebrows grown back, and by Thomas Digges and his mother, too, who instructs Dee not to think about her son’s coat until he is quite recovered.

  He is carried through the orchard up into his library and lain among his books, and the Queen has sent him a block of her best soap, as well as a box of oranges she was given by the Spanish ambassador but has found too sharp, and there is wood for his fire delivered from upriver, and bread and ale brought from Richmond Palace, and a yeoman is placed at his gate to deter any Bills or Bobs from bothering him for a while, at least from that direction.

  At New Year’s they are sent a cooked goose and savory cinnamon rice and sprout tops with almonds and a curious subtlety of sugar spun to resemble a boat that might or might not be intended to represent the barge, and then there are four bottles of Sir William Cecil’s favorite wine. Dee rouses himself to sit upright on a cushion under a blanket, to be clucked over by his mother, and Thomas Digges brings over his mother to share in the dinner, and they bring with them a capon roasted with spiced mincemeat, and another bottle of French wine to which Dee’s mother adds rosewater. They summon the yeoman from his post, who turns out to have a rough but unexpectedly charming singing voice, though his songs are all about the Cornish and what God wishes done unto them in punishment for some long-forgotten crime, and then Digges recites a poem he has made about the Great Comet, and then another that contrives to compare John Dee to Job of the Bible, and the barge to the whale, and that hints—without being able to be explicit about how—there might be a link between Job escaping the whale and John Dee escaping the barge through the use of whalebone.

  It is not long after the last bottle is turned up in the bucket and the fire’s embers are dying that Digges excuses himself and his sleepy mother, and Dee’s mother and Roger Cooke soon drift off, too, and the yeoman decides duty calls and he must take a last turn of the property; and so Dee is left alone once more, sitting on a cushion in his best doublet and a hat of finespun wool. He begins to feel maudlin or melancholic and gets to his feet. His legs are still shaky, but he feels a powerful need for air, and he stops to stand for a while on the wooden walkway behind his house, looking down through the orchard to the river. It is ragged cloud tonight, with a gentle wind, and he thinks there will be a frost tomorrow.

  He thinks about Jane Frommond. He has seen her once since he helped warm the life back into her: a glimpse as they carried her from her cell to the cart on a litter like his own. She had given him a little sign, a loosely clenched fist, that he took to suggest that he must stay staunch. Just thinking of her makes him smile. Like a shooting star, he thinks, and he scans the breaks in the cloud for a sign of the comet, about which he had almost forgotten until Thomas’s poem.

  He is standing like this when he sees on the river a lamplit barge, just such as the Earl of Leicester owns, come swinging around the corner, being rowed down from up river and he watches it slow and nose itself against the riverbank, and he wishes he had one last cup of wine. In the dark he hears a soft order, and in a pool of lamplight he sees a gangplank lowered. Who in God’s name is this abroad on such a cold night and at a time when all good folks should be abed?

  It is, of all people, Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth of England, in a thick fur-lined cloak, and a silk-lined hood. She is alone, insofar as she ever is, unaccompanied by councillors or courtiers, but she walks within a loose square of Yeomen, as if some assassin might lurk behind the trunks of Dee’s wizened old apple trees. Watching her come, Dee recalls that she still has left over from her coronation a red rug that is a yard and a half wide and nearly three-quarters of a mile long. It must come in parts, he supposes, and she might leave one with him, for just such an occasion as this.

  He removes his hat and bows deeply. He has not, he suddenly smells, despite his best efforts, been entirely successful at removing the bilge scent from his lower limbs.

  “Bess,” he says. “Happy New Year.”

  He hears her growl.

  “Dee,” she says, “we will forgive you that breach of manners this one last time, in acknowledgment of your recent troubles, and what you have done for us over the years, but if you ever call us that again we will have you taken to the Tower and put in Little Ease for the remainder of your days.”

  “Quite right, Your Majesty,” Dee tells her. “It is exactly what I would do.”

  The Queen laughs.

  “John,” she says, “we are mightily pleased to find you in such good spirits after your ordeals and are come to give you a New Year’s gift.”

  She signals to a man lurking in the dark to step forward. He is a giant of a man and carries in his arms a small barrel bound in rope rather than the usual iron hoops, like a testament to the coopers’ craft, that is obviously heavy with content.

  “Some wine?” Dee hopes. “How kind.”

  “Not wine, John, but that which you seek for the production of Greek fire.”

  Oh. Christ. Greek fire. He had almost forgotten about that. It occurs to him that he has never had the chance to explain or apologize for the breach in the Tower’s curtain wall. Perhaps now is not the time.

  He thanks the Queen.

  “But that much is not going to get us very far,” he worries.

  “It is merely a sample,” the Queen repeats. “It has come from Master Jenkinson’s Turk, as a mere taste of what is to come, brought posthaste, as a token of his goodwill, for he is said to esteem our person highly.”

  She widens her eyes and smiles, and he remembers she can be arch, Her Majesty, sometimes.

  “Well, it is very generous of you to pass it on,” he tells her. “Thank you. And perhaps put it down over there?”

  The wooden walkway creaks under the giant’s tread as he places the barrel by the kitchen door. The Queen is looking at Dee in expectation.

  Oh God, he thinks. He has to give her something in return.

  “I also have something for you,” he says, “though—” But she looks at him with such expectation, such bright eyes, and then past him, into hi
s library, where he keeps his cross-staff, his astrolabe, the globes that Mercator gave him, and Frisius’s astronomical brass rings.

  “Really?” she presses.

  “Ummm,” he says. “Well, perhaps I do. Yes. I do.”

  He turns, and then turns again, so as not to turn his back on her, and then he retreats awkwardly into his house to find a lamp to light his way into his library. Where is it? That bloody useless scrying stone. He finds it used to weigh down paper—bills, he notes, including one for the stone itself—but there is nothing suitable in which to wrap it. He will have to give it to her as is.

  He does so.

  “A ruby?” she wonders, holding it up to one of the lamps held by her men.

  “Not exactly,” he admits. “A scrying stone. In which messages from the angels may be read.”

  “Oh,” she says. “Such as that possessed by Nostradamus?”

  “Exactly.”

  “How does it work?”

  Dee thinks back to his visions from the table in the room in Whitehall, the night she was so nearly killed.

  “I once thought I knew,” he says, “but I confess I am now uncertain.”

  “So it is a stone,” she supposes.

  “I will redouble my efforts to master its secrets,” he promises.

  She passes it to the nearest man with a lamp, and it is as if it never existed, let alone cost eight pounds, which Dee has, admittedly, yet to pay. The Queen now signals she is to be given some space in which to talk privately, and the Yeomen step back, and Her Majesty becomes, for his sake once more, a little more like the Bess of old.

  “But honestly,” she says, touching his arm, “thank you, John, for saving Mistress Frommond.”

  “It was the least I could do.” He smiles.

  “She is very dear to me, though she is a somewhat impatient stitch at needlework.”

  Dee can think of much more that he would like to add by way of praise for Jane Frommond, but knows the Queen well enough to keep it to himself. Instead he nods and asks after Jane’s health.

  “Very weak, and still she gives off that terrible smell,” the Queen admits. “Though she has been washed in soap, top to toe. Bathed in the bath my father had built in Whitehall! But still. I wonder if she will ever smell clean?”

  “It was very foul, that water.”

  He doesn’t really want to think about it.

  “Why do you think he kept you down there?” the Queen asks.

  “It is a question I have oftentimes asked myself,” he admits, which is true, about six hundred times a day when he was in the hold. “When we first found the barge, it struck us both that it was the best place for the gunmen to have lived while they waited to hear you were coming. They had a purpose and would not have aroused any suspicion among the local people. They might also escape easily, after the deed was done: down the river, hidden under a tarpaulin, say, with their guns. Then to a creek where they might climb out and disperse unobserved. Or even across the sea, perhaps, to Holland?”

  “But the people of Holland do love us,” the Queen tells him. She means herself.

  “Perhaps the actual Hollanders do,” Dee treads carefully, since he supposes that is no longer necessarily true since she declined to send them troops and money, “but there are others who value Your Majesty less highly: the Flemish, say, or the Walloons. They live in fear the Hollanders will drive Spain from the Low Countries and supress Catholicism just as much as we fear the reverse.”

  The Queen knows this.

  “But why leave a man at the barge?” she wonders.

  “That has likewise puzzled me,” Dee confesses. “Perhaps the rest fled the county that night, but then, when they learned they had failed to kill you, they sent a man back there as a placeman, to hold it against another attempt on your life?”

  The Queen shudders.

  “If only you had not killed him,” she says, “Master Topcliffe might have elicited the truth.”

  Dee says nothing. What happened that day on the barge is a matter between God, himself, and the dead man, he thinks, not Master Topcliffe, who is the Queen’s torturer. A horrible-looking man with a face like two sides of well-aged beef, though of course that is hardly his fault. What is his fault is that he indulges his desire to torture men—and women—on the rack, or with the gauntlet, or in Little Ease, where a decent man would rather kill himself.

  “And that being so,” she concludes, “it is ever more vital that you complete your work on the Greek fire, for that way we will at least be able to defend ourselves.”

  Their gazes fall on the barrel by the back door.

  “Need I return to the Tower?” Dee asks.

  The Queen looks around at his own house: wood, wattle, thatched in parts, filled with the largest collection of books in all England.

  “Somewhere a little out of the way,” she suggests, “with plenty of space to experiment. And with access to the river, or the sea, for its water. Should anything go awry.”

  He thinks Greenwich.

  The Queen suggests the Isle of Sheppey.

  “Any damage done will only improve the place.”

  Dee’s heart sinks. Sheppey in January?

  “This month?”

  “Tomorrow. I will send a barge.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Whitehall Palace,

  second week of January 1578

  It is past Christmas, past New Year’s, even past the Epiphany when Master Francis Walsingham takes his first tentative steps in public on a pin-bright day; joined by Robert Beale, he walks down to the Custom House at Wool Quay, there to take a barge upriver to Whitehall. It is a journey he has made many times, but not having made it in so long, he notices the changes not only in Robert Beale—who looks worn out, with dark circles under his eyes—but along the way, too.

  “I see they’ve finally pulled the tooth,” he says, indicating the missing house on the bridge above as the barge slides under an arch.

  They reach Whitehall as the tide turns and are taken by a gentleman usher to find Mistress Frommond not in one of the rooms in the Queen’s privy apartments as expected, but out in one of the gardens, sitting on a stool in a shaft of thin winter sunlight and wrapped in furs and blankets lent her by Her Majesty and by Lettice Knollys, who has begun, Frommond tells them, to treat her as one of her daughters.

  “Forgive me, masters,” she says, “I was desperate for fresher air.”

  Her breath is a gauzy veil, and through it she is very pale, almost ethereal, her eyes remain like pure liquid honey in the sunlight, and Walsingham recalls his first thoughts of waking up in a bed next to her. Perhaps it is her lips: they are always slightly chapped, and it puts him in mind to kiss her. The scar on her cheek is mending nicely, he thinks, though it will never be invisible.

  Greetings are exchanged and gratitude to God is offered up for her deliverance. She thanks them and asks after Dr. Dee, and Master Walsingham takes a certain amount of pleasure in telling her that Dee is restored to life and is about the Queen’s business on the Isle of Sheppey.

  “Oh,” she says, disappointed. “I should like to thank him in person, though perhaps not now until he returns.”

  Walsingham sends for two more stools, and a table, and when they are produced, they sit and from his bag Beale brings out the things he claims Mistress Frommond asked him to find in the barge. They carry about them the distinctive reek of the hold, and Walsingham is pleased they are sitting out in the open. He waits to find out why they meant so much to Frommond, but she shows little interest in them.

  “May I ask why you wanted them?” Beale must ask. “The limning I can understand, if he is someone to you, but a dirty glove?”

  “The glove belonged to Alice Rutherford,” she tells them.

  Walsingham sits back.

  A momento mori then? Well, why not?

  “I found it in the forest,” Frommond goes on. “Between the road where Alice was shot and the barge.”

&nbs
p; Walsingham sits forward and looks at it afresh.

  “How ever did it get there?” he wonders.

  Beale picks it up and examines it.

  “I do not know,” Frommond tells them, “but it was used as a privy clout.”

  She means an arse-wipe. Beale returns it to the tabletop.

  Walsingham looks at it for a long while. Then he picks it up and spreads it out. One of the fingers is folded in. The index finger.

  “Was that how you found it?” he asks.

  She nods.

  “May I ask you take your left-hand gloves off, both of you?” Walsingham asks Beale and Frommond.

  They do: and Walsingham watches as both grasp the fingers of their left glove and pull. Beale’s are looser, less fine than Frommond’s and they come off first and easily. Frommond’s are more delicate, like this glove of Alice Rutherford’s, though a shade of yellow, and she must ease hers off, finger by finger. When they are done, each glove lies flat and perfectly formed. Why then is the finger of Alice Rutherford’s glove completely inverted? It can only be deliberate.

  “A code?” he asks.

  There is a momentary pause for thought. Then Frommond makes a noise that is part sigh, part gasp.

  “Yes,” she says. “Look: five coaches. Five fingers.”

  He says nothing. Only looks at her intently. Frommond reaches for the red glove and holds it up by the tip of its thumb.

  “The Queen’s coach was the second.”

  Walsingham says nothing. Is this possible? Alice learns which coach the Queen is traveling in, pulls the corresponding finger of her glove in, then drops the glove out of the window for a man waiting at the side of the road on a good horse, who picks the glove up, its code and meaning preagreed and understood, and then rides to alert the men from the barge? They hurry up through the woods, and line up at the side of the road, and know exactly at which carriage to shoot. In the intervening time, one of them, whoever has the glove, is taken short. He has a shit against a tree, and leaves the glove there, in the wood, its purpose served, until later, Dee and Frommond discover it.