The Queen's Men

by Oliver Clements

  “Yes,” Beale admits, “well, fingers crossed.”

  He is Uriah the Hittite to Beale’s David, Dee supposes.

  “And what does he think his wife is up to while he is off about his travels?”

  “She is with her sister’s family in Ely.”

  “That is very modern.”

  * * *

  They spend the next two days clearing mice droppings and warming the stones of the house. They keep the windows shuttered against word of what they are doing leaking out.

  “What have you told Washington?” Dee asks.

  “He believes you to be an alchemist.”

  “I am. Well. I could be.”

  A woman is to bring them bread and ale, and to cook dinners that she is to leave in the buttery, and take away linen, but she is to come no farther. Beale will see to the chamber pots and to the privy.

  “Is that needed?” Dee wonders. “I thought we had come all the way out here because we can be sure that not a soul hereabouts has ever seen Her Majesty in the flesh.”

  “I do not believe we can be too careful,” Beale tells him.

  Dee and Frommond have hardly spoken of their confinement in the barge. They walk awkwardly around each other, allowing each twice as much space as each needs. Only once have their hands touched, accidentally. When Beale departs to ride across country to fetch Ness, they are left alone. In the evening they sit by the fire, as if they have been married for twenty years.

  “This is not as good as the barge,” Dee suggests.

  “No,” Frommond agrees, “it amazes me that people still choose to live like this, when they might starve in the dark, up to their ankles in a freezing soup of their own making.”

  “Don’t forget the rats.”

  He sees her hand go to her face, her fingers tracing the long scar on her cheek from the boatman’s knife. He wonders how long it will be before she becomes used to it. A month? A year? Ten years? He himself is already used to it: it gives her an air of mystery, he thinks.

  A while later he asks why she is helping Beale with this scheme. She cannot quite say.

  “I suppose I wanted to do it to thank you.”

  “Me?”

  “He said it was your idea.”

  “Bloody Robert.”

  “Then why are you doing it?” she asks.

  Dee thinks.

  “It is because,” he says, after a long while, “Bess—Her Majesty—is brilliant. She is beautiful and brave, and the cleverest woman alive, but there is something within her—a caution; a reservation, perhaps—that stops her being the best she could be.”

  “Could that arise, do you think,” Frommond proposes, “from the experience of having her father have her mother’s head chopped off when she—Bess—was three?”

  Dee laughs.

  “It may do,” he agrees. “If you grow up believing that anyone you love can be taken from you in a snap of the fingers, and that someone you love can, in the same snap of the fingers, reveal themselves as a monster, then perhaps the lives and loves of ordinary folk are like to be a closed book to you. But whysoever she is as she is, she is still as she is, and in this state of frozen watchfulness, she shakes her head and watches opportunity after opportunity pass her by. She needs to be forced to act.”

  Frommond nods.

  “To do what?”

  “To end this war. Against Spain and the France and the Vatican. To change the world order. To replace the malice of the few with the virtue of the many. We could do it. I proposed—I tried to propose—a scheme to the Queen, which I believe would soon have the crowned heads of Christendom beating their swords into plowshares. But she would not even listen.”

  “You sound… angry?”

  Dee admits he is.

  “But I could never be angry with Bess for long. I love her with all my heart, and would do anything for her, if she would just let me. Sometimes I believe she will. It is as if it is on the tip of her tongue to say yes, but then up pops Hatton, or Cecil, or Walsingham, and we are back to the same old ways of failing.”

  At moments like this, Dee becomes terrified by how much rides on Queen Elizabeth’s shoulders, on her life.

  “Without her,” he says, “we are all dead. All hope is dead.”

  Frommond nods.

  “Well,” she says, “we must do what we can.”

  * * *

  Ness Overbury arrives two days later, hooded against the heavy March rain and brought by a carriage hired in Bury St. Edmunds. Dee and Frommond are in the hall and hear the iron-hooped wheels on the stone of the courtyard.

  “Here we go.”

  For some reason Dee can feel his heart in his throat. It feels as he imagines it might to meet a long-lost twin. They stand in the doorway and watch Beale help Ness down from the carriage. Frommond sighs.

  “He’d best try to not touch her like that if she becomes Her Majesty.”

  Dee had always supposed Beale and Ness to be lovers, but now, presented with the fact, he tries to think what it means.

  “It cannot go well,” Frommond announces.

  They step back to let Ness across the threshold in blue velvets, her hood lined in sage green to set off her red hair. She looks at them, in silence, and then tips back her hood. The same pale skin; the same broad forehead; the same slightly beaky nose; and crucially, devastatingly, the same dark, amused eyes, with the same soul-searching intensity. All that sets her apart from the Queen is a dark beauty spot, just there, above her lip.

  My God, Dee thinks. My God. He catches Frommond’s gaze before he says a word, and Frommond need only raise her eyebrows.

  “Mistress Overbury,” he says.

  “Dr. Dee,” she says, “and Mistress Frommond.”

  But her voice! It is enriched with a strong, almost direct country burr that in all other circumstances would be delightful, but here, in someone intending to imitate the Queen, becomes a hurdle. And the way she moves! There is none of the birdlike restraint or tight control of the Queen, but a fluid, knowing occupation of space. She knows what her body is for, it seems, and the effect it can have, on men especially, and she tilts herself toward Dee, who is suddenly overwhelmed by a powerful desire to see her dance, at the very least.

  Beale looms into view. Water drips from his cloak. He looks exhausted.

  “Well?” he says. “What do you think?”

  Dee laughs. Assessing a woman is usually at least somewhat covert, but with Ness Overbury, it is like inspecting a horse. He almost asks to see her teeth.

  “May I see your teeth?” Frommond asks.

  Dee and Overbury both laugh. Her teeth are neat and square, and ivory colored. Her laugh is throaty and unrestrained.

  “That need not matter,” Frommond tells them. “Her Majesty tries to hide hers, so you need only follow her example. But please, Mistress Overbury, I beg you: never laugh like that.”

  “How should I?”

  Beale attempts an impression that only makes the other three laugh. Then Frommond tries but starts laughing genuinely.

  “I’m sorry,” she says.

  “Well,” Beale admits. “We have plenty of work to be getting on with.”

  And so they set to, trying to turn Ness into Bess, each taking a turn to show her what the Queen does in any given circumstance, and how she might do it, from the moment she opens her eyes in the morning, to closing them at night.

  “But why?” Ness keeps asking. “Why should she bother with this? Whose idea was that?”

  And it is, as often as not, a good question. Why has all this ceremony accrued around the person of the Queen? Each additional ritual is become like a barnacle on a ship’s hull, building up to slow Ness down, so that even though she wakes at dawn, she is not ready to face the day until two hours later, when she emerges encrusted with powder and so trammeled about in linens and silks that she can scarce breathe, and so utterly bored to tears that she would rather die than sit with Dee and discuss the things in which Her Majesty is passionately inter
ested: Euclidean geometry; the Georgics; the works of Seneca, the astrology of Ptolemy; Greek grammar; the lost empire of King Arthur; the necessity of a National Library; the appointment of, and a pension for, a royal astrologer, or rather, an Astrologer Royal.

  Ness’s mind is not as sharp as the Queen’s, nor her intent a quarter so serious, and she is unwilling to follow Dee on what even he must acknowledge are his more arcane and abstruse intellectual excursions, but she has a gift for languages, and within a week can have a conversation with Dee in Latin.

  “Quod homo amat virginem?”

  The man loves a girl?

  “Mirantur quod virginem sed iunior puellae est quam in homine per decem annos et a superiore genere in familiam.”

  The man admires the girl but the girl is younger than the man by ten years and is from a higher class of family.

  “Puella amat homines,” Ness says.

  “The girl loves the men?” Dee says.

  “Puella amat homo,” she corrects herself.

  Ah. The girl loves the man.

  “Ipsum bonum,” he says.

  She is a very good mimic and can intuit a meaning that Frommond cannot fully express by the mere alteration in the position of her hand, or her gait, and during the first week they make such progress, so that when sitting and doing needlework, say, Ness is able to modulate her body and her voice to look and sound exactly like the Queen, or as alike as Dee and Frommond and Beale can remember. She is still somewhat too vigorous in her movements when walking; she enjoys her food too much; she fills her clothes to a distracting fullness; and of course her skin lacks the pitting of smallpox scars, but given time there is hope that they might, just, if necessary, perfect the pretense.

  But it is not easy, especially for Ness, who is very easily bored, and is almost violently impatient of any constraint or inactivity.

  “Please, for the love of God, just let me be,” she yells sometime in the second week, and they must let her walk off into the orchards that surround the house, tailed at an indiscreet distance by Robert Beale, who brings her back an hour later, face flushed, with mud on both their knees, and then in the third week she cries out that if this is what being Queen is like, then she wants no part in it.

  Sometime in the fourth week she tells them that this is even more boring than being at home, and that Beale had promised her adventure. He had told her that he had once met a man who had been to Persia. Her eyes actually glistened with a yearning to be elsewhere.

  In the fifth week she refuses to get up, and Beale must coax her out of bed, though she will not dress in any finery, and Frommond, whose task it has been to wash her in the morning so that she becomes used to it, comes down the stairs thoughtfully.

  “Jane?”

  “Hmmm?”

  The first buds are on the trees in the orchard now, and the rain is letting up, and the grass is a vivid shade of green, and Dee thinks of home. He wonders how his mother will be getting on. He has left her in the charge of Cooke and asked Thomas Digges to pop his head around the door now and then, to see how she does, but he finds he misses her, and trying to teach a reluctant student, however beautiful she may be, the rudiments of algebra, which she does not care to learn, is not what he had in mind when he joined Master Beale in this enterprise.

  “Do you hear from Master Walsingham?” Dee asks Beale.

  “Occasionally.”

  “Has there been any word on the men who shot Alice Rutherford?”

  “Nothing,” Beale tells him. “Master Walsingham hopes the gunmen have gone home… back to Halle. After the shooting they probably took flight down the river to Leamouth, and from there, well, anywhere.”

  “Really?” Dee asks. That is quite a risky thing to hope, he thinks. He wonders if there is something Beale is not telling him.

  “In a sense their task was complete,” Beale claims. “They gave Her Majesty such a fright that she did not send the Hollanders any troops or money, so…”

  He trails off. It is wishful thinking, both know it. Beale wants the gunmen to have thought that, but if they were members of the Guild of the Black Madonna, they will have rather died than failed. Perhaps they are dead, then.

  “So the danger has passed?” Dee, probes, disingenuously.

  “It has never passed, John,” Beale admits.

  * * *

  Time passes slowly for some, but quickly for Dee, who is enjoying this leisured lease of pleasure spent with Frommond and Beale, but it is one morning in perhaps the sixth week, when Dee is taking Ness through the early books of Dante, and she is reading aloud while he paces the room that he sees—through the window—someone in the orchard. A man, furtive and prying.

  Before he can move, he hears Ness groaning, and he turns to see she is bilious.

  “Oh God,” he says. “Really?”

  Her answer is a hard-earned splatch of beige vomit on the floor between her feet.

  “Master Beale! Master Beale! Come in here, please!”

  Beale feigns ignorance, but Ness manages a laugh.

  “Come on, Robert, they are not fools.”

  In those early days the whole house had been shaking with it, Dee restrains himself from reminding them. It is probably the only thing that has been keeping her here.

  “When is it due?” he asks.

  “August,” she supposes.

  They are all four silent for a long while, each trying to discern what this new development means to their intrigue.

  “Nothing, perhaps?”

  “But what will Master Overbury have to say?”

  “I can tell him it is his.”

  “His?” Beale gasps.

  “Why not?”

  “Because the child is mine!”

  Ness looks at him as if he is a fool, a child.

  “But I am married to John.”

  Beale leaps to his feet and lurches out of the room, the house, as if himself seeking somewhere to vomit.

  “What’s got into him?” Ness wonders.

  He is gone all afternoon. Dee waits to talk to him about whoever it was he saw in the orchard. A glimpse of a man it was, or he supposes it a man, sliding behind a tree. Whoever it was did not want to be seen.

  Meanwhile Frommond teaches Ness to shoot a bow.

  Bloody hell, she is good at that.

  Dee stands watching, waiting for another glimpse of whoever it was he saw that morning in the orchard, but there is nothing all day. Was it Washington himself perhaps? Come to spy on his tenants?

  When Beale gets back it is nearly dark but Ness is still out there, alone, patiently shooting arrows with an almost deadly accuracy, waiting for him, to show him what she can do.

  By the fire within, Frommond asks Dee about John Overbury.

  “Twice her age,” Dee tells her. “And not overly agreeable, according to Beale, but he would say that, I dare say.”

  They hear Ness’s booming laugh. When the two come in they are arm in arm and smiling. God knows what sort of arrangement they have managed, but their amity lasts late into the night.

  “I do not know whether to be scandalized or not,” Frommond says.

  “It will certainly make for a livelier court,” Dee supposes. Then he wonders whether that comment is treason. Probably. “Though that is not to say I would wish a livelier court,” he makes clear. She laughs.

  He tells her about seeing the man in the orchard.

  “No apples to steal, are there?” she queries. “Perhaps he was some local, wondering what we are up to.”

  “Could be,” he agrees.

  She makes a noise to suggest a ghost has just walked down her spine. They draw the shutters tight and bar the door, but they do not see the man again, and Dee begins to suppose that it was just a curious local, perhaps, and the matter is dropped.

  “Dogs,” Frommond says in the middle of the night. “That is what is odd about this place: we have none.”

  The next morning they get one, from the brewster’s husband: a lurcher pup, almost bl
ue black, with a pale chest and a wonky eye, and Dee takes to it.

  “I shall call him Francis.”

  He sleeps at the foot of Dee’s mattress and grumbles in the night.

  The next day, a constable calls, come from Banbury. He’s a young man with very ruddy cheeks, with a green vest and a stout stick.

  “John Samson by name,” he tells them.

  He wants to know why they have taken up the manor house in place of Master Washington but have yet to attend Sunday Mass at Saint James’s? His voice is sonorous, rich with hay-and-muck scent, and he sways from side to side, craning to look over Beale’s shoulders into the hall.

  Beale tells him they have been ill but are now recovered, and he thanks Mary Mother of God it was nothing serious, and that seems to satisfy the constable, who probably feared they were Anabaptists, and he retreats.

  “But we are on notice,” Beale tells them. “Will you and Jane go to the service on Sunday at least?”

  Most mornings thereafter Ness is too sick to attend any lessons, and so Dee and Frommond walk in the orchard, dew on their boots, watching Francis chase bees and the spring unfold.

  “This has been nice,” he tells her.

  She agrees.

  “It cannot last much longer, though, surely?” she asks. “I feel I have taught her all I know.”

  “Robert has the lease on the hall until Saint John’s.”

  “But that’s more than a month!” she says.

  He cannot decide if that pleases her or not. On balance, it does.

  “Will you stay?” he wonders.

  “I promised Her Majesty only that I would be back for progress.”

  Progress is in August.

  “Will you go with her?”

  “That was my promise, so… yes. I suppose I must. Will you?”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, why not?”

  “I have never before. Also I am not much of a dancer, if I am honest. When I do, things around me tend to get broken.”

  He is thinking plates and cups and benches and windows.

  She laughs.

  “I should like to see that,” she says.

  Dee is also thinking that he likes to go to Wales in the summer, to tramp through the valleys in the footsteps of King Arthur, to sleep by streams under the stars, rather than into the formal straits of the court in progress.