The Queen's Men

by Oliver Clements

  My God, he thinks, Ness.

  He has to get her away, away from everything, away where she cannot be found.

  He starts running, back the way he has come.

  * * *

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Mortlake, west of London,

  second week of August 1578

  Dee is back from Wales—unsuccessful, sunburned, wiry, and as broke as ever—standing at his gate, studying the large pile of black stone that recently has been dumped against his wall, when he feels a hand like a bear’s paw descend upon his shoulder, and a rough voice in his ear.

  “All right, Dr. Dee?”

  There is a strong smell of raw onions.

  “Bob!” Dee cries.

  “Bill, if you don’t mind, Doctor. Bob is in your orchard, in the event you’ve a mind to take to the river. What a nice little dog. Have a name, does he?”

  “Francis. He’s a lurcher.”

  Bill bends to stroke Francis and tell him what a good boy he is and so on, although Francis is more eager to cock his leg on the samples that Bill and Bob have brought back for having found them valueless.

  “So how much is it this time, Bill?”

  “It has mounted up in your absence, Doctor, I am afraid to say. There is the original outstanding sum of two pounds, six shillings, and eightpence owed to Master Inglestone, booksellers of Gutherons Lane, and then there is three pounds round owed to Master Truefitt, tailor, of Lombard Street, for a coat of green velvet, and also I regret to say there is the sum of eight pounds owed to Mr. Bowes, goldsmith, of Cheapside, for a showstone, whatever that may be.”

  “But that is more than most men earn in a year!”

  “Yes,” Bill agrees. “Quite some shopping spree that one, eh, Doctor?”

  “I have some gold within the house.”

  “It isn’t the stuff that turns green two days later, is it?”

  “Hmmm. Does it do that? Well, well. Obviously I have not quite perfected the process. And the samples you took, you had no joy with them?”

  “None at all, Doctor, as you see. And it turns out there is a great deal of this stuff on the market right now, so unless you have some real gold about your person, Dr. Dee, then I am regretfully going to have to take you to Ludgate.”

  “In manacles? Really? Surely there is no need for that.”

  “I’m sorry, Doctor, but it is as Bob would say: trick me once, shame on you; trick me twice, shame on me.”

  “Bob is a very wise man, obviously, but listen, Bill, may I at least put my bag down, kiss my mother, and introduce Francis to Master Cooke, who will be looking after him while I am at your pleasure?”

  “I don’t see why not, Dr. Dee, since you are a gentleman of your word. Only I must insist on the manacles.”

  “I’ll just—”

  “No, Doctor.”

  “But—”

  “It is these or I can’t let you go in, sad to say, Doctor.”

  Dee holds out his hands, watched by Francis, with his head cocked in puzzlement.

  “It is a bit strange, Francis, isn’t it? But there we are.”

  Bill applies the manacles and locks each one.

  “My God, Bill, are these silver?”

  “They are, Doctor. Clever of you to notice, and nothing but the best for you. We took them as a lien from an Edinburgh gentleman who was a familiar of the Queen of Scots, so there is a good chance these could have been worn by herself, as part of her costume no doubt, for a masque or some such.”

  Bill shows him the key. It is decorated with a thistle.

  “Well. Goodness, Bill. What an honor. Now, if you’ll excuse me? Come on, Francis, let us go and meet Johanna Dee, whom I am honored to call Mother, and Roger Cooke, whom I am honored to call Roger Cooke, and who, unless something turns up in the next moment or two, will be looking after you until I can raise thirteen pounds, six shillings, and eightpence. Would you do the honors, Bill?”

  Bill knocks on the gate.

  A moment later Cooke’s voice floats over.

  “Who is it?”

  “It is me, Roger, John.”

  “Why, Dr. Dee, you have acquired the knock of a bailiff!”

  The gate is unlocked. Cooke sees Bill.

  “Oh.”

  “Not too long now, Doctor, if you’ve a mind, for we must get you to Ludgate before curfew.”

  Dee brings Francis in and closes the gate on Bill, who remains standing outside, implacable.

  “Quick, Roger, we do not have much time. Fetch the jar of salis amoniaci and the spirit of niter. We are in need of aqua regia, fast.”

  They have made aqua regia fairly often in the past, so called because it eats through noble metals, including gold and silver, and they make some now, creating the distinctive red liquid in the last of their crucibles and a humble glazed jug.

  “How have you been, John?” his mother asks from the kitchen while they work. “You look tired.”

  When it is ready, Cooke spoons the aqua regia onto the chain link of the manacles. The fumes are very repellent and Dee turns his face from them.

  “Keep going.”

  It is not a quick process, but they have made a strong solution.

  Bill bangs on the gate.

  “Come on, Doctor! Time is fleeting!”

  “Shall I get that?” his mother wonders.

  “No, Mother! Leave it!”

  The banging continues.

  “He is very insistent,” Dee’s mother says.

  “Not yet, Mother!”

  He pulls his wrists apart and Cooke spools more acid in the chain.

  “It is not working quite as fast as I hoped. I think we may need an ax.”

  There is one with which they chop wood. Does he trust Cooke? He would have to place his hands on the block and let him swing at the gap. More hammering on the gate.

  “Doctor!”

  “Shall I let him—”

  “No!”

  Dee looks at Cooke. Well, he will have to trust him. Just then, with one last effort, the chain snaps.

  “Ha!”

  Dee is up the stairs and out on to the window before his mother can even open her mouth to ask if she should let Bill in. He scuttles along the ridge of the roof and leaps to catch the bough of Thomas Digges’s tree without so much as a pause to look at the river or consider the possibility of building an observatory, and he smacks his hands on the bough of the tree and is duly deposited neatly into the presence not of Thomas Digges happily digging for onions, but of Bob and his dog, and another man with a big stick with a gnarled root end.

  “You broke the queen’s bracelets!” Bob shouts.

  “I did not break them: I dissolved them. There is a—”

  The gnarled root end makes sharp contact with his head, and Dee feels the world slide and tip away from him.

  * * *

  He wakes up to a kind of hell: Ludgate prison for London’s debtors, at night; in the light of a single lamp burning an unhealthy flame, he sees a seething mass of men and women and children, each trying to find space to lie among piles of filthy straw that soak up the broad slough of ordure snaking its way through the middle of the low-roofed, overcrowded room. Rats and insects devour the quick and the dead alike, and the stink of corruption is thick and infernal.

  The first thing Dee notices is his manacles are much tighter, and much heavier, being made, he presumes, of iron or steel, and he bitterly regrets his foolishness with the Queen of Scots’ bracelets. His head still rings from the blow from the bailiff’s stick, though, so he believes himself well punished. A man, who might be dead, lies with his head on Dee’s ankle. He hauls himself free and brings his knees to his chest and tries to sleep till dawn. He knows all the tricks to parceling time.

  Is this worse than the hold of the barge? He has somewhere dry to sit, he supposes, but he does not have Frommond for company, and thinking of her gives him a kind of strength. Where will she be now? Back in Whitehall, he supposes, subjecting the Queen’s court to
her cool gaze. Or, no, preparing to go on progress.

  He raises his head.

  Christ, he thinks. I need to go to her now. He tries to stand, to make his way to the lamp by the cell door. He treads on people and on things he does not wish to think about, and he is insulted and lashed at by vengeful prisoners, and at the door he uses his manacles to hammer on the planks and shout for a guard and everybody in the vicinity tells him to shut his mouth and stop his hammering or it will be the worst for all of them because the guards will come and when they come they will lay about anyone and everyone they can reach with their clubs, but Dee will not stop shouting that he is John Dee and that he needs to see Francis Walsingham.

  And just as predicted the guards do come and they lay about anyone and everyone they can reach with their clubs, including Dee, and then they slam the door again, and Dee is at it again, and this time the reaction is even swifter, and eventually Dee sees that he is bringing nothing but more misery on all those about him, and so he slumps to the floor, his back to the door, battered and bruised and bloody, but despite it all he does not despair, because this will pass. This must pass. It must.

  * * *

  And it does, perhaps.

  Sometime later—it could be dawn, but how can he know?—he is woken by rough hands pulling at his collar.

  “Get the fuck out the way,” someone spits at him.

  But he can’t. He is pinned against the door by the press of inmates and can scarcely move a muscle. In the uncertain light he is face-to-face with a bald man whose nose is so broken it has migrated halfway to his ear. The back of Dee’s head is pressed to the door, and he can feel the boss of each nail pressing into his back. Then the door starts to open and he is forced into an even closer embrace with the man with the nose who turns out to be a woman who cackles at him and accuses him of being a dirty bastard. A mood of frenetic jollity seems to grip the crowd about him like a madness, a dance of death, and he can make neither head nor tail of it, until the door is finally open enough to allow the throng to spill out and he is carried helpless as a nutshell in a stream out of the room, along the corridor and up the steps to another room that is at least graced by natural light coming from two broad windows set high in the wall, and it is to these windows that everybody rushes as if to escape. But the windows are barred and through them he can see the legs and feet of passersby, and then he sees where he is: the begging room of the gaol.

  The clamor starts, with everybody pressed to the window shouting at those going by.

  “Please, mistress, I beg of you, a penny!”

  “Master—a penny for charity’s sake!”

  Dee lingers at the back of the room.

  “Shy beggars never prosper,” a guard tells him, and Dee supposes that is true, but like most men not born to such situations, yet finding themselves in them, he believes something will happen to take him from all this.

  But it doesn’t, all that day, while he stands there waiting for he knows not what, and then come evening, his stomach in knots from hunger, it is time to be locked up again, forced into that foul cellar.

  The night passes with Dee standing upright. At one point he dozes, but he is ready at dawn to be among the first to fight for a place at the begging window, hands shoved through the grilles, palms open for anything and everything, which includes spit, and worse, but no coins, or bread, and every inch of space at the window is fought for, a constant wrestle, all day, and for what?

  Nothing.

  He believes he will see someone he knows pass by. He believes in his heart that he will see Frommond. He continues to believe this as he is elbowed and pushed aside and he endures a second day without food and there is only a trough of water brought in buckets from the Fleet, already tainted by the city’s waste, and now made turbid and foul by the hands and faces of others who’ve dipped and splashed in it already. The next day he is so desperate he is no longer shy and he makes off with a head of broccoli that so nearly ended up in a small, grubby child’s hands, and he keeps it for himself and tears at it with lupine wrenches and he curses anyone who approaches and he knows he has become as bad as any in here but he does not care, because he has just realized that it is August and that the Queen is already gone on progress around the country, and with her: Frommond.

  Christ, he thinks. I must get out or I will die in here.

  For all his talents, all his knowledge, Dee has nothing that will allow him to turn himself into a cat, say, and slide between the bars and be away. That is what they might expect of a conjurer, a companion of hellhounds, a summoner-up of wicked and damned spirits. What did Dudley tell him that time on the boat? That common people feared him not because he made that giant golden beetle fly when he was at Trinity, but because it was known that in the weeks after he was accused of witchcraft in 1555 the children of one of the men who accused him of it fell ill, and one of them died. He has always been mortified by that, but perhaps now is the time to pray upon it.

  It is easy enough. Tell a guard that he—Dee—has laid a curse on the life and family of the man who allows him to die. Remind him who he is first, of course. Then, when he has purchase on the guard’s ear, offer to read his chart. Remind him he once read the Queen’s chart. Offer the same to any guard interested in what their future holds. They will not pay him in money, but privileges, and so the futures he predicts had best be good.

  The guards in Ludgate are dispiritingly mundane, with few ambitions beyond being made rich through the work of others and to sleep with other men’s wives. It is easy enough, but it is charlatans’ work, for none of the guards can be sure of the year they were born, let alone the hour of that largely unhappy event.

  Still though. The first day he earns bread, and ale, and a piece of cheese. The second day, as word of his services spreads among the guarding community, he is moved to a room upstairs, above sewer level, and allotted a part share of a still somewhat verminous mattress he must share with a pepperer with a shop of Bucklersbury, who all through that first night whispers sweetly in Dee’s ear, though that is as far as he goes. The third day: pen and paper, and some dried ink that he can resuscitate with spit. But it is only on the fourth day that he achieves what he set out to gain: the freedom of the leads.

  “Come on then, Doctor, out you go.”

  It is a thick summer’s morning when he steps out onto the roof, hemmed in only by the low gray wall of the battlements, and he has his note—promising untold wealth if whomsoever finds it can alert Her Majesty that her servant Dr. John Dee is unfairly taken up and put in Ludgate—already wrapped around a decent-sized onion, ready to be launched onto Fleet Street should he see someone he knows, or, even, anyone mildly receptive.

  It is not a water-fast plan, but it will have to do for now.

  He is not the only one granted license to stand on the roof, of course: there are a couple of women, who look as if they have been here awhile, and a family, eating cheese. In the shady corner, though, is a group of men, young, like guildsmen, perhaps, squatting together, each of them with his back to the wall, and alert, and when they see him, they look up. Often when you meet a group of people you are at a loss as to whom to greet first, but with this group there is no choice. He is a young man in a bloodred cap, with a badge—one of those pilgrims’ tokens—in the brim. He has a thin reddish beard and a level, determined look in his challenging gaze.

  It is Jan Saelminck.

  * * *

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Seething Lane, City of London,

  second week of August 1578

  Francis Walsingham has not slept well since Saint John’s and once again he wakes at dawn to the sounds of the water carriers greeting the dong carriers as they pass one another on the street outside his window. He lies for a while, trying to distract himself from thoughts of Sir Christopher Hatton’s men combing the country in search of Robert Beale, working in a steadily widening circle from the village in which Ness lives—lived?—with John Overbury, whom Henry Sydney has wri
tten to say has been wounded in Ireland, perhaps by his own men, and is not thought likely to survive. If that last bit is true, Walsingham muses, then it is the only aspect of this whole intrigue that has gone according to plan.

  If Hatton finds her, what will he do with her? This is the question that has haunted him over the last month and a half. What would he do if he were in Hatton’s place? The obvious thing would be to use her to bring Beale down, and with Beale Walsingham and Cecil, too. But a moment’s thought and he can see that if Hatton could turn Ness to his own purposes, then she might become his weapon. And a moment’s thought further, and Hatton could see that the best thing to do would be to do both things: destroy Beale, Walsingham, and Cecil, in that order, and then insinuate a biddable Ness onto the throne of England. Then: marry her.

  So Walsingham has his own men combing the counties also looking for Beale and Ness, and others pursuing Hatton’s men as well. He is almost certain that Hatton has men pursuing his men, too. It is a twisted circus, with the nation’s intelligencers tailing one another around the country, and meanwhile, what of the men who are really trying to kill the Queen? What are the men of the Guild of the Black Madonna up to? Merely because Saelminck cannot be found does not mean he has given up and slipped back over the Narrow Sea to Halle, does it? He might have gone back to Halle, along with all the other Dutch and Flemish builders going home for winter, but he—and they, the guildsmen—might well have come back with the returning tide of refugees who have fled Holland and come to England after the disaster of the Battle at Gembloux, when, as predicted, the Duke of Parma’s cavalry smashed William of Orange’s mishmash of Protestant volunteers. Could Saelminck and his guildsmen have come back with them? Could they be calmly working away on some building project right now, all just waiting their chance to step away from their tent, or hovel, or barge, to collect their guns, and shoot Her Majesty down? To root her out with fire?