The Queen's Men

by Oliver Clements

  “What about all my equipment? Where is that?”

  “Safely stowed below. Along with all your tubes and barrels and bellows and so on, all brought up from Sheppey. All under lock and key. All under the watchful eye of the Constable and his Yeomen.”

  Gregory peers back out of the window, up at the sky, as if trying to guess the time.

  “Anyway,” he says. “Finish up. Tide’s turned, and Walsingham will be here soon. You will want to see this.”

  They wend their way up the Lanthorn Tower to join the guards on the battlements of the now-repaired southern wall, overlooking the moat and the quay where Dee set fire to the crane. Across the moat, on the quay, are lined up perhaps a hundred Yeomen, turned out with arquebuses and halberds, standing to attention in neat blocks. They face the ship that is tied there, and running through them is some of that famous red carpet, left over from Her Majesty’s coronation.

  “What the…?”

  The ship tied to the quay is an ordinary-looking merchantman, though it is tidier and cleaner than any Dee has ever seen, ever, and nor is it stacked high with cages of pigs, goats, chickens and so on, or peopled with lounging toothless sailors. Instead there are carpets on the deck, and what must be soldiers, a dozen of them perhaps, helmeted, and in long robes, carrying polearms.

  “Is Her Majesty coming?” he asks.

  Gregory smirks.

  “Wait and see,” he says, pointing upstream. Dee shields his eyes against the setting sun. Under the bridge, through one of the middle arches where water throngs the fastest, comes a barge. Sleek, black, beflagged, with eight oars either side.

  “Cecil’s?”

  Gregory nods. The barge steers toward the quay below them and bumps gently against the pillars. Bargemen leap out and tie her up. There is a shout on board the merchantman, and a stir: her soldiers take positions, and the cook douses the fire with a couple of buckets of water. Someone hurries to the captain’s cabin below the foredeck. A moment later a party of men in colorful robes emerge like peach-colored peacocks. On Cecil’s barge, the gangplank is laid out, covered in yet more red carpet, and on it, in a boat cloak, a woman whom Dee would swear is the Queen, save she comes with no fanfare, just a very small crowd of courtiers, including Sir William Cecil and Francis Walsingham.

  “Christ,” Dee says, “is that… Ness?”

  Gregory says nothing. Dee watches in silence as Ness hesitates, turns to look about the place, as if for someone—Robert Beale perhaps, whom once she loved—fails to find what she is looking for, and then turns to stare at the ship on the quay ahead. She gathers herself. Cecil comes forward to stand alongside her—like a noble taking his daughter to meet the man he has arranged she should marry—and together they walk to the ship’s side. The men in flowing robes have spilled out onto the quay, and as she comes they do not just bow, they lie on the ground. It is the same with the soldiers.

  There is a comical moment, when Ness and Cecil stand there, not knowing what to do. Then one of the men shuffles forward to kiss her feet, and Dee can imagine what the real Ness might say to that. But he cannot gauge from the tilt of her head, or the angle of her shoulders what she is feeling now.

  “Puellam in nave questus est?”

  Is the girl getting on the boat?

  Gregory says nothing. He probably does understand Latin, but instead he lets out a long sigh. Below them the men have left a clear path to the gangplank that leads up onto the deck of the ship. Ness steps out along it.

  “Why?” Dee asks.

  Gregory still says nothing, but he grips Dee’s arm, and points at the bridge, from under which comes another barge.

  “There,” he says.

  Coming around the shadowed headland of Rotherhithe, her oars working thunderously against the turning tide, is another barge, smaller than Cecil’s but still quite something. Dee sees the familiar flags streaming from the bow.

  “Hatton.”

  “Hatton.”

  Two more barges follow behind, both stuffed with soldiers.

  “She just has to be aboard,” Gregory says. “In the cabin would be best. But aboard is good enough. For her, I mean.”

  They watch as Ness places one foot on the gangplank.

  “Go on,” Gregory whispers.

  “But why?” Dee asks.

  “Some verse,” Gregory tells him. “The Ottoman wants the Queen in return for the naft. Cecil can’t give him that, can he? So your Ness is the next best thing. She wants to go, Beale says.”

  “She wants to?”

  “Nothing for her here, now, is there? Family all dead and a death sentence hanging over you? Not what anyone wants, is it?”

  Dee supposes not.

  “Besides, she’ll live in a palace, won’t she? A harem. Not so bad. Better than Suffolk.”

  “There is that,” Dee mumbles, but bloody hell.

  “Don’t be so soft, Dee. These sorts give their daughters away to men they’ve never met, just for a couple of hundred acres of marshy sod.”

  Ness hesitates at the top of the gangplank. She stumbles very slightly and then turns to survey the land of her birth for perhaps the very last time, and there is something in her stance that is just as regal and fine as Her Majesty would manage. She sees Dr. Dee standing at the battlements. Their gazes lock, and they look at each other for a long time. What is she thinking? Dee wonders. She reminds him of one of the stories from Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, though he cannot recall which, and it seems as if the barge has become a bier, and that Mistress Overbury is sacrificing herself for love of her fellows.

  “Christ, Dee, look at you!” Gregory laughs. “She’s not stepping onto the scaffold! She’s not about to have her head lopped off, and here you are all somber. Ten pounds says she’s back in our lives in three years with some stories to tell.”

  Dee shakes his head, because it does not feel that way. She is a good woman, he thinks, ill done by, and behaving with grace and courage. It is all you can ever hope for.

  He raises his hand in farewell. She nods. Then removes the hood of her cloak to let the lamplight fall upon her red hair and catch the jewels in her diadem, and she steps aboard the ship.

  Gregory breathes out a great sigh of relief.

  “There,” he says. It is done.

  * * *

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Tower of London,

  same day, last week of August 1578

  Sir Christopher Hatton’s barge has nowhere to tie up, and so must use Saint Katharine’s dock, and by the time he is out and hurrying to discover just what is going on, and perhaps to try to arrest Ness Overbury, she is on a foreign ship, and he has no immediate jurisdiction.

  “I know what you are about, Walsingham!” he shouts. “Get her off! Her Majesty demands it!”

  But Cecil, next to him, makes that soft noise of regret and tells him that the Dragoman Beg comes as an ambassador from the Sublime Porte, and that diplomatic niceties forbid a boarding party.

  “This ship is like the diplomatic bag,” he tells Hatton. “And Beg is in the bag, don’t you see?”

  He laughs, a soft powdery laugh, and Hatton can only grind his heel in the grit.

  “Christ, Walsingham,” he says. “I know what you have done. What risks you’ve taken; the lies you’ve told; the deceits you have practiced.”

  Walsingham can only laugh at him.

  “You only know the half of it, Hatton!”

  “You will give me my title, Master Walsingham. You will address me as Sir Christopher, Master Walsingham!”

  Cecil, standing by in fog-gray linen, steps forward to usher Hatton away, back to his barge, to head downstream, so that he may be with Her Majesty in Greenwich, putting the finishing touches to the celebrations planned for her birthday.

  “What have we got planned, Sir Christopher?” Walsingham overhears him asking.

  Walsingham steps back into the shadows and watches for a moment as the ship’s hold hatches are opened, and the porters and sailors set about g
etting the naft onshore. He can feel its curious smell tingling in his nostrils. He remains until the final barrel of naft is unloaded, and bales of English cloth, which the Ottomans will probably not want, are loaded aboard in their place, more as ballast than anything else. When it is done, and the holds are battened down, and the ropes are about to be cast off, Mustafa Beg comes to the gunwale.

  “Good-bye, Lord Walsingham! Good-bye, England!”

  He is a funny little man, Dragoman Beg, and Walsingham has enjoyed his enthusiastic company.

  “You will take care of her, won’t you?” he asks.

  What will he say if Beg says no? But Beg is shocked at the thought he might not. Beg smiles.

  “She will be in a heaven on earth!” He laughs. “Much better than this place! No offense.”

  None taken, Walsingham thinks.

  The ropes are cast off, and the ship shivers in the running river as it is dragged out into the current by two boatloads of oarsmen, and in the very last of the late-evening sun, Ness appears on deck much swathed in a new, even finer cloak, of carmine red, to give a parting wave to England, and to her past life. Walsingham raises his hand to her.

  She does not even look at him.

  * * *

  He drinks wine that night, two bottles of it, and sleeps as he has not for months. The next morning he feels groggy, as is to be expected, but after a stout breakfast of pork and eggs and a pint of small beer, he attacks the pile of messages with vim, surprised to find nothing very much to disturb him save one from Cecil to tell him the Queen still dreams of fire.

  He walks to the Tower through late-summer sun, to find that John Dee has already started work processing the naft, and the man himself sitting on a bench with his back to the armory, sunning his face next to the open doors of the vault. There is a lurcher puppy by his feet and Dee occasionally calls out to his man Roger Cooke who is doing all the work, reminding him how to re-create the Greek fire recipe they perfected on the Isle of Sheppey: “Hotter!” “Stir it for as long as it takes to say the Lord’s Prayer twice!” “Don’t breathe it in!” Cooke is tending a fire under a large iron tripod, from which hangs a curious-shaped glass beaker that spits steam from a long spout, and he is surrounded by the ingredients he needs, including tallow, honey, olive oil, dragon’s blood (“for color”), and a breached barrel of the naft, which, Walsingham supposes, explains the smell, and why the guards on the battlements have taken cover against the possibility of another blast.

  Dee has lost weight, of course, and has a prison pallor, but the lurcher is the color of smoke at night, and will be very handsome.

  “What is his name?”

  Dee smiles and tells him. Walsingham just sighs. It is a compliment, really.

  “How does it progress?”

  Dee raises his hands to indicate, as far as Walsingham can tell, sorrow and resignation.

  “Gregory told me you had been having reservations,” Walsingham says.

  “Mmm.”

  Next to Dee, another man—young, scholarly—is rubbing fat into various pieces of equipment, including a set of bellows as big as a bull, an equally large barrel, much hooped-about with iron, and two thirty-foot-long snakes of stitched leather each end capped with a brass flange. Dee is reading from a weighty book the title of which he is not keen for Walsingham to learn.

  “And what about you, Master Walsingham? Any joy?”

  He means with Saelminck. Walsingham sighs.

  “None. He seems to have vanished, or blended back in. I have never known anything like it.”

  “Have you spoken to Hatton?”

  “Not about Saelminck. Not since I got his note to suggest that you had been doing my job for me, and that I should have known he was there all along. And so on and so on. Christ, Dee, I hate that man. I wish him nothing but ill.”

  “I suppose you could always say you did have Saelminck in custody, couldn’t you? But there is something else: about Hatton, and Saelminck. You remember Cornelius de Lannoy? The little Dutch fraudster for whom Saelminck worked? I believe he is now working for Hatton.”

  Walsingham sits on the bench next to Dee.

  “As an alchemist?”

  Dee nods.

  “Then he might know where Saelminck is?”

  “He might, though he is gone back to Flanders, to buy glass.”

  Walsingham laughs. He remembers that ruse. Still, he thinks, he will order a search of Hatton’s property while the man is in Greenwich with the Queen.

  “De Lannoy calls himself de Alneto now,” Dee goes on, “though he has kept the Cornelius.”

  “De Alneto is his real name. De Lannoy was his alchemical name. If that is a thing?”

  Dee allows it might be.

  “So what is he doing for Hatton?”

  Dee hesitates before answering: “Something alchemical.”

  Dee is up to something, Walsingham grasps, but what? Despite his other obligations, Walsingham is intrigued and decides to wait him out. Dee is no good at this and gives in after barely five breaths.

  “You remember the ore that Frobisher brought back from the New World?”

  Walsingham laughs again. That! He has not thought about it since it was unloaded with such fanfare, only to defy every effort, including Dee’s, to refine so much as an ounce of gold from it.

  “He claims he can derive gold from it?”

  “He claims.”

  Walsingham studies the ground between his feet for a moment. Now it is Dee’s turn to be silent next to him.

  “Will he come back to England, do you suppose?” Walsingham wonders.

  “Only if he can find more ore.”

  “Which we have. We can offer him as much as he likes: there are nearly two hundred tons of it.”

  Dee nods.

  “But Hatton will smell a rat if you offer it to him,” Dee goes on. “It will be better coming from me.”

  Walsingham smiles. So that is what he is up to! Negotiating his slice. Well, why not? He will only spend it on books. But it is a surprise. John Dee involving himself in grubby commerce!

  “You are certain he will find no gold?” he asks.

  “The ore has no value save that which a fool is willing to pay.”

  “So you are suggesting we assist de Alneto to defraud Hatton, and then arrest him?”

  Dee shrugs.

  “You could put it like that.”

  “My God, Dee,” he says, “you have made me smile. How much is Hatton willing to pay, do you think?”

  “How much are you willing to take?” Dee counters.

  Walsingham remembers de Alneto/Lannoy went very high with his promise to Cecil and the Queen. That is what took them in.

  “I will not take less than ten pounds a ton,” he decides. That is two thousand pounds from Hatton. “Anything that you can agree above that, we split, agreed? It will be your fee for all this.”

  He indicates Roger Cooke sweating in the inner ward. Dee accepts this with a limited nod of agreement. Christ, he is ungrateful.

  “Well, I will leave you to it, Dee,” he says. “I’m to meet Cecil and Hatton to discuss final arrangements for Her Majesty’s procession. I think they’ll have to change in the light of Saelminck’s—what?—escape?”

  Dee nods. And Walsingham is just moving off when Dee calls out, as if something has just occurred to him.

  “Oh, Master Walsingham?” he asks. “Will I get an invitation? To Her Majesty’s birthday?”

  Walsingham is surprised.

  “Do you want one? I did not have you down as a dancer?”

  Dee pulls a face.

  “I would say I was a pretty good dancer.”

  “Well, well,” Walsingham says. “I tell you what, Dee: If you get all this naft turned into Greek fire before her birthday, then I will make sure you are on the list, how does that sound?”

  Dee cocks an eyebrow.

  “Will Mistress Frommond be there?”

  “Ahh.” He chuckles. “So that’s it. We’ll see.”


  * * *

  “He wants fireworks,” Cecil tells Walsingham when he finds him at his house on the Strand. “They are like comets, only man-made, and multicolored, from Cathay. Guaranteed to burn down the city.”

  “We can forget about them,” Walsingham says with some glee. “Remind the Queen that she has been dreaming of fire.”

  Cecil twinkles with pleasure at that idea.

  “And he wants a procession from the Tower through the city to Saint Paul’s, and then on to Westminster. He is suggesting the usual players’ stages on the way, and he has gone for an Arthurian theme, in respect of Her Majesty’s heritage.”

  “Let me guess: Hatton as Lancelot? White chargers and so on?”

  “It certainly plays to his strengths.”

  “Well, anyway, we cannot have a procession through the city. Not with Saelminck’s whereabouts unknown. It will advertise her route more certainly than any red glove. Or maybe we can, and not have her ride down them?”

  “Try stopping Elizabeth Tudor riding down a street of adoring commons.”

  Hmmm.

  “The best we can manage is a procession along the river,” Walsingham suggests.

  Cecil’s eyes widen in alarm.

  “You cannot have forgotten last time?”

  “It was not last time,” Walsingham reminds him. “Her Majesty has been up and down the river a hundred times since. Even past Limehouse.”

  Cecil thinks.

  “I suppose she would be less of a target in a barge than were she in a carriage, or on a horse, dressed as Guinevere. Hatton will be furious but I suppose he might have his mummers and their stages moved to line the river? All along the quays and so on. They might still play for Her Majesty as she passes.”

  It is a pleasure to unhorse Hatton’s plans. He is, as predicted, furious.

  “I cannot expect a man of your status to know the meaning of the word majesty,” he shouts at Walsingham, “but for the future be certain to remember that majesty does not cower!”

  “It is not cowering not to wish to dress up as Guinevere, Sir Christopher.”

  “I will consult Her Majesty!” Hatton shouts. “I will tell her that this change of plan is your idea, and that it is malicious, capricious, and cowardly and the result of your own failures to capture the men who shot at her carriage, nearly a year ago to this day! It is a tribute to your rank incompetence.”