He runs up the incline. A glancing blow on his shoulder. Shrugged-off hands. A fist connects. Good. Isobel is still mounted, her horse terrified, ten paces away, but a man has the hem of her skirt, and another her boot.
She lashes both with her whip.
From behind, Fellowes pulls one man and spins him away. He holds up an arm, imagining she will slide off her saddle and under it as if it were a wing.
She does, and they are, for an instant, face-to-face and he might kiss her on any other occasion, but—
Something is wrong.
A great heat swarms in his chest. As if he is being crushed. He can’t breathe. Can’t move. He opens his mouth to bellow, to push Mistress Cochet away, for she is very close now and one arm is around him, and the other holds a—
A knife.
He clamps a hand over his breast. Blood. He looks at her face. Pure sorrow. Pity. Regret.
“Do not struggle,” she says. “Embrace it as you would embrace me.”
A blue blade. A stiletto. Hidden where? He reels. Falls. Darkness closing, life narrowing.
Life. Gone.
CHAPTER THREE
Mortlake, England, August 25, 1572
Dr. John Dee cannot sleep, but when he does, he dreams of angels, and he wakes with the word biathanatos on his lips.
“How’s that?” his mother asks, cupping a hand to her ear.
“Violent death,” he tells her, speaking loudly.
“That’s not what you want,” she says. “Is it? Not when you’ve got your interview to come?”
“No,” her son agrees.
He breaks his bread and dips it in his ale, then chews slowly, thinking about this most recent dream of his. He has become sure, of late, that they are encrypted communications from elsewhere. Angels? Men smile when he suggests this, but Christians are required to credit far more outlandish beliefs, and he is certain that had he the grammar of the communications, or their key, he might prove to be right.
The river, through the open door, is bad this morning, but the tide is on the turn, and soon its foul cargo will slip back downstream to London, where it belongs. He watches his mother fussing with the bread oven, obsessively sweeping out the ashes, and he wonders further about his dreams. He has many theories about their meanings, but like so many of his other theories, as yet they evade the pins of proof.
His mother is still sweeping.
He gets up, crosses to her shoulder, and turns her gently from her task.
She stares at him, half in terror, half in confusion.
“All’s well, Mother,” he says. “All’s well. Come now, let us sit awhile.”
She allows herself to be led to the bench by the door. They are both used to the smell. Lord, they smell that way themselves. Dee sits her down. She mews gently and yields up her brush of hawthorn twigs. He puts it aside. She has forgotten who I am, he thinks.
Just then, from the front door comes a booming knock.
His mother bends her head.
“Is it the Queen?” she whispers, her eyes round as new-minted pennies.
“Not today, I think,” Dee says, but he does not move to answer the door, to find out who it is, for he knows well enough.
“Because she’s been before, you know?” his mother continues. “To see my son. My son, John.”
He listens to her, just as he listens to the voices now raised at the front of the house. Both are painful in different ways. He supposes he has the count of twenty before the men from the front appear at the back.
“I must leave now, Mother. Don’t answer the door.”
“Are you in trouble?”
“I will be, if you answer the door.”
“I’ll not answer it then!” she says with a smile.
He kisses her lightly on her cap and then turns and takes up his traveling bag—weighty with lumpen objects—and his green doublet, and he slides through the back door, and a moment later is running down through the orchard to the river beyond.
When he is gone, the knocking grows louder.
“All right, all right,” his mother says. “I am coming.”
The man at the door is big, with a fat round face on a neck so thick it would take three hands to strangle, but with close-set eyes and a head polished to a brilliance. He carries a stout oak staff and, tucked into a thick leather belt that hardly restrains his bulging gut, is a well-used cudgel. The man behind him is slighter, narrower, but lithe and as mean-looking as a blade.
“This the residence of John Dee?” the first man asks.
Dee’s mother shakes her head.
“Never heard of him,” she says.
“You witless old sow,” the man tells her. “He is your son.”
She frowns.
“No,” she says. “You are the witless one, for I have no son.”
“You do. He is John Dee. And this is his house.”
And now she remembers.
“You are right!” she says. “I do. And this is his house.”
“And is he in?”
“Oh no. He is not here. He is on his way to the university at Cambridge, there to see the dean of Saint John the Evangelist, whom he says is to offer him a teaching post!”
The man smiles toothlessly. He thanks her and wishes her God’s blessings, and the two men go on their way, and when she closes the door on them, Widow Dee allows herself the simple, satisfied smile reserved for a proud mother.
* * *
Her son meanwhile hails a boat on Mortlake shore, and soon enough is following the tide of bobbing ordure down the river Thames to London. He sits with his bag on his knees, keeping it out of the boat’s lees. It contains a change of linen and three books, an astrolabe, the globe made by his friend Mercator, and another device of his own fashioning, with which he is very careful.
Fine weather and good luck bring him to Cambridge before sundown two days later, and he passes the lepers’ house just as the bell of Little Saint Mary’s rings curfew. That night Dee stays at the house of his friend James Pewlit, who has a house on Jesus Lane, and who has expended much social capital to get Dee the next day’s interview, but who, despite this, stays up with Dee into the short hours, talking of the rules of proportion and perspective in relation to accurate maps. Much wine is drunk and many sheets of paper are despoiled and set aside before they fall into bed with Mistress Pewlit and their newborn, to snore through what remains of the night, waking the next morning frowsy-headed and malodorous.
Noon, though, finds Dee well breakfasted and standing at a lectern before the stone-faced master, the dean, and some of the Fellows of the College of St. John the Evangelist. He knows his linen is fit only for the fire, and he wishes he had taken the time to visit a barber, but still, he thinks, they need not sit and stare at him like that.
Only the dean, the only working brain among a lot of dry old sticks, is following Dee’s thoughts on the subject of the moon’s influence on tidal ebb and flow with nods and murmurs, usually in the right places. The majority are unswayed, particularly by Dee’s device—made himself, somewhat crudely, but what do you expect?—which he holds aloft again to show how it predicts the risings and fallings of tides on any given shore, in any part of the world.
“You mean to tell us that that thing, that bollock of brass and leather, can predict the height of the tide in far distant Cathay?” the master asks.