The Heresy of Dr Dee

I Source of Darkness

IT WAS THE year of no summer, and all the talk in London was of the End-time.

Even my mother’s neighbours were muttering about darkness on the streets before its time, moving lights seen in the heavens and tremblings of the earth caused by Satan’s gleeful stoking of the infernal fires.

Tales came out of Europe that two suns were oft-times apparent in the skies. On occasion, three, while in England we never saw even the one most days and, when it deigned to appear, it was as pale and sour as old milk and smirched by raincloud. Now, all too soon, autumn was nigh, and the harvests were poor and I’d lost count of the times I’d been asked what the stars foretold about our future… if we had one.

Each time, I’d reply that the heavens showed no signs of impending doom. But how acceptable was my word these days? I was the astrologer who’d found a day of good promise for the joyful crowning of a woman who now, less than two years later, was being widely condemned as the source of the darkness.

By embittered Catholics, this was, and the prune-faced new Bible-men. Even the sun has fled England, they squealed. God’s verdict on a country that would have as its queen the spawn of a witch – these fears given heat by false rumours from France and Spain that Elizabeth was pregnant with a murderer’s child.

God’s bollocks, as the alleged murderer would say, but all this made me weary to the bone. How fast the bubble of new joy is pricked. How shallow people are. Give them shit to spread, and they’ll forge new shovels overnight.

All the same, you might have thought, after what happened in Glastonbury, that the Queen would seek my help in shifting this night-soil from her door.

But, no, she’d sent for me just once since the spring – all frivolous and curious about what I was working on, and had I thought of this, and had I looked into that? Sending me back to spend, in her cause, far too much money on books. Burn too many candles into pools of fat. Explore alleys of the hidden which I thought I’d never want to enter.

Only to learn, within weeks, that heavy curtains had closed around her court. Death having slipped furtively in. The worst of all possible deaths, most of us could see that.

Although not the Queen, apparently, who could scarce conceal her terrifying gaiety.

Dear God. As the silence grew, I was left wondering if the End-time might truly be looming and began backing away from some of the more foetid alleyways.

Though not fast enough, as it turned out.

II Rooker

September, 1560. Mortlake.

IT WAS TO be the last halfway-bright day of the season, but the scryer had demanded darkness: shutters closed against the mid-afternoon and the light from a single beeswax candle throwing shadows into battle on the walls.

‘And this…’ Dithering now, poor Goodwife Faldo looked at me over the wafer of flame and then across the board to where the scryer sat, and then back at me. ‘This is my brother…’ her hands falling to her sides and, even in the small light, he must surely have seen the flailing in her eyes ‘…John,’ she said lamely.

‘John Faldo,’ I said at once.

And then, seeing the eyes of my friend Jack Simm rolling upwards, realised why this could not be so.

‘That is, her husband’s brother.’

Thinking how fortunate it was that Will Faldo was out with his two sons, gleaning from his field all that remained of a dismal harvest. Had he been with us, the scryer might just have noted that Master Faldo was plump, with red hair, and a head shorter than the man claiming to be his brother.

Or he might yet see the truth when he uncovered what sat before him. It made a hump under the black cloth as might a saint’s sacred skull. My eyes were drawn back to it again and again. Unaware that the scryer had been watching me until his voice came curling out of the dark.

‘You have an interest in these matters, Master Faldo?’

A clipped clarity suggestive of Wales. Echoes of my late tad, in fact.

Jesu… I met his gaze for no more than a moment then looked away towards the crack of daylight betwixt shutters. The Faldos’ dwelling, firm-built of oak and riverbed daub, was but a short walk from Mortlake Church which, had the shutters been open, would have displayed itself like a warning finger.

‘The truth is,’ I mumbled, ‘that I’m less afraid of such things than my brother. Which is one reason why I’m here. And, um, he is not.’

The scryer nodded, appearing well at ease with his situation. Too much so, it seemed to me; the narrow causeway ’twixt science and sorcery will always have slippery sides and in his place I would ever have been watching the shadows. But then, that, as you know, is the way I am.

I studied him in the thin light. Not what I’d expected. A good twenty years older than my thirty-three, greying beard tight-trimmed to his cheeks and a white scar the width of his forehead. Well-clothed, in a drab and sober way, like to a clerk or a lawyer. Only the scar hinting at a more perilous profession.

He’d introduced himself to us as Elias, and I was told he’d been a monk. Were this true, it might afford him protection from whatever would come. Certainly his manner implied that we were fortunate to have his services.

‘And the other reason that Master Faldo is not with us?’

He smiled at me, with evident scepticism. I was silent too long, and it was the goodwife, alert as a chaffinch, who sprang up.

‘My husband… he knows naught of this. He’s working the day long and falls to sleep when he comes in. I…’ She lowered her voice and her eyelids, a fine and unexpected piece of theatre. ‘I was too ashamed to tell him.’

She’d already paid the scryer, with my money. I’d also been obliged to meet his night’s accommodation at the inn – more than I could readily afford, especially if I were to make a further purchase. Served me right for starting this game and involving the goodwife in the deception.

Brother Elias smiled at her with understanding.

‘So the treasure you want me to find… would be your wedding ring?’

Goodwife Faldo let out a small cry, hastily stifled with a hand. How could he possibly have known this by natural means? I stiffened only for a moment. It was no more than a good guess. He must oft-times be summoned to locate a woman’s ring or a locket. It was what they did.

‘What happened…’ Goodwife Faldo displayed her fingers, one with a circle of white below its joint ‘… I must have taken it off. To clean out the fire ready for the autumn? Laid it on the board, where you’re…’ Peering among the shadows on the board, as if the missing ring might be gleaming from somewhere to betray her. ‘And then forgot about it until the night. And it… was gone.’

‘You think someone stole it?’

‘I’d not want to think that. We trust our neighbours. Nobody here bolts a door. But… yes, I do fear it’s been taken. Been many years in my husband’s family, and has a value beyond the gold. Can you help me?’

‘Not me alone, Goodwife. Not me alone.’

Brother Elias speaking with solemnity and what seemed to me to be a first hint of stagecraft. Goodwife Faldo’s stool wobbling and the candlelight passing like a sprite across her coif as she sat up. Like many women, my mother’s neighbour was much attracted to the Hidden, yet in a half-fearful way – the joy of shivers.

‘I can only pray,’ she said unsteadily, ‘that whatever is summoned to help you comes from the right… quarter.’

This, I’ll admit, was a question I’d primed her to ask. No one should open a portal to the Hidden without spiritual protection. There are long-established procedures for securing this; I wanted to know if the scryer knew them.

‘Oh, it must needs be Godly,’ Elias assured her confidently. ‘If it’s to find this ring for us. However…’ his well-fed face became stern ‘…I must make it clear to you, Goodwife, that if the ring has been stolen and we are able to put a face to the thief, then it’s your business, not mine, to take the matter further.’

‘That’s, er…’ I coughed ‘…is another reason why I’m here.’

Me, the fighting man. Dear God.

‘And what are you, Master Faldo?’ the scryer said, but not as if he cared. ‘What’s your living?’

I shrugged.

‘I work at the brewery.’

The biggest employer of men in Mortlake. Tell him you work at the brewery, Jack Simm had said to me earlier. And then, looking at my hands. Dealing wiv orders.

‘And you…’ the scryer turned to Jack, ‘…were once, I think, an apothecary in London?’

‘Once.’

Jack stubbornly folding his arms over his wide chest as though to ward off further questions. Get on with it. The scryer cupped his hands over the black-draped object before him, drew a long breath, as if about to snatch away the cloth… and then stopped.

‘It’s not mete.’

Pulling his hands away from the mounded cloth, stowing them away in his robe.

A scowl split Jack Simm’s lambswool beard.

‘What?’

‘I regret it’s not mete for me to go on,’ Brother Elias said. ‘The crystal’s cold.’

Speaking with finality, where most of his kind would be smiling slyly at you while holding out their grubby hands for more money. Maybe it came to the same. Elias’s apparel showed he’d already prospered from his trade.

Yet I felt this wasn’t only about money. The air in here had altered. The hearth looked cold as an altar, the room felt damp. I became aware of the fingers of both my hands gripping the edge of the board as the scryer reached to the flagged floor for his satchel.

‘We should light a fire?’ Jack Simm said.

Halfway to his feet, angry, but Elias didn’t look at him.

‘If you want this to have results,’ he said quietly, ‘then I must needs go back to the inn and rest a while. I’ll return shortly before nightfall. That is, if you wish to continue with this…’

… comedy? Was that what he thought?

Did he suspect false-play?

Look, I wanted to say, if we’ve insulted your art, I beg mercy, but I feared you’d be a rooker. Back-street scryers, I thought all they sought was a regular income. That they had no aspiration to walk in the golden halls of creation and know the energies behind their art. I thought that all that mattered was that it worked. And if it didn’t, you faked it. I want to know where the fakery begins, to separate artifice from natural magic. I want to watch what you do, observe your methods. And… I want to know where to obtain the finest of shewstones.

Should I identify myself, accept a loss of face?

No. I held back, watching him shoulder his satchel and make his stately way to the Goodwife’s door, wondering if he’d return or vanish with my money.

‘Oh,’ he said mildly. ‘I have one question.’ He opened the door and the light washed over him. ‘Why am I summoned to Mortlake?’

From outside came the scurrying of birds.

‘Why Mortlake?’ the scryer said. ‘When Mortlake’s surely home to a man more qualified than I?’ He looked at each of us in turn. ‘Or is the good Dr Dee too busy conjuring for the Queen these days to waste his famous skills in service of his neighbours?’

Jack Simm glanced at me. I knew not how to respond.

‘Dr Dee,’ Jack said, ‘doesn’t scry.’

Hmm… not yet, anyway.

III Call Them Angels

JACK SIMM WAS a gardener now. He’d abandoned his London apothecary’s shop during Mary’s reign, when the agents of Bishop Bonner had been scouring the streets for signs of Protestants and witches alike, and anyone else who might be deemed an enemy of the Catholic Church.

Like many a poor bastard who’d burned in Bonner’s purge, Jack had been neither, but the scent of roasting flesh singes the soul. And he had a young wife and so chose to pursue his trade in a quiet way, from his home on the edge of the village, growing herbs in other people’s gardens as part-payment for his services. Growing certain mushrooms for me, to bring about visions. Not that they’d worked, but that wasn’t Jack’s fault.

I’d tell him he had no need to be a secret apothecary any more. It was a new reign. Everything was changed for the brighter. Kept telling him all this, but he was wary yet.

Particularly wary when, about four weeks previously, I’d asked him to find me a good scryer and perhaps a shewstone for sale.

For pretty much the same reason I’d wanted the mushrooms.

‘You ain’t a complete fool, Dr John,’ Jack had said, ‘but you’re ever running too close to the bleedin’ cliff-edge.’

We’d been walking the pathway through the wood behind his dwelling. An unusually muggy day – a sneer of a day, a taunt at a drear summer’s end. My shirt had been sweated to my spine while my boots were yet soaked from the puddles.

Look, I’d been aware of the scrying profession most of my life, my tad oft-times making mock of it – all furtive foreigners and gypsies who’d gaze into a stone or a mirror and tell you where your missing property might be recovered or how many children you’d have. Or, if you underpaid them, exactly when the children could expect to inherit your worldly goods.

Rookers to a man, and they oft-times conduct their trade through an apothecary, who takes a cut of the fee.

‘I could find you one, no problem,’ Jack had said. ‘When I was in town, we must’ve had a dozen or more of these bleeders in the shop. Wanting me to put ’em in touch wiv the sick and the bereaved or anyone who needed somebody to talk to the dead on their behalf, intercede wiv angels. I’d kick their arses down the street. And been cursed for it a few times. But I’m still here, ain’t I?’

He’d been gazing out between the heavy, dripping trees towards the swollen river and his voice was damp with disdain.

‘Why?’ he said. ‘That’s all I’m asking. I ain’t getting it, Dr John. I’ve watched men and woman staring into stones and seeing fings I can’t see. And if I can’t see it…? You know what I’m saying?’

‘Everything’s open to abuse,’ I said.

‘But you’re a… a whatsit, natural-philosopher… a man of bleedin’ science.’

‘Well, exactly,’ I said. ‘Knowing the science behind crystal-gazing makes all the difference.’

I could have told him then precisely why I was, of a sudden, interested in the art of scrying. But, although I trusted him more than most, it wasn’t the time. And I’d have to admit that I’d been as sceptical as he was until, at the university of Louvain, I’d been given sight of a rare manuscript by the scholar and cabalist Johannes Trithemius of Spanheim. Which explained why certain stones, if used with knowledge and reverence, could give access to the very engines of heaven.

‘A stone’s a stone, Dr John.’

‘Never dismiss what’s beneath your feet, Jack. Crystals will absorb and reflect celestial rays. If employed at certain times – on certain days, under specific planetary configurations – they’ll open up the inner rooms of the mind …to levels of existence normally denied to us.’

Jack kicked a lesser stone into the grass.

‘Spirits, is it?’

I sighed. A very loose word, oft-times misused.

‘Three spheres, Jack: this earthly plane and, above that, the astral, where earthbound spirits linger, the place of ghosts. And above and beyond all… the supercelestial… the over-realm, the furnace room of Heaven.’

As a scholar of Hebrew I’d studied in depth the Cabala which, through mystical symbolism, offers a stairway to the sublime. It makes logical, mathematical sense and, although Jewish in origin, can be practised just as effectively through Christianity. The Christian cabala would be my shield against the earthbound spirits and the kind of demonic entities which might enter a shewstone and possess the unguarded scryer.

As distinct from the higher spirits, the good spirits.

Call them angels.

‘In Europe,’ I said, ‘the shewstone is seen as a legitimate method of penetrating the higher mysteries. In England, it’s yet a joke, at best. At worst, the devil’s own mirror.’

‘You told them this in Europe?’

‘Hell, no.’

Not for me to confirm their opinion of England as a land of Philistines – or to confess my own ignorance. I’d read and reread the works of Agrippa and what I could of Trithemius, but my personal experience was, at best, thin and always would be until I seized the nettle and took steps to acquire my own shewstone.

A good one. A good crystal, with which to carry out experiments. But what kind, what colour, how big? These were fundamentals I ought to have known about but did not, for opinions varied.

‘You’re an innocent soul, Dr John.’ Jack Simm standing among the roots of a venerable oak and facing me like a father, hands sunk into the pockets of his jerkin. ‘You fink fings is different, now nobody gets burned. The Queen smiling, all gracious. Oh, yea, folks can believe what they like, long as they keep it to themselves. Like we ain’t heard all that before.’

‘Times change, Jack.’

‘Kings don’t change. Nor Queens. It’s religious freedom one day then, in a blinking, it’s all about how to prove you ain’t a witch’s daughter.’

The Queen’s mother, Anne Boleyn, executed by the Queen’s father for treason and adultery, had been possessed of a sixth finger and a furry growth on her neck. How much evidence did you want?

‘Now how’s the Queen do that?’ Jack said. ‘She makes war on witchcraft, and her advisers look around for somebody well-known to execute to make it look good.’

A dead twig had snapped under his boot, making me start as he sprang away from the oak, forefinger aimed at my chest.

‘Go on… tell me it’s wivout bleedin’ precedent. And you may mention the late King Harry.’

I wanted to laugh, but it wouldn’t come. This queen was different. This queen had an acute intelligence and questing mind fascinated by alchemy and the cabala. This queen was powerfully Protestant while celebrating the Mass in deep privacy.

‘Heresy.’ I’d shrugged. ‘All science is heresy. Now… can you help me?’

He’d paced a slow circle around the oak.

‘Yea, well,’ he’d said at last, ‘I suppose you oughter have somefink to take your mind off what’s happening downriver.’

He’d meant London. Becoming known in Europe as Satan’s city. And not, at this moment, a good place to be if you were a friend of Robert Dudley.

IV The Smoke of Rumour

WHEN BROTHER ELIAS had made his stately departure to the inn, we ate bread and goatcheese with Goodwife Faldo.

It had been Jack’s idea that she should play the pigeon so that I might observe a scrying without giving away my identity. Goodwife Faldo, who’d once taken my mother to see a cunning woman in the hope of asking my dead father if there was money hidden anywhere, had agreed at once to accept me as her brother for the day.

After our meal, she said she’d walk out to the meadow to suggest to her husband and sons that, rather than disrupt our sitting, they might eat at the inn tonight. I gave her my last shilling to pay for their meat and small beer, and then Jack and I walked down to the riverside where casks of fresh-brewed ale were being loaded into a barge. The air was cooling fast these evenings and the ambering sky above the distant city was smutted and heavy from first fires. And the smoke of rumour.

I hadn’t ventured into London for more than a week, but the gossip had been drifting down to me like black flakes from a lamp-scorched purlin. The city all atremble in the glitter of a dangerous lightning.

‘What were they saying when you were in town?’ I asked.

One reason I’d come to trust Jack Simm: he was a man of intelligence but without ambition.

Without ambition. What a blessed state that must be. Oft-times, my mother had accused me of it – far from the truth, of course, I did have ambition, though it related not to the attainment of high office so much as the acquisition of high knowledge. Not easy, however, without the level of protection that only wealth and position could provide.

Thus far, the Queen’s patronage had given me freedom to pursue my studies but not the means, for the fingers gripping the royal purse were famously held as tight as the rectal muscles of the ducks upon the river. Having calculed, by the stars, a smiling day for her coronation, I’d hoped for secure office, but nothing had come. And if things went wrong I could soon, as Jack had warned, be dangerously out of favour. In many ways, the daggers-out world of political advancement was far simpler than mine.

We’d moved away from the beer-barge, back into the wood, but I still kept my voice down low.

‘What were they saying?’

‘About Lord Dudley? You really want to know?’

‘In truth, I suspect not, but…’

‘Here it is: nobody I spoke to, from the pieman to the pamphlet-seller, finks he didn’t murder her. Although the pieman reckoned killing your wife to make room for the next one is only part of a great Tudor tradition, so he’s just getting in some practice for his future role as—’

‘Oh God, enough of this!’

‘You asked.’

‘Yes,’ I said wearily. ‘I asked.’

I’d barely seen Robert Dudley since he’d journeyed with me to Glastonbury in search of the bones of King Arthur, through which to strengthen the Queen’s majesty as Arthur’s spiritual successor. A quest with mixed success.

I’ve been hearing all about your journey to the West, she’d said on my one visit to the court since that mission. The horrors of it! Lord Robert was so very appreciative of your assistance in this matter.

My assistance, Highness? That’s what he said?

John… She’d laid a white and fragrant hand on my arm. He’s told me everything.

The lying, self-promoting bastard.

‘He’s never been mightily popular since she made him Master of the Horse, has he?’ Jack Simm said. ‘The lavish festivities, the arrogance, the preening.’

‘Behind all that,’ I said, not without doubt, ‘is a man of… integrity. Who’s seen much death.’

The execution of his father, the Duke of Northumberland, for the support of Jane Grey, the shortest-lived queen in history. Then his own confinement in the Tower under a death sentence, later withdrawn.

And all this time coming closer to the Queen than any man. Grown up together, locked away in the Tower at the same time during her sister’s reign. Always an understanding betwixt them. And the carnal attraction. As Master of the Horse, he took her hunting. Knew how best to entertain her – make her laugh, which she loved to do. Little doubt they’d have wed. If…

Jack shrugged.

‘Maybe he’s seen so much of death, it’s trivial to him now. Man who has his wife pushed down the stairs to get his paws on the Queen—’

‘Not proven.’

‘Nah, and never will be after they bribe the coroner. He’ll walk away in a pomander haze, but it won’t make no difference, will it? Still be the dog turd on a platter of sausages. And the closer you are to him…’

He was right, of course. But Dudley and I went back too long. Though only a few years older, I’d been appointed by his father to teach him mathematics and the mapping of the heavens, and he it was who’d sought my astrological advice on the coronation date.

Now, in the lowest alehouses – and some higher places, too, by all accounts – they were saying John Dee had taught Lord Dudley the blackest arts of sorcery, to win the Queen for Satan.

Never underestimate the malice of the common man.

I sank my hands into the pockets of my doublet and, in one, found a hole. I could never forget that, while in Glastonbury and rendered delirious by a fever, my friend had confessed that he’d wished his wife dead.

And now she was. Found at the foot of some stairs at a house called Cumnor Place in Berkshire where she was ‘staying with friends’. Dumped there by Dudley because the Queen wouldn’t have wives at court. Least of all, his.

My hands felt cold. Bess and me, we’re twin souls, Dudley had said when he was recovered from the fever. As if convinced that a marriage to the Queen was ordained by the heavens, though he’d never dared ask me to confirm it through astrology. Dear God, never in all history had there been a better reason for a man to kill his wife.

‘And what’s your thinking, Jack?’

Jack Simm leaned against an ash tree’s bole, smiling faintly.

‘I fink… if the Angel of the Lord come down on top of the Tower and proclaimed that Lord Dudley never done it and, while he’s here, that Dr John Dee ain’t a sorcerer… they’d all be waiting for his bleedin’ wings to drop off.’

‘Thank you, Jack.’

‘Now ask me why the scryer’s had to go back to the inn to warm his crystal.’

Were a shewstone to be used to reach the angelic, extensive preparation would be needed: days of purity, fasting, abstinence from alcohol. In this instance, I could think of three more practical reasons for the departure of Elias to the inn.

‘He wants to ask what John Dee looks like. What apparel he wears. And if Will Faldo’s brother works at the brewery. But… he’s not quite a rooker, is he?’

Or, if so, certainly of a higher grade than the lowlifes who hang like ravens around the taverns of Southwark.

‘Well,’ Jack said, ‘he did come recommended by a chaplain of the Bishop of London.’

‘Did he now?’

A good apothecary is ever well-connected.

‘Oh, he’s well-patronised. That’s why he costs. You still want me to ask him if he has a fine crystal to sell?’

‘For… an un-named customer of yours?’

‘Yea, yea. Dr John, look, he won’t learn noffing at the inn. This is Mortlake and he’s a stranger. They all remember your old man, whatever he done, and they like your mother. And, as long as you’re welcome at court, they like you.’

‘The wizard in his cave?’

‘They try not to fink too hard about that. Or the owls what goes woo woo. But they ain’t forgot when the Queen come to visit you at Candlemas, and how much the inn raked in, refreshing all the pikemen and the boys what carried the banners and the rest. Don’t make light of what you done for Mortlake, Dr John.’

I shook my head, bemused.

‘Just don’t bleedin’ ruin it now,’ Jack Simm said.

V The Ingle

A WAXING MOON’S the best time for it.

This was what I’d read, and it makes good sense to anyone who has stood on the edge of a tranquil pond and observed moonlight shivering in the water. Even more to those of us who watch and chart all the bright spheres of the heavens.

Reflected light. As above, so below. To hold a perfect crystal sphere in your hands is to enclose earth and heaven.

Dear God… to what level is this the truth?

The sun’s last stain lay upon the river when the scryer returned with his wood-framed cloth satchel.

This time, we truly had need of the candle, and I leaned into its halo to watch him unpack his bag, carefully taking out his treasures, all swathed in layers of grey and black cloth.

‘Have you eaten, Brother?’ Goodwife Faldo asked.

‘Goodwife,’ he said softly, ‘one must needs fast before a scrying.’

Which could be true; fasting prepares the body and keeps the spirit light and permeable. This man’s pomp and solemnity continued to imply a degree of learning I’d not expected. I watched him laying out his bundles on the board, his back to the empty ingle and the door to the winder-stair.

Then I stiffened when, from the most shadowed end of our bench, Jack Simm spoke.

‘And did you find Dr Dee?’

All dark in this simple, square farmhouse hall, except for the white of Jack’s beard and the goodwife’s coif. I felt her black cat rubbing his head against my left calf and reached down to stroke him, as if this discussion was no concern of mine. The scryer looked up, his eyes still.

‘If I were looking for Dr Dee, I’d be disappointed. Not often here these days, it seems. Appears to spend much of his time in the Low Countries, giving lectures. When he’s not at court teaching magic to the Queen.’

‘So now you see,’ Jack said, not looking at me, ‘why us lowly folk have no dealings wiv him.’

‘Though we do see his mother,’ Goodwife Faldo said.

I made murmurs to the cat. Brother Elias took out the shrouded stone and set it down before him and lowered the satchel to the stones behind his stool.

‘Hard to believe that bodged place is his family home.’

‘They say appearances have little value for the doctor,’ Jack said. ‘Not a man for whom a display of wealth—’

‘If wealth he has.’

‘The house is very tidy inside,’ Goodwife Faldo said. ‘Very tidy indeed.’

‘A man with neither wealth nor honour.’ Elias had unwrapped a pair of eyeglasses which he balanced on the bridge of his nose without looking up. ‘You’d think, given his position as the Queen’s primary advisor on the Mysteries, he’d be Sir John by now.’

I could almost hear Jack Simm inside my head, screaming at me to say nothing.

‘He’s good to his mother,’ Goodwife Faldo said, firm-faced.

‘And she to him, apparently, Goodwife. From what I’m told, without his mother he’d have no roof over his bed.’ Brother Elias chuckled absently and then looked up at last. ‘But then that’s no affair of mine. Let’s now proceed, shall we?’

The stone lay before him, still covered. Father Elias placed his palms together above it, closed his eyes.

‘Oh, God, author of all good things, strengthen, I beseech thee, thy poor servant, that he may stand fast, without fear, through this work. Enlighten, I beseech thee, oh Lord, the dark understanding of thy creature, that his spiritual eye may be opened to see and know thine angelic spirits descending here into this crystal.’

He laid both hands upon the shrouded stone, and my stomach tightened as if he’d touched me.

For I’d read these words, this entreaty. Written them, even.

‘Oh be sanctified and consecrated, and blessed to this purpose, that no evil phantasy may appear in thee… or, if they do gain ingress they may be constrained to speak intelligibly, and truly, and without the least ambiguity, for Christ’s sake. Amen. And forasmuch as thy servant here desires neither evil treasures, nor injury to his neighbour, nor hurt to any living creature, grant him the power of descrying those celestial spirits or intelligences that may appear in this crystal…’

My hands went cold upon my thighs below the board top. I’d translated it myself, in the past year, from unpublished writings I’d borrowed in Antwerp.

‘… and whatever good gifts, whether the power of healing infirmities, or of imbibing wisdom, or discovering any evil likely to afflict any person or family, or any other good gift thou mayest be pleased to bestow on me…’

I threw a glance at Jack Simm but could not make out his eyes.

‘… enable me, by thy wisdom and mercy, to use whatever I may receive to the honour of thy holy name. Grant this for thy son Christ’s sake. Amen.’

‘Amen,’ Goodwife Faldo said faintly.

Outside, the leaves on the trees were astir, the evening shaking with the last birdsong. When the scryer bent to his bundles I now knew exactly what he’d unveil. I saw an ebony pedestal and a golden plate and knew it would carry the engraving of the divine name, Tetragrammaton… and the names Michael, Gabriel, Uriel, Raphael, the four archangels ruling over the Sun, Moon, Venus and Mercury.

A continued tightening in my chest, a cool sweat upon my face and forehead. Trithemius had written that the names and characters must be drawn in order… the names of the seven planets and angels ruling them, with their seals or characters.

Let them be all written within a double circle, with a triangle…

Silence, now, and an odd sense of sacrament. I watched Elias place the crystal, still shrouded, upon its pedestal, becoming aware of Goodwife Faldo’s rapid breathing.

…this being done, thy table is complete and fit for the calling of the spirits…

I watched the scryer’s hands pulling away the cloth and saw, for the first time, the sphere.

What had I expected?

Scrying crystals – I’d seen some during my work abroad. But I’d been a mathematician, sometimes a teacher, sometimes a student, therefore interested only in their perfect geometry. There hadn’t been time then to approach their deeper mysteries. Nor had I been entirely convinced of what was said of them.

A stone’s just a stone.

At what point this night I became afraid, I’m not quite sure. To a scholar, fear arrives with a certain shame, akin to the shame a soldier feels, holding himself back from the heat of the fray as his comrades are cut down before him.

Not that I’d know. Unlike Dudley, I’ve never been a soldier, the kind of knowledge I hold having preserved me from bodily conflict. A bargain with the Crown which decrees I must stride out, wearing knowledge like armour, the questing mind thrust forward like to a sharpened blade.

Soon blunted tonight. I’d set out from my mother’s house believing that my own knowledge would far exceed that of the man I was to meet. Now I knew it wasn’t so and I suppose the fear came out of this. Yes, I’m a man of science and natural philosophy, skilled from years of study in mathematics, geography, celestial configuration, theology and so on. And no, I don’t believe this is the End-time, far from it. In fact, signs everywhere I look are telling me that this is the beginning of a new enlightenment, an explosion of spiritual light such as the Earth hasn’t seen since the days of old Greece and the ancient Egypt of thrice-great Hermes, who walked the night sky as if it were his kitchen garden.

As above, so below.

Elias’s hands were lifted and, for a brief moment, it was as though the candleglow shone from the hollows of his palms.

Below them, the true source of it, a small planet of light.

It was no bigger than a cider apple. Beryl, I guessed, a gemstone which comes in several colours and the shewstone possessed all of them: now a lucent brown, like the brown of an eye, now the soft ambered pink of a woman’s cheek.

It was as though the wan light had been expanded by some substance in the air, making everything more vivid, and I considered how this might be done, what theatre the scryer might employ to render us all dizzy with delusion.

I watched his plump hands as they spread apart either side of the stone, as if they were holding light like some solid object. I watched his lips forming words I could not hear and thought him to be summoning some spirit from the ether. I wanted to kill my fear by rising up and screaming at him, Tell me its name!

… and then time had passed, maybe faster than I knew, in a hollow of muttering and liturgy, and Elias was whispering, not to me but to Goodwife Faldo.

‘Hold out your hand.’

When she held it up, hesitant, he reached out quickly and seized her wrist and pulled her into the light, and I half-rose, fearing for some reason that he would feed her fingers into the candle flame.

But his own hand fell away, and hers stayed in the air, as if held there by strong light. As if detached from Goodwife Faldo at the elbow. Had she met his eyes? Did he have the ability, which I’ve marked in others, to hold her in thrall?

Or even all of us. I shook myself, blinking wildly, fearing that long minutes may have passed in a state where my senses were not my own. I saw that the scrying stone was duller now but seeming to quiver, like to a toad, on the boardtop, and I didn’t notice that the ringless hand had gone until I heard Jack Simm draw breath, sharply, as if aware of an alteration in the air.

Did I feel that, too? Maybe. I found I was gazing not at the shewstone but into the ingle, where a fire of logs and coal would soon be lit that would last all winter long. The warm core of the house where a stewpot would hang, the air pungent with cooking herbs grown by Jack Simm and the mellow crusting of bread in the side-oven.

But now, in this thin, uncertain, peripheral time between seasons, it was only a mean cavern of ill-dressed rubble-stone, and cold.

A cold reaching out of the ingle along with a stillness which could be felt, like to the rancid, waxen stillness of a stone chapel where a corpse lies before burial.

I liked it not. I tell myself I don’t fear death, but the presence of the dead conveys no sense of peace to me, and there can be no beauty without life.

Clack.

Something wooden falling to the floor.

A stool. Rolling away under the board, and the cat rushed between my ankles and I heard a poor cry, of the kind made without breath, and saw that Goodwife Faldo was backed against the wall by the shuttered window. Her face shadow-lined and stretched in agony, her coif dragged back, and she was pointing at the maw of the ingle and whimpering like an infant.

As if in another world, the hands of Elias were held apart, two inches from the globe, as though his fingers were bathed within its aura.

He said, with mild curiosity, ‘Tell me what you see, Goodwife.’

I followed her wretched gaze, heard her hoarsened voice.

‘Death.’

‘In what form?’

‘Oh my dear Lord!’

Both hands over her face, peering through her fingers, the candleglow cold as a haloed moon.

Her voice was held in my head and then faded as if it had lain down and died there. Panicked, I lurched to my feet and tried to follow her gaze into the ingle. All I saw there was packed rubblestone fading into the blackness of soot.

Nothing more.

Nothing. Jesu, have I ever felt more worthless than when I stood there, sightless, hearing the returning voice of Goodwife Faldo, an arid panting.

‘Does this mean death for us? Oh please God, make it go away. Please God, Father, I’ve two sons!’

One moment, her body was bowed over in anguish upon a sob, and then she was twisting around, squirming upright and stumbling into the ingle where I could hear her fumbling about and then the muffled clang of the bread oven’s door.

When she emerged, her hands were clasped together as if she held a baby bird. Holding it out to Elias, hands shaking.

‘Please,’ she whispered. ‘I beg mercy, Brother. I’ve sinned.’

Her shadow skating on the wall, she opened out her hands and the ring clinked upon the board next the crystal. Goodwife Faldo, scrabbling after it, shoulders still hunched and heaving. Snatching it up and ramming it on her finger.

Losing her coif as she tumbled away across the room and dragged the shutters wide to expose the purpling dusk.

VI Cousin

IT WAS LIKE to the air after a storm has blown itself out. The candle extinguished, the hall draped in a drabness of brown and grey. I felt weakened in a way I could not have anticipated, and saw faces everywhere, staring in from the unshuttered window and over the threshold where the door had been flung wide.

And one was my mother’s.

Jane Dee stepping through the doorway, dark-gowned, full of a fury seldom seen and so not easily dismissed.

‘Your doing!’

‘Mother—’

‘What have you caused?’

A tall woman of sixty years, admirably unbowed by circumstance, but ever dismayed by what I did and pained that my meagre earnings were spent more on books than repairs to the house my late tad had half-built.

However, Jane Dee was never more formidable than when bleeding from another’s wound.

‘Goodwife Faldo’s in bitter distress.’

‘Yes,’ I said tightly. ‘I know.’

‘What have you brought into her house? You tell me, now, John, what have you done?’

We were alone. Goodwife Faldo had not returned, and I looked around for Elias, but he too was gone, along with Jack Simm and the shadowed faces at the open door and the window. Some of them melting away upon the arrival of my mother, who, like my father, had been a good Catholic but now mistrusted the miraculous.

Was it? Was the miraculous ever so mean, cold and squalid as what seemed to have happened here this night?

‘On second thought, don’t tell me,’ my mother said.

I let go a sigh.

‘It’s gone, anyway.’

As if I knew. As if I was in any position to state that what I’d never seen was now no more. But my shivers recalled the deep bone-cold which no fire can reach because it’s forever beyond this life, beyond the air that we breathe. And I did not want to look again into the ingle. And see nothing.

‘… believing her family will perish for her sins,’ my mother was saying.

‘Any sin this night,’ I said, almost angrily, ‘is mine.’

‘John,’ she said sadly. ‘As if I didn’t know that.’

The way she’d spoken to me when I was six years old.

‘Mother,’ I said wearily, ‘I beg mercy, but it wasn’t—’

‘Don’t beg mine, beg hers.’

‘Yes… yes, I’ll do that.’

Gladly, for Goodwife Faldo was a good and generous woman, and I must needs make it clear to her that there was nothing for her to fear. And would have tried to explain it to my mother if I’d thought that, for one silent minute, she’d listen.

It had been no more than we’d deserved. I knew that now and profoundly regretted involving Goodwife Faldo in this conceit. Even the protective prayers intoned by Brother Elias would have been ineffective because our sitting was built upon deception. Any summoning not grounded in full honesty attracts only that which thrives on lies, confusion and all the lower longings of humanity which remain undissolved by death.

And I knew I’d get no sleep this night if I’d failed to find out what form it had taken. What they’d all seen and I – Oh, blood of Christ – had not.

‘Here.’ My mother drew something from a fold of her gown. ‘This was delivered.’

Placing on the board a thin letter with a seal which – Oh my God – I recognised at once. I picked it up and knew the paper.

Of all the times for this to be delivered…

‘Mother, when did this arrive?’

‘Not ten minutes ago. It’s why I was coming to find you… amid all the clamour and upset.’

I carried the letter to the window and broke the seal, tension quickening my blood as, in the fading light, I read,

Dr Dee

There is a need to speak with you on behalf of our Cousin. My barge will dock in Mortlake tomorrow at eight

Unsigned, yet I knew, my heart all aquake, that it was from Mistress Blanche Parry, my elder cousin on my father’s side. But that the cousin referred to in the letter was someone to whom neither of us was related. This term had been used before to disguise the identity of she whom Blanche served as Senior Gentlewoman. It was significant that this was far from a formal missive. It meant I was to be consulted in confidence.

‘Mother, the messenger… he’s not waiting for a reply?’

My mother, who also knew that seal, shook her head and then found a strained smile – any kind of summons to court would renew her hopes of me finding a stable income. She was of good family and had barely spoke to me for a week after I turned down the offer of a permanent lecturer’s post at Oxford.

‘I shall go now, John – left too quickly, with neither cloak nor lamp. You’d best come home. When you’ve brought your… small comfort to Goodwife Faldo.’

When she was gone, I took several long breaths and then knelt before the ingle. Alone here now and held in dread, for all my book-fed knowledge, of what I could not see, I said a fervent prayer to banish all unwanted spirits from this house. And then, espying under the window the coif shed by Goodwife Faldo, I picked it up and left.

This end of the village was quiet now, the sky pricked with first stars over the darkening river which linked us, better than any road, with London. I wondered if it would be Mistress Blanche in that barge tomorrow, or the Queen herself.

Then turned, knowing where the Goodwife would be.

St Mary’s, Mortlake, is a modern church, towered but without steeple – a misjudgement in my view, for a steeple conducts to earth divers rays from the firmament. When worshipping here, however, I tend to keep opinions like this to myself. A wisehead is seldom welcome in the house of God.

A single candle was lit upon the high altar, Goodwife Faldo bent in mute prayer on the lowest chancel step. I walked quietly along the aisle and knelt alongside her, leaving a seemly distance betwixt us.

I held out the coif. Marking the dawning of grey in the strands of her freed hair, a sheen of tears on her cheeks as she looked up at me, a pale smile flickering in the candlelight.

‘Why can we never leave well alone, Dr John?’

Tucking her hair into the white linen. I knew what she meant, but the idea of it was well beyond the imagining of a man who lives only to meddle.

‘It’s gone,’ I said, hoping to God I was right. ‘All gone now.’

‘Where?’

A good question, but this was hardly the time or place to serve up a treatise on the nature of the middle sphere.

‘Back into the stone,’ I said. ‘And the stone is back in the scryer’s bag. Where it should have stayed.’

‘Oh fie, Dr John!’ Lifting herself to the second step, which she sat upon. ‘The first mention of it by Master Simm, and I was hooked like an eel.’

She gazed beyond me, into the darkness of the nave.

‘When I was a child, I loved to go into church and feel it all closing around me. I felt cloaked in colours… and the sweetness of the incense. And all the Latin, like to the sound of spells being uttered. More… more magic than I could hold.’

‘Yes.’

The church had been all about magic, then, if we’d but known it.

‘And then the King made God smaller,’ Goodwife Faldo said.

I looked at her with an admiration that surprised me. Her tear-streaked face shone like an apple in the warm candlelight. I turned quickly away and looked up at the long panes in the stained window above the altar. Bright coloured glass reduced by the night to the dull hues of turned earth.

‘Don’t let them stop you, Dr John.’

‘Who?’

‘The Puritans, the Bible men. They’re taking hold. Get one of them as king and the world will be a grey place.’

‘This Queen won’t see that happen. The Queen loves magic and wonder.’

‘Yes. So we’re told. But she must have care. As must you. Small people like me – no-one cares any more what we believe, as long as we turn up at church on a Sunday and say the right words. I wouldn’t be taken away any more for letting a scryer into my house. Would I?’

‘Frances,’ I said. ‘What did you see?’

‘I lost my mind.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘There was a change in the air such as I’ve never felt since I was a child.’

‘There was. I felt it.’

‘The presence of something that wasn’t… I can’t put it into the best words, I’m only a farmer’s wife and I don’t read very well, and I …’

‘Tell me.’

‘I’d hid the ring in the bread oven. And of a sudden I felt a terrible guilt about that, as if it was the worst thing I’d ever done. As if I’d lied to God. And it came into my head that I must face a terrible penance. And the worst of all penance to me would be…’

Holding back tears.

‘The loss of your family,’ I said.

She nodded.

‘And that was when I saw the figure of a pale man. Not clear at first – as though made of dust motes. The bones… the bones were more solid and had their own—’

She shuddered. I looked for her eyes.

‘Bones?’

‘The bones had their own awful light. As though it were not light.’

‘Where were these bones?’

‘He was holding them. One in each hand, clasped to his chest. Death… death’s heads.’

‘Skulls? More than one?’

‘How can I ever sit before that hearth again?’

‘You can. It won’t happen again, Goodwife. Not there. Not ever again. None of it’ – Putting it all together in my head as I spoke – ‘none of it was real. Only pictures conjured from the crystal, which… held us all in thrall. Changed your head around so that you took your worst fears and made them into… pictures.’

She nodded, yet uncertain.

‘Ephemeral,’ I said firmly. ‘Illusion. Nothing was there. You didn’t lie to God. Only to the scryer. And you admitted it to him. You put things right.’

It took away the magic, but I felt it was what she wanted to hear at this moment.

‘And there’s been no plague this summer,’ I said.

Watching myself forming words while I was somewhere else. Somewhere grey and foetid and full of bones.

‘I feel so much calmer now,’ Goodwife Faldo said and laughed lightly. ‘Thank you, Dr John.’

VII Coincidence and Fate

MORTLAKE HIGH STREET. Sticky, blurred lantern-light, echoes of the cackle and whoop of roistering from the inn and, presently, the spatter of piss against a wall.

No place to look up at the stars or the new-born moon.

After walking Goodwife Faldo to her door, I should have gone home and slept, to be refreshed and fully sentient at the riverside on the morrow. But how could I sleep now?

The inn was ahead of me. Recently extended to offer five bedchambers, two with glass in their windows for the moneyed traveller, but yet a rough place after dark. I slowed my steps, recalling a night when, for no clear reason, I’d been given a beating by men unknown to me, although it was clear they knew who I was. Smash the conjurer down. Smash him down in the name of God!

Soft footsteps behind me and I turned. A light shining out in my path, and I froze into stillness as it rose level with my face.

‘Go quietly, Dr John.’

‘Jack.’

He carried one of the candle lanterns you could borrow from the inn if you were deemed sober enough to remember where to return it.

I said, ‘Where is he?’

‘Abed, I assume.’

‘Then I’ll wake him up.’

‘No need,’ Jack said. ‘We shared half a jug of small beer in the back room.’

‘And?’

‘He said it happens. On occasion, when the stone’s active, spirits that manifest in the crystal can be… fetched out of it and into the air.’

‘Astral forms?’

‘Apparitions. Creatures of the air. The scryer must never allow himself to become distracted by them. That’s their aim, he says. To distract him. All they seek’s attention. His, anyway.’

He gestured back up the street and I followed him back towards the church. We stood in the shadow of the coffin gate, where Jack put the lamp on the ground.

‘Elias has a reputation, going back to days as a novice at Wenlock Priory. Up towards Shrewsbury?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where he… caused some concern.’ Jack paused, sniffed. ‘Visions.’

I said nothing, and he began to rhyme them off, without emphasis, as if listing ingredients for a stew.

‘Holy martyrs stepping from the stained glass. Noises in the night. Words mysteriously etched on the walls of locked chambers. Cracks in statues. Well, this was the time of the Reform. Not what anybody wanted, then. So when the abbot finks about maybe having him exorcised, he’s off. Takes to the road. Where the gift of vision, once kept under the board, becomes his living.’

‘Evidently a good one.’

‘When he fetches up in London, sure.’

‘Where he has patronage?’

If he was recommended to Jack by a chaplain to the Bishop of London, might that not mean he had the protection of the bishop himself?

‘Somebody’s looking out for him, that’s for sure,’ Jack said.

I picked up the lantern and asked, because I had to,

‘What did you see this night? What did you see in the ingle?’

No reply. Back down the street, some man was retching.

‘Jack—’

‘Ah, how can we ever know?’

‘What did Elias see in the crystal?’

‘Wasn’t a ring, that’s for sure. Look, he wouldn’t talk about it and I didn’t want to come over too pushy. He says it don’t matter what he sees, he never questions it. He’s only the middleman.’

‘And you saw…?

‘Me? I dunno… bones? Hazy grey man-shape, wiv bones. I didn’t like it.’

‘Marked?’ I said urgently, before I could stop myself. ‘Marked here?’ Snatching up the lantern, holding it to my face and raising fingers to my cheeks. ‘And here?’

‘Keep your bleedin’ voice down. Marked how?’

‘Black lumps. As seen in places where sheep are farmed, wool gathered…’

Hell, I knew this was a far cry from scientific inquiry, that the last thing I should do was prompt him. But I was tired and overwound.

‘Who you got in mind, Dr John?’

‘There was a man I met in Glastonbury. A trader in what he claimed were holy relics. But they were just old bones. He had hundreds of bones. If they were digging up a graveyard for more burials he’d be there with his bag. In the end, he was able to give me the intelligence I needed about the bones of Arthur. This was just before he died. Of… of wool-sorters’ disease. Face full of foul black spots.’

Benlow the boneman. I recalled, with a sick tremor, how this man, an obvious buck-hunter, had tried to attach himself to me. Never thought I’d meet a man as famous as you, my lord.

‘He wanted to come to London. Wanted me to bring him back with me. I… may have… implied that this would be possible.’

‘You made a bargain wiv him?’

‘I suppose I was in his debt. But if he thought we had a bargain… it was one I couldn’t keep.’

Benlow crouching amid the smashed shelves of his grisly warehouse, having attempted, in his agony, to take his own life by cutting his wrists and his throat, but too weak. Dying eventually surrounded by the detritus of death, the bones he’d offered for sale as relics of the saints. A rooker in every sense, but in the end I’d felt pity for him and some measure of guilt.

And now he haunted me? Wanting me to know he was there, even though I could not see him – worse, it seemed to me, than if I could. The injustice mocked me daily – the learned bookman, heaven’s interpreter, cursed by a poverty of the spirit. I knew more about the engines of the Hidden than any man in England, but I could not see except, on occasion, in dreams.

And maybe in a scryer’s crystal?

I looked up at the night sky, in search of familiar geometry, but it had clouded over and there were neither stars nor moon.

‘Jack… erm… did you, by chance, ask him…?’

‘Where one might be obtained? A shewstone? Course I asked him.’

‘But?’

‘It ain’t simple, Dr John. And it ain’t cheap.’

Brother Elias had said there was always a few around, but most of them were of little value to a scryer, full of flaws and impurity. The more perfect of them were hard to come by and cost more than a court banquet.

‘And might be dangerous,’ Jack Simm said.

‘How?’

‘For a novice, he meant. The more perfect ones have been used by men of power. A man what’s never scryed might find himself driven into madness. It would take a man of knowledge and instinct to… deal wiv what it might… bring into the world.’

‘Hmm.’

‘A responsibility. Laden wiv obligation – his words.’

‘Of course.’

‘Like to a wife,’ Jack said. ‘You must take it to your bed.’

‘Go to!’

‘I’m telling you what he said. There must needs be a close bond ’twixt the crystal and the scryer, so you might sleep wiv it under your bolster. Bit bleedin’ lumpy, if you ask me, but monks is fond of discomfort.’

There was logic here. Crystal possesses strangely organic qualities; crystal spheres change, grow, in response to unseen influences. The stone in the Faldos’ hall this night, the way its colours changed, the way it seemed to tremble or crouch like a toad…

Ripples in my spine.

‘Oft-times you don’t choose the stone,’ Jack said. ‘The stone chooses you. He said the right one might come along when you ain’t looking for it.’

‘And does he have one he might sell?’

‘Reckons he’s offered crystal stones wherever he goes, but most of ’em’s flawed and there’s – aw, Jesu, I could see this coming a mile off – apart from his own, there’s only one other he’s coveted in years. Odd that, ain’t it?’

‘Go on…’

‘The kind you don’t find anywhere in Europe. Maybe a treasure from some ancient people of the west. A history of miracles and healing. But the man who has it, he’ll want a fair bit more gold than Brother Elias could put his hands on. And Brother Elias, if I don’t insult you here, Dr John, is a richer man than you.’

‘Jack,’ I said sadly, ‘you are a richer man than me. Where did he see it?’

‘Abbey of Wigmore. Not a long ride from Wenlock, out on the rim of Wales. That’s where he said he seen it.’

I did know of this abbey. It was close, in fact, to where my father was born. Dissolved now, of course.

‘Was it your impression that Elias might be an agent for whoever has the stone?’

‘Could be. Told him I was inquiring for a regular customer. But I reckon he knows.’

‘He was certainly asking questions about the extent of my wealth,’ I said. ‘Maybe he thinks I keep it abroad.’

‘Whatever, it don’t give me a good feeling. He ain’t a rooker in the normal sense, but it’s all too much like… coincidence and fate.’

I knew what he was saying, but I was in a profession which dismissed neither fate nor coincidence, only sought the science behind them.

‘Who owns the stone?’

‘He was being close on that, but I had the impression it was the last abbot. Gone now, obviously, and the abbey passed through the Crown and into private hands long ago.’

‘Easy enough to find out whose. But the abbott – is he even in the vicinity any more?’

‘Blind me, you don’t bleedin’ listen do you, Dr John? You could sell your house and put your mother on the streets and you still couldn’t afford it. I don’t understand none of this. I don’t see why the scrying stone – any scrying stone – is suddenly become so important for you. They’ve been around forever. Why now?’

Above the coffin gate, a single planet – the great Jupiter, inevitably – had found a hole in the nightcloud, as if to remind me of my insignificance and the pointlessness of concealment. I could sit on the truth of this matter, keep it to myself, take it to my grave…

‘Because— Oh God, because the study of its properties, notably in the matter of communion with angels, was… suggested to me.’

‘By whom?’

‘Is it not obvious?’

Jupiter seemed to pulse as if sending signals to me and was transformed into the sun in the pure glass of a tall window in a book-lined chamber at the Palace of Greenwich, where a light, merry voice was asking me had I thought of this, and had I looked into that?

‘Bugger,’ Jack said. ‘That’s all you need.’

I hear the French king consults one owned by the seer, Nostradamus, which is of immense benefit in planning campaigns. And winning the support of the angels. Do you have a shewstone of your own, John? Will it give us communion with the angels?

Well… obviously, I do, Highness, and intend to spend some time assessing its capabilities, but…

Perhaps worth more attention, John, don’t you think?

‘Jesu, Dr John,’ Jack Simm said. ‘You really know how to put yourself between heaven and hell and a pile of shite.’

‘We all walk a cliff-edge,’ I said.

‘She’ll forget, though, won’t she? She got too much to worry about.’

I blinked Jupiter away. Of course the Queen would not forget. Unless by design, she forgot nothing.

‘Yea, well…’ Jack Simm tossed the heel of a hand into my shoulder. ‘Leave it alone, eh?’

‘I fear I shall have to,’ I said.

‘Good.’ He picked up his lantern. ‘It’s a wasp’s nest. Go to your bed and fink not of ghosts.’

I nodded, resigned. This was not a night to remember with satisfaction, not in any respect.

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘But—’

‘Just… piss off, Dr John!’

I nodded. Passed through the coffin gate to the churchyard and the path to our house.

Even made it up to the rickety, stilted terrace before turning around to make sure I was not followed by the sickly shade of Benlow the boneman.

How much easier we could all sleep, now that Lutheran theologians had assured us that, with the abolition of purgatory, ghosts were no longer permitted to exist.

VIII Favoured

THAT NIGHT IT rained hard and my sleep was scorched by dreams.

Lately, I’d been welcoming journeys through the inner spheres and would keep paper and ink at my bedside to write down their substance upon awakening. But these… these I made no notes upon, because I dreamed not, as I’d feared, of Benlow the Boneman…

…but – oh God – of Eleanor Borrow with her green eyes and her soft body so close that I could feel its eager heat and had thrown out my arms in a feral desire. One of the few dreams I’d wished never to awake from, even if it meant, God help me, embracing death.

But I had, of course, awoken at once, and Nel’s warm body was gone to cold air, as if she’d been no more than a succubus, some siren of sleep sent to taunt me. I may have cried out in my anguish. In the pallid dawn only the pain in my heart was real. For, since Nel in Glastonbury, I’d not lain with a woman. And, before her, never at all.

It would have been wrong to feel a bitterness about this, for my waking life had been given over to study. My father had not oft-times been a wealthy man. He’d been proud to see me at Cambridge at the age of fourteen and, in order to repay him sooner, I’d eschewed strong drink, carousing and even sleep.

And now my poor tad was disgraced and dead and, while my scholar’s knowledge of mathematics and the stars had brought me some small fame in the universities of Europe, in England I was regarded by many as little more than—

Jesu! I rolled from my bed in a rush of anger.

—as little more than a rooker myself. I had few friends, not much money and no wife.

And oh, how my perception of this last condition had changed. The hollow emptiness of the single man’s life was something I’d never felt before my time with Nel. A constant raw longing which, for virtually all my sentient years, had applied only to knowledge.

Dear God, what am I become?

At the breakfast board, my mother said, ‘The hole in the roof that you attempted to mend last week is a hole once more.’

Holding up the painted cloth which had hung in the hall. Soaked through, now.

I closed my eyes, with some weariness. She’d probably been up since well before dawn, preparing sweetmeats with Catherine, her only servant. Making sure the house was as fit as ever it could be to welcome the woman closest to the Queen.

Hardly for the first time, I felt a strong pity for my mother. Something in that terse letter had told me it was unlikely that Blanche would even leave her barge this day. Just as with the visits of the Queen, all my mother’s work would be wasted.

‘It’s been a summer of endless rain,’ I said, ‘And I’ve never pretended to be any kind of builder. Builders are… men we should employ. When the money’s there.’

‘When the money’s there’ – My mother’s voice was flat – ‘you buy more books.’

I tore off a lump of bread. It was true enough. But I needed books, and all the knowledge therein, and more. All the knowledge that was out there. Needed to be ahead of the others, or what hope was there for us?

‘Another winter’s coming.’ My mother pulled her robe close about her and came out with what clearly had long been in her mind. ‘By the end of the summer, I’d rather expected you to have been… favoured.’

There could be no happy reply to this. I suppose I also had expected… well, something, by now. Not necessarily a knighthood – Sir William Cecil, as the Queen’s chief minister, inevitably would advise against the ennoblement of a man still considered by many to be a common conjurer.

What I needed, far more than social status, was a secure supply of money. Oft-times, the Queen had sent for me and would receive me pleasantly, and we’d talk for two or more hours about the nature of things. If she truly valued what I provided, both as an astrologer and a cabalist, then surely something with a moderate income would not be out of order… something to replace the rectorate of Upton-upon-Severn, awarded by the short-lived King Edward only be to taken away in Mary’s time.

More than a year and a half had passed since Elizabeth’s coronation, held on a day calculed by me, according to the stars, as heralding a rewarding reign. And such, for the most part, it had been.

Until the death of Amy, wife of Dudley.

I rose, brushing a few crumbs from my fresh doublet and the ridiculous Venetian breeches my mother had had made by a woman in the village. There was nearly an hour to spare before Blanche’s barge was due, but, almost certainly, she’d be early. A severe and efficient woman, my cousin, and usually disapproving of me.

Until she wanted something.

My mother had insisted I should be at the riverside over half an hour before the royal barge was due to arrive from Richmond Palace. But, as I had no wish to draw attention to what I guessed would be a discreet visit, I used the time to go to the inn to leave a letter for the post rider.

My dream of Nel had reminded me of the journeyman mapper, John Leland, who might have been her father, and I’d gone into my library early this morning and taken down his Itinerary to confirm that Wigmore Abbey was within a few miles of my tad’s birth-home, Nant-y-groes. With this in mind, it had seemed worth writing to my cousin, Nicholas Meredith, who lived in the nearest small town.

I’d never been to the town or met Nicholas Meredith but had received a letter of congratulation from him after the Queen’s coronation on the date calculed by me – this being widely spoken of at the time. We’d exchanged a few letters since, so I felt able to ask him, in confidence, if he knew anything of the present whereabouts of the former Abbot of Wigmore, whom I wished to consult on a matter of antiquarian interest.

It had been madness to lie to the Queen about owning a shewstone and the only fortuitous aspect of the current turbulence at court was that she hadn’t asked me to bring it to her. Yet.

I hear the French king consults one owned by the seer, Nostradamus.

Hmm. It seemed unlikely that the crystal consulted by the well-favoured and undoubtedly wealthy Nostradamus would be the kind of minuscule, flawed mineral that I could afford. I’d wondered if I might see Brother Elias at the inn and if it might be worth revealing my identity in hope of learning more about the Wigmore stone. It was a relief, I suppose, to find he’d gone at first light. Which left only one other man in London who might know of the stone or at least be able to direct me to someone who did. Maybe I could see him tomorrow – for at least I knew where he was.

The river lay brown and morose under dour cloud, wherries busy, as I waited at the top of the stone steps. A black barge was moored where the beer had been loaded yesterday, several men sitting in it as if waiting for cargo. But the river traffic was nearly all London-bound. No sign of flags or the glint of helm and pike blade. Nor, I guessed, would there be.

My poor mother. I looked back towards the house, my only home now, and thought I marked her face, all blurred in the window of her parlour. River water lay in shallow pools around the stilts supporting the parlour and hall. Far from the most distinguished dwelling, this, even in Mortlake.

Saddening to think that several properties had once been owned by my father, who had first come to London as a wool merchant, progressing to the import and export of cloth. This was before his appointment as gentleman server to the King, who also made him packer of goods for export – and that paid a good income. Oh, an important man, my tad, for a while. Until the financial collapse which left him with a cluster of riverside outbuildings bought cheaply and linked together to form a most eccentric dwelling which yet looked temporary.

From the river steps I could see, to one side of the house, the orchard and the small pasture rented for crumbs to William Faldo. It was yet my aim to use part of it to extend the house for further accommodation of my library – consisting at this time of two hundred and seventy-seven books, many of them the only editions to be found anywhere in England. I’d offered them to the Queen and to Queen Mary before her, for the foundation of a national library of England. But a monarch would ever rather spend money on war than learning. Unless, of course, it was the kind of learning that might effectively be used in war.

One thing was sure. If there was no improvement in my situation, then, God help me, I might have to sell books to repair the roof and find work teaching the sons of whichever of the moneyed gentry were prepared to employ an infamed conjurer.

‘Dr Dee?’

Two men had climbed from the black barge at the river’s edge and were approaching the steps. I was fairly sure I knew them not and made no reply.

‘Sent to fetch you, Doctor.’

‘Oh?’

Naturally, I was wary. I’d heard of men who’d been taken aboard such vessels as this, robbed and killed for their valuables and their remains thrown in the river. And no, the irony was not lost on me.

I didn’t move. When the first of them reached the top step, I saw that he was young, small-bearded and well-clad, in rusted doublet, high leather boots and good gloves. He looked impatient.

‘The circumstances of your appointment have now been changed, Doctor.’

‘My appointment?’

He let a low breath through his teeth.

‘Mistress Blanche… has been called away to attend to the Queen’s majesty but expects to be free to speak to you by the time we reach Greenwich.’

‘I see.’

‘Well then…?’

He stood aside, extending an arm to where his companions and the oarsmen waited in the black barge. I had no choice but to follow him down the steps. At the bottom, he stood back while I boarded the barge, and then leapt in after me, and the oarsmen pushed us hastily from the bank.

Too hastily, it seemed to me. I yet felt all was not right and stood close to the bow of the vessel.

‘Sit down, please, Doctor,’ the young man said.

It sounded more like an instruction than an invitation, but there were good cushions to sit on. Though hardly luxurious, this clearly was not a cargo barge, and I was not alarmed until, as we moved downriver towards the steaming midden of Southwark, it was steered sharply away from another barge coming out of London towards Mortlake.

This one had no flags, but there were at least seven armed men aboard. And one woman, subduedly cloaked and gazing ahead of her.

When I thought to hail my cousin and half-rose, I heard movement behind me and, twisting round, I saw the first man reaching to his belt.

‘Either you hold your tongue at this moment, Dr Dee,’ he said pleasantly, ‘or I must needs slice it off at the root.’