The Heresy of Dr Dee

IX The Summoning of Siôn Ceddol

Autumn, 1560. The Welsh Border.

MY FATHER GREW up in a modest farmhouse below the hill called Brynglas, at Pilleth on the border of England and Wales – the Welsh side.

The house, Nant-y-groes, is now the home of Stephen Price who, until recently, was Member of Parliament for this area, thus spending much time in London. More than was necessary, if truth be known, for Master Price was much taken with the excitement of London life and, on his increasingly infrequent returns home, would tend to find the place of his birth rather dull and – for the first time – strange.

Now he’s home for good. Fighting the drabness of his life with ambitious plans for his farm, but finding that life at Pilleth soon brings out the negative aspects of his essentially choleric temperament.

He’s dismayed, for example, when the village men won’t help him build his new barn. He has – intentionally, perhaps – forgotten how, below Brynglas, even the most commonplace activity is oft-times governed by custom and ritual.

‘I can’t,’ he says, when Pedr Morgan, the shepherd, tentatively offers him advice. ‘I’m supposed to be— I am the squire.’ He twists away. ‘Anyway, the boy’s the lowest kind of idiot. I can hardly be seen to consult an idiot before initiating something as fundamental as building a barn.’

Master Price likes to use some of the longer words he picked up in Parliament. This will not last.

Pedr Morgan shrugs his scrawny shoulders, no doubt wishing he were somewhere else – this is common on Brynglas at twilight.

‘It’s just what he does,’ Morgan says, uncomfortable. ‘You knows how it is.’

‘I know how it was,’ Master Price says with resignation. ‘Well, my thanks to you, Morgan, but I’ll have men brought in from Off. Local boys don’t want my money, that’s their choice, ennit?’

Pedr Morgan nods. He won’t press the matter and won’t be telling anybody what Master Price has said about Siôn Ceddol. Has no wish to stir up resentment against his master, but, hell, it must be some Godless place, that London. Sodom and Gomorrah and London, that’s how the new rector puts it. The rector’s this bone-faced Bible-man, and he doesn’t like Siôn Ceddol either, and that’s not good at all… for the rigid attitudes of a bone-faced Bible man will never bend.

Stephen Price stamps irritably away, and Pedr Morgan, thin and tired, most of his hair gone before its time, looks down to where his wife is waiting by the bridge with their three young children. She won’t follow him up the slope of Brynglas at close of day, any more than she’ll pass the earthen grave of the old dead. Even the sheep flee this hill before sunset.

And Price knows all that, at the bottom of him. But he’s been away too many times. He’s seen the shining towers of the future, and the future looks not like Pilleth. None of the fine towns he’s seen on his travels has risen out of old fear and clinging superstition. This can lead only to a mortal decay – the decay that Pilleth wears like a rancid old coat which no one must tear from its body lest the body itself falls away into rotten strips.

Pedr Morgan raises a hand to tell his wife he’s coming down, then turns briefly towards the church of St Mary, set into the hill halfway up, and crosses himself as he always does.

Except when the rector’s there.

I suppose I too was inclined to be dismissive and superior when my father spoke of his birthplace, putting on the accents which, he would say, might vary from country English to country Welsh within a mile.

For I was younger then and deep into my studies of Mathematics and Greek and the works of Euclid and Plato. Convinced that all knowledge and wisdom came from the Classical world, long gone. Unaware of the rivers of the divine and the demonic which rush invisibly through and around places like Pilleth.

And I suppose my tad’s fond memories of the border were shaped around the knowledge that he was unlikely ever to be going back.

A month has passed. Stephen Price has new cattle in the lower field, the first frosts cannot be far off. Yet only foundations for the new barn have been dug – painfully and laboriously by himself and his sons, assisted fearfully by the servants at Nant-y-groes.

To his fury, Price has failed to recruit skilled labour in Presteigne, the prosperous assize town a few miles from here – every man he’s approached claiming an obligation to work elsewhere or some affliction that renders him incapable of heavy labour.

It’s those great shelves of rock, found less than a foot down, that finished it. After three long days of struggle and the wrenching of a muscle in his back, he finally walks out to find Pedr Morgan, the shepherd.

Grumpily requesting him to talk to Mistress Ceddol about the employment of her damned brother.

He says nothing to his wife who, during his time as an MP, preferred to live down the valley with his older brother’s family. Joan doesn’t like it here and probably hopes that all his plans will fail so they don’t have to stay.

On the morning Siôn Ceddol comes, the land appears luminous, the shaven hay-meadows all aglisten from the rain following a thunderstorm which broke over Radnor Forest in the early hours, awakening the whole wide valley before dawn.

The strangeness soon becomes apparent to Stephen Price. It’s as though the summoning of Siôn Ceddol has set into a motion some ancient engine.

People come, as if to prepare the way. First to appear is the new Rector of Pilleth, full-robed and carrying his prized copy of the New English Prayerbook. Arriving at sun-up, he stands alone in the shorn grass, the prayer book open in his twiggy hands. His lips are seen to be moving although his voice is so hushed, rapid and intense that nobody hears the substance of it. Approaching him, as he knows must be expected of him, Price is wishing to God that Father Walter had not died when he did. Father Walter was no papist but he understood the ways of Pilleth.

The rector’s look would turn fresh apples black.

‘That you, of all men,’ he says, ‘would bend a knee to Satan…’

‘And you’d have all my cattle dead by Christmas, would you, Rector?’

‘If God wills it.’

If God wills it, Price thinks, feeling his face redden, likely we’ll have a new rector by All Souls Day.

Stephen Price stands his ground. For all he dismisses superstition, he carries no candles for a God with all the pity of a Norman baron.

After a few minutes, the rector throws back his bony head and, with the book under an arm, walks stiffly away in the direction of the hillside church. At the same time, villagers begin appearing on the boundaries of Stephen Price’s ground, like the risen dead.

‘Master Stephen… he’s yere.’

The housekeeper, Clarys, at his elbow. A woman who was at Nant-y-groes long before Stephen Price and may even have been known to my tad. Clarys nods towards the lower gate that gives entrance to the Presteigne road and the river bridge. Two figures stand behind it, male and female.

Stephen Price raises a weary hand towards the gate and beckons once before thrusting the hand away, embarrassed. When the two people pass through, one is walking an irregular path, watching the ground, like a dog responding to a scent.

It’s the first time Stephen Price has seen Siôn Ceddol. He doesn’t even know how the boy and his sister came to be in Pilleth village. They seem to have arrived during one of his periods in London, the mad boy apparently receiving the blessing of Mother Marged, the wise woman, before her death.

Through the sunhaze, he marks a scrawny boy of some sixteen years, wearing an ill-fitting jerkin and a red hat. When the boy reaches the platter of land on which the barn is marked out, he stops and turns the hat around on his head and sniffs the air like some wary animal. Never once looking at Stephen Price or anyone, and when he speaks it’s only to the woman with him and is neither in English nor Welsh, but some language of his own which ranges from mumbling to screams and yelps, like to a fox. Price has been told that many people believe this to be a faerie language.

Yet are drawn to him, it’s said, like night-moths to a taper. Already the people on the southern boundary hedge number twenty or more, watching the idiot boy pacing rapid circles in the grass.

‘This is madness,’ Price mutters.

Drawing a sharp look from the one person here who appears to understand what Siôn Ceddol is saying.

Anna Ceddol, the boy’s sister. Who speaks both English and Welsh and also, it seems, faerie. She’s approaching twenty-nine years and unmarried – because of her brother, obviously. An old maid in waiting. Their parents are dead, she’s all he has. And who would have the mad boy?

And so no one has her. Which is a crime against all creation, Price thinks, marking how lovely she is, in a way not of her class. Head held high, hair brushed back and eyes wide open, unafraid to the point of insolence.

‘What’s he doing?’ Stephen Price demands of her.

Speaking roughly, no doubt to ride over a surging of desire – as Siôn Ceddol teeters on the edge of the nearest of the foundation trenches and then jumps down into it.

‘Wait,’ Anna Ceddol says. ‘If you please, Master Price.’

And so they all wait, Stephen Price and his sons behind him and his servants behind them, as Siôn Ceddol’s red hat is seen bobbing along the top of the trench, suggesting that surely he can only be crawling along the bottom.

I was not, of course, there, but I can feel the air, as I write, all aglow with trepidation and awe. And an unnatural excitement – the soul of a village briefly lit by the glow of its disease. After some minutes, the boy emerges crawling, like to a spider, from the trench. Kneeling, he takes the hat off his tousled black hair, beating it against an arm and then turning it in his hands as if to make sure it’s clean of mud before replacing it on his head.

‘Ner,’ he says.

His bottom lip thrust out, sullen.

‘Nothing there,’ Anne Ceddol tells Stephen Price.

The boy has stepped back from the trench and now walks towards the beginnings of another, his hands splayed in front of him, stiffly at first and then aquiver, as he reaches it. It’s not a warm day – few of those this summer – but the sun is well aloft and lights the shallow trench as he drops into it, then disappears from sight, and there’s the sound of scratting, and a mist of earth flies up.

‘Fetch him a scratter.’

Stephen Price tosses the instruction to his eldest son, annoyed that he can’t take his eyes away from the place where Siôn Ceddol disappeared. When a trowell is produced Anna Ceddol accepts it and takes it to her brother and returns to Price.

‘Thank you.’

She stands so close that her beauty must be disturbing the hell out of him. Can’t avoid marking the form of her breasts, where her overdress is worn thin. The dress is the colour of the soil-spatter thrown up from the trench before a screech like to a barn-owl drives the people back in a panic of excitement.

And now Siôn Ceddol’s on his feet again, his face lit with a broad, pink grin.

Though not, it must be said, as broad as the grin of the earth-browned human skull now held up, clasped tightly between the boy’s eager hands to keep the jaw attached.

Weeks hence, when his barn is built and the summoning of Siôn Ceddol is raised one market day in the new Bull Inn at Presteigne, Stephen Price may be heard making dust of it. How the idiot boy was putting on a show of searching the ground, foot by foot, when he knew all along where the bones lay… having, Price is convinced, buried them there the night before. Either him or that sister of his who oft-times disturbs Price even more and in ways he’d rather not tell you about.

Well, he says in the Bull, to Bradshaw and Beddoes and Meredith, en’t as if they’d have had difficulty finding bones on Brynglas. Like to a charnel house this year.

‘An omen, they’re saying, the villagers. Like the weather. A reminder.’

Bradshaw eases his weight upon the bench and farts.

‘Don’t they know of the capture of this man Gethin? Is that not a good sign for them?’

‘Hell, no.’ Stephen Price almost laughs aloud. ‘It’s another sign that it’s all coming back, the blood and the fire, and they’re unprotected.’

‘Well, it’ll be good for us,’ Bradshaw says. ‘They’ve never recognised us in the west, as the county town. Now we’re settling their score for them.’

Stephen Price says nothing. Bradshaw’s from Off. Crossed the border to swell his fortune. He thinks wealth is the balm for all wounds.

Price buys more wine he can ill afford this year, to dull the fears that chatter in his head like the restless sprites that he’s sure no one he met in Parliament believes in. Blanking out the image of the skull the boy found. One eye-hole twice the size of the other, where the blade went in.

The night before last, Stephen Price woke in a sweat from a dream where he saw a man lying, all cut about, on his back, in his own blood, on the side of Brynglas Hill, with another man standing above him twisting the squat blade of his pike round and back and round again in that left eye while the dying man screams to heaven.

Price drinking harder to drown out the voice of the new and forbidding rector, the narrow, white-faced man arching his spine, peering into his face, asking him, Master Price, why do you let the devil have rein in Pilleth?

X Begins in Joy

THE COLD RAIN was lashing us by the time I was led to the scaffold.

More rickety than the last time I’d been here, some of the frame hanging loose. It might bear the weight of a man, but not for long. Clearly had not been used for some time, and its poor condition seemed in keeping with the rumours I’d heard.

‘Why did you not say where we were going?’

Angry now, but the man in the rusted doublet ignored my question, as he had every one since we’d left Mortlake. We passed under the scaffold to the front door, opened as we reached it, by an armed servant.

And then up the stairs. I knew the way. The owner used to call it his cottage. It was three storeys high and now had several new-made windows taller than a man. When last I’d been here, builders had been intensively at work on the scaffold, seemingly engaged on turning this into the finest house on the Strand. But rumour had suggested this might not be the London home of the secretary of state for much longer.

‘Was to have been another large window in the master bedroom by now,’ the secretary said mournfully when I was shown into his work chamber. ‘Foolish of me to wait for fine weather in a summer like this.’

‘Anything else, Sir William?’

The man who’d brought me loitered in the doorway until Cecil raised a dismissive hand from the folds of his drab robe.

‘No, no, thank you, Fellows. I’ll send for you when Dr Dee’s ready to leave.’

‘No need,’ I said curtly. ‘I’ll hail a wherry.’

Cecil peered at me.

‘Sit down, John?’

I stayed on my feet, behind the proffered chair. The usual mean coal fire smouldered in the hearth behind me and the rain rattled the panes. Whenever I was here, there would be rain.

‘If I’d refused to step into that barge, Sir William, would they have brought me here in chains?’

Cecil’s guard-dog eyes widened fractionally.

‘You think chains would have been necessary to restrain you? Taking more exercise nowadays, is it?’

‘Bigger books,’ I said. ‘Higher shelves.’

He didn’t laugh. For Cecil, banter was never indulged in for its own sake, only to grant himself more time to think. I noticed he’d put on more fat since last I’d seen him, as if to make himself harder to shift. Fewer than forty years behind him, but you’d have thought at least fifty.

‘John, I regret that we haven’t spoken a great deal since your return from Somerset with the, ah… remains of King Arthur.’

‘The Queen—’ I cleared my throat. ‘The Queen believes it was Dudley’s mission. I was there to hold his bridle while he resolved matters.’

I wouldn’t normally have passed this on, but I was tired of being undervalued and thus underpaid and guessed that, for the first time, this man, who had survived service to three successive monarchs, would begin to understand.

‘Oh really,’ Cecil said mildly, ‘What else would you have expected?’

There was considerable tension this year between Cecil and Dudley, whose star had grown brighter in the royal firmament than Venus at dawn. Cecil, meanwhile, had been deemed a disappointment for his failure, in negotiations with the French, to regain Calais for England. This had ever been unlikely, but the idea that it was even possible had been put into the Queen’s head by… Dudley, of course.

I said nothing. The word was that Cecil had felt himself abused to the point where he’d tendered his resignation to the Queen. But then Amy Robsart, who had become Amy Dudley, had died and something had snapped like an overwound crossbow.

Cecil went to sit down behind his trestle. The great window’s lower frames were barricaded from outside by the builders’ scaffold, but when he leaned back, tilting his oaken chair on two legs against the sill, at least half the spires of London were, once again, at his elbows, blurred by rain.

‘John, would you happen to know why Mistress Blanche wanted to see you?’

‘Would you?’

‘I might.’

‘However,’ I said, ‘when she – and, presumably the Queen – find out that you physically prevented the meeting taking place, as arranged—’

‘She’ll simply realise that you didn’t receive the letter. I gather it was left with your mother, you being absent at the time.’

How the hell did he know all this?

‘Having gone off on one of your… expeditions in search of the Hidden.’ Cecil leaned forward until the front legs of his chair met the floor. ‘Do you want to know what this visit may have been about, John?’

And what was I supposed to say to that? Cecil half stood to pull off his bulky black robe, revealing a doublet in what was, for him, the somewhat frivolous colour of charcoal. He tossed the robe across the wide trestle in front of him.

‘Now sit down,’ he said.

The people of the Welsh border take a long path to the point. My father loved to explain that this was because, in an area ever riven by conflict between the Welsh and the English, they would need to know precisely where a visitor’s allegiances lay before entrusting him with even the most trivial intelligence.

I’d oft-times marked this approach in the manners of Blanche Parry, who retained her accent, but was inclined to forget that the family of William Cecil – from whose tones all trace of Welshness had long ago been smoothed – had once spelled its name Seisyllt.

‘Did you know Amy Robsart, John?’

‘I wouldn’t say I knew her. She tended not to come very much to town.’

An understatement. The Queen was not exactly approving of wives brought to court, or even to London. Especially Dudley’s wife, obviously. In the absence of a Dudley country mansion, Amy had spent most of her married life as a guest of various friends of her husband. A dismal existence.

‘Met her once,’ I said. ‘On one of her rare visits to Dudley’s house at Kew.’

‘And what thought you of her?’

At last I sat down. Truth was I’d thought Amy quite beautiful. Also intelligent, lively and warm. In my view – was this treason? – as a wife, the Queen would not quite compare. God help me, I’d even caught myself, wishing that circumstances had been such that I might have met her before Dudley.

‘You’re blushing,’ Cecil said.

‘Heat of the fire.’

Cecil laughed.

‘What a waste, eh, John? As I oft-times think about a carnal marriage—’

‘Starts in joy, ends in tears?’

Cecil frowned. I’d gone too far.

‘A perceptive saying of yours oft-times retold,’ I said, in placation.

He made a steeple of his fingers. His own first marriage may even have been a carnal union, but his second one, to the severe Mildred, could only have been founded on a need for reliability and circumspection. Cecil was a man long wed to his career.

‘Do you know when he last saw her alive?’

I did but said nothing, remembering something else I’d noticed at my one meeting with Amy. While she was – of necessity, no doubt – fairly compliant, there was a certain equality in her union with Dudley. She was not nobility, merely the daughter of a country squire, yet seemed in no awe of the son of the Duke of Northumberland. To his credit, he seemed to like that about her.

‘It was over a year ago,’ Cecil said. ‘Over a year before she died.’

‘A long time.’

Too bloody long.

‘Distance,’ Cecil said, ‘can bring about a cooling.’

‘Sometimes.’

I’d never have left Amy for even a week. When I was called to Europe, I’d have taken her with me.

‘Let’s not walk around the houses, John.’ Cecil let his hands fall flat to the trestle. ‘I was ever fond of Robert Dudley, but never deluded about the extent of his ambition. He wants the highest role possible for a man not born to it. His whole life has been a play performed for the Queen. Whose side he’s scarce ever left.’

‘And she wished him away?’

Cecil was silent. Poor Amy’s fate, in these circumstances, saddened me more than I could say. The inquest had been opened three days after her body was found at the foot of a short stairway. And then adjourned sine die. Nobody knew how long before the jury would reach its verdict but when it came it seemed likely to be one of Accidental Death.

Nobody to blame. I pointed out to Cecil that Dudley had gone to great pains not to be seen as having or attempting to have an influence on the jury, calling for men who were unknown to him to serve on it.

‘Unknown? Is that what you think?’

I said nothing. Dudley had sworn to me his wife’s death from a fall had been a bitter shock to him, and I’d very much wanted to believe that. Although he’d said, on an earlier occasion, that she’d shown signs of unhealth and once had told him she might not have long to live, I’d refused to accept the dark stories, dating back some months before her death, that attempts had been made to poison her.

‘Not that it matters.’ Cecil half turned away from me to peer out over the shiny roofs of London. ‘The Queen herself is young, impulsive and will remain’ – Cecil swung round of a sudden to turn his mastiff’s gaze on me – ‘conspicuously besotted with a man now infamed and likely to remain so for the rest of his life.’

‘But if the inquest verdict clears him of blame—’

‘It doesn’t matter what the inquest verdict is. Enough men hated him before this to make even his return to court a slight against all decency. As for the thought of a Queen of England wed to a murderer… how does that play across the capitals of Europe? And if the Queen thinks everyone here will forget, in time, then she’s not as close to the mind of her country as she likes to believe.’

‘I don’t…’ I was shaking my head, ‘I can’t believe that Dudley’s a murderer.’

‘Well, not directly, no.’ Cecil spread his hands. ‘No one’s suggesting he planted his foot in her spine and kicked her down the bloody stairs. But whether he ordered it to be done, in his absence, is another matter entirely. Never be proven, but what’s that worth in Europe? Especially if, after however length of time, the Queen does something blindly foolish. She’s had suitors of her own standing in France, Spain, Sweden… and keeps them at arm’s length. At home, she has the Earl of Arundel waiting with his tongue hanging out…’

‘No hope for him, surely?’

‘I know there’s no hope, you know there’s no hope, but the old bladder peers blearily into the looking glass, sees a face twenty years younger and tells himself it’s only a matter of time before the Queen sees the sense of it.’

I nodded in wry agreement. It was well-enough known that Cecil’s own choice as a husband for the Queen was the Earl of Arran. A resident of France from a Scottish family with no love of Elizabeth’s cousin, Mary, the Queen of Scotland, who was also, since her marriage, Queen of France. In terms of a lasting peace in the north, Arran had much in his favour and would be a satisfyingly severe blow to French hopes of putting Mary on the throne of England.

But the lure of a carnal marriage. Twin souls since childhood. The power of the heart…

‘The Earl of Arundel would have had Dudley dead years ago,’ I said. ‘Or so it’s said.’

Cecil let a silence hang and the rain ceased as if he’d commanded it.

‘Arundel’s too old and too vain, but he’s hardly alone,’ he said at last. ‘Think of Norfolk. Think of those who conspired to get John Dudley topped and now fear Robert’s vengeance if he’s in a position to wreak some. Let me be honest. If he’s betrothed to the Queen, no matter how long after his time of mourning, Dudley must needs be looking over his shoulder all the way to the altar. Indeed, if a messenger was to come knocking on my door now with news that he’d been cut down… or shot… or skewered in a crowd…’

My hands had tightened around the seat of my chair. The rain had begun again.

‘Why are you telling me this?’

‘What did Mistress Blanche want with you?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Oh, come now, John. Who does the Queen trust more than Mistress Blanche to conduct business of a highly personal nature? And what personal business might concern you, as a long-time friend and confidant of Robert Dudley?’

‘I don’t know, I can’t—’

‘Think you not that the Queen might wish you to perform, in secret, a similar task to the one you did before the coronation?’

The sound of rain against the good glass panes was like to a cackling laughter. I felt my heart lurch.

‘You mean… she might want me to choose, by the stars, a day that’s mete for…?’

‘A royal wedding,’ Cecil said. ‘Indeed.’

XI Dark Merlin

BY NOW I’D learned that Cecil never ventured an opinion without a degree of secret certainty. It was said that his ambitious young fixer, Walsingham, had agents at court who didn’t even know of each other. Spies who spied on spies.

I leaned back, gazing at the window. London had misted, the steeples no more than indents on a bedsheet.

A terrible logic here. The Queen, for all her will and vigour, was ever indecisive, changing her mind three times in as many hours. Would make a firm decision then sleep on it and awake uncertain again. Dudley was no longer someone to play with. She would have accepted that the urging of her heart would not be enough. Might well seek some indication of heavenly affirmation, the design of destiny.

Might seek a date, however many months hence, which the stars found fortuitous for the announcement of a betrothal which at present would be abhorrent to so many.

Behind me, the coal fire hissed as rainwater dripped down the chimney. I took in a slow breath.

‘How does Blanche feel about this?’

Cecil smiled and made no reply. Which may have been an answer in itself. Blanche was a cautious and watchful woman who only lived to keep the Queen secure. No wonder she hadn’t turned her head this morning as her barge had glid past.

‘If the Queen’s determined on this, then she’ll try again to have Blanche reach me,’ I said. ‘What then?’

‘That, John… is precisely why we’re having this discussion.’

‘I can’t refuse. You know I can’t.’

‘Of course you can’t.’

‘And if what Dudley says about the coincidence of their times of birth is correct, then their destinies may indeed appear interwoven.’

‘Oh, please.’ The trestle groaned as Cecil leaned forward. ‘I have no doubts about your ability in this regard. Which is why I don’t want you and your fucking charts within a mile of the Queen at this time.’

‘I see.’

Cecil leaned back, folding his arms, giving me silence in which to consider my situation. I recalled how, on our return from Glastonbury, I’d been summoned here and shown a pamphlet handed out free on the streets. It was heralding a second coming – the birth of the child of Satan, the Antichrist, in the new black Jerusalem. Which was London, the fastest-growing city in Europe.

False prophecy originating from France, seedbed of the campaign to put the Queen of Scots on the English throne. I myself had been named as some kind of dark Merlin, canting spells at the lying-in of Queen Elizabeth, pregnant with the bastard child of Robert Dudley. Elizabeth, daughter of the adulterous witch, Anne Boleyn. They were now saying that the Queen – thanks, some said, to the magic and prayers of the French prophet and magus Nostradamus – had miscarried the babe. But the devil would not give in so easily.

I said at last, ‘What would you have me do?’

Cecil rose and put his robe back on, like a judge about to pass a hard sentence.

‘As I see it there are two approaches to this problem. One is for you to spend some time with your charts and return with the information that the stars at present are frowning on the prospects for a union of two people born under their particular signs.’

‘Which, as I’ve already said—’

‘Would be unlikely, yes.’

‘Sir William, I spent more than a year teaching mathematics and the elements of astrology to Dudley. One of the subjects he showed most interest in. What I’m saying is that to convince Dudley – and even the Queen, who’s far from ignorant of planetary movement – that the stars disapprove of their match—’

‘Or might better approve of them under some heavenly configuration not due to take place for… say, five years?’

A lot could have happened in five years. The Queen’s infatuation might have lost some of its fire. Or equally it might be proved beyond all reasonable doubt that Dudley had not killed his wife. Who could say?

I shrugged.

‘If it was not the answer she sought… I’m far from the only astrologer in England. All it needs is for one of them to go to another and my competency would be called into question. Also my integrity and all of my past work, and worse than that—’

‘All right. We’ll go no further down that road. Examined and rejected. This leaves the second path… from which you disappear.’

Cecil rose, sweeping his robe behind him, and picked a single lump of coal from the scuttle with tongs and dropped it on the fire.

‘I mean on one of your ventures in search of the Hidden. We spoke of this earlier. Wouldn’t be the first time, would it? Were you to be gone even for a matter of weeks, that might be sufficient.’

‘Oh.’

I felt a momentary relief. For one instant in time, I’d thought he’d meant that it was to be permanent, and the air betwixt us had seemed, of a sudden, cold with menace.

‘Do you have a matter of, ah, science, requiring your specific and immediate attention?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

‘Preferably in some place at least two days’ ride from London.’

Dear God, this man thought he could move anyone around, like a chesspiece, to suit his purposes.

Which, of course, he could. After a period when his advice had rarely been sought, Amy’s death looked to be putting him back where he was certain he belonged. And maybe he was right; I could think of no one at this time who was fit to replace him.

Replacing the tongs, Cecil went back to his chair.

‘Methinks this expedition of yours should begin at once. Would you agree?’

‘Sir William—’

‘Which means you won’t be lying at your mother’s house tonight.’

‘But my mother—’ I rose to my feet. ‘My mother has need of me. The fabric of the house wants repair, the roof leaks.’

I’d used this one before, but it was no less true for that.

‘Your skills extend to roofing, John? I’d hardly think so. But we’ll see to all of that. I’ll have a number of men dispatched to Mortlake to mend whatever needs mending. Your mother will scarce know you’re missing.’

He was right. My mother would be in delight.

Bastard.

‘My barge will take you back briefly to collect your bag, but I’ll want you away by nightfall.’

‘That’s impossible.’

‘Two days, then. Maximum.’

‘Sir William, if the Queen thinks I’m making distance between myself and—’

‘My problem, not yours. Two days. And stay out of London, meanwhile.’

The discussion over, Cecil rose.

Enshrouded in a damp dismay, I stumbled out onto the cobbles and knew not which way to turn. The Strand, once the home of senior churchmen, was now rosy with the new brick of London’s richest homes. Not a place which the secretary, his building work yet incomplete, would want to leave.

The rain had stopped and the brightening sky had brought out the chattering wives of the wealthy with their servants and pomanders, though this was hardly an area where nostrils might be assailed by the stink of beggars. Amongst the throng, I espied the unsmiling, unseasonably fur-wrapped Lady Cecil, out shopping with their two glum-faced daughters. Suspecting she’d be among those who considered me little more than a common conjurer, I turned back to walk the other way and thus glimpsed a man discreetly sliding through Cecil’s doorway.

Dark bearded, dark clad and instantly admitted to the house. Unmistakably Francis Walsingham, the Oxfordshire MP known to serve the Privy Council on a confidential level. A coolly ambitious man whom I was more than inclined to mistrust. The very sight of him made me wonder if I were followed and I pulled down my hat, threw myself into the crowd and then slipped into an alley, where I stood with my back to the rain-slick brickwork and found myself panting.

Fear? Very likely. I’d persistently refused the offer of Cecil’s barge, recalling the man who’d been beaten, robbed and drowned. If it could happen once this year, then it could happen again, and who’d question it?

You think me suffering from some persecution sickness? All I can say is that you weren’t with the secretary this day. A man who’d felt himself slipping into the pit and now was scrambling back up its steep and greasy sides.

And was, therefore, less balanced and more dangerous than ever he’d been.

I thought of Dudley, once his friend, fellow supporter of Elizabeth from the start. And then Dudley, drunk on his status at court, unable to do wrong in the Queen’s eyes, had seen himself as her first advisor, damaging Cecil. Now Dudley was sorely damaged and Cecil would seize his chance to…

…what?

Thrusting myself from the wall, a sweat on my brow, I followed the alleyway into another, this one ripe with the stench of rotting meat. I waited, listening for running footsteps above the distant bustling and chattering, the barking of dogs, the cries of street traders, the grinding of cartwheels and the clacking of builders’ hammers on brick and stone.

No one coming. I walked on, through the mud and stinking puddles, across an inn yard and along a mews, with its more friendly stench of horseshit, until I saw the glitter of the river.

I stood beneath an iron lamp on its bracket, Cecil’s voice in my head.

Do you have a matter of, ah, science, requiring your specific and immediate attention?

There was a man I would have visited on the morrow.

On the morrow, I was now commanded to be out of London.

I walked, with no great enthusiasm, out of the mews, to hail a wherry to take me not to Mortlake but across the river into Southwark’s seething maw. Not a place I’ve oft-times visited, having little taste for gambling, whoring, bear baiting or street-theatre. But, then, I didn’t have to go far after leaving the wherry.

A solid building close to the riverbank, like to a castle or my old college in Cambridge, but still a place I feared, like all gaols, as a result of having myself been held in one. At the mercy, as it happened, of the man I now thought to visit.

But… there are gaols and gaols, and it might have been Jack Simm who once had described the Marshalsea as the finest inn south of the Thames.

Now the official residence of the former Bishop of London, known in his day as Bloody Bonner.

XII Blood and Ash

SHUTTING THE DOOR behind us with his heel, he set down his jug of wine on the board and then rushed to clasp my right hand.

‘John, my boy…’ Letting go the hand, stepping back and inspecting me, beaming. ‘And, my God, you’re still looking like a boy. Some alchemical, eternal youth thing you’ve contrived?’

In truth, I must look as worn and weary as I felt. I removed my hat. He was just being kind.

Yes, yes, I know. Kind? Bishop Bonner? I still could barely look at him for long without recalling some poor bastard’s crispen feet, black to the bones in the ashes of the kindling… or the savage flaring of hell’s halo as the hair of another Protestant took fire. I’d oft-times wondered how many nights Bonner might lie awake in cold sweat, accounting to God for all the public burnings he’d ordered during the years of blazing terror after Mary had restored the Roman faith.

How many nights? Probably not one. Even now, in a bright new reign, when stakes were used more for the support of saplings, he seemed to believe that there’d been a moral substance to what he’d done. How could I possibly have grown to like this monster?

‘And what think you of my dungeon, John?’

His grin displaying more teeth than he deserved.

‘It’s not the Fleet, is it?’ I said.

Bonner sniffed.

‘You might think it looks not unpleasant, my boy, but you aren’t here when the brutal guards come at nightfall and hoist us in chains from iron rings on the walls.’

Inevitably, I looked up at the conspicuously unbloodied walls until his laughter seemed to crash from them like thunder. Haw, haw, haw. Then I heard a key turned in the lock on the door and spun around.

‘Don’t worry,’ Bonner said. ‘They lock me in for my safety. I’ll see you get out. Before the week’s end, anyway.’

I smiled cautiously. We had history, Bishop Bonner and I. When first we’d met it had been in my own cell, back when I was falsely accused of working magic against Queen Mary and also of heresy. The good man I’d shared it with was already become cinders and even though I’d overturned the primary case against me in court I’d no cause to believe I’d escape the same end.

But Edmund Bonner had been curious about my reputation as a scholar of the Hidden. Wanted to know what mystical secrets I might have uncovered at the Catholic university of Louvain.

And so, against all odds, I’d been allowed to live, even serving for a time as his chaplain – the inevitable guilt that haunted me tempered by the discovery that, just as Bloody Mary was said to have been surprisingly soft-hearted, Bloody Bonner had a learned and questing mind and was – God help me – good company.

‘Wild tales abound,’ he said, ‘of what you and Lord Dudley found in Glastonbury.’

‘Can’t tell you about it, Ned. You know that.’

‘Pah.’ He waved a hand. ‘It can be of no consequence now, anyway. As long as dear Bess was happy with you.’

She was far from happy with Bonner. Yet, even now, all he had to do to regain his freedom was to recognise her as supreme governor of the Church. While admiring his steadfast refusal, I guessed that, in his own mind, he already was free. Only the bars outside the window glass were evidence of a prison. Almost everything else was recognisable from the cramped chamber he’d occupied while under house arrest at his bishop’s palace: the chair and board, the looking glass and the books on the shelf, with Thomas Aquinas prominent.

Yes, it was fair to say the Marshalsea had not the squalor of the Fleet – none that could be seen, anyway. Established to confine maritime offenders, it now also housed debtors and those convicted of political crimes… and thrived upon a strong foundation of corruption. Prisoners with money could buy good meals and wine, and others without money were allowed out by day to earn some to hand over to their gaolers.

For Edmund Bonner, it was a life of no conspicuous discomfort. He’d expressed joy at my visit, offering to entertain me in the cellar where wine was served. But there were too many of his fellow prisoners in there, some with their wives who came and went unchallenged, especially if they brought money. Impossible for us to talk with confidence here so, taking with us a jug of wine, we’d gone upstairs to his cell.

There was a stool for me to sit on, while Bonner, clad in the robe of a humble Franciscan monk, poured wine for us.

‘I was told’ – eyes aglint with mischief as he stoppered the jug – ‘that after the demise of Dudley’s poor, wretched little wife had become known, the Queen would be seen around the court all in black attire—’

‘As was everyone at court.’

‘—with a dance in her step and a lovely, joyful smile upon her face that remained immovable for days. Is it still there?’

His own face – which, with his history, you might imagine moulded into a permanent rictus of hate – was, as ever, plump and benign as he handed me a cup and lowered his bulk to the edge of his pallet.

‘I understand that the smile,’ I said, ‘is now a little strained.’

He nodded, looking me steadily in the eyes.

‘I also heard that, some days before your friend Dudley was widowed, the Queen confided to the esteemed Spanish ambassador, Bishop La Quadra, that Lady Dudley would very soon be departing this life. Have you heard that, too?’

Yes, and wished I hadn’t.

‘When it first came to my notice,’ Bonner said, ‘I couldn’t help but wonder if it was you who’d happened to see this impending tragedy in the stars.’

I considered this unworthy of reply, but it didn’t stop him.

‘Because, as you must see, John, the only other possible explanation of the Queen’s foreknowledge of the death of Amy Dudley is that she was, herself, party to the disposal of the woman preventing marriage to her childhood sweetheart.’

‘There are many explanations,’ I said firmly, ‘and one is that the Spanish Ambassador is lying.’

‘A bishop of the Roman Church?’

‘As part of his campaign to win the English queen for the Spanish king – again.’

‘Well yes.’ Bonner nodded. ‘Indeed, it was my hope too that she’d see what God wanted of her and choose Philip of Spain for herself.’

‘Her sister’s widower? Was that ever truly on the cards?’

‘Was for him. And think of the benefits – we’d be back with Rome before the year’s end, and I’d be brought out of here in glory and made Archbishop of Canterbury.’

For a moment he looked almost serious and then a belch of laughter made his body rock.

‘In truth, I suppose I’ll die within these walls. Never mind.’ He took a slow sip of wine. ‘But methinks you didn’t come here to discuss the arrangements for my funeral.’

‘Or the marriage prospects of the Queen.’

‘Then what?’

I sipped some prison wine, which proved better than ours at home.

‘Wigmore Abbey,’ I said.

‘Where’s that?’

‘In the Welsh Marches. Not far from where my father was born.’

‘Ah yes. Of course it is. Or was. Is it was?’

‘So I believe.’

‘Never went there, John. Horrible journey, I hear. Best thing your father did, getting out of that wilderness, or you’d’ve been born into a life of penury and ignorance.’

He sat for some moments peering into his cup, then looked up and beamed.

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘It’s come to me, now. John Smart.’

I waited, guessing it had not come to him at all. It had ever been there, in the catacombs of his impressive mind.

‘Last Abbot of Wigmore. Got himself reported to Tom Cromwell, on a list of charges as long as my cock.’

‘What charges?’

‘As I recall… simony on a grand scale. Smart was littering the place with new-made priests. While also growing rich on the sale of abbey treasure. What a rogue the man was. Hunting and hawking with his canons. Poking maids and goodwives over quite a wide area. Ah… I see your ears are already awaggle.’

‘Abbey treasure? Gold? Plate?’

‘Doubtless.’

‘What else? Precious stones?’

Bonner frowned.

‘Methinks, before we travel further down this road, it would be as well for you to enlighten me as to our destination.’

I was hesitant. Bonner drained his cup and placed it on the board at his bedside.

‘John, I may have blood and ashes on my hands but I’m not known for breaking confidence.’

I nodded. What was there to lose? I took my wine over to the window, with its view, between bars, of the river, and told him what I knew about the shewstone of Wigmore Abbey.

I admit to being captivated by what I’d been told about this wondrous crystal with its history of miracles and healing. But talking to a cynic like Bonner could sometimes bring you sharply to your senses.

And the more I heard about the last Abbot of Wigmore, the more I wondered if he and the scryer, Brother Elias, were not, as Jack Simm had suspected, working together. Abbot Smart, an Oxford graduate, had been appointed Abbot of Wigmore by Cardinal Wolsey. Although there were rumours, Bonner said, that he’d paid for it. His rise had been rapid. In the years before the Reform he was also become suffragen Bishop of Hereford and accumulating endless money, most of it directly into his purse, by appointing over fifty candidates to Holy Orders.

‘Ho, ho,’ Bonner said. ‘What a holy knave the man was. Many attempts were made to unseat him, of course, but he always wriggled away, with the help of a small coterie of thoroughly reprehensible followers. While the abbey, both physically and morally, was rotting around him.’

‘But he escaped the dissolution with his life,’ I said.

‘And with a pension, for heaven’s sake! But then… who knows what favours he did for Lord Cromwell? A man who’d bend the law to have you hanged for stealing a spoon and sprung from a murderer’s death-cell if you were a friend he could use.’

If the shewstone was amongst his treasures, it seemed more than likely that he knew Elias and that both were well connected.

And well informed. In the right atmosphere, and with a good foundation, the power of insinuation is near limitless and may take on a life of its own. What had happened during our time in Glastonbury was surely talked about over a wide area of the west and beyond. It was not unlikely that Elias’s path had crossed with that of some fellow priest – even the garrulous Welsh vicar of Glastonbury – who had known of my passing association with Benlow the boneman. Unlikely, but not impossible.

‘You truly believe,’ Bonner said, ‘as a philosopher and a man of science, that it’s possible to achieve communion with the angelic hosts by means of a reflective stone?’

‘By means of celestial rays and the human spirit. There’s a long tradition of it.’

‘There’s a tradition of reading the future in the entrails of a chicken, John, but it still sounds like balls to me.’

‘Comes from a stimulation of the senses,’ I said. ‘Like to prayer and meditation in a church under windows of coloured glass, while the air is laden with incense. Sometimes a cloth is pulled over the head to shut out the world, so that, for the scryer, the crystal becomes luminous.’

Like to a small cathedral of light. I tried to find words to explain how attention to the light-play within the crystal might alter the workings of the mind, rendering it receptive to messages from higher spheres, and Bonner didn’t dismiss it.

‘But would you also accept,’ he said, ‘that a true mystic has no need of a scrying stone or any such tool?’

‘Of course.’ I looked over to where his rosary hung by the window. ‘But while a mystic accepts what he receives and dwells upon it—’

‘—you, as a man of science, must needs explain the process?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s how it is.’

Bonner smiled.

‘With which archangel do you seek to commune?’

‘Michael,’ I said at once.

His ancient sigil appearing in my mind, where I must have drawn it more than a hundred times in the past year, to summon courage and the powers of reason.

Which told me now to say nothing to Bonner about the Queen’s interest in communion with the supercelestial and the pressure upon me which would almost certainly resume when those deceitful mourning clothes were put away.

‘Methinks,’ he said, ‘that you imagine this stone might… awaken something in you?’

This would be the lesser of two admissions but I said nothing.

‘The great sorrow of your life,’ Bonner said, ‘is that you yourself, with all your studies and experiments, your extensive book-knowledge of ancient wisdom and cabalistic progression through the spheres are… how shall I put this…?’

‘Dead,’ I said. ‘Dead to the soul.’

Exaggerating, in hope that he’d contradict me.

‘Poor boy,’ he said.

I’d hoped he’d be able to tell me more, but all he could recall were this man Smart’s alleged crimes against both Church and Crown. Crimes for which, in earlier times, he would have roasted. The fact that he seemed to have survived suggested he knew men of influence.

So where was he now? Still at Wigmore? Bonner thought he might be able to find out if I could come back, say, in a week?

I supposed I could find accommodation in some part of London well away from the court and Cecil, but I’d forever be watching my back, and anyone, from a street-seller to a beggar, might be one of Walsingham’s agents.

And why would I take the risk of discovery for something I’d never afford?

I shook my head, Bonner regarding me from his pallet, a pensive forefinger extended along a cheek.

‘What else are you not telling me, John?’

Kept on shaking my head. I’d been drawn into circumstances I’d had no role in shaping. However the matter of Amy’s death and her own marriage was resolved, the Queen would remember that I’d not been here when she had need of my services. And Dudley… Dudley would also remember. If he survived.

… if a messenger was to come knocking on my door now with news that Dudley had been cut down… or shot… or skewered in a crowd…

I saw Cecil’s narrow, long-nosed face and dark, intelligent eyes, flecked, for the first time in my experience of him, with what seemed a most urgent need.

And then he’d said,

Were you to be gone, even for a matter of weeks, that might be sufficient.

For what? Sufficient for circumstances to alter so that Dudley’s marriage to the Queen was no longer a possibility…

… due to his death?

Was I mad to think thus?

‘Dudley, eh?’ Bonner said.

As if he’d tapped into my thoughts. I stared at him, startled.

‘Poor Dudley,’ he said. ‘Exiled from court, compelled to keep his burrowing tool out of the royal garden. Do you see him these days?’

‘I had… a letter from him, in which he told me that his wife may have fallen because her bones were made brittle through a malady in her breast. He’d spoken before of her illness.’

‘Interesting. I was told that the malady related to her humour. An advanced melancholy. Bodily, she appeared in good health… apart from the sallowness and loss of weight symptomatic of such a condition.’

‘Who told you that?’

‘Ah…’ Bonner shrugged. ‘You’d be surprised at the people who come and go from the Marshalsea. However, that’s neither here nor there.’

Something pulsed within me, and I knew what I had to do.

‘Ned, how do you get letters out?’

‘From here? There’s a guard who’ll collect them, for a consideration, and take them to a stable lad who, for another consideration—’

‘Nothing more private than that?’

‘An approach to the stableman himself is usually found safer for those of us allowed out of here. He’s at an inn round the corner. Offers a first-stage post-horse service. You want to send a letter?’

‘If you can spare me paper and ink.’

‘Where to? May I ask?’

‘Not far. Kew.’

‘He’ll do that by mid-afternoon. Paper and quill are in the box under the bookshelf. Sealing wax and ink, too. If it’s gone hard, add a little wine.’

‘Thank you.’

I sat down at the board with paper and quill and ink and kept the message short, asking only for a meeting. Bonner evidently didn’t feel the need to inquire who I was writing to, knowing full well who lived at Kew.

I sanded the ink and sealed the letter it with wax. He may not want to meet me at this time, but at least I would have tried.

‘I assume you know what you’re doing,’ Bonner said.

‘Not really.’

‘I’ll pray for you, then.’

‘Now I know I’m dead.’

But neither of us was laughing as I stowed the letter away in my doublet. Bonner arose and clasped my hand a final time and then brought out from his robe a single key with which he unlocked the door of his cell.

‘You have a key to your own prison?’

‘For reasons which escape me,’ Bonner said, ‘I yet seem to be less than popular in some quarters. It would not help the mood of the Marshalsea were I to be set alight in my own cell.’ He held the door open. ‘Good luck to you, John, in all your quests.’

‘Thank you, Ned.’

‘And should you ever come to possess the stone,’ Bonner said, ‘perchance you might bring it here one day. And we shall see what we shall see.’

I nodded and walked away along a short passage and down the stairs towards the darkness of the day.

XIII Court Clown

ALREADY, HE WAS saying, her ghost had been seen on those stairs at Cumnor Place. The little stairs, the too-short stairs.

‘All in white,’ Dudley said, ‘but with a grey light around her, like to a… a dusty shroud. Walking off the top step, gazing ahead of her and then… then she vanishes.’

His body stiffening as if to forestall a shiver, and then he was pouring more wine, as though to prove to himself that his hand was not shaking.

‘But never coming to me,’ he said. ‘Why not to me?’

He didn’t drink.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I never see them either.’

The weak sun had begun to fade into the river at the bottom of my mother’s garden. A garden which, like Dudley’s beard, was less tended these days. He looked hard at me, his skin darkening – stretched parchment held too close to a candle, as though the rage in him were burning through the grief.

Was it grief, or was there a suppressed excitement? How could I be sure? But the rage was ever there, and some of it might have been directed inwards.

He must have called for a horse the minute my letter had arrived. Five men had ridden with him to Mortlake – John Forest, his lieutenant, Thomas Blount, his steward and three men armed as though for war. Blount and Forest were in the old scullery, probably reducing my mother’s larder to crumbs, but two armed men were outside and one guarded the door of my private workroom, where Dudley and I now sat.

‘You know about these matters,’ he said. ‘If I murdered her, why’s she not haunting me?’

He spoke roughly, and then sat back, as if ashamed. Both of us silent now. Early evening light cowered in the murky glass behind my finest owl. Through a system of pulleys, this owl could flap his wings and make hoot but now stood like a sentinel in the small window.

‘Your men are all laden with weaponry,’ I said. ‘One with a firearm?’

‘You noticed that.’

Dudley rolled his head wearily, black hair still sweated to his brow from the vigour of the ride. The horses had been taken around the back, to what remained of our stables, but their arrival here would hardly have gone unobserved, and I knew I was imperilled by their very presence.

I said, ‘You’ve had threats to your life?’

‘There’s ever been threats to my life. I’m a Dudley.’

I’d met him just once since our return from Glastonbury. This was before Amy’s death, and he’d displayed a feverish hunger for life. It had seemed no time at all since his father, John Dudley, Earl of Northumberland, had hired me to teach his sons mathematics and astronomy. But, he was right, death and the Dudleys were bedfellows.

Robert Dudley was twenty-eight years old.

Five years younger than me, ten years younger than Sir William Cecil.

And of an age equal to the Queen. To the day, he’d claim. Even to the hour.

Twin souls.

Would he kill his own wife for her?

I’d stared hard at this question, night after night, and my most brutal conclusion was: yes, he might. If he scented destiny. If he saw himself as the only man who could save the country from France and Spain and a Catholic resurgence. If he thought Amy was ill and would not live long. If he—

Dear God, I must needs put this from my mind. I arose and went to the window, standing next to the owl, symbol of Athena, goddess of wisdom, and I’d rarely needed it more.

‘I was taken this morning to Cecil,’ I said.

Watching his fingers curl, the knuckles grown pale as I explained about the heralded visit to me of Blanche Parry and the act of near-piracy that had taken me to the Strand. And some of what I’d learned there.

Dudley drained his wineglass.

‘Cecil believes he’s doing what’s best for the Queen, but he’s fighting for his own future. And that, for once, makes him fallible. Vulnerable.’

‘And dangerous,’ I said.

‘You think he scares me?’

‘He should. By God he should.’

Seeing now that both these men were at their most dangerous. Each guessing that only one of them would come through.

‘Cecil’s served and survived, thus far, three monarchs,’ I said. ‘If I were a gambling man my money would not be on you.’

‘John, you don’t have any fucking money.’

I said nothing. The air was still. The first beating of horse-hooves had sent my mother, in a hurry, to the Faldos’ house. At one time she’d been impressed by my friendship with Dudley but now, although she never spoke of it, it was an evident source of trepidation.

‘Is it true,’ I asked him bluntly, ‘that Blanche had been sent to have me choose a date for your wedding to the Queen?’

A rueful smile.

‘Nothing so exact. It was hoped you might find some suggestion from the heavens that one match in particular might be… more propitious than any of the others. And… Yes, all right… that there might be a most suitable time to announce to the people of England a betrothal.’

He toyed with papers on my long board. The rough copy, made in Antwerp, from the writings of Trithemius of Spanheim, lay open next to some notes for my book of the Monas Hieroglyph which would explain in one symbol all I knew about where we lodged with regard to the sun and the moon and the influence of the planets. I’d been working on it, in periods, for nearly three years, knowing it must not be hurried.

I said, ‘Who hoped?’

‘What?’

‘Who hoped I might do these charts?’

Well, obviously, Mistress Blanche Parry would seek my services on behalf of only one person, but I wanted to hear him say it.

He said nothing. He lowered his head into his cupped hands on the boardtop and stayed thus, quite still, for long seconds. A man widely condemned as arrogant, brash, impulsive, never to be trusted… and I supposed I was heartened that he didn’t think to hide the less-certain side of himself from me.

At length, he raised his head, dragged in a long breath. The chamber was dimming fast around us. We might have been in a forest glade, with the owl watching us from the fork of a tree.

‘Very well, John,’ Dudley said. ‘Let’s get this over.’

What the hell had kept us friends? A fighting man and prolific lover who thrived on hunting stags and watching, with an analytical excitement, the baiting of bears by dogs… and a bear-sympathist who hunted only rare books and had lain with only one woman and could not sleep for the longing.

I spun away from the window.

‘You hadn’t seen her… for a whole year.’

‘John—’

‘You self-serving bastard’

Recoiling from myself. I rarely shout at anyone. Dudley bit off his response, sat breathing hard, his hands pushing down on the board.

‘Mercy.’ Holding myself together and banishing an image of Amy Robsart whom I feared I could have loved. ‘Yes, I do fully understand the Queen’s policy on wives at court.’

‘She wanted’ – he didn’t look at me – ‘to see me there every day. Every day.’

‘And every night?’

He was silent.

‘You told me you thought Amy was ill,’ I said. ‘You told me even she thought she’d die soon.’

‘That was what she said, yes.’

‘You brought a doctor to her?’

‘Several.’

‘Robbie… you ever think that was simply to test where your thought lay? See how badly you wanted her soon to be dead and out of the way of your ambition? Do you not think it possible that the only sickness she suffered was a malady of the mind?’

‘For a man of books, you seem to know a surprising amount about the ways of women.’ Dudley turned his head at last towards me. ‘Or was she ill because she was being slowly poisoned? I stayed away because I was having her poisoned and would rather not be there to watch it happening.’ Staring at me now, his eyes ablaze. ‘That’s what you think – I’d have my wife poisoned?’

‘I didn’t say that. You did.’

‘But one way or another I’m behind her death. Jesu, John, even I’d think I was behind it. Who had more to gain?’

‘Or more to lose.’

He said nothing. Would only have talked of twin souls, astrology.

Or all the dangerous marriages, any one of which might be forced on the Queen if she got much older unbetrothed. I was aware of a dark abyss below me.

‘You loved her once. Amy.’

Thinking that if there was any time he might leap up and strike me it was now. I didn’t step away. Would even, God help me, have taken the blow. But he didn’t move, except to lean back a little on the bench.

‘A squire’s daughter. And I was… nobody in particular. Not then. With ambition, of course, but in some ways just glad to be alive. Glad to have survived. We were happy. We were a pair. I… destroyed her.’

I stiffened. He was very still. The air was fogged on the cusp of night, Dudley’s voice toneless.

‘But I didn’t kill her. I didn’t pay anyone to kill her.’

This time I let the silence hang. I wanted to say I believed him, but the words would not quite come.

I could take this matter no further. Went and sat down opposite him and heard him swallow.

‘You know why Bess trusts you, John? Do you?’

I had no answer to this. I knew the Queen believed in me and what I did – she who’d learned eight languages, maybe more, and had once told me how she saw her reign as a magical period, framing a great tapestry of human progress.

‘I’ll tell you,’ Dudley said. ‘It’s because she knows that, for all your extensive knowledge of the vastness of things, you’re a simple soul without political ambition. You want only to buy more books. That so makes her laugh.’

‘I’m so glad,’ I said, ‘to be awarded the much-coveted status of Court Clown.’

‘God’s bollocks, John!’ Dudley bringing down a fist on the board, almost splitting one of its poor pine panels. ‘She has no fears about your fidelity, that’s all I’m saying. And knows she’ll get from you only the unwaxed truth as you see it… and that your vision’s far-reaching. And right now that’s worth a lot.’

So why doesn’t she pay me a lot? Or even anything.

Dudley looked at his empty cup, but I didn’t offer to refill it. Couldn’t anyway – we had no more wine.

‘Now tell me the truth,’ he said. ‘Why precisely did you ask to see me? What am I doing here?’

‘Because I would not have been able to live with myself if I returned to find you’d been—’

‘Returned from where?’ He looked up quickly. ‘Where are you going?’

I saw no reason to avoid the truth. I told him I must needs fulfil a promise to the Queen. In relation to her professed interest in scrying through a shewstone. Spoke aloud, it sounded almost foolish, but he, if anyone, would know that it wasn’t. He was already nodding.

‘She talked of that. She was… enthused.’

‘When was this?’

‘Not long ago.’

Avoiding my eyes, which seemed to confirm a long-held suspicion of mine that there’d been a least one meeting between Dudley and the Queen since Amy’s death. A guarded meeting, no doubt, away from court. Hooded figures in a palace garden, a covered barge on the river.

‘I told the Queen I’d acquired a crystal sphere. And would be working with it. And that I’d report back to her.’

I saw Dudley looking around the darkening workplace.

‘You won’t see one here,’ I said. ‘God knows, I’ve been trying to find one.’

Dudley began to laugh.

‘You mean one you can afford?’

‘The ones I can afford would probably be useless for my purposes. You’re right, I’m a clown. However…’

Told him, in some detail, about the crystal sphere last heard of in a former abbey in the Welsh borderlands. Finding I had his full attention.

‘So you don’t know if it’s still there and you’re fairly sure you wouldn’t be able to afford it, but you’re planning a long and arduous ride to find out?’

‘Haven’t decided yet. But the fact remains that Cecil wants me out of town for a while.’

‘You mean out of the reach of Blanche Parry. Can’t help wondering if Cecil wasn’t told about the plan to consult you by Mistress Parry herself – his fellow Welshie. Who may also disapprove of Bess’s taste in men. She’s polite to me, is old Blanche, but ever somewhat distant. Uncommon that, for a woman of whatever age.’

‘Robbie, she’s distant from me, and I’m her cousin.’

‘Cousin. Half of Wales is your cousin. Look at that bastard – isn’t he a cousin? The notorious villain, Thomas…’

‘Jones. Thomas Jones.’

‘Who robbed his betters on the road. Almost openly. Is he your cousin?’

‘Betrothed to my cousin, Joanne. And I don’t ask what he did or to whom. He was young then. Reformed now, anyway. A scholar, with a doctorate. And given a royal pardon.’

Dudley snorted.

‘Bess is quite ridiculously tolerant towards the Welsh.’

‘Perhaps because she is Welsh.’

‘She is not Welsh! Her grandfather was Welsh. Partly. So you think Cecil might try and have me slain, do you?’

The sky momentarily was shadowed by a flock of birds going to roost, the dimmed window glass turning Dudley’s fine doublet from its mourning indigo to black.

‘He likes you,’ I said. ‘But he might not shed tears over your corpse.’

His lips tightened, vanishing into his once-proud moustache, now straggled and uneven.

‘I… had a servant die, John. Couple of days ago. A kitchen maid. Spasms of the gut, and dead within an hour. I… ordered all the meat in the house taken out and buried.’

‘You’re thinking poison?’

‘If I died from it, people would say it was no more than divine justice.’ He stared up at me, his face twisting into wretchedness in an instant, the way a child’s does. ‘They can all say what the hell they like, now I’m exiled from court, and nobody visits me for fear they’ll come away soiled by second-hand guilt. Maybe’ – pushing himself back from the board, the bench-feet squealing on the flags – ‘you can summon Amy’s spirit into a fucking shewstone to tell us precisely how she died.’

Did I mark tears in his eyes? Finally? Tears for Amy? Tears for himself? Did he even know the difference?

‘What should I do?’ he said at last.

‘Not for me to say, Robbie. We’re acting on different stages now.’

‘You’re still my friend.’

I suppose I nodded, though I’d rarely been less sure of it.

XIV God and All His Angels

SHE’D BEEN IN a wild mood that day, the day not so long ago when they’d talked of knowing the future and having communion with angels. Red hair all down around her shoulders, the pale sun on her pale face, a faerie light in her amber eyes… and Dudley wanting her so badly that he’d fallen to his knees in the island garden at Richmond, burying his head in the grass ’twixt her feet.

Remembering now how she’d insisted that God and all His angels must surely be on her side.

Our side, Dudley had wanted to say, but didn’t. Telling me he’d been thinking of all they’d come through, both of them losing a parent to the block. Imprisoned side by side in the Tower, not knowing if they, too, would end up there.

But how will we know, she’d said, and he recalled her voice grown thin, when what we do fails to please them, and God and all His angels begin to turn away? How will we know when evil’s at the door?

‘Do you see?’ Dudley said to me. ‘Do you see where this goes?’

‘No,’ I said.

Although of course I did and was filled with a mixture of alarm and excitement, as Dudley arose and picked up the smaller of the two globes given to me by Gerardus Mercator, with whom I’d studied at Louvain. Holding it up to the last of the light, as if it were a symbol of his destiny.

‘Spirits,’ Dudley said. ‘A shewstone can bring forth spirits. Good spirits… evil spirits?’

I watched him slowly turning Mercator’s globe. Geography is one of my less-dangerous obsessions.

‘I’m a cabalist,’ I said, ‘and also a Christian. Therefore any spirits called into the stone by me must needs be touched by the angelic.’

‘Good enough,’ Dudley said. ‘So far. Go on.’

‘The Queen knows her reign could see the meeting point of science and the spiritual. A wondrous thing. If barriers are not raised against it.’

‘Ah… that old question of religion.’

‘Not an old question at all,’ I said ruefully. ‘When I was a boy, mystery was all around us. Christ was full-manifest in the Mass. Every baptism was an exorcism of evil spirits. The world vibrated with magic. And… and if men like me sought divine inspiration in the cause of making new discoveries, it would be a long time before someone cried heresy.’

‘Except possibly the Pope.’

I nodded sadly.

‘We get rid of the Pope, and what happens? In no time at all, we’ve gone too far the other way. Christ is not manifest in the Mass. It’s all theatre. Let’s strip it away, the new Bible-men cry, not for us to ask questions. The will of God is the will of God, and you either accept it or you go to Hell. You explore nothing. Jesu, I— I’m a Protestant, Robbie, I believe in the Church of England… and yet know it could take us back centuries.’

Both of us knew where the Queen stood on this. There would be no persecution of Catholics if they worshipped privately.

Or she’d be persecuting herself.

‘Tell me how it works,’ Dudley said. ‘The shewstone.’

‘I don’t fully know how it works. I know that planetary rays are drawn into the stone through ritual and the focus of the scryer, who must needs enter an altered state to perceive the flow of messages.’

‘If this French bastard Nostradamus can do it,’ Dudley said, ‘then you can do it.’

Dear God, I’d wish for a half of his confidence. I’d met Nostradamus just the one time and didn’t believe him a rooker. Not entirely. Envied him, I’d have to admit, for his standing at the French court and the monetary favours that came his way. The way he was venerated and left to experiment unmolested by Church or Crown.

‘We’re both reaching for the same things,’ I said. ‘Though my own feeling is that his prophecies are a little too… poetic. Not the best poetry, either.’

‘And shaped to the French cause.’ Dudley was yet nursing the globe. ‘This clever stone… does Nostradamus have one?’

‘Don’t know. He claims he’s a natural scryer who needs only to look into a glass of water to connect himself to channels of prophecy. But I’m a scientist and must needs have proof. Scrying stones have been around throughout history, but only now do we have the means and the knowledge to subject them to proper scientific study.’

‘What are we seeking here, John?’

We? I sought a careful answer.

‘Knowledge of the hidden engines that power the world? The workings of the mind of God?’

Jesu, that wasn’t careful at all, was it?

‘The mind of God, John?’

Dudley took breath in a kind of shudder, and I endeavoured to back away.

‘I just don’t believe we can do anything of significance alone. All great art comes through divine inspiration. Advances in science… the same.’

Told him what I’d gleaned from Bishop Bonner about the former Abbot of Wigmore, John Smart.

‘Bonner? You consulted Bonner? And the fat bastard’s going to keep his mouth stitched?’

‘I believe he will.’

‘You’re an innocent, John.’ Dudley shaking his head in feigned wonder. ‘All right, tell me about the mysteries of divine inspiration.’

I told him that while we could hardly aspire, either side of the grave, to a direct approach to God, there were… intermediaries.

‘Angels. Archangels – Gabriel, Michael?’

‘Just names, Robbie. Just names for whatever moves the celestial forces which make us what we are. Just names for the controlling—’

‘Good enough for me, John. How much does this man want for his stone?’

‘Probably more than I have in the world.’

I looked away in sudden apprehension, heard Dudley stand up.

‘But not, presumably,’ he said, ‘more than I have.’

Oh God help me… Shutting my eyes in dismay. Had this been what I’d been hoping for all along? Was this, in truth, why I’d writ the letter to him in Bonner’s cell?

‘All right, we’ll both go,’ Dudley said. ‘You and I. We’ll make a good bargain with this man, in the noble cause of expanding the Queen’s vision.’

We? The way we brought back the bones of Arthur?

‘Her stone,’ Dudley said. ‘Dedicated to the Queen’s majesty. But as you’re the only one who knows how to make it speak, you can keep it here and study it and caress it in your bed, whatever it takes, and bring it regularly to Bess at Richmond or Windsor. Present to her whatever you see within it. Or consider it advisable to see.’

What? I drew back across the chamber, hard against the door to the library, something twisted like a knife in my chest. I began to panic.

‘Robbie, we don’t know he still has it.’

‘We don’t? I thought you were of the opinion that the scryer had deliberately conveyed to your apothecary friend just enough information to tempt the infamous Dr Dee.’

‘What if it’s a rook?’

‘Then we have the abbot brought back and thrown in the Fleet. Jesu, John, I have to do something. I’m sick to my gut of confinement at Kew, everyone regarding me with half-veiled suspicion… barred from court for the sake of appearances. What’s the matter with you? Suddenly you don’t think yourself worthy to know the mind of God? Listen to me…’

It felt as if the surging of his energy was taking away the air, and I found it hard to breathe. A half moon, ridged by cheap glass, shone behind the owl, and Dudley’s voice rose in the darkness as if from the hollows of a dream. Talking of responsibility towards his heritage… all that his father had died for… the beheading of Jane Grey and all the other cruel deaths, the ashes of martyrs from which Elizabeth had arisen like the fresh and glistening spirit of a new age. Repeating her words from the island in the garden at the Palace of Richmond.

… how will we know when what we do fails to please them? How will we know when evil’s at the door?

And over this I heard the voice of Brother Elias, the scryer, repeating the exhortation of Trithemius of Spanheim.

‘… and whatever good gifts, whether the power of healing infirmities, or of imbibing wisdom, or discovering any evil…

Did I sense in Dudley this night a manner of madness? The haste with which he’d seized on this had made me wonder if truly he did fear for his life if he remained in London. Feared public assassination or a sordid, squirming death by poison. Or even a faked suicide. If so, what I’d told him about Cecil would scarce heighten his confidence of survival… unless…

Unless.

Across the board, his shape had almost gone to black and only the savagery of his smile shone through to show me he was afire.

Five days later, Sunday, as I returned, with my mother, from church, a letter was delivered to me by Dudley’s senior attendant John Forest who, along with Thomas Blount, his steward, seemed to have replaced his murdered servant Martin Lythgoe in the position of most-trusted.

The letter was to detail our itinerary, through Gloucester and Hereford, to the Welsh Border.

We shall be riding with a judge sent to preside over an assize court trial at Presteigne. In the border lands, in sombre attire, we should be inconspicuous in this company.

It seems likely the judge will be returning to London within a few days, which should give us ample time to conduct our business.

Until the company leaves, knowing of your problem, I should be glad to accommodate you here at Kew.

Please tell Forest if this is what you wish.

We were to travel with a judge on his way to preside over a trial? I guessed Dudley would be blind to the irony.

Still, it seemed a good and safe way to make the journey. Presteigne, county town of the new shire of Radnor, was within a few miles of my father’s old home, and my cousin Nicholas Meredith lived in the town. The invitation to stay at Kew also made sense, as long as I didn’t leave the house. And yet…

That evening, as the sun’s last amber strips tinted the river, I packed a bag with a change of doublet and my hand-scribed copy of the writings of Trithemius relating to the rituals of scrying.

Outside, Cecil’s builders, who had arrived this day to begin repairing my mother’s roof, were packing up their tools, loading them on to their cart. As it was pulled away, I stood in my workplace, next to the owl, feeling lost and solitary. Last night, I’d lain too long awake, trying to divert my thoughts from the coming journey by thinking of Nel Borrow who, in my mother’s eyes, would have made a most unsuitable wife – what Cecil would call, in contempt, a carnal marriage.

As distinct from the most dangerous of all marriages which beckoned Dudley. In writing to him from Bonner’s cell, I’d followed only my conscience, but was now become part of the engine which powered his determination to wed the Queen in the belief that it was right… for England and thus for the world.

Your Highness, the archangels Gabriel and Uriel both send their respects and what look to be dread warnings of what may happen if, to gratify the political ambition of others, you turn away from love…

Oh, you might think my part in it would be no more than smoke. For everyone who calls me a sorcerer there’s another who scorns me as a pretender to powers I don’t have. And they, God help me, may be closer to the truth.

Was I then supposed to remind Dudley that, for all my learning, I could not make the leap from the written page into the void? That the birthcharts I’d drawn were craft not prophecy, the dreams I’d so assiduously written down upon awakening were invariably mundane? That even the ghost which had travelled in my baggage all the way from Glastonbury to London was apparent to everyone but me?

That I was afraid to my gut that if we acquired the shewstone of Wigmore it would not speak to me?

And would that, anyway, stay his hand?

Last night, after my prayers, I’d told all this to Eleanor Borrow, wherever she lay. Nel, who would forever be a part of my past.

The full truth of this broke, as if the walls of our poor house were collapsing around me, and I stood with my back to the window and the owl and found myself to be weeping.