The Heresy of Dr Dee

LVI From an Angel

HE REFUSED WINE, accepting small beer. There was a ring of blood around the pupil of his left eye.

No longer wearing mourning, though his apparel was of earth colours, he’d ridden alone to Mortlake, and I wondered if this meant he no longer feared for his life… or if he no longer cared. I wondered if he’d been shown the letter from Thomas Blount. I wondered if he’d tell me if he had. I wondered too much.

There was an unseasonably close air for that time of year when late afternoon and evening are become one and the traffic of wherries on the river is thinned. Dudley leaned back on the bench in my workroom, the long board betwixt us, his shoulders against the wall.

‘So you gave it back.’

Oft-times you don’t choose the stone, Jack Simm had said, reporting the words of Elias the scryer. The stone chooses you.

I didn’t remind Dudley of this: my feeling was that if that stone had chosen me it was not for anything good.

But it hadn’t, anyway. It had been given either as a bribe for my silence or…

I didn’t know enough about the properties of crystal, though I could almost feel its weight again, pressed against the bottom of my gut, the lower mind. Had my clumsy, if heartfelt, invocation of the archangel in some way altered its vibration? Altered me? For altered I was.

‘Smart’s scryer was Gethin,’ I said.

‘And that taints it?’

‘Who can say what was invoked through Gethin’s madness? Who knows what lived in him? You’d really want to risk loosing something… uncertain into the Queen’s—?’

‘All right.’ A gloved hand was raised, a frown flickering across Dudley’s damaged face. ‘I understand. I’m already accused of carrying some satanic spore, so I’ll bow to your superior knowledge of the Hidden.’

I sighed.

‘For the first time in years I’m beginning to wonder if I truly—’

‘You do.’ His bloodied eyes hardened. ‘Never forget that, or you’ll be begging on the fucking streets.’

I said nothing. Could only wonder if such a simple life as that might not be preferable. Too many things which my poor mind was unable to arrange into the roughest of geometric patterns. I was humbled. I’d lost all faith in the power of my library. I lowered my hands and stared into them, watching them tremble.

‘I suppose… another crystal stone will come. When I’m deemed ready. If ever.’

‘Gethin,’ Dudley said, ‘fixed me with his eye and said I’d be dead within the week, and instead… he is.’

I said carefully, ‘Did you see it done?’

‘Saw his body. Saw it loaded on to a handcart.’

Not what I’d asked.

A silence. The air was like sand.

‘I suppose,’ Dudley said, ‘that I owe you my life.’

‘Not me. Thomas Jones, perhaps.’

‘Tell me I don’t have to thank him.’

‘I doubt he’ll be holding his breath in anticipation. How are you now?’

‘Better.’

As good as his word, for once, John Smart had indeed provided, for Dudley’s recovery, a good bedchamber with window glass. But not at the Bull.

‘How you could stay with the doxy after what she…’

‘Branwen Laetitia Swift,’ Dudley said.

Almost fondly.

‘Did she give you a potion? Did she aid in your abduction?’

All this yet worried me. How could Smart, in his role as her fishmonger and former associate of Gethin’s, not have been part of it? The most likely explanation, it seemed to me now, was that Smart had not realised for a while how high the plot went. Maybe not realised that the target was Lord Robert Dudley, panicked when he found out. Let’s say I thought it was ill-advised and might rebound. On him and his comfortable retirement.

‘Who knows?’ Dudley said. ‘I was taken in the street. Hit from behind, thrown into an alley. Dragged out as if drunk. And then beaten, tied down in a cart.’ He drained his cup. ‘Don’t want to talk about it. It demeans me.’

Did it? I was inclined to think that now he was out of it, he found it perversely flattering, the lengths to which they’d gone. And that coming through it had strengthened his cause.

He’d remained with Mistress Swift until he was fit enough to mount a horse his broken arm still bound. Three days – Dudley healed quickly. And ever thought the best of women, and they of him.

‘She had new boots made for me,’ he said. ‘Man must’ve been working day and night.’

‘With a sheath in the side?’

We’d not discussed this. For all his soldierly training, I suspected this might have been the first time he’d actually fought for his life.

‘You’d taken out the blade after they searched you but before they stole the boots – as obviously they would, boots of such quality.’

‘Secreted the blade into my sleeve. It took a couple of painful hours, but eventually I had the ropes stripped to a thread. When the older man left us alone, it was the obvious time. The boy had been taunting me in his halting English. How they’d be cutting off my cock and what they’d do with it.’

‘So they knew who you were.’

‘Evidently. It delighted them. Lost count of the beatings.’ His jaw tightening at the memory. ‘When the moment came, the boy made the first move. When his brother hadn’t returned by first light, he was on his feet, blade out. I think he’d have cut my throat if I hadn’t snapped the threads and… Not at my best, I have to say, but with surprise on my side…’ He shrugged. ‘You seen Cecil since your return?’

‘He hasn’t summoned me.’

Nor had his muscle come to snatch me into a barge. Cecil’s silence had said all I needed to hear.

‘However,’ I said, ‘a royal barge did arrive this morning.’

‘Jesu!’ Dudley sat up hard, with a clacking of the bench-feet on the flags. ‘Bess?’

My mother also had wondered as much and had been driven into a panic.

I shook my head.

‘Blanche.’

My cousin. The Queen’s senior gentlewoman and closest confidante. A social visit. Much circumspect Border-talk with never a mention of either astrology or wedding dates.

Dudley leaned forward across the board.

‘You told her?’

‘Everything.’

Dudley expelled a long long breath.

‘Hell’s bells, John.’

‘Who better?’ I said. ‘She won’t tell the Queen unless it becomes necessary. But she might have words with Cecil.’

‘You clever bastard.’ He sat back, smiling again. ‘What about Legge? Did he know why he was sent to Presteigne?’

‘Only to an extent, I’d guess. He’d simply know his duty was to see that Gethin was acquitted. He’s not a fool. Had he asked too many questions, well… would he even have arrived back in London?’

‘How would he not, with several dozen armed men?’

‘It would take but one man,’ I said, ‘to smother him in his chamber during some overnight—’

‘God’s bollocks, John! I always took you for an innocent.’

‘Me too,’ I said ruefully. ‘What will you do now?’

Soon wishing I hadn’t asked. In some awful way, fortified, convinced that God had brought him through for only one purpose, what he’d do was to continue as before, in pursuit of his life’s goal.

A spear of late sunlight lit the glass eyes of my finest owl, sitting stately on his window sill. The one that flapped his wings and said woo-woo.

As we walked down to the Thames, Dudley’s limp was barely perceptible; he stood tall again.

Oh, dear God.

‘Well, of course I won’t give up,’ he said.

I said nothing. The last barge of the day was returning empty to the Mortlake brewery as we went down the steps to the river’s edge.

‘Gather I’m to be honoured quite soon.’

‘How?’

‘Earldom. And if that doesn’t make me more of a candidate for Bess’s hand…’

‘Or it might be a compensation,’ I said.

‘Bollocks.’

‘You could waste your life.’

‘John.’ He turned to face me, his face half in shadow. ‘It is my life. It’s me or no one.’

‘She’s told you that?’

‘Had it from an angel,’ Dudley said.

When he’d gone, I sat on the top step and watched an olive mist floating over the water.

He hadn’t mentioned the letter from Thomas Blount. Even before this, I’d begun to wonder whether John Forest had even shown it to him. Perhaps Forest had been to Blount and cautioned against revealing intelligence suggesting Amy Dudley had been unfaithful to her husband and on the most intimate terms with her murderer.

That would most certainly demean him if it became public knowledge. And what would it achieve if Dudley knew? Murder by some Spanish assassin could never be proven now. There was little doubt that the inquest jury would return a verdict of death by accident.

Forest had perhaps reminded Blount that messengers were apt to be blamed. He himself had been embarrassed, on his return from Ludlow with twenty-five armed men, to find that Dudley was back in Presteigne and had commanded him, without explanation, to return to London.

My own greatest regret was that I’d not insisted on seeing Gethin’s body. I did not trust John Smart, who only wanted to protect his business and the reputation of Jeremy Martin.

While I had no doubt that Gethin was dead, I realised that he was only dead in the sense that his hero, Owain Glyndwr, was dead. No one knew where his body lay and perhaps no one ever would. Which would make a legend of him – stories told to children that he would one day return, this black sprite, if the spiritual defences of Brynglas were ever lowered.

And how could they be lower than they were now?

While Dudley had lain at the home of Branwen Laetitia Swift, Roger Vaughan and I had met with Bishop John Scory in the privacy of the church in Presteigne. Scory, with many threats and much bad feeling, was in the process of prising Matthew Daunce out of Pilleth and would choose his successor with care. The statue would be scrubbed and the church lightened with more windows.

Daunce, he said, would doubtless go to London where he had friends at the heart – if you could ever call it that – of the new Puritanism. I suspected his clerical career would rise. It was the way things were going.

Pilleth, however, would require spiritual ministry, of a more traditional kind. An old magic. John Scory asked my advice, as he had about the mysterious map of the world. I’d told him that Brynglas and its environs were no less mysterious to me now.

A lesson to be learned. I said I’d write in some detail to Scory when I’d given it more thought. It’s part of me now, that place, and I think I may have to return ere long.

After Siôn Ceddol was buried, not far from the church, I’d sought to persuade Anna to return with me to London, but had known it was unlikely. By Christmas I’d learn, in a letter from Stephen Price, that she was betrothed to a schoolmaster in Hereford.

Within three weeks of my return home, Thomas Jones came to Mortlake with my cousin Joanne, and we discussed these matters in some depth. I was intrigued to learn that five parish churches in the area of Pilleth and the Radnor Forest were dedicated to the Archangel Michael, which made me wonder if I’d not been drawn, that strange and tragic morn, into some archaic circus of power, long buried.

Who can say? Yet while the Wigmore shewstone remained there, I did take something away, which I was able to demonstrate to Thomas Jones… and hoped one day to show to the Queen in the gardens at Richmond.

The first instinct of it had been beside the tump, when the twig which had scored my head had twitched in my hand.

In my mother’s garden at Mortlake, I found forked twigs, of birch and hazel, with which, to my great joy, I was able to discover a new well betwixt our orchard and the church.

On another occasion, when Goodwife Faldo lost not a ring (thank God) but a copper brooch, I was able to find it for her – in the hedge by the road leading to the brewery – by walking with the twig held out before me and awaiting its response.

Feeling my wrists seized by an unknown force. Learning, by trial, that I should simply let it happen, for, when I tried to study how it happened, it would not. It was about… setting aside all intellect.

Several times, I’d swear that when my wrists moved I would look up and think I’d caught a bright bobbing movement over a hedge or a wall, like the progress of a red hat.

But, of course, this was in my mind, for I do not See.