The Heresy of Dr Dee (11 page)

‘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

A
LREADY, 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.’