many of us had feared we might never see again.
After all is said, should it not be man’s most ardent desire to see into the very mind of God? Does not God himself challenge us to interpret His art?
A silence.
Heresy, you whisper.
Burn him.
As they nearly did. A few years ago, in another reign – you may know something of this – I was close to being left as cinders upon a hearth of baked earth. Thoughts of it still sear my dreams, lie smouldering in my lower mind. The charges were manifestly unjust, but when did that ever matter?
Yet I survived, and now the wildfire of another dawn is kindled over the river, and I sit here in my mother’s parlour and throw up my hands – for what else is the charge of heresy but a brutal blindfold for the farsighted?
And I must needs set down what happened. Recount the whole bitter episode before it’s murked by memory and rendered impenetrable to the common man by my own exhaustive analysis – oft-times it being said that few can comprehend my writings, full weighted as they are with scientific terms, befuddled by diagrams and arcane symbols. The very tradecraft, some will say, of the devil.
So I’ll relate this story as simply and directly as it comes to memory. I shall not, as is my usual custom, carefully dissect and prod over each sentence or avoid what it tells of my inner nature… about what I was and what I am become.
But, before I begin, know this…
…there is a shape and pattern to it all. A universal geometry, the changing angles and rhythms of which, through mathematics and the study of the stars, we’re learning to calcule again, as men did in ancient times. Twin journeys: above and below, without and within. I try to chart them daily, whilst knowing that I am, in divers ways, no more than an onlooker.
And helpless.
For although some may have abilities like to the angels, yet they are not angels.
I’ve learned this, and in the cruellest of ways.
PART ONE
Yet some men say in many parts of Inglonde that kynge Arthure ys nat dede but had by the wyll of our Lord Jesu into another place, and men say that he shall com agayne and he shall wynne the holy crosse.
Le Morte d’Arthur.
I
Lest Graves Be Open
Mortlake, February, 1560.
My Mother’s only servant disappeared on the night we needed it least. The eve of the Queen’s visit. And of Candlemas.
Catherine Meadows had been a quiet maid. Efficient, demure and, more important, discreet. The first servant I’d let dust, or even enter, my library. Given the afternoon for herself, she’d left the house shortly before noon.
Less than an hour, this was, before the Queen’s messenger had come to alert us of her arrival here on the morrow. The Queen! God, my poor mother had gone wild: so much to do, and no servant to do it!
No more peace for me this day, then. By six, the moon was over the river, cold-haloed, and then came the first wash of stars, and still no sign of Catherine Meadows. Although I work best at night, when all is quiet, by half past eight I was obliged to close my books, douse my candles, unhook my long brown coat and venture into the bone-raw February night to inquire after her.
Maybe, in some inner vessel of my being, I had the inkling of an approaching menace. Who can truly say? I’ve oft-times wished such occult portents were more clear and direct, but – nature’s bitter irony – it’s rarely been that way for me.
A well-lit night – on the edge of a thaw, I felt, yet still hard as crystal. Hoar frost swelling the twigs and branches of our orchard as I walked out, without a lantern. Out towards the edge of the village and London town, calling first at a smoky old tavern, where I knew the man I sought spent an hour or so most evenings. But he was not amongst the drinkers this night, and hard-faced men were staring at me, so I slipped away and went further along the road to his cottage and found him there.
‘Ah, now, as it happened, Dr John, she come to me mid-afternoon. About her gran, Goodwife Carter – took bad.’
Jack Simm, once an apothecary, now my mother’s occasional gardener. His cottage, on the edge of a copse of oak and thorn, was strong-built and snug and far warmer than our house – unwise, therefore, to go in, lest I end up passing the whole night before his fire.
‘Bad how?’
We always fear the worst. Smallpox, usually.
‘Back trouble,’ Jack Simm said. ‘Bits of her spine took a walk, I reckon. Not my field, really. I left some wintergreen balm and give Cath a message to take to Gerald. The bone-twister?’
‘Who’s that, Jack?’ A woman’s voice from the firelit, herb-smelling interior. ‘Who’s out there?’
‘Dr John, Sarah. No problem.’ White-bearded Jack stepping out of the doorway, stained sacking belted around his waist, no boots. ‘You want me to ride out to their farm for you, Dr John? Won’t take-’
‘No, no. Too many robbers about. She’ll be back at first light, I’m sure. Go to your fire, Jack, and your wife. I’m sorry to have bothered you.’
But Jack Simm was pulling the door shut behind him and shambling out to join me at the roadside. Rubbing his hands together and wincing as he shifted from one unshod foot to the other on the frozen mud.
‘God’s bones, I’ll be bleedin’ glad to see some sign of a warming.’
‘Candlemas tomorrow,’ I said. ‘The first gleaming of spring in the olden days.’
‘Yeah, well, the sun was kinder in the olden days. Dr John-’ Clearing rough phlegm from his throat, lowering his voice. ‘There’s things I wouldn’t say in front of Sarah, a good woman but she gossips. Don’t mean to but she does. Here’s the truth of it. The Meadowses… A religious family, now. If you understand me.’
For the past two years, at summer’s close, Jack Simm had harvested herbs for me, including the small mushrooms which, when brewed, can bring on visions. We understood one another well.
‘The father,’ he said. ‘Always the bleedin’ father, innit?’
‘Hot gospel?’
‘Of an extreme kind.’
‘Is there another kind?’
Used to be only priests; now any man might think himself chosen by God as a device. Jack talked, in some dismay, of Abel Meadows – built like a chimney stack, Bible brandished as a weapon.
‘You mean he’s finally realised who his daughter’s working for,’ I said. ‘That’s what this is about?’
‘Comes here day ’fore yesterday, blethering about the end of time, like we got maybe weeks. Then he’s asking about the habits of Mistress Dee.’
‘ Mistress Dee? The bastard!’
‘I says, Master Meadows, I says, you’ll find that woman in church four times on Sundays and a good hour every weekday.’
‘True. Thank you. And, um… the son of Mistress Dee?’
