PART THREE
Although the semicircle of the Moon is placed above the circle of the Sun and would appear to be superior, nevertheless we know that the Sun is ruler and King. We see that the Moon in her shape and her proximity rivals the Sun with her grandeur, which is apparent to ordinary men, yet the face, or a semi-sphere of the Moon, always reflects the light of the Sun. It desires so much to be impregnated with solar rays and to be transformed into Sun that at times it disappears completely from the skies and some days after reappears, and we have represented her by the figure of the Horns.
Monas Hieroglyphica.
XX
Our Sister
‘Wife,’ Dudley said. ‘Seven children.’
The window glass was full of pinky light, the unwintry dawn creaming the sky like some sickly syllabub.
‘Five boys,’ Dudley said. ‘Two girls.’
This was a side of him I’d rarely seen. He sat, shivering in the cold and his anguish, on the side of his bed, still too weak to be out of it.
‘My father’s stable boy when I was young. Would, I swear, have died for my father – gone to the block in his stead. Loyalty, John. An immovable loyalty.’ He sucked in a hissing breath which must have pained his swollen throat. ‘The hell with Carew, if I find these bastards first, I’ll cut them down where they stand, piece by fucking-’
Then began to weep, knowing that, in truth, he couldn’t cut down a bed of reeds. His sword lay on the floorboards, half unsheathed as if he’d not the strength to draw it.
I stood up at the window, looking down into the high street, where the goodwives huddled watching men dismounting by the abbey gates: Fyche’s constables from Wells. They’d put Martin’s body, his insides on his lap, in an outbuilding at the abbey for Carew to inspect as soon as he arrived from Exeter.
I turned back to the pink-washed chamber.
Confession.
‘I sent him away,’ I said. ‘Yesterday. He’d followed me.’
‘Aye. Like a good hound.’
Dudley was sobbing, his shoulders aquake, and I sensed the murder of Martin Lythgoe all bound up, in the dark of his sickness, with the execution of his father and all the other dread memories of unjust killings he’d known in his score and six years.
At last, he looked up at me, without shame, through his tears.
‘With Lythgoe, there always had to be someone to watch over. After my father was gone, it was me. With me sick in bed, the poor bugger was looking out for you.’
‘And I sent him away.’
Fingernails piercing my palms.
‘Chrissake, John, how could you have known?’
Well, I couldn’t, but it didn’t matter. It was the circumstance. The fact that I’d dispatched this man to the most sickening and degrading of deaths because…
…because of some half-formed fascination with Eleanor Borrow. And you know the worst of it? The worst of it was that Dudley, being Dudley, would have understood.
‘Where did you send him, John?’
‘Back here. To… make sure you were drinking enough water.’
I know. I know. But if I’d told him about bidding Martin Lythgoe to find the farrier, he’d go dragging himself through the streets like a leper until he’d located the man himself.
‘I don’t remember.’ Squeezing his head. ‘Don’t remember him coming back. It was the last time I saw him and I don’t remember.’
‘You’d be sleeping. As you should be now.’
‘Can’t even…’ Head sinking into his hands. ‘Can’t even think. What… I mean, for God’s sake, what was Lythgoe doing there in the middle of the night? In the abbey?’
‘May not have happened in the middle of the night. He may have lain there some hours.’
How long for a candle to burn out? How long had the candle been? Or had someone else come along afterwards and stuffed it in his mouth? But only a madman would do that… and not possible, anyway, if the rigor had set in, jaws and teeth clenched tight.
‘And what were you doing there, John? What in God’s name took you to the abbey?’
‘Couldn’t sleep.’
‘You went out there alone… because you couldn’t sleep?’
As if he hadn’t done the same the previous night. Yet I was growing tired of lies and half-truths. I’d tell him, spell it out, the whole folly of it.
‘The abbot,’ I said. ‘They say the abbot doesn’t rest.’
‘Who says that?’
‘Cowdray. And if such a thing was there to be seen… I wanted to see it.’
Dudley stared at me. Reluctantly, I met his gaze.
‘For Christ’s sake, suddenly, everyone sees them. The Queen, you… everyone but me. There. A sorrowful admission from a half-man.’
From the street came the merry honk of a hunting horn, then a billowing of laughter. The blood was up, the chase was on.
‘Let me get this fully clear,’ Dudley said. ‘You went into the ruins intending to conjure the spirit of the last abbot?’
‘No! I don’t conjure. Don’t do that. I just wanted…’
Courage dying on me. Dudley slid back on to his pillow, staring up at the ceiling beams.
‘Do you know something? I think if I were a ghost, the very last man on earth I’d want to appear before would be John Dee. Walking all around me, peering and prodding and unrolling his measuring device and exhausting me with his endless questions about the condition of the afterlife and have I seen God yet and what does-’
‘All right.’
‘Or perchance you thought the spirit might conveniently point you in the direction of the bones of Arthur?’
Too close. I sat down on the stool under the window, said that I could only wish I’d gone there earlier, when Martin Lythgoe was yet alive.
‘What? So they could slay you, too? Where would that leave us?’
‘I might -’ wiped a hand across my unshaved jaw – ‘might’ve been able to-’
‘Display your mastery of the fighting arts? Throw a couple of heavy books at them?’
I said nothing. Dudley weakly raised his hands.
‘Forgive me, John, who am I to talk, weak as an infant born before time? God help me if I didn’t awake this morn with the sure knowledge that this whole adventure was no more than a scheme of Cecil’s to keep me out of Bess’s bedchamber long enough for him to talk sense into her.’
‘He’s alarmed by the gossip from France,’ I said. ‘That’s all.’
‘And who are the fucking French to lecture us on morals?’ Dudley’s head rolled back. ‘What’s this JP fellow say?’
‘Talks of devil-worship. But then, he’s a man who sees witchcraft and sorcery everywhere. He’s also thinking there are those with bitter memories of Leland’s list and its consequences for Glastonbury. Lives and livings brought
