but it was hanging open, so…’ Looking up at me, skin white-gold in the haze of light. ‘How is he?’
‘Not yet well.’
‘Then he has need of me?’
Reaching for the black cloth bag at her feet on top of her folded black cloak.
Need… Dear God…
‘He’s sleeping,’ I said quickly. ‘And… and better in body, most certainly, than yesterday, thank you. Though much damaged by the murder of his servant.’
‘Yes, that was-’
She broke off. Only seconds after the thunderblast, lightning had flared again, like full day, in the glass. And then, on the sudden, as she flinched at the exploding sky, I saw in her eyes what had been so well hidden by her voice.
Her doctor’s voice, which would be well practised at smoothing fears in herself and others. But the green eyes… to me, in this moment, they were the wild eyes of a bewildered animal in a forest of predators. And I felt calmer for seeing them, for they surely were not a witch’s eyes.
The chamber had fallen dark again. Could it be that she had nowhere else to go but here that was safe from Fyche’s hue and cry?
But, truly, how safe was this place?
I said, ‘You’ve seen Joe Monger this night?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Nor this day at all.’
I nodded, feeling this to be the truth. Time, then, to hasten to the chase. Not that this was any kind of chase, for if I were a predator then she’d walked into my den.
Holding my robe together with my left hand, I stood and held out the right.
‘John Dee,’ I said.
Thus began the hours of change. The night of a wild transformation.
How can I begin to tell this?
Tell me, then, Doctor, how can the soul…?
Alchemy.
We talk of it. We talk of transmutation, we, the men of science, the men of books. We say, there is a formula, there has to be a formula to turn low metal into solid gold, to make man into something close to God. Some ancient secret, maybe known to Pythagoras and addressed by Plato. A matter of the occult.
Most times, we say glibly, it will involve a painful passage through darkness towards a distant planet of light. But the truth is that almost none of us of us will ever attain that light, seeing only momentary glimpses like flashes from the beaten sky in the black belly of a storm. And then, having watched the flashes and searched deep within ourselves for something more lasting, will only – God help us – dwell forever in a deeper darkness.
Worldly matters must needs be dealt with first, some small mysteries opened out. It seemed she’d left early this morning to see a sick child at a poor farm in the marshes, towards Wells, when a rider carrying letters to that city had spied her and stopped to tell her of the murder. Returning later to Glastonbury she’d had the wit to exercise caution, knowing how some men, under cover of hue and cry, can behave towards women alone.
Slipping back into the town, not by the road but along sheep paths, she’d encountered Joan Tyrre, who’d told to her the worst of news – that she was sought – and she’d hastened away, back into the woods, only returning, well cloaked, after dark.
And had gone, not home, but to Cowdray who, having seen off Fyche and his constables, had given her food and drink and an attic room. Sending word, discreetly, to her father that she was safe. Cowdray, she said, was a good man, if you didn’t mind waiting a full half-year for settlement of your bill. Her father had cared for Cowdray’s wife before she died, easing her pain a good deal, and he’d not forget that.
I assured her that my friend, Master Roberts, would be swifter to settle. Anxious, naturally, to know if Dudley, as well as giving away my name, had betrayed his own identity. He hadn’t, but it seemed he’d come perilously close to it.
‘Your friend awoke that morning,’ Mistress Borrow said, ‘and knew not where he was. Nor who I was. Once, he called me Amy.’
‘Good,’ I whispered.
Meaning, good that he hadn’t called her Bess.
‘And then, in his delirium, he called out for you twice by name. Where’s John Dee? Send John Dee to me.’
‘Um… there must be others,’ I said, ‘of that name.’
‘Not in my knowledge. And anyway, there was something about your friend’s manner. A man used to giving orders and being obeyed, in a snapping of the fingers. But now I was less interested in him than in you. I had to find out. Obviously.’
At last I found a smile, recalling all her educated talk of astrological herbalism as we walked through the town and sat by the holy well. And all the time, she would have been charting the rising excitement in me, as we discussed the inherent power of places.
All that blithe skipping on the rim of heresy.
Heresy! Of a sudden, I wanted to cry it to the beams. Embrace it.
Or her. ‘I’ve tried to follow your work, of course,’ she said. ‘As best I could, from pamphlets left around the town by travellers. Some of them insist that you’re the cleverest man in Europe, while others…’
‘I know well what the others say. Anyway, both are distortions of the truth.’
‘Ah, but all say the Queen thinks very highly of you. That’s distortion, too?’
She sat, all serious, prim and decorous, looking down at her small hands in her lap. Why would my hands not be still? I sat on them. On the bed. Should not be sitting on the bed with a woman here, but she had the only chair.
The candles, still in a cluster on the board I’d took care to keep betwixt us, made a bright ball of light and shot golden arrows to the beams. Mistress Borrow bent and pushed aside her cloak to delve into her black cloth bag.
‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘that you’ve seen this one.’
I rose and accepted the crumpled pamphlet, holding it close to the candles.
IMPORTANT FOR ALL THE SECOND COMING
Know that the Queen hath been served with clear warning of the ending of the world. That which was foretold in the Book of the Revelation of St John will soon come to pass. Dr Dee, the royal stargazer, hath been commanded to foretell the date when England, wherein lies the New Jerusalem, will see the Second Coming of Our Saviour…
I read no further.
‘It’s bollocks,’ I said. Then blushed. ‘Beg mercy, mistress-’
‘Jesu, I’m a doctor.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Men cry out far worse when having a foot cut off.’
This casual mention of surgery tensed me. But I would not think on it now. Handing the pamphlet back, I wondered if this could be the peacock man’s paper, or were there more? Was this one mere twig from a huge oak tree of fakery? Or – more disturbing – was there something in the stars I’d missed?
‘Where did you get this?’
‘Some wool-merchants passing through.’
‘Well, you should know that no-one in this world has ever asked me to name the date of the apocalypse or the time of the Second Coming of Christ.’
‘No?’
‘You sound disappointed.’
‘ Tush, Dr John, you’re the Queen’s astrologer.’
‘So they tell me.’
She fell silent. At some point she would be asking what the Queen’s astrologer was doing here in Glastonbury. And in the light of what had happened since we arrived, this no longer seemed like a secret worth preserving.
So I waited for the next thunder to fade, and then told her. Told her, without identifying Robert Dudley, about our hitherto discreet mission to recover the bones which, whoever’s flesh had once been upon them, had lain in the
