The Queen’s ever mindful of the way such retribution gathered pace during the last reign. She won’t go down that dark road, and this is being made known throughout the realm.’
Nel Borrow opened her eyes as the thunder resounded, and I saw that her eyes were weeping and my heart strained in my breast.
‘We’ll get help for you!’ Hoarse with desperation. ‘I’m schooled in the law…’
She looked at me through the screen of her tears, and it was not scorn, but it was not faith either and who could blame her? I wanted to tell her that my companion was – potentially, at least – one of the most powerful men in the realm. That we were in a position to call down support from the very highest quarter.
Yet were we? I thought of Robert Dudley and his growing suspicions of the motives of Sir William Cecil. He has his own script. Thought of the Great Unspoken.
And then, worst of all, I thought of those surgeon’s knives all conveniently coated with gore, as if circumstance itself were bending to contrivance. I doubted that Nel Borrow even knew about the bloodied knives, not having seen her father since last night, and I did not think it would help to tell her.
‘You said there was a chamber made ready for you here,’ I said. ‘For the night.’
‘If I need it. But if I’m found there, it’ll come down on Cowdray. Don’t want that.’
She rose. I wanted to cry out to her: Stay here and let it all come down on me! But said nothing and dared not even stand, for fear that my basest desires would be insufficiently concealed by the threadbare robe across my knees.
She began to lace her cloak together at the neck.
‘Perhaps it were best if I left.’
‘Where will you go? They’ll be watching your father’s house.’
‘Joan Tyrre will take me in. It’s no more than a hovel, but better than a dungeon.
‘It’s late. She’ll be abed.’
‘Oh, no.’ Nel smiled. ‘Not tonight, Dr John. Not in a storm. Joan will be in her doorway looking out over the tor… watching for the King of Faerie and his hounds.’
‘The Wild Hunt?’
Remembering my tad terrifying me as a child with his tales of the Hounds of Annwn. The faerie king and his white hounds with red ears, reputed to ride the storm in search of lost souls.
Nel said, ‘Joan has ever hoped that one stormy night he’ll take her to his hall, to be his earthly bride.’
She laughed, the crossing of her teeth disclosed like a confidence as she began to draw up her hood.
‘Don’t go,’ I said.
She raised an eyebrow.
I said, ‘Stay here.’
She looked up at the ceiling ’twixt the oaken beams, her half-smile rueful now.
‘It was kindly of Cowdray to offer, but I’d rather not. The attic chamber here…’
‘Is probably cold and damp. However-’
‘And most severely disturbed. Or so they used to say, the pilgrims and the travellers. Doors which go banging in the night when there’s no wind. A babe’s whimpers. Boards that creak as if someone walks across them, though there’s no-one there.’
‘Haunted?’
‘So ’tis said.’
I must have thought on this for all of a second.
‘Then you should stay here in this chamber,’ I said, ‘and I shall see out the night up there.’
XXIX
The Storm
The wall was lit white again, and new thunder seemed to break before it had faded into shadow, huge and exultant in its violence and loud enough to be directly above us.
Maybe in the attic. Always one floor beyond me, these manifestations of the spiritual. It was ever thus. I felt like a clown, and all of it was apparent, all my folly lit by the unsparing sky.
‘And you wouldn’t be afraid,’ she said, ‘to pass the night up there all alone?’
‘My life’s experience tells me that ghosts tend to avoid me.’
She looked at me, with her hands hidden inside her cloak and her doctor’s bag at her feet. The hood had fallen away and her head was tilted to one side, as if inspecting some rarity.
‘Perchance, because you try too hard to know them?’
In my head, Dudley’s voice: I think if I were a ghost, the very last man on earth I’d want appear before would be John Dee.
‘It’s rather,’ I said sadly, ‘because I’m a dull and bookish man who has not the sight.’
Standing up at last, for the shame of it had diminished me. I recalled Dudley sprawled in his barge: is not John Dee the greatest adventurer of them all? A man prepared… to venture beyond this world!
The unwaxed truth was that I was a sham, a hollow man with a big library, and the only time Dudley had spoken with any real honesty was when, in faking my arrest, he’d hissed, Take this fucking impostor away!
‘There,’ I said, wearied. ‘The secret’s out. A man oft-times accused of conjuring who can’t even see what he’s supposed to have conjured. Others might be witness to the seepage ’twixt spheres. Not me.’
I suppose it was the first time I’d disclosed this directly to anyone and, in the silence which followed, I regretted it. Although doubtless mumbled miserably, it had sounded to my ears like strident organ chords swelled with bitterness.
‘ Tush, Dr John.’
Nel Borrow’s head was still atilt. She made a small, soft bud of her lips. It might be pity or it might be mockery, neither of these much to be desired. She leaned back against my bed.
‘Remember when you first came to the tor and set foot on the top…’
‘I fell over.’
‘But if I’d said to you, Oh, have a care, for you might fall over due to the strange force of the place… then you might not have fallen over.’
I said nothing.
‘You think too much. Weighing every new thing against all the volume of knowledge you hold in your head. In fact, it might even be said that you know too much.’
‘Mistress, most of the time, I think I know not half enough. If you’re saying that in order to see and feel what’s hidden I must needs forget myself and all that I’ve learned-?’
‘Forget yourself? No. It’s probably necessary that you should remember yourself.’
‘I don’t understand.’
And, God help me, I didn’t.
Light flared like laughter on the wall.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘’tis something I find hard to achieve myself for longer than a few moments. To grow quiet inside and become aware of my thoughts and my feelings… but to be no longer one with these earthly things. To become separate. To stand apart from who I think I am. In such a state… things may be received. So they say.’
‘Who say? Where did you learn of this?’
‘There are still a few people who come here on pilgrimage.’
‘What I mean is… this is not Christian, is it?’
A cautious observation, her reply less so, as the thunder cracked. But the air betwixt us was calm. She placed her palms together.
‘Did I say Christian pilgrimage?’
‘Go on.’
‘There are those who occasionally travel here from… distant places I’ve never heard of. Further than France or Spain or the low countries, anyway. Further even than the Arimathean travelled, I suppose.’
