And thus I felt ashamed. Inadequate. I should have done better; I was my mother’s only child. My father had determined that I should receive the best education their money could buy. I might have become a bishop or even a lawyer, for which I had qualification, instead of… whatever I am become.
The river shone dully, full of animal and doubtless many human carcasses embedded in a city’s shit. The sun was pale and hard-looking, like marble.
Conjurer, I was called by some, when my back was turned, and by others even when it was not.
III
His Second Coming
Rather than a crude summoner of spirits, a conjurer may, as you know, be seen in these more enlightened times as one who deals in illusion. And I’ve done that and found much delight there. Once, at college, for a piece of theatre, I fabricated a gigantic beetle which, through a system of pulleys and the employment of light and shadow, was seen to fly through the air. Spent many days in the making of it and many hours basking in the awe and mystification it inspired.
Nothing wrong with that. I was only a boy, and the beetle did not fly. Not as a bird flies, or an angel.
But now I am a man and more exercised by the true nature of angels. Fully accepting, however, that men like Sir William Cecil feel happier with what they know to be illusion, even if they know not how it’s done.
No frost today, only a sour sporadic rain as I boarded a wherry by Mortlake pier for my appointment. Low cloud stained with smoke and pricked by a hundred spires, the highest of them St Paul’s in the west.
We entered the city past the steaming midden of Southwark with its low-life amusements: bear-pits, cock- pits, whorehouses, gambling and theatre. I no longer noticed the impaled heads of criminals and traitors on London bridge; now that executions of the higher orders had become less commonplace, these crow-picked noddles were more of a grotesque attraction for visitors than a dread warning for the inhabitants.
As for Cecil’s new town house… all I understood was that it was on the Strand, where high-powered clergy once lived. But a wherrymen is a floating gazetteer, and mine knew precisely when to steer us to the bank, pulling in his oars by the footings of a new-built stone stairway.
‘Ain’t the biggest house inner row,’ he said. ‘But he got plans.’
‘The Secretary’s a personal friend of yours that you know of his plans?’
Hating at once, the way this must have sounded. Although I’d travelled with this same man seven times or more, I ever find difficulty in the exchange of common pleasantries.
The wherryman only grinned. At least I thought it was a grin, all his top teeth being gone – a fight, perchance, or he’d sold them to a maker of false sets, and I should have liked to ask, but…
‘One of his builder’s men’s marrying my youngest girl,’ the wherryman said. ‘They gets detailed orders, how he wants it done. Inspects every sodding brick.’
Cecil’s pastime, fashioning houses. I knew that. The tide had been with us, and when I found the house, three storeys high, behind a cage of builders’ wooden scaffolding, I was more than an hour early. Going in now would convey either over-eagerness or anxiety.
So I walked away from the Strand, arriving some minutes later in a street of brightly painted new shops selling fine furniture, tapestries and good lamps. You could tell how fashionable this quarter had now become by the apparel of the shoppers and the scarcity of children and beggars. Even the street stench here was less putrid, women carrying pomanders more as a declaration of status than to sweeten the air.
It had started to rain. I stepped into a covered shop doorway, from where the street-sellers’ cries were muted. Not that there were many of those around – with men as prominent as Sir William Cecil residing hereby, the security services would have seen to all that. If it hadn’t been for the rain, I might have wandered away into some other street and never heard ‘-the future! Learn what is to come! Learn how the world will end with darkness and disease before… His Second Coming!’
Purple proclamations of apocalypse. Some pamphleteer. Ever cheaper now, the pamphlets. More ubiquitous and more lurid, spewing out their grossly illustrated accounts of murder, executions and devil worship. And end-of- time warnings now, from the puritans.
‘-for yourselves the terrifying new predictions of Her Majesty’s stargazer! Read the forecasts of Dr Dee!’
Jesu! Now I was out of the doorway and backing clumsily around an unattended cart, finding myself in a cramped alley, the man’s bellow seeming to pursue me into the piss-stinking shadows.
‘Know the future now… what’s left of it.’
Beginning to sweat as I peered out to observe quite a crowd gathering around the pamphlet man. Respectable-looking people, women in furtrim, men in the new-fashion Venetian breeches. All hot for revelations of turmoil in the heavens, discovery of unknown lands full of strange winged creatures, some new war in Europe.
All invention, of course, but too many people were ready to believe anything committed to print and…
…did they not know I did not do this?
Second coming? My role was to scribe charts indicating planetary influences on world affairs, the balance of the humours. Possible directions, opportunities, auspices. But never a claim to full-fledged prophecy. That way, until we know more, lies madness.
But why had no-one told me about this shit?
Rumour and gossip, Dr John, rumour and gossip.
Jack Simm’s voice in my head, as I moved out towards the crowd. Had Jack known of this? Were there more such publications, about spells and divination and the conjuring of spirits in a house at Mortlake? Did everybody know about it, except for me?
Head in the stars, as ever, when it’s not in a book. My mother. Too much time with books, boy, isn’t it? Even my tad, once, in exasperation – the man who’d been so determined I should have the best education his money could secure.
‘Know the time of the End and the evil which comes before it!’ the pamphlet-seller bawled, lips plump and wet. ‘Prepare yourselves!’
Turning, as if he knew I was there, cowering in the shadows. A lumpen fellow in a leather hat with two peacock feathers, his wares in a crate at his feet.
The rain had ceased. I hung back, not knowing what to do. I could take the rogue to law, but a court case would only invite more of the kind of notoriety I could live without. For I would be questioned in public about the nature of my work and be compelled to answer, and I’d been there – oh God, yes – once before.
Face it: more likely, the man would simply disappear, leaving his pamphlets to blow in the gutters.
Steadied myself on the side of the cart. It was as if part of me had been snatched away to fulfil some presumed role on the public stage. As if, while the mind of John Dee was absorbed in the contents of his library, the conjurer strode the streets, dispensing darkness.
‘How do we know these are Dr Dee’s predictions?’ A woman, sounding scared. ‘How came you by them?’
‘How do we know, mistress?’ the pamphlet man screamed. ‘How do we know?’
Evidently playing for time.
‘Indeed,’ another said, a man in a long gaberdine. ‘What proof have you that the renowned Dee is the author of these prophecies?’
A moment’s silence as the pamphlet-seller clawed the air for inspiration, and then he sniffed loudly, puffed up his chest like a cock bird on a bough.
‘Dr Dee, sir, is a man who must needs guard his privacy. Myself, however, as his secretary and publisher, am given leave to make public those of his words what he considers might help men and women prepare for their fate. These being not his words, you understand, for he is a humble man, but the very utterings of messengers of God who communicate with him through his intelligent devices. ’
‘I’ll take two,’ a man said.
‘That’ll be four pence.’
I could stand it no more and stepped out of the alleyway.
‘So you’re -’ a sickness in my gut, for I’ve ever hated confrontation – ‘you’re Dr Dee’s publisher.’
