“We can visit those tunnels? You’ll lead me?”
“If you’re for it. We should dress in some rough disguise, I think. It would add to the excitement.”
“Indeed. We’ll go as young men. In those costumes of ours.”
“I thought the same. With swords and poignards and feathered bonnets.”
“Boots and leathern doublets. Aye. Now?”
“We have the moment.”
“We’ll seize it, then!” Gloriana kissed her friend upon the lips. “And then, when we’ve explored, we can tell a few companions. John Dee? What do you say? Wheldrake?”
“It might be best to make all this our own. No sharing. I’ll show you why.”
“You have our clothes, Una?”
“Where they always are. In the trunk.”
“And lanterns? Shall we need lanterns?”
“We shall.”
Gloriana frowned. “What if there’s danger? Broken steps, hidden pits, quaking roofs?”
“We’ll avoid them. I’ve already travelled the paths. I’ll lead you.” Una knew the Queen did not refer to her own danger but to her responsibilities as the Realm’s cornerstone.
“Shall we find demons, Una?”
Glad of Gloriana’s elation, anxious to maintain it by any means, Una cried: “Only those we can vanquish with glaive and valour, because our hearts are virtuous!”
“Where’s the entrance?” Gloriana was opening the trunk and dragging out the disguises they had used some while before, when they had conceived the notion of courting maids together.
“Here.” Una pointed at the far wall. “In the next room. A deep closet I’d scarcely used. It leads into a passage I knew was there. A few steps, then down to a blocked door which once led outside. There are many like it.”
“Aye. Hern’s Court created the fashion. But that’s not all, of course. Go on.”
“I found the wall behind the steps hollow. The bricks moved. I made a hole. And there it was!” Una tugged on loose britches and buckled them up. She pulled a linen shirt over her naked chest and pointed it, fluffing at the lace on collar and cuffs before drawing the peasecod doublet round her body and buttoning it from navel to throat. Stockings and shoes, a scarlet slouch hat with a blue ostrich plume, and she was ready to sling the belt, with sword and dirk, about her waist. Gloriana rolled up her hair, which was much longer than Una’s, and fitted it under a tighter cap, also feathered. She wore a short cape on one shoulder and her doublet was of brown padded velvet, but she resembled Una in essence. They stood, right hands on hips, left on hilts, and laughed at one another-two gallants of the Town, poor younger sons, ready for any escapade.
“Breakfast first,” said Una, always the leader when they were dressed thus. “And we must take one of those portable clocks of Master Tolcharde’s, so that we know when to return. The pocket watch?” She found it, wound it and placed it in her purse. Its loud tick sounded against her thigh. She swaggered to the door, opened it a fraction. Elizabeth Moffett had done as asked and porridge, herrings and bread were ready on a crystal table which had been brought back as booty from some forgotten West Indian campaign.
The eating done, Una took them to the closet, sliding back a squeaking panel, lifting her lantern to show the steps and, in the wall immediately to her left, a newly made hole. “Here,” she said. “I thought of it when I noticed that cold air came from a vent in one of my rooms downstairs-in what I had always considered solid stone. I discovered that there is an entire passage-too small for upright movement-which passes that room, which can be seen into in turn. If I wished, I could spy upon myself! But that’s not of much interest. Here.” She helped tall Gloriana through the gap. There were more steps, twin to the others, leading down.
The lantern light was almost too bright in the narrow chilly corridor. They whispered, yet their voices were amplified, as the light seemed to be amplified, at paradox with their confines, and oddly comforting. Dust in their nostrils brought unspecific nostalgia. They were both children now, holding hands and pressing on. A rat went by. They tipped their hats to him as he fled. Spiders were studied, patches of moss found to resemble the faces of certain courtiers. Their spirits rose so as to border on ecstasy while the tunnel turned, dropped, climbed, leading them away from Dignity and Charity and Grace and the other sober demands of office, until they entered a high gallery, all intricate, barbaric carving, with ancient beams supporting a ceiling of panelled wood, and the lanterns cast shadows, displayed inhuman faces and peculiar representations of animal forms, yet still they giggled, but more quietly, as if they feared to offend these ancestral monuments. Even when something moved, a larger shadow, not their own, they felt no anxiety, though they could not identify the source. They found grimy paintings and rubbed them clean to exclaim upon the unsuspected skills of ancient craftsmen. They seated themselves in dusty chairs and wondered how many hundreds of years they had waited here to be used again. They pretended to find human remains-sticks; fallen, rotted woodwork; rusting weapons; the bones of cats or rats-which hinted at epic murder from Albion’s legends. They investigated little rooms which still contained narrow beds and benches, lengths of chain and manacles, as if prisoners had slept and worked here-perhaps those who had carved the gallery which lay behind them. They descended pitted stone and heard water but never saw it. They found wax, so fresh-seeming it might have fallen from a candle an hour or so since. They found scraps of food, doubtless borne here by the ubiquitous rats. They heard movements everywhere and guessed these came from the inhabited palace, unseen on the other side of several walls. It was strange to be so close to activity without being able to see or even to identify the source of movements. They heard voices, laughter, cries, the rattle of implements, footfalls-fragments of sound, sometimes quite loud, sometimes very faint, as if space itself possessed different qualities within the walls. They were haunted by the living.
Una led Queen Gloriana up a further, twisting flight and crawled along a little tunnel, cautioning her to silence, until suddenly there was dappled light ahead of them, with its source on their right, from the wall. Una turned with difficulty and crawled backwards so that, head to head, they could both look through the lattice at the room below.
Gloriana’s astonishment gave Una considerable satisfaction. They could see Doctor Dee himself, pacing the length of a room half-full of curling parchments, of simple furniture, scientific glasses, instruments of brass and polished hardwood, untidy shelves and cupboards, crystals, mirrors, geographical globes, orreries, phials containing richly coloured liquids and powders, all the paraphernalia and stimuli for his myriad intellectual investigations.
He wore a loose robe, nothing else, and as he paced it opened to reveal his firm flesh, grizzled hair and, to their shared astonishment, his disproportionately large private parts, which he fingered absently all the while, as if to aid his concentration. Queen Gloriana bit her lip and shook with amusement, then became ashamed, tugging at Una to come away.
Una, however, crawled further back, to another square of light, and Gloriana was tempted to follow. Here they could see into John Dee’s bedchamber. It was as littered with charts and books and pieces of alchemical apparatus as the other room. Only the bed, draped with black curtains bearing a variety of mystical and astrological symbols as befitted the couch of a follower of Prometheus, was free of paper. Gloriana frowned a question, but Una’s hand begged her to be patient and to continue looking. Very soon Doctor Dee paced in, his robe sailing back from his bare body, his manhood now much huger in his sensitive hand. Gloriana gasped.
“Oh,” they heard him groan, “if only there were an antidote for love. This exquisite poison! It fills my being. Some philtre which robbed the body of lust but left the mind clear. There is none. To dampen such desires is to extinguish the higher investigations of the brain. I must have both! I must have both! Ah, madam! Madam!”
Gloriana creased an unbelieving brow.
He drew the curtains of the bed gently and it seemed that there lay in shadow a figure, tall and giving off a very faint lustre, as a putrefying corpse might shine. They saw John Dee begin to stroke the object. He murmured to it. He lay down beside it and he flung his arms around it, flung a leg across it-twitch. “Oh, my beauty! Oh, my love. Soon your loins shall live-and throb to my pounding dork! Ah! Ah!”
Gloriana pulled at Una, retreating.
Eventually they stood upright upon the stair, their lanterns held loosely in their hands. Gloriana was leaning heavily against the wall, her mouth hanging open. “Una!”
“It shows us a mortal sage, eh?”
“We should not have watched! That thing he has-what is it? Is he in love with a dead creature? Is it human or animal? Or a demon, even? Perhaps it is a demon, Una. Or a corpse, waiting for the demon to inhabit it.” The rustle and murmur from the walls had begun to disturb her now. “Does my Dee dabble in necromancy?”
