It is a memory, nothing more.
The bull—who is called Bill, it turns out—agrees. He summons another jug of ale for himself and the narrow-set man, who tells Dee his name is Robert Trunk.
“I shall call you Bob,” Dee tells him. “It is more pleasing that way, don’t you see? Bill and Bob. Bob and Bill. What about that?”
He laughs.
The ale comes, and they sit and watch Dee set about the rest of his pie in silence.
This could be awkward, Dee thinks, but a bottle of what the landlord swears is French brandy later, and they are firm friends.
“Do you know what?” he tells them. “Do you know what? They claim—the master, those bastards, all of them—they claim to be… to be men of learning. They probably speak Greek while they are swiving their bumboys. I don’t know. I don’t care. What a man does, you know, is up to him. And his God. That is me. I am like that. But don’t talk to me about learning. About mathematics. About… about. Things. When you have your arse greased like a… like a beaver… and it is stuck in the air for… for a turd in a loaf such as… such as I don’t know what. The Earl of Leicester. And don’t you ever, ever talk to me about reputation!”
Three hours after this, getting on toward sunset, the bull sleeps with the polished head on the board while the other is leering about the place, hopelessly confused, while the dog is licking his own testicles.
“Do you have transport?” Dee asks, suddenly sober.
“Huh?”
“A cart? A carriage even? Surely you are not proposing we walk back to London? They will want me in the Guildhall looking my best, won’t they?”
They don’t have a cart, or horses, but once the men are roused enough to buy one more bottle of brandy to take with them—“against the cold”—and have settled the reckoning, they find a sumpterman with space enough to take all three as far as Bishop’s Stortford for a price Bill fumbles in his purse to pay. Dee sits up front while Bob and Bill sleep in the jouncing bed of the cart behind, wrapped in each other’s arms. The sumpterman is silent, but Dee has a nice light baritone and while the cart rolls on into the evening, he sings the songs he learned in Leuven, in Flanders, until the sumpterman asks him to stop. The dog they’ve forgotten in Cambridge.
Two nights later and they are nearly at Ludgate gaol.
“One last drink?” Dee suggests.
And Bob and Bill agree. Their attitude to Dee has softened over the last two days: growls have turned to eye rolls, to laughter, then to thundering pats on the back, depending on the time of day, and the quantity of ale drunk. He has become their pet, he thinks, replacing their dog, and if he could but lick his own testicles then the masquerade would be complete.
Dee knows the keep at the Bull: a man named Chidiock Tunstal, with a forked red beard and a belly as if he were about to birth a bullock.
“Bring us ale, Chidiock,” Dee tells him, “and anything you have that is wrapped in greasy pastry.”
And when he does, Dee tells his companions that it is apt they should be spending their last evening together at the Bull.
“For you, Bill, seem to me a fellow born under an earth sign, such as Taurus, as, I am bound to say, do you likewise, Bob, though I should say you are more of a Capricorn. Good health.”
They drink. Neither man is interested in astrology for neither knows in which year he was born, let alone which month, let alone which day, but knowing himself to be a goat or a bull gives each a stake in the conversation, and it takes Dee only a moment to set them on the road to strife. It is basic stuff, and he need only nudge it along now and then—“Mars ascending, I should say: forever a cause of mischief and destruction” and “I see the scorpion’s heart in your chart”—and soon the two have seen the worst in each other. John calls to the fore something that happened with a purse that went missing in the village of Rotherhithe.
“Is there a star sign for thieves, Doctor?” Bill asks.
A drink is thrown, then its mug. Stools are kicked back. The whole bench too. Dee snatches up the jug of ale—still half full—just as the table’s legs splay under their grappling weight. He stands to watch for a moment. It is astonishing to see two large men fighting with no restraint. They kick, bite, gouge at each other, rolling off the table and in among the filthy rushes. Their blows connect with concentrated fury, and the sounds of each set the air rippling.
Dee steps away, and some time later, he finds himself on Billingsgate steps with five shillings, thruppence, and an empty jug of ale. It is a warm night, with a heavy yellow moon that hardly raises a reflection on the lugubrious river’s surface. A boatman agrees to take him under the bridge and upriver for one of the shillings. He is a nice old fellow, who has been on the river since he was a boy, and he does not mind Dee singing. An hour later, just a little before midnight, Dee is back in Mortlake, wiping the mud from his boots on the long grass of the orchard below his own house.
“Is that you, John?” his mother calls from the still open door.
CHAPTER FOUR
Sheffield Castle, August 29, 1572
Her third husband, James Hepburn, fourth Earl of Bothwell, had shown her how it was done.
Lightly so there is no bruising of your pretty wee neck, see?
Once she had overcome the terrors of having his hands around her throat, and of the darkness hazing the edges of her vision, she
