The Heresy of Dr Dee

his status at court, unable to do wrong in the Queen’s eyes, had seen himself as her first advisor, damaging Cecil. Now Dudley was sorely damaged and Cecil would seize his chance to…

…what?

Thrusting myself from the wall, a sweat on my brow, I followed the alleyway into another, this one ripe with the stench of rotting meat. I waited, listening for running footsteps above the distant bustling and chattering, the barking of dogs, the cries of street traders, the grinding of cartwheels and the clacking of builders’ hammers on brick and stone.

No one coming. I walked on, through the mud and stinking puddles, across an inn yard and along a mews, with its more friendly stench of horseshit, until I saw the glitter of the river.

I stood beneath an iron lamp on its bracket, Cecil’s voice in my head.

Do you have a matter of, ah, science, requiring your specific and immediate attention?

There was a man I would have visited on the morrow.

On the morrow, I was now commanded to be out of London.

I walked, with no great enthusiasm, out of the mews, to hail a wherry to take me not to Mortlake but across the river into Southwark’s seething maw. Not a place I’ve oft-times visited, having little taste for gambling, whoring, bear baiting or street-theatre. But, then, I didn’t have to go far after leaving the wherry.

A solid building close to the riverbank, like to a castle or my old college in Cambridge, but still a place I feared, like all gaols, as a result of having myself been held in one. At the mercy, as it happened, of the man I now thought to visit.

But… there are gaols and gaols, and it might have been Jack Simm who once had described the Marshalsea as the finest inn south of the Thames.

Now the official residence of the former Bishop of London, known in his day as Bloody Bonner.

XII Blood and Ash

SHUTTING THE DOOR behind us with his heel, he set down his jug of wine on the board and then rushed to clasp my right hand.

‘John, my boy…’ Letting go the hand, stepping back and inspecting me, beaming. ‘And, my God, you’re still looking like a boy. Some alchemical, eternal youth thing you’ve contrived?’

In truth, I must look as worn and weary as I felt. I removed my hat. He was just being kind.

Yes, yes, I know. Kind? Bishop Bonner? I still could barely look at him for long without recalling some poor bastard’s crispen feet, black to the bones in the ashes of the kindling… or the savage flaring of hell’s halo as the hair of another Protestant took fire. I’d oft-times wondered how many nights Bonner might lie awake in cold sweat, accounting to God for all the public burnings he’d ordered during the years of blazing terror after Mary had restored the Roman faith.

How many nights? Probably not one. Even now, in a bright new reign, when stakes were used more for the support of saplings, he seemed to believe that there’d been a moral substance to what he’d done. How could I possibly have grown to like this monster?

‘And what think you of my dungeon, John?’

His grin displaying more teeth than he deserved.

‘It’s not the Fleet, is it?’ I said.

Bonner sniffed.

‘You might think it looks not unpleasant, my boy, but you aren’t here when the brutal guards come at nightfall and hoist us in chains from iron rings on the walls.’

Inevitably, I looked up at the conspicuously unbloodied walls until his laughter seemed to crash from them like thunder. Haw, haw, haw. Then I heard a key turned in the lock on the door and spun around.

‘Don’t worry,’ Bonner said. ‘They lock me in for my safety. I’ll see you get out. Before the week’s end, anyway.’

I smiled cautiously. We had history, Bishop Bonner and I. When first we’d met it had been in my own cell, back when I was falsely accused of working magic against Queen Mary and also of heresy. The good man I’d shared it with was already become cinders and even though I’d overturned the primary case against me in court I’d no cause to believe I’d escape the same end.

But Edmund Bonner had been curious about my reputation as a scholar of the Hidden. Wanted to know what mystical secrets I might have uncovered at the Catholic university of Louvain.

And so, against all odds, I’d been allowed to live, even serving for a time as his chaplain – the inevitable guilt that haunted me tempered by the discovery that, just as Bloody Mary was said to have been surprisingly soft- hearted, Bloody Bonner had a learned and questing mind and was – God help me – good company.

‘Wild tales abound,’ he said, ‘of what you and Lord Dudley found in Glastonbury.’

‘Can’t tell you about it, Ned. You know that.’

‘Pah.’ He waved a hand. ‘It can be of no consequence now, anyway. As long as dear Bess was happy with you.’

She was far from happy with Bonner. Yet, even now, all he had to do to regain his freedom was to recognise her as supreme governor of the Church. While admiring his steadfast refusal, I guessed that, in his own mind, he already was free. Only the bars outside the window glass were evidence of a prison. Almost everything else was recognisable from the cramped chamber he’d occupied while under house arrest at his bishop’s palace: the chair and board, the looking glass and the books on the shelf, with Thomas Aquinas prominent.

Yes, it was fair to say the Marshalsea had not the squalor of the Fleet – none that could be seen, anyway. Established to confine maritime offenders, it now also housed debtors and those convicted of political crimes… and thrived upon a strong foundation of corruption. Prisoners with money could buy good meals and wine, and others without money were allowed out by day to earn some to hand over to their gaolers.

For Edmund Bonner, it was a life of no conspicuous discomfort. He’d expressed joy at my visit, offering to entertain me in the cellar where wine was served. But there were too many of his fellow prisoners in there, some with their wives who came and went unchallenged, especially if they brought money. Impossible for us to talk with confidence here so, taking with us a jug of wine, we’d gone upstairs to his cell.

There was a stool for me to sit on, while Bonner, clad in the robe of a humble Franciscan monk, poured wine for us.

‘I was told’ – eyes aglint with mischief as he stoppered the jug – ‘that after the demise of Dudley’s poor, wretched little wife had become known, the Queen would be seen around the court all in black attire—’

‘As was everyone at court.’

‘—with a dance in her step and a lovely, joyful smile upon her face that remained immovable for days. Is it still there?’

His own face – which, with his history, you might imagine moulded into a permanent rictus of hate – was, as ever, plump and benign as he handed me a cup and lowered his bulk to the edge of his pallet.

‘I understand that the smile,’ I said, ‘is now a little strained.’

He nodded, looking me steadily in the eyes.

‘I also heard that, some days before your friend Dudley was widowed, the Queen confided to the esteemed Spanish ambassador, Bishop La Quadra, that Lady Dudley would very soon be departing this life. Have you heard that, too?’

Yes, and wished I hadn’t.

‘When it first came to my notice,’ Bonner said, ‘I couldn’t help but wonder if it was you who’d happened to see this impending tragedy in the stars.’

I considered this unworthy of reply, but it didn’t stop him.

‘Because, as you must see, John, the only other possible explanation of the Queen’s foreknowledge of the