The Heresy of Dr Dee

‘You know why Bess trusts you, John? Do you?’

I had no answer to this. I knew the Queen believed in me and what I did – she who’d learned eight languages, maybe more, and had once told me how she saw her reign as a magical period, framing a great tapestry of human progress.

‘I’ll tell you,’ Dudley said. ‘It’s because she knows that, for all your extensive knowledge of the vastness of things, you’re a simple soul without political ambition. You want only to buy more books. That so makes her laugh.’

‘I’m so glad,’ I said, ‘to be awarded the much-coveted status of Court Clown.’

‘God’s bollocks, John!’ Dudley bringing down a fist on the board, almost splitting one of its poor pine panels. ‘She has no fears about your fidelity, that’s all I’m saying. And knows she’ll get from you only the unwaxed truth as you see it… and that your vision’s far-reaching. And right now that’s worth a lot.’

So why doesn’t she pay me a lot? Or even anything.

Dudley looked at his empty cup, but I didn’t offer to refill it. Couldn’t anyway – we had no more wine.

‘Now tell me the truth,’ he said. ‘Why precisely did you ask to see me? What am I doing here?’

‘Because I would not have been able to live with myself if I returned to find you’d been—’

‘Returned from where?’ He looked up quickly. ‘Where are you going?’

I saw no reason to avoid the truth. I told him I must needs fulfil a promise to the Queen. In relation to her professed interest in scrying through a shewstone. Spoke aloud, it sounded almost foolish, but he, if anyone, would know that it wasn’t. He was already nodding.

‘She talked of that. She was… enthused.’

‘When was this?’

‘Not long ago.’

Avoiding my eyes, which seemed to confirm a long-held suspicion of mine that there’d been a least one meeting between Dudley and the Queen since Amy’s death. A guarded meeting, no doubt, away from court. Hooded figures in a palace garden, a covered barge on the river.

‘I told the Queen I’d acquired a crystal sphere. And would be working with it. And that I’d report back to her.’

I saw Dudley looking around the darkening workplace.

‘You won’t see one here,’ I said. ‘God knows, I’ve been trying to find one.’

Dudley began to laugh.

‘You mean one you can afford?’

‘The ones I can afford would probably be useless for my purposes. You’re right, I’m a clown. However…’

Told him, in some detail, about the crystal sphere last heard of in a former abbey in the Welsh borderlands. Finding I had his full attention.

‘So you don’t know if it’s still there and you’re fairly sure you wouldn’t be able to afford it, but you’re planning a long and arduous ride to find out?’

‘Haven’t decided yet. But the fact remains that Cecil wants me out of town for a while.’

‘You mean out of the reach of Blanche Parry. Can’t help wondering if Cecil wasn’t told about the plan to consult you by Mistress Parry herself – his fellow Welshie. Who may also disapprove of Bess’s taste in men. She’s polite to me, is old Blanche, but ever somewhat distant. Uncommon that, for a woman of whatever age.’

‘Robbie, she’s distant from me, and I’m her cousin.’

‘Cousin. Half of Wales is your cousin. Look at that bastard – isn’t he a cousin? The notorious villain, Thomas…’

‘Jones. Thomas Jones.’

‘Who robbed his betters on the road. Almost openly. Is he your cousin?’

‘Betrothed to my cousin, Joanne. And I don’t ask what he did or to whom. He was young then. Reformed now, anyway. A scholar, with a doctorate. And given a royal pardon.’

Dudley snorted.

‘Bess is quite ridiculously tolerant towards the Welsh.’

‘Perhaps because she is Welsh.’

‘She is not Welsh! Her grandfather was Welsh. Partly. So you think Cecil might try and have me slain, do you?’

The sky momentarily was shadowed by a flock of birds going to roost, the dimmed window glass turning Dudley’s fine doublet from its mourning indigo to black.

‘He likes you,’ I said. ‘But he might not shed tears over your corpse.’

His lips tightened, vanishing into his once-proud moustache, now straggled and uneven.

‘I… had a servant die, John. Couple of days ago. A kitchen maid. Spasms of the gut, and dead within an hour. I… ordered all the meat in the house taken out and buried.’

‘You’re thinking poison?’

‘If I died from it, people would say it was no more than divine justice.’ He stared up at me, his face twisting into wretchedness in an instant, the way a child’s does. ‘They can all say what the hell they like, now I’m exiled from court, and nobody visits me for fear they’ll come away soiled by second-hand guilt. Maybe’ – pushing himself back from the board, the bench-feet squealing on the flags – ‘you can summon Amy’s spirit into a fucking shewstone to tell us precisely how she died.’

Did I mark tears in his eyes? Finally? Tears for Amy? Tears for himself? Did he even know the difference?

‘What should I do?’ he said at last.

‘Not for me to say, Robbie. We’re acting on different stages now.’

‘You’re still my friend.’

I suppose I nodded, though I’d rarely been less sure of it.

XIV God and All His Angels

SHE’D BEEN IN a wild mood that day, the day not so long ago when they’d talked of knowing the future and having communion with angels. Red hair all down around her shoulders, the pale sun on her pale face, a faerie light in her amber eyes… and Dudley wanting her so badly that he’d fallen to his knees in the island garden at Richmond, burying his head in the grass ’twixt her feet.

Remembering now how she’d insisted that God and all His angels must surely be on her side.

Our side, Dudley had wanted to say, but didn’t. Telling me he’d been thinking of all they’d come through, both of them losing a parent to the block. Imprisoned side by side in the Tower, not knowing if they, too, would end up there.

But how will we know, she’d said, and he recalled her voice grown thin, when what we do fails to please them, and God and all His angels begin to turn away? How will we know when evil’s at the door?

‘Do you see?’ Dudley said to me. ‘Do you see where this goes?’

‘No,’ I said.

Although of course I did and was filled with a mixture of alarm and excitement, as Dudley arose and picked up the smaller of the two globes given to me by Gerardus Mercator, with whom I’d studied at Louvain. Holding it up to the last of the light, as if it were a symbol of his destiny.

* * *

‘Spirits,’ Dudley said. ‘A shewstone can bring forth spirits. Good spirits… evil spirits?’

I watched him slowly turning Mercator’s globe. Geography is one of my less-dangerous obsessions.

‘I’m a cabalist,’ I said, ‘and also a Christian. Therefore any spirits called into the stone by me must needs be touched by the angelic.’