The Heresy of Dr Dee

‘Good enough,’ Dudley said. ‘So far. Go on.’

‘The Queen knows her reign could see the meeting point of science and the spiritual. A wondrous thing. If barriers are not raised against it.’

‘Ah… that old question of religion.’

‘Not an old question at all,’ I said ruefully. ‘When I was a boy, mystery was all around us. Christ was full-manifest in the Mass. Every baptism was an exorcism of evil spirits. The world vibrated with magic. And… and if men like me sought divine inspiration in the cause of making new discoveries, it would be a long time before someone cried heresy.’

‘Except possibly the Pope.’

I nodded sadly.

‘We get rid of the Pope, and what happens? In no time at all, we’ve gone too far the other way. Christ is not manifest in the Mass. It’s all theatre. Let’s strip it away, the new Bible-men cry, not for us to ask questions. The will of God is the will of God, and you either accept it or you go to Hell. You explore nothing. Jesu, I— I’m a Protestant, Robbie, I believe in the Church of England… and yet know it could take us back centuries.’

Both of us knew where the Queen stood on this. There would be no persecution of Catholics if they worshipped privately.

Or she’d be persecuting herself.

‘Tell me how it works,’ Dudley said. ‘The shewstone.’

‘I don’t fully know how it works. I know that planetary rays are drawn into the stone through ritual and the focus of the scryer, who must needs enter an altered state to perceive the flow of messages.’

‘If this French bastard Nostradamus can do it,’ Dudley said, ‘then you can do it.’

Dear God, I’d wish for a half of his confidence. I’d met Nostradamus just the one time and didn’t believe him a rooker. Not entirely. Envied him, I’d have to admit, for his standing at the French court and the monetary favours that came his way. The way he was venerated and left to experiment unmolested by Church or Crown.

‘We’re both reaching for the same things,’ I said. ‘Though my own feeling is that his prophecies are a little too… poetic. Not the best poetry, either.’

‘And shaped to the French cause.’ Dudley was yet nursing the globe. ‘This clever stone… does Nostradamus have one?’

‘Don’t know. He claims he’s a natural scryer who needs only to look into a glass of water to connect himself to channels of prophecy. But I’m a scientist and must needs have proof. Scrying stones have been around throughout history, but only now do we have the means and the knowledge to subject them to proper scientific study.’

‘What are we seeking here, John?’

We? I sought a careful answer.

‘Knowledge of the hidden engines that power the world? The workings of the mind of God?’

Jesu, that wasn’t careful at all, was it?

‘The mind of God, John?’

Dudley took breath in a kind of shudder, and I endeavoured to back away.

‘I just don’t believe we can do anything of significance alone. All great art comes through divine inspiration. Advances in science… the same.’

Told him what I’d gleaned from Bishop Bonner about the former Abbot of Wigmore, John Smart.

‘Bonner? You consulted Bonner? And the fat bastard’s going to keep his mouth stitched?’

‘I believe he will.’

‘You’re an innocent, John.’ Dudley shaking his head in feigned wonder. ‘All right, tell me about the mysteries of divine inspiration.’

I told him that while we could hardly aspire, either side of the grave, to a direct approach to God, there were… intermediaries.

‘Angels. Archangels – Gabriel, Michael?’

‘Just names, Robbie. Just names for whatever moves the celestial forces which make us what we are. Just names for the controlling—’

‘Good enough for me, John. How much does this man want for his stone?’

‘Probably more than I have in the world.’

I looked away in sudden apprehension, heard Dudley stand up.

‘But not, presumably,’ he said, ‘more than I have.’

Oh God help me… Shutting my eyes in dismay. Had this been what I’d been hoping for all along? Was this, in truth, why I’d writ the letter to him in Bonner’s cell?

‘All right, we’ll both go,’ Dudley said. ‘You and I. We’ll make a good bargain with this man, in the noble cause of expanding the Queen’s vision.’

We? The way we brought back the bones of Arthur?

‘Her stone,’ Dudley said. ‘Dedicated to the Queen’s majesty. But as you’re the only one who knows how to make it speak, you can keep it here and study it and caress it in your bed, whatever it takes, and bring it regularly to Bess at Richmond or Windsor. Present to her whatever you see within it. Or consider it advisable to see.’

What? I drew back across the chamber, hard against the door to the library, something twisted like a knife in my chest. I began to panic.

‘Robbie, we don’t know he still has it.’

‘We don’t? I thought you were of the opinion that the scryer had deliberately conveyed to your apothecary friend just enough information to tempt the infamous Dr Dee.’

‘What if it’s a rook?’

‘Then we have the abbot brought back and thrown in the Fleet. Jesu, John, I have to do something. I’m sick to my gut of confinement at Kew, everyone regarding me with half-veiled suspicion… barred from court for the sake of appearances. What’s the matter with you? Suddenly you don’t think yourself worthy to know the mind of God? Listen to me…’

It felt as if the surging of his energy was taking away the air, and I found it hard to breathe. A half moon, ridged by cheap glass, shone behind the owl, and Dudley’s voice rose in the darkness as if from the hollows of a dream. Talking of responsibility towards his heritage… all that his father had died for… the beheading of Jane Grey and all the other cruel deaths, the ashes of martyrs from which Elizabeth had arisen like the fresh and glistening spirit of a new age. Repeating her words from the island in the garden at the Palace of Richmond.

… how will we know when what we do fails to please them? How will we know when evil’s at the door?

And over this I heard the voice of Brother Elias, the scryer, repeating the exhortation of Trithemius of Spanheim.

‘… and whatever good gifts, whether the power of healing infirmities, or of imbibing wisdom, or discovering any evil…

Did I sense in Dudley this night a manner of madness? The haste with which he’d seized on this had made me wonder if truly he did fear for his life if he remained in London. Feared public assassination or a sordid, squirming death by poison. Or even a faked suicide. If so, what I’d told him about Cecil would scarce heighten his confidence of survival… unless…

Unless.

Across the board, his shape had almost gone to black and only the savagery of his smile shone through to show me he was afire.

* * *

Five days later, Sunday, as I returned, with my mother, from church, a letter was delivered to me by Dudley’s senior attendant John Forest who, along with Thomas Blount, his steward, seemed to have replaced his murdered servant Martin Lythgoe in the position of most-trusted.