The Heresy of Dr Dee

Holding back tears.

‘The loss of your family,’ I said.

She nodded.

‘And that was when I saw the figure of a pale man. Not clear at first – as though made of dust motes. The bones… the bones were more solid and had their own—’

She shuddered. I looked for her eyes.

‘Bones?’

‘The bones had their own awful light. As though it were not light.’

‘Where were these bones?’

‘He was holding them. One in each hand, clasped to his chest. Death… death’s heads.’

‘Skulls? More than one?’

‘How can I ever sit before that hearth again?’

‘You can. It won’t happen again, Goodwife. Not there. Not ever again. None of it’ – Putting it all together in my head as I spoke – ‘none of it was real. Only pictures conjured from the crystal, which… held us all in thrall. Changed your head around so that you took your worst fears and made them into… pictures.’

She nodded, yet uncertain.

‘Ephemeral,’ I said firmly. ‘Illusion. Nothing was there. You didn’t lie to God. Only to the scryer. And you admitted it to him. You put things right.’

It took away the magic, but I felt it was what she wanted to hear at this moment.

‘And there’s been no plague this summer,’ I said.

Watching myself forming words while I was somewhere else. Somewhere grey and foetid and full of bones.

‘I feel so much calmer now,’ Goodwife Faldo said and laughed lightly. ‘Thank you, Dr John.’

VII Coincidence and Fate

MORTLAKE HIGH STREET. Sticky, blurred lantern-light, echoes of the cackle and whoop of roistering from the inn and, presently, the spatter of piss against a wall.

No place to look up at the stars or the new-born moon.

After walking Goodwife Faldo to her door, I should have gone home and slept, to be refreshed and fully sentient at the riverside on the morrow. But how could I sleep now?

The inn was ahead of me. Recently extended to offer five bedchambers, two with glass in their windows for the moneyed traveller, but yet a rough place after dark. I slowed my steps, recalling a night when, for no clear reason, I’d been given a beating by men unknown to me, although it was clear they knew who I was. Smash the conjurer down. Smash him down in the name of God!

Soft footsteps behind me and I turned. A light shining out in my path, and I froze into stillness as it rose level with my face.

‘Go quietly, Dr John.’

‘Jack.’

He carried one of the candle lanterns you could borrow from the inn if you were deemed sober enough to remember where to return it.

I said, ‘Where is he?’

‘Abed, I assume.’

‘Then I’ll wake him up.’

‘No need,’ Jack said. ‘We shared half a jug of small beer in the back room.’

‘And?’

‘He said it happens. On occasion, when the stone’s active, spirits that manifest in the crystal can be… fetched out of it and into the air.’

‘Astral forms?’

‘Apparitions. Creatures of the air. The scryer must never allow himself to become distracted by them. That’s their aim, he says. To distract him. All they seek’s attention. His, anyway.’

He gestured back up the street and I followed him back towards the church. We stood in the shadow of the coffin gate, where Jack put the lamp on the ground.

‘Elias has a reputation, going back to days as a novice at Wenlock Priory. Up towards Shrewsbury?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where he… caused some concern.’ Jack paused, sniffed. ‘Visions.’

I said nothing, and he began to rhyme them off, without emphasis, as if listing ingredients for a stew.

‘Holy martyrs stepping from the stained glass. Noises in the night. Words mysteriously etched on the walls of locked chambers. Cracks in statues. Well, this was the time of the Reform. Not what anybody wanted, then. So when the abbot finks about maybe having him exorcised, he’s off. Takes to the road. Where the gift of vision, once kept under the board, becomes his living.’

‘Evidently a good one.’

‘When he fetches up in London, sure.’

‘Where he has patronage?’

If he was recommended to Jack by a chaplain to the Bishop of London, might that not mean he had the protection of the bishop himself?

‘Somebody’s looking out for him, that’s for sure,’ Jack said.

I picked up the lantern and asked, because I had to,

‘What did you see this night? What did you see in the ingle?’

No reply. Back down the street, some man was retching.

‘Jack—’

‘Ah, how can we ever know?’

‘What did Elias see in the crystal?’

‘Wasn’t a ring, that’s for sure. Look, he wouldn’t talk about it and I didn’t want to come over too pushy. He says it don’t matter what he sees, he never questions it. He’s only the middleman.’

‘And you saw…?

‘Me? I dunno… bones? Hazy grey man-shape, wiv bones. I didn’t like it.’

‘Marked?’ I said urgently, before I could stop myself. ‘Marked here?’ Snatching up the lantern, holding it to my face and raising fingers to my cheeks. ‘And here?’

‘Keep your bleedin’ voice down. Marked how?’

‘Black lumps. As seen in places where sheep are farmed, wool gathered…’

Hell, I knew this was a far cry from scientific inquiry, that the last thing I should do was prompt him. But I was tired and overwound.

‘Who you got in mind, Dr John?’

‘There was a man I met in Glastonbury. A trader in what he claimed were holy relics. But they were just old bones. He had hundreds of bones. If they were digging up a graveyard for more burials he’d be there with his bag. In the end, he was able to give me the intelligence I needed about the bones of Arthur. This was just before he died. Of… of wool-sorters’ disease. Face full of foul black spots.’

Benlow the boneman. I recalled, with a sick tremor, how this man, an obvious buck-hunter, had tried to attach himself to me. Never thought I’d meet a man as famous as you, my lord.

‘He wanted to come to London. Wanted me to bring him back with me. I… may have… implied that this would be possible.’

‘You made a bargain wiv him?’

‘I suppose I was in his debt. But if he thought we had a bargain… it was one I couldn’t keep.’

Benlow crouching amid the smashed shelves of his grisly warehouse, having attempted, in his agony, to take his own life by cutting his wrists and his throat, but too weak. Dying eventually surrounded by the detritus of death,