The Heresy of Dr Dee

All this yet worried me. How could Smart, in his role as her fishmonger and former associate of Gethin’s, not have been part of it? The most likely explanation, it seemed to me now, was that Smart had not realised for a while how high the plot went. Maybe not realised that the target was Lord Robert Dudley, panicked when he found out. Let’s say I thought it was ill-advised and might rebound. On him and his comfortable retirement.

‘Who knows?’ Dudley said. ‘I was taken in the street. Hit from behind, thrown into an alley. Dragged out as if drunk. And then beaten, tied down in a cart.’ He drained his cup. ‘Don’t want to talk about it. It demeans me.’

Did it? I was inclined to think that now he was out of it, he found it perversely flattering, the lengths to which they’d gone. And that coming through it had strengthened his cause.

He’d remained with Mistress Swift until he was fit enough to mount a horse his broken arm still bound. Three days – Dudley healed quickly. And ever thought the best of women, and they of him.

‘She had new boots made for me,’ he said. ‘Man must’ve been working day and night.’

‘With a sheath in the side?’

We’d not discussed this. For all his soldierly training, I suspected this might have been the first time he’d actually fought for his life.

‘You’d taken out the blade after they searched you but before they stole the boots – as obviously they would, boots of such quality.’

‘Secreted the blade into my sleeve. It took a couple of painful hours, but eventually I had the ropes stripped to a thread. When the older man left us alone, it was the obvious time. The boy had been taunting me in his halting English. How they’d be cutting off my cock and what they’d do with it.’

‘So they knew who you were.’

‘Evidently. It delighted them. Lost count of the beatings.’ His jaw tightening at the memory. ‘When the moment came, the boy made the first move. When his brother hadn’t returned by first light, he was on his feet, blade out. I think he’d have cut my throat if I hadn’t snapped the threads and… Not at my best, I have to say, but with surprise on my side…’ He shrugged. ‘You seen Cecil since your return?’

‘He hasn’t summoned me.’

Nor had his muscle come to snatch me into a barge. Cecil’s silence had said all I needed to hear.

‘However,’ I said, ‘a royal barge did arrive this morning.’

‘Jesu!’ Dudley sat up hard, with a clacking of the bench-feet on the flags. ‘Bess? ’

My mother also had wondered as much and had been driven into a panic.

I shook my head.

‘Blanche.’

My cousin. The Queen’s senior gentlewoman and closest confidante. A social visit. Much circumspect Border-talk with never a mention of either astrology or wedding dates.

Dudley leaned forward across the board.

‘You told her?’

‘Everything.’

Dudley expelled a long long breath.

‘Hell’s bells, John.’

‘Who better?’ I said. ‘She won’t tell the Queen unless it becomes necessary. But she might have words with Cecil.’

‘You clever bastard.’ He sat back, smiling again. ‘What about Legge? Did he know why he was sent to Presteigne?’

‘Only to an extent, I’d guess. He’d simply know his duty was to see that Gethin was acquitted. He’s not a fool. Had he asked too many questions, well… would he even have arrived back in London?’

‘How would he not, with several dozen armed men?’

‘It would take but one man,’ I said, ‘to smother him in his chamber during some overnight—’

‘God’s bollocks, John! I always took you for an innocent.’

‘Me too,’ I said ruefully. ‘What will you do now?’

Soon wishing I hadn’t asked. In some awful way, fortified, convinced that God had brought him through for only one purpose, what he’d do was to continue as before, in pursuit of his life’s goal.

A spear of late sunlight lit the glass eyes of my finest owl, sitting stately on his window sill. The one that flapped his wings and said woo-woo.

* * *

As we walked down to the Thames, Dudley’s limp was barely perceptible; he stood tall again.

Oh, dear God.

‘Well, of course I won’t give up,’ he said.

I said nothing. The last barge of the day was returning empty to the Mortlake brewery as we went down the steps to the river’s edge.

‘Gather I’m to be honoured quite soon.’

‘How?’

‘Earldom. And if that doesn’t make me more of a candidate for Bess’s hand…’

‘Or it might be a compensation,’ I said.

‘Bollocks.’

‘You could waste your life.’

‘John.’ He turned to face me, his face half in shadow. ‘It is my life. It’s me or no one.’

‘She’s told you that?’

‘Had it from an angel,’ Dudley said.

* * *

When he’d gone, I sat on the top step and watched an olive mist floating over the water.

He hadn’t mentioned the letter from Thomas Blount. Even before this, I’d begun to wonder whether John Forest had even shown it to him. Perhaps Forest had been to Blount and cautioned against revealing intelligence suggesting Amy Dudley had been unfaithful to her husband and on the most intimate terms with her murderer.

That would most certainly demean him if it became public knowledge. And what would it achieve if Dudley knew? Murder by some Spanish assassin could never be proven now. There was little doubt that the inquest jury would return a verdict of death by accident.

Forest had perhaps reminded Blount that messengers were apt to be blamed. He himself had been embarrassed, on his return from Ludlow with twenty-five armed men, to find that Dudley was back in Presteigne and had commanded him, without explanation, to return to London.

My own greatest regret was that I’d not insisted on seeing Gethin’s body. I did not trust John Smart, who only wanted to protect his business and the reputation of Jeremy Martin.

While I had no doubt that Gethin was dead, I realised that he was only dead in the sense that his hero, Owain Glyndwr, was dead. No one knew where his body lay and perhaps no one ever would. Which would make a legend of him – stories told to children that he would one day return, this black sprite, if the spiritual defences of Brynglas were ever lowered.

And how could they be lower than they were now?

While Dudley had lain at the home of Branwen Laetitia Swift, Roger Vaughan and I had met with Bishop John Scory in the privacy of the church in Presteigne. Scory, with many threats and much bad feeling, was in the process of prising Matthew Daunce out of Pilleth and would choose his successor with care. The statue would be scrubbed and the church lightened with more windows.

Daunce, he said, would doubtless go to London where he had friends at the heart – if you could ever call it that – of the new Puritanism. I suspected his clerical career would rise. It was the way things were going.

Pilleth, however, would require spiritual ministry, of a more traditional kind. An old magic. John Scory asked my advice, as he had about the mysterious map of the world. I’d told him that Brynglas and its environs were no less mysterious to me now.

A lesson to be learned. I said I’d write in some detail to Scory when I’d given it more thought. It’s part of me now, that place, and I think I may have to return ere long.