The Heresy of Dr Dee

XI

Dark Merlin





BY NOW I’D learned that Cecil never ventured an opinion without a degree of secret certainty. It was said that his ambitious young fixer, Walsingham, had agents at court who didn’t even know of each other. Spies who spied on spies.

I leaned back, gazing at the window. London had misted, the steeples no more than indents on a bedsheet.

A terrible logic here. The Queen, for all her will and vigour, was ever indecisive, changing her mind three times in as many hours. Would make a firm decision then sleep on it and awake uncertain again. Dudley was no longer someone to play with. She would have accepted that the urging of her heart would not be enough. Might well seek some indication of heavenly affirmation, the design of destiny.

Might seek a date, however many months hence, which the stars found fortuitous for the announcement of a betrothal which at present would be abhorrent to so many.

Behind me, the coal fire hissed as rainwater dripped down the chimney. I took in a slow breath.

‘How does Blanche feel about this?’

Cecil smiled and made no reply. Which may have been an answer in itself. Blanche was a cautious and watchful woman who only lived to keep the Queen secure. No wonder she hadn’t turned her head this morning as her barge had glid past.

‘If the Queen’s determined on this, then she’ll try again to have Blanche reach me,’ I said. ‘What then?’

‘That, John… is precisely why we’re having this discussion.’

‘I can’t refuse. You know I can’t.’

‘Of course you can’t.’

‘And if what Dudley says about the coincidence of their times of birth is correct, then their destinies may indeed appear interwoven.’

‘Oh, please.’ The trestle groaned as Cecil leaned forward. ‘I have no doubts about your ability in this regard. Which is why I don’t want you and your f*cking charts within a mile of the Queen at this time.’

‘I see.’

Cecil leaned back, folding his arms, giving me silence in which to consider my situation. I recalled how, on our return from Glastonbury, I’d been summoned here and shown a pamphlet handed out free on the streets. It was heralding a second coming – the birth of the child of Satan, the Antichrist, in the new black Jerusalem. Which was London, the fastest-growing city in Europe.

False prophecy originating from France, seedbed of the campaign to put the Queen of Scots on the English throne. I myself had been named as some kind of dark Merlin, canting spells at the lying-in of Queen Elizabeth, pregnant with the bastard child of Robert Dudley. Elizabeth, daughter of the adulterous witch, Anne Boleyn. They were now saying that the Queen – thanks, some said, to the magic and prayers of the French prophet and magus Nostradamus – had miscarried the babe. But the devil would not give in so easily.

I said at last, ‘What would you have me do?’

Cecil rose and put his robe back on, like a judge about to pass a hard sentence.

‘As I see it there are two approaches to this problem. One is for you to spend some time with your charts and return with the information that the stars at present are frowning on the prospects for a union of two people born under their particular signs.’

‘Which, as I’ve already said—’

‘Would be unlikely, yes.’

‘Sir William, I spent more than a year teaching mathematics and the elements of astrology to Dudley. One of the subjects he showed most interest in. What I’m saying is that to convince Dudley – and even the Queen, who’s far from ignorant of planetary movement – that the stars disapprove of their match—’

‘Or might better approve of them under some heavenly configuration not due to take place for… say, five years?’

A lot could have happened in five years. The Queen’s infatuation might have lost some of its fire. Or equally it might be proved beyond all reasonable doubt that Dudley had not killed his wife. Who could say?

I shrugged.

‘If it was not the answer she sought… I’m far from the only astrologer in England. All it needs is for one of them to go to another and my competency would be called into question. Also my integrity and all of my past work, and worse than that—’

‘All right. We’ll go no further down that road. Examined and rejected. This leaves the second path… from which you disappear.’

Cecil rose, sweeping his robe behind him, and picked a single lump of coal from the scuttle with tongs and dropped it on the fire.

‘I mean on one of your ventures in search of the Hidden. We spoke of this earlier. Wouldn’t be the first time, would it? Were you to be gone even for a matter of weeks, that might be sufficient.’

‘Oh.’

I felt a momentary relief. For one instant in time, I’d thought he’d meant that it was to be permanent, and the air betwixt us had seemed, of a sudden, cold with menace.

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

‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

‘Preferably in some place at least two days’ ride from London.’

Dear God, this man thought he could move anyone around, like a chesspiece, to suit his purposes.

Which, of course, he could. After a period when his advice had rarely been sought, Amy’s death looked to be putting him back where he was certain he belonged. And maybe he was right; I could think of no one at this time who was fit to replace him.

Replacing the tongs, Cecil went back to his chair.

‘Methinks this expedition of yours should begin at once. Would you agree?’

‘Sir William—’

‘Which means you won’t be lying at your mother’s house tonight.’

‘But my mother—’ I rose to my feet. ‘My mother has need of me. The fabric of the house wants repair, the roof leaks.’

I’d used this one before, but it was no less true for that.

‘Your skills extend to roofing, John? I’d hardly think so. But we’ll see to all of that. I’ll have a number of men dispatched to Mortlake to mend whatever needs mending. Your mother will scarce know you’re missing.’

He was right. My mother would be in delight.

Bastard.

‘My barge will take you back briefly to collect your bag, but I’ll want you away by nightfall.’

‘That’s impossible.’

‘Two days, then. Maximum.’

‘Sir William, if the Queen thinks I’m making distance between myself and—’

‘My problem, not yours. Two days. And stay out of London, meanwhile.’

The discussion over, Cecil rose.



Enshrouded in a damp dismay, I stumbled out onto the cobbles and knew not which way to turn. The Strand, once the home of senior churchmen, was now rosy with the new brick of London’s richest homes. Not a place which the secretary, his building work yet incomplete, would want to leave.

The rain had stopped and the brightening sky had brought out the chattering wives of the wealthy with their servants and pomanders, though this was hardly an area where nostrils might be assailed by the stink of beggars. Amongst the throng, I espied the unsmiling, unseasonably fur-wrapped Lady Cecil, out shopping with their two glum-faced daughters. Suspecting she’d be among those who considered me little more than a common conjurer, I turned back to walk the other way and thus glimpsed a man discreetly sliding through Cecil’s doorway.

Dark bearded, dark clad and instantly admitted to the house. Unmistakably Francis Walsingham, the Oxfordshire MP known to serve the Privy Council on a confidential level. A coolly ambitious man whom I was more than inclined to mistrust. The very sight of him made me wonder if I were followed and I pulled down my hat, threw myself into the crowd and then slipped into an alley, where I stood with my back to the rain-slick brickwork and found myself panting.

Fear? Very likely. I’d persistently refused the offer of Cecil’s barge, recalling the man who’d been beaten, robbed and drowned. If it could happen once this year, then it could happen again, and who’d question it?

You think me suffering from some persecution sickness? All I can say is that you weren’t with the secretary this day. A man who’d felt himself slipping into the pit and now was scrambling back up its steep and greasy sides.

And was, therefore, less balanced and more dangerous than ever he’d been.

I thought of Dudley, once his friend, fellow supporter of Elizabeth from the start. And then Dudley, drunk on 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.