The Heresy of Dr Dee

III

Call Them Angels





JACK SIMM WAS a gardener now. He’d abandoned his London apothecary’s shop during Mary’s reign, when the agents of Bishop Bonner had been scouring the streets for signs of Protestants and witches alike, and anyone else who might be deemed an enemy of the Catholic Church.

Like many a poor bastard who’d burned in Bonner’s purge, Jack had been neither, but the scent of roasting flesh singes the soul. And he had a young wife and so chose to pursue his trade in a quiet way, from his home on the edge of the village, growing herbs in other people’s gardens as part-payment for his services. Growing certain mushrooms for me, to bring about visions. Not that they’d worked, but that wasn’t Jack’s fault.

I’d tell him he had no need to be a secret apothecary any more. It was a new reign. Everything was changed for the brighter. Kept telling him all this, but he was wary yet.

Particularly wary when, about four weeks previously, I’d asked him to find me a good scryer and perhaps a shewstone for sale.

For pretty much the same reason I’d wanted the mushrooms.



‘You ain’t a complete fool, Dr John,’ Jack had said, ‘but you’re ever running too close to the bleedin’ cliff-edge.’

We’d been walking the pathway through the wood behind his dwelling. An unusually muggy day – a sneer of a day, a taunt at a drear summer’s end. My shirt had been sweated to my spine while my boots were yet soaked from the puddles.

Look, I’d been aware of the scrying profession most of my life, my tad oft-times making mock of it – all furtive foreigners and gypsies who’d gaze into a stone or a mirror and tell you where your missing property might be recovered or how many children you’d have. Or, if you underpaid them, exactly when the children could expect to inherit your worldly goods.

Rookers to a man, and they oft-times conduct their trade through an apothecary, who takes a cut of the fee.

‘I could find you one, no problem,’ Jack had said. ‘When I was in town, we must’ve had a dozen or more of these bleeders in the shop. Wanting me to put ’em in touch wiv the sick and the bereaved or anyone who needed somebody to talk to the dead on their behalf, intercede wiv angels. I’d kick their arses down the street. And been cursed for it a few times. But I’m still here, ain’t I?’

He’d been gazing out between the heavy, dripping trees towards the swollen river and his voice was damp with disdain.

‘Why?’ he said. ‘That’s all I’m asking. I ain’t getting it, Dr John. I’ve watched men and woman staring into stones and seeing fings I can’t see. And if I can’t see it…? You know what I’m saying?’

‘Everything’s open to abuse,’ I said.

‘But you’re a… a whatsit, natural-philosopher… a man of bleedin’ science.’

‘Well, exactly,’ I said. ‘Knowing the science behind crystal-gazing makes all the difference.’

I could have told him then precisely why I was, of a sudden, interested in the art of scrying. But, although I trusted him more than most, it wasn’t the time. And I’d have to admit that I’d been as sceptical as he was until, at the university of Louvain, I’d been given sight of a rare manuscript by the scholar and cabalist Johannes Trithemius of Spanheim. Which explained why certain stones, if used with knowledge and reverence, could give access to the very engines of heaven.

‘A stone’s a stone, Dr John.’

‘Never dismiss what’s beneath your feet, Jack. Crystals will absorb and reflect celestial rays. If employed at certain times – on certain days, under specific planetary configurations – they’ll open up the inner rooms of the mind …to levels of existence normally denied to us.’

Jack kicked a lesser stone into the grass.

‘Spirits, is it?’

I sighed. A very loose word, oft-times misused.

‘Three spheres, Jack: this earthly plane and, above that, the astral, where earthbound spirits linger, the place of ghosts. And above and beyond all… the supercelestial… the over-realm, the furnace room of Heaven.’

As a scholar of Hebrew I’d studied in depth the Cabala which, through mystical symbolism, offers a stairway to the sublime. It makes logical, mathematical sense and, although Jewish in origin, can be practised just as effectively through Christianity. The Christian cabala would be my shield against the earthbound spirits and the kind of demonic entities which might enter a shewstone and possess the unguarded scryer.

As distinct from the higher spirits, the good spirits.

Call them angels.

‘In Europe,’ I said, ‘the shewstone is seen as a legitimate method of penetrating the higher mysteries. In England, it’s yet a joke, at best. At worst, the devil’s own mirror.’

‘You told them this in Europe?’

‘Hell, no.’

Not for me to confirm their opinion of England as a land of Philistines – or to confess my own ignorance. I’d read and reread the works of Agrippa and what I could of Trithemius, but my personal experience was, at best, thin and always would be until I seized the nettle and took steps to acquire my own shewstone.

A good one. A good crystal, with which to carry out experiments. But what kind, what colour, how big? These were fundamentals I ought to have known about but did not, for opinions varied.

‘You’re an innocent soul, Dr John.’ Jack Simm standing among the roots of a venerable oak and facing me like a father, hands sunk into the pockets of his jerkin. ‘You fink fings is different, now nobody gets burned. The Queen smiling, all gracious. Oh, yea, folks can believe what they like, long as they keep it to themselves. Like we ain’t heard all that before.’

‘Times change, Jack.’

‘Kings don’t change. Nor Queens. It’s religious freedom one day then, in a blinking, it’s all about how to prove you ain’t a witch’s daughter.’

The Queen’s mother, Anne Boleyn, executed by the Queen’s father for treason and adultery, had been possessed of a sixth finger and a furry growth on her neck. How much evidence did you want?

‘Now how’s the Queen do that?’ Jack said. ‘She makes war on witchcraft, and her advisers look around for somebody well-known to execute to make it look good.’

A dead twig had snapped under his boot, making me start as he sprang away from the oak, forefinger aimed at my chest.

‘Go on… tell me it’s wivout bleedin’ precedent. And you may mention the late King Harry.’

I wanted to laugh, but it wouldn’t come. This queen was different. This queen had an acute intelligence and questing mind fascinated by alchemy and the cabala. This queen was powerfully Protestant while celebrating the Mass in deep privacy.

‘Heresy.’ I’d shrugged. ‘All science is heresy. Now… can you help me?’

He’d paced a slow circle around the oak.

‘Yea, well,’ he’d said at last, ‘I suppose you oughter have somefink to take your mind off what’s happening downriver.’

He’d meant London. Becoming known in Europe as Satan’s city. And not, at this moment, a good place to be if you were a friend of Robert Dudley.