The Heresy of Dr Dee

IV

The Smoke of Rumour





WHEN BROTHER ELIAS had made his stately departure to the inn, we ate bread and goatcheese with Goodwife Faldo.

It had been Jack’s idea that she should play the pigeon so that I might observe a scrying without giving away my identity. Goodwife Faldo, who’d once taken my mother to see a cunning woman in the hope of asking my dead father if there was money hidden anywhere, had agreed at once to accept me as her brother for the day.

After our meal, she said she’d walk out to the meadow to suggest to her husband and sons that, rather than disrupt our sitting, they might eat at the inn tonight. I gave her my last shilling to pay for their meat and small beer, and then Jack and I walked down to the riverside where casks of fresh-brewed ale were being loaded into a barge. The air was cooling fast these evenings and the ambering sky above the distant city was smutted and heavy from first fires. And the smoke of rumour.

I hadn’t ventured into London for more than a week, but the gossip had been drifting down to me like black flakes from a lamp-scorched purlin. The city all atremble in the glitter of a dangerous lightning.

‘What were they saying when you were in town?’ I asked.

One reason I’d come to trust Jack Simm: he was a man of intelligence but without ambition.

Without ambition. What a blessed state that must be. Oft-times, my mother had accused me of it – far from the truth, of course, I did have ambition, though it related not to the attainment of high office so much as the acquisition of high knowledge. Not easy, however, without the level of protection that only wealth and position could provide.

Thus far, the Queen’s patronage had given me freedom to pursue my studies but not the means, for the fingers gripping the royal purse were famously held as tight as the rectal muscles of the ducks upon the river. Having calculed, by the stars, a smiling day for her coronation, I’d hoped for secure office, but nothing had come. And if things went wrong I could soon, as Jack had warned, be dangerously out of favour. In many ways, the daggers-out world of political advancement was far simpler than mine.

We’d moved away from the beer-barge, back into the wood, but I still kept my voice down low.

‘What were they saying?’

‘About Lord Dudley? You really want to know?’

‘In truth, I suspect not, but…’

‘Here it is: nobody I spoke to, from the pieman to the pamphlet-seller, finks he didn’t murder her. Although the pieman reckoned killing your wife to make room for the next one is only part of a great Tudor tradition, so he’s just getting in some practice for his future role as—’

‘Oh God, enough of this!’

‘You asked.’

‘Yes,’ I said wearily. ‘I asked.’

I’d barely seen Robert Dudley since he’d journeyed with me to Glastonbury in search of the bones of King Arthur, through which to strengthen the Queen’s majesty as Arthur’s spiritual successor. A quest with mixed success.

I’ve been hearing all about your journey to the West, she’d said on my one visit to the court since that mission. The horrors of it! Lord Robert was so very appreciative of your assistance in this matter.

My assistance, Highness? That’s what he said?

John… She’d laid a white and fragrant hand on my arm. He’s told me everything.

The lying, self-promoting bastard.

‘He’s never been mightily popular since she made him Master of the Horse, has he?’ Jack Simm said. ‘The lavish festivities, the arrogance, the preening.’

‘Behind all that,’ I said, not without doubt, ‘is a man of… integrity. Who’s seen much death.’

The execution of his father, the Duke of Northumberland, for the support of Jane Grey, the shortest-lived queen in history. Then his own confinement in the Tower under a death sentence, later withdrawn.

And all this time coming closer to the Queen than any man. Grown up together, locked away in the Tower at the same time during her sister’s reign. Always an understanding betwixt them. And the carnal attraction. As Master of the Horse, he took her hunting. Knew how best to entertain her – make her laugh, which she loved to do. Little doubt they’d have wed. If…

Jack shrugged.

‘Maybe he’s seen so much of death, it’s trivial to him now. Man who has his wife pushed down the stairs to get his paws on the Queen—’

‘Not proven.’

‘Nah, and never will be after they bribe the coroner. He’ll walk away in a pomander haze, but it won’t make no difference, will it? Still be the dog turd on a platter of sausages. And the closer you are to him…’

He was right, of course. But Dudley and I went back too long. Though only a few years older, I’d been appointed by his father to teach him mathematics and the mapping of the heavens, and he it was who’d sought my astrological advice on the coronation date.

Now, in the lowest alehouses – and some higher places, too, by all accounts – they were saying John Dee had taught Lord Dudley the blackest arts of sorcery, to win the Queen for Satan.

Never underestimate the malice of the common man.

I sank my hands into the pockets of my doublet and, in one, found a hole. I could never forget that, while in Glastonbury and rendered delirious by a fever, my friend had confessed that he’d wished his wife dead.

And now she was. Found at the foot of some stairs at a house called Cumnor Place in Berkshire where she was ‘staying with friends’. Dumped there by Dudley because the Queen wouldn’t have wives at court. Least of all, his.

My hands felt cold. Bess and me, we’re twin souls, Dudley had said when he was recovered from the fever. As if convinced that a marriage to the Queen was ordained by the heavens, though he’d never dared ask me to confirm it through astrology. Dear God, never in all history had there been a better reason for a man to kill his wife.

‘And what’s your thinking, Jack?’

Jack Simm leaned against an ash tree’s bole, smiling faintly.

‘I fink… if the Angel of the Lord come down on top of the Tower and proclaimed that Lord Dudley never done it and, while he’s here, that Dr John Dee ain’t a sorcerer… they’d all be waiting for his bleedin’ wings to drop off.’

‘Thank you, Jack.’

‘Now ask me why the scryer’s had to go back to the inn to warm his crystal.’

Were a shewstone to be used to reach the angelic, extensive preparation would be needed: days of purity, fasting, abstinence from alcohol. In this instance, I could think of three more practical reasons for the departure of Elias to the inn.

‘He wants to ask what John Dee looks like. What apparel he wears. And if Will Faldo’s brother works at the brewery. But… he’s not quite a rooker, is he?’

Or, if so, certainly of a higher grade than the lowlifes who hang like ravens around the taverns of Southwark.

‘Well,’ Jack said, ‘he did come recommended by a chaplain of the Bishop of London.’

‘Did he now?’

A good apothecary is ever well-connected.

‘Oh, he’s well-patronised. That’s why he costs. You still want me to ask him if he has a fine crystal to sell?’

‘For… an un-named customer of yours?’

‘Yea, yea. Dr John, look, he won’t learn noffing at the inn. This is Mortlake and he’s a stranger. They all remember your old man, whatever he done, and they like your mother. And, as long as you’re welcome at court, they like you.’

‘The wizard in his cave?’

‘They try not to fink too hard about that. Or the owls what goes woo woo. But they ain’t forgot when the Queen come to visit you at Candlemas, and how much the inn raked in, refreshing all the pikemen and the boys what carried the banners and the rest. Don’t make light of what you done for Mortlake, Dr John.’

I shook my head, bemused.

‘Just don’t bleedin’ ruin it now,’ Jack Simm said.