The Heresy of Dr Dee

XLII

Contempt





UNDER THE CANDLE, it was a rich dark red. A swollen blood-drop.

Less than half the size of a tennis ball, but more perfectly spherical. After I blew out the candle, there were yet lights in it.

Lights that moved. A sprinkling of them. More lights than I could see in the air around us or the night sky, where the moon was so close-pressed by clouds that few stars were in evidence.

Only here in the inner firmament of the stone: points of white and piercing blue and a lambent orange, all in fluct.

As I looked at it, it seemed to breathe.

Easier than could I, who dared not touch it, this precious portal to the Hidden. Wondering: if I could have sat in this window-space, alone and concentrated, with the Trithemius manuscript and the whole untroubled night ahead of me, might I then find one of those fragments of light projected into the chamber in angelic form?

Whatever planet rules in that hour, the angel governing the planet thou shalt call,

sayeth Trithemius.

Raphael… Uriel…? I had no books or charts here. I didn’t know. Couldn’t think. And the night was far from untroubled.

‘So you were right,’ John Forest said.

‘Mercy?’

‘Everything you said to them. They’re in so much fear of how much you might know and who you might tell that they think to pay you off. Send you on your way with what you came here for.’

‘Yes. So it would appear.’

I took a last long look at the Wigmore shewstone before covering it over with the black cloth. A cloth of velvet like the one Elias, the scryer, had kept around his.

I could not believe they’d let such a treasure go so easily.

‘It must go back,’ I said.

‘What?’

Forest had snatched the stone from the boardtop, clutched it ridiculously to his breast.

‘No spiritual device should ever be acquired this way,’ I said. ‘It’s corrupted from the start. No good will come of it. Not for me or Dudley. Or the Queen.’

‘Are you gone mad?’ Forest thrust the stone at me. ‘Take it, for Christ’s sake! They’ll think you’re silenced. It’s your talisman. It’ll get you out of here. When you’re well away, throw the damned thing in the river if that’s what you want.’

‘I pray you, put it down,’ I said quietly.

John Forest weighed the stone in one hand before tossing it to the other and then he shrugged and replaced it on the board. Looking, for a moment, almost grateful, as if it had been too hot or too cold or he’d felt its alien energy racing up his arm.

‘You’d best ride back to Hereford,’ I said. ‘Where Dudley knows he can reach you. Where other letters may be waiting.’

‘And you?’

‘As you said, maybe they think I’m bought off with the shewstone.’

‘Dr John, they want you to take it and leave.’

‘I can’t leave. Not without Dudley. But you can.’

‘And leave you alone with these bastards?’

‘If I’m troubled by Bradshaw or Meredith or Martin, I’ll say I’ve written an account of all I know about property theft from the abbey and you’ve ridden with it to London. And if I’m not back there in a week, you’ll put it before whoever in the Privy Council deals with such matters, and Presteigne will be overrun with accountants. Now… go.’

Forest pulled on his leather gloves.

‘And what will you do?’

‘I’ll find him. Somehow I’ll find him.’

Hoping this sounded more confident than I felt, I dragged the board away from the window. Forest swung himself up on to the sill, looked down into the mews then back at me, his head bent under the lintel.

‘All right, I’ll go. But I’ll ride not to Hereford. Ludlow’s the place. To the Council of the Marches. Where I’ll rouse people, identify myself as Lord Dudley’s man. Tell them he’s missing within twenty miles of their stronghold. Return with a hundred armed men, at least, before sunrise. Take this town apart.’

‘And if all the time he’s with some other whore?’

He stared at me.

‘You think that, now?’

‘No,’ I said soberly. ‘Have a care. God go with you.’

I watched him lower himself from the window, gripping the ivy, his feet kicking against the wall until he could jump to the ground. Watched him leading his horse to the opening of the mews without looking up. Listened to the hooves as they gathered pace.

I’d never felt so alone, so useless. Twisted by contempt for myself and what drove me – a thirst for secret wisdom disguised as love for queen and country. I thought I might never unwrap the stone again.

The stone I’d thought to deliver to the Queen, with the promise of angelic advice on how best to exalt her majesty. The stone which might procure knowledge of which islands remained to be discovered beyond the known world, which unknown natural forces might be harnessed to the Queen’s cause.

What had led me to think that a man who could not see might walk in celestial light? The only man in the Faldos’ hall who’d caught no glimpse of even the boneman’s ghost, if such it was.

And worse, how could I have brought Dudley into this? A man with more enemies than he could name in a year. No matter that he’d leapt at it like a dog in a butcher’s shop, I was the one who’d laid the scented trail.

Hear his voice from that moment of engagement:

We’ll make a good bargain with this man, in the noble cause of expanding the Queen’s vision.

It had come too easy. The bargain was a black bargain, founded upon threats, and no good could come of it.

I gazed, without hope, at the shrouded stone. My Christian cabalism, that shield against the demonic, had been compromised by the means of its acquisition.

To begin with, how had John Smart known of my desire for it? As I’d not mentioned it in my own letter to my cousin Meredith, it surely could only have been through the whore, who’d learned of it from Dudley. The whore whose fishmonger, as we say in London, was Smart. I wondered how many bawdy houses in Presteigne were owned by this man, whose shrill laughter I could almost hear.

Go on… take the stone… for all the good it will do you.

Tainted.

I flung myself on the floor by the truckle, my teeming head buried in my quivering hands. Filled with dread, now, over Dudley who, in pursuit of my own ends, I’d left alone in a town full of hostile strangers. Where might I even begin to search for him?

Friendship apart, the thought of returning to London without him made me cold to the spine. I’d tell the Queen almost everything – for how could I not? – and be lucky to escape with my head, let alone my occasional place at court. For even though she’d ever dithered over his suitability as a husband, Dudley, beyond all doubt, was the only man she’d ever loved.

Maybe the angels could tell me where to find him. I stared at the black-wrapped stone and began to laugh, in a crazed way which could only break asunder into weeping, and then I was down on my knees in a vault of moonlight, praying for inspiration to a God who seemed this night to be very far away.

And then the King made God smaller.

Not the first time that Goodwife Faldo’s words in Mortlake church had come back to me.