The Heresy of Dr Dee

VI

Cousin





IT WAS LIKE to the air after a storm has blown itself out. The candle extinguished, the hall draped in a drabness of brown and grey. I felt weakened in a way I could not have anticipated, and saw faces everywhere, staring in from the unshuttered window and over the threshold where the door had been flung wide.

And one was my mother’s.

Jane Dee stepping through the doorway, dark-gowned, full of a fury seldom seen and so not easily dismissed.

‘Your doing!’

‘Mother—’

‘What have you caused?’

A tall woman of sixty years, admirably unbowed by circumstance, but ever dismayed by what I did and pained that my meagre earnings were spent more on books than repairs to the house my late tad had half-built.

However, Jane Dee was never more formidable than when bleeding from another’s wound.

‘Goodwife Faldo’s in bitter distress.’

‘Yes,’ I said tightly. ‘I know.’

‘What have you brought into her house? You tell me, now, John, what have you done?’

We were alone. Goodwife Faldo had not returned, and I looked around for Elias, but he too was gone, along with Jack Simm and the shadowed faces at the open door and the window. Some of them melting away upon the arrival of my mother, who, like my father, had been a good Catholic but now mistrusted the miraculous.

Was it? Was the miraculous ever so mean, cold and squalid as what seemed to have happened here this night?

‘On second thought, don’t tell me,’ my mother said.

I let go a sigh.

‘It’s gone, anyway.’

As if I knew. As if I was in any position to state that what I’d never seen was now no more. But my shivers recalled the deep bone-cold which no fire can reach because it’s forever beyond this life, beyond the air that we breathe. And I did not want to look again into the ingle. And see nothing.

‘… believing her family will perish for her sins,’ my mother was saying.

‘Any sin this night,’ I said, almost angrily, ‘is mine.’

‘John,’ she said sadly. ‘As if I didn’t know that.’

The way she’d spoken to me when I was six years old.

‘Mother,’ I said wearily, ‘I beg mercy, but it wasn’t—’

‘Don’t beg mine, beg hers.’

‘Yes… yes, I’ll do that.’

Gladly, for Goodwife Faldo was a good and generous woman, and I must needs make it clear to her that there was nothing for her to fear. And would have tried to explain it to my mother if I’d thought that, for one silent minute, she’d listen.

It had been no more than we’d deserved. I knew that now and profoundly regretted involving Goodwife Faldo in this conceit. Even the protective prayers intoned by Brother Elias would have been ineffective because our sitting was built upon deception. Any summoning not grounded in full honesty attracts only that which thrives on lies, confusion and all the lower longings of humanity which remain undissolved by death.

And I knew I’d get no sleep this night if I’d failed to find out what form it had taken. What they’d all seen and I – Oh, blood of Christ – had not.

‘Here.’ My mother drew something from a fold of her gown. ‘This was delivered.’

Placing on the board a thin letter with a seal which – Oh my God – I recognised at once. I picked it up and knew the paper.

Of all the times for this to be delivered…

‘Mother, when did this arrive?’

‘Not ten minutes ago. It’s why I was coming to find you… amid all the clamour and upset.’

I carried the letter to the window and broke the seal, tension quickening my blood as, in the fading light, I read,

Dr Dee

There is a need to speak with you on behalf of our Cousin. My barge will dock in Mortlake tomorrow at eight

Unsigned, yet I knew, my heart all aquake, that it was from Mistress Blanche Parry, my elder cousin on my father’s side. But that the cousin referred to in the letter was someone to whom neither of us was related. This term had been used before to disguise the identity of she whom Blanche served as Senior Gentlewoman. It was significant that this was far from a formal missive. It meant I was to be consulted in confidence.

‘Mother, the messenger… he’s not waiting for a reply?’

My mother, who also knew that seal, shook her head and then found a strained smile – any kind of summons to court would renew her hopes of me finding a stable income. She was of good family and had barely spoke to me for a week after I turned down the offer of a permanent lecturer’s post at Oxford.

‘I shall go now, John – left too quickly, with neither cloak nor lamp. You’d best come home. When you’ve brought your… small comfort to Goodwife Faldo.’

When she was gone, I took several long breaths and then knelt before the ingle. Alone here now and held in dread, for all my book-fed knowledge, of what I could not see, I said a fervent prayer to banish all unwanted spirits from this house. And then, espying under the window the coif shed by Goodwife Faldo, I picked it up and left.

This end of the village was quiet now, the sky pricked with first stars over the darkening river which linked us, better than any road, with London. I wondered if it would be Mistress Blanche in that barge tomorrow, or the Queen herself.

Then turned, knowing where the Goodwife would be.



St Mary’s, Mortlake, is a modern church, towered but without steeple – a misjudgement in my view, for a steeple conducts to earth divers rays from the firmament. When worshipping here, however, I tend to keep opinions like this to myself. A wisehead is seldom welcome in the house of God.

A single candle was lit upon the high altar, Goodwife Faldo bent in mute prayer on the lowest chancel step. I walked quietly along the aisle and knelt alongside her, leaving a seemly distance betwixt us.

I held out the coif. Marking the dawning of grey in the strands of her freed hair, a sheen of tears on her cheeks as she looked up at me, a pale smile flickering in the candlelight.

‘Why can we never leave well alone, Dr John?’

Tucking her hair into the white linen. I knew what she meant, but the idea of it was well beyond the imagining of a man who lives only to meddle.

‘It’s gone,’ I said, hoping to God I was right. ‘All gone now.’

‘Where?’

A good question, but this was hardly the time or place to serve up a treatise on the nature of the middle sphere.

‘Back into the stone,’ I said. ‘And the stone is back in the scryer’s bag. Where it should have stayed.’

‘Oh fie, Dr John!’ Lifting herself to the second step, which she sat upon. ‘The first mention of it by Master Simm, and I was hooked like an eel.’

She gazed beyond me, into the darkness of the nave.

‘When I was a child, I loved to go into church and feel it all closing around me. I felt cloaked in colours… and the sweetness of the incense. And all the Latin, like to the sound of spells being uttered. More… more magic than I could hold.’

‘Yes.’

The church had been all about magic, then, if we’d but known it.

‘And then the King made God smaller,’ Goodwife Faldo said.

I looked at her with an admiration that surprised me. Her tear-streaked face shone like an apple in the warm candlelight. I turned quickly away and looked up at the long panes in the stained window above the altar. Bright coloured glass reduced by the night to the dull hues of turned earth.

‘Don’t let them stop you, Dr John.’

‘Who?’

‘The Puritans, the Bible men. They’re taking hold. Get one of them as king and the world will be a grey place.’

‘This Queen won’t see that happen. The Queen loves magic and wonder.’

‘Yes. So we’re told. But she must have care. As must you. Small people like me – no-one cares any more what we believe, as long as we turn up at church on a Sunday and say the right words. I wouldn’t be taken away any more for letting a scryer into my house. Would I?’

‘Frances,’ I said. ‘What did you see?’

‘I lost my mind.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘There was a change in the air such as I’ve never felt since I was a child.’

‘There was. I felt it.’

‘The presence of something that wasn’t… I can’t put it into the best words, I’m only a farmer’s wife and I don’t read very well, and I …’

‘Tell me.’

‘I’d hid the ring in the bread oven. And of a sudden I felt a terrible guilt about that, as if it was the worst thing I’d ever done. As if I’d lied to God. And it came into my head that I must face a terrible penance. And the worst of all penance to me would be…’

Holding back tears.

‘The loss of your family,’ I said.

She nodded.

‘And that was when I saw the figure of a pale man. Not clear at first – as though made of dust motes. The bones… the bones were more solid and had their own—’

She shuddered. I looked for her eyes.

‘Bones?’

‘The bones had their own awful light. As though it were not light.’

‘Where were these bones?’

‘He was holding them. One in each hand, clasped to his chest. Death… death’s heads.’

‘Skulls? More than one?’

‘How can I ever sit before that hearth again?’

‘You can. It won’t happen again, Goodwife. Not there. Not ever again. None of it’ – Putting it all together in my head as I spoke – ‘none of it was real. Only pictures conjured from the crystal, which… held us all in thrall. Changed your head around so that you took your worst fears and made them into… pictures.’

She nodded, yet uncertain.

‘Ephemeral,’ I said firmly. ‘Illusion. Nothing was there. You didn’t lie to God. Only to the scryer. And you admitted it to him. You put things right.’

It took away the magic, but I felt it was what she wanted to hear at this moment.

‘And there’s been no plague this summer,’ I said.

Watching myself forming words while I was somewhere else. Somewhere grey and foetid and full of bones.

‘I feel so much calmer now,’ Goodwife Faldo said and laughed lightly. ‘Thank you, Dr John.’