The Heresy of Dr Dee (12 page)

What the hell had kept us friends? A fighting man and prolific lover who thrived on hunting stags and watching, with an analytical excitement, the baiting of bears by
dogs… and a bear-sympathist who hunted only rare books and had lain with only one woman and could not sleep for the longing.

I spun away from the window.

‘You hadn’t seen her… for a whole
year.
’

‘John—’

‘You self-serving
bastard
’

Recoiling from myself. I rarely shout at anyone. Dudley bit off his response, sat breathing hard, his hands pushing down on the board.

‘Mercy.’ Holding myself together and banishing an image of Amy Robsart whom I feared I could have loved. ‘Yes, I do fully understand the Queen’s policy on wives at
court.’

‘She wanted’ – he didn’t look at me – ‘to see me there every day.
Every
day.’

‘And every night?’

He was silent.

‘You told me you thought Amy was ill,’ I said. ‘You told me even she thought she’d die soon.’

‘That was what she said, yes.’

‘You brought a doctor to her?’

‘Several.’

‘Robbie… you ever think that was simply to test where your thought lay? See how badly you wanted her soon to be dead and out of the way of your ambition? Do you not think it
possible that the only sickness she suffered was a malady of the mind?’

‘For a man of books, you seem to know a surprising amount about the ways of women.’ Dudley turned his head at last towards me. ‘Or was she ill because she was being slowly
poisoned? I stayed away because I was having her poisoned and would rather not be there to watch it happening.’ Staring at me now, his eyes ablaze. ‘That’s what you think –
I’d have my wife poisoned?’

‘I didn’t say that. You did.’

‘But one way or another I’m behind her death. Jesu, John, even
I’d
think I was behind it. Who had more to gain?’

‘Or more to lose.’

He said nothing. Would only have talked of twin souls, astrology.

Or all the dangerous marriages, any one of which might be forced on the Queen if she got much older unbetrothed. I was aware of a dark abyss below me.

‘You loved her once. Amy.’

Thinking that if there was any time he might leap up and strike me it was now. I didn’t step away. Would even, God help me, have taken the blow. But he didn’t move, except to lean
back a little on the bench.

‘A squire’s daughter. And I was… nobody in particular. Not then. With ambition, of course, but in some ways just glad to be alive. Glad to have survived. We were happy. We
were a pair. I… destroyed her.’

I stiffened. He was very still. The air was fogged on the cusp of night, Dudley’s voice toneless.

‘But I didn’t kill her. I didn’t pay anyone to kill her.’

This time I let the silence hang. I wanted to say I believed him, but the words would not quite come.

I could take this matter no further. Went and sat down opposite him and heard him swallow.

‘You know why Bess trusts you, John?
Do
you?’

I had no answer to this. I knew the Queen believed in me and what I did – she who’d learned eight languages, maybe more, and had once told me how she saw her reign as a magical
period, framing a great tapestry of human progress.

‘I’ll tell you,’ Dudley said. ‘It’s because she knows that, for all your extensive knowledge of the vastness of things, you’re a simple soul without political
ambition. You want only to buy more books. That so makes her laugh.’

‘I’m so glad,’ I said, ‘to be awarded the much-coveted status of Court Clown.’

‘God’s bollocks, John!’ Dudley bringing down a fist on the board, almost splitting one of its poor pine panels. ‘She has no fears about your
fidelity
, that’s
all I’m saying. And knows she’ll get from you only the unwaxed truth as you see it… and that your vision’s far-reaching. And right now that’s worth a lot.’

So why doesn’t she pay me a lot? Or even anything.

Dudley looked at his empty cup, but I didn’t offer to refill it. Couldn’t anyway – we had no more wine.

‘Now tell
me
the truth,’ he said. ‘Why precisely did you ask to see me? What am I doing here?’

‘Because I would not have been able to live with myself if I returned to find you’d been—’

‘Returned from where?’ He looked up quickly. ‘Where are you going?’

I saw no reason to avoid the truth. I told him I must needs fulfil a promise to the Queen. In relation to her professed interest in scrying through a shewstone. Spoke aloud, it sounded almost
foolish, but he, if anyone, would know that it wasn’t. He was already nodding.

‘She talked of that. She was… enthused.’

‘When was this?’

‘Not long ago.’

Avoiding my eyes, which seemed to confirm a long-held suspicion of mine that there’d been a least one meeting between Dudley and the Queen since Amy’s death. A guarded meeting, no
doubt, away from court. Hooded figures in a palace garden, a covered barge on the river.

‘I told the Queen I’d acquired a crystal sphere. And would be working with it. And that I’d report back to her.’

I saw Dudley looking around the darkening workplace.

‘You won’t see one here,’ I said. ‘God knows, I’ve been trying to
find
one.’

Dudley began to laugh.

‘You mean one you can afford?’

‘The ones I can afford would probably be useless for my purposes. You’re right, I’m a clown. However…’

Told him, in some detail, about the crystal sphere last heard of in a former abbey in the Welsh borderlands. Finding I had his full attention.

‘So you don’t know if it’s still there and you’re fairly sure you wouldn’t be able to afford it, but you’re planning a long and arduous ride to find
out?’

‘Haven’t decided yet. But the fact remains that Cecil wants me out of town for a while.’

‘You mean out of the reach of Blanche Parry. Can’t help wondering if Cecil wasn’t told about the plan to consult you by Mistress Parry herself – his fellow Welshie. Who
may also disapprove of Bess’s taste in men. She’s polite to me, is old Blanche, but ever somewhat distant. Uncommon that, for a woman of whatever age.’

‘Robbie, she’s distant from
me
, and I’m her cousin.’

‘
Cousin.
Half of Wales is your cousin. Look at that bastard – isn’t
he
a cousin? The notorious villain, Thomas…’

‘Jones. Thomas Jones.’

‘Who robbed his betters on the road. Almost openly.
Is
he your cousin?’

‘Betrothed to my cousin, Joanne. And I don’t ask what he did or to whom. He was young then. Reformed now, anyway. A scholar, with a doctorate. And given a royal pardon.’

Dudley snorted.

‘Bess is quite ridiculously tolerant towards the Welsh.’

‘Perhaps because she
is
Welsh.’

‘She is
not
Welsh! Her grandfather was Welsh. Partly. So you think Cecil might try and have me slain, do you?’

The sky momentarily was shadowed by a flock of birds going to roost, the dimmed window glass turning Dudley’s fine doublet from its mourning indigo to black.

‘He likes you,’ I said. ‘But he might not shed tears over your corpse.’

His lips tightened, vanishing into his once-proud moustache, now straggled and uneven.

‘I… had a servant die, John. Couple of days ago. A kitchen maid. Spasms of the gut, and dead within an hour. I… ordered all the meat in the house taken out and
buried.’

‘You’re thinking poison?’

‘If
I
died from it, people would say it was no more than divine justice.’ He stared up at me, his face twisting into wretchedness in an instant, the way a child’s does.
‘They can all say what the hell they like, now I’m exiled from court, and nobody visits me for fear they’ll come away soiled by second-hand guilt. Maybe’ – pushing
himself back from the board, the bench-feet squealing on the flags – ‘you can summon Amy’s spirit into a fucking shewstone to tell us precisely how she died.’

Did I mark tears in his eyes? Finally? Tears for Amy? Tears for himself? Did he even know the difference?

‘What should I do?’ he said at last.

‘Not for me to say, Robbie. We’re acting on different stages now.’

‘You’re still my friend.’

I suppose I nodded, though I’d rarely been less sure of it.

XIV

S
HE’D BEEN IN
a wild mood that day, the day not so long ago when they’d talked of knowing the future and having communion with angels. Red hair all down around her
shoulders, the pale sun on her pale face, a faerie light in her amber eyes… and Dudley wanting her so badly that he’d fallen to his knees in the island garden at Richmond, burying his
head in the grass ’twixt her feet.

Remembering now how she’d insisted that God and all His angels must surely be on her side.

Our
side, Dudley had wanted to say, but didn’t. Telling me he’d been thinking of all they’d come through, both of them losing a parent to the block. Imprisoned side by
side in the Tower, not knowing if they, too, would end up there.

But how will we know
, she’d said, and he recalled her voice grown thin,
when what we do fails to please them, and God and all His angels begin to turn away? How will we know when
evil’s at the door?

‘Do you see?’ Dudley said to me. ‘Do you see where this goes?’

‘No,’ I said.

Although of course I did and was filled with a mixture of alarm and excitement, as Dudley arose and picked up the smaller of the two globes given to me by Gerardus Mercator, with whom I’d
studied at Louvain. Holding it up to the last of the light, as if it were a symbol of his destiny.

‘Spirits,’ Dudley said. ‘A shewstone can bring forth spirits. Good spirits… evil spirits?’

I watched him slowly turning Mercator’s globe. Geography is one of my less-dangerous obsessions.

‘I’m a cabalist,’ I said, ‘and also a Christian. Therefore any spirits called into the stone by me must needs be touched by the angelic.’

‘Good enough,’ Dudley said. ‘So far. Go on.’

‘The Queen knows her reign could see the meeting point of science and the spiritual. A wondrous thing. If barriers are not raised against it.’

‘Ah… that old question of religion.’

‘Not an
old
question at all,’ I said ruefully. ‘When I was a boy, mystery was all around us. Christ was full-manifest in the Mass. Every baptism was an exorcism of evil
spirits. The world
vibrated with magic.
And… and if men like me sought divine inspiration in the cause of making new discoveries, it would be a long time before someone cried
heresy
.’

‘Except possibly the Pope.’

I nodded sadly.

‘We get rid of the Pope, and what happens? In no time at all, we’ve gone too far the other way. Christ is
not
manifest in the Mass. It’s all theatre. Let’s strip
it away, the new Bible-men cry, not for us to ask questions. The will of God is the will of God, and you either accept it or you go to Hell. You explore
nothing.
Jesu, I— I’m a
Protestant, Robbie, I believe in the Church of England… and yet know it could take us back centuries.’

Both of us knew where the Queen stood on this. There would be no persecution of Catholics if they worshipped privately.

Or she’d be persecuting herself.

‘Tell me how it works,’ Dudley said. ‘The shewstone.’

‘I don’t
fully
know how it works. I know that planetary rays are drawn into the stone through ritual and the focus of the scryer, who must needs enter an altered state to
perceive the flow of messages.’

‘If this French bastard Nostradamus can do it,’ Dudley said, ‘then you can do it.’

Dear God, I’d wish for a half of his confidence. I’d met Nostradamus just the one time and didn’t believe him a rooker. Not entirely. Envied him, I’d have to admit, for
his standing at the French court and the monetary favours that came his way. The way he was venerated and left to experiment unmolested by Church or Crown.

‘We’re both reaching for the same things,’ I said. ‘Though my own feeling is that his prophecies are a little too… poetic. Not the best poetry, either.’

‘And shaped to the French cause.’ Dudley was yet nursing the globe. ‘This clever stone…
does
Nostradamus have one?’

‘Don’t know. He claims he’s a natural scryer who needs only to look into a glass of water to connect himself to channels of prophecy. But I’m a scientist and must needs
have proof. Scrying stones have been around throughout history, but only now do we have the means and the knowledge to subject them to proper scientific study.’

‘What are we seeking here, John?’

We?
I sought a careful answer.

‘Knowledge of the hidden engines that power the world? The workings of the mind of God?’

Jesu
, that wasn’t careful at all, was it?

‘The mind of God
, John?’

Dudley took breath in a kind of shudder, and I endeavoured to back away.

‘I just don’t believe we can do anything of significance alone. All great art comes through divine inspiration. Advances in science… the same.’