The Heresy of Dr Dee (2 page)

He’d introduced himself to us as Elias, and I was told he’d been a monk. Were this true, it might afford him protection from whatever would come. Certainly his manner implied that we
were fortunate to have his services.

‘And the other reason that Master Faldo is not with us?’

He smiled at me, with evident scepticism. I was silent too long, and it was the goodwife, alert as a chaffinch, who sprang up.

‘My husband… he knows naught of this. He’s working the day long and falls to sleep when he comes in. I…’ She lowered her voice and her eyelids, a fine and
unexpected piece of theatre. ‘I was too ashamed to tell him.’

She’d already paid the scryer, with my money. I’d also been obliged to meet his night’s accommodation at the inn – more than I could readily afford, especially if I were
to make a further purchase. Served me right for starting this game and involving the goodwife in the deception.

Brother Elias smiled at her with understanding.

‘So the treasure you want me to find… would be your wedding ring?’

Goodwife Faldo let out a small cry, hastily stifled with a hand. How could he possibly have known this by natural means? I stiffened only for a moment. It was no more than a good guess. He must
oft-times be summoned to locate a woman’s ring or a locket. It was what they did.

‘What happened…’ Goodwife Faldo displayed her fingers, one with a circle of white below its joint ‘… I must have taken it off. To clean out the fire ready for the
autumn? Laid it on the board, where you’re…’ Peering among the shadows on the board, as if the missing ring might be gleaming from somewhere to betray her. ‘And then forgot
about it until the night. And it… was gone.’

‘You think someone stole it?’

‘I’d not
want
to think that. We trust our neighbours. Nobody here bolts a door. But… yes, I do fear it’s been taken. Been many years in my husband’s family,
and has a value beyond the gold. Can you help me?’

‘Not me alone, Goodwife. Not me alone.’

Brother Elias speaking with solemnity and what seemed to me to be a first hint of stagecraft. Goodwife Faldo’s stool wobbling and the candlelight passing like a sprite across her coif as
she sat up. Like many women, my mother’s neighbour was much attracted to the Hidden, yet in a half-fearful way – the joy of shivers.

‘I can only pray,’ she said unsteadily, ‘that whatever is summoned to help you comes from the right… quarter.’

This, I’ll admit, was a question I’d primed her to ask. No one should open a portal to the Hidden without spiritual protection. There are long-established procedures for securing
this; I wanted to know if the scryer knew them.

‘Oh, it must needs be Godly,’ Elias assured her confidently. ‘If it’s to find this ring for us. However…’ his well-fed face became stern ‘…I
must make it clear to you, Goodwife, that if the ring
has
been stolen and we are able to put a face to the thief, then it’s your business, not mine, to take the matter
further.’

‘That’s, er…’ I coughed ‘…is another reason why
I’m
here.’

Me, the fighting man.
Dear God.

‘And what
are
you, Master Faldo?’ the scryer said, but not as if he cared. ‘What’s your living?’

I shrugged.

‘I work at the brewery.’

The biggest employer of men in Mortlake.
Tell him you work at the brewery
, Jack Simm had said to me earlier. And then, looking at my hands.
Dealing wiv orders.

‘And you…’ the scryer turned to Jack, ‘…were once, I think, an apothecary in London?’

‘Once.’

Jack stubbornly folding his arms over his wide chest as though to ward off further questions.
Get on with it.
The scryer cupped his hands over the black-draped object before him, drew a
long breath, as if about to snatch away the cloth… and then stopped.

‘It’s not mete.’

Pulling his hands away from the mounded cloth, stowing them away in his robe.

A scowl split Jack Simm’s lambswool beard.

‘What?’

‘I regret it’s not mete for me to go on,’ Brother Elias said. ‘The crystal’s cold.’

Speaking with finality, where most of his kind would be smiling slyly at you while holding out their grubby hands for more money. Maybe it came to the same. Elias’s apparel showed
he’d already prospered from his trade.

Yet I felt this wasn’t only about money. The air in here had altered. The hearth looked cold as an altar, the room felt damp. I became aware of the fingers of both my hands gripping the
edge of the board as the scryer reached to the flagged floor for his satchel.

‘We should light a fire?’ Jack Simm said.

Halfway to his feet, angry, but Elias didn’t look at him.

‘If you want this to have results,’ he said quietly, ‘then I must needs go back to the inn and rest a while. I’ll return shortly before nightfall. That is, if you wish to
continue with this…’

… comedy? Was that what he thought?

Did he suspect false-play?

Look
, I wanted to say,
if we’ve insulted your art, I beg mercy, but I feared you’d be a rooker. Back-street scryers, I thought all they sought was a regular income. That
they had no aspiration to walk in the golden halls of creation and know the energies behind their art. I thought that all that mattered was that it worked. And if it didn’t, you faked it. I
want to know where the fakery begins, to separate artifice from natural magic. I want to watch what you do, observe your methods. And… I want to know where to obtain the finest of
shewstones.

Should I identify myself, accept a loss of face?

No. I held back, watching him shoulder his satchel and make his stately way to the Goodwife’s door, wondering if he’d return or vanish with my money.

‘Oh,’ he said mildly. ‘I have one question.’ He opened the door and the light washed over him. ‘Why am
I
summoned to Mortlake?’

From outside came the scurrying of birds.

‘Why
Mortlake
?’ the scryer said. ‘When Mortlake’s surely home to a man more qualified than I?’ He looked at each of us in turn. ‘Or is the good Dr Dee
too busy conjuring for the Queen these days to waste his famous skills in service of his neighbours?’

Jack Simm glanced at me. I knew not how to respond.

‘Dr Dee,’ Jack said, ‘doesn’t scry.’

Hmm… not yet, anyway.

III

J
ACK
S
IMM 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?’