The Heresy of Dr Dee (5 page)

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.’

VII

M
ORTLAKE HIGH STREET
. Sticky, blurred lantern-light, echoes of the cackle and whoop of roistering from the inn and, presently, the spatter of piss
against a wall.

No place to look up at the stars or the new-born moon.

After walking Goodwife Faldo to her door, I should have gone home and slept, to be refreshed and fully sentient at the riverside on the morrow. But how could I sleep now?

The inn was ahead of me. Recently extended to offer five bedchambers, two with glass in their windows for the moneyed traveller, but yet a rough place after dark. I slowed my steps, recalling a
night when, for no clear reason, I’d been given a beating by men unknown to me, although it was clear they knew who I was.
Smash the conjurer down. Smash him down in the name of
God!

Soft footsteps behind me and I turned. A light shining out in my path, and I froze into stillness as it rose level with my face.

‘Go quietly, Dr John.’

‘Jack.’

He carried one of the candle lanterns you could borrow from the inn if you were deemed sober enough to remember where to return it.

I said, ‘Where is he?’

‘Abed, I assume.’

‘Then I’ll wake him up.’

‘No need,’ Jack said. ‘We shared half a jug of small beer in the back room.’

‘And?’

‘He said it happens. On occasion, when the stone’s active, spirits that manifest in the crystal can be… fetched out of it and into the air.’

‘Astral forms?’

‘Apparitions. Creatures of the air. The scryer must never allow himself to become distracted by them. That’s their aim, he says. To distract him. All they seek’s attention.
His, anyway.’

He gestured back up the street and I followed him back towards the church. We stood in the shadow of the coffin gate, where Jack put the lamp on the ground.

‘Elias has a reputation, going back to days as a novice at Wenlock Priory. Up towards Shrewsbury?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where he… caused some concern.’ Jack paused, sniffed. ‘Visions.’

I said nothing, and he began to rhyme them off, without emphasis, as if listing ingredients for a stew.

‘Holy martyrs stepping from the stained glass. Noises in the night. Words mysteriously etched on the walls of locked chambers. Cracks in statues. Well, this was the time of the Reform. Not
what anybody wanted, then. So when the abbot finks about maybe having him exorcised, he’s off. Takes to the road. Where the gift of vision, once kept under the board, becomes his
living.’

‘Evidently a good one.’

‘When he fetches up in London, sure.’

‘Where he has patronage?’

If he was recommended to Jack by a chaplain to the Bishop of London, might that not mean he had the protection of the bishop himself?

‘Somebody’s looking out for him, that’s for sure,’ Jack said.

I picked up the lantern and asked, because I had to,

‘What did
you
see this night? What did you see in the ingle?’

No reply. Back down the street, some man was retching.

‘Jack—’

‘Ah, how can we ever know?’

‘What did Elias see in the crystal?’

‘Wasn’t a ring, that’s for sure. Look, he wouldn’t talk about it and I didn’t want to come over too pushy. He says it don’t matter what he sees, he never
questions it. He’s only the middleman.’

‘And
you
saw…?

‘Me? I dunno… bones? Hazy grey man-shape, wiv bones. I didn’t like it.’

‘Marked?’ I said urgently, before I could stop myself. ‘Marked here?’ Snatching up the lantern, holding it to my face and raising fingers to my cheeks. ‘And
here?’

‘Keep your bleedin’ voice down. Marked how?’

‘Black lumps. As seen in places where sheep are farmed, wool gathered…’

Hell, I knew this was a far cry from scientific inquiry, that the last thing I should do was prompt him. But I was tired and overwound.

‘Who you got in mind, Dr John?’

‘There
was
a man I met in Glastonbury. A trader in what he claimed were holy relics. But they were just old bones. He had hundreds of bones. If they were digging up a graveyard for
more burials he’d be there with his bag. In the end, he was able to give me the intelligence I needed about the bones of Arthur. This was just before he died. Of… of
wool-sorters’ disease. Face full of foul black spots.’

Benlow the boneman. I recalled, with a sick tremor, how this man, an obvious buck-hunter, had tried to attach himself to me.
Never thought I’d meet a man as famous as you, my
lord.

‘He wanted to come to London. Wanted me to bring him back with me. I… may have… implied that this would be possible.’

‘You made a bargain wiv him?’

‘I suppose I was in his debt. But if he thought we had a bargain… it was one I couldn’t keep.’

Benlow crouching amid the smashed shelves of his grisly warehouse, having attempted, in his agony, to take his own life by cutting his wrists and his throat, but too weak. Dying eventually
surrounded by the detritus of death, the bones he’d offered for sale as relics of the saints. A rooker in every sense, but in the end I’d felt pity for him and some measure of
guilt.

And now he haunted me? Wanting me to know he was there, even though I could not see him – worse, it seemed to me, than if I could. The injustice mocked me daily – the learned
bookman, heaven’s interpreter, cursed by a poverty of the spirit. I knew more about the engines of the Hidden than any man in England, but I could not
see
except, on occasion, in
dreams.

And maybe in a scryer’s crystal?

I looked up at the night sky, in search of familiar geometry, but it had clouded over and there were neither stars nor moon.

‘Jack… erm… did you, by chance, ask him…?’

‘Where one might be obtained? A shewstone? Course I asked him.’

‘But?’

‘It ain’t simple, Dr John. And it ain’t cheap.’

Brother Elias had said there was always a few around, but most of them were of little value to a scryer, full of flaws and impurity. The more perfect of them were hard to come
by and cost more than a court banquet.

‘And might be dangerous,’ Jack Simm said.

‘How?’

‘For a novice, he meant. The more perfect ones have been used by men of power. A man what’s never scryed might find himself driven into madness. It would take a man of knowledge and
instinct to… deal wiv what it might… bring into the world.’

‘Hmm.’

‘A responsibility. Laden wiv obligation –
his
words.’

‘Of course.’

‘Like to a wife,’ Jack said. ‘You must take it to your bed.’

‘Go to!’

‘I’m telling you what he
said.
There must needs be a close bond ’twixt the crystal and the scryer, so you might sleep wiv it under your bolster. Bit bleedin’
lumpy, if you ask me, but monks is fond of discomfort.’

There was logic here. Crystal possesses strangely organic qualities; crystal spheres change, grow, in response to unseen influences. The stone in the Faldos’ hall this night, the way its
colours changed, the way it seemed to tremble or crouch like a toad…

Ripples in my spine.

‘Oft-times you don’t choose the stone,’ Jack said. ‘The stone chooses you. He said the right one might come along when you ain’t looking for it.’

‘And does he have one he might sell?’

‘Reckons he’s offered crystal stones wherever he goes, but most of ’em’s flawed and there’s – aw, Jesu, I could see this coming a mile off – apart from
his own, there’s only one other he’s coveted in years. Odd that, ain’t it?’