Phil Rickman - The Heresy of Dr Dee

Watching his fingers curl, the knuckles grown pale as I explained about the heralded visit to me of Blanche Parry and the act of near-piracy that had taken me to the Strand. And some of what I’d learned there.

Dudley drained his wineglass.

‘Cecil believes he’s doing what’s best for the Queen, but he’s fighting for his own future. And that, for once, makes him fallible. Vulnerable.’

‘And dangerous,’ I said.

‘You think he scares me?’

‘He should. By God he should.’

Seeing now that both these men were at their most dangerous. Each guessing that only one of them would come through.

‘Cecil’s served and survived, thus far, three monarchs,’ I said. ‘If I were a gambling man my money would not be on you.’

‘John, you don’t have any fucking money.’

I said nothing. The air was still. The first beating of horse-hooves had sent my mother, in a hurry, to the Faldos’ house. At one time she’d been impressed by my friendship with Dudley but now, although she never spoke of it, it was an evident source of trepidation.

‘Is it true,’ I asked him bluntly, ‘that Blanche had been sent to have me choose a date for your wedding to the Queen?’

A rueful smile.

‘Nothing so exact. It was hoped you might find some suggestion from the heavens that one match in particular might be… more propitious than any of the others. And… Yes, all right… that there might be a most suitable time to announce to the people of England a betrothal.’

He toyed with papers on my long board. The rough copy, made in Antwerp, from the writings of Trithemius of Spanheim, lay open next to some notes for my book of the Monas Hieroglyph which would explain in one symbol all I knew about where we lodged with regard to the sun and the moon and the influence of the planets. I’d been working on it, in periods, for nearly three years, knowing it must not be hurried.

I said, ‘ Who hoped?’

‘What?’

‘Who hoped I might do these charts?’

Well, obviously, Mistress Blanche Parry would seek my services on behalf of only one person, but I wanted to hear him say it.

He said nothing. He lowered his head into his cupped hands on the boardtop and stayed thus, quite still, for long seconds. A man widely condemned as arrogant, brash, impulsive, never to be trusted… and I supposed I was heartened that he didn’t think to hide the less-certain side of himself from me.

At length, he raised his head, dragged in a long breath. The chamber was dimming fast around us. We might have been in a forest glade, with the owl watching us from the fork of a tree.

‘Very well, John,’ Dudley said. ‘Let’s get this over.’

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.