Phil Rickman - The Heresy of Dr Dee

Siôn had done this? Struck his father…

… with the thigh bone?

It took me about three hours get him out to the hill,’ Anna said. ‘I had to do it myself.’

He didn’t find that man , she’d said, of Siôn. He wouldn’t even come out that day. He was afraid and clung to the fire.

‘I smashed his face with the spade. And then took the spade to him… down there. Bore it on the spade into the wood. I suppose the pigs ate it. Pedr Morgan found him next day and his wife came to me to ask what we should do.’

I thought of Stephen Price who’d buried Tomos Ceddol, not knowing who he was. Buried him twice. In the tump.

Why? Because it was the only place I could think of where the mad boy wouldn’t find him.

But no one lay easy in the tump.

She felt… what he wanted to do to her. Felt it inside.

I would talk to Scory. This was a matter for a priest of the old kind. Someone practised in the cure of souls.

‘Come home with me,’ Anna Ceddol said. ‘Please come home with me. For tonight.’

HE REFUSED WINE, accepting small beer. There was a ring of blood around the pupil of his left eye.

No longer wearing mourning, though his apparel was of earth colours, he’d ridden alone to Mortlake, and I wondered if this meant he no longer feared for his life… or if he no longer cared. I wondered if he’d been shown the letter from Thomas Blount. I wondered if he’d tell me if he had. I wondered too much.

There was an unseasonably close air for that time of year when late afternoon and evening are become one and the traffic of wherries on the river is thinned. Dudley leaned back on the bench in my workroom, the long board betwixt us, his shoulders against the wall.

‘So you gave it back.’

Oft-times you don’t choose the stone , Jack Simm had said, reporting the words of Elias the scryer. The stone chooses you.

I didn’t remind Dudley of this: my feeling was that if that stone had chosen me it was not for anything good.

But it hadn’t, anyway. It had been given either as a bribe for my silence or…

I didn’t know enough about the properties of crystal, though I could almost feel its weight again, pressed against the bottom of my gut, the lower mind. Had my clumsy, if heartfelt, invocation of the archangel in some way altered its vibration? Altered me ? For altered I was.

‘Smart’s scryer was Gethin,’ I said.

‘And that taints it?’

‘Who can say what was invoked through Gethin’s madness? Who knows what lived in him? You’d really want to risk loosing something… uncertain into the Queen’s—?’

‘All right.’ A gloved hand was raised, a frown flickering across Dudley’s damaged face. ‘I understand. I’m already accused of carrying some satanic spore, so I’ll bow to your superior knowledge of the Hidden.’

I sighed.

‘For the first time in years I’m beginning to wonder if I truly—’

‘You do .’ His bloodied eyes hardened. ‘Never forget that, or you’ll be begging on the fucking streets.’

I said nothing. Could only wonder if such a simple life as that might not be preferable. Too many things which my poor mind was unable to arrange into the roughest of geometric patterns. I was humbled. I’d lost all faith in the power of my library. I lowered my hands and stared into them, watching them tremble.

‘I suppose… another crystal stone will come. When I’m deemed ready. If ever.’

‘Gethin,’ Dudley said, ‘fixed me with his eye and said I’d be dead within the week, and instead… he is.’

I said carefully, ‘Did you see it done?’

‘Saw his body. Saw it loaded on to a handcart.’

Not what I’d asked.

A silence. The air was like sand.

‘I suppose,’ Dudley said, ‘that I owe you my life.’

‘Not me. Thomas Jones, perhaps.’

‘Tell me I don’t have to thank him.’

‘I doubt he’ll be holding his breath in anticipation. How are you now?’

‘Better.’

As good as his word, for once, John Smart had indeed provided, for Dudley’s recovery, a good bedchamber with window glass. But not at the Bull.

‘How you could stay with the doxy after what she…’

‘Branwen Laetitia Swift,’ Dudley said.

Almost fondly.

‘ Did she give you a potion? Did she aid in your abduction?’

All this yet worried me. How could Smart, in his role as her fishmonger and former associate of Gethin’s, not have been part of it? The most likely explanation, it seemed to me now, was that Smart had not realised for a while how high the plot went. Maybe not realised that the target was Lord Robert Dudley, panicked when he found out. Let’s say I thought it was ill-advised and might rebound. On him and his comfortable retirement.

‘Who knows?’ Dudley said. ‘I was taken in the street. Hit from behind, thrown into an alley. Dragged out as if drunk. And then beaten, tied down in a cart.’ He drained his cup. ‘Don’t want to talk about it. It demeans me.’

Did it? I was inclined to think that now he was out of it, he found it perversely flattering, the lengths to which they’d gone. And that coming through it had strengthened his cause.

He’d remained with Mistress Swift until he was fit enough to mount a horse his broken arm still bound. Three days – Dudley healed quickly. And ever thought the best of women, and they of him.

‘She had new boots made for me,’ he said. ‘Man must’ve been working day and night.’

‘With a sheath in the side?’

We’d not discussed this. For all his soldierly training, I suspected this might have been the first time he’d actually fought for his life.

‘You’d taken out the blade after they searched you but before they stole the boots – as obviously they would, boots of such quality.’

‘Secreted the blade into my sleeve. It took a couple of painful hours, but eventually I had the ropes stripped to a thread. When the older man left us alone, it was the obvious time. The boy had been taunting me in his halting English. How they’d be cutting off my cock and what they’d do with it.’

‘So they knew who you were.’

‘Evidently. It delighted them. Lost count of the beatings.’ His jaw tightening at the memory. ‘When the moment came, the boy made the first move. When his brother hadn’t returned by first light, he was on his feet, blade out. I think he’d have cut my throat if I hadn’t snapped the threads and… Not at my best, I have to say, but with surprise on my side…’ He shrugged. ‘You seen Cecil since your return?’

‘He hasn’t summoned me.’

Nor had his muscle come to snatch me into a barge. Cecil’s silence had said all I needed to hear.

‘However,’ I said, ‘a royal barge did arrive this morning.’

‘Jesu!’ Dudley sat up hard, with a clacking of the bench-feet on the flags. ‘ Bess? ’

My mother also had wondered as much and had been driven into a panic.

I shook my head.

‘Blanche.’

My cousin. The Queen’s senior gentlewoman and closest confidante. A social visit. Much circumspect Border-talk with never a mention of either astrology or wedding dates.

Dudley leaned forward across the board.

‘You told her?’

‘Everything.’

Dudley expelled a long long breath.

‘Hell’s bells, John.’

‘Who better?’ I said. ‘She won’t tell the Queen unless it becomes necessary. But she might have words with Cecil.’