Phil Rickman - The Heresy of Dr Dee

‘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?’

‘Go on…’

‘The kind you don’t find anywhere in Europe. Maybe a treasure from some ancient people of the west. A history of miracles and healing. But the man who has it, he’ll want a fair bit more gold than Brother Elias could put his hands on. And Brother Elias, if I don’t insult you here, Dr John, is a richer man than you.’

‘Jack,’ I said sadly, ‘ you are a richer man than me. Where did he see it?’

‘Abbey of Wigmore. Not a long ride from Wenlock, out on the rim of Wales. That’s where he said he seen it.’

I did know of this abbey. It was close, in fact, to where my father was born. Dissolved now, of course.

‘Was it your impression that Elias might be an agent for whoever has the stone?’

‘Could be. Told him I was inquiring for a regular customer. But I reckon he knows.’

‘He was certainly asking questions about the extent of my wealth,’ I said. ‘Maybe he thinks I keep it abroad.’

‘Whatever, it don’t give me a good feeling. He ain’t a rooker in the normal sense, but it’s all too much like… coincidence and fate.’

I knew what he was saying, but I was in a profession which dismissed neither fate nor coincidence, only sought the science behind them.

‘Who owns the stone?’

‘He was being close on that, but I had the impression it was the last abbot. Gone now, obviously, and the abbey passed through the Crown and into private hands long ago.’

‘Easy enough to find out whose. But the abbott – is he even in the vicinity any more?’

‘ Blind me , you don’t bleedin’ listen do you, Dr John? You could sell your house and put your mother on the streets and you still couldn’t afford it. I don’t understand none of this. I don’t see why the scrying stone – any scrying stone – is suddenly become so important for you. They’ve been around forever. Why now?’

Above the coffin gate, a single planet – the great Jupiter, inevitably – had found a hole in the nightcloud, as if to remind me of my insignificance and the pointlessness of concealment. I could sit on the truth of this matter, keep it to myself, take it to my grave…

‘Because— Oh God, because the study of its properties, notably in the matter of communion with angels, was… suggested to me.’

‘By whom?’

‘Is it not obvious?’

Jupiter seemed to pulse as if sending signals to me and was transformed into the sun in the pure glass of a tall window in a book-lined chamber at the Palace of Greenwich, where a light, merry voice was asking me had I thought of this , and had I looked into that ?

‘Bugger,’ Jack said. ‘That’s all you need.’

I hear the French king consults one owned by the seer, Nostradamus, which is of immense benefit in planning campaigns. And winning the support of the angels. Do you have a shewstone of your own, John? Will it give us communion with the angels?

Well… obviously, I do, Highness, and intend to spend some time assessing its capabilities, but…