Ormond House - The Bones of Avalon

‘Look – religion’s in disarray. For many ordinary folk the only certainty’s bleedin’ Satan. You got conjurers everywhere, and they operates a secret trade.’

‘But -’ was Bonner right about this? – ‘not so secret as it was?’

Jack bent and picked up a blackened acorn.

‘I let my shop go, when they put it round I was dispensing love potions. Old men’d come in saying they’d heard as how the powdered horn of a ram could harden their cocks. “Then why’n’t you go and bleedin’ powder one?” I’d say, and they’d look at their boots and mumble about how it needed somefing else… You see? That’s the fine line I wasn’t gonna cross.’

He looked around but, apart from rooks and ravens, we were well alone. Came and stood before me in a sodden heap of last year’s leaves.

‘When you was accused of attempting to murder Queen Mary by dark arts, that was horseshit. But it can be done, can’t it?’

‘Murder by magic? There’s precedent.’

I walked a tight circle around a birch sapling, thinking of Henry, Lord Neville, the son of the Earl of Westmorland, who, twelve or so years earlier, had been accused of conspiring to murder his wife and his father by magical means, to obtain his inheritance and pay his gambling debts. Having, it was said, hired an experienced sorcerer, a man well qualified in magic and medicine. And I was thinking, also, of the women who, it was said, could lay down a death-spell, inscribed in blood and sped on its way by days of dark meditation and self-denial – the black fast.

‘I think…’ I hesitated. ‘I believe the mind is a powerful tool which can unlock doors into the unknown. And thus awaken energies which can be directed, to cause both benefit and… and harm. But if you ask me can I do these things…?’

Turning away, feeling, for all my years of study, my knowledge and my practical inventions, worthless and without substance.

‘Master.’

I spun round. She was standing on the edge of the path, looking like some woodland sprite.

‘Catherine…’ She was wrapped in one of my mother’s shawls. ‘You’re back?’

‘My ma’s has been to talk to your… to Mistress Dee. All’s quite well now, Doctor.’

Her face was dark, like a bruised apple. I wondered if there’d been a rift with her puritan father over this.

‘Please, the mistress says can you come home at once. You’ve a visitor.’

‘Who?’

Becoming tense.

‘Someone from court.’ Catherine Meadows gave Jack a tentative smile. ‘Master Simm.’

‘There you go,’ Jack whispered to me, as she turned away onto the path. ‘You can leave on your mission with no anxiety.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Thank you, Jack.’

No anxiety. Of course not.

Five horses were tethered in our yard, and I saw four armed men standing by the gate, and thought at once of the day my rooms had been searched and sealed and…

Take him.

Almost turning and walking away then, to buy time, before I recognised two of the men from the Queen’s company, and one gave me a respectful salute. Me nodding and breathing again.

Only the four of them, so it could not be someone of particular eminence. Other than the Queen herself, there are few people at court I feel safe to trust.

Hurrying inside, past the fire in the hall, I found them in the parlour overlooking the river: two women of similar age, seated by the window, sharing a platter of sweetmeats.

‘Cousin?’

‘Good afternoon, Dr Dee,’ Blanche Parry said. ‘I am come to collect the books.’

Remaining seated. Her dark clothing almost nun-like.

‘But I thought… that I was to bring them. The books?’

‘More discreet, it is, for me to take them from you.’

A small voice, yet oddly pitched, so that it carried like pipes.

I call her cousin, yet am not sure precisely how we’re related.

‘You’ve ridden here from Richmond… just for the books?’

‘It were best,’ Blanche said, ‘that you were not seen too often at court.’

‘The Queen thinks that?’

‘It’s best.’

I felt a chill. Looked into her small, shrewd eyes, fine lines around them. It was my tad who, with an uncommon prescience, had advised me years ago that our kinship with Mistress Blanche would one day prove an asset, and it was true that the Queen’s most senior gentlewoman had known Elizabeth since she was a babe. Had access, more than anyone, to the innermost sanctum.

I said. ‘ You think I should keep a distance.’

My mother frowned at such disrespect, but Blanche’s expression remained constant. Constant was Blanche’s watchword.

‘I merely suggest,’ she said, ‘that it were better for the Queen if your dealings were to remain discreet. You tend to question things too much, Dr Dee.’

‘One of my failings.’

‘You must excuse my son, Mistress Blanche,’ my mother said quickly. ‘I sometimes think that John is only ever half in this world and half in some dark place of his own complicated imaginings. Not at all healthy, to my thinking.’

I pulled up a stool, my complicated imaginings telling me that this visit was about more than books.

‘As you, more than anyone, would be aware, Mistress Blanche,’ I said, ‘the Queen’s a most intelligent woman, who’s been reading manuscripts in Greek since she could barely-’

‘And I thought you an intelligent man, Dr Dee,’ Blanche snapped, ‘who would realise that it were best that the Queen should not be seen to be inquiring too deeply into certain areas of learning.’

I fell silent. My mother arose.

‘Please excuse me, Mistress Blanche. I shall prepare a warm drink before your journey back to Richmond. Also for your men.’

‘Thank you.’ Blanche looking up, a distant smile like a mist upon her face. ‘It has been good to see you again, Jane.’

My mother nodding and slipping away. Me sensing a prearrangement here, as Mistress Blanche gestured me to my mother’s chair next to the river window.

‘I’m informed, Dr Dee, that you’re to perform a service for Sir William Cecil.’

‘So it would appear.’

‘He’s a good man, for whom the Queen’s interests are always central.’

‘Indeed. His constant concern for the Queen is like to an older brother’s.’

‘And with you to Somersetshire… also goes Lord Dudley?’

‘A man whose support for the Queen -’ I watched her eyes – ‘is equally beyond question.’

‘But whose reputation is, if anything, even worse than yours,’ my cousin said. ‘If for different reasons.’

‘You don’t dice your words, do you, Mistress Blanche?’

I pushed my chair back towards the window. A tired sun hung over the river in a cradle of stringy cloud. Obviously, Dudley’s relations with Elizabeth, on whatever level, would be a source of anxiety to Blanche, even though it was said she had oft-times passed intimate letters from one to the other.

However, as the women with whom Dudley had been intimate must by now outnumber the wherries on the Thames, his reputation was no more the reason Blanche Parry was here than to collect the books on Arthur.

One thing you should know about men and women of the border – any border – is that they ever use the small and narrow roads, and it can take an endless time before their reasons are manifest. Something embedded in their nature, relating to a need for caution with strangers. Along the border of England and Wales, even quite close relatives can be strangers through many generations, and I was resigned to a lengthy and, for the most part, aimless preamble.

‘Even apart from his adventures with women,’ Blanche Parry said, ‘Dudley is deemed by some to be ungodly.’

‘What?’

‘For his study of the stars and similar interests. And… for his choice of friends.’