S Parris - Prophecy

I walk to the window and lean on the sill, gazing out at the afternoon sky, now fading to a burnished auburn. My room overlooks the back of the house; from here I can see down the gardens as far as the great brown stretch of the Thames, broad as a highway, its sluggish waters reflecting the sinking sun. If I am honest with myself, I am afraid. Whatever the outcome of these plots with Mary Stuart, my own future hangs in the balance; I can see this much clearly. If this invasion, which at the moment sounds like the late-night revenge fantasy of disenfranchised men and a furious captive queen, should somehow become reality, I would not stand a chance in a newly Catholicised England. But if — as I sincerely hope — these plots are thwarted, it seems impossible that Castelnau could continue here as ambassador with any credibility once his involvement is known. And if he should be expelled, I must make sure that I am valuable to Walsingham and the English court for my own sake, not just for my access to the embassy and its intrigues. If I could discover who killed Cecily Ashe, I reason, Queen Elizabeth could not doubt my usefulness.

Then it occurs to me: there is a friend I can talk to, someone who has precisely the skills needed to test my theory about the perfume and the ring, and who also understands discretion. I have neglected him in the flurry of these past days, but he is the one person who knows more about the Great Conjunction than anyone in London. Tomorrow, then, I will return to Mortlake, to the house of Doctor Dee.

Mortlake, London

29th September, Year of Our Lord 1583

Doctor Dee’s library is, to me, one of the uncelebrated wonders of this rainy island. His entire house is a sprawling hotch-potch of extensions, additions, new wings and secret rooms, so that it is impossible from the outside to tell the shape of the original cottage that once belonged to his mother, buried somewhere deep within the labyrinth. All these addenda were designed by his own hand according to his own esoteric precepts, to serve some particular purpose of his work, and the library is the culmination of his achievement. His collection of books and manuscripts, and indeed the room itself, is grander than the college libraries I saw in Oxford; at vast expense he has had built the new vertical shelving popular in the European universities rather than the old-style lecterns, so that the books may be displayed to better advantage from floor to ceiling, around the walls. This does not necessarily help the visiting scholar, since there appears to be no obvious method to cataloguing the works, unless it is some arcane system that exists purely in Dee’s own head, for he can put his hand immediately on any work you care to name, and remembers exactly where to replace it.

There are shelves crammed with ancient maps and charts rolled on wooden spindles and stacked horizontally; cases with ancient manuscripts of vellum and gilt illumination, saved from the destruction of England’s monastic libraries; there are books that Dee crossed a continent to find, books which cost him a year’s income, books bound in calfskin of rich brown with brass bindings, books which in another country would see him burned at the stake. Here you can find the De Occulta Philosophia of Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim, the Liber Experimentorum of the mystic Ramon Lull, Burgo’s Treatise on Magic , the writings of Nicolaus Copernicus and Abbot Trithemius’s studies of cryptography; you can, if the subject interests you, find books on mathematics, metallurgy, divination, botany, navigation, music, astronomy, tides, rhetoric or indeed any branch of knowledge that at some time has been committed to pen and ink. In one corner of the room, he keeps a pair of painted globes mounted on brass stands, one showing the Earth and the other the heavens, a gift from the great cartographer Gerard Mercator; in another, a quadrant five feet tall, and other devices of his own construction for measuring the movements of the planets.

Beyond this cavernous library, with its vaulted wooden ceiling, where you often encounter travel-weary scholars and writers who have crossed seas or ridden for days to consult some book of which Dee owns the only known copy, lie the inner rooms, where only his most trusted friends and associates are admitted: his alchemical laboratory and his private study, his sanctum.

‘Some sort of poison, you think?’ Dee murmurs, canted over the work bench in his laboratory. He holds up the glass perfume bottle to an oil lamp that hangs from a hook above him, so that its facets reflect fragments of light as he turns it curiously from side to side. Outside, the weather is still bright with the last warmth of summer, but in this room the shutters are always closed. Standing in Dee’s laboratory gives you the sense of being trapped in the belly of a great beast, with the dark and the heat from the several fires continually burning, and the fact that the room seems to pulse with autonomous life: six stills of various sizes, with vast interconnected vessels and flasks of clay, glass or copper, puff and bubble constantly, as if engaged in an ongoing conversation with one another. Clouds of steam float across the ceiling and disperse in clammy rivulets down the peeling walls. Today there is a filthy smell in the room, a decaying, barnyard stink.

‘Oh, that,’ Dee says, grinning mischievously like a small boy caught out, when he sees me wrinkling my nose. ‘I am experimenting with distilling horse dung.’

‘For what purpose?’

‘I won’t know that till I see what we get from it. Now.’

He unstops the perfume bottle and sniffs the liquid with the practised nose of a vintner assessing a new wine. I am amazed he can smell anything over the boiling horse dung.

‘Hm. They’ve mixed it with rosewater. But you’re right — there’s something else in there. Acrid. Show me the finger again.’

He draws my hand into the light. Though the redness has faded where I touched the perfume, a small blister has risen. Dee nods thoughtfully. ‘Any number of common plants or berries might have that effect, if the sap was concentrated. Could cause considerable discomfort if it was rubbed over delicate skin, as perfume is. It’s a spiteful trick, if nothing else.’

‘And if someone drank it? Could it be poisonous?’

He frowns. ‘Depends on what the base substance is. But why would he imagine the girl would take it into her head to drink the perfume?’

‘Perhaps it was not intended for the girl.’

‘But why would anyone drink perfume?’

‘They wouldn’t. Unless they were unaware that it had been added to their food or cup. Which would be an easy thing if you came into contact with them every day.’

Dee’s eyes gape and he stares at me, appalled, as he understands my meaning. ‘The queen?’ His voice comes as barely a whisper. ‘You’re suggesting that girl intended to poison the queen?’

‘I don’t know. It’s only a theory.’ I pace about between the stills, trying to breathe through my mouth as I talk, to avoid the manure fumes. ‘It seems, as you say, oddly spiteful and pointless to give a woman poisoned perfume that will make welts rise on her skin. But what if Cecily knew that the perfume was never meant to be worn, if her suitor gave her the bottle for another purpose? Think, Dee — there are any number of desperate men ready to assassinate the queen for the liberation of the Catholic Church.’

Dee nods, sanguine. ‘They arrested a fellow only last month on the road from York with two loaded pistols, boasting to all and sundry that he was going to kill Elizabeth to restore England. He was obviously mad, poor devil. They hung and quartered him anyway, to make an example.’