S Parris - Prophecy

‘Was it the sign of Jupiter, by any chance?’ I say, unable to keep the sarcasm from my voice. But Dee looks stricken.

‘Sweet Jesus. No — but you are close. It was the sign of Saturn. How on earth could you know?’

I rise, infuriated, cross to the window and turn sharply back to him.

‘He has plucked this detail straight from the murder at court! Come, John — the man is a charlatan. He is playing you like a harp — can you not see it?’

‘But Ned goes nowhere near the court or those circles. How would he learn of a detail like that?’

‘It is the talk of London!’ I cry, exasperated. ‘He only has to step out of doors to hear people gossiping about it in the streets. He has picked up a handbill from somewhere, read the lurid descriptions and thought it would make a neat picture for his next invention! Do not lose sleep over it, for heaven’s sake.’

‘Now, Bruno.’ He looks weary. ‘I know you do not like Ned, but really — he is a very gifted scryer and you insult me to suggest otherwise. He speaks with the spirits in their own heavenly language. I have heard him.’

‘He is a criminal! Have you not seen his ears? That’s what they do to those who forge coins, is it not? And if he can counterfeit money, why not visions, and languages?’

‘Ned has led a hard life and has made his mistakes, but all that is in the past. He is an honest fellow now, Bruno. It is not for us to judge.’

I run my hands through my hair, grasping at handfuls; there will be no reasoning with him. ‘Christ’s body, John! You are entitled to make some judgement of a man if he is living off you. You are too soft-hearted.’

Dee smiles fondly. ‘This from the man who could not bear to hurt a mouse.’

We stare at each other, the mouse suddenly remembered. Dee rouses himself with surprising speed from his chair and hurries back through to the laboratory, his robe whipping behind him; I follow at a clip. Here among the stills, with their soft, intestinal murmurings, the atmosphere is more humid now, and more fetid. The room smells like a farm in a midsummer thunderstorm.

Dee lifts the lid and holds the small wooden box up to the lamp. The mouse lies motionless, its tiny feet splayed outwards. A pool of thin, watery shit spreads around its tail, a similar one of a reddish liquid around its head. Its eyes bulge unnaturally, like the glass eyes of a stuffed creature.

‘Interesting,’ Dee muses, nodding as if pleased with this result, his head almost touching mine as we lean in. ‘The substance has worked quickly — see, where it has voided its stomach from both ends. I must confess I was not persuaded by your theory, Bruno, but it seems you were right.’

‘What substance would have this effect?’ I ask, peering closer, half-hoping to see the mouse convulse or twitch.

‘Hard to say. Something like yew, or black bryony possibly, both easy to come by at this time of year, easy to extract.’

‘And would it work in the same way on a person?’

‘Not so quickly, especially if it was diluted with rosewater. But in essentials, I should think so, in a large enough dose. It’s clearly had a violent purgative effect. I’ll cut this creature up and have a close look at the innards, although I won’t have time before I go this evening. But Bruno —‘ he turns to me, his eyes wide again with dawning fear — ‘if your guess is correct, someone must warn the queen immediately.’

‘No!’ It comes out more sharply than I intended. ‘I mean to say — all we know for certain is that a bottle of poison was given to one of the queen’s maids in the guise of perfume. That girl is now dead, but we know nothing of who gave it to her or why. Until we have some definite ideas, it is best the queen should not be alarmed and the court thrown into uproar. She is already heavily guarded. Besides,’ I add, ‘the person who gave me the perfume might be compromised.’

‘You don’t understand, Bruno.’ He clasps my shoulders and gives them a little shake. ‘Ned’s vision, the red-haired woman, her downfall. It all fits. I fear Her Majesty is in terrible danger.’

I do not want to ask, but know I must. ‘What was the end of the vision?’

‘After she revealed her breast with the sign of Saturn carved into her flesh, she held the book and key aloft and opened her mouth as if to give a great speech, but before she could utter a word, she was pierced through the heart by a sword and then swept away by a raging torrent.’ His grip tightens and his eyes wildly search mine; clearly he expects a better response.

‘Well, he certainly has a sense of drama. Where is Kelley, by the way?’ I glance around the laboratory, as if the scryer might be hiding behind one of the larger stills.

‘Oh, I have not seen him since yesterday evening. He was so shaken by the vision that he needed to go away for a while to recover.’ He sees my eyes narrow. ‘He has done it before, Bruno. If the session with the spirits has taxed him too hard, he will disappear for a few days so that he can come back refreshed.’

‘Really. It must be exhausting for him.’ I frown. ‘And he never tells you where he goes?’

‘I never ask.’

I place my hands on his shoulders in return; we stand for a moment locked in this half-embrace while I look into those melancholy grey eyes, so full of wisdom and yet, in some ways, so blind.

‘Do not, under any circumstances, try to tell the queen about this vision this evening,’ I say gently, as if admonishing a child. ‘If any harm really were to befall her, they would say you foresaw it by the power of the Devil, and in the much more likely event that nothing happens, you will be taken for a false prophet, no better than these pamphleteers. I do not pretend to understand Kelley’s motives, but we do better to concentrate on what we know of real dangers to the queen —‘ I nod towards the perfume bottle on the work bench — ‘than on whatever dreams he may or may not see in the stone.’

Dee is about to protest, but suddenly it seems a great weariness comes on him, and he hangs his head instead.

‘Perhaps you are right, Bruno. Better not to give my enemies more arrows to aim at me.’

I glance sideways at the stiff little body of the brown mouse in the box, remembering its pulse in the palm of my hand. How quickly a life is snuffed out, I think. If only we could catch the soul as it took flight, follow its journey and return to chart the territory, like the adventurers to the New World, like Mercator with his globes. But the mouse has not been sacrificed in vain. It has proved, if nothing else, that the queen’s enemies almost managed to reach into her bedchamber. But how to begin to find them?

As I am taking my leave at his front door, I suddenly remember a question that Dee, if anyone, might be able to answer.

‘The seventeenth day of November — has it some astrological significance? I have tried to think, but I don’t have charts with enough detail here to calculate whether it will be the occasion for anything of note in the heavens.’

Dee chuckles. ‘I don’t know about the heavens, but any Englishman will tell you that here on the ground it is Accession Day. The anniversary of Her Majesty’s accession to the throne, you know — since 1570 she has declared it a public holiday, with pageants and processions to celebrate her glorious reign. Street parties and so on. It should be a sight worth seeing this year, being the twenty-fifth since her coronation. Why do you ask?’

I hesitate, wondering if I should tell him about the paper hidden inside Cecily Ashe’s mirror, but I fear he would come instantly to the same conclusion as I, except that he would tie it to Kelley’s ridiculous invention and feel compelled to warn the queen, in that slightly hysterical way he sometimes has. My mind turns over quickly, even as Dee looks at me expectantly. Did whoever gave Cecily a vial of poison disguised as perfume also send her the date on which he intended her to use it? Was Elizabeth’s twenty-fifth Accession Day supposed to be the day of her death? The uproar this suggestion would cause at court would create such noise and smoke as to obscure any trace of the real plot; besides, something had obviously gone badly wrong if that was the intention. Cecily Ashe was dead, and the poison safe in Dee’s laboratory. Did this mean the would-be assassin would find another means to strike at the queen on Accession Day? There is no doubt in my mind now that Cecily was killed by the man who gave her those gifts, who had involved her in a plot to poison the queen and then left her corpse holding an effigy of Elizabeth stabbed, a reminder of the task she had somehow failed to carry out.