by Phil Rickman
Look, I’d been aware of the scrying profession most of my life, my tad oft-times making mock of it – all furtive foreigners and gypsies who’d gaze into a stone or a mirror and tell you where your missing property might be recovered or how many children you’d have. Or, if you underpaid them, exactly when the children could expect to inherit your worldly goods.
Rookers to a man, and they oft-times conduct their trade through an apothecary, who takes a cut of the fee.
‘I could find you one, no problem,’ Jack had said. ‘When I was in town, we must’ve had a dozen or more of these bleeders in the shop. Wanting me to put ’em in touch wiv the sick and the bereaved or anyone who needed somebody to talk to the dead on their behalf, intercede wiv angels. I’d kick their arses down the street. And been cursed for it a few times. But I’m still here, ain’t I?’
He’d been gazing out between the heavy, dripping trees towards the swollen river and his voice was damp with disdain.
‘Why?’ he said. ‘That’s all I’m asking. I ain’t getting it, Dr John. I’ve watched men and woman staring into stones and seeing fings I can’t see. And if I can’t see it…? You know what I’m saying?’
‘Everything’s open to abuse,’ I said.
‘But you’re a… a whatsit, natural-philosopher… a man of bleedin’ science.’
‘Well, exactly,’ I said. ‘Knowing the science behind crystal-gazing makes all the difference.’
I could have told him then precisely why I was, of a sudden, interested in the art of scrying. But, although I trusted him more than most, it wasn’t the time. And I’d have to admit that I’d been as sceptical as he was until, at the university of Louvain, I’d been given sight of a rare manuscript by the scholar and cabalist Johannes Trithemius of Spanheim. Which explained why certain stones, if used with knowledge and reverence, could give access to the very engines of heaven.
‘A stone’s a stone, Dr John.’
‘Never dismiss what’s beneath your feet, Jack. Crystals will absorb and reflect celestial rays. If employed at certain times – on certain days, under specific planetary configurations – they’ll open up the inner rooms of the mind …to levels of existence normally denied to us.’
Jack kicked a lesser stone into the grass.
‘Spirits, is it?’
I sighed. A very loose word, oft-times misused.
‘Three spheres, Jack: this earthly plane and, above that, the astral, where earthbound spirits linger, the place of ghosts. And above and beyond all… the supercelestial… the over-realm, the furnace room of Heaven.’
As a scholar of Hebrew I’d studied in depth the Cabala which, through mystical symbolism, offers a stairway to the sublime. It makes logical, mathematical sense and, although Jewish in origin, can be practised just as effectively through Christianity. The Christian cabala would be my shield against the earthbound spirits and the kind of demonic entities which might enter a shewstone and possess the unguarded scryer.
As distinct from the higher spirits, the good spirits.
Call them angels.
‘In Europe,’ I said, ‘the shewstone is seen as a legitimate method of penetrating the higher mysteries. In England, it’s yet a joke, at best. At worst, the devil’s own mirror.’
‘You told them this in Europe?’
‘Hell, no.’
Not for me to confirm their opinion of England as a land of Philistines – or to confess my own ignorance. I’d read and reread the works of Agrippa and what I could of Trithemius, but my personal experience was, at best, thin and always would be until I seized the nettle and took steps to acquire my own shewstone.
A good one. A good crystal, with which to carry out experiments. But what kind, what colour, how big? These were fundamentals I ought to have known about but did not, for opinions varied.
‘You’re an innocent soul, Dr John.’ Jack Simm standing among the roots of a venerable oak and facing me like a father, hands sunk into the pockets of his jerkin. ‘You fink fings is different, now nobody gets burned. The Queen smiling, all gracious. Oh, yea, folks can believe what they like, long as they keep it to themselves. Like we ain’t heard all that before.’
‘Times change, Jack.’
‘Kings don’t change. Nor Queens. It’s religious freedom one day then, in a blinking, it’s all about how to prove you ain’t a witch’s daughter.’
The Queen’s mother, Anne Boleyn, executed by the Queen’s father for treason and adultery, had been possessed of a sixth finger and a furry growth on her neck. How much evidence did you want?
‘Now how’s the Queen do that?’ Jack said. ‘She makes war on witchcraft, and her advisers look around for somebody well-known to execute to make it look good.’
A dead twig had snapped under his boot, making me start as he sprang away from the oak, forefinger aimed at my chest.
‘Go on… tell me it’s wivout bleedin’ precedent. And you may mention the late King Harry.’
I wanted to laugh, but it wouldn’t come. This queen was different. This queen had an acute intelligence and questing mind fascinated by alchemy and the cabala. This queen was powerfully Protestant while celebrating the Mass in deep privacy.
‘Heresy.’ I’d shrugged. ‘All science is heresy. Now… can you help me?’
He’d paced a slow circle around the oak.
‘Yea, well,’ he’d said at last, ‘I suppose you oughter have somefink to take your mind off what’s happening downriver.’
He’d meant London. Becoming known in Europe as Satan’s city. And not, at this moment, a good place to be if you were a friend of Robert Dudley.
IV
The Smoke of Rumour
WHEN BROTHER ELIAS had made his stately departure to the inn, we ate bread and goatcheese with Goodwife Faldo.
It had been Jack’s idea that she should play the pigeon so that I might observe a scrying without giving away my identity. Goodwife Faldo, who’d once taken my mother to see a cunning woman in the hope of asking my dead father if there was money hidden anywhere, had agreed at once to accept me as her brother for the day.
After our meal, she said she’d walk out to the meadow to suggest to her husband and sons that, rather than disrupt our sitting, they might eat at the inn tonight. I gave her my last shilling to pay for their meat and small beer, and then Jack and I walked down to the riverside where casks of fresh-brewed ale were being loaded into a barge. The air was cooling fast these evenings and the ambering sky above the distant city was smutted and heavy from first fires. And the smoke of rumour.
I hadn’t ventured into London for more than a week, but the gossip had been drifting down to me like black flakes from a lamp-scorched purlin. The city all atremble in the glitter of a dangerous lightning.
‘What were they saying when you were in town?’ I asked.
One reason I’d come to trust Jack Simm: he was a man of intelligence but without ambition.
Without ambition. What a blessed state that must be. Oft-times, my mother had accused me of it – far from the truth, of course, I did have ambition, though it related not to the attainment of high office so much as the acquisition of high knowledge. Not easy, however, without the level of protection that only wealth and position could provide.
Thus far, the Queen’s patronage had given me freedom to pursue my studies but not the means, for the fingers gripping the royal purse were famously held as tight as the rectal muscles of the ducks upon the river. Having calculed, by the stars, a smiling day for her coronation, I’d hoped for secure office, but nothing had come. And if things went wrong I could soon, as Jack had warned, be dangerously out of favour. In many ways, the daggers-out world of political advancement was far simpler than mine.
We’d moved away from the beer-barge, back into the wood, but I still kept my voice down low.
‘What were they saying?’
‘About Lord Dudley? You really want to know?’
‘In truth, I suspect not, but…’
‘Here it is: no
body I spoke to, from the pieman to the pamphlet-seller, finks he didn’t murder her. Although the pieman reckoned killing your wife to make room for the next one is only part of a great Tudor tradition, so he’s just getting in some practice for his future role as—’
‘Oh God, enough of this!’
‘You asked.’
‘Yes,’ I said wearily. ‘I asked.’
I’d barely seen Robert Dudley since he’d journeyed with me to Glastonbury in search of the bones of King Arthur, through which to strengthen the Queen’s majesty as Arthur’s spiritual successor. A quest with mixed success.
I’ve been hearing all about your journey to the West, she’d said on my one visit to the court since that mission. The horrors of it! Lord Robert was so very appreciative of your assistance in this matter.
My assistance, Highness? That’s what he said?
John… She’d laid a white and fragrant hand on my arm. He’s told me everything.
The lying, self-promoting bastard.
‘He’s never been mightily popular since she made him Master of the Horse, has he?’ Jack Simm said. ‘The lavish festivities, the arrogance, the preening.’
‘Behind all that,’ I said, not without doubt, ‘is a man of… integrity. Who’s seen much death.’
The execution of his father, the Duke of Northumberland, for the support of Jane Grey, the shortest-lived queen in history. Then his own confinement in the Tower under a death sentence, later withdrawn.
And all this time coming closer to the Queen than any man. Grown up together, locked away in the Tower at the same time during her sister’s reign. Always an understanding betwixt them. And the carnal attraction. As Master of the Horse, he took her hunting. Knew how best to entertain her – make her laugh, which she loved to do. Little doubt they’d have wed. If…
Jack shrugged.
‘Maybe he’s seen so much of death, it’s trivial to him now. Man who has his wife pushed down the stairs to get his paws on the Queen—’
‘Not proven.’
‘Nah, and never will be after they bribe the coroner. He’ll walk away in a pomander haze, but it won’t make no difference, will it? Still be the dog turd on a platter of sausages. And the closer you are to him…’
He was right, of course. But Dudley and I went back too long. Though only a few years older, I’d been appointed by his father to teach him mathematics and the mapping of the heavens, and he it was who’d sought my astrological advice on the coronation date.
Now, in the lowest alehouses – and some higher places, too, by all accounts – they were saying John Dee had taught Lord Dudley the blackest arts of sorcery, to win the Queen for Satan.
Never underestimate the malice of the common man.
I sank my hands into the pockets of my doublet and, in one, found a hole. I could never forget that, while in Glastonbury and rendered delirious by a fever, my friend had confessed that he’d wished his wife dead.
And now she was. Found at the foot of some stairs at a house called Cumnor Place in Berkshire where she was ‘staying with friends’. Dumped there by Dudley because the Queen wouldn’t have wives at court. Least of all, his.
My hands felt cold. Bess and me, we’re twin souls, Dudley had said when he was recovered from the fever. As if convinced that a marriage to the Queen was ordained by the heavens, though he’d never dared ask me to confirm it through astrology. Dear God, never in all history had there been a better reason for a man to kill his wife.
‘And what’s your thinking, Jack?’
Jack Simm leaned against an ash tree’s bole, smiling faintly.
‘I fink… if the Angel of the Lord come down on top of the Tower and proclaimed that Lord Dudley never done it and, while he’s here, that Dr John Dee ain’t a sorcerer… they’d all be waiting for his bleedin’ wings to drop off.’
‘Thank you, Jack.’
‘Now ask me why the scryer’s had to go back to the inn to warm his crystal.’
Were a shewstone to be used to reach the angelic, extensive preparation would be needed: days of purity, fasting, abstinence from alcohol. In this instance, I could think of three more practical reasons for the departure of Elias to the inn.
‘He wants to ask what John Dee looks like. What apparel he wears. And if Will Faldo’s brother works at the brewery. But… he’s not quite a rooker, is he?’
Or, if so, certainly of a higher grade than the lowlifes who hang like ravens around the taverns of Southwark.
‘Well,’ Jack said, ‘he did come recommended by a chaplain of the Bishop of London.’
‘Did he now?’
A good apothecary is ever well-connected.
‘Oh, he’s well-patronised. That’s why he costs. You still want me to ask him if he has a fine crystal to sell?’
‘For… an un-named customer of yours?’
‘Yea, yea. Dr John, look, he won’t learn noffing at the inn. This is Mortlake and he’s a stranger. They all remember your old man, whatever he done, and they like your mother. And, as long as you’re welcome at court, they like you.’
‘The wizard in his cave?’
‘They try not to fink too hard about that. Or the owls what goes woo woo. But they ain’t forgot when the Queen come to visit you at Candlemas, and how much the inn raked in, refreshing all the pikemen and the boys what carried the banners and the rest. Don’t make light of what you done for Mortlake, Dr John.’
I shook my head, bemused.
‘Just don’t bleedin’ ruin it now,’ Jack Simm said.
V
The Ingle
A WAXING MOON’S the best time for it.
This was what I’d read, and it makes good sense to anyone who has stood on the edge of a tranquil pond and observed moonlight shivering in the water. Even more to those of us who watch and chart all the bright spheres of the heavens.
Reflected light. As above, so below. To hold a perfect crystal sphere in your hands is to enclose earth and heaven.
Dear God… to what level is this the truth?
The sun’s last stain lay upon the river when the scryer returned with his wood-framed cloth satchel.
This time, we truly had need of the candle, and I leaned into its halo to watch him unpack his bag, carefully taking out his treasures, all swathed in layers of grey and black cloth.
‘Have you eaten, Brother?’ Goodwife Faldo asked.
‘Goodwife,’ he said softly, ‘one must needs fast before a scrying.’
Which could be true; fasting prepares the body and keeps the spirit light and permeable. This man’s pomp and solemnity continued to imply a degree of learning I’d not expected. I watched him laying out his bundles on the board, his back to the empty ingle and the door to the winder-stair.
Then I stiffened when, from the most shadowed end of our bench, Jack Simm spoke.
‘And did you find Dr Dee?’
All dark in this simple, square farmhouse hall, except for the white of Jack’s beard and the goodwife’s coif. I felt her black cat rubbing his head against my left calf and reached down to stroke him, as if this discussion was no concern of mine. The scryer looked up, his eyes still.
‘If I were looking for Dr Dee, I’d be disappointed. Not often here these days, it seems. Appears to spend much of his time in the Low Countries, giving lectures. When he’s not at court teaching magic to the Queen.’
‘So now you see,’ Jack said, not looking at me, ‘why us lowly folk have no dealings wiv him.’
‘Though we do see his mother,’ Goodwife Faldo said.
I made murmurs to the cat. Brother Elias took out the shrouded stone and set it down before him and lowered the satchel to the stones behind his stool.
‘Hard to believe that bodged place is his family home.’
‘They say appearances have little value for the doctor,’ Jack said. ‘Not a man for whom a display of wealth—’
‘If wealth he has.’
‘The house is very tidy inside,’ Goodwife Faldo said. ‘Very tid
y indeed.’
‘A man with neither wealth nor honour.’ Elias had unwrapped a pair of eyeglasses which he balanced on the bridge of his nose without looking up. ‘You’d think, given his position as the Queen’s primary advisor on the Mysteries, he’d be Sir John by now.’
I could almost hear Jack Simm inside my head, screaming at me to say nothing.
‘He’s good to his mother,’ Goodwife Faldo said, firm-faced.
‘And she to him, apparently, Goodwife. From what I’m told, without his mother he’d have no roof over his bed.’ Brother Elias chuckled absently and then looked up at last. ‘But then that’s no affair of mine. Let’s now proceed, shall we?’
The stone lay before him, still covered. Father Elias placed his palms together above it, closed his eyes.
‘Oh, God, author of all good things, strengthen, I beseech thee, thy poor servant, that he may stand fast, without fear, through this work. Enlighten, I beseech thee, oh Lord, the dark understanding of thy creature, that his spiritual eye may be opened to see and know thine angelic spirits descending here into this crystal.’
He laid both hands upon the shrouded stone, and my stomach tightened as if he’d touched me.
For I’d read these words, this entreaty. Written them, even.
‘Oh be sanctified and consecrated, and blessed to this purpose, that no evil phantasy may appear in thee… or, if they do gain ingress they may be constrained to speak intelligibly, and truly, and without the least ambiguity, for Christ’s sake. Amen. And forasmuch as thy servant here desires neither evil treasures, nor injury to his neighbour, nor hurt to any living creature, grant him the power of descrying those celestial spirits or intelligences that may appear in this crystal…’
My hands went cold upon my thighs below the board top. I’d translated it myself, in the past year, from unpublished writings I’d borrowed in Antwerp.
‘… and whatever good gifts, whether the power of healing infirmities, or of imbibing wisdom, or discovering any evil likely to afflict any person or family, or any other good gift thou mayest be pleased to bestow on me…’
