The Heresy of Dr Dee

by Phil Rickman

  I threw a glance at Jack Simm but could not make out his eyes.

  ‘… enable me, by thy wisdom and mercy, to use whatever I may receive to the honour of thy holy name. Grant this for thy son Christ’s sake. Amen.’

  ‘Amen,’ Goodwife Faldo said faintly.

  Outside, the leaves on the trees were astir, the evening shaking with the last birdsong. When the scryer bent to his bundles I now knew exactly what he’d unveil. I saw an ebony pedestal and a golden plate and knew it would carry the engraving of the divine name, Tetragrammaton… and the names Michael, Gabriel, Uriel, Raphael, the four archangels ruling over the Sun, Moon, Venus and Mercury.

  A continued tightening in my chest, a cool sweat upon my face and forehead. Trithemius had written that the names and characters must be drawn in order… the names of the seven planets and angels ruling them, with their seals or characters.

  Let them be all written within a double circle, with a triangle…

  Silence, now, and an odd sense of sacrament. I watched Elias place the crystal, still shrouded, upon its pedestal, becoming aware of Goodwife Faldo’s rapid breathing.

  …this being done, thy table is complete and fit for the calling of the spirits…

  I watched the scryer’s hands pulling away the cloth and saw, for the first time, the sphere.

  What had I expected?

  Scrying crystals – I’d seen some during my work abroad. But I’d been a mathematician, sometimes a teacher, sometimes a student, therefore interested only in their perfect geometry. There hadn’t been time then to approach their deeper mysteries. Nor had I been entirely convinced of what was said of them.

  A stone’s just a stone.

  At what point this night I became afraid, I’m not quite sure. To a scholar, fear arrives with a certain shame, akin to the shame a soldier feels, holding himself back from the heat of the fray as his comrades are cut down before him.

  Not that I’d know. Unlike Dudley, I’ve never been a soldier, the kind of knowledge I hold having preserved me from bodily conflict. A bargain with the Crown which decrees I must stride out, wearing knowledge like armour, the questing mind thrust forward like to a sharpened blade.

  Soon blunted tonight. I’d set out from my mother’s house believing that my own knowledge would far exceed that of the man I was to meet. Now I knew it wasn’t so and I suppose the fear came out of this. Yes, I’m a man of science and natural philosophy, skilled from years of study in mathematics, geography, celestial configuration, theology and so on. And no, I don’t believe this is the End-time, far from it. In fact, signs everywhere I look are telling me that this is the beginning of a new enlightenment, an explosion of spiritual light such as the Earth hasn’t seen since the days of old Greece and the ancient Egypt of thrice-great Hermes, who walked the night sky as if it were his kitchen garden.

  As above, so below.

  Elias’s hands were lifted and, for a brief moment, it was as though the candleglow shone from the hollows of his palms.

  Below them, the true source of it, a small planet of light.

  It was no bigger than a cider apple. Beryl, I guessed, a gemstone which comes in several colours and the shewstone possessed all of them: now a lucent brown, like the brown of an eye, now the soft ambered pink of a woman’s cheek.

  It was as though the wan light had been expanded by some substance in the air, making everything more vivid, and I considered how this might be done, what theatre the scryer might employ to render us all dizzy with delusion.

  I watched his plump hands as they spread apart either side of the stone, as if they were holding light like some solid object. I watched his lips forming words I could not hear and thought him to be summoning some spirit from the ether. I wanted to kill my fear by rising up and screaming at him, Tell me its name!

  … and then time had passed, maybe faster than I knew, in a hollow of muttering and liturgy, and Elias was whispering, not to me but to Goodwife Faldo.

  ‘Hold out your hand.’

  When she held it up, hesitant, he reached out quickly and seized her wrist and pulled her into the light, and I half-rose, fearing for some reason that he would feed her fingers into the candle flame.

  But his own hand fell away, and hers stayed in the air, as if held there by strong light. As if detached from Goodwife Faldo at the elbow. Had she met his eyes? Did he have the ability, which I’ve marked in others, to hold her in thrall?

  Or even all of us. I shook myself, blinking wildly, fearing that long minutes may have passed in a state where my senses were not my own. I saw that the scrying stone was duller now but seeming to quiver, like to a toad, on the boardtop, and I didn’t notice that the ringless hand had gone until I heard Jack Simm draw breath, sharply, as if aware of an alteration in the air.

  Did I feel that, too? Maybe. I found I was gazing not at the shewstone but into the ingle, where a fire of logs and coal would soon be lit that would last all winter long. The warm core of the house where a stewpot would hang, the air pungent with cooking herbs grown by Jack Simm and the mellow crusting of bread in the side-oven.

  But now, in this thin, uncertain, peripheral time between seasons, it was only a mean cavern of ill-dressed rubble-stone, and cold.

  A cold reaching out of the ingle along with a stillness which could be felt, like to the rancid, waxen stillness of a stone chapel where a corpse lies before burial.

  I liked it not. I tell myself I don’t fear death, but the presence of the dead conveys no sense of peace to me, and there can be no beauty without life.

  Clack.

  Something wooden falling to the floor.

  A stool. Rolling away under the board, and the cat rushed between my ankles and I heard a poor cry, of the kind made without breath, and saw that Goodwife Faldo was backed against the wall by the shuttered window. Her face shadow-lined and stretched in agony, her coif dragged back, and she was pointing at the maw of the ingle and whimpering like an infant.

  As if in another world, the hands of Elias were held apart, two inches from the globe, as though his fingers were bathed within its aura.

  He said, with mild curiosity, ‘Tell me what you see, Goodwife.’

  I followed her wretched gaze, heard her hoarsened voice.

  ‘Death.’

  ‘In what form?’

  ‘Oh my dear Lord!’

  Both hands over her face, peering through her fingers, the candleglow cold as a haloed moon.

  Her voice was held in my head and then faded as if it had lain down and died there. Panicked, I lurched to my feet and tried to follow her gaze into the ingle. All I saw there was packed rubblestone fading into the blackness of soot.

  Nothing more.

  Nothing. Jesu, have I ever felt more worthless than when I stood there, sightless, hearing the returning voice of Goodwife Faldo, an arid panting.

  ‘Does this mean death for us? Oh please God, make it go away. Please God, Father, I’ve two sons!’

  One moment, her body was bowed over in anguish upon a sob, and then she was twisting around, squirming upright and stumbling into the ingle where I could hear her fumbling about and then the muffled clang of the bread oven’s door.

  When she emerged, her hands were clasped together as if she held a baby bird. Holding it out to Elias, hands shaking.

  ‘Please,’ she whispered. ‘I beg mercy, Brother. I’ve sinned.’

  Her shadow skating on the wall, she opened out her hands and the ring clinked upon the board next the crystal. Goodwife Faldo, scrabbling after it, shoulders still hunched and heaving. Snatching it up and ramming it on her finger.

  Losing her coif as she tumbled away across the room and dragged the shutters wide to expose the purpling dusk.

  VI

  Cousin

  IT WAS LIKE to the air after a storm has blown itself out. The candle extinguished, the hall draped in a drabness of brown and grey. I felt weakened in a way I could not have anticipated, and saw faces everywhere, staring in from the unshuttered windo
w and over the threshold where the door had been flung wide.

  And one was my mother’s.

  Jane Dee stepping through the doorway, dark-gowned, full of a fury seldom seen and so not easily dismissed.

  ‘Your doing!’

  ‘Mother—’

  ‘What have you caused?’

  A tall woman of sixty years, admirably unbowed by circumstance, but ever dismayed by what I did and pained that my meagre earnings were spent more on books than repairs to the house my late tad had half-built.

  However, Jane Dee was never more formidable than when bleeding from another’s wound.

  ‘Goodwife Faldo’s in bitter distress.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said tightly. ‘I know.’

  ‘What have you brought into her house? You tell me, now, John, what have you done?’

  We were alone. Goodwife Faldo had not returned, and I looked around for Elias, but he too was gone, along with Jack Simm and the shadowed faces at the open door and the window. Some of them melting away upon the arrival of my mother, who, like my father, had been a good Catholic but now mistrusted the miraculous.

  Was it? Was the miraculous ever so mean, cold and squalid as what seemed to have happened here this night?

  ‘On second thought, don’t tell me,’ my mother said.

  I let go a sigh.

  ‘It’s gone, anyway.’

  As if I knew. As if I was in any position to state that what I’d never seen was now no more. But my shivers recalled the deep bone-cold which no fire can reach because it’s forever beyond this life, beyond the air that we breathe. And I did not want to look again into the ingle. And see nothing.

  ‘… believing her family will perish for her sins,’ my mother was saying.

  ‘Any sin this night,’ I said, almost angrily, ‘is mine.’

  ‘John,’ she said sadly. ‘As if I didn’t know that.’

  The way she’d spoken to me when I was six years old.

  ‘Mother,’ I said wearily, ‘I beg mercy, but it wasn’t—’

  ‘Don’t beg mine, beg hers.’

  ‘Yes… yes, I’ll do that.’

  Gladly, for Goodwife Faldo was a good and generous woman, and I must needs make it clear to her that there was nothing for her to fear. And would have tried to explain it to my mother if I’d thought that, for one silent minute, she’d listen.

  It had been no more than we’d deserved. I knew that now and profoundly regretted involving Goodwife Faldo in this conceit. Even the protective prayers intoned by Brother Elias would have been ineffective because our sitting was built upon deception. Any summoning not grounded in full honesty attracts only that which thrives on lies, confusion and all the lower longings of humanity which remain undissolved by death.

  And I knew I’d get no sleep this night if I’d failed to find out what form it had taken. What they’d all seen and I – Oh, blood of Christ – had not.

  ‘Here.’ My mother drew something from a fold of her gown. ‘This was delivered.’

  Placing on the board a thin letter with a seal which – Oh my God – I recognised at once. I picked it up and knew the paper.

  Of all the times for this to be delivered…

  ‘Mother, when did this arrive?’

  ‘Not ten minutes ago. It’s why I was coming to find you… amid all the clamour and upset.’

  I carried the letter to the window and broke the seal, tension quickening my blood as, in the fading light, I read,

  Dr Dee

  There is a need to speak with you on behalf of our Cousin. My barge will dock in Mortlake tomorrow at eight

  Unsigned, yet I knew, my heart all aquake, that it was from Mistress Blanche Parry, my elder cousin on my father’s side. But that the cousin referred to in the letter was someone to whom neither of us was related. This term had been used before to disguise the identity of she whom Blanche served as Senior Gentlewoman. It was significant that this was far from a formal missive. It meant I was to be consulted in confidence.

  ‘Mother, the messenger… he’s not waiting for a reply?’

  My mother, who also knew that seal, shook her head and then found a strained smile – any kind of summons to court would renew her hopes of me finding a stable income. She was of good family and had barely spoke to me for a week after I turned down the offer of a permanent lecturer’s post at Oxford.

  ‘I shall go now, John – left too quickly, with neither cloak nor lamp. You’d best come home. When you’ve brought your… small comfort to Goodwife Faldo.’

  When she was gone, I took several long breaths and then knelt before the ingle. Alone here now and held in dread, for all my book-fed knowledge, of what I could not see, I said a fervent prayer to banish all unwanted spirits from this house. And then, espying under the window the coif shed by Goodwife Faldo, I picked it up and left.

  This end of the village was quiet now, the sky pricked with first stars over the darkening river which linked us, better than any road, with London. I wondered if it would be Mistress Blanche in that barge tomorrow, or the Queen herself.

  Then turned, knowing where the Goodwife would be.

  St Mary’s, Mortlake, is a modern church, towered but without steeple – a misjudgement in my view, for a steeple conducts to earth divers rays from the firmament. When worshipping here, however, I tend to keep opinions like this to myself. A wisehead is seldom welcome in the house of God.

  A single candle was lit upon the high altar, Goodwife Faldo bent in mute prayer on the lowest chancel step. I walked quietly along the aisle and knelt alongside her, leaving a seemly distance betwixt us.

  I held out the coif. Marking the dawning of grey in the strands of her freed hair, a sheen of tears on her cheeks as she looked up at me, a pale smile flickering in the candlelight.

  ‘Why can we never leave well alone, Dr John?’

  Tucking her hair into the white linen. I knew what she meant, but the idea of it was well beyond the imagining of a man who lives only to meddle.

  ‘It’s gone,’ I said, hoping to God I was right. ‘All gone now.’

  ‘Where?’

  A good question, but this was hardly the time or place to serve up a treatise on the nature of the middle sphere.

  ‘Back into the stone,’ I said. ‘And the stone is back in the scryer’s bag. Where it should have stayed.’

  ‘Oh fie, Dr John!’ Lifting herself to the second step, which she sat upon. ‘The first mention of it by Master Simm, and I was hooked like an eel.’

  She gazed beyond me, into the darkness of the nave.

  ‘When I was a child, I loved to go into church and feel it all closing around me. I felt cloaked in colours… and the sweetness of the incense. And all the Latin, like to the sound of spells being uttered. More… more magic than I could hold.’

  ‘Yes.’

  The church had been all about magic, then, if we’d but known it.

  ‘And then the King made God smaller,’ Goodwife Faldo said.

  I looked at her with an admiration that surprised me. Her tear-streaked face shone like an apple in the warm candlelight. I turned quickly away and looked up at the long panes in the stained window above the altar. Bright coloured glass reduced by the night to the dull hues of turned earth.

  ‘Don’t let them stop you, Dr John.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The Puritans, the Bible men. They’re taking hold. Get one of them as king and the world will be a grey place.’

  ‘This Queen won’t see that happen. The Queen loves magic and wonder.’

  ‘Yes. So we’re told. But she must have care. As must you. Small people like me – no-one cares any more what we believe, as long as we turn up at church on a Sunday and say the right words. I wouldn’t be taken away any more for letting a scryer into my house. Would I?’

  ‘Frances,’ I said. ‘What did you see?’

  ‘I lost my mind.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘There was a change in the air such as I’ve never felt
since I was a child.’

  ‘There was. I felt it.’

  ‘The presence of something that wasn’t… I can’t put it into the best words, I’m only a farmer’s wife and I don’t read very well, and I …’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘I’d hid the ring in the bread oven. And of a sudden I felt a terrible guilt about that, as if it was the worst thing I’d ever done. As if I’d lied to God. And it came into my head that I must face a terrible penance. And the worst of all penance to me would be…’

  Holding back tears.

  ‘The loss of your family,’ I said.

  She nodded.

  ‘And that was when I saw the figure of a pale man. Not clear at first – as though made of dust motes. The bones… the bones were more solid and had their own—’

  She shuddered. I looked for her eyes.

  ‘Bones?’

  ‘The bones had their own awful light. As though it were not light.’

  ‘Where were these bones?’

  ‘He was holding them. One in each hand, clasped to his chest. Death… death’s heads.’

  ‘Skulls? More than one?’

  ‘How can I ever sit before that hearth again?’

  ‘You can. It won’t happen again, Goodwife. Not there. Not ever again. None of it’ – Putting it all together in my head as I spoke – ‘none of it was real. Only pictures conjured from the crystal, which… held us all in thrall. Changed your head around so that you took your worst fears and made them into… pictures.’

  She nodded, yet uncertain.

  ‘Ephemeral,’ I said firmly. ‘Illusion. Nothing was there. You didn’t lie to God. Only to the scryer. And you admitted it to him. You put things right.’

  It took away the magic, but I felt it was what she wanted to hear at this moment.

  ‘And there’s been no plague this summer,’ I said.

  Watching myself forming words while I was somewhere else. Somewhere grey and foetid and full of bones.

  ‘I feel so much calmer now,’ Goodwife Faldo said and laughed lightly. ‘Thank you, Dr John.’