by Phil Rickman
VII
Coincidence and Fate
MORTLAKE HIGH STREET. Sticky, blurred lantern-light, echoes of the cackle and whoop of roistering from the inn and, presently, the spatter of piss against a wall.
No place to look up at the stars or the new-born moon.
After walking Goodwife Faldo to her door, I should have gone home and slept, to be refreshed and fully sentient at the riverside on the morrow. But how could I sleep now?
The inn was ahead of me. Recently extended to offer five bedchambers, two with glass in their windows for the moneyed traveller, but yet a rough place after dark. I slowed my steps, recalling a night when, for no clear reason, I’d been given a beating by men unknown to me, although it was clear they knew who I was. Smash the conjurer down. Smash him down in the name of God!
Soft footsteps behind me and I turned. A light shining out in my path, and I froze into stillness as it rose level with my face.
‘Go quietly, Dr John.’
‘Jack.’
He carried one of the candle lanterns you could borrow from the inn if you were deemed sober enough to remember where to return it.
I said, ‘Where is he?’
‘Abed, I assume.’
‘Then I’ll wake him up.’
‘No need,’ Jack said. ‘We shared half a jug of small beer in the back room.’
‘And?’
‘He said it happens. On occasion, when the stone’s active, spirits that manifest in the crystal can be… fetched out of it and into the air.’
‘Astral forms?’
‘Apparitions. Creatures of the air. The scryer must never allow himself to become distracted by them. That’s their aim, he says. To distract him. All they seek’s attention. His, anyway.’
He gestured back up the street and I followed him back towards the church. We stood in the shadow of the coffin gate, where Jack put the lamp on the ground.
‘Elias has a reputation, going back to days as a novice at Wenlock Priory. Up towards Shrewsbury?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where he… caused some concern.’ Jack paused, sniffed. ‘Visions.’
I said nothing, and he began to rhyme them off, without emphasis, as if listing ingredients for a stew.
‘Holy martyrs stepping from the stained glass. Noises in the night. Words mysteriously etched on the walls of locked chambers. Cracks in statues. Well, this was the time of the Reform. Not what anybody wanted, then. So when the abbot finks about maybe having him exorcised, he’s off. Takes to the road. Where the gift of vision, once kept under the board, becomes his living.’
‘Evidently a good one.’
‘When he fetches up in London, sure.’
‘Where he has patronage?’
If he was recommended to Jack by a chaplain to the Bishop of London, might that not mean he had the protection of the bishop himself?
‘Somebody’s looking out for him, that’s for sure,’ Jack said.
I picked up the lantern and asked, because I had to,
‘What did you see this night? What did you see in the ingle?’
No reply. Back down the street, some man was retching.
‘Jack—’
‘Ah, how can we ever know?’
‘What did Elias see in the crystal?’
‘Wasn’t a ring, that’s for sure. Look, he wouldn’t talk about it and I didn’t want to come over too pushy. He says it don’t matter what he sees, he never questions it. He’s only the middleman.’
‘And you saw…?
‘Me? I dunno… bones? Hazy grey man-shape, wiv bones. I didn’t like it.’
‘Marked?’ I said urgently, before I could stop myself. ‘Marked here?’ Snatching up the lantern, holding it to my face and raising fingers to my cheeks. ‘And here?’
‘Keep your bleedin’ voice down. Marked how?’
‘Black lumps. As seen in places where sheep are farmed, wool gathered…’
Hell, I knew this was a far cry from scientific inquiry, that the last thing I should do was prompt him. But I was tired and overwound.
‘Who you got in mind, Dr John?’
‘There was a man I met in Glastonbury. A trader in what he claimed were holy relics. But they were just old bones. He had hundreds of bones. If they were digging up a graveyard for more burials he’d be there with his bag. In the end, he was able to give me the intelligence I needed about the bones of Arthur. This was just before he died. Of… of wool-sorters’ disease. Face full of foul black spots.’
Benlow the boneman. I recalled, with a sick tremor, how this man, an obvious buck-hunter, had tried to attach himself to me. Never thought I’d meet a man as famous as you, my lord.
‘He wanted to come to London. Wanted me to bring him back with me. I… may have… implied that this would be possible.’
‘You made a bargain wiv him?’
‘I suppose I was in his debt. But if he thought we had a bargain… it was one I couldn’t keep.’
Benlow crouching amid the smashed shelves of his grisly warehouse, having attempted, in his agony, to take his own life by cutting his wrists and his throat, but too weak. Dying eventually surrounded by the detritus of death, the bones he’d offered for sale as relics of the saints. A rooker in every sense, but in the end I’d felt pity for him and some measure of guilt.
And now he haunted me? Wanting me to know he was there, even though I could not see him – worse, it seemed to me, than if I could. The injustice mocked me daily – the learned bookman, heaven’s interpreter, cursed by a poverty of the spirit. I knew more about the engines of the Hidden than any man in England, but I could not see except, on occasion, in dreams.
And maybe in a scryer’s crystal?
I looked up at the night sky, in search of familiar geometry, but it had clouded over and there were neither stars nor moon.
‘Jack… erm… did you, by chance, ask him…?’
‘Where one might be obtained? A shewstone? Course I asked him.’
‘But?’
‘It ain’t simple, Dr John. And it ain’t cheap.’
Brother Elias had said there was always a few around, but most of them were of little value to a scryer, full of flaws and impurity. The more perfect of them were hard to come by and cost more than a court banquet.
‘And might be dangerous,’ Jack Simm said.
‘How?’
‘For a novice, he meant. The more perfect ones have been used by men of power. A man what’s never scryed might find himself driven into madness. It would take a man of knowledge and instinct to… deal wiv what it might… bring into the world.’
‘Hmm.’
‘A responsibility. Laden wiv obligation – his words.’
‘Of course.’
‘Like to a wife,’ Jack said. ‘You must take it to your bed.’
‘Go to!’
‘I’m telling you what he said. There must needs be a close bond ’twixt the crystal and the scryer, so you might sleep wiv it under your bolster. Bit bleedin’ lumpy, if you ask me, but monks is fond of discomfort.’
There was logic here. Crystal possesses strangely organic qualities; crystal spheres change, grow, in response to unseen influences. The stone in the Faldos’ hall this night, the way its colours changed, the way it seemed to tremble or crouch like a toad…
Ripples in my spine.
‘Oft-times you don’t choose the stone,’ Jack said. ‘The stone chooses you. He said the right one might come along when you ain’t looking for it.’
‘And does he have one he might sell?’
‘Reckons he’s offered crystal stones wherever he goes, but most of ’em’s flawed and there’s – aw, Jesu, I could see this coming a mile off – apart from his own, there’s only one other he’s coveted in years. Odd that, ain’t it?’
‘Go on…’
‘The kind you don’t find anywhere in Europe. Maybe a treasure from some ancient people of the west. A history of miracles and healing. But the man who has it, he’ll want a fa
ir bit more gold than Brother Elias could put his hands on. And Brother Elias, if I don’t insult you here, Dr John, is a richer man than you.’
‘Jack,’ I said sadly, ‘you are a richer man than me. Where did he see it?’
‘Abbey of Wigmore. Not a long ride from Wenlock, out on the rim of Wales. That’s where he said he seen it.’
I did know of this abbey. It was close, in fact, to where my father was born. Dissolved now, of course.
‘Was it your impression that Elias might be an agent for whoever has the stone?’
‘Could be. Told him I was inquiring for a regular customer. But I reckon he knows.’
‘He was certainly asking questions about the extent of my wealth,’ I said. ‘Maybe he thinks I keep it abroad.’
‘Whatever, it don’t give me a good feeling. He ain’t a rooker in the normal sense, but it’s all too much like… coincidence and fate.’
I knew what he was saying, but I was in a profession which dismissed neither fate nor coincidence, only sought the science behind them.
‘Who owns the stone?’
‘He was being close on that, but I had the impression it was the last abbot. Gone now, obviously, and the abbey passed through the Crown and into private hands long ago.’
‘Easy enough to find out whose. But the abbott – is he even in the vicinity any more?’
‘Blind me, you don’t bleedin’ listen do you, Dr John? You could sell your house and put your mother on the streets and you still couldn’t afford it. I don’t understand none of this. I don’t see why the scrying stone – any scrying stone – is suddenly become so important for you. They’ve been around forever. Why now?’
Above the coffin gate, a single planet – the great Jupiter, inevitably – had found a hole in the nightcloud, as if to remind me of my insignificance and the pointlessness of concealment. I could sit on the truth of this matter, keep it to myself, take it to my grave…
‘Because— Oh God, because the study of its properties, notably in the matter of communion with angels, was… suggested to me.’
‘By whom?’
‘Is it not obvious?’
Jupiter seemed to pulse as if sending signals to me and was transformed into the sun in the pure glass of a tall window in a book-lined chamber at the Palace of Greenwich, where a light, merry voice was asking me had I thought of this, and had I looked into that?
‘Bugger,’ Jack said. ‘That’s all you need.’
I hear the French king consults one owned by the seer, Nostradamus, which is of immense benefit in planning campaigns. And winning the support of the angels. Do you have a shewstone of your own, John? Will it give us communion with the angels?
Well… obviously, I do, Highness, and intend to spend some time assessing its capabilities, but…
Perhaps worth more attention, John, don’t you think?
‘Jesu, Dr John,’ Jack Simm said. ‘You really know how to put yourself between heaven and hell and a pile of shite.’
‘We all walk a cliff-edge,’ I said.
‘She’ll forget, though, won’t she? She got too much to worry about.’
I blinked Jupiter away. Of course the Queen would not forget. Unless by design, she forgot nothing.
‘Yea, well…’ Jack Simm tossed the heel of a hand into my shoulder. ‘Leave it alone, eh?’
‘I fear I shall have to,’ I said.
‘Good.’ He picked up his lantern. ‘It’s a wasp’s nest. Go to your bed and fink not of ghosts.’
I nodded, resigned. This was not a night to remember with satisfaction, not in any respect.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘But—’
‘Just… piss off, Dr John!’
I nodded. Passed through the coffin gate to the churchyard and the path to our house.
Even made it up to the rickety, stilted terrace before turning around to make sure I was not followed by the sickly shade of Benlow the boneman.
How much easier we could all sleep, now that Lutheran theologians had assured us that, with the abolition of purgatory, ghosts were no longer permitted to exist.
VIII
Favoured
THAT NIGHT IT rained hard and my sleep was scorched by dreams.
Lately, I’d been welcoming journeys through the inner spheres and would keep paper and ink at my bedside to write down their substance upon awakening. But these… these I made no notes upon, because I dreamed not, as I’d feared, of Benlow the Boneman…
…but – oh God – of Eleanor Borrow with her green eyes and her soft body so close that I could feel its eager heat and had thrown out my arms in a feral desire. One of the few dreams I’d wished never to awake from, even if it meant, God help me, embracing death.
But I had, of course, awoken at once, and Nel’s warm body was gone to cold air, as if she’d been no more than a succubus, some siren of sleep sent to taunt me. I may have cried out in my anguish. In the pallid dawn only the pain in my heart was real. For, since Nel in Glastonbury, I’d not lain with a woman. And, before her, never at all.
It would have been wrong to feel a bitterness about this, for my waking life had been given over to study. My father had not oft-times been a wealthy man. He’d been proud to see me at Cambridge at the age of fourteen and, in order to repay him sooner, I’d eschewed strong drink, carousing and even sleep.
And now my poor tad was disgraced and dead and, while my scholar’s knowledge of mathematics and the stars had brought me some small fame in the universities of Europe, in England I was regarded by many as little more than—
Jesu! I rolled from my bed in a rush of anger.
—as little more than a rooker myself. I had few friends, not much money and no wife.
And oh, how my perception of this last condition had changed. The hollow emptiness of the single man’s life was something I’d never felt before my time with Nel. A constant raw longing which, for virtually all my sentient years, had applied only to knowledge.
Dear God, what am I become?
At the breakfast board, my mother said, ‘The hole in the roof that you attempted to mend last week is a hole once more.’
Holding up the painted cloth which had hung in the hall. Soaked through, now.
I closed my eyes, with some weariness. She’d probably been up since well before dawn, preparing sweetmeats with Catherine, her only servant. Making sure the house was as fit as ever it could be to welcome the woman closest to the Queen.
Hardly for the first time, I felt a strong pity for my mother. Something in that terse letter had told me it was unlikely that Blanche would even leave her barge this day. Just as with the visits of the Queen, all my mother’s work would be wasted.
‘It’s been a summer of endless rain,’ I said, ‘And I’ve never pretended to be any kind of builder. Builders are… men we should employ. When the money’s there.’
‘When the money’s there’ – My mother’s voice was flat – ‘you buy more books.’
I tore off a lump of bread. It was true enough. But I needed books, and all the knowledge therein, and more. All the knowledge that was out there. Needed to be ahead of the others, or what hope was there for us?
‘Another winter’s coming.’ My mother pulled her robe close about her and came out with what clearly had long been in her mind. ‘By the end of the summer, I’d rather expected you to have been… favoured.’
There could be no happy reply to this. I suppose I also had expected… well, something, by now. Not necessarily a knighthood – Sir William Cecil, as the Queen’s chief minister, inevitably would advise against the ennoblement of a man still considered by many to be a common conjurer.
What I needed, far more than social status, was a secure supply of money. Oft-times, the Queen had sent for me and would receive me pleasantly, and we’d talk for two or more hours about the nature of things. If she truly valued what I provided, both as an astrologer and a cabalist, then surely something with a moderate income would not be out of order… something to replace th
e rectorate of Upton-upon-Severn, awarded by the short-lived King Edward only be to taken away in Mary’s time.
More than a year and a half had passed since Elizabeth’s coronation, held on a day calculed by me, according to the stars, as heralding a rewarding reign. And such, for the most part, it had been.
Until the death of Amy, wife of Dudley.
I rose, brushing a few crumbs from my fresh doublet and the ridiculous Venetian breeches my mother had had made by a woman in the village. There was nearly an hour to spare before Blanche’s barge was due, but, almost certainly, she’d be early. A severe and efficient woman, my cousin, and usually disapproving of me.
Until she wanted something.
My mother had insisted I should be at the riverside over half an hour before the royal barge was due to arrive from Richmond Palace. But, as I had no wish to draw attention to what I guessed would be a discreet visit, I used the time to go to the inn to leave a letter for the post rider.
My dream of Nel had reminded me of the journeyman mapper, John Leland, who might have been her father, and I’d gone into my library early this morning and taken down his Itinerary to confirm that Wigmore Abbey was within a few miles of my tad’s birth-home, Nant-y-groes. With this in mind, it had seemed worth writing to my cousin, Nicholas Meredith, who lived in the nearest small town.
I’d never been to the town or met Nicholas Meredith but had received a letter of congratulation from him after the Queen’s coronation on the date calculed by me – this being widely spoken of at the time. We’d exchanged a few letters since, so I felt able to ask him, in confidence, if he knew anything of the present whereabouts of the former Abbot of Wigmore, whom I wished to consult on a matter of antiquarian interest.
It had been madness to lie to the Queen about owning a shewstone and the only fortuitous aspect of the current turbulence at court was that she hadn’t asked me to bring it to her. Yet.
I hear the French king consults one owned by the seer, Nostradamus.
Hmm. It seemed unlikely that the crystal consulted by the well-favoured and undoubtedly wealthy Nostradamus would be the kind of minuscule, flawed mineral that I could afford. I’d wondered if I might see Brother Elias at the inn and if it might be worth revealing my identity in hope of learning more about the Wigmore stone. It was a relief, I suppose, to find he’d gone at first light. Which left only one other man in London who might know of the stone or at least be able to direct me to someone who did. Maybe I could see him tomorrow – for at least I knew where he was.
