The Heresy of Dr Dee

by Phil Rickman

  Not that she was alone at Cumnor. There were retainers, perhaps half a dozen of them. A small, itinerant household.

  So where was this retinue on the day of Amy’s death?

  Why… at the local fair.

  Amy, it seemed, had ordered everyone – everyone, women and men – to go to the fair. Would hear no word of dissent.

  I’d heard about this before and had not liked what it implied.

  It had been a Sunday and the day after the Queen’s twenty-seventh birthday which Dudley, who arranged the festivities, might have claimed was also his. For his wife’s birthday, he would have sent a present.

  My mother had heard gossip in Mortlake village about Amy being so stricken with darkness of mind over her husband’s neglect that she’d oft-times determined to make away with herself. And yet, not so very long before that, she seemed in good heart. Dudley had been told of a letter, dated August 24, which she’d sent to her London tailor, William Edney, with instructions for the styling of a velvet gown. She was not frugal with her clothing, having spent nearly fifty shillings on a Spanish gown of russet damask, and she urged Edney to make haste to get the latest gown to her.

  Had she really wanted a new gown in which to throw herself down eight steps to a far from certain death?

  Yes… a mere eight stone steps, and not even a straight flight – a bend in it, apparently.

  The only sequence of events I could imagine begins in an instant of blinding despair, as Amy stands at the top of the stairs, maybe with an image all aflame in her mind of Dudley and Elizabeth dancing together on their birthday… and in her anguish she hurls herself, with some violence, from the top step to the stone flags below.

  Which sat well with her ordering of everyone to the fair, so that she might be alone. No one to stop her.

  ‘Broken her neck.’ Dudley gazing down the sloping street and doubtless seeing stairs stretching away into a black mist. ‘That’s what I was told. What everyone was told. Including Tom Blount.’

  His steward, whom he’d sent to Cumnor in his place, so that he might not be seen as attempting to interfere with the inquiry.

  ‘You thought she’d killed herself?’ I said.

  ‘My first thought, yes.’

  ‘Because she didn’t want to stand in your way.’

  His eyes closed.

  ‘Yet you told me earlier this year that she believed herself mortally ill.’

  ‘From what she told me. But what if she was lying?’

  I thought that if a wife of mine had suggested she was dying of some malady, I’d not leave her side. Must needs stop thinking like this. I was not Robert Dudley. Had never been blinded by an all-consuming sense of destiny.

  There was yet more to this. Some private matter which, even as one of Dudley’s oldest friends, I’d never be told. Nor should be, I supposed.

  ‘Did you tell the Queen what Amy said?’

  In my head the voice of Bishop Bonner.

  … heard that, some days before your friend Dudley was widowed, the Queen confided to the esteemed Spanish ambassador, Bishop la Quadra, that Lady Dudley would very soon be departing this life.

  Dudley having told her was the only reason I could think of for the Queen’s terrifying foresight. The only reason I dare allow myself to think of.

  No reply. He’d gone to sit on the remains of a stone wall, where part of an old house was being taken down.

  ‘Blount told me a report had been written about the state of the… of Amy’s body. He couldn’t get a sight of the document.’

  ‘When it’s put before the coroner, its content should be made public.’

  ‘When… No date’s set for the resumption of the inquest. Knew I could demand to see it, though. If I pulled rank.’

  ‘And you thought that wise?’

  ‘God no. Didn’t even try. But did have a quiet meeting with Anthony Forster. Well, if it was your house, you’d want to know everything, wouldn’t you?’

  Forster, of course, had not been there either when Amy died but, yes, he’d want to know.

  ‘We arrived the day after two servants had seen her ghost at the top of the stairs. Forster said the rest of them were afraid to go into that part of the house, day or night.’

  ‘But you went there.’

  ‘Oh yes. I saw the place. The chances of falling to your death from those stairs are… slight.’

  ‘But her neck was—’

  ‘Broken, yes. And she was found at the bottom of the stairs. But there were…’ He thought for a moment. ‘What’s never been talked about is that there were other injuries. Dints. In her head. Which may have been caused by hitting the stone, but one was a good two inches deep. What does that suggest to you?’

  ‘Something sharp. Maybe the sharp edge of a stair?’

  Had the feeling I was clutching at reeds here.

  ‘Oh, John, come on…’

  ‘It might also suggest she was struck. A two-inch dint… speaks to me of a blow from a… a sword blade.’

  ‘If you saw that stair, then you’d know nothing else explains it. And yet… Tom Blount says he understands, from his inquiries, that the jury is not disposed to see evidence of evil.’

  Dudley stood up and faced what remained of the sun. I only hoped he wasn’t seeing it as I was. The clouds like reddened lips had become the slit of an open wound, so that the sun – a sun which this day had scarce lived – looked to be dying in an ooze of sticky blood.

  I said, ‘Anyone seeing the entire household, apart from Amy, at the fair… would have a good idea that she was alone. Might this be a robbery? Was anything taken?’

  ‘No. I’m telling you, somebody killed her, John. Somebody went into Cumnor to kill her. No doubt left.’

  His face looked very dark against the low light. The gipsy, they called him, those who sought to dishonour him, and the change wrought by the butchery to his beard and moustache made this seem not unjust. Without those trademark facial twirls, even a friend might take some time to recognise Lord Dudley.

  ‘Let’s bring this into the air,’ I said. ‘You think someone killed her to damage you.’

  ‘I know it.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Make a list.’

  ‘But if it was someone who wanted to make sure you would not wed the Queen, surely it were better than Amy lived.’

  ‘Ah, well, you would think that, wouldn’t you? But then… perhaps you wouldn’t.’

  He turned sharply and began to walk quickly away, back along the route we’d come, across the street towards the castle mound, me striding after him.

  And then he called back, over a shoulder,

  ‘Suppose someone killed her… so she wouldn’t die?’

  ‘What?’

  He stopped, panting, at the foot of the castle mound.

  ‘Yes, all right… I may have told Bess what Amy had said. About having a mortal illness. Maybe a sickness of the breast, I don’t know exactly what I said. But why the hell she had to tell that scheming bastard la Quadra, who yet wants her for the King of Spain… or some muffin appointed by Spain to snatch England back for Rome…’

  ‘She’d have told the Spanish ambassador simply to give Spain the message that marriage to you might no longer be out of the question. She probably regretted it as soon as it was out.’

  Both of us knowing the Queen was sometimes inclined to speak with insufficient forethought, even on matters of world significance.

  ‘And meanwhile la Quadra blabs,’ Dudley said. ‘The man has a mouth like a slop pail. How many people have told you what the Queen said?’

  He’d started to climb the castle mound between shadowy stacks of broken masonry and bushes of broom and gorse, snatching at handfuls of grass, calling back at me.

  ‘Jesu, John, are you not seeing this yet? If my wife had died of natural cause…’

  Close to dark now, bats flittering overhead, and…

  … and dear God, yes, I was seeing it now. I followed him up the mound, tripping ov
er a slab of masonry, picking myself up, my hands slimed with mud and dew, Dudley shouting back at me, too loud.

  ‘If it was a natural cause, then I’d be not only free but blameless.’

  Yes. For his enemies, the worst of all situations. So if Amy was to die in an unnatural way before her time – however short that time might be…

  I reached the flattened top of the mound just as the last of the sun, dull as an old coin, slid down into the western hills. Soot-dark hills which gave a sense of the real Wales, its isolation, its secrecy.

  … killed… so she wouldn’t die.

  God…

  Dudley was facing me with hands on hips.

  ‘If her death is unnatural, then I’m yet free but, in most people’s eyes, far from blameless. Even if nothing can be proved against me.’

  ‘What are you going to do, Robbie?’

  ‘Try not to get killed as well, I suppose. A good many men would feel justified in doing it, if I’m seen to have escaped justice for the wilful murder of my wife.’

  If someone had killed Amy expecting Dudley to be held responsible and then to walk away in shame, retire to the country to live out his years in the comparative seclusion of the English squirearchy… then they knew him not as I did.

  He ran fingers across the wreckage of his beard.

  ‘Life seems as dark to me now as when I was in the Tower awaiting the block.’

  ‘But if you were to find out who killed Amy…?’

  ‘How? Through a fucking shewstone?’ He raised both hands. ‘Ah… mercy. Look… even if it were possible to discover the killer, it would rather depend, methinks, on who it was.’

  There were names I wouldn’t say out loud beyond the walls of my own home. What a wasp’s nest this country was become.

  It was cold on that mound. I knew not who’d built the castle or who had destroyed it – maybe Glyndwr. But there was a feeling of hostility here; we were not wanted. I looked down at Presteigne. How tidily it sat. Glimmerings, as tapers were lit behind the windows of the wealthy.

  ‘Let’s go back,’ Dudley said.

  I followed him, feeling sad to the soul. What if Amy had been lying about her illness to see what response she’d get from Dudley? What if she was suffering from no more than a malady of the mind, grown out of a profound loneliness?

  A plea for love answered by death.

  XXIII

  Dark Alleys

  WE WALKED BACK into the town, me in a grey fog, to find that a crowd was gathered around the sheriff’s house. Pitch torches blazed either side of the gates, their reflected flames riffling like lilies on the puddles where a group of men had dismounted, ostlers hurrying to take the horses.

  The sheriff’s company was back and without Prys Gethin. I saw Vaughan addressed by a red-faced man in a muddied jerkin and moved closer to listen.

  ‘… his humour, Roger?’

  Vaughan muttered something, and the red-faced man groaned, threw up his hands, then turned and addressed the crowd.

  ‘Too foul, it is, see. Not safe to make the journey before nightfall. Not with a prisoner the Welsh want back.’

  Evidently this year’s sheriff, Evan Lewis. His promise to ride out again to New Radnor on the morrow brought a sour response, a man asking, with sarcasm, what would happen if it was pissing down again.

  ‘Let him go, is it, Evan, so he’ll catch a cold?’

  A rope of damp pennants fell from the darkening sky, evidently cut down. Made a mocking garland around the sheriff’s hat, Lewis wrenching it away, shouting over a river of laughter.

  ‘We’ll hold the trial at New Radnor, then. That what you want? Is it?’

  I turned to Dudley.

  ‘That even possible?’

  ‘He’s jesting. You think he’d deprive the goodfolk of Presteigne of an entertainment they’d waited twenty years for?’

  ‘This talk of curses…’

  ‘Talk of curses? God’s bollocks, John, looks to me that Plant Mat’s brought nothing but good fortune to this town. Given it the Great Sessions, and now a good hanging? They should throw a feast for the bastard before he dangles.’

  I’d found it interesting, though, the way the sheriff had said the Welsh wanted Gethin back. As if it was accepted that Presteigne was not truly Wales. Admittedly, we hadn’t been long in the town, but I’d yet to hear someone speak the language.

  Evan Lewis, scowling, passed through his own gates to face the judge. Dudley turned away, in the direction of the Bull, and I was about to follow him, when someone stepped purposefully between us.

  ‘Dr Dee?’

  By a torch’s fizzing light, I marked a man of about my own height, perhaps a few years older and fairer of hair and skin. Clad as a country gentleman in fine leather jerkin and boots that stood well in foot-deep puddles.

  ‘Nicholas Meredith,’ he said.

  ‘My God, we were trying to find you…’

  I held out my hand; he didn’t take it, and it was knocked aside by a fellow pushing past. Nicholas Meredith braced himself against the sheriff’s wall. I smiled.

  ‘Good to meet you at last, cousin.’

  ‘I received a letter from you this morning, Dr Dee.’ The border accent was in his voice, but so also was an education. ‘Replying to it at once, with proper civility.’

  ‘Well, yes—’

  ‘Evidently a waste of my time. Why would you write to me, knowing you were coming here? And saying nothing of that.’

  ‘Cousin Nicholas, I wrote before I knew I’d be coming.’

  Telling him about the providence of the judicial company. Thinking he’d understood when the dazzle of the pitch torch made it seem as if he was smiling.

  In fact he was not.

  ‘You’ve made me look a fool, Dr Dee. Fetching up without a word, taking a chamber at my inn.’

  ‘Your inn? I didn’t even know that. We were simply told it was the best inn in Presteigne. My…’ I made a gesture towards Dudley. ‘This is my colleague, Master Roberts, an antiquary. We were both—’

  ‘Your letter’ – my cousin didn’t even look at Dudley – ‘suggests you’re here in search of treasure.’

  ‘Of a kind.’

  ‘Well, well…’ Nicholas Meredith jutted his chin. His short beard was combed to an elegant point. ‘How like your father.’

  No mistaking his expression this time; I’d seen too many sneers. A low growl from Dudley.

  ‘That knave,’ my cousin Meredith said.

  I had no response, was held in shock. Not two hours ago, the innkeeper had talked of my cousin’s pride in my father’s position at King Henry’s court. All the talk was about him. And me too. All this man’s letters to me had been invariably cordial.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I said at last. ‘The innkeeper said you spoke well of my father. How close he was to the old king.’

  ‘I’m sure he was,’ Nicholas Meredith said. ‘Close enough to pocket the spoons.’

  A long hissing breath came out of Dudley, but he was yet ignored. A few men had made a half circle around us, in the way that men do, scenting the approach of violence. Meredith raised his tone.

  ‘You think we’re so removed from London, Dr Dee, that we hear nothing of what goes on there? You think we know nothing of your father’s crimes? You think we weren’t dishonoured by him?’

  ‘I know not what you’re—’

  ‘In your ill-writ letter,’ my cousin said, ‘you ask if I know of the whereabouts of a gemstone, formerly the property of the Abbey of Wigmore. Possibly misappropriated. Hah, methinks, how can this man talk so loftily about the misappropriation of church treasures when his own father—’

  ‘My father was a kind man,’ I said softly. ‘A generous man.’

  ‘Particularly with the property of others.’

  I’m not good at conflict, have no ready store of oiled ripostes. I stood in silence, aware of a greater gathering of onlookers and Dudley at my shoulder.

  ‘Forgive me for intruding, John, but why
don’t we just beat the piss out of this muffin?’

  I could feel how badly Dudley wanted this to become a fight, if only to relieve himself of weeks of stored-up rage. And still, Nicholas Meredith behaved as if he wasn’t there.

  ‘Were you about to deny that Rowland Dee, when churchwarden at St Dunstan’s in London, stole church plates left in his charge?’

  Dudley’s right hand was at his belt, where he’d keep a dagger.

  ‘No,’ I said quietly.

  Dudley stiffened. Nicholas Meredith smiled.

  ‘You asked about Abbot Smart? My letter, when you receive it on your return, will tell you he’s long gone. Probably into France. You’ll learn that nobody here has seen him for years. So if you’ve somewhere else on your treasure-hunting itinerary, I suggest you depart for it at first light.’

  As he turned away, my hose was soaked at the groin by a splash of fire-bright water thrown up by his boot.

  In my haste to avoid a further exchange, I’d walked the wrong way, and we found ourselves down by the church and the river. A mean river compared with the Wye, and the bridge was wooden and creaked when I stood upon it, but at least we seemed to be alone.

  ‘… doesn’t matter if it’s true,’ Dudley was hissing. ‘You don’t let any man who spoke thus walk away undamaged.’

  ‘It does matter,’ I said. ‘Matters to me. My father sullied his status as churchwarden at St Dunstan’s. He sold plate that certainly wasn’t his to sell. He’d lost his place at court and his business was ruined – through no fault of his own, I’d guess. I’m sure he… would have made good, when his fortunes improved.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, John, every family has some knavery to hide.’

  I looked down at the moonlit river, swollen by the downpour and not far below the bridge timbers.

  ‘He was not a thief. He was a proud man. And he paid for the best education I could’ve had. I wish I’d been able to earn enough money to ease his old age. But he died. And now I don’t earn enough to support my mother in the way she once was used to.’

  ‘You’ve not done badly under the circumstances. Given that he doesn’t seem to have left you any money… or even a house.’