The Heresy of Dr Dee

by Phil Rickman

  A drab day, not long after the year’s beginning. Sky like a soiled rag, sooted snow still clinging to the cobbles. I’d walked down, for maybe the last time, from my lodgings behind New Fish Street, through air already fugged with smoke from the morning fires. A stink of sour ale and vomit in the alley, and a hanging dread.

  ‘Dr Dee…’

  The man pushing through the ring of onlookers wore a long black coat over a black doublet, expensive but unslashed. Mole-sleek hair was cut close to his skull.

  ‘You may not remember me, Doctor.’

  His voice soft, making him younger than his appearance suggested.

  ‘Um…’

  ‘Arrived in Cambridge not long before you left.’

  I was edging a cautious thumbnail over the yellowing face within the coffin. All the people you’re supposed to recognise these days. Why? They’re something then nothing, here then gone. Waste of study-time.

  ‘Quite a big college,’ I said.

  ‘I think you were a reader in Greek at the time?’

  Which would have made it 1547 or ’48. I hadn’t been back to Cambridge since, having – to my mother’s fierce consternation – turned down a couple of proffered posts there. I looked up at him, shaking my head and begging mercy, for in truth I knew him not.

  ‘Walsingham,’ he said.

  Heard of him. An MP now, about five years younger than me, so still in his twenties. Ambitious, they said, and courting Cecil for position. His messenger had been banging on my door before eight, when it was yet dark. I hadn’t liked this; it put me on edge. It always does, now.

  ‘Lucky to catch me, Master Walsingham. I was about to leave London for my mother’s house in Mortlake.’

  ‘Not permanently, I trust?’

  I looked up, suspicious. A week earlier, the tight-arse who owned the house where I was lodging had finally raised the rent beyond my means – maybe under the impression, as many now seemed to be, that I was a man of wealth. It was as if this Walsingham knew the truth of my situation. How was that possible? There was also an assumed authority here which I doubted that he, as a mere MP, had any right to exercise.

  Still, this matter intrigued me, so I was prepared to indulge him for a while.

  ‘Wax?’ he said.

  Squatting down in the mud on the other side of the coffin, which was laid across a stone horse-trough. Putting out a forefinger to the face, but then drawing it back.

  ‘Let’s see,’ I said.

  And then, impatient with all this superstition, placed both hands inside the coffin and lifted out the bundle, prompting a gasp from someone as I bent my head and sniffed.

  ‘Beeswax.’

  ‘Stolen from a church, then?’

  ‘I’d guess. Shaped over a flame. See the fingermark?’

  What had lain in the box was naked upon a cloth of dark red, edged in gold. It was a foot in length, three inches in thickness. The eyes were jagged holes, the mouth a knife-slit smeared red. The smudged print was on one over-plump breast and another small glob of red made a dark berry in the cleft between the legs.

  ‘An altar candle?’ Walsingham said.

  ‘Could be. It was you who found it?’

  ‘My clerk. I live not far away, along the river. He thought at first it must be some nun’s still-born babe. When he—’

  ‘Don’t they usually just get dropped in the river wrapped in rags?’

  ‘—when he finally found the balls to take off the lid, he returned at once. Had me roused.’

  I looked around: two constables, a man of the Watch, a couple of whores and a vagrant near the entrance to the alley. A dying pitch-torch smouldered by the door of a mean tavern on the corner, but the buildings either side were all tight-shuttered, no smoke from the chimneys. Warehouses, most likely.

  ‘Found exactly as . . .?’

  ‘No, no. The foul thing was in a most conspicuous position out on the quayside, where anyone might chance upon it. I had it moved here, then sent the Watch to knock on doors. A man walking the streets with a coffin in his arms can’t have gone entirely unseen.’

  I nodded. Probably some drunkard out there still fearing for his sanity. I laid the waxen effigy back in the box and hefted the whole thing. It was quite light – pine maybe, ’neath the tarry black.

  ‘And then you summoned me,’ I said. ‘Can I, um, ask why?’

  The question was left on the air; he tossed another at me.

  ‘Dr Dee, given that we both know who it represents, how is it supposed to work?’

  I eased what I now saw to be a wooden crown from the hair of plaited straw. I picked it up. Not well carved, but from a distance . . .

  ‘And if it is fashioned from an altar candle,’ Walsingham said, ‘would that be considered to enhance its, ah, efficacy?’

  ‘Master Walsingham, before we take this further—’

  Walsingham raised a hand, stood up, waved to the constables and retainers to move further away and then made motion toward a doorway opposite the trough. I scrambled up and followed him. He leaned back into a door frame which was flaking and starting to rot. A man drawn to damp and shadows.

  Who evidently thought the same of me.

  ‘My understanding, Dr Dee, is that you’re our foremost authority on what we might call matters of the hidden.’

  A sudden skreeting of seagulls over the river. Walsingham waited, bony face solemn, eyes sunk into hollows. I was wary now. How I’d served the new Queen was no secret, but it carried more risk than profit; anyone given leave to part dark curtains inevitably drew the suspicions of the vulgar.

  But what could I say? I shrugged and acknowledged an academic interest. Reticent, though, because he still hadn’t given reason why a wax doll in a babe’s coffin should be an MP’s affair.

  ‘Seems to me, Dr Dee, that in seeking the provenance of this artefact we have two directions.’

  We?

  ‘The first… some kind of papist pretence, to spread alarm. Hence its public display.’ He nodded toward the two constables. ‘See their faces. They fear for their very souls through being in its proximity.’

  ‘Which you do not?’

  Fairly sure in my mind, now, that the Walsinghams were a strong reformist family, with a link to the Boleyns and, presumably, a hatred of idolatry in any form. Hence his disdainful use of nun for a street-woman.

  ‘And the second direction,’ he said, ‘would, of course, be toward Satan himself.’

  These midnight questions, I approach them daily. Yet with care.

  Know this: a few of us are endowed with abilities like to the angels. Some can see the dead or pluck thoughts from the minds of others. And to some are gifted the means to bring about change in the natural order of things.

  All this I know, and yet, if you thought to detect there an element of self-reference, then you must needs forget it. Mine’s the scholar’s way. A commitment to finding and charting pathways towards lights both beyond us and within us. Which, let me tell you, is never easy, for the paths are all overgrown with barbs and briars, and we are ever led by false lights.

  I’ve oft-times followed them, too, those false lights, but I’m more cautious now.

  ‘What we both know,’ I said, ‘is that London’s full of cunning villainy.’

  Walsingham sniffed tightly.

  ‘Quite. But does this thing have satanic power, or not?’

  ‘It evidently has the power to arouse fear and anxiety.’

  I looked at the constables, murmuring one to another now. Muted laughter to disguise a primitive terror. I wished I could take the effigy and its box for further examination but decided it was inadvisable to demonstrate too much interest.

  ‘It’s clear someone’s gone to some considerable effort,’ I said. ‘The coffin’s passably well made. The doll itself… hardly a work of high art. And yet…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The one odd thing is that, apart from the fingermark, there’s no… I mean, normally an image like this might b
e pricked with pins. The clear intention being to arouse pain, whether in mind or body, in the person it represents. There’s nothing like that here that I can see.’

  ‘It’s laid out as a corpse in a coffin! How clear do you—?’

  ‘Death, yes, sure, but what kind of death?’

  ‘A prediction, then? An omen?’

  ‘The quality of the cloth and the general workmanship suggest… well, a certain wealth and a serious intent. The crudeness of the eyes and mouth conveying, rather than a lack of artistic skill, a simple contempt for the subject. Which is further emphasised by that smirched fingermark upon the, um, breast.’

  No accident, that.

  ‘It’ll get back, of course,’ Walsingham said.

  ‘ To court?’

  ‘Too many people know already. I can swear every one of those men to secrecy – and I shall – but it’ll still get back. Could be pamphlets on the street before the week’s end.’

  ‘I can be available,’ I said, ‘to offer some reassurance to the, um… should it be required.’

  ‘I’m sure you can, Dr Dee. Meanwhile, what’s to be done with it? Melt it on the fire?’

  ‘Um… no.’ I took a step back. ‘I wouldn’t do that. Not in the first instance. I’d have its… its inherent darkness… dispersed. By a bishop, if possible. Do you know any bishops, Master Walsingham?’

  ‘I will by tonight, if necessary.’

  ‘Good. He’ll know what to do.’

  I nodded and was about to walk away, when Walsingham said, ‘Suppose there’s another.’

  ‘Like this?’

  ‘They could be all over London. A spreading rash of evil. Where can we find you?’

  I couldn’t see it; a multiplicity of effigies would somehow reduce the insidious effect.

  ‘I’ll be leaving today, as I said, for my mother’s house. If you get word to Lord Dudley, he’ll have a messenger sent to me.’

  Taking care to throw in that mention of Dudley. Even though his odour was not good in certain circles, his was yet a potent name. Walsingham nodded and bent over to the coffin and this time he put a finger very close to the wax, as if he might be touching it, though I thought not.

  ‘Is that blood?’

  The smear of red across the knife-slit mouth. I’d wondered about that. And, more significantly, the glob of red between the legs – preferring to say nothing about this lest my supposition of its intent as regards future childbearing be wrong.

  ‘If it’s the blood of whoever made this,’ I said, ‘it might be thought to carry the essence of that person’s hatred to… she who’s represented here. Blood was also seen by the ancients as an agent for the, um, materialising of spirits.’

  ‘For conjuring?’

  Never my favourite word.

  ‘It’s a matter of will. The harnessing of the human will to something from another… level of existence.’

  ‘Something demonic?’

  ‘If the Queen’s appointed by God…’

  ‘If? You doubt that?’

  The question lightly posed, his eyes half lidded.

  Jesu.

  ‘No, no,’ I said. ‘Obviously not. What I’m saying is that the corruption of an altar candle could, as I think you’ve already suggested, be an attempt to subvert the power of God in this respect.’

  ‘Breaking the sacred thread within the line of monarchy?’

  ‘Which might itself be considered already weakened by—’

  ‘The sex of the monarch?’

  This man thought too fast for my liking.

  ‘This is only my own—’

  ‘Of course’, Walsingham hissed. ‘That’s why you’re here.’

  I looked at him closely.

  ‘Who are you?’ I said. ‘What are you?’

  ‘What do I look like?’

  ‘You look,’ I said, like walking darkness.’

  And he smiled and nodded, quite clearly pleased at this.

  When I’m asked how it all began, this is the incident I recall: the first example, in my own witness, of a malevolence – an intelligent malevolence – directed at the Queen.

  You must needs be aware of its effect on me. In my way, I’ve loved this woman for whom I’ll part any dark curtains, seek answers to the most forbidding of midnight questions. For if this is the time for an uncovering of universal mysteries, then I’d like to think she has made that possible by displaying a manner of tolerance which many of us had feared we might never see again.

  After all is said, should it not be man’s most ardent desire to see into the very mind of God? Does not God himself challenge us to interpret His art?

  A silence.

  Heresy, you whisper.

  Burn him.

  As they nearly did. A few years ago, in another reign – you may know something of this – I was close to being left as cinders upon a hearth of baked earth. Thoughts of it still sear my dreams, lie smouldering in my lower mind. The charges were manifestly unjust, but when did that ever matter?

  Yet I survived, and now the wildfire of another dawn is kindled over the river, and I sit here in my mother’s parlour and throw up my hands – for what else is the charge of heresy but a brutal blindfold for the far-sighted?

  And I must needs set down what happened. Recount the whole bitter episode before it’s murked by memory and rendered impenetrable to the common man by my own exhaustive analysis – oft-times it being said that few can comprehend my writings, full weighted as they are with scientific terms, befuddled by diagrams and arcane symbols. The very tradecraft, some will say, of the devil.

  So I’ll relate this story as simply and directly as it comes to memory. I shall not, as is my usual custom, carefully dissect and prod over each sentence or avoid what it tells of my inner nature… about what I was and what I am become.

  But, before I begin, know this…

  …there is a shape and pattern to it all. A universal geometry, the changing angles and rhythms of which, through mathematics and the study of the stars, we’re learning to calcule again, as men did in ancient times. Twin journeys: above and below, without and within. I try to chart them daily, whilst knowing that I am, in divers ways, no more than an onlooker.

  And helpless.

  For although some may have abilities like to the angels, yet they are not angels.

  I’ve learned this, and in the cruellest of ways.