by M. J. Trow
‘Christian charity.’ The magus nodded. ‘He was my friend, once.’ Dee turned and walked across the Great Hall towards a small door in the corner, which led to the kitchen. Balthasar went out to the wagons to fetch Rose; Marlowe and Hern waited for Helene. It seemed only polite to be escorted by the lady of the house.
‘Master Marlowe,’ Hern said. ‘We must have a talk, you and I, before we go much further.’
‘Why?’ Marlowe said. ‘I thought my purse was all the conversation we needed.’
‘I have been thinking things through. You are a man with a mission; I see it in your eyes. I don’t want that, whatever it is, to bring trouble to us.’
‘The trouble, if it comes, will come but singly,’ Marlowe said. ‘You and your troupe will not be dragged into it. I have . . . friends.’
Hern looked dubious. ‘What friends are they?’
‘If I told you, then they would be of no use to me, would they?’ Marlowe told him. ‘They are the kind of friends who lose their power if everyone knows them. Don’t worry, Hern. It will all be well.’
A soft footfall behind him made him turn.
‘Helene,’ he said, ‘you made me jump.’
‘I’m sorry, Master Marlowe,’ she said. ‘I am naturally very light on my feet. Come, let me take you to John’s room. We can choose the most comfortable chairs. And I have this bottle of brandy here.’ She raised it to show them, a cobweb clinging to the side. ‘I am no expert, but Gregory Leslie had hidden it well, so I think it will be of some quality.’ She took Marlowe’s arm and led the way, but he could feel her trembling. ‘Mind the wet patch at the foot of the stairs,’ she said over her shoulder to Hern. ‘Oh, too late. There is a cloth over in the corner there. Cook hung it over that statue. It gave her . . . ideas.’
Hern half hopped over to the dark space under the stairs and whipped the cloth from the statue. It had been hiding a very obvious attribute and he thought he could see a theme developing. The cook was clearly mad; Dee was rather soft in the head, whatever the Queen may think; the manservant was obviously simple. The brains in this house belonged to Helene, without a doubt. A beautiful and very accomplished woman. No wonder Edward Kelly had come back, like a pigeon to its nest.
While he blotted the blood from the sole of his shoe, a small door opened behind the stair. A blast of cold, musty air which came with it suggested cellars, long unused. Simon the strongman slid along the wall where the shadows were longest and slipped out of the front door without a word. Hern did not call out although a quiet word with the man later would be more than necessary. This was not a house in which to be caught out in clandestine behaviour. He waited in the shadows and after a few minutes, the door opened and shut again, but this time the shadow was a woman, one that Hern did not know. With her head down, she also made for the door and was soon gone. Hern sighed. Yes, a word would certainly be necessary in the morning.
‘Gentlemen and ladies,’ Dee said, looking around his fireside. ‘I am so glad to have you all here, old friends –’ he smiled at Marlowe – ‘and new, I hope. I am anxious to learn from you but first I would like to demonstrate my small skill. Helene has told me that she is somewhat tired and I don’t want to keep her up longer than I need.’
It was true that Helene Dee did not look at all well. She was pale and quiet but she smiled at her husband and then at her guests. ‘Today has been quite tiring, yes,’ she said. ‘A lot to take in. So, if you don’t mind . . .’
Rose leaned towards her from where she sat on a short bench, next to Balthasar and whispered in her ear. Helene flushed a little, but shook her head. The men looked away, as men will when women whisper.
Dee looked a little askance and then cleared his throat. ‘May I ask Master Marlowe if he will help me?’ he said.
Marlowe looked at him nervously. He knew this man and the kind of thing he liked to do. If demons were involved – and knowing Dee, there would be at least the hint of a demon somewhere – then he was not sure his doubts were strong enough to defend him. Dee read his mind.
‘No demons, Kit. But I think you will find it interesting.’ He held out his hand and pushed a bench back from the fire to clear a space. ‘Will you help? Helene will be here. And as you know, I would have no harm come to her.’
Marlowe stepped forward reluctantly and stood side by side with the beauty and faced Dee.
‘As you can see,’ Dee said to Hern, Balthasar and Rose, ‘Master Marlowe and my wife are much the same size, although I would estimate that Master Marlowe weighs an ounce or two more. But I can make my wife weigh nothing so that she will float to the ceiling. And I can make Master Marlowe weigh so much he will not be able to move a limb.’
Hern and Balthasar exchanged looks. ‘I would like to see that,’ Hern said, politely. Rose smiled at Helene and sat back to watch.
Dee turned Helene and Marlowe so that they faced each other and joined their hands. They were almost the same height and they stood toe to toe, looking into each other’s eyes. Dee stood behind them, facing his guests. Raising one hand, he pressed down on Marlowe’s shoulder, whilst holding the other hand about six inches above Helene’s head. He spoke in a low whisper and Marlowe was amazed to hear that he was simply reciting the Collects for the Sundays of Lent, in Latin. But somehow, as he identified the words, they seemed to slur together and his view of the world became very limited until all he could see were Helene’s eyes, boring into his.
And something very strange was happening. He was having to look up to look into Helene’s eyes. He was having to tilt his head right back to keep her eyes in his view. She was at the end of a light-filled tunnel, she was far away, she was drifting off, further and further away. He tried to tell her to stay still, but there was something wrong with his mouth. His tongue was stuck to the bottom of it, lodged beneath his teeth and his lips were glued shut. But although he was rather puzzled, he wasn’t frightened. He felt instead as though he was sinking into the floor, which was made for some reason of the softest feather, very warm and comfortable. His eyelids were really heavy, and he could only see Helene now through the slits that his eyes had become. So heavy. So very heavy.
To the watchers, it looked no less impressive. As Dee muttered behind the pair, Helene rose inches and then feet into the air. She floated up to the ceiling and hovered there, her clothes wafting on an unfelt breeze. Marlowe had sunk to the floor and was unable to rise. Even his hair, the locks usually in motion around his face, hung as though lined with lead. His eyelids drooped over his large brown eyes and his bottom lip hung and drooled.
Dee looked up at the Egyptians. ‘Please step forward,’ he said, ‘and try to lift Master Marlowe from the floor. I can guarantee you will be unable to do so. As for my wife, you may walk beneath her if you wish, although gentlemen, I would urge you to respect the fact that she is a married woman and of a chaste disposition.’ He looked closely at Rose. ‘I’m sorry, my dear,’ he said. ‘Did you speak?’
‘A cough,’ she said, ‘nothing more. I apologize, Dr Dee. Do go on.’
‘Erm . . . yes. Please, do come and examine my wife and Master Marlowe.’
Hern walked over to Marlowe and pulled at his arm. Nothing happened; not only did it not wake the man, but Hern could not make the arm move even an inch. He tried the other, with the same result. He picked at a lock of hair, but it was as if the man had been turned to stone. Balthasar was walking around Helene, his head below the level of her feet, which were not dangling as if she were hanging, but flat, as though she stood on a glass floor above him.
‘Can she move?’ he asked Dee.
‘Indeed,’ the old magus replied. ‘My wife is weightless, Balthasar. It is Master Marlowe who weighs as much as the world we stand on.’ He raised his voice. ‘Helene,’ he said. ‘Can you walk towards the window, to show Balthasar that you can move.’
Helene Dee walked across the room, seven feet up in the air, her feet bending and straightening on her invisible floor. Then she turned and came back to her starting place.
Hern and Balthasar felt the hairs stand up on the backs of their necks. They knew some tricks, God knew, but nothing like this. This was breaking all the laws that God had ordained and while they didn’t bother with laws as a general rule there were some, one of which is that women don’t walk on thin air, which they had always tried to obey. They glanced at each other; there was nothing in their repertoire which would impress this man. They had lost the race, without having moved from the starting place.
Dee was almost dancing with pleasure. ‘Well, gentlemen,’ he crowed. ‘Can you tell me how it is done?’
Hern had to admit defeat and Balthasar just shrugged his shoulders. ‘You are a true magus, Dr Dee,’ he said. ‘You have me foxed.’
Suddenly, Rose stood up and walked across to where the men stood. ‘Helene was doing this trick before she met you, John Dee, Queen’s magus,’ she said. ‘Has she told you all her tricks?’ Then she turned to Balthasar. ‘I sought you out because I thought you could truly tell my future, could help me change it to something I wanted it to be. But you are just a man, like all the others. Credulous, fooled by a pretty face. I won’t be coming any further with you, Balthasar, you and your troupe. I saw that in my future, even when you couldn’t. Something is wrong here. Someone has done evil. It can’t be put right.’ She looked up at Helene Dee, who now hung in the air like a rag doll. ‘Something is wrong. Look at her.’
Dee wrung his hands. ‘What is it?’ he cried. ‘Helene? Helene? Come back to me. Wake up!’
‘It’s no good, Dr Dee,’ said Rose. ‘Evil has been done. Helene is dead.’
And as she spoke, the woman, light and air and beauty, turned once as she hung there and fell like a stone into Hern’s arms.
EIGHT
John Dee was taken away by Lily, fished out of her bed by Hern for the purpose, and put to bed. The magus was a magus no longer, just an old, grief-stricken man. He, who could bring the dead back to life, or at least thought he could, had said goodbye to Helene as she lay cooling in her bed. She looked even more beautiful, if possible, as she lay there, her face free of the slightest worry, her skin wiped smooth by the deep sleep of death. Only her bluing nails and lips and her stiffening fingers gave any clue that she was not just sleeping soundly.
Marlowe was curled up in a ball on the floor of the retiring room. He had come screaming out of his trance as soon as Helene fell and every fibre of his body hurt as though he had been trampled. Whatever the secret of the trick, whoever had been in control of it, Dee or Helene, or even Rose, it had never been intended to end so suddenly. The weight which had been transferred to him should have been lifted, ounce by ounce and given back to Helene, so that she gently came back to earth and he could get up and move around. When Dee and Helene were on song, it sometimes worked that the light became the heavy and so on until everyone tired of it. Dee had even used the Queen herself in the trick one night at Placentia and had almost been skewered by Sir Christopher Hatton for his pains.
Lily came to him after she had lulled Dee to sleep. Passing her hands over him, she had looked up at Balthasar, looming over the boy as he lay and whimpered in pain. ‘I’m trying my best, Balthasar,’ she said, as though he had spoken. ‘Everything inside him feels wrong to me. As if his bones are not in the right place.’
‘It was the damnedest thing, Lil,’ Balthasar said, chewing his lip. ‘She just dropped like a stone and he just came up on to his feet with such a scream that I felt my bowels turn to water. And then he dropped again and he has been like this ever since.’
Lily carried on stroking Marlowe’s back, because it seemed to ease him. ‘I gather Rose knew Mistress Dee,’ she said, somewhere between a question and a statement.
‘I gather she did,’ Balthasar said.
‘Is that why she sought you out, do you think?’ Lily said, kneading the muscle in the small of Marlowe’s back, and being rewarded by a small scream. ‘I am so sorry, Master Marlowe,’ she muttered to him, moving her hand. ‘To bring her here,’ she carried on, not looking at Balthasar.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I thought I could see into her soul, Lily, but her soul is not what I saw. I don’t know who she is or why she sought me out.’ He drew a huge trembling breath. ‘I thought . . .’
Lily got up, dusting off the front of her skirt, for all the difference it made. ‘Balthasar,’ she said, ‘any one of us would be proud . . .’
He shook her off, but not unkindly. He had often thought that if he ever took a woman, it might well be Lily. He gave her a smile, but not his usual one which was like the moon coming out from behind a cloud, tinting everything it shone on with silver. ‘I will find another rose,’ he said. ‘She can’t be the only one in the garden.’ And he walked away, leaving Lily and Marlowe to stay together through the night, until in the dawn he finally relaxed and fell asleep. Lily got up from where she had been shielding him with her body from the terrors which shook it and went back to the camp, to stir oatmeal with the women.
It took Joseph Fludd quite a while to fix his eyes on the horizon. The cold pearl of the sky stretched out beyond the breakwater where the grey surf lifted and the gulls wheeled overhead. This was only his second time out of his county of Cambridge and he felt uneasy. The sky was too big out here, the wind even more chill than at home. He had no jurisdiction here, no edge. Even the limited powers he had as Constable were denied him and he had left his tipstaff at home.
For three days he’d haunted the dockside taverns of Lynn, buying a draught of local Norfolk ale and making it last. His ultimatum from the Mayor had been clear enough and there would be no expenses. He’d toyed for a while with tethering the old nag Hobson had hired him on the waste ground beyond the church of St Margaret but he knew there would be laws against that and however his search went he would never be able to afford to replace a horse. So his money had to last and his lodgings in a lean-to behind the Grey Goose did not come cheap.
Fludd was used to the cold of his native Cambridge, the unforgiving wind that crept round Petty Cury and across the bridge at Magdalen. The draughty, crumbling castle barbican that was his constabulary home above the cherry orchards had sudden cold spots of its own, when the wind currents eddied up the shafts of the old garderobes, now disused. But nothing had prepared him for Lynn in the grip of winter. Men he had drunk with the night before, narrow-eyed men with leather faces and sour looks, men who worked on the barges on the Broads and fished the sea off Brancaster Bay, spoke of this being nothing. Back in . . . and the year changed with the telling . . . the sea itself froze, with ice mountains lining the sands that stretched on forever. Birds, the gulls with their tragic cries and the curlews on the heathland, dropped dead from the sky with cold. And they had lowered their voices and closed to him when they spoke solemnly of the Jesus of Ely. The ship came in, they had told him, on a winter’s day just like this one, when the sky was lead and death moaned in the wind. No birds followed the Jesus home and no one waited on the shore to welcome her. The Jesus was not due back for a month or more from Flushing over the unforgiving North Sea; yet here she was, her sails furled and her anchor trailing. When they boarded her, still drifting in the narrows, there was not a soul on her. The charts lay on her captain’s table, bread and cheese, nibbled by the ship’s rats, scattered the crew’s quarters. Her hold was empty, though it should have been full of woollens and grain. It was the cold, the fishermen told Fludd, the ice fingers of the sea that had done for them all. And it would all be explained one day when the sea gave up her dead.
He had endured the silence, noted the nodding heads and dipped his lips again into the Norfolk ale. Fludd had waited for a suitable moment, then he raised the subject, casually. Had anyone seen any Egyptians? Those weird folk who rode piebald horses and told the future, those horse thieves and tinkers? Most had shaken their heads. One or two had told him tall tales of elsewhere in the county, how Egyptians had been hanged in Norwich not long since and one had disappeared in the market square there in a cloud of purple s
moke. There were no Egyptians in the county now; the constabulary had driven them out. One thing they did well, the constabulary, the only thing the constabulary did well, was to move on Egyptians; whip them at the cart’s tail, then hang them. And what, the drinking fishermen wanted to know, was Fludd’s interest in all this? He wasn’t a Constable too, was he?
Marlowe and Balthasar Gerard sat in the kitchen of the great and silent house, trying to warm themselves on the embers of the fire. The cook was prostrate with grief and no one begrudged her that; she had known Nell since she had been brought in by Dee one wet night, soaked to the skin and filthy. It had been the cook who had wrapped her in a blanket and warmed her by the fire while Bowes and Dee had prepared a bath for her. Not usually what she would call men’s work, but they had remembered a herb or two to perfume the water and Dee had even remembered some cloths to dry the girl with. They had been the finest towels, brought from Turkey at great expense and were usually kept in the linen press against the day that the Queen might come – although the likelihood of her visit coinciding with her annual bath was not strong.
Finally, they had got through the layers of caked mud and there she was, as beautiful as the day and with a nature to match, sunny and happy almost always and if she ever felt a little cribbed, confined in her marriage to the magus, no one ever knew. She treated the cook and Bowes as if they were her friends, she treated Kelly with gentle contempt and she was the most beautiful and also the most silent hostess in London. In all, the day Dee had found her and looked beyond the mud to the jewel beneath had been the household’s happiest day. And now the saddest day had come, one which none of them had thought to see. They were all old enough to be her parents and had all thought that one day she would see them severally into their graves.
‘Did you know her well, Kit?’ Balthasar suddenly dropped into the silence.
‘Not well, no,’ he said. ‘But to see the outward Helene was to know the inner, as I have understood it. I have never asked, but I felt that the marriage was . . .’
