The Heresy of Dr Dee

Phil Rickman

• Publisher: Corvus
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780857897701
• eBook ISBN: 9781848872783
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Historical Literature
• Index: Literature

Tudor intrigue, murder and the dark arts - the second in an acclaimed historical series starring Dr John Dee

All talk is of the End-time... and the dead are rising.

At the end of the sunless summer of 1560, black rumour shrouds the death of the one woman who stands between Lord Robert Dudley and marriage to the young Queen Elizabeth. Did Dudley's wife, Amy, die from an accidental fall in a deserted house, or was it murder? Even Dr John Dee, astrologer royal, adviser on the Hidden and one of Dudley's oldest friends, is uncertain. Then a rash promise to the Queen sends him to his family's old home on the Welsh Border in pursuit of the Wigmore Shewstone, a crystal credited with supernatural properties.

With Dee goes Robert Dudley, considered the most hated man in England. They travel with a London judge sent to try a sinister Welsh brigand with a legacy dating back to the Battle of Brynglas. After the battle, many of the English bodies were, according to legend, obscenely mutilated. Now, on the same haunted hill, another dead man has been found, similarly slashed.

Devious politics, small-town corruption, twisted religion and a brooding superstition leave John Dee isolated in the land of his father.

Contents

PART ONE

I. Source of Darkness

II. Rooker

III. Call Them Angels

IV. The Smoke of Rumour

V. The Ingle

VI. Cousin

VII. Coincidence and Fate

VIII. Favoured

PART TWO

IX. The Summoning of Siôn Ceddol

X. Begins in Joy

XI. Dark Merlin

XII. Blood and Ash

XIII. Court Clown

XIV. God and All His Angels

PART THREE

XV. The Hill of Bones and Ghosts

XVI. Pike-head

XVII. A Sense of the Ominous

XVIII. Transcending the Mapper’s Craft

XIX. Dungheap

XX. Old Itch

XXI. Rowly’s Boy

XXII. So She Wouldn’t Die

XXIII. Dark Alleys

XXIV. All Heavy with Old Death

XXV. Thrown From the Body

XXVI. Blade’s Edge

XXVII. Likely a Sin

XXVIII. The Jury

XXIX. Betwixt the Living and the Dead

XXX. More Than Water

XXXI. A Popular Knave

PART FOUR

XXXII. Given Back

XXXIII. The Single Eye

XXXIV. Adversary

XXXV. The Etiquette of Cursing

XXXVI. In Dark Arts

XXXVII. Falling Away

XXXVIII. Unholy Glamour

XXXIX. Property of the Abbey

XL. Paper Kites

XLI. Personal Dressmaker

XLII. Contempt

XLIII. Graveyard Mist

XLIV. Monstrous Constellations

XLV. Cold Geometry

XLVI. Portal

XLVII. Orifice

XLVIII. Not in a Goodly Way

XLIX. Skin of the Valley

L. Courtly Dance

LI. Ragged White

LII. The Wasting

LIII. Untethered

LIV.

LV. For Tonight

PART FIVE

LVI. From an Angel

PART ONE

All my life I had spent in learning… with great pain, care and cost I had, from degree to degree, sought to come by the best knowledge that man might attain unto in the world. And I found, at length, that neither any man living, nor any book I could yet meet withal, was able to teach me those truths I desired and longed for…

JOHN DEE

I

Source of Darkness

IT WAS THE year of no summer, and all the talk in London was of the End-time.

Even my mother’s neighbours were muttering about darkness on the streets before its time, moving lights seen in the heavens and tremblings of the earth caused by Satan’s gleeful stoking of the infernal fires.

Tales came out of Europe that two suns were oft-times apparent in the skies. On occasion, three, while in England we never saw even the one most days and, when it deigned to appear, it was as pale and sour as old milk and smirched by raincloud. Now, all too soon, autumn was nigh, and the harvests were poor and I’d lost count of the times I’d been asked what the stars foretold about our future… if we had one.

Each time, I’d reply that the heavens showed no signs of impending doom. But how acceptable was my word these days? I was the astrologer who’d found a day of good promise for the joyful crowning of a woman who now, less than two years later, was being widely condemned as the source of the darkness.

By embittered Catholics, this was, and the prune-faced new Bible-men. Even the sun has fled England, they squealed. God’s verdict on a country that would have as its queen the spawn of a witch – these fears given heat by false rumours from France and Spain that Elizabeth was pregnant with a murderer’s child.

God’s bollocks, as the alleged murderer would say, but all this made me weary to the bone. How fast the bubble of new joy is pricked. How shallow people are. Give them shit to spread, and they’ll forge new shovels overnight.

All the same, you might have thought, after what happened in Glastonbury, that the Queen would seek my help in shifting this night-soil from her door.

But, no, she’d sent for me just once since the spring – all frivolous and curious about what I was working on, and had I thought of this, and had I looked into that? Sending me back to spend, in her cause, far too much money on books. Burn too many candles into pools of fat. Explore alleys of the hidden which I thought I’d never want to enter.

Only to learn, within weeks, that heavy curtains had closed around her court. Death having slipped furtively in. The worst of all possible deaths, most of us could see that.

Although not the Queen, apparently, who could scarce conceal her terrifying gaiety.

Dear God. As the silence grew, I was left wondering if the End-time might truly be looming and began backing away from some of the more foetid alleyways.

Though not fast enough, as it turned out.

II

Rooker

September, 1560. Mortlake.

IT WAS TO be the last halfway-bright day of the season, but the scryer had demanded darkness: shutters closed against the mid-afternoon and the light from a single beeswax candle throwing shadows into battle on the walls.

‘And this…’ Dithering now, poor Goodwife Faldo looked at me over the wafer of flame and then across the board to where the scryer sat, and then back at me. ‘This is my brother…’ her hands falling to her sides and, even in the small light, he must surely have seen the flailing in her eyes ‘…John,’ she said lamely.

‘John Faldo,’ I said at once.

And then, seeing the eyes of my friend Jack Simm rolling upwards, realised why this could not be so.

‘That is, her husband’s brother.’

Thinking how fortunate it was that Will Faldo was out with his two sons, gleaning from his field all that remained of a dismal harvest. Had he been with us, the scryer might just have noted that Master Faldo was plump, with red hair, and a head shorter than the man claiming to be his brother.

Or he might yet see the truth when he uncovered what sat before him. It made a hump under the black cloth as might a saint’s sacred skull. My eyes were drawn back to it again and again. Unaware that the scryer had been watching me until his voice came curling out of the dark.

‘You have an interest in these matters, Master Faldo?’

A clipped clarity suggestive of Wales. Echoes of my late tad, in fact.

Jesu… I met his gaze for no more than a moment then looked away towards the crack of daylight betwixt shutters. The Faldos’ dwelling, firm-built of oak and riverbed daub, was but a short walk from Mortlake Church which, had the shutters been open, would have displayed itself like a warning finger.

‘The truth is,’ I mumbled, ‘that I’m less afraid of such things than my brother. Which is one reason why I’m here. And, um, he is not.’

The scryer nodded, appearing well at ease with his situation. Too much so, it seemed to me; the narrow causeway ’twixt science and sorcery will always have slippery sides and in his place I would ever have been watching the shadows. But then, that, as you know, is the way I am.

I studied him in the thin light. Not what I’d expected. A good twenty years older than my thirty-three, greying beard tight-trimmed to his cheeks and a white scar the width of his forehead. Well-clothed, in a drab and sober way, like to a clerk or a lawyer. Only the scar hinting at a more perilous profession.

He’d introduced himself to us as Elias, and I was told he’d been a monk. Were this true, it might afford him protection from whatever would come. Certainly his manner implied that we were fortunate to have his services.

‘And the other reason that Master Faldo is not with us?’

He smiled at me, with evident scepticism. I was silent too long, and it was the goodwife, alert as a chaffinch, who sprang up.

‘My husband… he knows naught of this. He’s working the day long and falls to sleep when he comes in. I…’ She lowered her voice and her eyelids, a fine and unexpected piece of theatre. ‘I was too ashamed to tell him.’

She’d already paid the scryer, with my money. I’d also been obliged to meet his night’s accommodation at the inn – more than I could readily afford, especially if I were to make a further purchase. Served me right for starting this game and involving the goodwife in the deception.

Brother Elias smiled at her with understanding.

‘So the treasure you want me to find… would be your wedding ring?’

Goodwife Faldo let out a small cry, hastily stifled with a hand. How could he possibly have known this by natural means? I stiffened only for a moment. It was no more than a good guess. He must oft-times be summoned to locate a woman’s ring or a locket. It was what they did.

‘What happened…’ Goodwife Faldo displayed her fingers, one with a circle of white below its joint ‘… I must have taken it off. To clean out the fire ready for the autumn? Laid it on the board, where you’re…’ Peering among the shadows on the board, as if the missing ring might be gleaming from somewhere to betray her. ‘And then forgot about it until the night. And it… was gone.’

‘You think someone stole it?’

‘I’d not want to think that. We trust our neighbours. Nobody here bolts a door. But… yes, I do fear it’s been taken. Been many years in my husband’s family, and has a value beyond the gold. Can you help me?’

‘Not me alone, Goodwife. Not me alone.’

Brother Elias speaking with solemnity and what seemed to me to be a first hint of stagecraft. Goodwife Faldo’s stool wobbling and the candlelight passing like a sprite across her coif as she sat up. Like many women, my mother’s neighbour was much attracted to the Hidden, yet in a half-fearful way – the joy of shivers.

‘I can only pray,’ she said unsteadily, ‘that whatever is summoned to help you comes from the right… quarter.’

This, I’ll admit, was a question I’d primed her to ask. No one should open a portal to the Hidden without spiritual protection. There are long-established procedures for securing this; I wanted to know if the scryer knew them.

‘Oh, it must needs be Godly,’ Elias assured her confidently. ‘If it’s to find this ring for us. However…’ his well-fed face became stern ‘…I must make it clear to you, Goodwife, that if the ring has been stolen and we are able to put a face to the thief, then it’s your business, not mine, to take the matter further.’

‘That’s, er…’ I coughed ‘…is another reason why I’m here.’

Me, the fighting man. Dear God.

‘And what are you, Master Faldo?’ the scryer said, but not as if he cared. ‘What’s your living?’

I shrugged.

‘I work at the brewery.’

The biggest employer of men in Mortlake. Tell him you work at the brewery, Jack Simm had said to me earlier. And then, looking at my hands. Dealing wiv orders.

‘And you…’ the scryer turned to Jack, ‘…were once, I think, an apothecary in London?’

‘Once.’

Jack stubbornly folding his arms over his wide chest as though to ward off further questions. Get on with it. The scryer cupped his hands over the black-draped object before him, drew a long breath, as if about to snatch away the cloth… and then stopped.

‘It’s not mete.’

Pulling his hands away from the mounded cloth, stowing them away in his robe.

A...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Author biography
• Contents
• PART ONE
• PART TWO
• PART THREE
• PART FOUR
• PART FIVE
• Notes and Credits