The Heresy of Dr Dee Read Free

scryer.
    As distinct from the higher spirits, the good spirits.
    Call them angels.
    ‘In Europe,’ I said, ‘the shewstone is seen as a legitimate method of penetrating the higher mysteries. In England, it’s yet a joke, at best. At worst, the devil’s
own mirror.’
    ‘You told them this in Europe?’
    ‘Hell, no.’
    Not for me to confirm their opinion of England as a land of Philistines – or to confess my own ignorance. I’d read and reread the works of Agrippa and what I could of Trithemius, but
my personal experience was, at best, thin and always would be until I seized the nettle and took steps to acquire my own shewstone.
    A good one. A good crystal, with which to carry out experiments. But what kind, what colour, how big? These were fundamentals I ought to have known about but did not, for opinions varied.
    ‘You’re an innocent soul, Dr John.’ Jack Simm standing among the roots of a venerable oak and facing me like a father, hands sunk into the pockets of his jerkin. ‘You
fink fings is different, now nobody gets burned. The Queen smiling, all gracious. Oh, yea, folks can believe what they like, long as they keep it to themselves. Like we ain’t heard all
that
before.’
    ‘Times change, Jack.’
    ‘Kings don’t change. Nor Queens. It’s religious freedom one day then, in a blinking, it’s all about how to prove you ain’t a witch’s daughter.’
    The Queen’s mother, Anne Boleyn, executed by the Queen’s father for treason and adultery, had been possessed of a sixth finger and a furry growth on her neck. How much evidence did
you want?
    ‘Now how’s the Queen
do
that?’ Jack said. ‘She makes war on witchcraft, and her advisers look around for somebody well-known to execute to make it look
good.’
    A dead twig had snapped under his boot, making me start as he sprang away from the oak, forefinger aimed at my chest.
    ‘Go on… tell me it’s wivout bleedin’ precedent. And you may mention the late King Harry.’
    I wanted to laugh, but it wouldn’t come. This queen was different. This queen had an acute intelligence and questing mind fascinated by alchemy and the cabala. This queen was powerfully
Protestant while celebrating the Mass in deep privacy.
    ‘Heresy.’ I’d shrugged. ‘All science is heresy. Now… can you help me?’
    He’d paced a slow circle around the oak.
    ‘Yea, well,’ he’d said at last, ‘I suppose you oughter have somefink to take your mind off what’s happening downriver.’
    He’d meant London. Becoming known in Europe as Satan’s city. And not, at this moment, a good place to be if you were a friend of Robert Dudley.

IV
The Smoke of Rumour
    W HEN B ROTHER E LIAS had made his stately departure to the inn, we ate bread and goatcheese with Goodwife
Faldo.
    It had been Jack’s idea that she should play the pigeon so that I might observe a scrying without giving away my identity. Goodwife Faldo, who’d once taken my mother to see a cunning
woman in the hope of asking my dead father if there was money hidden anywhere, had agreed at once to accept me as her brother for the day.
    After our meal, she said she’d walk out to the meadow to suggest to her husband and sons that, rather than disrupt our sitting, they might eat at the inn tonight. I gave her my last
shilling to pay for their meat and small beer, and then Jack and I walked down to the riverside where casks of fresh-brewed ale were being loaded into a barge. The air was cooling fast these
evenings and the ambering sky above the distant city was smutted and heavy from first fires. And the smoke of rumour.
    I hadn’t ventured into London for more than a week, but the gossip had been drifting down to me like black flakes from a lamp-scorched purlin. The city all atremble in the glitter of a
dangerous lightning.
    ‘What were they saying when you were in town?’ I asked.
    One reason I’d come to trust Jack Simm: he was a man of intelligence but without ambition.
    Without ambition.
What