‘No, never!’ Dee shut his mouth with a snap. ‘Although of course, sometimes evil spirits speak as friends and give false advice.’
‘So the Queen does the wrong thing,’ Marlowe said.
Dee leaned forward. ‘Never say such a thing,’ he said. ‘And especially not in front of him.’ He pointed to a large toad that appeared to be dozing on the hearthstone. It reminded Marlowe of the portraits he had seen of Cardinal Wolsey. ‘He misses nothing.’
Marlowe’s smile was by now a complete rictus. Had Manwood gone mad, to send him to this place?
‘But I can see that you are doubting, Master Marlowe. Test me this way. Tell me one thing about your friend’s death and I will tell you the cause of it.’ He sat back, with his hands clasped on his chest and his head thrown back, so he appeared to be examining the ceiling. Stuffed birds hung there, an owl in full flight, a goshawk plunging on its prey.
Marlowe thought through what he had seen in the flickering candle flame that early dawn in Whitingside’s rooms. It was hard to revisit, but he forced himself. If by describing what he saw he could make Dee forget his plans to raise the dead, then he would rack his brain until it hurt. ‘He . . . he had . . . his back was arched, his fingers were clenched and . . .’
Dee held up a hand. ‘No, no. That is ample. Now, let me think . . .’ His head snapped back up so that his amazing eyes bored into Marlowe’s. ‘I will ask you some questions. Answer me truthfully. Try no tricks, now, Master Marlowe. Now, then . . . he had vomited?’
Marlowe nodded. Not too clever a guess, when all was said and done.
‘The vomit was green –’ Dee was getting into his stride now – ‘like grass. His bed was disordered. The room looked as though there had been a fight. Umm . . . let me think . . . no one had seen him for a few days. Tell me, did Master Whitingside have a wife?’
Marlowe shook his head.
‘A woman of any kind in his life?’
He thought of Meg, not the purest woman who ever lived perhaps, but certainly in love with Ralph. He nodded. ‘A girl loved him, yes.’
Dee narrowed his eyes. ‘Then he had something some of us never have,’ he said. ‘Do you know this wench?’ he said. On Marlowe’s nod, he continued, ‘Could you find out whether Master Whitingside could . . . perform in his last days?’
‘Perf . . . oh, I see. Yes, I dare say she would tell me if I asked her.’
‘Because if it was found that he could not . . . perform . . . then that would make the diagnosis certain.’
‘Diagnosis of what?’
Dee looked smug. ‘That your friend was poisoned by a tincture of foxglove. Easily obtained and deadly.’
‘Would he have taken it himself? Do people do such things?’ Marlowe suddenly had a sickening feeling that he was chasing the wrong hare.
Dee reached forward to a pestle on the table in front of him and began to grind something inside it with a brass mortar. ‘The Scots,’ he said, ‘call the foxglove bloody fingers or dead man’s bells.’ His eyes flicked upwards to glance at Marlowe, who was watching him, fascinated. ‘Apt, eh, in the case of your friend? The Welsh –’ he carried on with his dark stirring, leaning in to his task and twisting the mortar widdershins – ‘always of a gentler disposition, know it as fairy-folks’ fingers or lambs-tongue leaves. Quite poetic, don’t you think?’
The poet-to-be did.
‘Dr Fuchs, late of Tubingen gave the plant its real name – digitabulum.’
‘A thimble?’ Marlowe frowned.
Dee smiled. Cambridge was still turning out scholars after all. ‘Dr Dodoens prescribed it boiled in wine to relieve the chest.’
‘Does it?’
‘No, Master Marlowe,’ Dee said coldly. ‘It kills you.’ He sniffed the contents of the pestle. ‘My old friend John Gerard finds it useful for those who have fallen from high places.’
‘Not that either?’ Marlowe was beginning to follow the drift of all this.
‘Most assuredly not,’ Dee said, ‘but since the man is Lord Burghley’s gardener, only time will tell.’ He closed to Marlowe in the deepest confidence. ‘They don’t come much more highly placed than Lord Burghley.’
‘Unless you include yourself, Dr Dee,’ Marlowe said, but Dee chose to ignore it.
‘You asked me whether people take the foxglove to poison themselves. I don’t doubt that people have taken the tincture for that purpose, but it is quite slow to act and if they changed their mind, there would be nothing that could be done, save watch them die in agony. And of course –’ he chuckled – ‘should they recover, they would be guilty of the sin of suicide. Attempted, that is.’
‘So it is murder, then?’ Marlowe said.
Dee rubbed his hands together. ‘Now we need to find out who did this horrible deed. And there is a complication, which might work for or against us.’
‘Oh?’ Marlowe was all ears.
‘Cambridge is in the eastern counties, Master Marlowe, the Fenlands. The foxglove is rarely found there.’
‘So, you’re saying . . .’
‘The man – or woman – who gave your friend the tincture may be an outsider, someone who is not native to Cambridge but bought the deadly thimble-full from elsewhere . . . Canterbury, perhaps.’
Marlowe nodded. He couldn’t wait to get back to Cambridge and start digging into Ralph’s last hours. He got up. ‘Thank you, sir,’ he said. ‘If I could perhaps sleep in one of your stables for the night, I will be away in the morning.’
‘My dear fellow,’ Dee said. ‘You will do no such thing. I will come with you to Cambridge and we will start at first light. We must find out your friend’s murderer and to do that there is but one course of action.’
‘What is that?’ Marlowe asked.
Dee rubbed his hands together again. ‘We must raise Master Whitingside and ask him to his face.’
EIGHT
It seemed only hours since Marlowe had last stood here in the dark, the wrong side of the churchyard wall. The moon was different; even Dee could do nothing about that and he had been rather testy about it. Apparently his raising spell worked better at certain phases of the moon, and this wasn’t it. But it seemed to Marlowe that time was of the essence. Ralph Whitingside would not be any deader if they waited, that was true, but on the other hand, his murderer could be putting miles between himself and Cambridge, especially if he got wind of Dee’s presence and his errand there.
They had crossed the river at Putney, where Marlowe saw the great grey towers of the abbey at Westminster far to the east, and had ridden across country to Highgate and Enfield before spending the night in the shadow of St Mary the Virgin at Chelmsford.
Dee could have been Marlowe’s father in terms of years, but he stood the pace well, his tough little chestnut cantering alongside Marlowe’s bay as they took the slope into timbered Lavenham, still prosperous in its heritage of wool. It was late afternoon as they rode through Saffron Walden, the sun casting shadows on the pargetted walls they cantered past. Marlowe could not believe this route was shorter than the one he had taken south – the detour to Lavenham alone should have added half a day. Yet they had trotted past the church of St Michael in Trumpington as the sun set over the tomb of the great crusader knight who lay there.
Marlowe turned to Dee, with a question in his brain which would not take shape on his lips. How could he ask a question which requested an explanation for the bending of time and distance to the magus’ will? He chose, in the end, to remain silent. The smile playing on Dee’s face told him all he needed to know; that he had no need to know, that as long as the end justified the means, the means were unimportant.
In the graveyard, the preparations were long and involved, Dee muttering to himself as he unpacked the many canvas sacks at his feet. Carrying them from the horses to the church, trying to look casual as the weight slewed them from side to side on the narrow pavements had been tricky. But tricky was meat and drink to Dee. Then there had been the problem of finding first the candle and then the flint and tinder. Then lighting the candle without setting fire to the hedge. But finally, all was ready.
Dee was seriously missing his usual helpmeets, either Helene or his manservant. Even Edward Kelly, co-magus and con-artist, long gone to the University of Cracow would have been of some help, as once Dee began his raising ceremony he was often so deep in thought, concentrating on the job in hand, that he needed help in sticking to the ritual. The results when everything went right were spectacular and dangerous enough, God Himself knew well. What might go wrong if a herb was wrongly placed, an incantation wrongly pronounced, was probably in the Devil’s keeping.
So Dee muttered and muttered, placing candles at precise angles to one another, making lines between them over the uneven ground of Whitingside’s grave in salt, in powdered roots of arcane cultivation, in blood from his own pricked finger. He swirled his way around the graves in an arc, a circle of fire from the brand he carried, before plunging it suddenly into the earth.
Eventually, all was in place and Dee stepped back. Marlowe had expected the angel Uriel, or at the very least fireworks and incandescence and was leaning, disappointed, bored and yet not a little relieved, against the still warm stones of the churchyard wall. Surely, this mix of mathematics and herbalism could not bring a soul back from wherever it had gone. And Marlowe was increasingly of the belief that the soul, should there be such a thing, went out with not so much as a whimper as soon as breathing stopped.
In a low voice, Dee gestured to Marlowe to light the candles in a specific order, starting at the top left and going widdershins around the circle, lighting the one in the middle last. The candles were short and black and as each wick flared a smell which Marlowe was loath to identify began to permeate the air. Dee was speaking more clearly, words now in Latin, now Hebrew, now in a language with which Marlowe felt himself familiar, in a dark, visceral way. It sounded like the first words ever spoken; it could be foretelling the end of the world when all the stars would go out one by one, and God would rule a clean new universe again. He shivered. Then, like the foretold stars, one by one the candles went out, left to right, widdershins.
The silence was palpable, thick and dark. Marlowe had stared into the blackness for so long that he had started to see little sparkles on the edge of his vision. Everywhere he looked, he could see will o’ the wisps dancing. When he moved his head, they moved too with long tails behind their infinitesimal bright bodies. Dee’s muttering now was so fast that the Latin words which Marlowe had understood at the beginning were now just a slur of sound, rising and falling in a hypnotic cadence and filling the space around the two men in a spiral of hopeful magick.
Dee leaned down and was almost touching the grave with his forehead. He grabbed Marlowe’s sleeve and pulled him down with him. They could smell the new growth of weed and flower in the soil, the dampness from a summer shower releasing the smells of dead foliage and tin from the earth. Dee’s breath was loud in Marlowe’s ear, and on the breath the endless chant, dulling the senses until it filled the world. In front of Marlowe’s dilated pupils, even in the dense black night, he thought he saw the soil begin to stir, as though the earth itself drew in its breath, waiting to exhale and give Ralph Whitingside back to the living, if only for a while.
Dee sprang back, pulling Marlowe with him. ‘Give him room!’ he said, his eyes bright even in the near-darkness. ‘Let the dead speak!’
Marlowe jumped a mile as a voice in his ear shouted loudly enough to break the drums. Dee was expecting a reply, but nonetheless gave a small start.
‘Let the dead speak? Not in my parish!’ The priest of St Stephen’s, who had turned a deaf ear and a blind eye in compassion for Ralph Whitingside’s friends at the illicit burial, was having no truck with necromancy or any other -mancy, for that matter. The Reverend John Springer was of the new persuasion. He allowed no rings at his wedding ceremonies and there were no pews in his church. He had personally painted over the Garden of Eden on his vestry wall and was happy to throw the thigh bone of St Stephen into his rose garden, where it might do some good.
He had been watching these two for some time and, whilst a little gentle grieving by candlelight was all very well, although a little morbid for his own personal taste, he had been alerted by his serving girl as she turned down their bed, that there were dark doings in the churchyard. Not quite in the churchyard, but near enough and, dragging on his cassock, Springer had sprinted out of his house hard by the church wall and done his work.
Springer was built like an ox and toyed with banging the heads of these black magicians together before having them burned. The old man would be a walkover, but the younger one looked as if he might be able to handle himself and Springer’s Christianity was not as muscular as all that.
‘Get out of my parish and don’t let me see either of you again!’ he bellowed. The pitchfork he had leaned against the wall for extra emphasis decided the pair when in the hands of a religious maniac and they ran for it.
From what he judged to be a safe distance, Dee shouted back at the man. ‘Do you know who I am, hedge priest? I am John Dee, Magus to the Queen of England.’
‘Well done!’ Springer said. ‘I hope she would be proud, to know you were conjuring up spirits who should be allowed to sleep in peace. Go on with you, both of you, and do your nasty conjuring somewhere else. If I see you again, it’ll be the Consistory Court and then the stake.’ He shook the pitchfork for emphasis and Marlowe and Dee thought it best to resume their headlong flight, not really slowing down until they turned the corner of Bene’t’s Lane and cannoned into Constable Fludd.
‘I didn’t finish it,’ Dee hissed to Marlowe before the introductions were made. ‘God only knows what will happen in the Potter’s Field from now on. The banishing rite!’ He was shaking his head. ‘My God! My God!’
Back at the wrong side of the churchyard wall, the ground settled back into place with an almost inaudible sigh. For now.