The Heresy of Dr Dee (49 page)

Thanks once again to the present owners of the two houses at Nant-y-groes. Also Duncan Baldwin and Lucille, for legal advice. Apart from those involving royalty and high government figures,
there’s little evidence of the way Elizabethan trials were conducted, especially at assize level. It seems unlikely that there were barristers for the prosecution and defence, as we know them
today, which suggests that most of the questioning of witnesses was done by the judge himself. The rights of the accused to offer up a defence were not automatic and might depend on the generosity
of the judge.

Thanks to Sir Richard Heygate, co-author with Philip Carr-Gomm of (every home should have one)
The Book of English Magic
for links to portals and John Dee; Ed Wilson for London geography
and yet more legal assistance; Bev Craven, masterly graphic artist and connoisseur of the curious; Alun Lenny for the background on Plant Mat, Twm and Dee’s Welsh roots; my wife, Carol, for
the usual massive and perceptive edit; and Sara O’Keeffe at Corvus for a final overview… and a lot of patience.

Pilleth Church on Brynglas is well worth a visit. The holy well remains, if not the statue of the Virgin and – as someone said – it’s so light and welcoming up
there these days that it looks as if ‘work’ has been carried out there.

The name of Rhys Gethin, who achieved Owain Glyndwr’s greatest victory, at Pilleth, is still remembered in Wales – most recently as the professed author of communications from the
small terrorist unit, Meibion Glyndwr, who ran an arson campaign against English-owned holiday cottages in north Wales in the 1980s. The most intriguing account of Glyndwr’s campaign and its
aftermath is Alex Gibbon’s
The Mystery of Jack of Kent and the Fate of Owain Glyndwr.

My apologies to Nicholas Meredith, who may have been an entirely honest and decent businessman and property dealer.

The Mappa Mundi can be seen at Hereford Cathedral.

Legends of
guardians
of ancient sites are well known on the Welsh border. And some stories of guardian manifestations are rather too recent to qualify as old legends. An archaeologist
once told me he’d been refused permission to excavate a Bronze Age mound on a farm in Powys because the farmer had himself once sunk a spade into it and seen something so dreadful he’d
not gone near it since, with any kind of implement.

According to legend, the restless spirit of Amy Robsart at Cumnor Place was removed from Cumnor by ten priests with candles.

Poor Amy. That seems wrong, somehow.

Enjoyed
The Heresy of Dr Dee
?

The Bones of Avalon
, Dee’s first investigation, is also available from Corvus

England, 1560

A country divided

Riven by religious strife and dynastic ambition

Elizabeth Tudor

The newly crowned queen

Twenty-six years old, superstitious and desperately vulnerable

Dr John Dee

The queen’s astrologer

Scholar, suspected sorcerer and now investigator, sent to Glastonbury to unearth the missing bones of King Arthur

The Bones of Avalon

Centuries-old secrets, unexpected violence, the breathless stirring of first love… and the cold heart of a complex plot against Queen Elizabeth I.

Read on for a taste of this exciting adventure!

A foreboding.

I
MUST HAVE
been the only man that morning to touch it. They’d gathered around me in the alley, but when I put a hand into the coffin they all drew
back.

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.