The Secrets of Life and Death

by Rebecca Alexander

  Edward Kelley

  26 November 1585

  Niepolomice

  Our new prison was a chamber close to the king’s quarters, perhaps because it was easier to secure. We were escorted by a group of men with red uniforms, Swiss guards from the Vatican, each with a cross emblazoned on their tunics. I was cowed. Not one stood under two yards tall, and their hair was cropped short so it was hard to tell one from another, their chins bare. They were supplemented by men with the blue uniforms of the Polish guard, their steel breastplates covered with short cloaks.

  ‘It seems we are dangerous, dear Edward.’ Dee looked tired but still managed a smile. ‘There must be a dozen sentries just for us.’

  Twenty, more like, I thought. ‘Master Dee, this is the Inquisition. We are lost.’ The words choked me.

  The quarters were larger than we had been given before, a good fire crackling in the hearth, our belongings carefully unpacked. Dee spent some minutes looking through them. I took my prayer book and journal.

  ‘Better burn the psalter my wife gave you.’ It was softly spoken, but Dee had authority in his deep voice. ‘It will be tangible proof of heresy in Rome.’

  ‘I cannot believe you are so calm! We are destined for the auto-da-fé and all you say is burn a holy book.’ Tears rose to my eyes, as much from anger as fear. Tales of torture, dismemberment and burning came unbidden into my head.

  He smiled sadly. ‘You are so young. I have faced an Inquisition before, and lived. You must have faith, Edward.’

  ‘You have?’

  ‘It was in the reign of her Grace, Queen Mary.’ He bit his lip, perhaps recalling that time of terror for English Protestants. ‘I was younger than you, and indiscreet with my beliefs. I had cast horoscopes for both the royal princesses and was called to account for it.’ He stretched out his arms, cracking knuckles on his long fingers. ‘This was thirty years ago. I was quite as afraid as you are now. Queen Mary and her papal advisers from Rome sent Bishop Bonner to investigate and prosecute me for treason and heresy.’

  ‘The Burning Bishop?’ I was amazed. History had demonised all of Bloody Mary’s henchmen, and Bonner had died in the tower at the command of my queen.

  ‘Indeed.’ Dee dropped onto a stool, rubbing his knees. ‘I am getting too old for these adventures. Perhaps I should retire to dote on my children back in Mortlake.’

  ‘What happened at your Inquisition?’ I was fascinated, the tale gave me a little hope.

  ‘I was called to account for my actions in the Star Chamber. I was exonerated of treason, naturally, as my intention was entirely benign. But my religious proclivities were seen as heretical and I was turned over for further religious examination to Edmund Bonner.’

  I had grown up with tales of torture and imprisonment of the hundreds of Protestant martyrs who had suffered under Queen Mary’s piety. It seemed impossible that this urbane old man could have survived unscarred by it. My disquiet must have shown on my face.

  ‘I wasn’t tortured. I was placed under house arrest, but my friends could come and go as they pleased. Then I was taken to see the bishop at his palace. I was vindicated.’ He shrugged, holding a hand out for the psalter. ‘Our intentions are pure, Edward, we are doing God’s work. You must have faith.’

  He cast the treasured book, a gift from Jane Dee, into the fire, along with a handful of his own notes. ‘The rest, I think, we shall be able to explain. Do you have any of those pamphlets we picked up in Bohemia?’

  I rummaged through my pack, and found them, dropping them into the yellow blaze as the psalms burst into flame. ‘I would find it easier to have my faith being questioned in England than in the heart of Rome.’

  He looked at me, his dark eyes filled with compassion. ‘And, of course, Edward, you can always tell them you are, at heart, a Catholic. If you agree to attend mass and confession …’

  ‘Master Dee, I have never—’ I was shocked.

  ‘I know. I think of you as a fine Christian, Edward, but I suspected you had Catholic sympathies when I met you, and the last journey through Europe has confirmed my suspicions. It is nothing to be ashamed of, surely?’

  ‘I have worshipped as a Protestant in good faith,’ I said. ‘I speak to the one God.’

  In my early years I had wanted to become a priest but my base nature betrayed me with some slattern who worked for my father. I had still found comfort in the Mass, but Elizabeth’s coronation made celebrating it difficult, and my parents converted away from Rome.

  ‘Indeed. The angels have blessed you, Edward, and me. They, at least, know our hearts are honest and true. They will protect us.’

  I turned away, shaking with the fear again. The angels, their bright faces and bell-like voices, half imagined, half heard. I shut my eyes as my doubts crowded me like the Swiss guards outside. It had seemed so harmless back in London, becoming Dee’s scryer, allowing the images to spill into words. I prayed as never before.

  I must have fallen asleep in the chair, still clothed in Dee’s finery, because I was woken by a hand clamped onto my face, almost suffocating me.

  ‘Silens.’ The harsh whisper was hissed into my ear. I struggled like a madman, the image of the squad of Swiss guards still in the forefront of my mind. Another man swung around, bearing a lamp, and I saw maybe five or six shapes in black, muffled in cloaks up to their eyes, all with naked swords. Dee was being gagged in rough fashion, and two men restrained him.

  ‘Exsisto silens. Vel nex.’ Silence or death. I stopped struggling, and shut my eyes, holding on to the last of my dignity with my bladder.

  My arms were pinned to my side by a rope, another binding my hands before me. A cloth gag was forced into my mouth and tied cruelly tight. It reeked of sweat and smoke. One man lifted me by the rope and set me on my feet, before pulling me to the door. I was grateful I was still in my boots. Dee’s bare legs and feet were dragged into the corridor ahead of me. I stumbled over something, and realised it was one of the Polish guards. The remains of the food in my stomach rose, as I saw his head had been split by a single sword blow. I swallowed it back down, not wanting to suffocate in the gag. More bodies, some in the red of the Swiss, were slumped in doorways. As we passed into the inner curtain, the muffled thud of a crossbow sounded close to my left ear, and one of Istvan’s Hungarian guards fell, gurgling, a bolt in his throat. I watched the life leave his eyes, as I staggered over his twitching body under the light of a torch set in the wall.

  A scuffle ahead of us was resolved swiftly by our kidnappers, who went among the fallen and slit throats as if slaughtering pigs. We were taken to the outer courtyard and I was boosted into a saddle. I was trussed tight, but at least they placed my feet in the stirrups and tied my hands to the pommel. A tall man ahead, swathed in a cloak that covered his face, grabbed my reins, jerking the horse forward.

  As the creature bounded ahead I was knocked sideways, this way and that, riding faster than I would have attempted in daylight. After a few minutes, my bonds tightened cruelly by my being tied to the pommel, I managed to catch the thing in my hands, and get a sense of the rhythm of the horse. The saddle pounded under me painfully, bruising me as we traversed half a league or more, past the remains of my slaughtered nag. Her scarlet wounds and thrusting bones suggested a corpse half-eaten in the glimpse afforded by our captors’ torches. They streamed behind them as they galloped, the burnt tallow stench in their wake. My teeth rattled in my head, until I clenched them, and finally managed to look about me. The world was dark and confusing as it jerked along. Dee, there, his bare head lighter in the orange glow of his leader’s torch, as tossed about as I. My ears strained for the sound of a pursuit, but the hooves upon the hard-packed road deafened me. I did not know whether to pray for pursuit, for surely to return us to Niepolomice would be a certain deliverance to the Inquisition. Yet these bandits terrified me, occasionally whooping like a yelping animal, or crying out some command in their fluid, hissing tongue. Hungarian, I guessed, not German, nor any language I could un
derstand.

  A slash in the face from a branch of pine needles slapped me back in the saddle, and I tasted blood where my lip had been split. I cried out in terror, blinded for a moment, then leaned forward, low over the horse’s neck against a more solid collision.

  As I clung to the saddle, my thighs shaking with tiredness as they kept my body anchored to the horse, I started to think about the events of the night. If this was – God save us – Konrad, then the examination was going to be a private one, in some torture chamber. Then the Pope would not have to explain the killing of English gentlemen to our allies. If this was one of Báthory’s allies … I could only speculate what they wanted, or what they would do if we did not provide it.

  My childhood prayers rose, unbidden, into my mind, in snatches between stumbles and turns.

  ‘O Lord,’ I sounded in my head, ‘from ill deliver us, the days and times … times are dangerous: from everlasting death deliver us. And in our last end,’ I prayed that it was not so, ‘comfort us.’ I misremembered the rest, so melancholy was the thought of my end, that I was filled with misery and instead, my mind turned to the smile, the kind words and friendship of Mistress Jane Dee.

  My nose was barely a foot from the neck of the horse, so low that the pommel brushed my chest upon its exertions. I prayed in snatches, clinging with fingers numbed as much by cold as by my cruel bonds. As the pain in my hams and arms grew, the rain started, needling into my face and down my neck, until I could do no more than hang on and wait for death.

  Chapter 26

  The police had gone from the village, so Jack left Sadie chained up in the living room. She had arranged to meet Pierce in a public place, safely in daylight, and the girl had pleaded and begged to stay upstairs. Jack didn’t have the heart to drag her down to the priest hole again. She left her with a few magazines and a tray of food and drink. She made extra, knowing Sadie would ignore her instruction not to feed the dog. She smiled to herself as she sat down, remembering the tricks Sadie was somehow persuading the half-wolf to perform.

  She looked around, her back against one of the benches in the cathedral green. Lichens, in shades of yellow, stained the silvered oak against a bronze plaque: ‘IN MEMORY OF PEGGY, FROM HER LOVING HUSBAND LARRY CLARKE. 1987.’ The late sunshine had little warmth in it, but it had taken the chill off the damp wood. A few dozen people wandered around the walls of the great church in the late afternoon. It gave her time to think about the man with the lazy smile who was uncomfortably creeping into her thoughts. She hardly knew him and yet … somehow she trusted him. He was here somewhere in the town, at the university, perhaps teaching. She checked her phone for texts yet again, then shook herself mentally. Focus. What relationship could she have with him? She had maybe five years left of her continued, unnatural existence. What had he said the Vatican called it? Souls held back from heaven by sorcery.

  She scanned the road alongside the cathedral. Some tingle in the air made her twitchy, and she turned to look at the stand of trees behind her. When she turned back, Pierce was staring at her, maybe a dozen feet away.

  She jumped, and reached in her pocket for a weapon.

  He grinned, his long teeth uneven and stained nicotine-yellow like the rest of him. ‘Nice to see you, too, Jackdaw. Easy now, I won’t hurt you.’

  She waved to the end of the bench, her bag a barrier in the middle. ‘Sit over there.’

  He did, stretching out cracked and split boots, and folding his hands over his stomach. ‘Nice spot.’

  She had never seen him in daylight before. His filthy raincoat hung open over a sweater full of holes, revealing another beneath it, bulking him up. His narrow face was dominated by a curved nose, and his pointed chin was covered with grey stubble. He folded one arm over the other, revealing overly long fingernails, tapered and nicotine-yellow. He turned to look at her, his small eyes deep-set into his skull, and bloodshot. ‘You have a girl,’ he gloated. ‘A young girl. Perfect.’ His tongue snaked over his lips.

  She tried to keep her expression blank.

  ‘I got a buyer.’ He waved one hand at her. ‘We could make a killing, you and I. This woman, she’s prepared to pay big money.’

  ‘What woman?’

  He chuckled, his barks of laughter turning into a cough. ‘I could tell you that, and you sell to her direct, cuts me out.’ He held both hands up, wafting the smell of mould at her.

  ‘She has already approached me.’ She turned in the seat, to watch his hands. ‘Even if I had a girl, I wouldn’t hand her over like … merchandise.’

  His eyes started looking her over, and she realised he had never seen her in daylight either. ‘You don’t look so good, Jack. Pale.’

  ‘I wouldn’t hand a child over like a mongrel. You don’t know what this woman wants with her.’

  ‘You ain’t got to worry. She told me she was doing medical research. Very exclusive, for this big magical clinic. Your girl would be well cared for, and helping people.’

  Jack couldn’t keep the sarcasm out of her voice. ‘Like a cow, chained up and milked of her blood.’

  He shrugged. ‘That’s what you want her for, ain’t it? Easy money.’

  She clenched her fists with frustration, her breath misting out of her. It was getting colder, the sky darkening as the afternoon drew on. ‘I need to know more about this woman.’

  He cracked a smile. ‘And why would I do that? What you going to do, Jack, zap me again?’

  ‘You think I won’t?’ She watched his smile contort into a sneer.

  ‘You’re so far out of your league, you’re going to get burned,’ he hissed. ‘Once she finds where the girl is, she’ll take her, and neither of us will see a penny.’ He fumbled in a pocket and brought out a half-smoked roll-up. ‘Very charming woman, and more important, she’s loaded.’ He patted another pocket, and pulled out a box of matches.

  She leaned away from him, pulling her coat around her neck, feeling the chill seeping up the sleeves of her jacket as she did. Damn it, she couldn’t afford to get so cold, she could feel her heart rate dropping.

  ‘This woman, she’s not just easy money.’ She sat forward, brushing the leather bag where his foul raincoat might have touched it. ‘She’s trouble. You and I might have had our differences – but this woman is really dangerous.’

  He looked up at her, his thin lips twisted into a parody of a smile. ‘I’m touched by your concern.’ He sucked in foul-smelling smoke and hacked a few times before spitting on the grass. ‘But it’s not me who needs to worry, Jackdaw. We’ll get the girl anyway; I’m just suggesting you might like to make it easier, for a sensible price. Then no one gets hurt.’

  ‘Fuck off.’ She stood up, brushing off the lichens. ‘You have no idea where she is.’

  ‘Oh, but you’re going to tell me where she is. You won’t get away this time …’ He grinned, and leaned forward as if to stand. When he couldn’t, he scowled, and curled his claws onto the arm of the bench. He tried to lurch forward, but the effort recoiled him back into his seat, his eyes widening.

  ‘Wha … ?’ He struggled, fighting to lean forward, move his arms, anything. His fingers twitched as if they were trying to find fists.

  ‘I scratched a binding circle on the bench.’ Under the bench, actually, where he would be less likely to look. ‘You’ll be fine once I’ve gone.’

  The more he struggled, the less his muscles worked, and he slumped back, relaxing his jaw until it softened enough to speak. ‘Your little tricks won’t help you with this buyer. She’s the real thing,’ he whispered. He was so angry spittle sprayed the air in front of him.

  Jack watched his hand clench on the arm of the bench, the long claws digging in. The bench creaked, groaning under some internal pressure, and she could see parallel cracks inching along the bleached wood. Shit, he’s going to escape.

  She darted forward. ‘You’re a spent force, Pierce, a little go-between. You don’t know anything.’

  She turned her back on him, feeling rather than he
aring his reaction, as his rage entrapped him, welding his muscles with his own anger. That should last for a few seconds. Nevertheless, she let the slight slope help her into a run, dodged under a huge rhododendron and vaulted over the wall of the green. She landed in the backyard of a shop. She paused for a second, crouching, and looked back in time to see the bench disintegrate. She raced through the shop – a florist’s, redolent with lilies – and onto the high street. That was the moment the paralysis hit, a flash of cold erupting into her. Painful pins and needles cramped her midriff, forcing her to bend forward, staggering. She realised the paving slabs were coming to meet her, even as she tried to put weak hands out to break her fall.

  Chapter 27

  The living room was the warmest room in the cottage. Sadie was tired of inactivity but every time she stood up, the weakness flowed over her like a blanket of sleep. She tried standing a little closer to the edge of the circle, breathing through the wave of nausea as she moved, letting it recede. She found she could stand no closer than about two feet from the edge before she gagged. She started to explore by shuffling around on the thin carpet.

  The room was squarish, with an old rug almost as big as the room. It probably had flowery patterns on it at some time, like Gran’s. Gran wouldn’t have put up with the dirty marks, dog hairs and bald patches, though. In the time Sadie had been at Jack’s cottage, she couldn’t recall the sound of a vacuum cleaner. The sofas were much the same, sagging cushions, greasy arms, like old people’s furniture. But it was homely in its own way, two of the walls lined with rickety shelves covered with books. The other walls were covered with painted panelling, scuffs and scratches giving no clue to the secret door that led to the little cell that Jack called the priest hole and Sadie called the dungeon. She looked at the books.