by S. J. Parris
If the mirror held a secret message, might the other gifts also have some significance beyond themselves, that only the giver and receiver would recognise? The ring, with its misspelled motto - that, surely, must be a deliberate mistake? Sa Virtu M’Atire - but whose virtue? Cecily’s? Or someone else’s? The ring will only fit my little finger; my fingers are slender, but this ring was not made for a man’s hand. As I slip it on and turn my hand to look again at its inscription, I notice a red blotch where I dipped my forefinger into the perfume. The skin is raised up in a kind of welt, which itches and burns when I rub it. Hardly what you want in a perfume, I think, and I am relieved that I didn’t taste it; it must be cheaply made, though that seems strange, given how costly the bottle and the other gifts look. Then, in an instant, understanding dawns, and I have to get up, clutching the bottle in my fist, and pace the room, sweat prickling under my collar. I need to talk to someone about these ideas; ordinarily I would find Sidney, and for the first time, I truly begin to feel his absence. I don’t even know if he and his new wife are in London, but even if they were, I cannot expect to continue as close to him as I was in Oxford if I am to go on being trusted here, within the walls of the French embassy.
Who, then, can I talk to? I can’t go directly to Walsingham with this, even though it was he who involved me in the death of Cecily Ashe; at least, I don’t want to go to him until I am certain my theory is right. There is William Fowler, of course; Walsingham has sent him to me as a substitute for Sidney and I suppose I must confide in him, though Fowler’s inscrutable reserve hardly inspires affection like Sidney’s colourful braggadocio. Sitting down heavily again on my bed, I realise that I miss my friend; his marriage has made me feel all the more acutely how alone I really am in England. But there is another reason why I don’t want to talk to Fowler, apart from the fact that his remit is only to convey my intelligence concerning the plots brewing in Salisbury Court, and it is a matter of personal pride: Abigail Morley has trusted me with Cecily Ashe’s secrets and I want to be the one who unravels them. I want to prove my abilities by finding this killer, without involving someone like Fowler, who I can’t help regarding on some level as a rival for Walsingham’s approbation, even though we are supposed to be working together.
I walk to the window and lean on the sill, gazing out at the afternoon sky, now fading to a burnished auburn. My room overlooks the back of the house; from here I can see down the gardens as far as the great brown stretch of the Thames, broad as a highway, its sluggish waters reflecting the sinking sun. If I am honest with myself, I am afraid. Whatever the outcome of these plots with Mary Stuart, my own future hangs in the balance; I can see this much clearly. If this invasion, which at the moment sounds like the late-night revenge fantasy of disenfranchised men and a furious captive queen, should somehow become reality, I would not stand a chance in a newly Catholicised England. But if - as I sincerely hope - these plots are thwarted, it seems impossible that Castelnau could continue here as ambassador with any credibility once his involvement is known. And if he should be expelled, I must make sure that I am valuable to Walsingham and the English court for my own sake, not just for my access to the embassy and its intrigues. If I could discover who killed Cecily Ashe, I reason, Queen Elizabeth could not doubt my usefulness.
Then it occurs to me: there is a friend I can talk to, someone who has precisely the skills needed to test my theory about the perfume and the ring, and who also understands discretion. I have neglected him in the flurry of these past days, but he is the one person who knows more about the Great Conjunction than anyone in London. Tomorrow, then, I will return to Mortlake, to the house of Doctor Dee.
Chapter Six
Mortlake, London
29th September, Year of Our Lord 1583
Doctor Dee’s library is, to me, one of the uncelebrated wonders of this rainy island. His entire house is a sprawling hotch-potch of extensions, additions, new wings and secret rooms, so that it is impossible from the outside to tell the shape of the original cottage that once belonged to his mother, buried somewhere deep within the labyrinth. All these addenda were designed by his own hand according to his own esoteric precepts, to serve some particular purpose of his work, and the library is the culmination of his achievement. His collection of books and manuscripts, and indeed the room itself, is grander than the college libraries I saw in Oxford; at vast expense he has had built the new vertical shelving popular in the European universities rather than the old-style lecterns, so that the books may be displayed to better advantage from floor to ceiling, around the walls. This does not necessarily help the visiting scholar, since there appears to be no obvious method to cataloguing the works, unless it is some arcane system that exists purely in Dee’s own head, for he can put his hand immediately on any work you care to name, and remembers exactly where to replace it.
There are shelves crammed with ancient maps and charts rolled on wooden spindles and stacked horizontally; cases with ancient manuscripts of vellum and gilt illumination, saved from the destruction of England’s monastic libraries; there are books that Dee crossed a continent to find, books which cost him a year’s income, books bound in calfskin of rich brown with brass bindings, books which in another country would see him burned at the stake. Here you can find the De Occulta Philosophia of Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim, the Liber Experimentorum of the mystic Ramon Lull, Burgo’s Treatise on Magic, the writings of Nicolaus Copernicus and Abbot Trithemius’s studies of cryptography; you can, if the subject interests you, find books on mathematics, metallurgy, divination, botany, navigation, music, astronomy, tides, rhetoric or indeed any branch of knowledge that at some time has been committed to pen and ink. In one corner of the room, he keeps a pair of painted globes mounted on brass stands, one showing the Earth and the other the heavens, a gift from the great cartographer Gerard Mercator; in another, a quadrant five feet tall, and other devices of his own construction for measuring the movements of the planets.
Beyond this cavernous library, with its vaulted wooden ceiling, where you often encounter travel-weary scholars and writers who have crossed seas or ridden for days to consult some book of which Dee owns the only known copy, lie the inner rooms, where only his most trusted friends and associates are admitted: his alchemical laboratory and his private study, his sanctum.
‘Some sort of poison, you think?’ Dee murmurs, canted over the work bench in his laboratory. He holds up the glass perfume bottle to an oil lamp that hangs from a hook above him, so that its facets reflect fragments of light as he turns it curiously from side to side. Outside, the weather is still bright with the last warmth of summer, but in this room the shutters are always closed. Standing in Dee’s laboratory gives you the sense of being trapped in the belly of a great beast, with the dark and the heat from the several fires continually burning, and the fact that the room seems to pulse with autonomous life: six stills of various sizes, with vast interconnected vessels and flasks of clay, glass or copper, puff and bubble constantly, as if engaged in an ongoing conversation with one another. Clouds of steam float across the ceiling and disperse in clammy rivulets down the peeling walls. Today there is a filthy smell in the room, a decaying, barnyard stink.
‘Oh, that,’ Dee says, grinning mischievously like a small boy caught out, when he sees me wrinkling my nose. ‘I am experimenting with distilling horse dung.’
‘For what purpose?’
‘I won’t know that till I see what we get from it. Now.’
He unstops the perfume bottle and sniffs the liquid with the practised nose of a vintner assessing a new wine. I am amazed he can smell anything over the boiling horse dung.
‘Hm. They’ve mixed it with rosewater. But you’re right - there’s something else in there. Acrid. Show me the finger again.’
He draws my hand into the light. Though the redness has faded where I touched the perfume, a small blister has risen. Dee nods thoughtfully. ‘Any number of common plants or berries might have that effect, if the sa
p was concentrated. Could cause considerable discomfort if it was rubbed over delicate skin, as perfume is. It’s a spiteful trick, if nothing else.’
‘And if someone drank it? Could it be poisonous?’
He frowns. ‘Depends on what the base substance is. But why would he imagine the girl would take it into her head to drink the perfume?’
‘Perhaps it was not intended for the girl.’
‘But why would anyone drink perfume?’
‘They wouldn’t. Unless they were unaware that it had been added to their food or cup. Which would be an easy thing if you came into contact with them every day.’
Dee’s eyes gape and he stares at me, appalled, as he understands my meaning. ‘The queen?’ His voice comes as barely a whisper. ‘You’re suggesting that girl intended to poison the queen?’
‘I don’t know. It’s only a theory.’ I pace about between the stills, trying to breathe through my mouth as I talk, to avoid the manure fumes. ‘It seems, as you say, oddly spiteful and pointless to give a woman poisoned perfume that will make welts rise on her skin. But what if Cecily knew that the perfume was never meant to be worn, if her suitor gave her the bottle for another purpose? Think, Dee - there are any number of desperate men ready to assassinate the queen for the liberation of the Catholic Church.’
Dee nods, sanguine. ‘They arrested a fellow only last month on the road from York with two loaded pistols, boasting to all and sundry that he was going to kill Elizabeth to restore England. He was obviously mad, poor devil. They hung and quartered him anyway, to make an example.’
‘But not everyone is so hot-headed. A sharper man might reason that a better way to get to the queen is by turning someone she trusts to his cause. A maid of honour like Cecily Ashe would have had ample opportunity to slip something into the queen’s wine, if she was provided with it.’
I can tell he is not convinced.
‘Well, Bruno - before we run away with these theories, let us have a better idea of what is in this bottle.’ He hands me the perfume and crosses to a wooden crate tucked into a corner of the room, behind a vast belching conical pot half the height of a man, suspended on a brass frame above a fire. When he lifts the lid of the crate there is a sudden scratching and scuffling, accompanied by furious squeaks. Dee reaches in and pulls out his hand clasped around a struggling brown mouse. ‘Now then.’ He looks up and catches sight of my expression. ‘They multiply like the plague in the outhouses - I have the kitchen boy catch me a supply for the laboratory. You’d be surprised how varied their uses can be. What, Bruno?’
‘It seems a little cruel.’ I shrug.
‘The pursuit of knowledge is often brutal,’ he says blithely. ‘But that is science. And you would hardly want me to test it on a servant, now, would you? Hold the mouse.’ He passes the lithe, wriggling body into my hands. I feel the tiny heart pattering against my fingers, the warmth of its frantic life. The tail whips back and forth as Dee moves unhurriedly from bench to bench, gathering pieces of apparatus - a glass tube, a funnel, a small box with a hinged lid. He instructs me to hold the creature on its back. It likes this even less and nips me sharply; I curse and almost drop it as a bead of blood swells on my finger.
‘Keep it still,’ Dee says impatiently, as if I were the one playing up. With some difficulty, he inserts the tube into the mouse’s mouth, which the poor animal resists with all its meagre force, squealing pitifully, until I am afraid I will crush the life out of it in my attempts to subdue it. Dee attaches the funnel to the neck and pours in some liquid from the perfume bottle. A considerable amount of it spills out; it is questionable whether the mouse has swallowed any, but Dee opens the lid of the little box and tells me to put the creature inside.
‘And now we wait,’ he says happily, as if he had just put a batch of cakes in the oven. ‘In the meantime, Bruno, I too am troubled by something that I must share with you. Come.’
He leads me through the door at the back of the laboratory into his private study, where I had last joined him and Kelley for their seance. I am relieved to see that Kelley is not there.
‘She has summoned me to Whitehall this very evening,’ he says, motioning me to a chair with one hand and worrying at the point of his beard with the other. ‘I do not think this is good news. Walsingham rode over to see me yesterday. He showed me this.’ He crosses to his desk and holds up a copy of the same pamphlet I had bought for a penny in St Paul’s courtyard, with the signs of Jupiter and Saturn printed boldly on its front page. ‘Francis wanted to warn me,’ he continues, quietly. ‘What with the girl’s murder at Richmond, it seems the world is gone quite mad with talk of prophecies and apocalypse, Fiery Trigons and Great Conjunctions. This sort of thing -‘ he slaps the paper with the back of his hand - ‘abounds, fuelling the common people’s fear and unrest. The Privy Council feels it is getting out of hand and must be stopped.’ He sighs, with a rattled dignity, and lays the paper back face down on the desk.
‘But none of that is your doing.’
‘Quite right. I am only the messenger.’ He spreads his hands wide in a gesture of humility. ‘But apparently Lord Burghley talks of introducing new legislation that would make it illegal to cast the queen’s horoscope. He thinks that will put an end to these feverish predictions of her death. I don’t see that it will help - already a man stands to lose a hand for writing that kind of filth, and still they print them, and fools read them.’
He sits heavily and leans forward over his knees, clasping his hands together, prayer-like, and staring intently into the near distance as if he saw someone there who was trying to speak to him. I adopt the same position in silent sympathy; I can see his predicament. Poor Dee: if it is against the law to cast the queen’s horoscope, she can hardly go on employing a private astrologer, and royal patronage is almost his only source of income. He has a wife and two young children to support, not to mention that idler Ned Kelley, who has attached himself to Dee’s household; on top of that, alchemy and book collecting are not cheap pursuits. He needs a reliable flow of money to fund his experiments and maintain his library, and he also needs the queen’s protection from those who whisper against him.
‘Henry Howard is behind this,’ Dee mutters darkly, as if he has followed my own thoughts, his gaze still fixed on the same spot. ‘He will not rest until he sees me banished from court and out of the light of her favour altogether.’
‘Henry Howard?’ I look at him, puzzled. ‘He has something to do with these pamphlets?’
‘No - it is he who leads the charge against them!’ Dee cries, leaping from his chair and striding again to the desk, where he picks up a small, leather-bound book which he waves at me as if in evidence. ‘He rails against all forms of knowledge that he has not the capacity to understand, he talks of summoning demons, he argues that it is the queen’s toleration of astrologers like me that has led to the present frenzy of prophets and fortune-tellers sowing fear and dis belief up and down the land. No one at court wants to be seen disagreeing with his book. But the idea that Henry Howard should set himself up as the champion of cool reason! Listen to this, Bruno.’ He flicks through a few pages, clears his throat and reads. ‘“Certain busy-bodies in the commonwealth, who with limned papers, painted books, figures of wild beasts and birds, carry men from present duties into future hopes.” He means me, of course. Or this - “the froth of folly, the scum of pride, the shipwreck of honour and the poison of nobility.” All of it aimed at me, you see, and there is much more I could read you.’
I reach out for the book quickly before he can carry out this threat. The title is stamped in gold on the front: A Defensative Against the Poison of Supposed Prophecies. ‘Why does Henry Howard hate you so much?’
Dee sits down again and folds his hands.
‘He was my pupil once,’ he says, with a trace of sadness. ‘He came to me secretly, hungry for the kind of knowledge that you and I know can be dangerous in the wrong hands. This would have been ten years ago, just after his brother was execut
ed - he was about your age then. A fearsomely clever young man, he was, and on his travels he had encountered philosophers and magi who had shown him the writings of Hermes Trismegistus. He desired to become an adept.’
‘And you agreed?’
‘He was a talented scholar, and he paid generously, perhaps because he wanted it well hidden that he was coming to me. But …’ Dee spreads his hands in a gesture of regret. ‘The great mysteries of the ancient philosophies must be approached with humility. I soon saw that Henry Howard’s ambition far outstripped his wisdom.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘He became obsessed by the lost book of Hermes. Ah, I see you smiling, Bruno. Aren’t we all, you are thinking? But I ask you - that lost fifteenth book, what do you understand it to contain?’
‘No one knows for certain,’ I say. ‘That is its irresistible lure. We know only that the great philosopher and astrologer, Marsilio Ficino, refused to translate it for Cosimo de’ Medici because he was afraid of the consequences for Christendom.’