Prophecy (2011)

by S. J. Parris

  ‘You feign drunkenness very well, by the way,’ he remarks, as if we were casual acquaintances making small talk at some tavern. ‘Did you feed good Rhenish to my dog, is that what happened? Poor brute’s been sick all over the back stairs.’

  I say nothing. For a moment we watch one another in the candlelight and I give a sudden involuntary shiver. The room seems very cold.

  ‘Well, Bruno.’ He looks me up and down, his tone finally asserting his mastery of the situation. ‘I do not need to ask if you recognise what you find here.’ He waves a hand that takes in the circles on the floor, the altar, the brazen head.

  ‘You pursue secret knowledge, even while you publicly decry it,’ I mutter. ‘Dee suspected as much.’

  ‘Of course he did.’ Howard’s voice betrays a touch of impatience. ‘He always knew I was a natural adept. But he had the arrogance to presume that he held the key to my progress and could simply shut me out from the higher reaches of that knowledge. He is guided by fear, you see, Bruno,’ he says, suddenly brusque. ‘The last thing Dee wants is a rival for the queen’s faith in such matters. Matters that lie on the other side of religion, in its shadows. He wishes to be recognised as her magus, and he will thwart anyone who tries to come up behind him. You will find this out for yourself eventually.’ He shakes his head and takes another step closer to me, the sword still held idly against his leg. With his face barely a foot from mine, he breaks into a grotesque smile. ‘But he lacks the one thing that would make him the preeminent magus of our age, and he cannot sleep for yearning for it. Neither can you.’

  ‘The lost book of Hermes.’ My voice is barely audible, but my breath rises in a plume between us in the cold air. ‘You stole it from him in Oxford, then.’

  It is not meant as a question. Howard merely curves his smile wider.

  ‘It found its way into my hands. Oh yes, you may well hang your mouth open, Bruno. It is, I presume, what you have come here to find? You are resourceful, I’ll give you that.’ He turns sharply and crosses the room to the small altar, then turns and fixes me with those black eyes.

  ‘But a man in exile, Bruno, is always vulnerable. Am I not right? Little wonder he seeks powers beyond his own temporal means. You and I understand this,’ he adds, with feeling. ‘My brother Thomas lost us the greatest dukedom in England. My family name is now stained with treason. I have been threatened with prison and banishment, and I am forced to live as a lodger with my nephew and feign loyalty to the usurper Elizabeth.’ He curls his lip. ‘I am shut out of the heritage that is rightfully mine as surely as if I were banished from English soil. But I am only biding my time.’

  ‘And your solution is to finish what your brother started?’ I say, raising my chin.

  He frowns at me for a moment, as if calculating how much I might know.

  ‘Why do you say that? Because of my comment at dinner about Mary’s heirs?’

  ‘If she was once willing to marry your brother, why not you?’

  He lifts the sword and points it at me, and I feel my bowels contract; for a moment I think he might be about to run at me. But eventually he nods.

  ‘Very astute of you, Bruno. The Howards are descended from Edward Plantagenet, the first English king of that name. Did you know that?’ Without waiting for a reply, he continues, ‘We are of royal blood. There should be a Howard heir on the throne.’

  ‘You mean to take Mary to wife, once she is liberated and crowned by this invasion, and get an heir by her?’

  He grimaces.

  ‘It is my duty to my lineage. I would not expect a common-born man to understand such an ideal.’

  Instinctively my fists clench, as they always do when confronted with such claims of the nobility’s inborn super iority. But I keep my voice calm.

  ‘Douglas is right, though. Mary Stuart already has an heir with an impeccable royal pedigree and he is king of Scotland.’

  ‘Young men are not immortal, Bruno,’ Howard says, with a low laugh. ‘And James has yet to breed.’

  I look at him, and realise I have not even begun to understand the scale of his hopes. Howard’s plans reach far beyond this invasion, far beyond the restoration of the Roman faith that the others envision; his scheming stretches into a future in which he is king of a Catholic England, his own son the heir and the young King James somehow the victim of an unfortunate accident, like his father. I understand now why Howard keeps Archibald Douglas so close; if Douglas could kill the father so efficiently, why not recruit him to kill the son? For the right price, I have no doubt that Douglas would oblige. But the real fear clawing at my insides comes because I realise the only reason Henry Howard would have confided such an incredible - some might say insane - plot to me is because he feels confident I will not have the chance to repeat it. My right hand itches instinctively to reach for my knife, though it is not there, and I force myself to keep still. If Howard thinks I am armed he may search me and then he would find the genealogy. I look down at the glass bottle I had almost forgotten I was holding. Saint Agnes, he says. This hair belonged to someone more recent. But I cannot begin to understand how the murders at court fit into Howard’s elaborate long-term plan.

  ‘But enough of that,’ he says, unexpectedly light-hearted. ‘I was going to show you something to make you tremble, was I not? Come closer, Bruno.’

  To my great relief, he lays the sword on the altar, though he keeps his hand within easy reach as he lifts the purple cloth that covers it. The stone beneath shows a carved bas-relief of figures, their faces so worn by time that only a blurred outline of their humanity remains. It appears cen turies old.

  ‘Comes from one of the Sussex abbeys torn down in the Dissolution,’ he remarks, as if he reads my thoughts. ‘My brother bought it secretly and kept it in his own chapel. We had it brought here after he died. You cannot imagine the work it takes to move a thing like that. Illegal to possess it, of course.’

  His voice grows muffled as he turns his back to me and crouches in front of the altar. Set into the stone near the base is a narrow recess; Howard reaches in and draws out a wooden casket, its lid inlaid with an intricate pattern stamped in gold. He takes a key from somewhere inside his robe and unlocks the box. I take a tentative step nearer, my palms prickling with sweat; I am anxious to stay out of the range of that sword. As I pass the black cabinet I gently kick my discarded knife out of sight, just underneath it, while his back is turned.

  ‘You won’t see properly from there,’ he says, standing and turning. ‘Come.’

  He holds it out to me, an object wrapped in a layer of protective linen. As I move closer, he unwraps the coverings to reveal a book bound in faded leather. I experience a sudden weakness in my limbs, as if my body had been flushed with cold water, as my heart gives an impossible lurch and I rush forward, almost forgetting the sword.

  Could this really be the book I had chased from Venice to Paris to Oxford, the fifteenth book of the writings of the Egyptian sage Hermes Trismegistus, brought to Cosimo de’ Medici out of the ruins of Byzantium, given to the great neo-Platonist Marsilio Ficino to translate and hidden by him when he recognised the awful power of what it contained? The book that, according to an old Venetian I had known in Paris, Ficino gave into the safekeeping of the bookseller Vespasiano da Bisticci, whose apprentice mistakenly sold it on to an English collector; the book that had lain unrecognised in an Oxford college library until a wily librarian saved it from the Royal Commission’s purges; the book that an unscrupulous dealer named Rowland Jenkes had sold to Dee for a fortune, and which Dee held in his hands for barely a day before it was stolen from him at Henry Howard’s command? By all that was sacred - could it be that I was finally in the presence of the book that was believed to hold the secret of man’s divine origin, of how to recover that divinity? I hardly dared breathe.

  ‘Open it, if you want.’ Howard’s smile grows wolfish. His eyes glitter; he looks like a child flaunting a marzipan figure, determined that you should fully appreciate the wonder of it,
secure in the knowledge that you shall never take it from him. He nods, encouraging. I reach out, my hand visibly trembling, and lift the book from the casket. In the moment of opening the cover, it is as if the world ceases turning; I can hear my own heartbeat as if it came from somewhere outside. The bound manuscript pages are old and stiff, the Greek characters so faint in places as to be almost illegible, but as I begin to read, there is no doubt in my mind that this book is authentic.

  Howard nods again as I turn the pages, my eyes hungrily scanning the lines, thinking what I would offer for the chance to spend a day with this book, to study it, copy it, drink it in. Eventually he grows impatient.

  ‘Read on, Bruno. Skip the prologue and the early chapters. Turn to the middle section.’

  Surprised, I obey, and as the book falls open towards the middle, I understand his slightly hysterical look of triumph. I read the Greek lines, then read them again. As my frown deepens, Howard begins to laugh.

  ‘You see, Bruno? You see?’

  I experience a disorientating sense of falling, just as Howard himself must have done when he first opened the book. I look down at the page, then back to Howard, shaking my head in disbelief.

  ‘Encoded.’

  ‘Exactly! The meat of the book, its most secret and sacred wisdom, is so inflammatory that the scribe didn’t dare write it without a cipher. In the prologue Hermes mentions the Great Key, the Clavis Magna. But this must exist separately, and I do not have it.’ His eyes burn with a frenzied energy. ‘Fourteen years! Fourteen years I have attempted to break the code. I have tried every system of cryptography I have ever read about, but I cannot. I cannot make it yield.’

  I watch him, the book limp in my hands, my mouth open. Fourteen years of trying to decipher the book you believe will yield the secret of immortality. I almost pity him; small wonder his plans seem touched by madness. It is a wonder he has held on to his mind at all.

  ‘But Ficino must have had it,’ I wonder, aloud. ‘The Great Key. Ficino read the whole book, according to the story I heard, else how would he have been so afraid to translate it?’

  ‘It exists somewhere, or it can be deduced,’ Howard says, and I hear the years of weariness in his voice. ‘But how to find it, Bruno? Where to begin?’

  ‘Dee has a great many treatises on cryptography in his library,’ I reply, holding his gaze. ‘But then you know that.’

  He merely raises an eyebrow.

  ‘Ask Dee for help? And confess that I have the book he was nearly killed for? Naturally, over the years I have made attempts to discover whether Dee holds anything among his papers that he may not know to be the key of which Hermes speaks. I have sent servants and associates to his house to pose as travelling scholars. And, yes, I have taken the opportunity to search there myself if I knew he was absent. In all this time I have barely touched the surface of Dee’s library.’ His face hardens and he looks at me as if he has only just remembered who I am. ‘But Dee is close to being ruined. Elizabeth will no longer be able to turn a blind eye to his practices. And when he is - even if his life is spared, his goods will be forfeit. I will have his library somehow.’ The cold determination in his voice belies the wild light in his eyes; if his sanity is doubtful, it has not affected his ruthlessness. But his reference to Dee’s impending ruin is almost a confession.

  ‘Is Ned Kelley one of these associates you send out to do your work?’

  He rubs his pointed beard as if trying to recall where he has heard the name.

  ‘Kelley. A crook, of course, but with a remarkable imagination and a curious ability to win the affection of strangers, though I must say it has never worked on me.’

  ‘Nor me.’

  ‘The servant Johanna brought him to me - she found him at some fair, cheating at card tricks. She thought he might prove useful to me. But no one could have foreseen how Dee would take Kelley to his bosom, and how easily Kelley would work on him.’ He smirks. A sudden rage rises in my chest and I grip the book tighter.

  ‘You paid Kelley to lure Dee into conjuring spirits so that he could be publicly disgraced and punished,’ I say, through my teeth. Howard permits himself an indulgent chuckle.

  ‘I knew if Dee believed he could truly communicate with celestial beings he wouldn’t be able to resist telling the queen. She is still drawn to the idea of knowledge beyond mortal means, but that would be a step too far for those advocates of reason in her council. Walsingham, Burghley. Myself, natur ally.’ He smiles, patting his breast. ‘Dee will be cut down faster than a cankered apple tree, you shall see. And I no longer need live in fear of his exposing the secrets of my past.’ He folds his arms across his chest and tilts his head back to appraise me down the length of his nose. ‘Which brings me to you, Bruno.’

  ‘And the girls,’ I blurt, ignoring him, a flush of rage spreading across my face, ‘they died for this? To lend credibility to Kelley’s violent prophecies? To implicate Dee in murder, just to make sure you finished his reputation for good?’

  Howard is too much of a courtier to allow his polished mask to slip for long, but I had thought the accusation might prompt some admission of guilt in his expression, however fleeting. What I see instead is confusion, then outrage.

  ‘Girls? Good God, Bruno - you don’t think I had anything to do with that?’ He looks genuinely stricken - but I must not forget that he is a politician and an expert dissembler. ‘That would be insanity - murders that draw attention to threats against the queen at the very time we are trying to organise an invasion which depends on surprise? Why on earth would I jeopardise the plans on which I have staked my whole future?’

  ‘Ned Kelley’s prophecy foretold the death of Abigail Morley in almost every particular,’ I say, lowering my voice. ‘How else could he have known?’

  He shakes his head impatiently.

  ‘Kelley was a fool - he allowed his imagination to be coloured too far by the lurid reports he read in pamphlets. So when the killer repeats himself, it looks as if Kelley foresaw the event. No - these murders could have been catastrophic for our invasion plans. Increased raids on Catholics, increased questioning, more guards around the court, and they’ll be watching Mary more closely, just at a time when I have Throckmorton riding around the country trying to stir the Catholic nobles into a spirit of war - you think I would purposefully bring all this down upon our heads? By the cross - it would be madness!’ His eyes flash. ‘No. If Dee is implicated in murder as a result, some good will have come of it, but I assure you, Bruno, I am furious about the timing of these murders. Besides,’ he adds, with a little preening gesture, ‘I would never engage in such a vulgar display. Death is occasionally necessary, but it ought to be discreet. That sort of grotesque spectacle is the work of a man whose vanity outweighs his sense of purpose.’

  I look at him and the thrill of my earlier certainty shrivels to a point and disappears. Despite the self-satisfied twitch of his smile, I think he is speaking the truth. Wanting to persuade myself that he was behind the murders, I have tried to make the facts fit, but I have never found a plausible explanation for the way the murders so overtly tried to imply a Catholic threat. And now that I know the extent of Howard’s regal and dynastic ambitions, I can see that the assassination of Elizabeth would clearly work against his interests, so the theory that he set up Cecily Ashe to poison the queen also crumbles. But if Howard is not the killer, then who?

  ‘You had better return my book now, Bruno,’ he says, holding out a hand. ‘I wouldn’t put it past you to crack the cipher while my back was turned.’

  Slowly, I step forward, my arm leaden as I reach out and let him take the book. The rough grain of the leather slides beneath my fingertips as he pulls it from my grasp; I watch him tuck it back into its casket with a sense of desolation, as if I had found a lover only to lose her again in the same moment. Except that I have pursued this book across a continent and a sea with greater devotion than I have shown to any woman; to have held it in my hands and have it snatched away is almost
worse than to have gone on blindly seeking it, never knowing if it even existed. Nor can I escape the insistent voice of my own vanity: that, given time, Dee and I between us could surely break the cipher that has defeated Henry Howard for fourteen years. My eyes follow it longingly as Howard locks the casket and clasps it to his chest. My chances of ever touching that book again look remote.

  The sword glitters on the altar under the candle flames. If I were to lunge for it now, while Howard busies himself with the casket, I might just be able to grab it before he has a chance to react, though he is nearer. As if he senses my eyes on it, without looking up he reaches out and lays a proprietorial hand on the hilt.

  ‘You leave me with a dilemma, Bruno,’ he says, as he tucks the casket under his left arm. ‘All of this -‘ he gestures around the chapel, taking in the chart, the brazen head, the altar - ‘you should not have seen. My greatest secret. If it were made known, it would be the final nail in the coffin of my family’s reputation, and would certainly see me in the Tower. You were never a man I wholly trusted, even before this night. So what am I to do with you, now that you have found me out?’ His thumb lightly strokes the hilt of his sword, though he doesn’t yet pick it up.

  A coldness ripples along my spine and through my gut; my throat clenches. I had half-expected this, but stubbornly I still hope I might reason with him.

  ‘Dee has guessed at your secret, and not divulged it - why do you think I would not do the same?’

  He must catch the fear in my voice, because he laughs, without humour.

  ‘Dee has no proof of anything. And he has a healthy respect for the reach of my influence, whereas you, Bruno, appear to have no respect at all.’ He rests his left hand on his hip and shakes his head. ‘I don’t think I have ever witnessed such a cocksure swagger in a man of low birth.’