‘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.