“And you want to waste such a precious gift on these two?” Elizabeth looked skeptical.
“Once Matthew saved Philip’s life. He is like a brother to me.” Mary blinked at the queen with owlish innocence.
“You can be as smooth as ivory, Lady Pembroke. I wish we saw more of you at court.” Elizabeth threw up her hands. “Very well. I will keep my word. But I want Edward Kelley in my presence by midsummer—and I don’t want this bungled, or for all of Europe to know my business. Do you understand me, Master Roydon?”
“Yes, Your Majesty,” Matthew said through gritted teeth.
“Get yourself to Prague, then. And take your wife with you, to please Lady Pembroke.”
“Thank you, Majesty.” Matthew looked rather alarmingly as if he wished to rip Elizabeth Tudor’s bewigged head from her body.
“Out of my sight, all of you, before I change my mind.” Elizabeth returned to her chair and slumped against its carved back.
Lord Burghley indicated with a jerk of his head that we were to follow the queen’s instructions. But Matthew couldn’t leave matters where they stood.
“A word of caution, Your Majesty. Do not place your trust in the Earl of Essex.”
“You do not like him, Master Roydon. Nor does William or Walter. But he makes me feel young again.” Elizabeth turned her black eyes on him. “Once you performed that service for me and reminded me of happier times. Now you have found another and I am abandoned.”
“‘My care is like my shadow in the sun / Follows me flying, flies when I pursue it, / Stands and lies by me, doth what I have done,’” Matthew said softly. “I am your Shadow, Majesty, and have no choice but to go where you lead.” “And I am tired,” Elizabeth said, turning her head away, “and have no stomach for poetry. Leave me.”
“We’re not going to Prague,” Matthew said once we were back in Henry’s barge and headed toward London. “We must go home.”
“The queen will not leave you in peace just because you flee to Woodstock, Matthew,” Mary said reasonably, burrowing into a fur blanket.
“He doesn’t mean Woodstock, Mary,” I explained. “Matthew means somewhere . . . farther.”
“Ah.” Mary’s brow furrowed. “Oh.” Her face went carefully blank.
“But we’re so close to getting what we wanted,” I said. “We know where the manuscript is, and it may answer all our questions.”
“And it may be nonsense, just like the manuscript at Dr. Dee’s house,” Matthew said impatiently. “We’ll get it another way.”
But later Walter persuaded Matthew that the queen was serious and would have us both in the Tower if we refused her. When I told Goody Alsop, she was as opposed to Prague as Matthew was.
“You should be going to your own time, not traveling to far-off Prague. Even if you were to stay here, it will take weeks to ready a spell that might get you home. Magic has guiding rules and principles that you have yet to master, Diana. All you have now is a wayward firedrake, a glaem that is near to blinding, and a tendency to ask questions that have mischievous answers. You do not have enough knowledge of the craft to succeed with your plan.”
“I will continue to study in Prague, I promise.” I took her hands in mine. “Matthew made a bargain with the queen that might protect dozens of witches. We cannot be separated. It’s too dangerous. I won’t let him go to the emperor’s court without me.”
“No,” she said with a sad smile. “Not while there is breath in your body. Very well. Go with your wearh. But know this, Diana Roydon: You are setting a new course. And I cannot foresee where it might lead.”
“The ghost of Bridget Bishop told me ‘There is no path forward that does not have him in it.’ When I feel our lives spinning into the unknown, I take comfort from those words,” I said, trying to comfort her. “So long as Matthew and I are together, Goody Alsop, our direction does not matter.”
Three days later on the feast of St. Brigid, we set sail on our long journey to see the Holy Roman Emperor, find a treacherous English daemon, and, at long last, catch a glimpse of Ashmole 782.
26
Verin de Clermont sat in her Berlin home and stared down at the newspaper in disbelief.
1 February 2010
A Surrey woman has discovered a manuscript belonging to Mary Sidney, famed Elizabethan poetess and sister to Sir Philip Sidney.
“It was in my mother’s airing cupboard at the top of the stairs,” Henrietta Barber, 62, told the Independent. Mrs. Barber was clearing out her mother’s belongings before she went into care. “It looked like a tatty old bunch of paper to me.”
The manuscript, experts believe, represents a working alchemical notebook kept by the Countess of Pembroke during the winter of 1590/91. The countess’s scientific papers were thought to have been destroyed in a fire at Wilton House in the seventeenth century. It is not clear how the item came to be in the possession of the Barber family.
“We remember Mary Sidney primarily as a poet,” commented a representative of Sotheby’s Auction House, who will put the item up for bid in May, “but in her own time she was known as a great practitioner of alchemy.”
The manuscript is of particular interest as it shows that the countess was assisted in her laboratory. In one experiment, labeled “the making of the arbor Dianæ,” she identifies her assistant by the initials DR. “We might never be able to identify the man who helped the Countess of Pembroke,” explained historian Nigel Warminster of Cambridge University, “but this manuscript will nevertheless tell us an enormous amount about the growth of experimentation in the Scientific Revolution.”
“What is it, Schatz?” Ernst Neumann put a glass of wine in front of his wife. She looked far too serious for a Tuesday night. This was Verin’s Friday face.
“Nothing,” she murmured, her eyes still fixed on the lines of print before her. “A piece of unfinished family business.”
“Is Baldwin involved? Did he lose a million euros today?” His brotherin-law was an acquired taste, and Ernst didn’t entirely trust him. Baldwin had trained him in the intricacies of international commerce when Ernst was still a young man. Ernst was nearly sixty now, and the envy of his friends with his young wife. Their wedding photos, which showed Verin looking exactly as she did today and a twenty-five-year-old version of himself, were safely hidden from view.
“Baldwin’s never lost a million of anything in his life.” Verin hadn’t actually answered his question, Ernst noticed.
He pulled the English newspaper toward him and read what was printed there. “Why are you interested in an old book?”
“Let me make a phone call first,” she replied cagily. Her hands were steady on the phone, but Ernst recognized the expression in her unusual silver eyes. She was angry, and frightened, and thinking of the past. He’d seen that same look moments before Verin saved his life, wrenching him away from her stepmother.
“Are you calling Mélisande?”
“Ysabeau,” Verin said automatically, punching in numbers.
“Ysabeau, yes,” Ernst said. Understandably, he found it hard to think of Verin’s stepmother by any other name than the one used by the de Clermont family matriarch when she’d killed Ernst’s father after the war.
Verin’s call took an inordinately long time to connect. Ernst could hear strange clicks, almost as though the call were being forwarded again and again. Finally it went through. The phone rang.
“Who is this?” a young voice asked. He sounded American—or English, maybe, but with his accent nearly gone.
Verin hung up immediately. She dropped the phone to the table and buried her face in her hands. “Oh, God. It’s really happening, just as my father said it would.”
“You’re frightening me, Schatz,” Ernst said. He’d seen many horrors in his life, but none so vivid as those that tormented Verin on those rare occasions when she actually slept. The nightmares about Philippe were enough to unravel his normally composed wife. “Who was that on the phone?”