Hoar frost was glittering upon the spidery winter branches of the apple trees, and I felt the movement of hidden tides.
Made no move until the last wherry in the royal fleet had rounded the bend in the Thames, and then I went into the house. A fire of fragrant applewood was ablaze in the entrance hall. I’d built the fire myself, my mother adding more logs, in case we should be honoured. I passed by the pastries, all untouched, and found her sitting forlorn in the small parlour, watching the Thames through the poor, milky glass which in summer would protect us from the river’s stink.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
Throwing my coat over a chair, tired and more than a little cast down.
‘There was a time when Mistress Blanche Parry would have made time for me.’ My mother turned away from the grey-brown water, arose and patted her skirts. ‘Not any more, apparently.’
‘Blanche is jealous of her position at court. It’s not your fault. It’s me she doesn’t trust.’
‘Being protective of the Queen’s interests and welfare,’ my mother said, ‘is how she would see it.’
‘Also more than a little apprehensive of the advance of the sciences.’
My mother, Jane Dee, looked as if she’d bitten into a onion.
‘What?’ I said.
‘Would Mistress Blanche call it science, do you think?’
‘Maybe not.’
Avoiding my mother’s eyes, I noticed that the panelling on the walls was flaking for want of varnish, while the red-brocaded fabric of my mother’s chair looked all tired and worn. I noticed also that a sleeve of her dark brown dress had been patched in two places.
She had asked nothing about what the Queen had said or the reason for the visit. I could have told her that Elizabeth, already renowned as a demanding and expensive guest at the finest homes, would be unlikely to enter one that was conspicuously more lowly. In this case, I was sure, mindful and considerate of our poverty.
And thus I felt ashamed. Inadequate. I should have done better; I was my mother’s only child. My father had determined that I should receive the best education their money could buy. I might have become a bishop or even a lawyer, for which I had qualification, instead of… whatever I am become.
The river shone dully, full of animal and doubtless many human carcasses embedded in a city’s shit. The sun was pale and hard-looking, like marble.
Conjurer, I was called by some, when my back was turned, and by others even when it was not.
III
His Second Coming
Rather than a crude summoner of spirits, a conjurer may, as you know, be seen in these more enlightened times as one who deals in illusion. And I’ve done that and found much delight there. Once, at college, for a piece of theatre, I fabricated a gigantic beetle which, through a system of pulleys and the employment of light and shadow, was seen to fly through the air. Spent many days in the making of it and many hours basking in the awe and mystification it inspired.
Nothing wrong with that. I was only a boy, and the beetle did not fly. Not as a bird flies, or an angel.
But now I am a man and more exercised by the true nature of angels. Fully accepting, however, that men like Sir William Cecil feel happier with what they know to be illusion, even if they know not how it’s done.
No frost today, only a sour sporadic rain as I boarded a wherry by Mortlake pier for my appointment. Low cloud stained with smoke and pricked by a hundred spires, the highest of them St Paul’s in the west.
We entered the city past the steaming midden of Southwark with its low-life amusements: bear-pits, cock-pits, whorehouses, gambling and theatre. I no longer noticed the impaled heads of criminals and traitors on London bridge; now that executions of the higher orders had become less commonplace, these crow-picked noddles were more of a grotesque attraction for visitors than a dread warning for the inhabitants.
As for Cecil’s new town house… all I understood was that it was on the Strand, where high-powered clergy once lived. But a wherrymen is a floating gazetteer, and mine knew precisely when to steer us to the bank, pulling in his oars by the footings of a new-built stone stairway.
‘Ain’t the biggest house inner row,’ he said. ‘But he got plans.’
‘The Secretary’s a personal friend of yours that you know of his plans?’
Hating at once, the way this must have sounded. Although I’d travelled with this same man seven times or more, I ever find difficulty in the exchange of common pleasantries.
The wherryman only grinned. At least I thought it was a grin, all his top teeth being gone – a fight, perchance, or he’d sold them to a maker of false sets, and I should have liked to ask, but…
‘One of his builder’s men’s marrying my youngest girl,’ the wherryman said. ‘They gets detailed orders, how he wants it done. Inspects every sodding brick.’
Cecil’s pastime, fashioning houses. I knew that. The tide had been with us, and when I found the house, three storeys high, behind a cage of builders’ wooden scaffolding, I was more than an hour early. Going in now would convey either over-eagerness or anxiety.
So I walked away from the Strand, arriving some minutes later in a street of brightly painted new shops selling fine furniture, tapestries and good lamps. You could tell how fashionable this quarter had now become by the apparel of the shoppers and the scarcity of children and beggars. Even the street stench here was less putrid, women carrying pomanders more as a declaration of status than to sweeten the air.
It had started to rain. I stepped into a covered shop doorway, from where the street-sellers’ cries were muted. Not that there were many of those around – with men as prominent as Sir William Cecil residing hereby, the security services would have seen to all that. If it hadn’t been for the rain, I might have wandered away into some other street and never heard ‘-the future! Learn what is to come! Learn how the world will end with darkness and disease before… His Second Coming!’
Purple proclamations of apocalypse. Some pamphleteer. Ever cheaper now, the pamphlets. More ubiquitous and more lurid, spewing out their grossly illustrated accounts of murder, executions and devil worship. And end-of-time warnings now, from the puritans.
‘-for yourselves the terrifying new predictions of Her Majesty’s stargazer! Read the forecasts of Dr Dee!’
Jesu! Now I was out of the doorway and backing clumsily around an unattended cart, finding myself in a cramped alley, the man’s bellow seeming to pursue me into the piss-stinking shadows.
‘Know the future now… what’s left of it.’
Beginning to sweat as I peered out to observe quite a crowd gathering around the pamphlet man. Respectable-looking people, women in furtrim, men in the new-fashion Venetian breeches. All hot for revelations of turmoil in the heavens, discovery of unknown lands full of strange winged creatures, some new war in Europe.
All invention, of course, but too many people were ready to believe anything committed to print and…
…did they not know I did not do this?
Second coming? My role was to scribe charts indicating planetary influences on world affairs, the balance of the humours. Possible directions, opportunities, auspices. But never a claim to full-fledged prophecy. That way, until we know more, lies madness.
But why had no-one told me about this shit?
Rumour and gossip, Dr John, rumour and gossip.
Jack Simm’s voice in my head, as I moved out towards the crowd. Had Jack known of this? Were there more such publications, about spells and divination and the conjuring of spirits in a house at Mortlake? Did everybody know about it, except for me?