Rookers to a man, and they oft-times conduct their trade through an apothecary, who takes a cut of the fee.
‘I could find you one, no problem,’ Jack had said. ‘When I was in town, we must’ve had a dozen or more of these bleeders in the shop. Wanting me to put ’em in touch wiv the sick and the bereaved or anyone who needed somebody to talk to the dead on their behalf, intercede wiv angels. I’d kick their arses down the street. And been cursed for it a few times. But I’m still here, ain’t I?’
He’d been gazing out between the heavy, dripping trees towards the swollen river and his voice was damp with disdain.
‘Why?’ he said. ‘That’s all I’m asking. I ain’t getting it, Dr John. I’ve watched men and woman staring into stones and seeing fings I can’t see. And if I can’t see it…? You know what I’m saying?’
‘Everything’s open to abuse,’ I said.
‘But you’re a… a whatsit, natural-philosopher… a man of bleedin’ science.’
‘Well, exactly,’ I said. ‘Knowing the science behind crystal-gazing makes all the difference.’
I could have told him then precisely why I was, of a sudden, interested in the art of scrying. But, although I trusted him more than most, it wasn’t the time. And I’d have to admit that I’d been as sceptical as he was until, at the university of Louvain, I’d been given sight of a rare manuscript by the scholar and cabalist Johannes Trithemius of Spanheim. Which explained why certain stones, if used with knowledge and reverence, could give access to the very engines of heaven.
‘A stone’s a stone, Dr John.’
‘Never dismiss what’s beneath your feet, Jack. Crystals will absorb and reflect celestial rays. If employed at certain times – on certain days, under specific planetary configurations – they’ll open up the inner rooms of the mind …to levels of existence normally denied to us.’
Jack kicked a lesser stone into the grass.
‘Spirits, is it?’
I sighed. A very loose word, oft-times misused.
‘Three spheres, Jack: this earthly plane and, above that, the astral, where earthbound spirits linger, the place of ghosts. And above and beyond all… the supercelestial… the over-realm, the furnace room of Heaven.’
As a scholar of Hebrew I’d studied in depth the Cabala which, through mystical symbolism, offers a stairway to the sublime. It makes logical, mathematical sense and, although Jewish in origin, can be practised just as effectively through Christianity. The Christian cabala would be my shield against the earthbound spirits and the kind of demonic entities which might enter a shewstone and possess the unguarded scryer.
As distinct from the higher spirits, the good spirits.
Call them angels.
‘In Europe,’ I said, ‘the shewstone is seen as a legitimate method of penetrating the higher mysteries. In England, it’s yet a joke, at best. At worst, the devil’s own mirror.’
‘You told them this in Europe?’
‘Hell, no.’
Not for me to confirm their opinion of England as a land of Philistines – or to confess my own ignorance. I’d read and reread the works of Agrippa and what I could of Trithemius, but my personal experience was, at best, thin and always would be until I seized the nettle and took steps to acquire my own shewstone.
A good one. A good crystal, with which to carry out experiments. But what kind, what colour, how big? These were fundamentals I ought to have known about but did not, for opinions varied.
‘You’re an innocent soul, Dr John.’ Jack Simm standing among the roots of a venerable oak and facing me like a father, hands sunk into the pockets of his jerkin. ‘You fink fings is different, now nobody gets burned. The Queen smiling, all gracious. Oh, yea, folks can believe what they like, long as they keep it to themselves. Like we ain’t heard all that before.’
‘Times change, Jack.’
‘Kings don’t change. Nor Queens. It’s religious freedom one day then, in a blinking, it’s all about how to prove you ain’t a witch’s daughter.’
The Queen’s mother, Anne Boleyn, executed by the Queen’s father for treason and adultery, had been possessed of a sixth finger and a furry growth on her neck. How much evidence did you want?
‘Now how’s the Queen do that?’ Jack said. ‘She makes war on witchcraft, and her advisers look around for somebody well-known to execute to make it look good.’
A dead twig had snapped under his boot, making me start as he sprang away from the oak, forefinger aimed at my chest.
‘Go on… tell me it’s wivout bleedin’ precedent. And you may mention the late King Harry.’
I wanted to laugh, but it wouldn’t come. This queen was different. This queen had an acute intelligence and questing mind fascinated by alchemy and the cabala. This queen was powerfully Protestant while celebrating the Mass in deep privacy.
‘Heresy.’ I’d shrugged. ‘All science is heresy. Now… can you help me?’
He’d paced a slow circle around the oak.
‘Yea, well,’ he’d said at last, ‘I suppose you oughter have somefink to take your mind off what’s happening downriver.’
He’d meant London. Becoming known in Europe as Satan’s city. And not, at this moment, a good place to be if you were a friend of Robert Dudley.
IV
The Smoke of Rumour
WHEN BROTHER ELIAS had made his stately departure to the inn, we ate bread and goatcheese with Goodwife Faldo.
It had been Jack’s idea that she should play the pigeon so that I might observe a scrying without giving away my identity. Goodwife Faldo, who’d once taken my mother to see a cunning woman in the hope of asking my dead father if there was money hidden anywhere, had agreed at once to accept me as her brother for the day.
After our meal, she said she’d walk out to the meadow to suggest to her husband and sons that, rather than disrupt our sitting, they might eat at the inn tonight. I gave her my last shilling to pay for their meat and small beer, and then Jack and I walked down to the riverside where casks of fresh-brewed ale were being loaded into a barge. The air was cooling fast these evenings and the ambering sky above the distant city was smutted and heavy from first fires. And the smoke of rumour.
I hadn’t ventured into London for more than a week, but the gossip had been drifting down to me like black flakes from a lamp-scorched purlin. The city all atremble in the glitter of a dangerous lightning.
‘What were they saying when you were in town?’ I asked.
One reason I’d come to trust Jack Simm: he was a man of intelligence but without ambition.
Without ambition. What a blessed state that must be. Oft-times, my mother had accused me of it – far from the truth, of course, I did have ambition, though it related not to the attainment of high office so much as the acquisition of high knowledge. Not easy, however, without the level of protection that only wealth and position could provide.
Thus far, the Queen’s patronage had given me freedom to pursue my studies but not the means, for the fingers gripping the royal purse were famously held as tight as the rectal muscles of the ducks upon the river. Having calculed, by the stars, a smiling day for her coronation, I’d hoped for secure office, but nothing had come. And if things went wrong I could soon, as Jack had warned, be dangerously out of favour. In many ways, the daggers-out world of political advancement was far simpler than mine.
We’d moved away from the beer-barge, back into the wood, but I still kept my voice down low.