‘I shall go now, John – left too quickly, with neither cloak nor lamp. You’d best come home. When you’ve brought your… small comfort to Goodwife Faldo.’
When she was gone, I took several long breaths and then knelt before the ingle. Alone here now and held in dread, for all my book-fed knowledge, of what I could not see, I said a fervent prayer to banish all unwanted spirits from this house. And then, espying under the window the coif shed by Goodwife Faldo, I picked it up and left.
This end of the village was quiet now, the sky pricked with first stars over the darkening river which linked us, better than any road, with London. I wondered if it would be Mistress Blanche in that barge tomorrow, or the Queen herself.
Then turned, knowing where the Goodwife would be.
St Mary’s, Mortlake, is a modern church, towered but without steeple – a misjudgement in my view, for a steeple conducts to earth divers rays from the firmament. When worshipping here, however, I tend to keep opinions like this to myself. A wisehead is seldom welcome in the house of God.
A single candle was lit upon the high altar, Goodwife Faldo bent in mute prayer on the lowest chancel step. I walked quietly along the aisle and knelt alongside her, leaving a seemly distance betwixt us.
I held out the coif. Marking the dawning of grey in the strands of her freed hair, a sheen of tears on her cheeks as she looked up at me, a pale smile flickering in the candlelight.
‘Why can we never leave well alone, Dr John?’
Tucking her hair into the white linen. I knew what she meant, but the idea of it was well beyond the imagining of a man who lives only to meddle.
‘It’s gone,’ I said, hoping to God I was right. ‘All gone now.’
‘Where?’
A good question, but this was hardly the time or place to serve up a treatise on the nature of the middle sphere.
‘Back into the stone,’ I said. ‘And the stone is back in the scryer’s bag. Where it should have stayed.’
‘Oh fie, Dr John!’ Lifting herself to the second step, which she sat upon. ‘The first mention of it by Master Simm, and I was hooked like an eel.’
She gazed beyond me, into the darkness of the nave.
‘When I was a child, I loved to go into church and feel it all closing around me. I felt cloaked in colours… and the sweetness of the incense. And all the Latin, like to the sound of spells being uttered. More… more magic than I could hold.’
‘Yes.’
The church had been all about magic, then, if we’d but known it.
‘And then the King made God smaller,’ Goodwife Faldo said.
I looked at her with an admiration that surprised me. Her tear-streaked face shone like an apple in the warm candlelight. I turned quickly away and looked up at the long panes in the stained window above the altar. Bright coloured glass reduced by the night to the dull hues of turned earth.
‘Don’t let them stop you, Dr John.’
‘Who?’
‘The Puritans, the Bible men. They’re taking hold. Get one of them as king and the world will be a grey place.’
‘This Queen won’t see that happen. The Queen loves magic and wonder.’
‘Yes. So we’re told. But she must have care. As must you. Small people like me – no-one cares any more what we believe, as long as we turn up at church on a Sunday and say the right words. I wouldn’t be taken away any more for letting a scryer into my house. Would I?’
‘Frances,’ I said. ‘What did you see?’
‘I lost my mind.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘There was a change in the air such as I’ve never felt since I was a child.’
‘There was. I felt it.’
‘The presence of something that wasn’t… I can’t put it into the best words, I’m only a farmer’s wife and I don’t read very well, and I …’
‘Tell me.’
‘I’d hid the ring in the bread oven. And of a sudden I felt a terrible guilt about that, as if it was the worst thing I’d ever done. As if I’d lied to God. And it came into my head that I must face a terrible penance. And the worst of all penance to me would be…’
Holding back tears.
‘The loss of your family,’ I said.
She nodded.
‘And that was when I saw the figure of a pale man. Not clear at first – as though made of dust motes. The bones… the bones were more solid and had their own—’
She shuddered. I looked for her eyes.
‘Bones?’
‘The bones had their own awful light. As though it were not light.’
‘Where were these bones?’
‘He was holding them. One in each hand, clasped to his chest. Death… death’s heads.’
‘Skulls? More than one?’
‘How can I ever sit before that hearth again?’
‘You can. It won’t happen again, Goodwife. Not there. Not ever again. None of it’ – Putting it all together in my head as I spoke – ‘none of it was real. Only pictures conjured from the crystal, which… held us all in thrall. Changed your head around so that you took your worst fears and made them into… pictures.’
She nodded, yet uncertain.
‘Ephemeral,’ I said firmly. ‘Illusion. Nothing was there. You didn’t lie to God. Only to the scryer. And you admitted it to him. You put things right.’
It took away the magic, but I felt it was what she wanted to hear at this moment.
‘And there’s been no plague this summer,’ I said.
Watching myself forming words while I was somewhere else. Somewhere grey and foetid and full of bones.
‘I feel so much calmer now,’ Goodwife Faldo said and laughed lightly. ‘Thank you, Dr John.’
VII
Coincidence and Fate
MORTLAKE HIGH STREET. Sticky, blurred lantern-light, echoes of the cackle and whoop of roistering from the inn and, presently, the spatter of piss against a wall.
No place to look up at the stars or the new-born moon.
After walking Goodwife Faldo to her door, I should have gone home and slept, to be refreshed and fully sentient at the riverside on the morrow. But how could I sleep now?
The inn was ahead of me. Recently extended to offer five bedchambers, two with glass in their windows for the moneyed traveller, but yet a rough place after dark. I slowed my steps, recalling a night when, for no clear reason, I’d been given a beating by men unknown to me, although it was clear they knew who I was. Smash the conjurer down. Smash him down in the name of God!
Soft footsteps behind me and I turned. A light shining out in my path, and I froze into stillness as it rose level with my face.
‘Go quietly, Dr John.’
‘Jack.’
He carried one of the candle lanterns you could borrow from the inn if you were deemed sober enough to remember where to return it.
I said, ‘Where is he?’
‘Abed, I assume.’
‘Then I’ll wake him up.’
‘No need,’ Jack said. ‘We shared half a jug of small beer in the back room.’
‘And?’
‘He said it happens. On occasion, when the stone’s active, spirits that manifest in the crystal can be… fetched out of it and into the air.’
‘Astral forms?’
‘Apparitions. Creatures of the air. The scryer must never allow himself to become distracted by them. That’s their aim, he says. To distract him. All they seek’s attention. His, anyway.’
He gestured back up the street and I followed him back towards the church. We stood in the shadow of the coffin gate, where Jack put the lamp on the ground.