Prophecy - Страница 20

‘Oh? By whom?’

‘By the Spanish ambassador.’

‘Mendoza is here?’ She exchanges a glance with Courcelles. ‘Excuse me, gentlemen.’ With a swish of her skirts, she strides the length of the gallery and disappears. Courcelles looks at me and gives one of those infuriating Gallic shrugs.

The velvet bag is still safely tucked under my pillow. In the light that slants through my dormer windows, I lay out the three objects again on the bed. The mirror glass has been loosened by its fall, and as I fiddle with the tortoiseshell backing to see if I might fix it, I realise with a jolt that it is designed to be taken apart. Carefully, I work the glass from side to side until it eases out from the casing. Behind it, there is a square of paper. With trembling fingers, I unfold it and smooth it out, and my heart catches in my throat. Someone has written the all-too-familiar symbols of Jupiter and Saturn, and below them, a date: 17th November. Nothing more. I turn over the paper, raise it to my face and sniff it, in case some other unseen message has been written there in orange juice, but there is no scent. My heart hammers against my ribs; I don’t know what I have uncovered here, but surely this has some bearing on the murder of Cecily Ashe. The date holds no significance for me, but taken together with the planetary symbols, it must hold a meaning for whoever sent this secret note to Cecily, hidden inside the glass of her mirror. Presumably it also meant something to her when she received it, although she could hardly have guessed it was a date she would not live to see.

If the mirror held a secret message, might the other gifts also have some significance beyond themselves, that only the giver and receiver would recognise? The ring, with its misspelled motto — that, surely, must be a deliberate mistake? Sa Virtu M’Atire — but whose virtue? Cecily’s? Or someone else’s? The ring will only fit my little finger; my fingers are slender, but this ring was not made for a man’s hand. As I slip it on and turn my hand to look again at its inscription, I notice a red blotch where I dipped my forefinger into the perfume. The skin is raised up in a kind of welt, which itches and burns when I rub it. Hardly what you want in a perfume, I think, and I am relieved that I didn’t taste it; it must be cheaply made, though that seems strange, given how costly the bottle and the other gifts look. Then, in an instant, understanding dawns, and I have to get up, clutching the bottle in my fist, and pace the room, sweat prickling under my collar. I need to talk to someone about these ideas; ordinarily I would find Sidney, and for the first time, I truly begin to feel his absence. I don’t even know if he and his new wife are in London, but even if they were, I cannot expect to continue as close to him as I was in Oxford if I am to go on being trusted here, within the walls of the French embassy.

Who, then, can I talk to? I can’t go directly to Walsingham with this, even though it was he who involved me in the death of Cecily Ashe; at least, I don’t want to go to him until I am certain my theory is right. There is William Fowler, of course; Walsingham has sent him to me as a substitute for Sidney and I suppose I must confide in him, though Fowler’s inscrutable reserve hardly inspires affection like Sidney’s colourful braggadocio. Sitting down heavily again on my bed, I realise that I miss my friend; his marriage has made me feel all the more acutely how alone I really am in England. But there is another reason why I don’t want to talk to Fowler, apart from the fact that his remit is only to convey my intelligence concerning the plots brewing in Salisbury Court, and it is a matter of personal pride: Abigail Morley has trusted me with Cecily Ashe’s secrets and I want to be the one who unravels them. I want to prove my abilities by finding this killer, without involving someone like Fowler, who I can’t help regarding on some level as a rival for Walsingham’s approbation, even though we are supposed to be working together.

I walk to the window and lean on the sill, gazing out at the afternoon sky, now fading to a burnished auburn. My room overlooks the back of the house; from here I can see down the gardens as far as the great brown stretch of the Thames, broad as a highway, its sluggish waters reflecting the sinking sun. If I am honest with myself, I am afraid. Whatever the outcome of these plots with Mary Stuart, my own future hangs in the balance; I can see this much clearly. If this invasion, which at the moment sounds like the late-night revenge fantasy of disenfranchised men and a furious captive queen, should somehow become reality, I would not stand a chance in a newly Catholicised England. But if — as I sincerely hope — these plots are thwarted, it seems impossible that Castelnau could continue here as ambassador with any credibility once his involvement is known. And if he should be expelled, I must make sure that I am valuable to Walsingham and the English court for my own sake, not just for my access to the embassy and its intrigues. If I could discover who killed Cecily Ashe, I reason, Queen Elizabeth could not doubt my usefulness.

Then it occurs to me: there is a friend I can talk to, someone who has precisely the skills needed to test my theory about the perfume and the ring, and who also understands discretion. I have neglected him in the flurry of these past days, but he is the one person who knows more about the Great Conjunction than anyone in London. Tomorrow, then, I will return to Mortlake, to the house of Doctor Dee.

Chapter Six

Mortlake, London

29th September, Year of Our Lord 1583

Doctor Dee’s library is, to me, one of the uncelebrated wonders of this rainy island. His entire house is a sprawling hotch-potch of extensions, additions, new wings and secret rooms, so that it is impossible from the outside to tell the shape of the original cottage that once belonged to his mother, buried somewhere deep within the labyrinth. All these addenda were designed by his own hand according to his own esoteric precepts, to serve some particular purpose of his work, and the library is the culmination of his achievement. His collection of books and manuscripts, and indeed the room itself, is grander than the college libraries I saw in Oxford; at vast expense he has had built the new vertical shelving popular in the European universities rather than the old-style lecterns, so that the books may be displayed to better advantage from floor to ceiling, around the walls. This does not necessarily help the visiting scholar, since there appears to be no obvious method to cataloguing the works, unless it is some arcane system that exists purely in Dee’s own head, for he can put his hand immediately on any work you care to name, and remembers exactly where to replace it.

There are shelves crammed with ancient maps and charts rolled on wooden spindles and stacked horizontally; cases with ancient manuscripts of vellum and gilt illumination, saved from the destruction of England’s monastic libraries; there are books that Dee crossed a continent to find, books which cost him a year’s income, books bound in calfskin of rich brown with brass bindings, books which in another country would see him burned at the stake. Here you can find the De Occulta Philosophia of Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim, the Liber Experimentorum of the mystic Ramon Lull, Burgo’s Treatise on Magic, the writings of Nicolaus Copernicus and Abbot Trithemius’s studies of cryptography; you can, if the subject interests you, find books on mathematics, metallurgy, divination, botany, navigation, music, astronomy, tides, rhetoric or indeed any branch of knowledge that at some time has been committed to pen and ink. In one corner of the room, he keeps a pair of painted globes mounted on brass stands, one showing the Earth and the other the heavens, a gift from the great cartographer Gerard Mercator; in another, a quadrant five feet tall, and other devices of his own construction for measuring the movements of the planets.

Beyond this cavernous library, with its vaulted wooden ceiling, where you often encounter travel-weary scholars and writers who have crossed seas or ridden for days to consult some book of which Dee owns the only known copy, lie the inner rooms, where only his most trusted friends and associates are admitted: his alchemical laboratory and his private study, his sanctum.

‘Some sort of poison, you think?’ Dee murmurs, canted over the work bench in his laboratory. He holds up the glass perfume bottle to an oil lamp that hangs from a hook above him, so that its facets reflect fragments of light as he turns it curiously from side to side. Outside, the weather is still bright with the last warmth of summer, but in this room the shutters are always closed. Standing in Dee’s laboratory gives you the sense of being trapped in the belly of a great beast, with the dark and the heat from the several fires continually burning, and the fact that the room seems to pulse with autonomous life: six stills of various sizes, with vast interconnected vessels and flasks of clay, glass or copper, puff and bubble constantly, as if engaged in an ongoing conversation with one another. Clouds of steam float across the ceiling and disperse in clammy rivulets down the peeling walls. Today there is a filthy smell in the room, a decaying, barnyard stink.

‘Oh, that,’ Dee says, grinning mischievously like a small boy caught out, when he sees me wrinkling my nose. ‘I am experimenting with distilling horse dung.’

‘For what purpose?’

‘I won’t know that till I see what we get from it. Now.’

He unstops the perfume bottle and sniffs the liquid with the practised nose of a vintner assessing a new wine. I am amazed he can smell anything over the boiling horse dung.