Prophecy - Страница 21

‘Hm. They’ve mixed it with rosewater. But you’re right — there’s something else in there. Acrid. Show me the finger again.’

He draws my hand into the light. Though the redness has faded where I touched the perfume, a small blister has risen. Dee nods thoughtfully. ‘Any number of common plants or berries might have that effect, if the sap was concentrated. Could cause considerable discomfort if it was rubbed over delicate skin, as perfume is. It’s a spiteful trick, if nothing else.’

‘And if someone drank it? Could it be poisonous?’

He frowns. ‘Depends on what the base substance is. But why would he imagine the girl would take it into her head to drink the perfume?’

‘Perhaps it was not intended for the girl.’

‘But why would anyone drink perfume?’

‘They wouldn’t. Unless they were unaware that it had been added to their food or cup. Which would be an easy thing if you came into contact with them every day.’

Dee’s eyes gape and he stares at me, appalled, as he understands my meaning. ‘The queen?’ His voice comes as barely a whisper. ‘You’re suggesting that girl intended to poison the queen?’

‘I don’t know. It’s only a theory.’ I pace about between the stills, trying to breathe through my mouth as I talk, to avoid the manure fumes. ‘It seems, as you say, oddly spiteful and pointless to give a woman poisoned perfume that will make welts rise on her skin. But what if Cecily knew that the perfume was never meant to be worn, if her suitor gave her the bottle for another purpose? Think, Dee — there are any number of desperate men ready to assassinate the queen for the liberation of the Catholic Church.’

Dee nods, sanguine. ‘They arrested a fellow only last month on the road from York with two loaded pistols, boasting to all and sundry that he was going to kill Elizabeth to restore England. He was obviously mad, poor devil. They hung and quartered him anyway, to make an example.’

‘But not everyone is so hot-headed. A sharper man might reason that a better way to get to the queen is by turning someone she trusts to his cause. A maid of honour like Cecily Ashe would have had ample opportunity to slip something into the queen’s wine, if she was provided with it.’

I can tell he is not convinced.

‘Well, Bruno — before we run away with these theories, let us have a better idea of what is in this bottle.’ He hands me the perfume and crosses to a wooden crate tucked into a corner of the room, behind a vast belching conical pot half the height of a man, suspended on a brass frame above a fire. When he lifts the lid of the crate there is a sudden scratching and scuffling, accompanied by furious squeaks. Dee reaches in and pulls out his hand clasped around a struggling brown mouse. ‘Now then.’ He looks up and catches sight of my expression. ‘They multiply like the plague in the outhouses — I have the kitchen boy catch me a supply for the laboratory. You’d be surprised how varied their uses can be. What, Bruno?’

‘It seems a little cruel.’ I shrug.

‘The pursuit of knowledge is often brutal,’ he says blithely. ‘But that is science. And you would hardly want me to test it on a servant, now, would you? Hold the mouse.’ He passes the lithe, wriggling body into my hands. I feel the tiny heart pattering against my fingers, the warmth of its frantic life. The tail whips back and forth as Dee moves unhurriedly from bench to bench, gathering pieces of apparatus — a glass tube, a funnel, a small box with a hinged lid. He instructs me to hold the creature on its back. It likes this even less and nips me sharply; I curse and almost drop it as a bead of blood swells on my finger.

‘Keep it still,’ Dee says impatiently, as if I were the one playing up. With some difficulty, he inserts the tube into the mouse’s mouth, which the poor animal resists with all its meagre force, squealing pitifully, until I am afraid I will crush the life out of it in my attempts to subdue it. Dee attaches the funnel to the neck and pours in some liquid from the perfume bottle. A considerable amount of it spills out; it is questionable whether the mouse has swallowed any, but Dee opens the lid of the little box and tells me to put the creature inside.

‘And now we wait,’ he says happily, as if he had just put a batch of cakes in the oven. ‘In the meantime, Bruno, I too am troubled by something that I must share with you. Come.’

He leads me through the door at the back of the laboratory into his private study, where I had last joined him and Kelley for their seance. I am relieved to see that Kelley is not there.

‘She has summoned me to Whitehall this very evening,’ he says, motioning me to a chair with one hand and worrying at the point of his beard with the other. ‘I do not think this is good news. Walsingham rode over to see me yesterday. He showed me this.’ He crosses to his desk and holds up a copy of the same pamphlet I had bought for a penny in St Paul’s courtyard, with the signs of Jupiter and Saturn printed boldly on its front page. ‘Francis wanted to warn me,’ he continues, quietly. ‘What with the girl’s murder at Richmond, it seems the world is gone quite mad with talk of prophecies and apocalypse, Fiery Trigons and Great Conjunctions. This sort of thing —‘ he slaps the paper with the back of his hand — ‘abounds, fuelling the common people’s fear and unrest. The Privy Council feels it is getting out of hand and must be stopped.’ He sighs, with a rattled dignity, and lays the paper back face down on the desk.

‘But none of that is your doing.’

‘Quite right. I am only the messenger.’ He spreads his hands wide in a gesture of humility. ‘But apparently Lord Burghley talks of introducing new legislation that would make it illegal to cast the queen’s horoscope. He thinks that will put an end to these feverish predictions of her death. I don’t see that it will help — already a man stands to lose a hand for writing that kind of filth, and still they print them, and fools read them.’

He sits heavily and leans forward over his knees, clasping his hands together, prayer-like, and staring intently into the near distance as if he saw someone there who was trying to speak to him. I adopt the same position in silent sympathy; I can see his predicament. Poor Dee: if it is against the law to cast the queen’s horoscope, she can hardly go on employing a private astrologer, and royal patronage is almost his only source of income. He has a wife and two young children to support, not to mention that idler Ned Kelley, who has attached himself to Dee’s household; on top of that, alchemy and book collecting are not cheap pursuits. He needs a reliable flow of money to fund his experiments and maintain his library, and he also needs the queen’s protection from those who whisper against him.

‘Henry Howard is behind this,’ Dee mutters darkly, as if he has followed my own thoughts, his gaze still fixed on the same spot. ‘He will not rest until he sees me banished from court and out of the light of her favour altogether.’

‘Henry Howard?’ I look at him, puzzled. ‘He has something to do with these pamphlets?’

‘No — it is he who leads the charge against them!’ Dee cries, leaping from his chair and striding again to the desk, where he picks up a small, leather-bound book which he waves at me as if in evidence. ‘He rails against all forms of knowledge that he has not the capacity to understand, he talks of summoning demons, he argues that it is the queen’s toleration of astrologers like me that has led to the present frenzy of prophets and fortune-tellers sowing fear and dis belief up and down the land. No one at court wants to be seen disagreeing with his book. But the idea that Henry Howard should set himself up as the champion of cool reason! Listen to this, Bruno.’ He flicks through a few pages, clears his throat and reads. ‘“Certain busy-bodies in the commonwealth, who with limned papers, painted books, figures of wild beasts and birds, carry men from present duties into future hopes.” He means me, of course. Or this — “the froth of folly, the scum of pride, the shipwreck of honour and the poison of nobility.” All of it aimed at me, you see, and there is much more I could read you.’

I reach out for the book quickly before he can carry out this threat. The title is stamped in gold on the front: A Defensative Against the Poison of Supposed Prophecies. ‘Why does Henry Howard hate you so much?’

Dee sits down again and folds his hands.

‘He was my pupil once,’ he says, with a trace of sadness. ‘He came to me secretly, hungry for the kind of knowledge that you and I know can be dangerous in the wrong hands. This would have been ten years ago, just after his brother was executed — he was about your age then. A fearsomely clever young man, he was, and on his travels he had encountered philosophers and magi who had shown him the writings of Hermes Trismegistus. He desired to become an adept.’

‘And you agreed?’

‘He was a talented scholar, and he paid generously, perhaps because he wanted it well hidden that he was coming to me. But …’ Dee spreads his hands in a gesture of regret. ‘The great mysteries of the ancient philosophies must be approached with humility. I soon saw that Henry Howard’s ambition far outstripped his wisdom.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘He became obsessed by the lost book of Hermes. Ah, I see you smiling, Bruno. Aren’t we all, you are thinking? But I ask you — that lost fifteenth book, what do you understand it to contain?’

‘No one knows for certain,’ I say. ‘That is its irresistible lure. We know only that the great philosopher and astrologer, Marsilio Ficino, refused to translate it for Cosimo de’ Medici because he was afraid of the consequences for Christendom.’