‘There’s a tradition of reading the future in the entrails of a chicken, John, but it still sounds like balls to me.’
‘Comes from a stimulation of the senses,’ I said. ‘Like to prayer and meditation in a church under windows of coloured glass, while the air is laden with incense. Sometimes a cloth is pulled over the head to shut out the world, so that, for the scryer, the crystal becomes luminous.’
Like to a small cathedral of light. I tried to find words to explain how attention to the light-play within the crystal might alter the workings of the mind, rendering it receptive to messages from higher spheres, and Bonner didn’t dismiss it.
‘But would you also accept,’ he said, ‘that a true mystic has no need of a scrying stone or any such tool?’
‘Of course.’ I looked over to where his rosary hung by the window. ‘But while a mystic accepts what he receives and dwells upon it—’
‘—you, as a man of science, must needs explain the process?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s how it is.’
Bonner smiled.
‘With which archangel do you seek to commune?’
‘Michael,’ I said at once.
His ancient sigil appearing in my mind, where I must have drawn it more than a hundred times in the past year, to summon courage and the powers of reason.
Which told me now to say nothing to Bonner about the Queen’s interest in communion with the supercelestial and the pressure upon me which would almost certainly resume when those deceitful mourning clothes were put away.
‘Methinks,’ he said, ‘that you imagine this stone might… awaken something in you?’
This would be the lesser of two admissions but I said nothing.
‘The great sorrow of your life,’ Bonner said, ‘is that you yourself, with all your studies and experiments, your extensive book-knowledge of ancient wisdom and cabalistic progression through the spheres are… how shall I put this…?’
‘Dead,’ I said. ‘Dead to the soul.’
Exaggerating, in hope that he’d contradict me.
‘Poor boy,’ he said.
I’d hoped he’d be able to tell me more, but all he could recall were this man Smart’s alleged crimes against both Church and Crown. Crimes for which, in earlier times, he would have roasted. The fact that he seemed to have survived suggested he knew men of influence.
So where was he now? Still at Wigmore? Bonner thought he might be able to find out if I could come back, say, in a week?
I supposed I could find accommodation in some part of London well away from the court and Cecil, but I’d forever be watching my back, and anyone, from a street-seller to a beggar, might be one of Walsingham’s agents.
And why would I take the risk of discovery for something I’d never afford?
I shook my head, Bonner regarding me from his pallet, a pensive forefinger extended along a cheek.
‘What else are you not telling me, John?’
Kept on shaking my head. I’d been drawn into circumstances I’d had no role in shaping. However the matter of Amy’s death and her own marriage was resolved, the Queen would remember that I’d not been here when she had need of my services. And Dudley… Dudley would also remember. If he survived.
… if a messenger was to come knocking on my door now with news that Dudley had been cut down… or shot… or skewered in a crowd…
I saw Cecil’s narrow, long-nosed face and dark, intelligent eyes, flecked, for the first time in my experience of him, with what seemed a most urgent need.
And then he’d said,
Were you to be gone, even for a matter of weeks, that might be sufficient.
For what? Sufficient for circumstances to alter so that Dudley’s marriage to the Queen was no longer a possibility…
… due to his death?
Was I mad to think thus?
‘Dudley, eh?’ Bonner said.
As if he’d tapped into my thoughts. I stared at him, startled.
‘Poor Dudley,’ he said. ‘Exiled from court, compelled to keep his burrowing tool out of the royal garden. Do you see him these days?’
‘I had… a letter from him, in which he told me that his wife may have fallen because her bones were made brittle through a malady in her breast. He’d spoken before of her illness.’
‘Interesting. I was told that the malady related to her humour. An advanced melancholy. Bodily, she appeared in good health… apart from the sallowness and loss of weight symptomatic of such a condition.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘Ah…’ Bonner shrugged. ‘You’d be surprised at the people who come and go from the Marshalsea. However, that’s neither here nor there.’
Something pulsed within me, and I knew what I had to do.
‘Ned, how do you get letters out?’
‘From here? There’s a guard who’ll collect them, for a consideration, and take them to a stable lad who, for another consideration—’
‘Nothing more private than that?’
‘An approach to the stableman himself is usually found safer for those of us allowed out of here. He’s at an inn round the corner. Offers a first-stage post-horse service. You want to send a letter?’
‘If you can spare me paper and ink.’
‘Where to? May I ask?’
‘Not far. Kew.’
‘He’ll do that by mid-afternoon. Paper and quill are in the box under the bookshelf. Sealing wax and ink, too. If it’s gone hard, add a little wine.’
‘Thank you.’
I sat down at the board with paper and quill and ink and kept the message short, asking only for a meeting. Bonner evidently didn’t feel the need to inquire who I was writing to, knowing full well who lived at Kew.
I sanded the ink and sealed the letter it with wax. He may not want to meet me at this time, but at least I would have tried.
‘I assume you know what you’re doing,’ Bonner said.
‘Not really.’
‘I’ll pray for you, then.’
‘Now I know I’m dead.’
But neither of us was laughing as I stowed the letter away in my doublet. Bonner arose and clasped my hand a final time and then brought out from his robe a single key with which he unlocked the door of his cell.
‘You have a key to your own prison?’
‘For reasons which escape me,’ Bonner said, ‘I yet seem to be less than popular in some quarters. It would not help the mood of the Marshalsea were I to be set alight in my own cell.’ He held the door open. ‘Good luck to you, John, in all your quests.’
‘Thank you, Ned.’
‘And should you ever come to possess the stone,’ Bonner said, ‘perchance you might bring it here one day. And we shall see what we shall see.’
I nodded and walked away along a short passage and down the stairs towards the darkness of the day.
XIII
Court Clown
ALREADY, HE WAS saying, her ghost had been seen on those stairs at Cumnor Place. The little stairs, the too-short stairs.
‘All in white,’ Dudley said, ‘but with a grey light around her, like to a… a dusty shroud. Walking off the top step, gazing ahead of her and then… then she vanishes.’
His body stiffening as if to forestall a shiver, and then he was pouring more wine, as though to prove to himself that his hand was not shaking.
‘But never coming to me,’ he said. ‘Why not to me?’
He didn’t drink.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I never see them either.’
The weak sun had begun to fade into the river at the bottom of my mother’s garden. A garden which, like Dudley’s beard, was less tended these days. He looked hard at me, his skin darkening – stretched parchment held too close to a candle, as though the rage in him were burning through the grief.