Forest’s face was yet a mask of bewilderment as I gave voice to the unspeakable.
‘Why would Amy have gone to so much effort to make sure she was alone in the house for the visit of a Spanish dressmaker? Because, as Blount’s letter says, she knew him. He’d made gowns for her before. She was fond of the Spanish styles. So… how well did she know him?’
‘Stop!’ Forest cried out. ‘For Christ’s sake, Dr Dee, go no further with this madness until we find Lord Dudley. There’s true darkness here. Darkness on every side.’
‘Well enough to wish to be alone with him?’
‘We must needs leave this place. Without delay. Those bastards downstairs, they’d rather burn it down with us inside—’
‘A woman alone in someone else’s house?’ I couldn’t stop now. ‘A woman who’d not seen her husband for a year, only heard the persistent rumour about him siring the Queen’s child?’
‘I pray you, Dr Dee, get out of here.’
Even as Forest snatched up the letter and the bill, bundled them together and thrust the packet inside his doublet, a knock came on the door of the bedchamber.
One knock. Truly, no more than a tap but in our present mood it had the impact of a mace. A hiss issued from Forest.
‘Don’t open it.’
I said, ‘Who’s that?’
My heart leaping at the thought that it might be Dudley.
But there was no reply, only the padding of soft footsteps, I thought receding down the stairs, but could not be sure. I waited until I could hear nothing outside then brought the candle to the door. As I drew back the bolt, Forest pulled his side-sword, whispering.
‘Open it no more than an inch. Keep your hand out of the opening. Stand hard against the door.’
So I might slam it in a face?
But there was no face.
I peered through the widening gap. The only movement was the flame from the sconce on the landing slanting in the draught from the opened door. I went out, lifting the candle into the corners. No one there, no one on the stairs.
‘Nobody,’ I said.
Stumbling, then, as my left foot prodded something on the floorboards, sending it skittering.
I crouched with the candle: a sackcloth bundle, no more than a few inches wide. Unexpectedly heavy. I brought it back into the chamber and closed and rebolted the door.
Placed the bundle on the board under the window in full moonlight.
‘Careful.’ Forest laid his sword on the truckle, pulled on his leather gloves. ‘Let me do this.’
‘You think something might spring out at us?’
‘And you think it’s a bar of gold as a bribe, do you?’
I supposed that any man who’d been with the Dudley family as long as Forest would, in any situation, fear a blade from out of darkness. He pulled at the sackcloth, which came easily away, revealing another cloth underneath. Black.
‘Holy God,’ I said.
Gently lifting away the corners of soft black cloth.
What lay beneath welcomed the moon.
Forest stepped away.
‘What is it?’
Despite the circumstances of its arrival, I was stricken with awe.
‘This,’ I said, ‘would seem to be… what we came here for.’
XLII
Contempt
UNDER THE CANDLE, it was a rich dark red. A swollen blood-drop.
Less than half the size of a tennis ball, but more perfectly spherical. After I blew out the candle, there were yet lights in it.
Lights that moved. A sprinkling of them. More lights than I could see in the air around us or the night sky, where the moon was so close-pressed by clouds that few stars were in evidence.
Only here in the inner firmament of the stone: points of white and piercing blue and a lambent orange, all in fluct.
As I looked at it, it seemed to breathe.
Easier than could I, who dared not touch it, this precious portal to the Hidden. Wondering: if I could have sat in this window-space, alone and concentrated, with the Trithemius manuscript and the whole untroubled night ahead of me, might I then find one of those fragments of light projected into the chamber in angelic form?
Whatever planet rules in that hour, the angel governing the planet thou shalt call,
sayeth Trithemius.
Raphael… Uriel…? I had no books or charts here. I didn’t know. Couldn’t think. And the night was far from untroubled.
‘So you were right,’ John Forest said.
‘Mercy?’
‘Everything you said to them. They’re in so much fear of how much you might know and who you might tell that they think to pay you off. Send you on your way with what you came here for.’
‘Yes. So it would appear.’
I took a last long look at the Wigmore shewstone before covering it over with the black cloth. A cloth of velvet like the one Elias, the scryer, had kept around his.
I could not believe they’d let such a treasure go so easily.
‘It must go back,’ I said.
‘What?’
Forest had snatched the stone from the boardtop, clutched it ridiculously to his breast.
‘No spiritual device should ever be acquired this way,’ I said. ‘It’s corrupted from the start. No good will come of it. Not for me or Dudley. Or the Queen.’
‘Are you gone mad?’ Forest thrust the stone at me. ‘Take it, for Christ’s sake! They’ll think you’re silenced. It’s your talisman. It’ll get you out of here. When you’re well away, throw the damned thing in the river if that’s what you want.’
‘I pray you, put it down,’ I said quietly.
John Forest weighed the stone in one hand before tossing it to the other and then he shrugged and replaced it on the board. Looking, for a moment, almost grateful, as if it had been too hot or too cold or he’d felt its alien energy racing up his arm.
‘You’d best ride back to Hereford,’ I said. ‘Where Dudley knows he can reach you. Where other letters may be waiting.’
‘And you?’
‘As you said, maybe they think I’m bought off with the shewstone.’
‘Dr John, they want you to take it and leave.’
‘I can’t leave. Not without Dudley. But you can.’
‘And leave you alone with these bastards?’
‘If I’m troubled by Bradshaw or Meredith or Martin, I’ll say I’ve written an account of all I know about property theft from the abbey and you’ve ridden with it to London. And if I’m not back there in a week, you’ll put it before whoever in the Privy Council deals with such matters, and Presteigne will be overrun with accountants. Now… go.’
Forest pulled on his leather gloves.
‘And what will you do?’
‘I’ll find him. Somehow I’ll find him.’
Hoping this sounded more confident than I felt, I dragged the board away from the window. Forest swung himself up on to the sill, looked down into the mews then back at me, his head bent under the lintel.
‘All right, I’ll go. But I’ll ride not to Hereford. Ludlow’s the place. To the Council of the Marches. Where I’ll rouse people, identify myself as Lord Dudley’s man. Tell them he’s missing within twenty miles of their stronghold. Return with a hundred armed men, at least, before sunrise. Take this town apart.’
‘And if all the time he’s with some other whore?’
He stared at me.
‘You think that, now?’
‘No,’ I said soberly. ‘Have a care. God go with you.’