The Heresy of Dr Dee

The Heresy of Dr Dee - By Phil Rickman




PART ONE


All my life I had spent in learning… with great pain, care and cost I had, from degree to degree, sought to come by the best knowledge that man might attain unto in the world. And I found, at length, that neither any man living, nor any book I could yet meet withal, was able to teach me those truths I desired and longed for…

JOHN DEE





I

Source of Darkness





IT WAS THE year of no summer, and all the talk in London was of the End-time.

Even my mother’s neighbours were muttering about darkness on the streets before its time, moving lights seen in the heavens and tremblings of the earth caused by Satan’s gleeful stoking of the infernal fires.

Tales came out of Europe that two suns were oft-times apparent in the skies. On occasion, three, while in England we never saw even the one most days and, when it deigned to appear, it was as pale and sour as old milk and smirched by raincloud. Now, all too soon, autumn was nigh, and the harvests were poor and I’d lost count of the times I’d been asked what the stars foretold about our future… if we had one.

Each time, I’d reply that the heavens showed no signs of impending doom. But how acceptable was my word these days? I was the astrologer who’d found a day of good promise for the joyful crowning of a woman who now, less than two years later, was being widely condemned as the source of the darkness.

By embittered Catholics, this was, and the prune-faced new Bible-men. Even the sun has fled England, they squealed. God’s verdict on a country that would have as its queen the spawn of a witch – these fears given heat by false rumours from France and Spain that Elizabeth was pregnant with a murderer’s child.

God’s bollocks, as the alleged murderer would say, but all this made me weary to the bone. How fast the bubble of new joy is pricked. How shallow people are. Give them shit to spread, and they’ll forge new shovels overnight.

All the same, you might have thought, after what happened in Glastonbury, that the Queen would seek my help in shifting this night-soil from her door.

But, no, she’d sent for me just once since the spring – all frivolous and curious about what I was working on, and had I thought of this, and had I looked into that? Sending me back to spend, in her cause, far too much money on books. Burn too many candles into pools of fat. Explore alleys of the hidden which I thought I’d never want to enter.

Only to learn, within weeks, that heavy curtains had closed around her court. Death having slipped furtively in. The worst of all possible deaths, most of us could see that.

Although not the Queen, apparently, who could scarce conceal her terrifying gaiety.

Dear God. As the silence grew, I was left wondering if the End-time might truly be looming and began backing away from some of the more foetid alleyways.

Though not fast enough, as it turned out.