Free The Heresy of Dr Dee by Phil Rickman Page A

mother—’ I rose to my feet. ‘My mother has need of me. The fabric of the house wants repair, the roof leaks.’
    I’d used this one before, but it was no less true for that.
    ‘Your skills extend to roofing, John? I’d hardly think so. But we’ll see to all of that. I’ll have a number of men dispatched to Mortlake to mend whatever needs mending.
Your mother will scarce know you’re missing.’
    He was right. My mother would be in delight.
    Bastard.
    ‘My barge will take you back briefly to collect your bag, but I’ll want you away by nightfall.’
    ‘That’s impossible.’
    ‘Two days, then. Maximum.’
    ‘Sir William, if the Queen thinks I’m making distance between myself and—’
    ‘My problem, not yours. Two days. And stay out of London, meanwhile.’
    The discussion over, Cecil rose.

    Enshrouded in a damp dismay, I stumbled out onto the cobbles and knew not which way to turn. The Strand, once the home of senior churchmen, was now rosy with the new brick of
London’s richest homes. Not a place which the secretary, his building work yet incomplete, would want to leave.
    The rain had stopped and the brightening sky had brought out the chattering wives of the wealthy with their servants and pomanders, though this was hardly an area where nostrils might be
assailed by the stink of beggars. Amongst the throng, I espied the unsmiling, unseasonably fur-wrapped Lady Cecil, out shopping with their two glum-faced daughters. Suspecting she’d be among
those who considered me little more than a common conjurer, I turned back to walk the other way and thus glimpsed a man discreetly sliding through Cecil’s doorway.
    Dark bearded, dark clad and instantly admitted to the house. Unmistakably Francis Walsingham, the Oxfordshire MP known to serve the Privy Council on a confidential level. A coolly ambitious man
whom I was more than inclined to mistrust. The very sight of him made me wonder if I were followed and I pulled down my hat, threw myself into the crowd and then slipped into an alley, where I
stood with my back to the rain-slick brickwork and found myself panting.
    Fear? Very likely. I’d persistently refused the offer of Cecil’s barge, recalling the man who’d been beaten, robbed and drowned. If it could happen once this year, then it
could happen again, and who’d question it?
    You think me suffering from some persecution sickness? All I can say is that you weren’t with the secretary this day. A man who’d felt himself slipping into the pit and now was
scrambling back up its steep and greasy sides.
    And was, therefore, less balanced and more dangerous than ever he’d been.
    I thought of Dudley, once his friend, fellow supporter of Elizabeth from the start. And then Dudley, drunk on his status at court, unable to do wrong in the Queen’s eyes, had seen himself
as her first advisor, damaging Cecil. Now Dudley was sorely damaged and Cecil would seize his chance to…
    …what?
    Thrusting myself from the wall, a sweat on my brow, I followed the alleyway into another, this one ripe with the stench of rotting meat. I waited, listening for running footsteps above the
distant bustling and chattering, the barking of dogs, the cries of street traders, the grinding of cartwheels and the clacking of builders’ hammers on brick and stone.
    No one coming. I walked on, through the mud and stinking puddles, across an inn yard and along a mews, with its more friendly stench of horseshit, until I saw the glitter of the river.
    I stood beneath an iron lamp on its bracket, Cecil’s voice in my head.
    Do
you have a matter of, ah, science, requiring your specific and immediate attention?
    There
was
a man I would have visited on the morrow.
    On the morrow, I was now commanded to be out of London.
    I walked, with no great enthusiasm, out of the mews, to hail a wherry to take me not to Mortlake but across the river into Southwark’s seething maw. Not a place I’ve oft-times
visited, having little taste