Free The Heresy of Dr Dee by Phil Rickman Page B

for gambling, whoring, bear baiting or street-theatre. But, then, I didn’t have to go far after leaving the wherry.
    A solid building close to the riverbank, like to a castle or my old college in Cambridge, but still a place I feared, like all gaols, as a result of having myself been held in one. At the mercy,
as it happened, of the man I now thought to visit.
    But… there are gaols and gaols, and it might have been Jack Simm who once had described the Marshalsea as the finest inn south of the Thames.
    Now the official residence of the former Bishop of London, known in his day as Bloody Bonner.

XII
Blood and Ash
    S HUTTING THE DOOR behind us with his heel, he set down his jug of wine on the board and then rushed to clasp my right hand.
    ‘John, my boy…’ Letting go the hand, stepping back and inspecting me, beaming. ‘And, my God, you’re still
looking
like a boy. Some alchemical, eternal youth
thing you’ve contrived?’
    In truth, I must look as worn and weary as I felt. I removed my hat. He was just being kind.
    Yes, yes, I know. Kind? Bishop Bonner? I still could barely look at him for long without recalling some poor bastard’s crispen feet, black to the bones in the ashes of the kindling…
or the savage flaring of hell’s halo as the hair of another Protestant took fire. I’d oft-times wondered how many nights Bonner might lie awake in cold sweat, accounting to God for all
the public burnings he’d ordered during the years of blazing terror after Mary had restored the Roman faith.
    How
many nights? Probably not one. Even now, in a bright new reign, when stakes were used more for the support of saplings, he seemed to believe that there’d been a moral substance
to what he’d done. How could I possibly have grown to like this monster?
    ‘And what think you of my dungeon, John?’
    His grin displaying more teeth than he deserved.
    ‘It’s not the Fleet, is it?’ I said.
    Bonner sniffed.
    ‘
You
might think it looks not unpleasant, my boy, but you aren’t here when the brutal guards come at nightfall and hoist us in chains from iron rings on the walls.’
    Inevitably, I looked up at the conspicuously unbloodied walls until his laughter seemed to crash from them like thunder.
Haw, haw, haw.
Then I heard a key turned in the lock on the door
and spun around.
    ‘Don’t worry,’ Bonner said. ‘They lock me in for my safety. I’ll see you get out. Before the week’s end, anyway.’
    I smiled cautiously. We had history, Bishop Bonner and I. When first we’d met it had been in my own cell, back when I was falsely accused of working magic against Queen Mary and also of
heresy. The good man I’d shared it with was already become cinders and even though I’d overturned the primary case against me in court I’d no cause to believe I’d escape the
same end.
    But Edmund Bonner had been curious about my reputation as a scholar of the Hidden. Wanted to know what mystical secrets I might have uncovered at the Catholic university of Louvain.
    And so, against all odds, I’d been allowed to live, even serving for a time as his chaplain – the inevitable guilt that haunted me tempered by the discovery that, just as Bloody Mary
was said to have been surprisingly soft-hearted, Bloody Bonner had a learned and questing mind and was – God help me – good company.
    ‘Wild tales abound,’ he said, ‘of what you and Lord Dudley found in Glastonbury.’
    ‘Can’t tell you about it, Ned. You know that.’
    ‘Pah.’ He waved a hand. ‘It can be of no consequence now, anyway. As long as dear Bess was happy with you.’
    She was far from happy with Bonner. Yet, even now, all he had to do to regain his freedom was to recognise her as supreme governor of the Church. While admiring his steadfast refusal, I guessed
that, in his own mind, he already was free. Only the bars outside the window glass were evidence of a prison. Almost everything else was recognisable from the cramped chamber he’d occupied