The Heresy of Dr Dee by Phil Rickman Page A

they’ll come away soiled by second-hand guilt. Maybe’ – pushing
himself back from the board, the bench-feet squealing on the flags – ‘you can summon Amy’s spirit into a fucking shewstone to tell us precisely how she died.’
    Did I mark tears in his eyes? Finally? Tears for Amy? Tears for himself? Did he even know the difference?
    ‘What should I do?’ he said at last.
    ‘Not for me to say, Robbie. We’re acting on different stages now.’
    ‘You’re still my friend.’
    I suppose I nodded, though I’d rarely been less sure of it.

XIV
God and All His Angels
    S HE’D BEEN IN a wild mood that day, the day not so long ago when they’d talked of knowing the future and having communion with angels. Red hair all down around her
shoulders, the pale sun on her pale face, a faerie light in her amber eyes… and Dudley wanting her so badly that he’d fallen to his knees in the island garden at Richmond, burying his
head in the grass ’twixt her feet.
    Remembering now how she’d insisted that God and all His angels must surely be on her side.
    Our
side, Dudley had wanted to say, but didn’t. Telling me he’d been thinking of all they’d come through, both of them losing a parent to the block. Imprisoned side by
side in the Tower, not knowing if they, too, would end up there.
    But how will we know
, she’d said, and he recalled her voice grown thin,
when what we do fails to please them, and God and all His angels begin to turn away? How will we know when
evil’s at the door?
    ‘Do you see?’ Dudley said to me. ‘Do you see where this goes?’
    ‘No,’ I said.
    Although of course I did and was filled with a mixture of alarm and excitement, as Dudley arose and picked up the smaller of the two globes given to me by Gerardus Mercator, with whom I’d
studied at Louvain. Holding it up to the last of the light, as if it were a symbol of his destiny.

    ‘Spirits,’ Dudley said. ‘A shewstone can bring forth spirits. Good spirits… evil spirits?’
    I watched him slowly turning Mercator’s globe. Geography is one of my less-dangerous obsessions.
    ‘I’m a cabalist,’ I said, ‘and also a Christian. Therefore any spirits called into the stone by me must needs be touched by the angelic.’
    ‘Good enough,’ Dudley said. ‘So far. Go on.’
    ‘The Queen knows her reign could see the meeting point of science and the spiritual. A wondrous thing. If barriers are not raised against it.’
    ‘Ah… that old question of religion.’
    ‘Not an
old
question at all,’ I said ruefully. ‘When I was a boy, mystery was all around us. Christ was full-manifest in the Mass. Every baptism was an exorcism of evil
spirits. The world
vibrated with magic.
And… and if men like me sought divine inspiration in the cause of making new discoveries, it would be a long time before someone cried
heresy
.’
    ‘Except possibly the Pope.’
    I nodded sadly.
    ‘We get rid of the Pope, and what happens? In no time at all, we’ve gone too far the other way. Christ is
not
manifest in the Mass. It’s all theatre. Let’s strip
it away, the new Bible-men cry, not for us to ask questions. The will of God is the will of God, and you either accept it or you go to Hell. You explore
nothing.
Jesu, I— I’m a
Protestant, Robbie, I believe in the Church of England… and yet know it could take us back centuries.’
    Both of us knew where the Queen stood on this. There would be no persecution of Catholics if they worshipped privately.
    Or she’d be persecuting herself.
    ‘Tell me how it works,’ Dudley said. ‘The shewstone.’
    ‘I don’t
fully
know how it works. I know that planetary rays are drawn into the stone through ritual and the focus of the scryer, who must needs enter an altered state to
perceive the flow of messages.’
    ‘If this French bastard Nostradamus can do it,’ Dudley said, ‘then you can do it.’
    Dear God, I’d wish for a half of his confidence. I’d met Nostradamus just the one time and