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builder’s men’s marrying my youngest girl,’ the wherryman said. ‘They gets detailed orders, how he wants it done. Inspects every sodding brick.’
    Cecil’s pastime, fashioning houses. I knew that. The tide had been with us, and when I found the house, three storeys high, behind a cage of builders’ wooden scaffolding, I was more than an hour early. Going in now would convey either over-eagerness or anxiety.
    So I walked away from the Strand, arriving some minutes later in a street of brightly painted new shops selling fine furniture, tapestries and good lamps. You could tell how fashionable this quarter had now become by the apparel of the shoppers and the scarcity of children and beggars. Even the street stench here was less putrid, women carrying pomanders more as a declaration of status than to sweeten the air.
    It had started to rain. I stepped into a covered shop doorway, from where the street-sellers’ cries were muted. Not that there were many of those around – with men as prominent as Sir William Cecil residing hereby, the security services would have seen to all that. If it hadn’t been for the rain, I might have wandered away into some other street and never heard—
    ‘—the future! Learn what is to come! Learn how the world will end with darkness and disease before…
His Second Coming!’
    Purple proclamations of apocalypse. Some pamphleteer. Ever cheaper now, the pamphlets. More ubiquitous and more lurid, spewing out their grossly illustrated accounts of murder, executions and devil worship. And end-of-time warnings now, from the puritans.
    ‘—for yourselves the terrifying new predictions of Her Majesty’s stargazer! Read the forecasts of Dr Dee!’
    Jesu!
Now I was out of the doorway and backing clumsily around anunattended cart, finding myself in a cramped alley, the man’s bellow seeming to pursue me into the piss-stinking shadows.
    ‘Know the future now
… what’s left of it.’
    Beginning to sweat as I peered out to observe quite a crowd gathering around the pamphlet man. Respectable-looking people, women in furtrim, men in the new-fashion Venetian breeches. All hot for revelations of turmoil in the heavens, discovery of unknown lands full of strange winged creatures, some new war in Europe.
    All invention, of course, but too many people were ready to believe anything committed to print and…
    …did they not know
I did not do this?
    Second coming? My role was to scribe charts indicating planetary influences on world affairs, the balance of the humours. Possible directions, opportunities, auspices. But never a claim to full-fledged prophecy. That way, until we know more, lies madness.
    But why had no-one told me about this shit?
    Rumour and gossip, Dr John, rumour and gossip.
    Jack Simm’s voice in my head, as I moved out towards the crowd. Had Jack known of this? Were there more such publications, about spells and divination and the conjuring of spirits in a house at Mortlake? Did everybody know about it, except for me?
    Head in the stars, as ever, when it’s not in a book.
My mother.
Too much time with books, boy, isn’t it?
Even my tad, once, in exasperation – the man who’d been so determined I should have the best education his money could secure.
    ‘Know the time of the End and the evil which comes before it!’ the pamphlet-seller bawled, lips plump and wet. ‘Prepare yourselves!’
    Turning, as if he knew I was there, cowering in the shadows. A lumpen fellow in a leather hat with two peacock feathers, his wares in a crate at his feet.
    The rain had ceased. I hung back, not knowing what to do. I could take the rogue to law, but a court case would only invite more of the kind of notoriety I could live without. For I would be questioned in public about the nature of my work and be compelled to answer, and I’d been there – oh God, yes – once before.
    Face it: more likely, the man would simply disappear, leaving his pamphlets to blow in the gutters.
    Steadied myself