Read The Heresy of Dr Dee for Free Online Page B

heel of a hand into my shoulder. ‘Leave it alone, eh?’
    ‘I fear I shall have to,’ I said.
    ‘Good.’ He picked up his lantern. ‘It’s a wasp’s nest. Go to your bed and fink not of ghosts.’
    I nodded, resigned. This was not a night to remember with satisfaction, not in any respect.
    ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘But—’
    ‘Just…
piss off
, Dr John!’
    I nodded. Passed through the coffin gate to the churchyard and the path to our house.
    Even made it up to the rickety, stilted terrace before turning around to make sure I was not followed by the sickly shade of Benlow the boneman.
    How much easier we could all sleep, now that Lutheran theologians had assured us that, with the abolition of purgatory, ghosts were no longer permitted to exist.

VIII
Favoured
    T HAT NIGHT IT rained hard and my sleep was scorched by dreams.
    Lately, I’d been welcoming journeys through the inner spheres and would keep paper and ink at my bedside to write down their substance upon awakening. But these… these I made no
notes upon, because I dreamed not, as I’d feared, of Benlow the Boneman…
    …but –
oh God
– of Eleanor Borrow with her green eyes and her soft body so close that I could feel its eager heat and had thrown out my arms in a feral desire. One of
the few dreams I’d wished never to awake from, even if it meant, God help me, embracing death.
    But I had, of course, awoken at once, and Nel’s warm body was gone to cold air, as if she’d been no more than a succubus, some siren of sleep sent to taunt me. I may have cried out
in my anguish. In the pallid dawn only the pain in my heart was real. For, since Nel in Glastonbury, I’d not lain with a woman. And, before her, never at all.
    It would have been wrong to feel a bitterness about this, for my waking life had been given over to study. My father had not oft-times been a wealthy man. He’d been proud to see me at
Cambridge at the age of fourteen and, in order to repay him sooner, I’d eschewed strong drink, carousing and even sleep.
    And now my poor tad was disgraced and dead and, while my scholar’s knowledge of mathematics and the stars had brought me some small fame in the universities of Europe, in England I was
regarded by many as little more than—
    Jesu!
I rolled from my bed in a rush of anger.
    —as little more than a rooker myself. I had few friends, not much money and no wife.
    And oh, how my perception of this last condition had changed. The hollow emptiness of the single man’s life was something I’d never felt before my time with Nel. A constant raw
longing which, for virtually all my sentient years, had applied only to knowledge.
    Dear God, what am I become?

    At the breakfast board, my mother said, ‘The hole in the roof that you attempted to mend last week is a hole once more.’
    Holding up the painted cloth which had hung in the hall. Soaked through, now.
    I closed my eyes, with some weariness. She’d probably been up since well before dawn, preparing sweetmeats with Catherine, her only servant. Making sure the house was as fit as ever it
could be to welcome the woman closest to the Queen.
    Hardly for the first time, I felt a strong pity for my mother. Something in that terse letter had told me it was unlikely that Blanche would even leave her barge this day. Just as with the
visits of the Queen, all my mother’s work would be wasted.
    ‘It’s been a summer of endless rain,’ I said, ‘And I’ve never pretended to be any kind of builder. Builders are… men we should employ. When the money’s
there.’
    ‘When the money’s there’ – My mother’s voice was flat – ‘you buy more books.’
    I tore off a lump of bread. It was true enough. But I
needed
books, and all the knowledge therein, and more. All the knowledge that was
out there
. Needed to be ahead of the others,
or what hope was there for us?
    ‘Another winter’s coming.’ My mother pulled her robe close about her and came out with what clearly had