I
“Jane…I need you.”
My heart lurched. It was a long time since Dr John Dee had said that to me.
I blinked sleep out of my eyes and peered across my bedchamber. My scholarly husband stood in the doorway, candlestick in hand, but he was not undressed for bed. Nor did his eye gleam with desire, or even droop with wine-lust. His face was pale beneath its greying beard. He looked scared.
I sat up quickly. “What’s wrong? The children…?”
“Sleeping in peace,” my husband assured me. “I…need you in my workshop, Jane.”
I shuddered. It was nearly two years since I’d last heard those words from him. Those words had preceded the effective end of our marriage.
Yet I’d seldom seen John so white with fear as he was now; certainly not since that last shattering night in damned Trebona.1 His hand trembled, quivering the candle to send crazy shadows spidering across the rafters.
I glanced across at the cot-bed where month-old Madina slumbered. The other children slept in a nursery under the attic eaves.2 I looked back at John. I tried to keep my voice steady. “What must I do?”
He heard the tremor. “Nothing like that,” he frowned. We never now discuss my part in his former experiments. “It is—Jane, I have succeeded!”
“Succeeded at what?” I began, but some nuance of expression in his face warned me of his meaning. “You mean you have found one? Brought one?”
My husband nodded. “At last. In greatest need. Perhaps that was what was lacking before—need. Need most dire!”
I misunderstood him then. I thought he referred to our reduced straits, near-bankrupt after our long sojourn overseas, returned four months since to a house burned and plundered by the ignorant and the jealous who thought Dr John Dee a sorcerer or necromancer. I even dared hope he was speaking of the parlous state of our marital relationship, so sundered that we merely staggered through the motions of matrimony. I did not yet know of the darker problem with which he wrestled.
His beard was matted, I noticed irrelevantly, and his garments were creased with many hours of uninterrupted labour. I reviewed when I had last seen John, and wondered that a time had come when his three days’ absence from our board could pass without my notice.
“You’re saying—claiming—that your experiments have worked?” I clarified. “That you have summoned…”
“An angel,” John insisted. “I have summoned the Angel of Truth.”
He swallowed hard. So even my brilliant husband had doubted whether his rites and calculations would ever bear fruit.
John pressed a night-robe at me. “Hasten. There isn’t time for…for anything! He is come—it is come—but who knows how long the bindings will hold? I need your aid, to shore up the circle, to take notes as I question the being. Please, Jane…I really do need you. Please?”
As long as it was since John had come to my bed, how much longer since he had allowed me at his work? Perhaps he wouldn’t have called upon me now had not our fallen circumstances robbed him of all other assistance.
I almost turned him down. Bitter words rose at the back of my throat. And yet—an angel! And John, shocked and vulnerable as I had not seen him for so long. John, needing me.
I dragged the robe over my shift. “Show me your angel.”
John led down the narrow staircase to his workroom. A complicated chalk circle etched with seven names of God warded the door. The threshold was scattered with salt.
“John, these are serious precautions for an angel.”
My husband winced. “We are beyond what we know here, Jane. Beyond aught I have achieved, even with…” He fell silent. He would not name his former associate in my presence. “What is in that room, inside a diagram of conjuration, is far from anything in our experience. Every precaution is necessary.”
He did not mention his old experiments in an Essex graveyard, nor the Reichstein scryings in which he had involved our son, Arthur. He would never remind me of the Uriel rites in Trebona. He did not need to. I knew how seriously he took precautions in his conjurations. I knew what happened when those precautions failed.
“He may try to escape,” John warned me. “He may seek to beguile you to breach the circle that confines him. Remember that he is more than he seems. His mind is not as ours. He is dangerous.”
I wanted to protest. Had John learned nothing? To bring such an entity into our home, where our children lay sleeping? To leash such a thing behind some flimsy line of chalk and salts?
My husband must have seen the criticism in my scowl. “There’s good reason for this risk, Jane. I swear it. There are…matters of state, of high policy. Matters concerning the fate of nations.”
I recalled the stream of visitors we had received these past bleak months at Mortlake. I had naively assumed that they were well-wishers, greeting our long-delayed return to England, perhaps bringing comfort and assistance in our reduced straits. I should have known that privy secretary Sir Francis Walsingham, England’s spymaster,3 would never call on the Queen’s astrologer from mere courtesy.
“What matters?” I asked John.
He shook his head. “No time now for that. We must enter my workshop and reinforce the bindings. Paint an outer ring with tincture of hyssop, whispering the Paternoster—Greek, not Latin. Beware answering the creature’s questions. Do not tell him your name.”
We paused at the threshold. “An Angel of Truth, you said.”
“Yes. And do we not know, Jane, that there are some truths which must be feared?”
He had the right of it. I nodded. He clasped my hand—his touch was cold and unfamiliar, a stranger’s grip. He unlocked his workroom door.
There was light within. Five lanterns were positioned at the points of the pentacle drawn in the centre of the floor. A diagram was inscribed in careful detail across the polished oak, like the sigil upon the portal but much more complicated. Supplementary lines etched out to five smaller circles, each containing a small dish, variously filled with water, incense, flame, iron, and coal. John had bound his guest with the five elements and the secret names of the Creator.
I gasped. Right until then I had not really believed. A delusion, it might have been; John was well able to fool himself into believing his results more than they really were. Or a trick, to lure me back to his experiments and more vile degradation. But there, inside the magic circle on a high-backed wing-chair, sat a creature unlike any I had seen.
He seemed almost human. Tall he was, a head higher than most men, thin faced with sharp cheekbones, a hawk-hooked nose, hair drawn back revealing widow’s peaks. His eyes glittered in the lantern-light, sharper and cleverer than anything I had ever seen in mortal man.
He stirred as we entered, looking up from a contemplation of his long, delicate hands. His fingertips were pressed together, but it did not look like prayer.
He spoke. “Good evening,” he bade us, “Doctor John Dee. And…” Those narrowed piercing eyes ran over me, “…Mistress Jane Fromond Dee.”
John gasped. “An Angel of Truth,” he breathed. “I did not tell him…”
The Angel tutted. “Come, come. If I’m to be plagued with hallucinations, at least allow that my deeper mind will provide me with signs and hints as to what vision I am to experience.”
John’s hand still gripped mine. It tightened as the Angel spoke. The creature’s voice was deep, masculine, cultured. A scholar’s speech, yet without deference or humility. A cold voice, devoid of emotion or humanity.
The Angel gestured around the workshop. “Construction, décor, and furnishings bespeak of sixteenth century, yet the items here are not of three hundred years vintage but new. The smell, I may note, is particularly authentic; and the stench, some dried clay upon that matting, and certain sounds beyond your house, suggest a Surrey location close to the Thames. The clutter of your study indicates travel and scholarly endeavour. I perceive you have lately visited the Continent—Nuremburg, Frankfurt, Prague, Cracow and elsewhere. The volumes on your desk…”
John looked to the content on his table. A new-printed copy of Hariot’s a briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia lay there, carefully bookmarked where John had reached in his studies.
The Angel made a wide gesture with those artistic fingers. “Those calculations on the chalk-board refer to a revision of the calendar in line with Gregorian principles, making use of the controversial Copernican theories of your correspondent Tycho Brahe. That partially-assembled device on the tool-bench is a replacement sea compass for one recently looted from this study during your European absence.”
His gaze fixed upon my husband. John shied back a step.
The spirit leaned forwards. “Your hands display the callosities of a constant writer, a scholar given to using a goose-quill judging by the ink-spots on your cuff. Old acid burns on the backs of your hands suggest a practical chemist. Your dentistry and complexion speak of primitive medical practices. In short, my delusion insists that you are John Dee, Elizabethan mathematician, navigator, astronomer and alchemist. Fascinating.”
John gestured for me to begin my work reinforcing the circle. He picked up his hickory stave, to command the Angel if he could. “You know much that no mortal could,” he told the spirit, “but I charge thee now to speak thy name!”
“Holmes,” the Angel replied, without hesitation or chagrin. “William Sherlock Scott Holmes.”4
“Homes?” John puzzled. No book I had ever seen, nor any of my husband’s reading judging by his expression, chronicled an entity of such a name. And there had once been many volumes of angel-lore on the shelves of Mortlake, before our house had been plundered in our absence and damaged by fire. It was not only our personal relationship that was wrecked and gutted on our return to England.
“Sherlock Holmes,” the Angel corrected us. “From the Old English holm and the Norse holmr, meaning holly tree. But this is irrelevant. I note from your easel that you are studying a manuscript which I have seen before—or later, might perhaps be a more accurate tense.”
The spirit directed our attention to the vellum codex that John had left open on his writing slope. I had not seen this document before, but was amazed and enthralled by it. A fold-out triple page was rendered with beautiful depictions of plants and animals, accompanying a text in some coded language that I did not recognise.5
John’s brows rose even further. “You…know this tome? I have only recently acquired it. It is said to be the work of Roger Bacon.”6
“I am intimately acquainted with it, my dear doctor,” the Angel replied. “Indeed, I suspect it to be the primary and immediate cause of my remarkable current delusion.”
John brandished his hickory wand. “I charge you, explain!”
“I was retained by representatives of the Society of Jesus from the Villa Mondragone at Frascati, Italy.7 This document had been extracted from their archive. They believed the thief had brought it to London, and therefore sought out my assistance in recovering the codex. This I did—the problem was elementary. Having recovered the tome I naturally inspected it in my Montague Street chambers8 to verify that it was the stolen item and to study the remarkable cypher it employed.”
John looked uncertainly at the thick volume with its narrow strange-charactered script. “You…decoded this?”
The Angel looked rueful. “I had scarcely begun when what I assume was some fungal toxin dusted onto the sheets took its effect and triggered this remarkable sensory delusion. I posit an interaction with other chemical agents which I have utilised of late to direct and divert my cognitive capacities. A fourteen percent solution of…9 No matter. It seems the most rational response to my hallucination to treat it as real until my mind resolves itself to conventional reality once more.”
I did not understand Holmes’s words, though he spoke them as if they had sense and meaning. I am not sure even John followed, though his is the most acute mind I have ever known.
“I am John Dee,” my husband admitted to the spirit in the circle. “Late of John’s College Cambridge and the University of Louvain, Fellow and Under-Reader at Trinity, Dean of Gloucester, Freeman of the Mercers’ Company…”
“Yes, yes,” the Angel interjected. “I am somewhat familiar with you and your work. Mathematicall Praeface to The Elements of Geometry of Euclid of Megara laid down some basic principles of calculation. General and Rare Memorials Pertayning to the Perfect Art of Navigation pioneered some excellent practical applications of science and mathematics. I was not so impressed with Parallaticae commentationis praxeosque nucleus quidam—too much superstitious astrological nonsense without clear evidence.”
John frowned. “The work was well received in several European courts. Prince Laski, King Stephen Batory, Emperor Rudolph himself…”
“There will always be fools to admire foolish unsupported theories,” Holmes snapped. “Your Heparchia Mystica - On the Mystical Rule of the Seven Planets—was confounded nonsense.10 Your Paradoxal Compass, however, was an admirable advance in polar navigation. You should have refined your studies to the geo-mathematical and astronomical, where they would have been much admired.”
John advanced as if to remonstrate with the Angel’s brutal critique. I caught my husband’s shoulder. “He goads you to cross the circle, John.”
The spirit mused for a moment. “An occasional correspondent of mine even dedicated his volume The Dynamics of an Asteroid to you.”11
“He is testing you, John,” I warned.
My husband looked closely at the gaunt figure that regarded him across the enchanted circle. “Not testing me,” John reasoned. “He is reading me, as a man might read a text. See how he scans the room, every book and paper, every instrument, missing nothing. If he provokes me it is to observe my reactions and learn from them.”
“Most perspicacious,” the Angel of Truth remarked. “However…our encounter, ephemeral as it might be, is clearly for some purpose. If one follows the logic of the situation as it presents itself, you have gone to remarkable lengths to obtain a consultation on some problem that perturbs and perplexes you, doctor.”
John raised his stave again. “Yes. I charge and conjure thee, Angel of Truth, to answer fully and freely in revealing the plot aimed against Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth.”
The spirit snorted. “You don’t require an Angel of Truth, then, Dr Dee. You require an Angel of Detection.” He seemed amused.
I turned to John. “What’s this? There is some conspiracy afoot against the queen? Is that why Walsingham came to Mortlake of late?”
There was a time when I would have recognised my husband’s intense concern at some intractable problem. There was a day when he would have told me about it. Even now he looked a little shamefaced. “Walsingham came to me in confidence, to see if I could explain…” He paused, unsure how much he should tell me.
Holmes sat back in his chair, leaning on one arm to cradle his long forehead. “If I am to be presented with a case, Dr Dee, pray use that well-regarded intellect and impart the information as precisely and cogently as you are able. Spare no detail but include no editorial. Above all, let your account be interesting. Begin.”
John looked at me. “You will record the conversation, Jane? Make notes as you used to?”
I stuffed down my first responses and assented. Most people assumed that it was for my looks that the widowed and eminent scholar had wedded a wife twenty-eight years his younger. I always suspected it was because I was literate and could record his experiments as he made them.
The Angel settled back in his chair, folding his hands on his lap and giving John his full attention.
My husband began. “This matter was brought to me by Sir Francis Walsingham, Secretary of the Queen’s Privy Council. It is a matter of national security.” He reached for a small wooden case and hinged it open to show Holmes the contents. “On Christmas Day, one of these ornamental pins was discovered in Her Majesty’s clothing, threaded into the fabric of her day gown.”
I craned to look into the box. On a padded cushion lay six straight silver pins, three inches long with ornate moulded heads. They were the kind of fashion accessory that a lady might use to fasten hair, scarf, or veil.
“Little was thought of it,” John went on, “until the first day of January, when a second was similarly discovered. That evinced some concern, for none were seen close by the queen to thread such a pin into her mantle. Indeed, one who was close enough to slide the pin into her dress was surely close enough to slide a dagger into her back.”
I could see why Sir Francis, always Elizabeth’s first protector, might be alarmed.
“A third pin appeared on Twelfth Night,12 but this time on her majesty’s night-gown. Her Majesty’s lady-in-waiting, Lady Elsbet FitzHammond, was closely questioned but would not confess to planting it. Lady Elsbet is rumoured to have been a mistress of disgraced Sir Francis Drake.13 In any case, she was removed from her position.”
“Who undertook these investigations?” demanded the Angel.
“Walsingham himself, assisted by some gentlemen of the court. Depositions were taken, witnesses of high degree. Many were…”
Holmes waved John on. “The other pins?”
“This fourth on February 1st, discovered by Her Majesty’s new lady in waiting, Jenet Hastings, when she disrobed the queen at night. It was threaded into some concealed undergarment, where none could possibly have placed it. The fifth appeared on March 16th on Elizabeth’s pillow, stitched there as she slept. You will imagine that the sovereign of England is well guarded in these times of Papist plot, and yet…”
“Who discovered this pin?” the Angel interrupted.
“Her Majesty herself. It was the first thing she saw when she awoke. There was a considerable stir.”
“I imagine so,” I interjected. A shudder ran through me.
John saved the most spine-tingling event for last. “This sixth object was discovered only two weeks ago, on Lady Day…14 in her majesty’s hair!”
“Detail,” insisted our consulting spirit.
“Coming out of chapel, the item was noticed by William Cecil, Baron Burleigh himself, the Lord High Treasurer of England. Good Queen Bess15 was much alarmed. As you can imagine there had by then been much gossip and speculation about the appearance of these talismans.”
“Cries of witchcraft,” I supposed.
“Most certainly, and of Papal devilry. Many observed that witches stab pins into poppet dolls to work malice on their enemies. Some hold it to be a work of vengeance for the execution of Scots Mary16 - or even divine judgement for it. Accusations abound. A dozen great men have been arrested, questioned, their estates seized.”
“Indeed,” muttered the Angel. “And you, Dr Dee, do you attribute these pins and their appearance to some supernatural agency?”
John paused. He smoothed his beard as he often did when thinking. “I am loath to resort to crying deviltry until I have exhausted the possibilities of human agency. I have read the depositions that Walsingham took. There are still possibilities for mortal intervention. However, mundane or mystical, if the queen is in danger then nothing must be stinted to save her.” He gestured to the circle where the remarkable creature he’d conjured listened to his account.
Holmes held out his hand for the pins. My husband shook his head. “Do you think me a novice, that I will break the binding circle? Make your observations from there, Holmes. I charge thee!”
The Angel growled. “Have you tested the pins? Analysed their composition, the silver content therein? Are all of them of the same minting, or are some created separately from others? What of the heads, those ornately carved decorations, each slightly different from the rest? Under a lens it might be possible to discern any meaning those imprints bears.” He glared at John. “You can either be a sorcerer or a scientist, Dee. In this matter you cannot be both!”
A great hammering at our outer door interrupted John’s answer. The thumps made us both jump. “Who could that be at this time of night?” I asked, trying to keep my voice calm. Had the ignorant fools who had broken in and wrecked John’s workshop in our absence returned to finish us, too? Or did soldiers bear some arrest warrant to drag John away for diablerie or too-close association with Catholic scholars in Europe?
“Stay here,” John instructed, passing me the hickory wand. He set the box of pins down beside the Bacon manuscript. “Keep watch.” He hastened out of the room to attend the urgent knocking.
I turned back to guard the Angel—but he was gone from his chair!
Holmes was out of the circle. He had stridden across it to pick up the pin casket. Now the Angel was examining the items with a tiny lens from his pocket.
I raised the hickory stick faintly. A spirit escaped its bonds can be cruel and dangerous. I knew that to my cost. Memories of that night in Trebona—when Uriel and Madimi had entered Kelley and convinced John that Kelley should lay with me—set me trembling again.17
“Your husband loves you,” the Angel told me, absently. He continued his inspection of the pins as he spoke. “It is evident from your body language that the two of you have been distant of late, since well before the birth of your recent child. Your glances around this workshop indicate that you have been excluded from this place since your return to England. Your reaction to my simple perambulation across a scribble of chalk suggests some disturbing experience with Dr Dee’s previous researches. I assure you, madam, that I mean you and your spouse no harm, and that that your current estrangement is as avid a source of grief to him as to you.”
“You…you know this?” I gasped.
“The signs are evident to any who will take the trouble to observe them.” He laid a long hand on the illustrated page of Bacon’s codex. “There is a subtle genius in this code. It requires certain modes of thought which predispose one to creative illusion. This is a most remarkable experience.”
“If you will not harm us, will you help us?” I asked. “John is wise, and good, but not always worldly. He thinks Sir Francis Walsingham his friend, but Walsingham would sacrifice any man in service of the state. If John cannot solve this problem…”
“Sir Francis is first amongst those I must interview,” Holmes declared.
“You…will assist? At what price?”
Holmes snorted. “The uniqueness of the experience pays for itself, Mistress Dee. The problem and context are sufficiently engaging to divert. And now, I suspect, comes a further complication.”
He looked to the door as John returned. My husband was so pale and shocked that he did not even react to the spirit’s escape. He clutched me and broke the news that had come so suddenly by urgent courier. “Walsingham…Walsingham is dead! He was discovered so in his bed—a silver pin pressed into his heart!”
I had not previously been to Hampton Court, that great cardinal’s palace built by old Thomas Wolsey, stolen by Henry VIII, expanded to be the largest royal dwelling in England. At another time I would have thrilled at the barge-ride along tidal Thames, at our arrival through Anne Boleyn’s gate—she was executed before the chambers prepared for her there were completed—at the great hall with its carved hammer-beam roof, at the sheer pomp and majesty and bustle and intrigue of Elizabeth’s court, so well-remembered from my younger days at Windsor.18
John was familiar with the site. He paused in the inner court to point out to Holmes the astronomical clock that showed time of day, moon-phase, month, quarter-year, sun and star sign, and the state of the tide at London Bridge.19 I was too concerned about the abrupt summons that had dragged us from Mortlake at dawn to take in the details.
We entered a royal palace in mourning for one of the queen’s mainstays. Few could remember a time when Walsingham had not held a subtle and near-silent grip on the nation’s governance. Yet already there were whispers, ambitions, changing allegiances, to fill the power void that Sir Francis’ passing had left.
John and I were led into that court—and an Angel of Truth walked beside us!
Spirit Holmes might be, dragged by John’s arts from some other place, but he strode as confidently as any man of mortal flesh, his odd quilted robe billowing behind him, his legs clad in cloth tubes over short boots, his shirt of odd design and material, stiff-collared and studded. His hands were rammed into capacious pockets.
Beyond the great hall were privy chambers, smaller but equally ornate. We were led to one such room where a dozen or more courtiers gathered round a table. The only one I recognised from scant acquaintance was sat in the tallest and most elaborate chair, at the centre of the huddle: William Cecil, Baron Burleigh himself.
The Lord High Treasurer looked up from the volume he’d been consulting as we entered. “Ah, Dee,” he muttered. “And…?”
“My lord,” John replied, “may I present my wife, Jane Fromond, formerly lady-in-waiting at court to Lady Howard of Effingham.20 And this is my associate, Master Holmes of…”
“Mycroft,” the Angel supplied.21
“I am consulting with him in my inquiries.”
“Your inquiries,” said Lord William. From what I’d glimpsed of him and heard back in my Windsor days he had always been a sour man. Years had not improved him, though his political stature had grown and grown. Surely it was he who would replace the late Sir Francis as Secretary of State.22 If any had cause to celebrate Walsingham’s death—or arrange it—then it was Baron Burleigh. “You are summoned here, Dee, to testify as to why Sir Francis Walsingham visited you some days ago.”
My husband clutched the lapels of his court gown and addressed himself as if to a Star Chamber.23 “Sir Francis has long been a patron of the sciences. On many occasions he referred some question to me, and found me to be of full use.”
“He used you as a spy, you mean,” one of the young men flanking Burleigh snorted.
“I am a loyal and patriotic Englishman,” snapped John. “If I visit abroad, in company of kings, princes, and prelates, it behoves me to communicate any matter of national interest to the man entrusted with preserving our nation’s security. It was in this vein that Sir Francis visited me at Mortlake a short time ago, to lay before me the problem of the silver pins.”
“A sorcerer for sorcery,” the youngster sneered.
“A scholar for a task not fitted to the ignorant,” John barked. His glower quelled the bravo; perhaps the young toady had sought to please his master with his impertinence.
“That is a concern that has occupied much of our thought at court,” the Lord High Treasurer admitted. “There have already been many accusations, some arrests, even duels over the matter. Superstition runs rife, and yet—when the Privy Secretary dies of such a tine to the heart, one begins to fear the devil’s hand.”
I noted the volume that the men were consulting. De la Démonomanie des Sorciers was French philosopher Jean Bodin’s seminal condemnatory work on witches and witchcraft.24 And we brought with us a spirit conjured by arcane art!
Burleigh suppressed a shudder at his own words then asked, “Have your researches suggested any conclusion, Dr Dee?”
John glanced at Holmes before replying. “Well, my first observation is that each of these pins is slightly different. See the embossed heads? Close examination under a lens of magnification reveals that each has a different sigil engraved upon the knob. This first is Venus, then Mars, Jupiter, Saturn—I shall return to describing the fifth—and the pin found in her majesty’s hair carries the symbol of the Moon. In short, this set includes each of the planetary bodies that orbit our Earth excepting the Sun—unless we choose to dare follow Copernicus and place Sol at the centre of our cosmology.”25
“Have you the pin that was taken from Walsingham?” the Angel asked. Such was his authority that an attendant handed over a linen-wrapped object without question.
“What of the fifth pin, then?” Burleigh asked John.
“Closely examined, chemically tested, the silver is of a different mint,” my husband reported. “Somewhat more mixed with tin, antimony, and bismuth than the others. The head appears to be copied from the fourth pin, representing Jupiter. In brief, this pin is not part of the set. It came from another source, for another reason.”
“The dates!” I realised. “John, the fourth pin came on the first day of February, you said. There was a gap, a long gap, before that fifth one appeared in mid-March. Suppose someone felt that the scare was dying down? That her majesty was getting over her fright? Maybe someone took matters into his own hands?”
“Someone with access to the real pins to be able to mould a copy,” John reasoned.
Holmes turned on us all angrily, waving the Walsingham pin. “This item has been cleaned! The blood stains are wiped away. It has probably been washed! How am I expected to deduce anything when idiots have tidied away the evidence and destroyed any clue?”
Baron Burleigh frowned. He did not like being barked at. “Of what use might a blood-crusted shaft be, sir?” he demanded gruffly.
Our Angel answered to no Earthly authority and feared none. “It might tell everything. Whether the victim was alive or dead when the pin punctured him. Did he die of a pierced heart, or was this placed there afterwards? If the wound was fatal, what effusion of blood occurred to suggest whether the needle-point was withdrawn to let its puncture do its work and then replaced later? Useless to ask now. Where is the corpse?”
“It lies in state in the lady chapel here at Hampton,” the Lord High Treasurer revealed. “Sir Francis had been unwell for some time and had repaired again to his own estates. When he died, Her Majesty attended on him immediately and had him brought back in her own cortege. There will be a full state funeral presently.”
“And I suppose the corpse will have been washed and cleaned,” Holmes objected. He turned to John. “Carry on, doctor. Sift what you can from these ignorant fools whilst I inspect this seventh pin with my lens.”
My husband hastened to mollify the powerful men whom Holmes had insulted. “We can perhaps get to the truth of all this without having to resort to cries of witchcraft,” he offered. “The fifth pin might be the key. The different pin. That was the one discovered on the queen’s pillow. Who had access to her chamber that night?”
“Very few,” Lord William deemed. “We can send for the waiting lady, Jenet Hastings, and ask her.”
“Send for her,” commanded the Angel, “but do not remain for the interview. I shall conduct that. What became of Elsbet Fitz Hammond, by the way?”
“After she was put to the question she was sent home to her father,” John recalled from the testimony. “Whatever else she had done or not, she had disgraced herself over Drake.”
Holmes dismissed adultery with a wave of his eloquent hands. “Was she put to torture?”
“No,” insisted Burleigh. “There was scant evidence to warrant it. Even Francis Walsingham, anti-Papist terrier that he was, would baulk at using such cruelty on a noble lady without some cause.”
The Angel of Truth paced the chamber. “I will see Lady Jenet first,” he announced. “Then I must view Walsingham’s body. Then speak to some other witnesses—you noticed the pin in Her Majesty’s hair, I understand, Lord William? And after that I shall need to interview Elizabeth Gloriana Regina herself.”
“That is not possible,” Burleigh objected.
“Make it possible, Lord William,” Holmes demanded. “If you want this murky business resolved, if you would not have it hanging over the court while Sir Francis is buried, if you do not want rumour and panic spreading like wildfire, accusation on accusation and suspected traitors everywhere, get me my interviews.”
John interceded. “Her Majesty has always been pleased to entertain me before when I have something of import for her.” It was true. Her Majesty even set the date of her coronation by Dr Dee’s astrological calculations.
“Very well, I shall see what may be done,” the Lord High Treasurer conceded.
“We shall take this chamber,” Holmes told him. “Dr Dee will bring you a list of our requirements shortly.”
I had never thought to see Baron Burleigh and his toadies hastened from a room as Holmes did then, yet swiftly the Angel was alone with John and I. He brandished the seventh pin at us. “The last of the set,” he announced. “See the engraving on the head, doctor? A sun! The pins were placed in order from the centre of a Copernican universe, then moon and sun to finish all. A minor detail, except to tell us that our perpetrator is an educated person, who either believes in a heliocentric creation or else has a sly sense of humour.”
“A nice detail,” John agreed. “There are astrological significances to the celestial bodies and their corresponding metals and notes which have occult significance also. A practicing magician might elect to use such symbols in this progression for some malefic purpose.”
I saw Holmes’ expression sour at this suggestion of necromancy. I hastily intervened. “A man need not be able to perform magic to believe he does. The perpetrator surely knows that these signs will add to a general rumour that the queen is plagued with sorcerous malice.”
“The progression was completed with sol,” reflected my husband, England’s greatest astrologer and celestial philosopher. “Certainly it is with that symbol that the supposed curse bit. Unless one assumes that terra forms part of the set too, and a worse final stroke is still to come?”
“The hint of occult trappings is significant,” the Angel conceded without emotion.
“However, it cannot lead us to whoever placed these items, nor tell us how. Or why? There are so many suspects it is impossible to even guess. How many arrests did Walsingham make these last few weeks as fear mounted? How many loyalties have been tried? How many secrets betrayed? If these pins are indeed cursed, they scatter their malediction far and wide.”
“They do,” Holmes agreed.
The door rattled. A young girl peered timidly round the timber. She wore a sombre, high-necked dress with no jewellery; court mourning garb. She was surely no older than I was when I first went to Windsor, a tender seventeen. “I am sent to Doctor Dee?”
The child was frightened. “Come in, Lady Jenet,” I requested as kindly as I could.
“Yes, come in,” Holmes told her. “Come and tell us why you slipped a fake pin into the queen’s pillow that night. Or better yet, let me tell you.”
Jenet’s brows rose. “What? No. I never…”
“Observe the tiny bulge beneath this girls neck-hem,” Holmes advised John. “The faintest rattle of muffled beads?”
John quickly followed the Angel’s reasoning. “Lady Jenet conceals a Papist rosary under her clothes! The Hastings must be secret Catholics, I deem—and as such have ample reason to wish Protestant Queen Bess an uncomfortable fright with silver hatpins.”
Jenet backed away. Her eyes were wide with horror at her discovery. Catholic plotters went to the gallows, the headsman, or the stake. “No!” she told us, desperately. “They never—they wouldn’t! It was me that bethought of it, none other. Only me.”
John accused her. “You forged, or had some helper forge, a copy of the genuine fourth pin you had discovered before as you undressed the queen. Why?”
The maid-in-waiting dropped to her knees. “I’ll confess. Anything you want. It was me. I am a witch! I am possessed of a demon! No other helped. No other instructed. It was me, all me. Burn me—but blame no-one else!” She began to sob.
Holmes was relentless. “Mistress Jane, you hypothesised that our fifth, anomalous pin was planted after so long a pause to keep her majesty and the court disturbed, to fan fading rumours of divine displeasure against queen and administration.”
“I was five years at Windsor Castle. I know how court gossip works,” I replied.
Holmes stalked round the weeping girl, lunged suddenly, and hooked the concealed prayer beads from the girl’s neckline.
“Give those back…!” blurted Jenet. She reached futilely for the confiscated necklace. It occurred to me how unwise and foolish it was to wear a rosary at Hampton Court, however well concealed beneath formal mourning dress. Surely the girl did not wear her talisman always? Had she donned it before her interview in the hopes of divine protection? To prevent its discovery in its usual hiding place if her chamber was searched? Or was I missing something?
Holmes lifted his lens to inspect the rosary clasp. “I see now that Lady Jenet had another motive for her deeds. Observe the engraving, doctor. E F-H. Might we posit Elsbet FitzHammond, this lady’s predecessor-in-office, who was dismissed on suspicion of planting the pins?”
“How came you by this necklace?” John demanded of Jenet.
“A gift!” she whimpered, kneeling almost double now in her fear and distress. “Given to me as a remembrance.”
“You claim to have this from Lady Elsbet?”
“I…no, of course not.”
“Then how do you explain the inscription?”
Jenet reached the end of her resources. She lost all power of coherent speech and collapsed weeping, sprawled across the tiled floor.
“Lady Elsbet would only own such a dangerous item if she were Papist,” my husband argued. “To pass it to you would be to deliver herself into your hands, for this rosary’s discovery would betray her to those who hunt such secret Catholics—Walsingham, for example.”
I had to intervene, to save the sobbing girl from her implacable interrogators. “John, Holmes, you don’t understand how it can be at court. When a young girl comes to such a great household to serve a high lady, shyest and least at first amongst so many noble retainers, that newcomer can be overawed. It is easy—and common—for such an impressionable girl to develop an admiration, a devotion, to some older and more experienced courtier. As Lady Elsbet once did with Drake.” I dared a glance at John. “As I did with the queen’s astrologer.”
My husband blinked and did not meet my look.
I went on. “As I think Jenet did with Lady Elsbet.”
Now John stirred. “You think the girl had a passion-crush for the former senior lady-in-waiting?” John knew well that women can couple together amorously in their own fashion to the release of pleasure—another lesson we had learned at Trebona under Madimi-Kelley’s malefic carnal guidance.
“Poor Jenet may have placed the fake fifth pin to ‘prove’ that her object of desire was innocent of the charges that had cast her from court,” I reasoned.
Holmes regarded the quivering, hysterical mass that had been his suspect. “Nothing more can be got from her for now. We will return to this witness later. Let her be placed under watch, but say nothing of what she’s confessed to Burleigh or any other. Our investigation has scarcely begun.”
The Angel of Truth led us on to the chapel where Sir Francis’ body lay. No sombre choir monks interrupted our study. In these Protestant days such indulgences smack of Papery. John, Holmes and I were left alone with the bier and coffer that held the fallen Secretary of State’s mortal remains.
The spirit wasted no time in niceties but immediately stripped open the corpse’s tunic and began an inspection of his wounds. To my dismay, John peeled down Walsingham’s hose.
“Here is the pin mark,” Holmes noted. “It penetrated the heart well enough, but as best I can tell—after these benighted fools have sponged and scented away the evidence—there was no great effusion such as a beating organ would have gushed from the lesion. A stiletto prick could kill a man, but with a three-inch pin it requires proximity and absolute accuracy.”
“Here,” John beckoned the Angel to the dead man’s nethers. “Walsingham’s balls. Feel them.”
Holmes did so without demur. “A great lump,” he found.
“Like unto a third testicle. When Sir Francis visited me at Mortlake he was much changed from the hearty man I had known before my Continental sojourn. He’d came to consult me on the witchcraft pins, of course, and to thank me for certain intelligences I had conveyed to him during my travels by means of coded letters. He brought a sum of gold to assist Jane and I in repairing our home after its vandalism and looting, and passed to me the names of certain men to whom I might look to find my missing books.26 In return I consulted on his failing health. He confided that he was having gut pains and difficulty pissing.”
“A testicular tumour such as this one could certainly impede his passing water,” agreed the Angel. “One might wish for the opinion of a reliable modern man of medicine but…it is entirely possible that Walsingham’s deterioration and death could be attributed to blockage and infection of the urinary tract. Or this growth might be one signifier of many other malignant tumours beneath his flesh.”
“Caused by sorcery?” I ventured.
“Caused by nature,” Holmes scorned. “If we could cut open the carcass…”
“I beg you not to try,” John told the Angel hastily. There was a limit to the license we might claim. “Is there aught else to see here? If we are not to desecrate the flesh of England’s spymaster and the queen’s favourite?”
There was not. Holmes led us back to the room he had commandeered for interviews. Weeping Jenet had been cleared away to some annex. The Angel demanded, through John, conversations with an eclectic roster of men.
First was the Master of the Queen’s Wardrobe. “Who had access to Her Majesty’s gowns before she dressed? How were they stored? How were they guarded?”
The portly gentleman stuttered out his information. The monarch’s gowns were very valuable, kept in locked storage in the privy wardrobe safe from men and moths. A guard stood sentry in the lobby outside. The Master and some few ladies-in-waiting had keys. When her majesty dressed there were always several ladies in attendance. It was these women’s duty to see that Gloriana appeared immaculate. An unauthorised addition to her underclothes or outer mantle would most certainly be noted before she was allowed to leave. Her senior Lady in Waiting, formerly Elsbet, now Jenet, was responsible for a final check.
“It is impossible that those pins could have been there when her majesty left her dressing rooms,” the Wardrobe-Master insisted. “The only feasible way would have been for her senior lady to affix the pin during final inspection, and Sir Francis—God rest his soul after his long labours—put Lady Elsbet to the question and found her innocent.”
“Say rather he could not prove her guilt,” John clarified, then thought again. “Walsingham was ruthless enough to wring the truth from any man or woman, though. If he released Elsbet FitzHammond he must have been satisfied.”
Next was the Warden of the Queen’s Bedchamber. I recalled this fussy little man’s counterpart at Windsor, a sly grabby fellow we ladies took good care to avoid being corned by. This specimen was altogether different; I doubt whether ladies interested him at all.
“The queen’s private chambers are guarded at all times and points,” this functionary assured us. “There are many plots against her majesty’s life. Security is vital. None may enter without permission. Few have that privilege.” He reeled off the names of ladies in waiting, some more common maids and footmen, and certain trusted guards who had permission to intrude.
“On the night when the pin appeared on her majesty’s night-gown, the 6th of January, I believe, did the queen receive any visitor to her chamber by night?” Holmes enquired. “A suitor, perhaps?”
The Warden of the Queen’s bedchamber spluttered at the suggestion that the Virgin Queen might receive a midnight caller in her bower. Yet even in my day at Windsor there were certain rumours repeated to me by Lady Howard that…
But this is not relevant to my present account. The Angel demanded and received assurances that no stranger had violated the monarch’s room that night. Only Lady Elsbet and three other maids had attended her.
Walsingham’s private secretary was a cultured, well-spoken man with a fashionable forked beard. He never met Holmes’ eye. The Angel questioned him on his former employer’s business. “Sir Francis was said to be the best-informed man in England,” our spirit noted. “What happened to his files and notes after his death?”
“All my master’s papers were bundled together and dispatched to the Tower of London for the queen’s pleasure.”
“Nothing abstracted? Nothing burned?”
“In the last days of his illness Sir Francis disposed of certain documents himself, feeding them to his bedroom hearth.”
“He was a knowledgeable man. Well read?”
“Yes. He corresponded with many of the great thinkers of our day.” The secretary’s shifty gaze flickered over John for a scant moment.
My husband chimed in with questions. “When was the pin in his heart discovered? At the moment of his death?”
“It was concealed beneath his outer jacket. It was only when he was stripped for his shroud that the item was first seen.”
“There was not enough blood to betray the wound?”
“Underlinens were soaked, but the lining of Sir Francis’ mantle had absorbed the effusion so it was not evident to the eye. The discharge was not great.”
I remembered Holmes’ earlier comments. “Not enough for it to have spurted from a beating heart?” I checked.
“I would have thought not,” the secretary opined. “Of course, some thought the spirit that had murdered the Secretary of State might have feasted upon his blood.”
“The stains were discovered was after he had been laid out at his home and the queen and court had hastily visited to pay their respects?” Holmes checked.
“Yes. When he was brought to the chapel here and stripped in preparation for his shroud-clothes. Though even before that some cried poison and others cried witchcraft. Sir Francis Walsingham has been England’s bastion against black magic and Spanish and French aggression for many years. Even in these last few weeks that her majesty has been tormented by the curse-pins he rooted out many traitors. He has cleaned England of those who seek our ruler’s harm. Countless enemies would wish to see his death.”
The Angel was tireless. He continued on until night fell and sconces were lit to illuminate his interrogation room. Humbler servants were summoned to add their testimony: guards, serving girls, footmen, coachmen, butlers, heralds, scrubbing women, sweeps. Each lady in waiting was questioned without knowing what the others had said. Even the scullions charged with laying out Sir Francis’ corpse were called to speak.
As the night ground on I found a moment to break from taking notes and speak in undertones with my husband. “It’s close now to twenty-four hours since you conjured the Angel of Truth. How long can he continue to manifest?”
John shook his head. “In truth, wife, I am still not certain how I brought him to us, or what I did differently from any time I have performed the rites before. You know that I have enjoyed some success in bringing forth spirits…”
“Enjoyed?” I challenged the conjurer’s choice of words.
“Well, Madimi was…You know I am sorry for Madimi, Jane.”
“So you have said,” I answered bitterly. “You have rarely shown it, though.”
John swallowed. “I have taken Theodore for my own, raised him in my household.”
“Theodore might be your own. Not Kelley’s—or whatever demon he claimed rode him as he tormented me.”
John glanced at Holmes as the Angel interrogated the Keeper of the Queen’s Jewel Box. “This is not the time to speak of such things, Jane.”
“No, the time was long ago, John. Before you avoided my bed. Before that one drunken night when you got me with child again. Before you closed me from your heart and counsel as a soiled thing unworthy of your regard—soiled by your consent and command, John, never by any will of mine.”
I saw the guilt in my husband’s stare. The rite of Uriel still cast its shadows over his heart.
I took a deep breath. “The Angel of Truth…Holmes…He said that you still had regard for me. Still loved me.”
Dr John Dee looked away. “I will need to make a careful study of Bacon’s manuscript. The Angel was somehow brought here by that.”
There was to be no answer to my deepest question.
“I have surreptitiously appropriated certain artefacts from the Angel,” John whispered. “A hair, a thread of his gown, a cup he touched which bears the grease-imprint of his fingertips. From these I can perhaps devise the alchemy to treat Bacon’s codex so it will bring Holmes to me.”
“Holmes is already here.”
John rubbed his forehead. “This Angel comes from outside time. Outside our time anyway. If I prepare a summoning for him over the months to come then it may bring him to us last night.” He reached out and touched my cheek, a gesture of affection that was strange and alien in our cold contemporary lives. “Keep careful note of everything he speaks and does, Jane. There is no other but you I can rely on for this…and none I would rather have at my side to rely upon.”
We were interrupted. Holmes dismissed the jeweller and rose to stalk the room.
“Have you concluded your interviews?” my husband ventured.
“Not quite,” the detective spirit replied. “There are three more people I must see, and such is their importance that I deferred their questioning until I was fully informed of the detail our minor witnesses could afford. Now I am prepared to speak with William Cecil.”
It was perhaps a sign of Baron Burleigh’s worry that he consented to meet with Dr Dee and Sherlock Holmes as the clock bell tolled eleven. He came alone and found my husband and our angel awaiting him at a writing table. I shall never forget that image of those two brilliant men, painted by candlelight, seated side by side in rapt attention. Holmes’ gaunt, hawk-like countenance and John’s wise intent gaze both focussed on the Lord High Treasurer.
“What have you discovered, astrologer?” Lord William demanded. He may have sneered.
Holmes pressed his fingertips together. “We are close to revealing our conclusions, but some few anomalies must still be explored. You opposed the late Sir Francis’s recent policies regarding the appearance of these pins, I understand.”
“Of course,” scorned Burleigh. “Any rational man must see that England’s future depends upon a balance of interests. We are, and shall remain, a Protestant nation, but we must have relations with Catholic Europe. Perhaps, had Drake’s foray prospered to punish the Spanish for their Armada, it might be different; but with religious war in Holland27 and our queen expelled from the Catholic communion by the Pope we cannot afford to be so broad and blatant in our persecutions.”
“Walsingham arrested several people these last few weeks, as concern for the queen’s wellbeing mounted,” John observed.
“And left me with the mess to clean,” the Lord High Treasurer spat. “Sir Francis was apt to become so enamoured of his tangled plots that he forgot their wider consequences. He entrapped poor Scots Mary with his Babington conspiracy and had her head.28 With one blade-stroke he inspired a hundred counter-plots against Elizabeth and her state. I do not wish to malign the dead, but the man was an adventurer—irresponsible and heedless of the collateral harm his exploits caused.”
“Did you attend upon Sir Francis’ body as he lay out at his estates before the queen brought him to Hampton Court?” Holmes enquired.
“When word came of his death my place was here, to ensure the smooth transition of responsibilities to other hands.”
I well understood what those words really meant. No man would benefit more from Walsingham’s passing than William Cecil.
“Were you present at the interrogation of Elsbet FitzHammond?”
“As if Sir Francis would allow any to contaminate his questioning! Look to Walsingham’s smooth-tongued secretary for an account of that event—if you can get any word of sense from his conspiratorial lips.”
Holmes deferred to John for a turn at the questions. “It was you who first spotted the pin in Her Majesty’s hair, I believe,” my husband began. “Please describe the occasion.”
“We had heard an early morning service on Lady Day. Her Majesty was attended by her usual retinue. She bade me walk beside her as she left the church. We progressed down the nave aisle and emerged from the eastern porch. A pale sun glinted off something in her majesty’s hair. Not in her wig, but the natural locks that emerged beneath it, just below the left ear. I looked more closely, and there was one of those infernal pins, thatched into the queen’s plait!”
“How did her majesty react?”
“She was much distressed. Each pin’s appearance has alarmed her more. She must have heard by then the court gossip that the witchcraft was growing stronger, that each pin came closer to piercing her heart. She tore the item loose and hurled it in the mud. I retrieved it for Walsingham’s investigation. I understand he subsequently passed it to you.”
“That’s correct,” John confirmed. “Sir Francis, though ill by then and withdrawn from court, made a personal visit to Mortlake. You summoned me to ask about it.”
“He wasn’t there on Lady Day,” Lord William declared. “Walsingham’s malaise was already taking a grip by then. If…if there is some sorcery directed against her majesty and her principal ministers…”
“The truth will be discovered,” the Angel assured him. “You may go now, my lord. You have been moderately helpful.”
It was close to midnight when Holmes again summoned the unfortunate Jenet Hastings. The lady in waiting had endured long hours under guard, knowing that her secrets were discovered. She entered timidly, supported by two soldiers whom John dismissed.
“It is time to reveal the truth,” the Angel warned her. “Dr Dee, Mistress Jane and I are not a court. We owe no duty to the Lord High Treasurer, or to Sir Francis Walsingham’s faction. We are not here to catch Catholics nor to punish affections. But we shall have a full account from you before you leave this room.”
There was no doubt in the spirit’s voice. Jenet trembled and shrank back in her chair, but from Holmes there was no escape.
“The rosary. Did you steal it or was it given to you?”
“It was a gift. Truly, sir, it was given as a keepsake.”
“From Lady Elsbet?”
Jenet squeezed her eyes shut and nodded.
“You were fond of her?”
Another nod, and a deep blush.
“You idolised her.”
“Yes.”
Holmes pushed the beads across to the young woman. “Pray with it now,” he instructed. “Out loud. Show us how it works.”
Jenet faltered. Her hands clutched the necklace. “H-hail Mary, full of grace…” she began.
The Angel shook his head. “The Lord’s Prayer, then ten Hail Marys, then Glory Be To the Father,” he corrected the lady in waiting. “You are no Catholic. That was Elsbet.”
“She gave you the beads for affection,” John suggested to the girl. “As a sign of trust.”
“Or as a final coercion to carry out a task that Elsbet was no longer able to perform,” Holmes accused. “There are a strictly limited number of people who could have placed the pins about Her Majesty. Of them, her lady in waiting is the one who could have done so the easiest. Most often the logical suspect is the correct one. Catholic Elsbet was slipping those pins into the Queen’s garments—until she was suspected and taken for questioning. Did she leave you that fourth pin to plant after she had gone, to suggest supernatural occurrence rather than human agency? To offer her an alibi?”
Jenet hesitated to surrender up her friend.
“And the fifth,” the Angel persisted inexorably. “When no new instruction came from close-watched Elsbet did you decide by your own initiative to forge another pin, modelled upon the one previously left in your charge, to continue the deception, to protect your idol and further her plot?”
Jenet gasped. The spirit had hit upon the exact truth.
John saw the problem, though, and spoke it before I could. “Elsbet could have placed the first three talismans, and Jenet the fourth and fifth, but what of the sixth that appeared in church? Or the seventh in Walsingham’s dead flesh?”
Holmes took up quill and scribbled some words on a scrap of parchment. “For that,” he replied enigmatically, “we require one final testimony.” He handed the paper to Jenet. “Take that and deliver it now. Go in haste.”
The lady fled from the room, trailing guardsmen. John and I regarded the Angel of Truth with surprise.
“You see now how it came to be, and why?” Holmes asked us.
“I confess to still being puzzled,” my husband regretted. “What have you seen that mortal eyes cannot discern?”
“Nothing that mortal eyes cannot perceive,” Holmes snorted. “You are blinded by your training, doctor, by your prejudices and preconceptions. Free yourself of these things and you will excel. Your name will resound down history as a thinker, a scholar, a seeker. Merely look at what you see!”
John hesitated. “My name will be remembered? Is that prophecy or…?”
“Care not so much that it will be recalled as for what it will be recalled, Dr Dee,” the Angel advised.
“Are we close, though?” I had to ask. “Close to penetrating this terrible mystery?” I missed my children, and my exchange with John earlier had left me raw, unsettled, hurt, as I’d not been since those weeks recovering from Madimi’s ministrations.
Holmes interlaced his fingers save for two pointed indexes which he directed towards the door. The portal opened. Elizabeth Regina swooped into the room.
I had seldom seen the queen so close. She must have been approaching sixty, old King Harry’s daughter who had reigned these twenty years with absolute power, who had survived her mad, bloody sister and executed her cousin, who had loved Dudley and destroyed him,29 who had defied Spanish Philip and the Pope himself and forged a new England.
Holmes eyes sparkled.
Her Majesty held the parchment he had sent by Jenet. “What is the meaning of these words?”
John winced. Our monarch has a tendency to have men beheaded if they catch her ire.
“I believe the message was quite legible, ma’am,” Holmes responded. “However, there are a few points I should like to clear up before I am satisfied that I have fathomed the case.”
“A few points?” the queen repeated.
“Indeed. When did you first deduce that Lady Elsbet was placing the pins upon your person?”
An invisible contest seemed to be going on between ruler and spirit, some wrestling of mind and character beyond the outward show that we could see. Queen Bess elected to answer the question. “It was self-evident. The simplest explanation. When Elsbet was exiled and Jenet attempted the same ruse it became clear what was going on. Jenet is not so clever as Elsbet.”
John stirred. “You were distressed.”
“I certainly appeared so. Why spoil a perfectly useful plot?”
Holmes’s face lit with admiration. “You also discerned, then, that Elsbet and her Catholic contacts were not the originators of the scheme?”
“Of course. Elsbet is smarter than Jenet, but not so clever or well read as to devise the astrological symbol sequence on the pin-heads. It was clear that she had a backer.”
“So there was a Catholic plot?” I blurted, then regretted it. “Um, Your Majesty.”
“No, Jane,” Holmes told me. “What value would there be in stirring up anti-Catholic sentiment by so public a resort?”
“Would Walsingham have allowed a secret Catholic so close a place in the monarch’s intimate household?” John objected.
“He would certainly have known,” Holmes confirmed. “That is presumably the hold he had over the lady, to force her to plant the pins?”
“And so alarm me and my court into allowing his Papist-cleansing?” the queen suggested. “Francis knew of his illness. He knew he had not long to finish his work for me and leave me a kingdom secured from treason and treachery. Hence his Byzantine plot to nudge my hand against my enemies, or potential enemies, while protecting me from opprobrium at court and amongst the general masses. Who objects to defending the queen from foulest black witchcraft?”
“You allowed Jenet to continue Elsbet’s—Walsingham’s work!” John exclaimed.
“And continued it yourself,” Holmes observed. “No other could have placed that sixth pin whilst you were at prayer in church but you.”
“I sent a trusted messenger to Elsbet in her exile,” Her Majesty revealed. “At my letter the girl confessed all and yielded up the remaining two pins from the set that Francis had given her. One I used to complete Francis’s plot; his weeding out of future threats was a useful last gift to me. I wonder if he realised by whose agency his pin was placed? I imagine he did. He was a subtle man.”
“On this occasion he was mystified. For evidence I offer Dr Dee’s involvement. Your ailing spymaster would hardly have made the journey to Mortlake to recruit Dee’s help in discovering who placed the first five pins. It was that mysterious sixth that troubled him.”
“And the final pin you reserved for Walsingham himself, majesty,” John concluded. “You visited him as he lay out at his estates. You paid your last respects there.”
The monarch inclined her head slightly. “The old scoundrel had gone behind my back before, for my own good as he saw it. He and Dudley used a warrant of execution for poor Mary that I had signed on condition it would not be delivered without my further consent.”
“His behaviour in the current matter was not uncharacteristic then,” surmised the Angel.
“Characteristic but irking. His final gambit used even my own superstition to further his ends. I felt a little bit of posthumous payback was in order. I returned his final pin to him.” Queen Bess snorted. “Perhaps the myth-makers will decide that Francis’s last loyal act was to draw upon himself the supernatural end that would otherwise have befallen me?”
“Burleigh does not know,” John realised.
“Burleigh is a fine man and a good servant. He does not need to know everything. England is mine, and only I keep all its secrets.” Walsingham’s papers had gone to the Queen’s own Tower of London.
Holmes was satisfied. “Then the problem is solved. It was hardly a challenge once the obfuscations of royal etiquette were dismissed. Walsingham never prosecuted Elsbet nor put her to torture because she was his agent all along. You never confronted him because he was doing your business for you in a way you could forever deny.30 The plot had just enough macabre touches to draw idle attention from the likely and correct solution. My congratulations, Your Majesty. A neat and professional gambit.”
Elizabeth shifted her head in the barest motion of acknowledgement, of one master to another. Without making any other gesture she somehow caused her guards to re-enter the chamber.
“Now that you know the truth, you must also know that you cannot take it beyond this room,” regretted the Queen. “I am sorry, Doctor Dee, Mistress Jane. You have never done me harm. You come to this end through your loyal endeavours to serve me.”
I gasped. “We are…to die?”
John folded me in his embrace. “There’s no other way,” he recognised. “Jane—my beloved Jane—I am so sorry. All my arts and cunning have led you to torment and shame and…this.”
“Not only to this,” I assured him. “To enlightenment and joy and travel and the society of kings, to poets and wonders and our children. And to love!” I swallowed back sobs and clung to him. “I would not change the bad if it would also take away the good.”
He held me tight. The dark spirit that had lain on us ever since the Trebona rite could not endure that affection. I felt it lift from us, cast back to sinister shadow from whence it could not return.
“I love you, my wife,” John told me. “You are my angel.” In the end he too had discovered truth.
“Ah, angels,” Holmes interrupted, rising from his chair to his full impressive height. “Remarkable things, those. Do you believe in angels, Your Majesty? You’re not shackled by superstition, as is clear from your part in our recent conundrum. But do you believe there is a greater truth?”
The queen looked at John and I, together at the last, clinging to each other. She faced our detective Angel with a quizzical regard. “There’s no trick can save you. I’ll see that your ends are quick and merciful. Dee’s children will be maintained.”
Holmes chuckled then, the only time I had heard his mirth. “Dr Dee and his good lady wife will swear an oath to silence on this. Better, he’ll pronounce the conclusion about Walsingham taking your supernatural doom on himself and so further cover your trail. He is a man adept at secrets, visionary, gifted, and loyal; and Jane is his true match.”
“I am sorry,” good Queen Bess mourned.
“Don’t make an error now,” Holmes advised her. “Watch.” He turned to John and I. “Dr Dee, you conjured me here to solve your mystery. It is now revealed. My work is done. Release me. I need to rouse in my own rooms and return to the waking world.”
Comprehension dawned on John’s face. “Yes,” he breathed. “Thank you.” He raised his hand. “Sherlock Holmes of Mycroft, Angel of Truth, Spirit of Detection, your labours are done. I charge thee depart without malice. By rod and rood I dismiss thee! Avaunt!”
Holmes disappeared. Only a pungent scent of Virginian tobacco remained where he had stood.
Her Majesty saw him vanish in plain sight. “Remarkable,” she whispered to herself.
John and I had the sense to stand silent.
“A spirit,” the queen recognised. “Conjured by your art, John.”
“At mighty need only,” my husband cautioned prudently. “At unique cost.”
Gloriana turned to us. She was England. “I will take your oaths and command your service as the Angel suggested. No man so clever as to associate with a creature of that kind should be wasted to the headsman’s axe.”
We made bow and curtsey. “He brought the truth,” John acknowledged, clasping my hand tight. The Angel had brought truth to us too.
John needed me.
1. Dr Dee, his associate Edward Kelley, and their wives visited Třeboň, German Wittingau, in southern Bohemia in what is now the Czech Republic, intermittently from 1556-1559. Dee recorded the alchemical experiments and séances they undertook there in his diary—and their eventual conclusion.
2 This detail indicates a narrative date of early April 1590, since Jane’s second daughter Madina was christened on 5th March of that year. Jane’s older children at that time were Arthur, Katherine, Rowland, Michael, and Theodore.
3 Walsingham’s titles do not immediately indicate the power this political insider possessed. As Privy Secretary he set the agenda for the Queen’s Privy Council, her most intimate circle of advisors. He was also referred to as Secretary of State, in an era long before there was a role of Prime Minister. Walsingham effectively set the nation’s foreign and domestic policies and ran its civil service. He was instrumental in thwarting several plots to displace or kill Queen Elizabeth I. It was his support that sent Sir Francis Drake on his circumnavigation of the globe. He was probably the driving force behind the 1586 entrapment for treason and subsequent execution of Elizabeth’s Catholic cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots.
4 At no time in the Canon does Watson or Doyle record Holmes’s full name. The information is revealed in W.S. Baring-Gould’s definitive 1962 biography, Sherlock Holmes.
5 Jane describes here what would be known in modern times as the Voynich Manuscript, a mysterious tome “discovered” in 1912 by book dealer William Voynich. He claimed to have purchased the volume in a lot of books sold by the Jesuits from their great Collegio Romano library at Villa Mondragone. Carbon dating has placed the book’s paper to the fourteenth century but doubt remains as to whether the content is authentic or a brilliant hoax. An accompanying letter claims its provenance from Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (1552-1612) then through the hands of Johannes Marcus and Athansius Kircher. Tradition has attributed the coded—or nonsense—volume to Roger Bacon (see footnote 6), with Dee selling the book on to Rudolf. The manuscript is now in the care of Yale University. Reproductions of it are available online.
6 Roger Bacon (1214-1294), English philosopher and Franciscan friar, was accorded the title of Doctor Mirabilis—marvellous teacher—for his erudition and research. His 840-page Opus Majus covers optics, mathematics, alchemy, and astronomy. He may have been the first European to describe gunpowder. As with many middle ages scholars, he was also popularly attributed with occult learning and magical powers.
7 The Jesuits’ distinctive, historical, and beautiful headquarters outside Rome housed their greatest library. The former papal residence was sold in 1981 and is now part of the University of Rome Tor Vergata.
8 Holmes’s move to his more famous Baker Street address depended upon him finding some flat-mate with whom to share the cost.
9 In the Canon, Watson chronicles Holmes’s occasional use of a seven percent solution of cocaine, then a legal drug. This is quite a mild dose. A fourteen percent solution used by a Watsonless Holmes bespeaks of a more serious addiction.
10 This work, written “under the guidance of the angel Uriel” from a series of séances in 1582-3, contains diagrams and instructions for the summoning of spirits.
11 This would be the scholarly and controversial work published by Professor James Moriarty, “a book which ascends to such rarefied heights of pure mathematics that it is said that there was no man in the scientific press capable of criticizing it.”
12 The 6th of January, the twelfth night after Christmas, was the end of medieval Christmas revels, remembered now in vestige as the date by which trimmings and trees should be cleared away.
13 Drake (c1540-1596) was the archetypal English privateer explorer, second man to circumnavigate the world, wanted pirate to the Spanish fleet, second in command of the English force that had broken the invading Spanish Armada, and general swashbuckler. King Philip II of Spain placed a bounty on his head of 20,000 ducats—US$6.5m in modern money. Drake fell out of favour in 1589 when his mission to Lisbon to follow-up the English triumph over the Spanish Armada went wrong, costing 12,000 English lives and 20 English ships.
14 March 25th, one of the old English “quarter days” on which rents and taxes were due and wages were paid. The other quarter days were Midsummer’s Day (24th June), Michaelmas (29th September), and Christmas Day. March 25th converts to April 6th under the current Gregorian calendar, and that revised date still marks the beginning of the British tax year.
15 A colloquial term for Elizabeth I.
16 Mary Stuart, (1542-1587) Queen of Scots and dowager Queen of France, was Elizabeth’s first cousin once removed and had a strong claim on the English throne. Elizabeth kept her imprisoned for eighteen years before Walsingham’s entrapment garnered enough evidence to compel her execution. Baron Burleigh later criticised the Queen very strongly for allowing Mary’s death. Mary’s son became King James IV of Scotland and succeeded Elizabeth I to also become James I of England and Wales, uniting the kingdoms into Great Britain.
17 Dee’s partnership with medium and alchemist—and convicted fraudster—Edward Kelley, ended abruptly shortly after Kelley relayed the spirit Madimi’s command that the two men should lay with each other’s wives. Dee records the “cross-matching” on 22nd May 1587; Jane’s son Theodore was born nine months later.
18 Hampton Court remains one of the stateliest of all England’s stately homes even today. Little of the complex as laid out by Cardinal Wolsey around 1514 or massively extended by Henry VIII from 1528 survives unchanged. The palace and grounds were thoroughly overhauled and rebuilt in the 1600s.
Anne Boleyn was the second wife of Henry VIII, for whom he broke England from the Catholic faith and instituted Protestant Anglicism. She was executed in 1536 on charges of adultery, incest, and witchcraft.
Hampton Court is now open to the public. A visit is recommended.
19 This massive 1540 timepiece, built into the gatehouse tower wall in what is now called the Clock Court, still functions. Its display of the tide’s condition was a practical one at a time when most traffic to Hampton Court came by Thames; at low water there were dangerous rapids under the arches of London Bridge.
20 Lady Howard was wife to Lord Admiral Charles Howard, who had commanded the fleet that repelled the “invincible” Spanish Armada. She remained a good friend to Jane and her husband throughout their lives.
As a minor lady of court, Jane would have required royal assent to wed Dee, and Dee’s diary describes his visit to court at Windsor at the end of November 1577 and several conferences with the queen and “Mr Secretary Walsingham”, one of which must have broached the subject. Jane married Dee on 5th February 1578.
21 Again according to Baring-Gould, Holmes’ birthplace in the North Riding of Yorkshire supplied the names of both Holmes’s paternal uncle and his elder brother.
22 Cecil had actually already held the post from 1550-53 under King Edward VI.
23 Jane shows some political naiveté here. The Star Chamber was a court convened from the 15th century in the royal palace of Westminster, made up of privy councillors and common law judges. It took its name from the painted roof of the court-room, which represented a night sky so the accused could look up and consider his place in the universe. Tasked with trying those deemed too powerful for conventional courts, it met in secret without indictments or witnesses, relying upon written evidence alone.
24 De la Démonomanie des Sorciers (On the Demon-Mania of Sorcerers) by jurist, political philosopher, and French MP Jean Bodin (1530-1596) was a very popular tome, published in ten editions from 1580 to 1604. It cited cases of demonic pact, lycanthropy, and intercourse with devils, and argued for legal exemptions when dealing with witches from the usual judicial requirements of physical evidence, witnesses, and confession without torture. It was influential in developing the climate of inquisition which led to thousands of convictions and executions for trafficking with the devil in the years to follow.
25 The ancient Greeks knew of the planet Mercury, although they mistook its morning and evening appearances as separate bodies (the morning version was named Apollo). It was also part of ancient Chinese and Indian astronomical lore and was known to medieval Islamic stargazers. It was not recognised in the west until Galileo’s 17th century observations. Uranus was considered a star rather than a planet until the 18th century.
Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) was the Renaissance astronomer and mathematician who posited a heliocentric model of the universe. The idea was not well received by the Catholic church on doctrinal grounds and was still a point of contention in Galileo’s time.
26 Thieves who benefited by acquiring books through the Mortlake villagers’ arson attack on absent “magician” Dee’s house included Dee’s former pupil John Davis and Catholic polemicist Nicholas Saunder (or Sanders). Ironically it is Saunder’s loot, now lodged at the Royal College of Physicians, which forms the majority of the surviving part of Dee’s collection today.
27 Burleigh’s role in the Dutch Protestant rebellion was to finance it enough to continue but not so much as to allow it success. In this way religious concern was diverted from England and a potential rival nation was weakened and distracted.
28 Elizabeth I imprisoned Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots, also a viable claimant for the English throne, for eighteen years. Idealistic recusant Sir Antony Babinton was recruited into a poorly-thought-out Papist plot to rescue Mary and place her in power with military support from Spain and the Catholic League of France. One of Walsingham’s double-agents uncovered the plan. Babinton was “turned”, forced to lead on the conspirators so that there was clear evidence of their guilt. This included corresponding with Mary until she wrote ordering Elizabeth’s assassination. This final proof was enough for Walsingham to bring down the whole conspiracy. Sixteen principal plotters were executed. Babington was disembowelled before death. Mary was tried for treason (without legal counsel, access to the evidence, or the right to call witnesses) and eventually beheaded on 8th February 1587.
29 The other of Elizabeth’s three greatest courtiers alongside Burleigh and Walsingham was Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester (1532 or 3—1588), who was widely rumoured to be her lover. When Dudley’s first wife died suddenly of a fall downstairs it was bruited that he had murdered her to be free to marry the queen. The resultant scandal killed off any chance for such a wedding, but Dudley and Elizabeth remained close all their years. Dudley refrained from other marriage until very late in his life; the queen reacted badly when she learned of his secret wedding to Lettice Knollys, Countess of Essex, and banished the lady from court. Dudley died unexpectedly two years before our present narrative. Elizabeth kept to her chambers and admitted no-one for six days until Baron Burleigh had the door broken in. She retained Dudley’s last letter to her in her bedside treasure box all her life.
30 One of Queen Elizabeth’s mottoes was Video et taceo—“I see and am silent.”