Two nights later and they are nearly at Ludgate gaol.
“One last drink?” Dee suggests.
And Bob and Bill agree. Their attitude to Dee has softened over the last two days: growls have turned to eye rolls, to laughter, then to thundering pats on the back, depending on the time of day, and the quantity of ale drunk. He has become their pet, he thinks, replacing their dog, and if he could but lick his own testicles then the masquerade would be complete.
Dee knows the keep at the Bull: a man named Chidiock Tunstal, with a forked red beard and a belly as if he were about to birth a bullock.
“Bring us ale, Chidiock,” Dee tells him, “and anything you have that is wrapped in greasy pastry.”
And when he does, Dee tells his companions that it is apt they should be spending their last evening together at the Bull.
“For you, Bill, seem to me a fellow born under an earth sign, such as Taurus, as, I am bound to say, do you likewise, Bob, though I should say you are more of a Capricorn. Good health.”
They drink. Neither man is interested in astrology for neither knows in which year he was born, let alone which month, let alone which day, but knowing himself to be a goat or a bull gives each a stake in the conversation, and it takes Dee only a moment to set them on the road to strife. It is basic stuff, and he need only nudge it along now and then—“Mars ascending, I should say: forever a cause of mischief and destruction” and “I see the scorpion’s heart in your chart”—and soon the two have seen the worst in each other. John calls to the fore something that happened with a purse that went missing in the village of Rotherhithe.
“Is there a star sign for thieves, Doctor?” Bill asks.
A drink is thrown, then its mug. Stools are kicked back. The whole bench too. Dee snatches up the jug of ale—still half full—just as the table’s legs splay under their grappling weight. He stands to watch for a moment. It is astonishing to see two large men fighting with no restraint. They kick, bite, gouge at each other, rolling off the table and in among the filthy rushes. Their blows connect with concentrated fury, and the sounds of each set the air rippling.
Dee steps away, and some time later, he finds himself on Billingsgate steps with five shillings, thruppence, and an empty jug of ale. It is a warm night, with a heavy yellow moon that hardly raises a reflection on the lugubrious river’s surface. A boatman agrees to take him under the bridge and upriver for one of the shillings. He is a nice old fellow, who has been on the river since he was a boy, and he does not mind Dee singing. An hour later, just a little before midnight, Dee is back in Mortlake, wiping the mud from his boots on the long grass of the orchard below his own house.
“Is that you, John?” his mother calls from the still open door.
CHAPTER FOUR
Sheffield Castle, August 29, 1572
Her third husband, James Hepburn, fourth Earl of Bothwell, had shown her how it was done.
Lightly so there is no bruising of your pretty wee neck, see?
Once she had overcome the terrors of having his hands around her throat, and of the darkness hazing the edges of her vision, she had to admit the effect was extraordinary.
It is not the only thing I have to show you, he’d told her.
And he was right: it was not. But he was dead now, she thinks, or imprisoned somewhere, and so might as well be, and so is she. Sometimes, at night, alone in her bed in Tutbury, or Sheffield, or Chatsworth, or any of the other castles she is shuffled between, she thinks about that.
But she is spoiled to any other way now, for nothing else delivers her in transport in such a violent fashion, and so she has taught this girl when and where to apply her fingers—just here, and here, when I signal—and she goes at it fairly regularly, though under orders of her confessor, she tries to keep it down to once a day.
But by Christ she is so bored.
All she has to look forward to is that, and needlework with Lady Elizabeth Talbot.
And so now, why not?
“Margaret?”
Margaret Formby knows what she wants, and she sets aside her own circle of stitching and crosses the small room while Mary lies back on the large bed. She is a handsome, severe girl, Margaret, who was initially awkward and scared of what she was asked to do, but she has learned well and now her touch is firm at the right time, and delicate when it is not the right time. Mary tips her head back and sees rain on the gray glass of the window behind her. She wishes she might have it opened and that she might have a view of the countryside. She cannot do the first, and nor has she the second, and so she allows Margaret to lift her skirts, and part her braies, and she devotes herself, for the moment, to such pleasures as she can get.
After the passing of time during which a man might say the first cycle of the rosary, Mary takes over from Margaret, as they have practiced. Oftentimes, in the past, the earl used to insert into her anus a stubby, knobbled length of silver that he called his “other membrum verile,” which, when she was on the point of her delivery, he would slowly withdraw. The first time he did this, she fainted. He spoiled her, she thinks, just as he spoiled so many women.
“Now! Now!”
Margaret presses. Mary cannot breathe. The light fades. She can see worms in the peripheral of her vision. Hot. Waves of pleasure swell through her body, and she thinks this is what transubstantiation will be like. This is rapture. This is what it will be like when she is finally lifted up by the angelic host and borne in bliss to heaven. But then the pleasure becomes intense—violent, and in its extremity it becomes pain. Her mind is collapsing; her body is killing itself.
She jerks upright on the bed, throwing Margaret away. She draws in great gasps of air. Her face is scarlet; her entire body feels afire. She feels cored out, caved in.
Margaret never knows if this is what she wants.
“Get away,” Mary tells her, for now she cannot stand to look at her.
Mary rights her braies and pulls down her skirts and after she has regained her breath, her composure, and her sense of solidity, she stands. Her heart beats in her temples.
Margaret is back at her stitching.
Time gathers weight. Heavier and heavier. Mary feels it everywhere, pushing her down, crushing her. She is crushed. By time. By despair. By misery. She turns back to the bed and falls on it, lying facedown, and she lets the tears come.
* * *
Later that afternoon, she receives her gaoler, Sir George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, with no fewer than four of his guards, each with a sword, primed to act as if she would attack their master.
“God give you good day, Your Majesty,” he says, bowing low, maintaining the pretense that he is other than her keeper. He wears broadcloth breeches, a finely stitched doublet, and a wide, furred cape, which opens to reveal a surprisingly modest, though pearled, codpiece that fails to catch her slightest attention.
“And unto you, Sir George.”
“I trust you are well? You look somewhat downcast.”
Downcast? Downcast? She thinks to give him downcast.
“I am quite well,” she tells him instead. “Tired is all.”
He glances over at Margaret, whose hand is paused midstitch. Of course she is a spy. Does she tell him all?
By the Mass, who cares.
“What is it you want, Sir George?” she asks.
Now he comes to it, and it is a good thing.