“Out of my sight, all of you, before I change my mind.” Elizabeth returned to her chair and slumped against its carved back.
Lord Burghley indicated with a jerk of his head that we were to follow the queen’s instructions. But Matthew couldn’t leave matters where they stood.
“A word of caution, Your Majesty. Do not place your trust in the Earl of Essex.”
“You do not like him, Master Roydon. Nor does William or Walter. But he makes me feel young again.” Elizabeth turned her black eyes on him. “Once you performed that service for me and reminded me of happier times. Now you have found another and I am abandoned.”
“‘My care is like my shadow in the sun Follows me flying, flies when I pursue it, Stands and lies by me, doth what I have done,’” Matthew said softly. “I am your Shadow, Majesty, and have no choice but to go where you lead.”
“And I am tired,” Elizabeth said, turning her head away, “and have no stomach for poetry. Leave me.” “We’re not going to Prague,” Matthew said once we were back in Henry’s barge and headed toward London. “We must go home.”
“The queen will not leave you in peace just because you flee to Woodstock, Matthew,” Mary said reasonably, burrowing into a fur blanket.
“He doesn’t mean Woodstock, Mary,” I explained. “Matthew means somewhere . . . farther.”
“Ah.” Mary’s brow furrowed. “Oh.” Her face went carefully blank.
“But we’re so close to getting what we wanted,” I said. “We know where the manuscript is, and it may answer all our questions.”
“And it may be nonsense, just like the manuscript at Dr. Dee’s house,” Matthew said impatiently. “We’ll get it another way.”
But later Walter persuaded Matthew that the queen was serious and would have us both in the Tower if we refused her. When I told Goody Alsop, she was as opposed to Prague as Matthew was.
“You should be going to your own time, not traveling to far-off Prague. Even if you were to stay here, it will take weeks to ready a spell that might get you home. Magic has guiding rules and principles that you have yet to master, Diana. All you have now is a wayward firedrake, a glaem that is near to blinding, and a tendency to ask questions that have mischievous answers. You do not have enough knowledge of the craft to succeed with your plan.”
“I will continue to study in Prague, I promise.” I took her hands in mine. “Matthew made a bargain with the queen that might protect dozens of witches. We cannot be separated. It’s too dangerous. I won’t let him go to the emperor’s court without me.”
“No,” she said with a sad smile. “Not while there is breath in your body. Very well. Go with your wearh. But know this, Diana Roydon: You are setting a new course. And I cannot foresee where it might lead.”
“The ghost of Bridget Bishop told me ‘There is no path forward that does not have him in it.’ When I feel our lives spinning into the unknown, I take comfort from those words,” I said, trying to comfort her. “So long as Matthew and I are together, Goody Alsop, our direction does not matter.”
Three days later on the feast of St. Brigid, we set sail on our long journey to see the Holy Roman Emperor, find a treacherous English daemon, and, at long last, catch a glimpse of Ashmole 782.
Chapter Twenty Six
Verin de Clermont sat in her Berlin home and stared down at the newspaper in disbelief.
The Independent
1 February 2010
A Surrey woman has discovered a manuscript belonging to Mary Sidney, famed Elizabethan poetess and sister to Sir Philip Sidney.
“It was in my mother’s airing cupboard at the top of the stairs,” Henrietta Barber, 62, told the Independent. Mrs. Barber was clearing out her mother’s belongings before she went into care. “It looked like a tatty old bunch of paper to me.”
The manuscript, experts believe, represents a working alchemical notebook kept by the Countess of Pembroke during the winter of 1590/91. The countess’s scientific papers were thought to have been destroyed in a fire at Wilton House in the seventeenth century. It is not clear how the item came to be in the possession of the Barber family.
“We remember Mary Sidney primarily as a poet,” commented a representative of Sotheby’s Auction House, who will put the item up for bid in May, “but in her own time she was known as a great practitioner of alchemy.”
The manuscript is of particular interest as it shows that the countess was assisted in her laboratory. In one experiment, labeled “the making of the arbor Dian?,” she identifies her assistant by the initials DR. “We might never be able to identify the man who helped the Countess of Pembroke,” explained historian Nigel Warminster of Cambridge University, “but this manuscript will nevertheless tell us an enormous amount about the growth of experimentation in the Scientific Revolution.”