The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [234]
It was not easy to find, being one of a group of houses belonging to a former religious foundation and occupying, with its gardens and courtyards, the triangle between Broad and Threadneedle Streets. The servant who opened the door was of the kind one might expect to find in a scholarly bachelor’s household, and the room she took him to, dark and crowded, was as sluttish as herself, with a vague smell of sulphur and horseradish. The dust lay on the woodwork like rock flour. There she left, and Lymond waited.
It was very quiet. Outside it had begun to rain: the creak of it against the small, obscured panes of the windows was the only sound in the room once the maid’s footsteps had receded and vanished; louder than all the far-off London noises: the chatter, the cries and the barking, the rumble and squeak of cart wheels; the perpetual landslide of horses’ hooves between the leaning canyons of wood and plaster and stone. In the room itself there was nothing to see: it was a parlour for receiving unwanted guests and held not even a book which would have identified the interests of the occupier. Lymond glanced round once and then stood perfectly still with his back to a rent table, his cloak thrown beside him, his face serene, as the silence stretched on.
There was no sound of movement to break it. Only a voice, suddenly, light and dry, which spoke from the shadows. It said, ‘You are observant. But there is no need to defend your mind against me.’ And a tall man, moving from the dark inner doorway where he had been standing stepped into the room. A lean man with a long nose and high, ruddy cheekbones, who wore a dusty gown over his black, shabby doublet, and a black cap on his light, glossy hair; whose eyes were ageless but whose hands, loose at his sides, were capable and broad-fingered and young. He came to a halt a pace away from Francis Crawford and said, ‘I have certain foibles, which you must forgive me. Perhaps you think this meeting unimportant. It is not. I am John Dee.’
Lymond said, ‘We have met, at Rheims.’
The pupils in the large eyes moved back and forth, studying him. ‘You heard my lectures on Euclid? Ah. You were in France with the Scottish Queen Dowager, and it was fashionable. What did you learn from them?’
‘That you find lecturing tiresome,’ Lymond said.
‘So you find me patronizing,’ the other man said. ‘And I am rightly reminded that you are the master of armies. Shall we proceed on a basis of mutual respect until we find out whether we may endure something closer? Come. My study is warmer.’ And moving ahead of his guest, he walked along a dark passage and standing aside, opened a door. Lymond entered.
The dazzle of light inside was so great that at first he shielded his eyes, blinded after the shadows. Then, dropping his hand, he traced the cause, and, angry as he was, his lips relaxed.
Mirrors lined the walls of John Dee’s sanctuary. Mirrors subtly aligned and invisibly misshapen, placed on frieze and wainscoting and ceiling so that every aspect of the crowded room was repeated to cheating infinity: the piled books and crossed scrolls, the racks of instruments and shelves of pots, jars and alembics, the pinned maps and charts, the iron clock and the magnifying glass, the great Mercator globe on the floor, and the bunches of dried herbs, slowly swinging from the beamed ceiling. It was less a study than a workshop, with standish and quills competing with auger and handsaw and file: sawdust and filings were gathered everywhere and only the mirrors opposite the door, wilfully distorting, had been kept deliberately clean.
Lymond studied himself, by turns squat and undulating, and suddenly laughed. ‘I am duly deflated. May I look?’ And finding his way across, examined them. He said, ‘You are severe with your visitors, Master Dee. You know why I am here?’
John Dee