The Cornerstone (21 page)

Sated at last, the men retired upstairs to the famous library, which occupied the entire second floor. Marlowe had to stop himself from gawking, as all four walls, from the floor to the heavy-timbered ceiling, were covered in shelving containing priceless books from every corner of the world. A long mahogany table took up most of the space in the center of the room. It was covered with opened books and scattered sheaves of parchment bearing notes, calculations, sketches, and blocks of writing in a flowing, looping hand. Clearly this was a workroom, used for study and invention, not a museum.

Magister Coronzon crossed the room in long strides to stand at the tall window with its lead glass panes set in intricate tracery. It occurred to Marlow that although the house might seem ordinary to the likes of Lord Walsingham and his palace cronies, there was evidence throughout this ordinary house of money spent. He imagined Dee had patrons capable of thanking him in expensive ways. Coronzon turned his back to the room, seemingly not interested in the discussion of spies and intrigue.

Walsingham, however, made it clear where his motives lay. Marlowe listened intently to his description of how Her Gracious Majesty Elizabeth I “could make use of the talents of a man such as yourself, who is known to many and can go places where perhaps others cannot.” He further explained how plots against the Queen’s life were fomented by enemies abroad and at home, and how the network of spies he’d established was the front-line defense against these plots. Would Marlowe consider joining their ranks?

“My lord Secretary, ‘twould be an honor,” he’d answered, wondering what he’d gotten himself into. He couldn’t very well refuse an offer that came from Court, but he wasn’t entirely convinced it would turn out to his benefit. He well knew from his many contacts that spies, once compromised or no longer needed, tended to meet a swift and secretive end.

Walsingham offered his hand to grip. “We’ll speak more of this anon. For now, ‘tis enough that you’ve agreed. I bid you farewell, then. The Heavens grant us success in all our endeavors.”

“Shall I accompany your Grace downstairs?” Dee asked him.

“Nay, sir, I require but a kiss of thy lovely wife and I am on my way.” Dee gave him a withering smile. Watching the subtle sparring between these two masters of intrigue and deception, Marlowe wondered if, for once, he might possibly be out of his depth. In spite of protestations, Dee followed the minister down the stairs, leaving Marlowe alone with the tall stranger from Wittenberg.

“I sense a hesitancy,” the man said, looking over his shoulder at Marlowe. “Playing at spies not to your liking?”

Marlowe startled. Again, Coronzon’s strange accent caught him up. At times during the evening he’d sounded like a proper Englishman, even addressing Dee in the familiar with his
thees
and
thous
, but at other times syntax and figures of speech entirely foreign peppered his discourse. It wasn’t German, or French, or even Italian because Marlowe knew those languages. It had a Latinate punch to it, but he wasn’t sure. In fact, everything about Coronzon was slippery, shifting, hard to pin down. It was most unnerving.

“The theater’s more to my liking,” he said, feeling strangely detached from his words, as if he were a lurking presence high up in the gallery looking down on a play in progress. Heat flamed his cheeks. Marlowe stilled the urge to open his jacket and unlace his jerkin at the neck, even though the room was chilly.

Coronzon watched him with a lazy, half-lidded gaze. Marlowe’s mind was suddenly filled with the fleeting image of a stalking reptile. The silver threads gleamed on the man’s jacket as he turned his back to the window and faced the eight-branched candelabra alight on the book table. “My own interest is in observing man’s hidden drives and desires. Such a complicated species.” The words were delivered barely above a whisper, yet Marlowe heard him perfectly well.

Unbelievably, Christopher Marlowe—the great London wit and master of words—had no comeback…his brain seemed to have come unhinged from his vocal cords. He could only stare at the sharp planes of Coronzon’s face, etched in firelight.

“So much want and need, yet so much repression.” Coronzon’s voice and breath brushed his cheek below the ear, yet the man stood several feet away. Marlowe staggered a step backward and swallowed hard. Inexplicably, surreptitiously, he was certain the Magister had begun to seduce him without even touching him. How this could be he was at a loss to explain, but his deepest, most hidden secrets suddenly seemed opened and laid out on the table with all the books and documents, on display for any who could read the secret appetites of his heart.

Coronzon reached inside his coat. “Care for a smoke?”

“Nay…I…failed to bring a pipe with me.” He’d only recently taken up the practice made popular by Sir Walter Raleigh and his privateering friends from the New World colonies.

Coronzon smiled and licked his top lip. Marlowe’s heart balked for a beat or two—was that tongue forked? He rubbed at his eyes. Surely not. The Wittenberg scholar or book dealer or whatever he was removed from an inner pocket a delicate pipe with a slender stem of four or five inches attached to a small round bowl. It was already filled with a pinch of tobacco that wafted the scent of cherry blossoms into the room. The man produced a thin straw from the same pocket, held it to a candle flame and as soon as it took light, applied it to the leaf in the pipe bowl. He inhaled deeply and allowed the smoke to escape slowly through his nostrils. He handed the pipe to Marlowe.

Without a word, he took hold of the pipe by the bowl. It was smooth and silky to the touch, ivory, yellowed with age. He also realized the bowl was carved with the gamboling figures of nymphs and satyrs—he could feel them under his fingertips. He inhaled and tasted the sharp, sweet aroma all the way down to the bottom of his lungs. He was certain that nothing had ever tasted as blissful or produced as satisfying a sensation in his body and mind in the mere quarter century he’d been alive. He moved to return the pipe, but Coronzon raised his hand.

“Nay, my good playwright, have another taste. It’s the best leaf available. I’ve carried it here straight from the highland fields of Peru.”

Marlowe inhaled again. How could he not? At that moment, a rumbling under his feet and the growing din of iron-shod wheels on cobblestone gave him a start. From the increasing avalanche of noise, he was convinced a monstrously huge coach or wagon must be passing outside. Gripped by an irrational fear, he strained to see though the leaded panes to the rutted dirt track that passed through the village but all was total darkness, neither starlight nor torchlight on the river, nor falling snow in the moonlight. It was as if he were looking out the window with his eyes pinched shut. He staggered back from the sill, heart pounding in his breast. The ivory pipe slipped from his fingers but somehow ended up in the grasp of Magister Coronzon before it hit the floor.

Coronzon stowed the pipe in its hidden pocket and smiled cordially, as if he’d heard nothing unusual. “Did you know our learned Dr. Dee has an alchemical laboratory?”

Marlowe swallowed. “I-I did not.”

Coronzon nodded sagely. “Aye, ‘tis a wonder. What he does in there is part of the reason men fear him for a sorcerer.”

Marlowe struggled to get his brains unscrambled. Had the pipeweed been laced with something? “He seems a fair gentleman to me. I…see no reason to fear him.”

Coronzon laughed a most melodious laugh that insinuated itself around the room, caressed the candle flames, and stroked the heavy timbers of the ceiling before settling itself in Marlowe’s thick russet hair. Or so it seemed. He shook his head as if to wake from a dream.

“I believe my Lord Walsingham has departed. Come below, sir, and have a final cup with the Professor and myself. We have something to show you that I think you will find fascinating.” Coronzon crossed nimbly from window to doorway almost before Marlowe could register that he had moved at all. Struck dumb, he followed the tall, slender figure out of the library and down to the main room where Dee waited beside the great fireplace.

Coronzon nodded without speaking, and Dee pulled on his heavy cloak and handed Marlowe’s to him. The three of them exited the front door and went out into the night.

Kit Bayard rose to his feet. He’d wasted too much time dawdling around with ghosts of the past when those in the present demanded immediate attention. He stretched to his full height, letting the kinks unwind from his spine. To mere mortals, he cut a smart figure in a black turtleneck, khaki cargo pants which he loved for the many pockets, and Moroccan leather boots with a slight heel. To the minions of Death, however, he must seem a withered, pallid shade who refused to cross over. This pending afterlife, for want of a better term, had its attractions, but lately it wasn’t following the agreed-upon rules as he understood them.

“I don’t know what you’re playing at,” he said aloud, “but I am still master of the
buachloch
and don’t either of you forget it. You cannot remake the terms of the bargain.” At least he didn’t think so.

The image of Dee and his black-caped companion ignited in his brain. What had they told him, those two, when his ownership of the stone was sealed? He tried to remember the exact words.

“Have a care not to touch anything,” Dee admonished him as they made their way around tables packed tight with beakers, retorts, cauldrons, vials, and grinding stones. He followed as bidden, Dee’s tall gangly figure ahead of him, Magister Coronzon’s presence behind him like a warm breath on the back of his neck although the man was several feet away. They’d entered the mysterious building in the side yard with a raw wind at their backs, but once inside with the heavy iron-hinged door latched shut, the air was still with no hint of the escalating storm. In the pitch dark, Dee had struck flint with practiced accuracy, which caught a piece of charcloth and produced a tiny flame. From it he lit a fat beeswax candle ready beside the door. He held it aloft and details of the room leapt into view.

At the back of the laboratory, on one of its windowless stone walls hung a drawing nearly as tall as a man. Marlowe stared at the lone symbol inscribed there—it wasn’t an astrological sign or a foreign letter like a Hebrew
aleph
. Black ink on parchment, it took the shape of a circle with a smaller circle inside like a single eye, a crescent on top like horns and a vertical line descending from the bigger circle to represent perhaps a body with a shorter line midway across it where arms might be depicted. The vertical line terminated in an inverted crescent, somewhat suggestive of legs. It bore the vague suggestion of a humanoid figure (a horned Cyclops came to his mind), but in truth, it looked like nothing he’d seen before.

Dee followed his gaze. “‘Tis a glyph given to me in divine meditation. Thus you see an angelic expression of the ineffable unity of all Creation. I have used it as guidance in my philosophical and mathematical studies.”

Again, Marlowe could think of nothing to say. The man was obviously deadly serious, but it was clear that his mind operated on planes not normally frequented by ordinary people. Dee seemed to sense his confusion. “A difficult concept to grasp, of course. Some years ago when I was much younger I penned an exhaustive interpretation of it.
Monas Hieroglyphica,
’tis not likely you’ve read it.”

"
The Hieroglyphic Monad
,” offered the Magister, crowding from behind in the tight squeeze between a heavy, long worktable in the room’s center and deep shelves containing laboratory glassware and corked vessels filled with who knew what. If Marlowe had decided to retreat and leave these two to their own dark devices, he could not have done so without a physical struggle. He stood, trembling, caught between the two taller men, grim in their black cloaks.

“You’d something to show me—was it this?” He nodded toward the glyph, hating the fact that his usually sonorous actor’s voice had gone tremulous.

“Nay,” answered Dee. “What I have for you rests there.” He led them to a small round table hidden in the shadows of a corner. On the table rested a leather bag closed at the top by a thick drawstring. It seemed innocuous, a simple leather bag containing…something round. Marlowe could not stop the imperceptible trembling that had gripped his frame.

“Magister, if it please thee…” Dee stepped to the side of the table. “Thou hast the better skill to describe what is within,” he said, indicating the bag.

Marlowe felt sweat slick under his armpits, despite the cold. It was vaguely disturbing how Dee spoke formally to himself and Walsingham, but slipped into the informal mode of address when conversing with Coronzon. They were much more than mere acquaintances, that much he kenned.

Marlowe jumped as Coronzon laid a hand on his shoulder, but then his muscles relaxed, the shudders flowing out of him like the trickle of spring water over a rill. “What we wish to show you was made by the two of us, using the blended skills of sorcery and alchemy. It has served Dr. Dee well these many years, but now we feel that to achieve its full potential, it would better serve a lusty younger man of the quickest wit and possessed of a hotblooded taste for life and adventure.” He paused, as if to let that much sink in. “Would you not say, my good playwright, that this is a most fitting description of yourself?”

Marlowe rubbed at his eyes, trying to clear the clouds in his head. But yes, he did feel a surge of potency at Coronzon’s recognition of his charisma and intellect. It was gratifying to find company who could recognize a man’s worth for what it was. “Aye,” he said, looking from Dee’s long serious face to the closed bag. Coronzon he could feel at his back, but not see. “I believe the description is apt.”

“Perfect! I can think of no better candidate for her ladyship.” Coronzon squeezed Marlowe’s shoulder ever so slightly and let go.

“Behold.” Dee untied the knot and spread open the mouth of the bag. He pushed it down around the sides of what appeared to be an ordinary chunk of weathered granite.

Marlowe leaned in closer. “‘Tis but a rock.”